by Leo Champion
But she hadn’t had this drink in clear line of sight all the time – she’d turned almost ninety degrees away from it to sit in the merc’s lap. So as she reached for it, she dipped her index finger into it, just momentarily as she raised the full blue glass to her mouth.
The clear nail polish on her index finger, however, was becoming pale red.
Oh no. Suddenly the hotness between her legs was sidelined, pushed aside by an entirely different set of priorities. Her body stiffened; she found herself lowering the drink back toward the bar as she slid off the merc’s lap and turned to face him.
“You okay, babe? Here, have your drink.”
I was two minutes away from taking you upstairs. You dumb fuck, you stupid fuck!
She looked again at her right index finger. The mickey-detecting nail polish was still pale red, positive.
“Here,” the merc said, reaching around her waist.
She leaned back out of his reach and then, seething, emptied the glass into his face.
“You stupid fuck!” she snarled as he started to rise from the stool. She punched him hard on his left ear, brought her elbow slamming up into his jaw, a knee brutally into his hip. The merc weighed half again what she did; she’d have had no chance against him in a fair fight at close quarters, so she had zero intention of giving him one. Her boot slammed into his shin and her other foot hooked around his legs, yanking him over.
As he went down she kicked him savagely in the ribs.
“You stupid motherfucker!” Now she’d have to start at square one with another guy, unnecessarily.
“I assume,” came a low voice pleasantly from behind her, “that there is a reason you just beat up your date.”
She turned while the merc struggled on the ground, moaning and gasping and holding his hands to his face. Sparky was a moderately tall and very broad person with a shaved head and an obviously-fake Santa Claus beard that almost certainly concealed some kind of augmentation. They ran technical as well as security for the Last Stand and wore an implanted headset, a black T-shirt over a steroid-muscular chest, and heavy boots. One of their – Diana Angela had never been able to guess what was between Sparky’s legs – fingerless-gloved hands held, but did not brandish, a small metallic device.
She held up her right index finger, showed Sparky the nail polish.
“Turns red on contact with roofies.” She turned back to the prick who’d tried to dose her. “Stay the fuck down, asshole.”
“Bitch hit me,” the mercenary whined, wiping blood from his mouth and starting to sit up. “Bitch just jumps up and fuckin’ goes at me! You weren’t a chick I’d fuck you up so hard…”
Sparky stepped over, standing right above the man.
“You just stay down there for a moment. Lady D, you got a sample of that drink?” They mumbled something inaudible, probably subvocal, into their mouthpiece.
Diana Angela shook her head. “Threw it in his face. What, you think I’m lying about the nail polish?” She held her red-tinted fingernail up again. “I was about to get a room with the stupid fuck anyway!”
“Din’t dose nobody,” the mercenary complained, but didn’t move to rise, not with Sparky standing right over him. Diana Angela would have preferred a couple of good kicks to the balls to keep him down, but she supposed Sparky’s intimidation did the job too.
Another security type, a tall but lean white man with a high forehead, appeared carrying a cellphone wired to a small electronic rod. Sparky waved him off.
“Nothing to run, she threw it in his face. Just get him the fuck out.”
“You heard,” the other bouncer said to the merc. “Get up slowly and don’t give Sparks an excuse to zap you.”
“Try something,” Diana Angela growled softly. “Just give me an excuse to break your fucking jaw.”
“None of that,” said Sparky. “Now Lady D, were you wearing a pretty pink and white dress at the Hux earlier tonight?”
What did that have to do with anything? She raised an eyebrow.
“Might have been, why?”
The mercenary was slowly getting to his feet, moaning a little but keeping his hands clearly visible. The other bouncer gestured with his head toward the front door and the rapist started to move in that direction. He looked over his shoulder at Sparky and Diana Angela, anger in his eyes.
She was angry, too, and not just because a man who’d tried to rape her was walking out under his own power, basically scot-free.
“Because we’re told a blonde chick in a pretty pink and white dress, otherwise matching your description, went upstairs with a nice man from Hackensack,” said Sparky, “who was then found dead.”
Diana Angela shrugged. She could hardly deny it, but she could defend it. “You think child killers are nice people?”
Sparky shrugged their bear-like shoulders. “We got a call from TGI on Thirty-Ninth. Midtown’s men looking for you – they’ll be here soon too. If your friend doesn’t go fetch them right now.”
The hell had Midtown’s troops been involved in chasing after her in the first place, she thought irritably. The killing had been in a private fucking club, not the middle of Eighth Avenue where they were obliged to give a shit.
“Roman Kalashov can suck my cunt,” she said with a frown. “Don’t his men have cops to moon or something?” But no, those words were no more than pro-forma bullshit. The reality was that she would be wise to scram, very soon.
She reached into one of the pouches at her belt for the high-value money clip and peeled off a picture of Barack Obama.
“Might want to at least equal what they’ll pay for your arrest,” Sparky observed through that fake beard. It might have existed to hide some kind of facial cybernetics; it did suffice to hide their expressions. When their tone went flat and gravelly like this… well, there was someone she never wanted to play poker with.
“And what’s that?” she asked, giving him another five-hundred.
“Keep going.”
Two more Obamas went into Sparky’s meaty hands, their owner nodding slowly, until a grin broke out across their face.
Diana Angela scowled; two grand? It wasn’t that she needed the money – hard cash was illegal to possess upstairs and as a US-13 her credited salary was seven figures anyway – but it was the spirit of the thing. But Sparky had their own expenses to pay, she supposed, and she did appreciate the warning.
“That’s enough. Go out the staff exit, grab the long brown coat hanging from the lockers – it was mine, you just bought it from me. They’re looking for a girl in pink and lace, but my man says they’ve got security photos too.”
“Yeah yeah,” Diana Angela said, and then extended a hand. “Thanks for the heads-up, I guess. How long you think I should stay gone for?”
Sparky gave another of those rolling shrugs as they shook her hand.
“Probably until that guy’s boss goes back to Hackensack. Midtown soldiers don’t jump for cheap, so this guy must be throwing some real bling around to get them up searching bars for you. When he runs out or goes home, they’re going to stop. But… give it a day or two, OK?”
Well fuck, she thought as she started to make her way toward the door Sparky had indicated. The night had started out so promisingly, but… blocked and now chased out of the best place for picking up another guy?
* * *
The Midtown gate guards mostly paid attention to people coming in, looking for potential trouble and making sure guns and blades above a certain length – the rather arbitrary twelve inches – were peace-bonded into their sheaths. Nothing she carried was that long, so…
Sparky’s long brown coat was Sparky’s enormous size, which meant it fit around Diana Angela’s toned but lean build like a cloak; it had a very, very faint metallic smell and, she’d found, a surprising number of tissues and handkerchiefs that also had a slight trace of a metallic smell to them. She wrapped one of the hankies over her hair like a shawl and slouched her way through the crowds, looking at the ground
but keeping situational awareness as she headed for the Seventh Avenue gate.
At one point she saw a foursome of Midtown soldiers accompanied by a guy in a suit who might have been an Association higher-up but might just as easily have been Hux security; they were watching the street but didn’t give the hunched, brown-cloaked figure a second glance.
It was about eleven o’clock in early February, pretty much the coolest time of the year in the city. That meant nightly lows in the high forties, by the Fahrenheit system they still used on the streets. Right now she was headed south to the No-Go Zone, armed and ready on her own.
Under the big coat, her weapons were ready as she passed through the gates. Midtown’s riot-masked soldiers didn’t give her a second glance, though, as she mingled with a convoy of raff pulling carts under the eye of some brown-and-green uniformed guards. Her attitude was seething frustration as she made her way down Seventh Avenue through desolate streets, turning left to avoid Chelsea. She’d never been back to Greenwich Village, which had been devastated during the Commune but largely rebuilt since. Too many memories, that she wasn’t ready to confront. And probably would never be, she had to admit.
But her attitude was more frustration as she made her way around a cluster of sewer vermin lying in wait on Sixth Avenue, circling past some streetgangers on Twenty-Third Street and a tribe of sewergangers out raiding as she headed east along Nineteenth, arkscrapers towering up around her amidst the abandoned high-rise buildings.
From inside the scrapers you never really got just how big the things were – they were the world from the inside, just like she imagined Earth was just one of several balls of rock to the spacers. The spacers were a culture separate from her own and the Intendancy frowned hard on communication with them; they were unredeemable shitlords who cared nothing for virtue. She’d applied, at one point, for emigration – but even Uncle Hugo had been unable to help her with the necessary permits. The Intendancy did not, said Uncle Hugo, want people like her leaving.
That had been one of the things that had really made her hate her society – it had blocked the exits. It was thoughts like that that made her want to take a knife to the upper levels, the sealed levels; she had always wanted to do to a Speaker for the People what she did to sewer vermin or high-level streetscum… but that would, of course, in practice be suicide. She’d seen the security they had up there.
Crossing the Fourteenth Street free road took her into the No Go Zone, which started there and ended on the south side of Canal Street. Roman Kalashov’s triangular vig flags stopped appearing on the tenement walls here. South of Canal, and at points all across the Six Boroughs, they paid vig to City Hall instead. The Mayor’s old, formal, language called it “tax”; Midtown didn’t bother sugarcoating the concept.
The agreement that neither side would send troops into the NGZ, or demand vig from tenements here, had been what had ended the big war of the early 2170s, after the Russian and Italian organized families had joined forces to become the Midtown Association and march on City Hall. The Downtown Association – the NYPD and their levies – had vigorously resisted them, and most of the actual fighting had taken place in the neighbourhoods she was passing through now. John Kiska had been a Midtown levy in that war, which had lasted years and devastated the area, and he’d written about it in detail. The history was well known thanks to that.
Greenwich Village, starting several blocks to her right as she made her way past another tenement line, had been possible thanks to that. During the first month or so of the Commune, Boss Kalashov and Mayor O’Grady had respected the treaty and left the area alone. It had given Spartacus time to become First Citizen with his monstrous right-hand woman Rosa Luxembourg, to set themselves up and consolidate things, straightening out the military and appointing commissars to keep it straight.
She wondered if the Downtown Association – this tenement, the Garsons, was closer to Canal Street than Fourteenth – would make the same mistake again. One tenement’s revolution could spread beyond that… but if the trouble was closer to Downtown, Midtown would probably threaten to enforce the treaty if City Hall sent NYPD into the No-Go. Just to screw with them.
She wondered why people at all were supporting another Commune. Hadn’t they learned from the first time? Trying to improve the world only led to worse misery.
It was entirely possible, she thought as she skirted another group of surfaced sewer raiders, a knife in each hand but avoiding them in the shadows, that Mayor O’Grady would not have to intervene directly. It would have prevented the realization of nightmares if someone had taken a knife to Spartacus’ throat early on in the Commune. People had tried, in fact, and she had killed them, because her role in the Commune had been as her lover’s bodyguard… but she had come to deeply regret that.
The miserable disaster that had been the Commune had been born of idealism and it had completely destroyed her own idealism, as well as her faith and her hopes. So many people had tried so hard to make things better, but their best efforts had led to Rosa Luxembourg’s torture chambers, starving people in alleys, tens of thousands dead and many more crippled.
She had been weeping as she’d detonated the bombs, but she had pressed those triggers. She had had a role in bringing about the Commune’s misery; eventually she had taken responsibility for her actions and ended it. And if it came up again, she would avoid repeating the mistake of waiting as long as she had the first time…
Chapter Seven
She heard cheering as she skirted the precinct, assuring herself of its borders. The Garsons’ northern border, facing blocks and blocks of abandoned high-rise buildings, was the East Houston Street free road; its eastern border, facing a precinct whose gate signs said they were the Lonsdales, was the Bowery. Triangular red and white vig flags with ‘2’ below them, indicating the bearer had paid the flag-holder’s vig for that month, hung from both tenements’ gates.
At a narrow alley her map called Spring Street, which soldiers were now filling with razor wire, the territory became a precinct that encompassed the Garsons’ like an L-shaped Tetris piece around four blocks. The same red and white vig flag appeared there, too, under soldiers in red and grey with ungainly axes attached to the ends of their street-made pipe muskets. The vig collector was the tenement on the south side of the Broome Street free road, from which the half-red, half-white flag flew as a proud square. A sign above their gates said ‘South Bowery Neighbourhood Association’.
Cautiously she circled up the Lafayette Street free road, which had a two-block wide forest of abandoned-building no-man’s-land before Broadway and more tenements. Abandoned buildings weren’t necessarily taller than tenement ones – eighty- and hundred-story buildings in Downtown and Midtown were thoroughly populated, amidst the plentiful arkscraper trash feeds – but the abandoned ones had been made uninhabitable by generations of streetgangers picking them to concrete shells; they were usually too tall to pull down into more than huge rubble heaps, under the shadow of dangerously collapsing neighbours. Sometimes they fell on their own; after more than a century, few of them were exactly structurally sound. You had to be careful in them.
Now, she observed the precinct from one of the ten-story buildings overlooking it from across East Houston. She crouched in a third-floor window gap having picked her way up a collapsing stairway and warily around some streetgangers. The soldiers of this precinct wore green and black and the ones at the Elizabeth Street gates were working in pairs to spool razor wire across lower-level windows. So they were preparing for war… wise.
Inside the precinct’s gates, however, there were people in the streets clearly drinking, every once in a while cheering “Ham-mer! Ham-mer!”
Now she had her sense of the area – you scouted places you didn’t know so that you could escape them when things went sour, and you always assumed things would go sour on a kill – it was time to go in and take a closer look…
* * *
Like most precincts, the Garsons had d
one their best to seal itself from below. That included blocking drains and manholes with concrete plugs, sometimes with small holes drilled through them so that the streets wouldn’t flood when rains came, that sewergangers liked to chisel away at.
None had been at work here, but with the gain on her thermal vision set to maximum she was able to compare air temperatures and find a long-forgotten trapdoor under a crawlspace on the edge of a sub-basement. Carefully she crawled up into the crawlspace and worked herself from there into an area of old sofas and decaying mattresses. The basements were where you sheltered when the airbornes came with their bombs, but right now this one was empty; everyone was up on the streets.
Her usual way of getting into a precinct at night, by pretending to be a paid girl sent for someone, would have required her to get a cab and an escort; guards at border posts at eleven pm tended to be careful about who they opened the gates for. And if this was the revolution it looked like from outside the precinct, it was likely that whatever high-up she named would be decorating a lamp post. Stealth had seemed a safer option than bluff.
Soon she was on a street crowded with thousands of happy people, alcohol on most of their breaths. They were cheering loudly and, this late – it was a bit past eleven thirty – a bit drunkenly in many cases: “Yeah!” and “Hammer!”
It was small-scale and brought flashbacks from the early Commune to mind, the joyous mobs on the night of May First – and quite a few nights after that, until Spartacus had become First Citizen and cracked down – happily enjoying the fruits of the labour that had until then been stolen from them. And that was true here, too – there were expensive bottles of alcohol in the hands of clerks and raff, and many were wearing clothing that had clearly not been theirs this morning, designer headgear – there were even a couple of top hats circulating – and high-end suits that didn’t fit. There’d been looting, that was for sure.