by S. C. Jensen
“You tell her, Dickie!” Hammett wiggled its nanoparticle butt into the crook of Dickie’s arm as if it expected a good show. “I’ve been trying for the last year to get through to her and I’m out of ideas.”
“You’re one of the strongest, most fearless, badass people I’ve ever met.” Dickie shot to his feet and sent Hammett’s sphere catapulting across the room. I heard the pig squeal indignantly, but I couldn’t look away from Dickie. His face had bloomed into an almost purple hue. He took a step toward me and pointed his finger in my face. “I look up to you. I would give anything to be like you—”
“Dickie,” I said, putting my hands up. “I’m sorry. I—”
“No!” he shouted so forcefully he bounced up on his toes and the homburg slipped off and slid in front of his eyes. He shoved it back and waved his finger around. “You let me finish. I’m tired of sitting down and shutting up and following you around like I have nothing important to say. I do. I’m not just some slapstick sidekick, you know.”
“I know, Dickie.”
He pursed his lips at me and I shut up. Hammett rolled up and stood between us, its little cartoon eyes bouncing between us like they were following a high-stakes, ping-pong death match.
“I hang around you like a kicked dog just hoping some of what makes you you might rub off on me,” he said. “So when you’re moping around and feeling useless because you can’t run in and risk your life for everyone, how the hell am I supposed to feel?”
I opened my mouth to reply but Hammett shook its head.
“I’ve had enough.” Dickie put his foot down. Literally. Hammett rolled back before its sphere was crushed beneath it. “You are going to march right back up those stairs, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and start helping out. Just like the rest of us are always doing for you.”
His eyes glared fiercely at me from under the brim of his hat. With a sharp tug, he straightened the lapels on his pinstripe suit. Then he brushed some imaginary lint off his sleeves and put his hands on his hips. Then he put his hands in his pockets.
His shoulders slumped.
“I’m sorry, Bubs,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me. I—”
I grabbed Dickie with my upgrade and crushed him to my chest. I wanted to tell him that I knew he was more than just a sidekick, that I admired the way life seemed to just roll off his shoulders, the way he always faced up to difficult situations with a grin and good humour. But the words stuck in my throat and all I managed to croak out was, “thank you.”
“Huh?”
I gave him a final squeeze and then let him go. I said, “You’re absolutely right. Let’s go help the heroes.”
I took a deep breath and walked slowly back up the stairs. Dickie didn’t need to know that I’d already come to that conclusion before his speech. He probably needed to get all that off his chest as much as I had needed to hear it. Because there was no doubt in my mind that Dickie mattered. And that meant there was a good chance I did too.
“Well done,” Hammett whispered once I was inside the stairwell. “I think we finally got through to her.”
“Thanks,” Dickie said, his voice trembling. “I thought she was going to hit me.”
“Nah,” Hammett said. Then, after a beat. “Okay. I kind of did too.”
I smiled and shook my head.
“Come on, you two,” I called from the bottom of the stairs. “Don’t make me go back in there alone.”
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Dickie said. “Because I really didn’t mean . . .”
I came back and leaned against the naked butt of the statue mannequin with my arms crossed.
“I need you, Dickie,” I said. “I can’t do it without you.”
“Okay.” Dickie picked Hammett up with one hand and put his other arm around my shoulders. I felt his fingertips like a warm pressure through the electric sensors on my upgrade. “Partners?”
“Partners.”
“Fifty-fifty?” Hope tinged his voice.
I made a thinking noise. “Sixty-forty.”
“Deal.”
“And you still have to bring the coffee and doughnuts.”
Dickie tripped on the bottom stair. He said, “Rats.”
Gore came to before Oki and her team made for the pick-up point, but he still needed a few hours of repair time to complete whatever freakish super-genetic healing he was doing. He offered to guide the team via hidden transmitters in case they ran into any trouble at Libra that Oki wasn’t prepared for.
Sal had set up hidden cameras at the body drop before he’d discovered Gore in the pile, and Oki, Kymani, Yin, and Demi each wore invisible micro-comms—tiny implants in their jaws and ears that could send and receive audio data via satellite—even within Libra’s facilities, according to the whiz kids. They had organic camera implants embedded inside their corneas so we could see what they saw. I worried that Libra’s security would catch the devices as soon as the harvesters brought them through the scanners, but Oki assured me her tech was completely untraceable.
Biotech built from organic materials had been abandoned by R&D decades ago because it broke down too quickly for commercial uses, she said. Giant mega-corporations like Libra and LunAstro always had their eyes on the flashy new toys. Trade Zones were constantly trying to one-up each other with weaponized technology. But for the underground grinders and back-alley hackers, fast and temporary was an asset. As a bonus, there were no known detection devices on the market that targeted the obsolete tech.
Gore looked at it all and seemed to agree.
So Cosmo worked his magic to turn Oki and the whiz kids into fresh-dead corpses. Then the A-team headed out and the B-team stayed back to watch the monitors.
“Why do you have all this stuff anyways?” I asked.
Cosmo, who was perched on the edge of a long, white table covered in blinking dials and sensors, was preening his nails with a deadly looking file. He was like a technological bird of paradise, picking bits of fake dead flesh out from beneath his fingernails.
“Because I can.”
I thought of all the cush it must take to fill this playboy mansion with a room to suit every fleeting whim that floated between his ears. Or his legs. It boggled the mind.
“Must be nice,” I said.
“I think it’s awesome.” Dickie’s eyes reflected the bright, blinking lights of the holoscreens all around him. “What do you use it all for? I mean, when you’re not aiding and abetting felony crimes against the Trade Zone?”
Cosmo waggled his carefully arched eyebrows at Dickie and grinned. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
I cringed. “Is that code for what I think it’s code for?”
“Are you thinking about making sweet love beneath the sweltering lights of my private feedreel network so that we can enjoy the sweating flower of youthful passion even when we’re old and grey?”
“Ew,” I said. “No.”
Dickie’s eyes went wide. “I knew I should have gone to beauty school.”
“It wouldn’t help,” Cosmo said forlornly. “The ones you want still always play hard to get.”
Gore looked over his shoulder at me from the screen displaying the body drop location. He said to me, “You keep strange company.”
“They keep me.” I crossed my arms and stared at the screen, too, waiting for something to happen.
After we’d been watching the holoscreens for a couple of hours without any action, Cosmo had one of his guys go down to the kitchen for refreshments. He came back a few minutes later burdened with trays littered with tall, thin bottles of effervescent liquid in pastel colours and bizarre glittering confections, sculptured to look like lipsticked lips and platform pumps and handbags. He set the trays on the cracked table top without comment and immediately returned to his monitoring station, replaced his headset, and began sliding his fingers o
ver the data coming in from Oki and the whiz kids’ transmitters.
Nobody seemed worried.
I eyed the tray of cookie-things. I picked up a pink bralette by a strap made with what looked like string candy and dangled it suspiciously in front of my nose, sniffed at it. “Are these edible?”
Cosmo slinked across the room to me with his gold lace boots clip-clopping daintily. He slipped an arm around my waist and leaned in until we were cheek to cheek. Then he whipped out his tongue like a lizard snatching a fly and licked the bralette out of my fingers. He said, “Pass the panties, please.”
“Get your own.” I shoved him away with my upgrade and grabbed a bottle of something fizzy and pink. “I hope these are caffeinated.”
“Spoilsport,” Cosmo ran the pink tip of his tongue over full, painted lips and grinned. “One of these days I’ll catch you with your guard down.”
“It’s no use.” Hammett pranced around the trays of food and sniffed at the confections. Little numbers whizzed by over its head as the pig scanned and calculated nutritional values, just in case it felt like torturing me later. “There’s not even a flicker of interest. I’ve been dialled into her biometrics for more than a year now, and the only time I’ve seen the sexy needle twitch is when—”
“Shut it, Piggy.” I grabbed the sphere off the table and felt the nanoparticle skin shift around my hand as Hammett re-formed itself in my grip. “Unless you want to experience this mission from the inside of a recycling chute.”
Hammett huffed. “It’s not like they don’t know.”
Cosmo put his hands on his hips and leaned conspiratorially toward the pig. He winked and stage whispered behind his hand, “We’ll talk later.”
“Drop it, both of you.”
I stared at the screen in front of Gore with acid burning in my chest. The feed from the pick-up location flickered. Sal appeared on the holoscreen, dragging a makeshift travois stretcher into the frame. The old shotgun was slung over his shoulder, pinched between huge shoulder blades. His hairy shoulders strained beneath the dirty, sleeveless shirt as he heaved the travois into the centre of the room. Oki and the kids lay on the stretcher, limbs loose and mouths gaping. One by one, Sal picked up their bodies and laid them gently against the far wall. He wiped his hands on his pants and looked at a misshapen heap at the back of the room. Then he dragged the kids up on top of Oki and arranged their limbs until they appeared to have been carelessly dumped there.
A lump lodged in my throat as I watched Sal bend and press a finger to each of their lips. Saying goodbye. It should have been me and Gore. I couldn’t let that feeling go. No matter what the risk, it wasn’t fair to send Oki and these kids in to do this job. Messing with Libra was no joke. These weren’t the back-alley, black-market hustlers Sal and Oki were accustomed to dealing with. A mistake could be deadly. There was a very real chance that not all of them would make it back out alive. The white-haired girl, Demi, faced the camera, upside down. Cosmo had painted grey into the pale skin around her mouth and eyes, added the faintest tint of yellow to her cheeks. Her mouth was a black hole with no teeth showing.
She looked dead already. Like she’d been dead for a long time.
I held the bottle to my lips but I didn’t drink. I breathed slowly out through my mouth, and the bottle made a forlorn moan. I said, “How can we be sure they’ll get picked up by the Libra facility?”
“It’s been pre-arranged,” Gore said, not taking his eyes off the monitor. “SecurIntel handled the communications.”
“Isn’t that what Libra is expecting?”
“If they have the information that LunAstro provided us,” Gore said. Now that we were down to business, he dropped the tough-guy swagger and spoke with the hurried but precise tone of a military commander. “And I think we can assume they do.”
“Bugs in the bangtail?” I asked. “Or you mean with Patti’s CBI getting hacked?”
“Or some other inside job . . .” His voice trailed off as he stared at the screen. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll be expecting something. They won’t be able to trace any drop arranged by SecurIntel. I doubt they’ll try. They get hundreds of comms a day from various points around the city. They’ll focus their efforts scanning bodies on the way into the facility, looking for us.”
“And here we are, tucked safely away like bugs in a rug.” Bitterness laced my words but I couldn’t help it. “The inglorious B-team.”
“Wars are fought behind screens like these,” Gore said, a growl creeping into his voice. “You think you have to be on the ground to be important to a mission? Tell that to the CEOs who can level a city with the push of a button. Men like your Nathanial Price.”
The hairs on the back of my neck strained to get away from my skin. “That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“It shouldn’t,” he said.
“Will the drug last?” Anxiety was taking hold again. I could see it happening as if it was happening to someone else. The nerves in my shoulder twinged and my fingers shook. I clenched my hands into fists at my side. I said, “What if it works too well? What if they start getting hacked apart by grinders before the drug wears off?”
“Stop,” Gore said. He turned in his chair and gave me a level gaze. There was no worry in his face, no stress. He was a professional. If he wasn’t worried, I didn’t need to be either. It was a good line. I could keep telling myself that until I keeled over from lack of worry.
He said, “I measured the doses. They’ll be out for two hours. Plenty of time for pick-up and delivery.”
“Okay.” I kept my throat tight so the words wouldn’t shake. “And once they’re inside?”
“They’re flagged for long-term storage. No hacking. If there are complications, I can buy them extra time.”
Complications. He made it sound like a lullaby. I took a deep breath and tried to allow myself to be soothed by the calm in his voice. I wondered where Patti and Johanna were now. Would they ever end up at #709 or was that just a ruse to let me think I had them where I wanted them? Of all the places in HoloCity they could hide out, why would they want to scatter in a hovel like that? Nothing but bare pipes and a dirty mattress and bars on the windows, staring out at the pale, jutting buildings of Creep Stacks, like crooked teeth in the mouth of an ogre. Was it a trick? Maybe Patti suspected me. My last-ditch plan to pass her off to Libra was off the table now, if Oki was even partially right about Nathanial Price. He wasn’t going to help me help Rae. He wasn’t going to help anyone but himself.
But Patti didn’t know that.
And what about Johanna? It was clear that she didn’t like me. Didn’t trust me. Fine. I didn’t trust her either. She seemed protective of Patti. Too protective, given the short-term nature of their acquaintance. Or was I just being suspicious because it gave me something to do?
“Hey, Gore,” I said. Then, because it helped me feel more at ease, I added, “Monkey breath?”
He wrinkled his pale white forehead at me and said, “I was wondering how long you could be civil for.”
“Have you ever seen anything like the tech that cyber-witch had?” I said. “There’s something about her story that doesn’t sit right with me.”
Gore shook his head. The muscles in his shoulders bunched around the base of his neck as if it was an effort to stay still. He said, “Not around these parts.”
“What about other parts,” I said. “Other Trade Zones. You travel right?”
“I’ve heard a lot of stories.” Gore stood up and walked over to the table. He eyed the tray of glittery cookie sculptures and picked up a bottle of water instead. “Nothing is impossible these days. If you can dream it up, someone out there can make it happen.”
“I’m still waiting for my flying car,” Dickie piped up through a mouthful of confectionary underpants.
“Don’t hold your breath,” Gore said. “The infrastructure is a nightmare.�
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“Mega-corps are only interested in wholesale technologies, right?” Cosmo said, picking something pink out of his teeth with a long, gold fingernail. “Translation: boring. Leave it to your industrious entrepreneurs to handle the fun stuff. I like the sounds of a cyber-witch. Marketing potential up the woo-hoo. What kind of tech are we talking?”
“You’d like her,” I told Cosmo. “She’s all black corsets and spank-you boots and purple hair and great balls of fire.”
He bit into a lip-shaped cookie and chewed thoughtfully. “I can work with that . . .”
“Leave the witch to me,” Gore said. I thought I detected a hint of tension in his voice. “If we see her again.”
“She seemed very interested in your time in the Barrens.” I sipped my drink and kept my eyes on the screen. Since he was in a talking mood, I asked, “Is that how you met Tom?”
On the screen, Sal’s posture changed.
I felt Gore’s eyes on the side of my face, but my gaze was locked on the feed. Something was wrong. Sal stood slowly. He reached over his back to grab the barrel of the shotgun. He pulled the gun over his head and spun around, knees slightly bent, his big belly rising and falling with slow, even breaths. He crept forward like a fat tomcat stalking a juicy rat, hard and muscular under the bulk.
Gore pushed me out of the way and sat in front of the holoscreen again. He swiped his fingers over the controls and zoomed in on the scene. “Where’s the sound?”
Cosmo snapped his fingers and one of his technicians, still enshrined within the circular station, to work on the audiofeed.
The dim lights surrounding Sal flickered and he crouched lower. We had no sound, but Sal moved his head from side to side as if he was listening to something.
“What’s going on?” I said. “I don’t like this.”
“Your friend in there likes it less.” Gore put a hand up and held it in front of my face. He said, “Quiet.”
Muscles on the side of my neck strained against a retort, but watching Sal made my tongue shrivel like a worm inside my mouth. The speakers flared to life with a crackle of static and the lights flickered. Something moved out of the shadows behind the lumpy pile of bodies at the back of the room. Something pale, crawling on its belly. Something naked and almost human.