by Jenn Lyons
me, I will.”
I sucked on the cigarette. “What’s your name, handsome?”
No reaction from the walking behemoth, but his slender side-kick looked uncomfortable.
“Come on now. If you want me to play nice, we’d best be friends. That means being on a first name basis, don’t you think?” I smiled. It was a friendly smile only to the exceptionally gullible. Forestal might have fallen for it. He seemed new. “I could always give you a nickname. Let’s see...” I tapped my lip with a finger and examined the large man. “How about I call you G-”
“Campbell,” the officer interrupted. “My name is Tal-Campbell.”
“Lovely. Scottish, isn’t that?” He looked about as Scottish as I was, which is to say, about as Scottish as a Komodo dragon.
“Maybe.” He frowned then. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Ah well. Doesn’t really matter, now does it? But now that we’re so very close, Campbell, think you’d mind explaining to me why the alarms didn’t go off? The damn things rang out like ambulance sirens for every Leaguer who walked through those doors, but not a peep for this man. No warning at all until the bullets hit. Who can turn the security grid off like that?” I gave him a long, hard look. “Besides the boys over at MOJ, of course.”
The smaller man interjected. “He wasn’t a Leaguer, Miss. He was a slave-caste—a janitor.”
“Quiet, Tal-Forestal.”
I sneered at Campbell. “That was no janitor and his gun should have set off the alarms.”
“Lieutenant, I don’t have time to discuss the finer points of restaurant security with you. We are required to test your weapons. You know that.”
“I shot off your ‘janitor’s’ arm, but it didn’t kill him. Didn’t even slow him down. He topped himself. Check the vid footage. A place like this has cameras covering every inch.”
“We can’t check the vids,” Campbell growled. “They’ve been erased.”
I stared blankly at the back wall. “How convenient.”
“I thought so too.” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned close. If I wasn’t used to Sarcodinay who had twenty centimeters on him in height, I might have been really intimidated. “We’ve five dead here. It is nothing short of a miracle that we don’t have more than that. Four of them were killed with diamond slugs, the kind the League like to use, and the man with the machine gun has a wound type we’ve never even seen before. A maser killed the last one, the man on the couch. The only people in the whole place who were wearing maser vambraces were the two Sarcodinay bodyguards and—at least according to these scans—you, and the waiter said you were arguing with the man killed by the maser.”
“Paul,” I whispered. “His name was Paul.”
“I need to see your weapons. All of your weapons, including the ones that look like jewelry.”
I continued to stare at the back wall, but the line of my jaw turned hard and tight. “It doesn’t seem real. It’s like saying the sun won’t rise tomorrow, that the Kantari have sworn off practical jokes. It can’t be—”
“Lieutenant, I truly am sorry, but I’m going to have to put you under—” He reached down and touched my arm.
It was a mistake and he had no one but himself to blame: he knew I was Black Flagged.
I grabbed his arm and twisted, hooked a foot around his legs and yanked hard, then rode him down to the marble. My right arm, with its pretty and oh-so-lethal gold bracelet, pointed at the caste mark on his forehead.
The restaurant fell quiet as a morgue.
“Is this what you want?” I asked him.
He blinked, not hurt as much as surprised. “Let’s not get excited.”
“I never fired my maser, Tal. Too many people were in the room, too much chance I’d miss. I’m not that sloppy. The energy cell has a full charge. I fired one bullet from my side arm. One. That bullet blew that bastard’s arm off, and he didn’t even care. He killed himself after that, like he killed Minister Lorvan and the Minister’s two bodyguards, and the question that you should be asking yourself is why, when Lorvan was clearly expecting an attack, the first thing his two bodyguards did was murder my friend. He wasn’t the one shooting.”
Campbell glanced back at the crime scene. “That’s Minister Lorvan?”
“What’s left of him. Your restaurant computer didn’t tell you?”
Campbell didn’t answer the question. He seemed more concerned with me for some reason. “Now what?”
“I don’t trust MOJ. You bastards never keep your word. I don’t expect you to start now. So I’m walking out of here. I go back to the League, and if you want my statement, you come talk to me there.”
He gazed at me coolly, and the corner of his mouth turned up in a smile that I, not being the gullible sort myself, was in no way inclined to interpret as friendly. “Nice plan.”
“It’s simple, but I don’t have many choices.”
“You don’t have any choices,” Campbell corrected. “You know that. If you kill me, you’re not walking out of here, and if you don’t, you’re not walking out of here.”
I glanced around. MOJ people surrounded me—and maybe they weren’t wearing full armored suits, but they still had shields out, shock sticks ready and electrified. None of them looked like they wanted to be my friend. Forestal stood off to the side, chewing on his thumbnail.
I looked down at Tal-Campbell, who I was wrapped around in a way that might have been considered provocative under other circumstances. I could feel his pulse through the fabric of his jacket. I smiled at him and felt the anticipation writ large on tensed, hard muscles: we both realized what was coming. I could practically hear the firing of the starter’s gun; that sweet, beautiful release of adrenaline.
I pulled my pistol out of its holster and spun it under legs, partly as a distraction but mostly so I wouldn’t be tempted to use it. A person could end up hurt. Then I rolled to the side in the opposite direction, off of Campbell. Some idiot swung on me as I did, and I grabbed his arm and twisted so he hit the Detective with his shock stick instead. Campbell wasn’t wearing combat gear, just the uniform. That took care of the Mountain. He was the one I had been the most worried about; I didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to know he was the kid who always placed tops in the combat classes.
I activated my web gloves and they started to glow. If you looked closely you could see delicate traceries of energy connecting the fingers of my left hand to the fingers of the right, but I wasn’t giving anyone the chance for a close inspection. MOJ people swung several more shock sticks in my direction. Most were clumsy enough for me to flat out dodge and the web gloves blocked the two that weren’t.
MOJ shock sticks have a core of metal through the center tonfa. Gives them that extra bit of spice, but also means someone who knows how to use a pair of magneto-web gloves can block them without any danger of being electrocuted. Personally, I’ve always felt that was a design flaw, but since web gloves are a Sarcodinay weapon that takes years to master, I can see why they didn’t think it would be a problem as long as MOJ were still working for the Sarcodinay.
I grabbed an MOJ goon and pulled, tripping him and rolling to my feet. As he fell, he passed through the space between my outstretched hands and screamed. His eyes rolled back in his head. He was unconscious before he’d stopped falling.
Those caste-marks didn’t exist so people would know whom to invite to the dinner party. It’s how the Sarcodinay controlled all their little pets. An Urban’s caste-mark is filled with nanites, bonded to nerve tissue. Metal nanites. A quick pass is highly unlikely to be fatal, but I know from experience that it’s an excruciating pain.
I knew I didn’t have much time. Sooner or later, probably sooner, someone would become scared or frustrated and go for a maser. I’ve blocked maser hits, but only because I knew where the shot was coming from before they pulled the trigger. I am fast, but I’m not faster than the speed of light. If I was lucky someone might waste a few valuable seconds trying to work my own pistol; it had a
fingerprint scan in the grip. I didn’t try grabbing their weapons for similar reasons.
I blocked two more tonfa blows while roundhouse kicking the third man back into the fourth’s shock stick. It didn’t do much. They were both wearing shielding, but they needed a few seconds to untangle themselves. I didn’t give them those seconds.
I flipped over tables and slid under chairs. The marble made it easy, and the body armor slowed them down. Twice I was hit by low intensity magnetic blasts that would have knocked me out if my caste-mark nanites were made of metal. I grinned as I heard shouts of frustration. Two more MOJ enforcers joined the dreamland patrol when they tried to tackle me. By this point I was almost to the airlock, and fooled myself into thinking escape was possible.
My hand touched the automated panel at the exact moment light exploded behind my eyes. Electricity coursed through me as the shock stick went to work. Muscles spasmed, clenched, stopped working entirely. I fell to the ground.
Before I passed out I looked up to see Tal-Campbell towering above me, holding a shock stick and coldly sneering.
ggg
“Why do I have to?” I ask with a little girl’s voice. That makes sense though, since I am a little girl. I look up at the man in front of me.
I know he is not as large as the Sarcodinay, but he still seems enormously tall, a stretched out scarecrow man with wild dark hair that always gets into his eyes and a face that is all hooked
