The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

by S. Andrew Swann

  “What?”

  “I did a long-distance reprogramming of your comm’s computer. Don’t worry it’s not permanent. And—” Dittrich glanced off to his left, “—unless your name is Kobe Anaka, that’s not your comm.”

  Angel sighed. “You do know Nohar, right?”

  Dittrich nodded. “And you’re the hell-bunny he scraped off the remains of Musician’s Towers way back when.”

  Angel opened her mouth to say something, but instead simply nodded.

  “Any friend of Nohar’s . . . What can I do?”

  She took a deep breath and dove into the story again. Dittrich stopped her when she got to the pile of ramcards on her dining room table. “Whoever they are, they’re looking for some sort of data file.”

  “Okay,” Angel said, unsure.

  “They haven’t found it yet.”

  “How’s that follow?”

  “There’s nothing at the condo, and at your apartment they’re interrupted before they can put things back—hmm. You know what it sounds like to me?”

  “What?”

  “Your Byron was a data courier. He moved things VanDyne didn’t trust to the data net. Stuff too hot for anyone to trust to a wire. High-risk, high-reward, easily could make a few million doing that. Did he give you anything on a ramcard? A movie, music, software, love poetry—”

  Angels’ hand found its way into her pocket. The season tickets were still there. She pulled them out of her pocket and looked at the rainbow-sheened cards with the Earthquakes’ logo on them. She stared at them with growing realization. “You bastard, Byron.” All that time, was she just being used?

  Dittrich nodded. “I think Nohar wanted me to give you a line on a fellow hacker out there on the coast.”

  “Yes, someone to help sort out this mess.”

  “Before I do so—a warning from an old hand at the information game.”

  Angel looked up and waited for Dittrich to go on.

  “Data that valuable’s likely to be just as dangerous.”

  • • •

  Angel left Anaka asleep on his futon. She’d decided that it was pretty much a sure thing the cop was going to sleep through the rest of the day. Alcohol and exhaustion had finally caught up with the man.

  Over and over, Angel thought about the damn tickets. She did not want to think that Byron was using her like that, planting crap like that on her—

  The more she thought about it, though, the more it was starting to look like Byron was acting the playboy. While she had been taking things seriously, he’d been taking it as just another fling. She was just another female he’d charmed, the only real distinction being that she was the last. She hadn’t been in a relationship, she’d been in an effing lottery.

  She surprised herself by actually considering not accepting the money.

  “Come on, let’s not be a fool twice,” she said to herself as she hit the switchbacks on Lombard Street.

  “Oh, God,” she said as she hit the first turn. She started cursing rapidly in Spanish as she slowed to a crawl and maneuvered the large BMW down the insane curves. She would have avoided this stretch if she’d been thinking.

  She had one brief close call with a Dodge Portola pickup on the last turn. A long, red-flagged length of white PVC pipe that hung out the back of the truck bed actually swept over the front hood of her car, barely missing the windshield. It took all the self-control Angel had not to slam on the brakes in the middle of the turn.

  She came out the other end of the bend without impaling her car on the pipe.

  Cursing herself, she continued down Lombard, and almost ran down a cable car trolling through the intersection at Columbus. The BMW froze, half in the intersection, as the car passed by in front of her going at its slow, sedate, pace. It caught her attention that there was not a single moreau on the car.

  Horns began to blare behind her.

  She turned down Columbus and suddenly, for the first time since coming to Frisco, began to worry about the neighborhood. Nob Hill and points north were solid pink. Always had been solid pink. That usually didn’t bother her . . .

  Today was different.

  She drove down Columbus, toward Chinatown, toward the Pyramid, and she could feel the pinks looking at her. She could feel the drivers around her thinking she didn’t belong in that kind of car, didn’t belong this far north of Market.

  Suddenly, this city didn’t seem so different. Frisco might not have any concrete barriers blocking off access to the morey neighborhoods, it might not have a morey curfew, it might even have one or two morey cops, but the eyes that followed her down Columbus Avenue could have been from Cleveland, or LA, or New York.

  She was sitting at the light at Montgomery, just in front of the Pyramid, and something hit her windshield.

  Angel heard a smack, and some liquid splashed across her field of view. She looked to the left, and she saw a knot of pinks on the crosswalk. One of them had thrown a bulb of coke, or coffee, or some dark beverage at the BMW’s windshield.

  “Go home,” she heard one say.

  There were seven or eight of them, and what scared Angel was the fact that they weren’t skinheads. They looked like fairly normal pink adolescents.

  They had crossed to stand in front of her car, and they stopped.

  One gave her the finger, two others put their hands on the hood and began rocking the car up and down on the shocks.

  “Oh, shit,” Angel whispered. She checked to make sure the doors were locked. As she did, the humans began to surround the car.

  “Where’d the rat steal this—”

  “Don’t want your kind here—”

  “Looking for some kind of trouble—”

  The humans began to hit the car with their fists.

  The light changed and the car behind her began to lay on the horn. Christ, Angel thought, couldn’t he see the mess she was in? She punched the BMW’s comm to call the cops, but the damn thing only broadcast static. She looked up and saw a pink with a denim jacket and a T-shirt with an “Alex Gregg in ’60” logo on it. He was whipping the end of her severed antenna across the hood of the car.

  One of the pinks jumped up on the hood and started to jump up and down, and Angel heard a window behind her shatter.

  That was fucking enough.

  She slammed the BMW into reverse, flooring the accelerator and turning the wheel. The rear wheels bit pavement and her car shot back to the left, across the double yellow line. The computer on the BMW began to flash all sorts of collision avoidance lights and traffic warnings at her.

  The pink on the hood took a header backward and fell headfirst into a storm sewer drain. Two pinks on the left jumped back, out of the BMW’s way and into the other lane.

  An old Dodge four-door was turning in from Washington and slammed on the brakes in the center of the intersection to avoid running down one of the pinks. A motorcycle crunched into it broadside. The cyclist tumbled over the hood of the Dodge and landed on a few of the pinks who were still standing in the crosswalk.

  There was a crunch as the BMW kissed fenders with the car behind it, then Angel shot backward in the opposite lane, up Columbus the way she’d come. There was screaming from behind her, and she saw that one of the pink kids had put his arm through her rear passenger side window. He was now hanging on to the door, his other hand frantic for some sort of handhold. Angel grinned as she shot backward through the intersection at Jackson—fortunately, the light was with her—and slammed on the brakes just on the other side of the light.

  The pink tumbled from her door, and Angel made a squealing left turn on to Jackson.

  It might have been a dumb idea, but she looped around Jackson Square and came down Washington to view the destruction from the other end. She shouldn’t have been worried about the kids. They deserved what they got. However, she still found hers
elf hoping that no one got seriously hurt. If nothing else, she didn’t want any more trouble with the cops.

  She drove by the intersection in front of the Pyramid, and everyone seemed to be standing around, ambulatory— Except for the kid who’d taken the header into the storm drain. He was lying in the street, unmoving.

  Angel didn’t stop to give the survivors a chance to tear her apart.

  She turned down Stockton and followed the length of Chinatown as the night darkened around her.

  When she hit the tunnel, she realized she was shaking. She took a few deep breaths and told herself that she’d deal with it later. She’d talk to the cops later, too, after she found the contact Dittrich gave her.

  What the hell was happening to this city?

  She left the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel and the night seemed even darker now. She was surrounded by post-earthquake Chinatown, south of the so-called Gateway Arch. Nothing around her now was more than twenty years old. It was all chrome pagodas and flickering neon. There seemed to be something quintessentially Asian about garish street signs.

  And here, where Chinatown was busy crowding Market, there were moreaus. Lots of moreaus. A quarter of the refugees from the Asian war were nonhuman, and half of those were Chinese. Angel drove by towering ursoids, the typically long-limbed Asian rabbit strains, dark-haired canines, as well as some exotic species that she couldn’t place.

  The name Dittrich had given her was Kaji Tetsami—a name that didn’t belong down here. A Jap in Chinatown was about as out of place as a rabbit at a mosque. But, as she turned on to Post Street to approach a postmodern steel and glass neo-Asian monstrosity she realized that her navigation wasn’t off. The address Dittrich gave her was in the southwest corner of Chinatown. The rich part that held a lot of descendants of old Hong Kong refugee money.

  The address was, in fact, the neo-Asian monstrosity she was approaching. It was a residential tower that took up most of a city block, and if her estimate of the thing’s height was correct, Tetsami lived close to the top of the building. Maybe the top.

  She pulled into the parking garage, and was stopped by a transparent, probably armored, barrier. She sat and idled, wondering what the hell she was supposed to do. She didn’t see a comm box around, only two lanes of concrete and one video camera.

  “Please lower your window,” came a voice from nowhere.

  Angel did so, looking for where the voice was coming from. The sound was amplified and echoey in the concrete chamber, but she couldn’t locate the source, even with her oversized ears.

  “Name?”

  “Angel Lopez,” she said, trying to find the guard, the voice pickup, or the speaker. She ended up deciding that it was all in the camera.

  “Who do you wish to see?”

  “Kaji Tetsami.”

  There followed a long silence. It grew to such a length that she thought that their speaker or their voice pickup might be broken.

  “I’m here for a Mr. Tetsami. Hello?”

  She got no response.

  She had shifted the BMW into reverse and was about to pull back out of the garage when the transparent door rolled up into the ceiling.

  “Parking space five-zero-seven,” said a different amplified voice.

  Angel pulled into the garage, and noted the door closing immediately behind her. She took one turn into the structure and saw a guardhouse. It sat behind armored windows that had a human watching a few dozen vid screens. As she passed it she noted an open door behind the rent-a-cop. She saw part of a rack and at least three shotguns and a small submachine gun.

  She drove through the garage past Porsches, Mercedes Benzes, other BMW’s, a Ferrari, a Maduro—

  The lane split into two ramps. The one going up had a sign saying “050-499.” The one down said “500+.” The one down was labeled “authorized personnel only.”

  She turned down the lower ramp and began the descent. Another armored door was raising as she approached. She drove past it and found herself in a much smaller sublevel of the garage.

  The BMW was barely ten yards into the garage when she saw the dozen armed rent-a-cops lining the walls. They all had their hands on their weapons and, as Angel looked back behind her, the door was already closed.

  “Oh, shit,” she whispered to herself.

  Chapter 13

  “Get out of the car,” said one of the guards.

  Angel didn’t argue. She stepped out.

  “Step away from the vehicle and keep your hands in sight.”

  The troops wore black. Their only insignia was an ID card clipped to their breast pockets. With the body armor and the automatic weapons, they looked more like a mercenary unit than building security. They were all human, except the one shouting the orders.

  Their leader was one of the rare results of genetic tampering on humans. At a distance, he could pass. But his smell was all wrong for a pink. That, and his joints were too big. When he moved he moved wrong. The platform the engineers designed for the guy’s hyped strength and reflexes was disturbing for her to watch in action—and she wasn’t even human.

  The guy was the first frank she’d seen since Cleveland. Franks were, as a rule, more insular than moreys. Most of the pinks who hated moreaus were positively terrified of frankensteins. It seemed to be a racial characteristic. The pinks’ fear of the franks led to a UN resolution banning genetic experimentation on humans long before the war. Only a few countries dabbled in it after that, and only a few products of that managed to get over the border.

  Franks were rare.

  A small chromed door opened at the far end of the garage, and out stepped another one. This one was different. He was short, as short as Angel, and as bald as one of the Knights.

  The tampering on his genes was more subtle. It didn’t ring in his odor, which could blend in with any pink crowd without Angel noticing. It was more in the shape of his skull, the length of his fingers.

  Like the guards, he wore black, but his black was a suit that could have cost a few grand. He wore black down to the buttons on his shirt, down to the gloss-black rings on his fingers, down to the metallic frames on the thick tinted glasses he wore.

  Occasionally Angel saw light reflected in those glasses that didn’t originate anywhere inside the garage.

  “Names,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Names have power, Angelica. Names are to conjure with.” The man walked up to her, and she saw a number of the guards visibly tense. “Names open doors.” He nodded slightly back where he had come.

  She was beginning to get the picture. “I—”

  The man raised an incredibly long finger to quiet her. “It is a novelty for someone to walk up to the front door and ask for me. I am . . . curious.”

  He was close enough that she could see the display that scrolled across the inside of his glasses.

  “I was told you could help me.”

  “Someone has knowledge . . . who?”

  Angel swallowed and decided to go through with it. It was silly, but apparently Bobby Dittrich knew what he was about. “He said to tell you that ‘The Digital Avenger knows your hat size.’”

  The scene froze. The bald man had an oddly shaped head, and Angel was afraid that she had committed a lethal insult.

  Instead, the man laughed. Really laughed. He shook his head and clapped his hands once. In response, the guards melted back through the chrome door he had come from. All but the other frank, who stood, gun lowered, at parade rest next to the door.

  “Angelica,” the bald man said, “you have some odd friends.”

  “So you are Mr. Tetsami?”

  “Please refrain from using that name from now on. It makes people nervous.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “Mr. K, if you need a name. Intriguing that you should find your way to me.
But come to my office.” Tetsami, or Mr. K, waved ahead of him, toward the chromed door.

  He led her through a spotless white corridor, lit by indirect lighting. They passed doors, but they were few and far between. It became obvious, after a while, that there was a gentle slope downward and the corridor extended way beyond the confines of the building above.

  “Where are we?”

  “Shall I tell you?” asked Mr. K. He glanced sideways at her and smiled. “In the early thirties, when they started work on the ill-fated Mill Valley Ballistic Launch facility, this city started an optimistic northern spur to the old BART system.”

  “North to what?”

  “After the earthquake, exactly.”

  The corridor ended, and they started descending a stairway that led into a circular chamber whose floor was fifteen or twenty meters below them. Their corridor entered near the arched ceiling and the stairway took a right angle and hugged the side of the curving wall as they descended.

  The room was huge. It could have been thirty meters in diameter, all white walls and blue carpeting. Diffuse white light came from a starburst pattern of fluorescents that pointed radially from the center of the slightly domed roof.

  The room itself dwarfed its contents. There may have been a dozen terminal stations down there, only a few seemed to be occupied at the moment. The silence, especially to Angel, was unnerving. Acres of blue carpeting seemed to smother any sounds, so other than a diffuse high-frequency hum from somewhere, the only real sound seemed to come from the footsteps of the people around her.

  Central to the room was a black machine. It was contained in a cylindrical case whose transparent walls ran floor to ceiling. The container dwarfed the black machine while simultaneously drawing all attention directly to it.

  It was made of four metallic slabs resting crosswise on a black toroid that formed its base. As they descended, and Angel could make out more detail, she saw the top of the toroid was divided into wedge-shaped panels and that the rectangular slabs didn’t quite touch in the center. In the gap, she saw hundreds, perhaps thousands, of neatly arrayed cables running from the inside of the rectangular slabs and down through the hole in the torus.