by Pat Cadigan
Looking at the locations of where the victims had been found gave Ido an idea of the Un-Coupler’s preferred territories. He used a few different places but his favourite killing ground was near the ruins of the old cathedral. He hadn’t dropped any bodies there lately but he was bound to go back there soon. Ido decided to see if that would be tonight.
The Un-Coupler was good for 55,000 credits, a nice sum that would sustain the clinic as well as a nurse’s salary. There might even be enough to spare for new materials so Ido could start over with the chip.
* * *
Damn that squeaky wheel, Ido thought as he wheeled the case through the late-night streets. He could resize a twelve-year-old’s cyborg arm, give a guitar player a new start, and fix a man’s autonomic nervous system. But he couldn’t get that goddam wheel to stop squeaking. Someday it was going to drop him in the shit in a way he never saw coming.
Ido paused to get his bearings, then headed towards the jagged silhouette of the ruined cathedral. The Un-Coupler liked the cathedral because of the stones. They were nice and heavy, good for crushing heads. Ido wheeled his case around to the far side of the cathedral and found a patch of scrubby grass in the shadows near an outside wall where he could lay the case on its side to open it.
One of the other Hunter-Warriors, that vain son of a bitch Zapan, had told Ido any weapon that had to be assembled was a ridiculous waste of time and effort. Death could creep up behind him before he could stick tab A into slot B. He advised Ido to get himself either another weapon or another line of work.
Ignoring Zapan had never got anyone killed, so Ido went with that. He already had another line of work. As for weapons, there were an astonishing number of devices made for the express purpose of taking people out of this world. Ido had tried just about all of them from every arms dealer in town, legal and illegal. Then he’d gone home and made the Rocket Hammer.
Constructing an instrument for killing went against everything he stood for as a doctor. However, the murder of his daughter had gone against everything he had stood for as a father, so maybe that evened things out.
Well, no, not really. The clinic was supposed to even things out, but there was nothing that could ever balance the murder of his daughter. He was simply doing the only thing left for him to do. He took her killer off the streets. Then he took other killers off the streets and hoped that would save other parents from the miserable perversity of having a child die before them. Only a Hunter-Warrior could cure that condition, not a doctor.
Ido wasn’t sure where the idea of the Rocket Hammer had come from or what had suggested it to him. He’d sketched it on paper, then used a design-engineering program on the computer. It had been hard to construct, harder than anything else he’d ever done—well, until the chip.
Ido took the two main components out of the foam-lined case. The lower part of the handle had the controls; the upper part included the hammer head. As he put them together, he felt the handle vibrate in his grip. The sensation made him feel strong. He tightened his grip on it as he looked up its length to the head.
The head had come to him practically in a vision. One side was blunt, like a mallet, made for smashing. The other side was a shiny, extra-hard, thick piece of metal that tapered to a nasty point, made for irreparable damage. The blunt side had vents for propulsion, so that when he swung pointy side first, there was more in the blow than the power of his arms. There were also a few small motors on the blunt side; a control on the handle would turn one blow into several, like a jackhammer.
The Rocket Hammer was heavier than he’d intended, and the controls made it more complicated than almost any other weapon save for McTeague’s cyborg Hellhounds. It was easier to transport in the case, but that was all right. It made him look like some harmless eccentric rather than a Hunter-Warrior. Marks ran from Zapan and others like him, but they seldom gave Ido a second look; he could take them by surprise.
Some marks never ran from anyone; they thought they were invincible. Ido heard the voices coming through the cathedral, a man and woman pleading and a loud, jeering laugh, high and shrill enough to break glass.
It never ceased to amaze Ido that, although killers came in all shapes and sizes, they all had a compulsion to play with their victims for the sheer sadistic pleasure of it.
Ido moved the suitcase up against the cathedral wall and waited to see if the cyborg planned to kill his victims inside or drag them outside and work them over a little more. Holy places and hallowed ground weren’t things most psychos worried about. The Un-Coupler probably didn’t even know what a cathedral was. Just that it had lots of heavy stones for crushing skulls with.
A man suddenly flew through one of the arched gaps that had once been a window and landed on the ground with a cry of pain. As he struggled to get up, Ido saw he was at least sixty-five. He got to his knees but he was too off-balance to make it to his feet. His shoulder was dislocated. Ido winced in sympathy—it must have hurt like hell, even more than his broken nose which was bleeding so much, the man had to be on blood thinners. He needed a hospital now.
The man spotted Ido in the shadows and opened his mouth. Ido shook his head emphatically and put a finger to his lips, then hefted the Rocket Hammer so the man would know he was a Hunter. A second later, the woman tumbled out of the window onto the ground. She made a low grunt but didn’t cry out. The man tried to stand up again but she got to her feet first and went to him with the tell-tale movements of someone with cyborg legs. She could have run away easily, gone for help, but she wouldn’t leave him. Ido felt a pang and told himself to toughen up; these people needed him to save them, not envy their relationship.
The Un-Coupler leaped out of the window and landed directly in front of them. “I don’t know if I’ve tenderised you enough yet,” the cyborg said in a high-pitched demented squeal. “Old meat’s so tough—like beef jerky with metal. That’d be you, sweetheart,” he added, gesturing at the woman.
She picked up an irregularly shaped chunk of stone almost as large as her head and held it in both hands, getting ready to heave it at him, for all the good that would do.
“Ooooh! I can use that!” enthused the Un-Coupler. “Toss it to me!” His fingers clicked as he flexed them. He was going to kill the woman first—Ido could see that as plainly as if there was a glowing sign over his head spelling it out. He’d kill the woman first to torment the husband, tearing her limbs off like a nasty kid with a fly. Then he’d crush her head with the rock she was holding. The sound would be obscene.
And the guy wouldn’t budge. She hadn’t left him; he wasn’t going to leave her either. Not that he could. He was in agony, trembling, his knees about to buckle. They’d die for each other and with each other, and the Un-Coupler hated them so much for that he could barely contain himself.
They’d suffered enough. Ido stepped out of the shadows with the Rocket Hammer. “Hey, tin can!” he yelled. “How about you and I go a few rounds instead?”
The Un-Coupler whirled on him and Ido’s heart jumped and accelerated into high gear. The cyborg was a piecemeal mess. No part of him matched any other part—even his eyes were two different colours and sizes. One arm was an exposed framework that seemed to have been jerry-rigged in a hurry; the other was carved to resemble organic musculature, ending in a scythe rather than a hand. His right leg was such a mess of cobbled-together parts, Ido was surprised it worked. His left leg was a single limb that Ido had seen before, on a member of the Factory Motorball practice team. The player himself had vanished the day he’d been cut and never reappeared. He must have parted himself out… or the leg was actually the last original part. Ido really hoped it wasn’t.
A fragment of history popped into Ido’s mind: the notion of spontaneous generation. The people of a less knowledgeable time had believed that mice sprang into existence from a dirty shirt in a box and mud at the bottom of a lake turned into fish. Ido could almost believe that the Un-Coupler and others like him congealed out of the trash pile combined wi
th bad air and hopelessness in the shadow of Zalem.
Ido shoved the thought away as the Un-Coupler squealed and lunged for him.
He swung the Rocket Hammer blunt end first and knocked the cyborg’s legs out from under him. “Go! Run! To a hospital!” Ido yelled at the couple who were just standing on the sidewalk, transfixed. The next blow brought the blunt end down on the cyborg’s composite leg, which came apart in an explosion of metal pieces.
“I’ll kill you!” the cyborg screamed and made a swipe at him. Ido ducked and gave him a jackhammer blow to one shoulder. The cyborg’s arm popped out to reveal wires and cables.
Ido glanced at the spot where the couple had been. Correction: still were. Dammit. As the Un-Coupler tried to get to his feet, Ido gave him another jackhammer blow, this one to the centre of his torso.
“Go to a hospital!” Ido yelled at the couple angrily.
The woman started pushing the man down the sidewalk. They were in shock, Ido knew, but he couldn’t help feeling a little annoyed anyway. Did they really think they were safe just because he was there beating up their attacker? Didn’t they know they needed medical attention? Didn’t they know they had to get to a safe place?
A safe place? As if there really were such a thing.
Ido slammed the cyborg’s chest again and the armour fractured into pieces. But he was still threatening to kill Ido, as if he had a chance of doing such a thing. Ido smashed the other knee, breaking his leg in half.
The Un-Coupler was on his back now, still making swipes in Ido’s direction with his good arm. Ido smashed his hips, destroying the pelvic connectors, and raised the hammer to smash his lower torso.
Now who’s playing with his prey? a small voice whispered nastily in his mind. Or is this really your idea of fun?
Ido turned the hammer around and brought the pointy end down onto the Un-Coupler’s neck with propulsion. The cyborg’s head separated from his body with a wet, meaty noise that made Ido queasy. He put it in his bounty bag, then cleaned off the Rocket Hammer and put it away.
He dropped the case at home before going to the bounty headquarters at the Factory to turn in the Un-Coupler’s head. The deckman didn’t thank him or compliment him on a job well done for getting a dangerous killer off the street. Deckmen never did. They looked like trashcans with cartoon-like faces on them, and no one knew what they were for other than to creep people out. Ido didn’t care, as long as he got the promised bounty.
He thought he’d been out all night, but there were still some dark hours left.
There always were.
CHAPTER 12
“What else do you work on?”
Chiren looked up from the 3-D schematic floating over her worktable to the young guy standing beside it. Which assistant was this, Dave? George? Oh, right—Theo. He was the one with the freckles across the bridge of his nose.
“Excuse me?” Chiren asked, her tone stiff and formal.
“I was just wondering,” said Theo. He was hairless—all the assistants were, lacking even eyebrows and eyelashes. Vector had told them it was the only way to maintain proper laboratory hygiene. As if that were real and not something Vector had made up to assert his ownership. “Her” assistants were in fact his property; his property didn’t even grow hair without his permission.
If the assistants ever wondered why she could have hair without violating proper laboratory hygiene, they kept it to themselves. They seldom asked any questions that weren’t essentially some form of How high? or What colour? For all the personality they showed, they might have been deckmen, and if Vector could have figured out how to make them serve the same purpose, he’d have replaced all the humans already. Except her, of course—unless the Factory developed a special lady-faced deckman with both cyber and bedroom skills. Then she might be out of a job.
“What were you ‘just wondering’?” she asked the assistant, even more stiffly.
It wasn’t always easy to read people who had no facial hair, but she could tell Theo wished he’d just kept his mouth shut and enjoyed the boredom instead of finding something to do.
“Uh, what you thought you might need for tonight’s round of upgrades,” he said, trying to look like the kind of helpful employee she wouldn’t ask Vector to get rid of.
“No, it wasn’t,” Chiren said firmly. “What else do I work on besides Paladins—that’s what you meant, isn’t it?”
Poor Theo couldn’t help squirming under her gaze. “I know you used to do a lot of general cyber-medicine,” he said.
“At my ex-husband’s clinic,” Chiren prodded. “Before I came here full-time. Before I lost my daughter.”
“I didn’t mean to get so p-personal with you,” the assistant said, his expression a mix of misery and desperation, “or to bring up things you don’t care to talk about with people like me.”
“People like you? What kind of people are those?” Chiren asked, deciding to be merciless. “People I barely know? People I employ to wash beakers and sterilise instruments? Or people who have the bad judgment to try getting familiar with their betters?”
Theo was staring at the floor. “Um… I’m gonna go wash some beakers now.”
“Good idea. We have lab hygiene to maintain.” She turned back to the schematic. “Wash all the beakers. When you’re done, wash everything else.”
“Yes, Dr Chiren.” The assistant practically ran for the storage closet.
That had been mean even for her, Chiren thought. Nonetheless, every cat needed a scratching post, and every soul needed to know which they were—cat or post.
It was good to know where you fit in, where you stood. Vector was king of the trashcans. She was here to keep him on his trashcan throne and to be rewarded later for a job well done. The assistants were merely tools, and it was best for all concerned that they didn’t get any stupid ideas, like thinking they knew her just because they worked for her. Breaking in new shoes didn’t mean the shoes knew you.
Which reminded her: after seven straight days of wear, these damned stilettos were still pretty rigid. This was the most uncomfortable pair yet, but Vector loved her in stilettos and kept giving them to her. She was tired of them; if you’d seen one pair of stilettos, you’d pretty much seen them all.
This was true of a lot of things in Iron City. Only Motorball held her interest. Building champions was the only thing that didn’t bore her stupid, the one thing that she could stand to do while she waited for Vector to make good on his promise to send her home to Zalem.
Sometimes, however, even that could be a pain in the neck; the shoulders too. Chiren sat back and rolled her head slowly around on her neck to loosen the muscles. Without having to be asked, Ido would have come over to rub her shoulders, starting with the muscles at the base of her neck and going all the way down to her shoulder blades. Just remembering how it felt made her sigh. The only person she allowed to touch her physically now was Vector and he didn’t do massages outside the bedroom. He’d have hired a massage therapist if she’d asked but he wouldn’t have allowed Chiren to keep one on standby in the lab.
What she really needed, however, wasn’t a massage. She needed help from someone who was her intellectual equal and, in terms of lateral thinking and application, her superior. There was only one person like that in Iron City and Vector wasn’t going to like it. She didn’t like it herself.
On the other hand, she knew Vector still wanted Ido back. If Ido had come to him asking to work the pits again, Vector would have gladly taken him back. He would have hemmed and hawed to see if he could make Ido beg for it, and he’d have shorted him on salary, but he’d have taken him back.
Maybe if Ido saw her fancy set-up, he might even change his mind about Motorball. Ido was still grieving, and he would never stop blaming himself. But maybe the idea of having the right equipment, the latest tech, and the best materials and resources, would get through to the scientist in him. Nothing could extinguish that spark—he’d be Dr Dyson Ido, cyber-surgeon, until the day he die
d.
Chiren dialled her phone.
* * *
Ido had wanted to say no and hang up on her like a sane, sensible person. But Chiren would never have called him unless she’d truly needed help and had no other choice—this was Iron City after all. The lonely man he was still craved to be a husband, even if he could no longer be a father; that man was also hoping Chiren had called because she missed him.
The sane, sensible man in him said this was a sad, futile hope that would only enlarge the sucking chest wound that was his grief. But the lonely man wasn’t listening.
Even if he did say no, she would only call back and keep calling until she got him to say yes. As a result, he would go to her believing even harder in the fairy tale that she wanted him and he’d be in even worse condition when she eventually thanked him for his help and sent him away. Better he should go to her while he was strong enough to recover without it affecting his work in the clinic. His patients shouldn’t suffer for his foolishness.
But he refused to work at the stadium. He hadn’t been there since losing their daughter and he couldn’t, wouldn’t, go back.
Chiren told him it wasn’t a problem. There was a practice going on tonight. It was impossible to work properly with trainers yelling and players complaining and then pestering her about some new tech they’d heard about that didn’t even exist. She gave him the address of her new laboratory.
Ido wasn’t thrilled about going to the Factory, even if her lab was actually in an outbuilding and not the main headquarters. But at least he wouldn’t be carrying a couple of severed heads in a bounty bag. Plus, Chiren’s lab wouldn’t have Centurians lining the walls waiting for a threat they could shoot to pieces.
* * *
Ido arrived to find Vector’s top team on the premises. Apparently it was Upgrade Night before the next game. Ido no longer kept track, so he had no idea if it was a season game, an exhibition, or a play-off. The Paladins were their usual rowdy selves and Chiren had curtained off half the lab to make a waiting area, where they could hang out, watch videos and bullshit each other while her weird, bald assistants waited on them hand and foot, or hand and wheel, and made sure they didn’t bother her.
