by Pat Cadigan
“Good idea,” Hugo said.
“Not bad for a prude,” added Koyomi, giving him a soft punch on the arm.
Tanji looked over her head at Hugo. “Thanks, but you don’t have to sound so surprised.”
“Gear up,” Hugo told the crew. “Except no fire-bottles.”
“Why not?” asked Dif.
“Because that smell is sewer gas, and sewer gas is methane and a bunch of other stuff, all of it flammable.” He turned to Dif. “When you were scouting it out, did you happen to feel any breezes or drafts or anything?”
Dif frowned at him incredulously. “Are you kidding?”
“No ventilation,” Hugo replied. “Fire burns oxygen. If a fire-bottle goes off down there, we’ll have a hard time breathing. You can’t fight if you can’t breathe.”
Louie looked at Hugo with something like wonder. “How do you know all that?”
Hugo shrugged. “Just stuff I picked up,” he said. In truth, he wasn’t sure himself. “You want to talk about it later, we can as long as you take my word for it right now. If I see a fire-bottle in the tunnel, you’re off the crew even if we don’t die.”
* * *
Once they were down in the tunnel, Hugo almost called it off. There was more light than he’d expected—Dif actually hadn’t exaggerated how bright the long overhead rods were, and they had come on while they were still climbing down the ladder. But that much light made Hugo think there had to be surveillance cameras, although he couldn’t find anything that looked like it had a lens.
The space, however, seemed smaller than Dif had described. Small enclosed spaces had never bothered Hugo, but with his hood up, goggles on and a bandanna over his nose and mouth, he felt like he was being smothered. Worse, the bandanna did little to block the smell, which was more pungent than Dif had led him to believe. Hugo was sorry he hadn’t made them stick to the original plan of ambushing the cyborg as he came up out of the manhole.
Why the hell was the cyborg using underground tunnels to move around anyway? He probably had to be hosed down several times a day to get rid of the smell, which seemed almost as solid as the tunnel itself.
Dif showed them two junctions—one where a tunnel branched off to the right, and another farther on that went off to the left. Dif and Louie took the latter and Hugo, Tanji and Koyomi hid in the former. The plan was simple—he, Tanji and Koyomi would jump out and confront the cyborg, while Dif and Louie came up behind him with a net. They’d throw the net over him, then everyone would hit him all at once with paralyser bolts. A shock to the back of the neck was usually enough to take a cyborg down, but Hugo wanted to hit him in the shoulders, elbows and knees, just to be sure everything was immobilised.
Twenty minutes after they took their positions, the lights went out. Tanji and Koyomi both jumped; Hugo hoped they didn’t notice he had as well. “It’s just the motion sensors,” he whispered to Koyomi. “They’ll go on again when we move.”
Koyomi yanked down the scarf covering the lower part of her face. “I know that,” she snapped.
“Scarf up,” he ordered.
She made a face as she obeyed. “I can hardly breathe.”
“Breathe later, shut up now,” Tanji whispered. “I think I hear something.”
Hugo heard it too: the sound of distant voices. He couldn’t make out any words but they had a metallic quality, like they were coming from the bottom of a big empty basin.
What if the cyborg wasn’t alone?
That should have occurred to him before now, Hugo thought, wincing. Just because he’d always been alone when Dif and Louie had been tracking him didn’t guarantee the cyborg would be alone tonight. Hugo wanted to pound his head against the wall. If he had another TR cyborg with him, they were going to have their work cut out for them. Could the five of them take down two big cyborgs in this confined space?
Hugo could see it going either way. If both cyborgs were tangled up in the net, all they had to do was keep hitting them with paralysers until they stopped moving. Would Vector pay for the extra cyborg body, or would he expect them to throw it in for free? They should talk it over before they delivered, Hugo thought.
What if there were three?
Abruptly, Hugo realised the voices had stopped. Farther down the tunnel, lights went on as the cyborg moved towards them. Hugo’s phone vibrated with a text from Dif: He’s coming.
Is he alone? Hugo texted back and received a thumb’s-up in reply. But he could hear the footsteps now—just one person—and he almost went limp with relief. He had to plan a lot better next time, Hugo thought, and not let himself get talked into anything, especially when the person doing the talking wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.
More lights were going on now. The sewer smell was also getting stronger. By the time the lights in their part of the tunnel went on, Hugo was breathing through his mouth, although it didn’t help much. Was the cyborg bringing a load of raw sewage with him?
Hugo’s phone lit up with another message from Dif: NOW.
He jumped out in front of the cyborg with Koyomi and Tanji following. The smell hit him in the face with renewed force and he heard Koyomi make a disgusted noise.
“And what would you little bugs want?” the cyborg said, laughing. There was a dark smear on his cheek below his right eye and stains on his metal arms, but most of the smell seemed to be coming from whatever was caked on his feet. “Better not run around in here or the exterminator’ll come for you!”
Dif and Louie were creeping up behind him. Why didn’t they just throw the net over him already? What were they waiting for?
All at once the cyborg gave a shudder and his face lost all expression. “The underworld is where my children live,” he said in a low voice that made Hugo’s skin crawl. “You have no business here.”
Agree totally, Hugo thought and looked past him at Dif and Louie. “Net him already!”
But the cyborg had turned around. Before Dif and Louie could even raise the net, he grabbed them and banged their heads together, taking the net away from them as they fell. The cyborg pivoted and tossed the net at Hugo. Hugo dived between his legs, getting another faceful of stink, while Tanji dodged to one side. The net went over Koyomi and the cyborg pulled her close, saying something else about their not belonging there. Hugo bounced to his feet behind him and stuck his paralyser in the back of the cyborg’s neck.
Koyomi let out a scream that gave Hugo an instant and complete understanding of the term “blood-curdling”. He heard her banging on the cyborg’s metal chest with her fist and saw the smaller, framework arms thrust outward. A long moment later, Koyomi fell to the floor of the tunnel and scuttled away, sobbing and retching as she disentangled herself from the net using one hand and keeping the other arm close to her chest. Hugo hit the cyborg in the back of the neck again and he fell forward on his face, the extra arms thrusting straight out.
Tanji appeared beside him as if by magic and stuck the cyborg at the base of his spine. Not his tailbone, but close enough to give Hugo a brief surge of spiteful satisfaction. The back of the cyborg’s thigh sprang open and a cable snaked out to wrap itself tightly around Tanji’s legs.
“Oh, gross!” Tanji hollered, falling over almost on top of the cyborg. “Get it off, get it off!”
Hugo vaulted over the cyborg, grabbed the net and threw it over him, giving him another shot to the base of his skull with the paralyser.
The cyborg’s torso lifted, all of his arms contracting. Tanji was yelling for him not to do that, it made the cable squeeze harder. Get it off, get it off! Dif stumbled over and stuck his paralyser at the place where the cyborg’s leg joined his torso. There was a sharp crack and the cable around Tanji’s thigh went limp.
Tanji staggered away, picked up his paralyser bolt and hit the cyborg in the same spot on the other leg. “Just in case,” he said grimly. “Bastard. I’ll have to shower for a month to get rid of the stink.”
The cyborg began to laugh. The sound made Hugo draw back wi
th revulsion, but Dif, Tanji and Louie all sprang forward and jabbed their paralysers into the base of his neck. The laughter cut off.
“I never want to hear anything that creepy ever again,” Hugo blurted.
“Guy’s obviously some kind of nutcase,” Tanji said. “One minute he’s calling us bugs, the next he’s talking about his children? What the hell was that about?”
“Multiple personalities,” Dif said knowingly. “Some people have, like, a hundred.”
“I don’t care,” Hugo said. “Let’s just get him disconnected before he wakes up—”
“Yeah, about that,” Louie said, giving Dif a significant look. “You forgot to tell them.”
“We forgot,” Dif corrected him.
“What?” Hugo yelled.
Dif looked sheepish. “Well, that buzzing you hear?”
Hugo was about to say he didn’t hear anything when he realised he did.
“It’s more of a humming,” Louie said.
“It’s the exterminator,” Dif said quickly. “All the movement and thrashing around triggered it. It thinks there’s rats or something it has to exterminate.”
“Wrap him in the net so we can get him up the ladder,” Hugo ordered them, and turned to see Koyomi, still holding her arm protectively to her chest.
“I can’t climb,” she said in a small voice. “He broke my arm.” She started to cry. “Bastard.”
Hugo got them to drag the cyborg all the way to the ladder, then told Koyomi to get on top of the cyborg and loop her good arm through the net.
“No,” she said. “I hate you just for suggesting it.”
Tanji bent down with his back to her. “Can you hold onto me, then?” She climbed on and he carried her up the ladder piggyback-style. Hugo, Dif and Louie were about to pull the netted, unconscious cyborg up the ladder when the exterminator appeared at the far end of the tunnel.
“That’s an exterminator?” Hugo said. It was a metal dome four feet high wearing a skirt of constantly moving knives.
“Nasty, isn’t it?” Louie said as they struggled up the ladder with the cyborg.
Hugo grunted; a lot of things in Iron City were nasty. At least this one couldn’t climb.
* * *
“What do you want?” said Vector without looking away from the wall screen. “And why in God’s name do you stink?”
Hugo was at a loss for words. He looked at the cyborg body lying near the door of the laboratory. After he’d dropped Koyomi and Tanji at the emergency room, he and Dif and Louie had wrapped the thing in several garbage bags. Louie had suggested adding baking soda to get rid of the smell, but they didn’t have any and none of them knew where to get some at stupid o’clock in the morning. Now Hugo was glad he’d told Dif and Louie to wait outside after they’d helped him bring the body into the lab.
“I’m delivering your order,” Hugo said. “The cyborg body with all the extras. That’s what you’re smelling.” Please believe that, he prayed in silent desperation.
Vector turned his head and looked at him with the expression of a man who was fed up with being fed up and wanted someone to take it out on. “You want to explain yourself? And this better be good, because I know I never asked for anything smelling like that.”
Hugo hesitated. Down at the other end of the room, Chiren was moving from examination tables to cabinets to shelves, picking things up and banging them down or slamming cabinet doors, all the while muttering under her breath. She was pretending she was busy, Hugo realised, and Vector was pretending she wasn’t shredding his last nerve.
“We found your order in the sewer,” Hugo said finally.
“I did not order anything from the sewer.” Vector sat up straighter in the chair, frowning at Hugo. “What is it with you? First south-town; now the sewer? You can’t go any lower, kid. Not in this life.”
“We thought he was in the Velvet Orchid,” Hugo said unhappily, trying to make his face a neutral mask.
“How the hell do you get from the Velvet Orchid to the sewer?” Vector demanded.
Practice, Vector, practice. Hugo had to bite his lips together so he wouldn’t say it out loud. “By an access tunnel,” he said finally. “That’s where we grabbed him after he came up out of the sewer.”
Vector frowned at him for a couple of seconds longer and then started to laugh. “Seriously? You found him in the sewer? Damn, kid, that’s perfect. You have no idea how perfect it is.” He twisted around to look at Chiren, who was rattling the glassware in one of the cabinets as she searched for nothing.
“Hey, Chiren!” Vector called to her.
Chiren kept looking through the cabinet, giving no indication that she’d heard him.
“Hey, baby, got some good news for you!” Vector went on. When she still didn’t respond, he added, “Stop that and pay attention when I’m talking to you or I’ll come over and make you.”
He hadn’t raised his voice. If anything, he’d lowered it, but it made Chiren freeze. Then she slowly closed the cabinet and turned around to look at Vector. Hugo tried to keep his face neutral. He hadn’t thought anyone could be so pale. Her blue eyes had gone from icy and intense to watery and faded. Whatever had happened tonight had been really bad, and Vector blamed her, whether it had been her fault or not. Hugo tried to think of some way to get out of there and come back later. No one was supposed to see Vector like this, especially not him.
“Our friend Hugo here has just delivered our special order,” Vector was telling Chiren. “You know, the cyborg body with all those great enhancements, arms within arms, an extra lung and all that fancy shit? Well, you know where the kid found him? You’ll never guess—in the sewer!” Vector gestured at Hugo like a game show host presenting the grand prize. “That’s right, baby, our Next Big Thing was gettin’ down and dirty with our Last Big Thing! Who shoulda been our Next-To-Last Big Thing but shit happens, and not just in the sewer.”
Vector suddenly turned back to Hugo with a big fake smile that Hugo thought was the most hideous thing he’d ever seen. “Hey, kid, you didn’t happen to see Grewishka too, did you?”
Hugo blinked at him, utterly baffled. What did Grewishka have to do with anything?
“No? How about our chances for a Motorball championship?” Vector asked. “Surely you saw those, seeing as how they all got flushed down the toilet!”
Someone touched Hugo’s shoulder and he jumped; one of Vector’s bodyguards was looming over him. It was all he could do not to turn and run.
But the man spoke to him in a low voice, barely above a whisper. “It’s been a lousy night. Somebody killed the new guy and ran off with the speed chip.”
Chase was dead? Hugo was shocked, partly by the fact that someone had actually been able to kill him and partly that anyone had dared to even try it, given that the cyborg was one of Vector’s stable. And if that wasn’t enough, they’d stolen the super-chip. But who besides Chiren would know how to remove it and who could have been that crazy—
Hugo caught his breath. Ido. Only Ido.
“You come back tomorrow afternoon,” the bodyguard whispered. “Sometime after two.” He started to usher Hugo towards the door and Hugo let him.
“Hold it right there, kid!” Vector hollered. Hugo cringed, waiting for Vector to shoot him. “I gotta pay you! This is a professional operation!” He beckoned impatiently. Hugo went to him. Vector jumped up with an even bigger fake smile and pulled him over to a nearby cabinet with a keypad. It took him three tries to get it open; Hugo pretended to be engrossed in something on his phone.
“There, third time’s the winner!” Vector announced, with fake cheer that sounded closer to hysteria. He threw the cabinet door open so widely it bounced back. Vector stilled it with one hand as he reached inside and yanked a package of credits off a shelf. “Good job. Thanks a lot,” he said, shoving the credits at Hugo with an even bigger fake smile. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”
“I, uh, I’ll try not to, sir.” Hugo couldn’t help thinking that wouldn
’t be easy, given how small one-fifth of the take was. But he wasn’t going to short anybody. When he’d formed the crew, Hugo had promised equal shares. He wasn’t going back on that, now or ever.
“Great. Glad you were on time, kid. I always appreciate that. But the way things worked out, you coulda taken another week.” Vector’s grin looked totally demented as he gave Hugo a clap on the shoulder, shoving him towards the exit. Then he raised his voice to address the whole room. “Now, somebody—I don’t care who—” Vector looked pointedly at the bodyguard. “Take that stinking thing outside and turn a power hose on it. Now!”
Go, the bodyguard mouthed at Hugo, and Hugo went.
* * *
At least Dif and Louis had the good grace not to comment on the small size of their shares. Hugo took them to the CAFÉ café to pick up their gyros, then drove to the hospital to check on Koyomi.
He found Tanji alone in a nearly empty waiting room. He’d taken off his hoodie and stuffed it into a plastic bag. “Yay, hooray,” Tanji said in a flat voice as Hugo gave him his share. “So how overjoyed was Vector that we delivered on time?”
Thank God he’d made Tanji stay with Koyomi, Hugo thought. “He’d have danced and shouted Hallelujah but they were having a weird night.”
“Did he at least say thank you?” Tanji asked.
“Only in words.”
Tanji made a sour face. “I think we’re gonna have to raise the going rate,” he said. “We should figure the headcount into the charge.”
“You think we could’ve done it with just us three?”
Tanji shook his head. “We’d’ve probably still been fighting him when the exterminator showed up. And he might’ve broken all our arms.” He pulled up the neck of his t-shirt and sniffed it. “I think my hoodie caught most of the smell.”
Hugo took off his own hoodie and sniffed his own shirt. “I can’t tell,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, the whole night stinks. Where’d you get the bag?”
Tanji nodded at the reception desk where a man in a blue-and-white uniform was sitting with his face cupped in his palm and his eyes closed. “Just ask the nurse. He’ll give you one.”
