“Oh is that it?” Cheddar replied, “Well, I would if I could, sweetness, but since the Delegation busted my motor, I hope a lev will do.”
A humming noise sounded from the other side of the table as Cheddar’s enormous chair rose into the air. Sun li could see that his torso was actually fused to the chair and that his legs were missing entirely.
“I am sorry,” Sun li bowed before him. “I did not know. Please forgive me.”
Cheddar floated back to the ground, still wearing his enigmatic smile. “No need to fret. My old legs were useless stumps anyway. I get around much better in this contraption.”
Sun li quietly took a seat beside Brit.
“Sunny, this is Cheddar. Cheddar, Sunny,” Brit introduced them.
“My name is Sun li,” she reminded him as Cheddar nodded in her direction. It fell woefully short of an actual greeting but for an undersider it was more than she would have expected. She returned the gesture.
“Yeah, well, whatever,” Brit shrugged. “Enough with the introductions. Give us the specs, man.”
Cheddar reached inside his robe and produced a pair of gunmetal tags that could be used for transport between any of the major cities within Delegation territory. Sun li’s father kept a pair of them in his memory box beside his bed. His were copper and worn, from a time Sun li could barely remember: their flight from Chay. But these were smooth and fresh cut.
“This drop is hot, my man. The people fronting this operation have a hard date of six days for you get there and back with the package. You meet the deadline or you get zeroed.”
Brit reached for the tags but Sun li snatched them first.
“And who are we working for?” she asked, examining the metal plates. They had Delegation codes etched on them which made them look like they had actually been obtained legally.
Brit whistled through his teeth. “You’re off track, love. Cheddar doesn’t have to tell you anything—”
“I want to know,” she glared at Brit’s reflection in Cheddar’s visor.
Cheddar chuckled again. “Got your hands full, I see,” he said, “I thought you were a Jammer, Brit. Didn’t see that one coming?”
“This is what you get when you book an honest blade, I guess,” Brit observed, shifting in his chair and scratching at the nervous tick on his face.
“You’re working for the Doctor, lady,” Cheddar informed her. “And if that don’t put your mind at ease, I don’t know what will.”
“Deliverance?” Sun li uttered the word in shock. That was the last name she expected to hear. As far as she knew they were just a popular movement within the Delegation, but one that was trying to effect change from within. “But I thought they were a legitimate group. They don’t work with—”
“People like me?” Cheddar interrupted her. “Not all undersiders are bad blood, Chay girl.”
Sun li stared at his visor, trying to imagine his eyes behind it. “If you were really part of the resistance you wouldn’t be running with Jammers.”
Deliverance was anti-augmentation and even anti-chem. The man behind the organization, an enigmatic scientists known only as “the Doctor” was said to have discovered the technology to make humanity “organic” again, maybe even clean up the sky. Sun li could not imagine what a group like that would want from a military facility.
“Jammers got to eat, same as the rest of us. And if the honest work don’t pay, you can’t fault a man for trying,” Cheddar remarked.
Sun li sighed. It was no use arguing with an undersider. They were all the same.
“Fine, now tell me where you’re sending us.” She held up the tags.
Cheddar pointed towards them. “Those are tickets, good for round trip passage on a hover barge from the station to the frontier.”
“What? You’re taking us to the Scrape?” Sun li spun towards Brit. “You said we were going to Silenia.” She fixed him with a fiery glare, but he only gave her a blank look in return.
“I never said we’d stop in Silenia,” the jammer replied, “I believe my exact words were, ‘the job is in Silenia or thereabouts.’”
“Never trust a Jammer.” Cheddar’s bright smile flashed in her eyes.
Sun li clenched the arms of her chair, trying to hold her emotions in check.
“But you don’t actually intend on going into the Scrape, do you?” she shot back.
Brit nodded. “I don’t like it any more than you do, love,” he answered. “But Deliverance is paying so that’s how we’re playing.”
She shook her head. Everything inside her was fighting this path they were leading her down, but she knew that her father’s health depended on this mission. Brit had only given her a single arcoiris up to this point. That would keep her father alive until she got back but the specialist had said she would need at least three more to cure him completely.
“Deliverance is sending us to our death,” Sun li protested. “The Scrape is swarming with Factor Ten forces. We’ll be killed the moment we step over the border.”
“Relax, Sunny,” Brit assured her. “Deliverance has informed me that the Delegation is launching a major offensive tomorrow. It’s no secret that Factor Ten hasn’t been able to replace the automaton forces at the rate the Delegation is destroying them. What little they have left they’ll be forced to use to fight off the attack. We might run into a few patrols but nothing you can’t handle.”
Sun li crossed her arms and gave him a doubtful look. It was a terrible plan.
“I’ve run the calculations, followed all the branches,” Brit went on, “The outcomes are 89 out of 97 that at least one of us makes it back alive. You’ve got a Jammer at your back. I can see danger before it’s coming.”
Brit’s tone was confident, but the nervous twitch in his lip betrayed him. Sun li could tell his mind was wrapped up in details that he wasn’t telling her. She was no jammer, but those odds were not at all what she would have put them at.
She stood up and walked away from the table, flushed with anger at what she was being forced into. She tried to think of some way she could back out of this, but there wasn’t time to find another job. This mission was her father’s only chance.
“Why didn’t Deliverance just contact us directly?” she asked, trying to brush her doubts aside. “Why go through a facilitator?” She did not bother hiding the curl in her lip as she said that last word. Cheddar may have been crippled by the Delegation, but that was no excuse to be fronting jobs on the underside.
“I may not have legs, but I’ve got my eyes and ears to the street girl. This is Delegation territory. Deliverance is out gunned here,” Cheddar replied. “In fact, I’ve already turned up one key piece of information that I need to share.”
“By all means,” said Brit.
“Echoes banging around the underside that The Gray Man is also after the package. Don’t know who he’s working for, but it don’t matter. Whoever can afford him must want it bad and he’ll cut down anyone who stands in his way.”
Sun li had heard mention of this name before, but all she knew was that he was a bounty hunter. Brit’s nervous tick flared up again telling her he must be more than that. He sat there for several moments, thinking before he spoke.
“This development reduces our favorable outcomes to 28 out of 97. This mission just got a whole lot more interesting,” Brit remarked.
“I contacted Deliverance and let them know about the situation. They’ve agreed to throw in an extra hundred thousand lira as incentive.”
Brit gave a start. “A hundred thousand? I’m not gonna lie, that’s some serious bank. But you know I’m not in this for the money, Cheddar. Not this time.”
“I know about your little side deal with the Doctor. Just consider this a going away present, something for your retirement fund.” Cheddar flashed him another one of his blinding smiles.
“So who is this Gray Man?” Sun li wondered aloud, a bit shaken by the odds Brit had just spouted off. “Will a blade pierce his flesh? Because i
f so, we should have nothing to fear.”
“They say he’s a ninety-niner, Chay girl: ninety-nine percent auger. How he’s still functioning no one knows. But you should definitely be afraid,” Cheddar warned, “Very afraid.”
CHAPTER THREE
A Gimcracked Barge
A light drizzle coated the world of Kess. Of the twenty slices in a day at least ten of them were usually marked by some form of precipitation. Usually it was thin and misty like this one, but at times, the rain could come down in torrents and when that happened, the cities usually went on lockdown. Not even undersiders broke lockdown then, though they had their ways of getting around underground.
The bigger drops were said to be the dangerous ones. They usually came mixed with traces of endyne, fallout from the Hedron Wars in the time before the Delegation rose to power. It was endyne which was poisoning the water supply, infecting the population through the terrible wasting sickness which even the best scientists of the Delegation seemed unable to stop.
The jammer and the blade sat hunkered down in the back of the exposed hover barge as the winds whipped over them. Between the heat and the breeze, the light drops of rain seemed to vaporize when they hit the surface of their impermeable coats. They were alone in the back of the vehicle except for a large, elongated metal crate with strange lettering on the outside. Sun li tried to catch glimpses of the terrain as they sped through the hills of Chenth, avoiding the populated areas, but it all looked the same: gray silt mounds covered by occasional patches of dark gray scrub. She had made this trip once before, but she was far too young to remember it.
It was mostly ex-Delegation soldiers who ran this route now, running supplies to and from the few crazy folk who lived on the frontier. Only pilots with connections could get the required permission to go out into the uninhabited areas, and the one Brit had hired a balding man named Osh with one eye missing and a metal neck; he had obviously spent time in the military. Though Sun li had been nervous about getting into the back of his transport, the man acted professionally enough and had promised to get them to the edge of the Scrape in two days time.
The further they went, however, the more Sun li doubted his claim. It seemed like every few miles another piece of the rusted out barge they were in flew off into the dust. Mostly it was bolts or chips off the paneling but once the handle to one of the cargo compartments on the floor jerked free without warning, whizzing by Sun li’s temple. It probably would have hit her if she hadn’t twitched when she heard it snap loose.
A blade always had to be aware of their environment. Her father had taught her that the masters of the art were never truly out of battle, always expecting danger from somewhere, even in their sleep. One never knew when the strike would come, but if you lived expecting it to come, you had a better chance of avoiding it.
She supposed being a jammer must have been similar in that respect. She had heard that they were always thinking, always analyzing what might come next, though she didn’t really know for sure if that were true. This was the first time she had ever worked with one and the only other blade in the barrio she knew who had taken a job with a jammer had never come back.
The hover lurched to the side, jarring Sun li from her thoughts. The entire frame of the vehicle started to vibrate and a panel blew off the side, landing in the distance in a puff of dust. Both Brit and Sun li inched away from that side of the hover and exchanged anxious looks.
The barge began to slow down. Sun li could hear the main engines cut out and after that, the transport began to coast. It was some time before they came to a complete stop.
Osh, a rather short man for being ex-military, popped out of the pilot’s cockpit at the front of the vehicle.
“Relax folks,” he told them. “I’ll have her live and in concert in a micro-slice.”
Smoke began billowing out from under the ship as he opened a side panel and rooted around inside it.
“Just a power channel that went down. Happens all the time. That’s why I always carry a spare.” Osh held up a wired panel in his hands.
He opened up another, larger compartment. Smoke billowed up from it as he disappeared into the guts of the ship. As he rattled around in the inner workings of the hover, Sun li pulled down her hood and gazed out across the hills, hoping to get a better look now that they had stopped, but there was nothing new.
The Azulant Rise, her father had told her, was what this land used to be called before the war. It was still blue then, filled with living, growing things, when her mother and father escaped the Purge and brought her to Bracken.
“I can’t believe Cheddar hooked us up with this gimcracked rig,” Brit remarked, “For what they are paying us they could have practically bought us our own streamliner.”
“That wouldn’t have exactly made for a very stealthy trip across the sector,” Sun li remarked.
Brit scrunched up his face, sulking.
“Don’t you ever let yourself dream? Even a little?” he fired back.
“Dreams require discipline to achieve, just like everything else,” she said, paraphrasing the Code.
“Well, you’d make a lousy jammer then. Possibilities. That’s all that really matters in life.”
Sun li shook her head, once again struck by just how foolish he seemed to be for someone who was supposed to be so smart.
“What’s it like, being a jammer? How do you concentrate, thinking so many thoughts at once?” A loud crackling noise erupted from inside the ship, followed by Osh cursing in words that were thankfully unintelligible.
Brit sat up so that he was closer to eye level with her. For once, he had a serious look on his face. “No you’ve got it all wrong, love. We don’t think them all at once, we just think faster. We jam the thoughts on top of each other so that we get more into each mental cycle. The newer autolyte stimulators can force ten thoughts through the neural channels in the time that you norms fit in only one. And naturally, I’m grafted in with the latest spec.” He tapped the side of his head where she guessed the device must have been implanted.
“It doesn’t bother you that you’re going to burn out and die in a few years from that thing inside your head?” Sun li did know that much at least. All forms of augmentation reduced life expectancy, some more than others, but that didn’t seem to stop people from getting them. The lure of being faster, stronger, smarter, was worth any price for some.
“You don’t mince words do you?” Brit answered back.
“If we’re going to work together, it’s important that we understand one another. Skill may win a battle, but character wins the war.”
“Yes, I’ve read your code, though most of it is antiquated nonsense,” Brit scoffed. There was a whirring sound from inside the hover. The vehicle shook and the engine hummed briefly but then died again.
Sun li did not bother responding to his remark. All her life she had grown up around people who had told her the same thing. But what others thought about Kamido mattered little to her. She knew it was true, even if she herself was still learning how to live by it.
“All that matters is the moment,” Brit went on, “I don’t care if my lights will go out before its time. I’d rather go down in flames while I’m still young than keep hoping for this miserable world to change. When you get old your parts stop working. Your oil dries up, and your circuits don’t fire. I mean look at your old man—”
She thrust her finger in his face before he could finish the sentence. “Never speak about my father unless you mean to show him the respect and honor he deserves.”
Brit rolled his eyes and flapped his lips. He looked like he was about to say something when thankfully Osh emerged from the bowels of the ship, interrupting their conversation before it got any uglier.
“She’s all good now,” he said, wiping his hands on his tattered shirt. The fabric may have once been a beige or brown, but the original color could no longer be seen for all the dirt and grime that had been rubbed into it. He patted the hover and the
hum of the lev engines below clicked out and then clicked back in again. “Next stop, Silenia.”
As Osh ducked into the cockpit, Sun li caught sight of a dark shape beneath the purple Kessian sky.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
“A drone, judging by the low altitude,” Brit replied after studying it for a moment.
“It’s coming this way,” she added, turning to Brit to gauge how much danger they were in. He kept staring at it as it closed in on their location.
Sun li could make out more of the details as it loomed closer. It was almost completely flat, with angular wings. The color of it was hard to pin down. In fact, it seemed to be shifting all the time, often blending in completely with the purple haze overhead.
“It won’t do anything to us,” Brit remarked. “No Factor Ten drone could make it this far into Delegation territory. 16 outcomes out of 22 say it’s either Delegation reconnaissance or heading to another outpost.”
“But the Delegation attacks people for no reason all the time. How can you be sure it’s not headed for us?” Sin li asked.
“We’re on a legal charter. It won’t strike,” Brit replied, though despite his confident tone he didn’t take his eyes off it. “Still, we better get moving just in case.” He banged on the roof of the pilot’s compartment. “Come on, what’s the hold up?” he shouted.
“Just running a few, um, checks on the systems,” Osh replied, sounding rushed. The note of panic in his voice did little to instill confidence in Sun li.
“I could fix this floating scrap heap faster than that flat-liner,” Brit muttered under his breath, using one of the many derogatory terms undersiders had for those who sided with the Delegation.
Sun li dipped her head over the side of the hover, judging whether or not she could survive a jump. The hover was hardly going as fast as she would have liked, but she doubted she’d live if she leapt from the ship.
The Jammer and the Blade Page 2
