The Jammer and the Blade

by Edwardson, DJ

  “As you knew I would be. 32 outcomes out of 47,” the newcomer remarked, his footsteps drawing closer, pattering down the pavement, almost indistinguishable from the steady drops of rain. “So this is the blade you hired?”

  “She couldn’t bear to part ways with me.” Brit gave her an unhappy look as if she were a pet that he was being forced to put down.

  The stranger’s footsteps stopped just behind her.

  “You strayed from the schematic, then. The desired outcome was to leave her on the ship, was it not?” the Doctor reminded him.

  Brit’s face lost a little of its color at these words, but he tried to maintain a confident expression. “That was what I tried to do, but—” he began.

  “No matter,” the Doctor cut him off, “I will take care of the situation. What I am concerned about for the moment is the product.”

  Sun li’s emotions raged inside of her. The way they were talking about her made her feel like a mere object, a possession. She was just another piece of refuse that had to be thrown into the pile out behind SloJams along with the rest of the garbage.

  “I have the device right here,” Brit assured him, his voice brightening. He flipped open his satchel. He had some difficulty pulling out the rubricon with one hand, but eventually it slipped free and he handed it to whoever was standing behind Sun li. “There was hardly any resistance, just as you predicted. And I had the contact demonstrate it for me. It’s pretty impressive. I can demo it again for you if you’d like to see how it works.”

  “That’s all right,” said the Doctor. “I am quite familiar with the way the device functions.”

  It sounded like the man shoved it into a container of his own. There was a low peal of thunder off in the distance indicating that the storm was about to get worse.

  “So, when do I get my upgrade?” Brit blurted out, tapping his foot nervously. Sun li thought he looked almost child-like for a moment, but it wasn’t innocence that was reflected in his face. It was rather something more like greed at the expectation that he was about to receive a new toy which he had been begging for.

  “Yes, the upgrade,” the Doctor began and then sighed, “I don’t like to disappoint people. It’s the hardest part about changing the world, realizing that you cannot save it for everyone.”

  Brit gave a start, almost losing his grip on the neutralizer.

  “But no one else would take that job,” said Brit. “It would have been a suicide mission if not for the Delegation attack. The only reason I took it was because you promised—”

  “You are a jammer,” the Doctor interrupted him, “You should have known the outcome you were seeking was highly improbable. In fact, if you had had the data which I possess you would have known that it is impossible—at least with present technology. There may come a day when perhaps we can redeem augers like you, but I’m afraid that you will not live to see it.”

  The rain began to pour down harder. Sun li couldn’t feel the drops as they slid off the energy field surrounding her, but she could see that it was getting worse. She was surprised the sirens signaling a lockdown had yet to sound.

  The Doctor’s feet scraped against the gritty pavement. She could hear his footsteps receding off in the distance, but soon they were drowned out by the music from the nearby building. It seemed to be all drums now, beating, pounding, rumbling sounds like a storm was raging inside the club.

  Brit made as if he was going to drop the neutralizer and run after the Doctor. Sun li could tell by the panicked look on his face that he wanted to, but he stayed where he was, whether out of fear of her or because he realized that there was nothing he could do to make the Doctor give him what he wanted. His lips were twitching wildly.

  “We are all lines on a schematic,” the Doctor called out, lifting his voice above the music and the rain. “Society needs us to be so long and so wide to fit into the overall structure. But when the line does not serve the design, it must be erased. Good-bye, Brit.”

  Two flashes of light burst from above like lightning, slamming into Brit’s chest. But it wasn’t lighting. They were blasts from locus pulsers. He collapsed, two giant black gashes etched across his upper body.

  Sun li’s body sprang to life as the neutralizer clattered onto the pavement. She flicked her wrists and the blades flared to life just in time to absorb the next two blasts. She caught sight of two dark figures, nestled amongst the generators and machinery on top of the roof of SlowJams.

  She glanced at the pile of crates next to the club and realized that she could have scaled them and been on the roof in a moment, but these hired guns were not who she was after.

  Twirling her arms to absorb the steady stream of pulser fire, she dashed down the alleyway just in time to see the Doctor’s shadow recede around the corner.

  If she ran out after him into the street with her blades engaged, there was a good chance that she’d be spotted by Delegation forces or at least someone who would report her to them, but she had to take the risk. Her father’s only hope was escaping into the street.

  As she dashed out into the street, the pulser fire died away. Whoever the rooftop snipers were they were not foolish enough to take their battle out into the streets. Sun li felt no such reservations.

  Panic flooded her body. She flew down the street, her blue blades slicing the air like pinwheels of light. Despite the pelting rain which cascaded onto the city in windy sheets, there were still at least two dozen people in the street. As she scanned the crowd she suddenly came to the realization that she had no hope of finding the man she was after. Her back had been to him the entire time he was speaking with Brit. She had never seen what he looked like.

  She coasted to a halt and hung her head, her tears mixing with the rain. She had been beaten. All her efforts had been for naught. Her skill as a blade, her father’s training, even the Code itself—all had failed to get her what she needed. She felt like a fool for placing her confidence in a set of worn out phrases and adages from a dying race. What good was Kamido if it couldn’t save her father? It was just a set of words, nothing more.

  Her father was going to die.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Doctor

  Thunder rattled the sky and the alarms sounded throughout the city. Bracken was once again on lockdown. The crowd in the street began to scatter. A few rushed into SlowJams and other nearby buildings. The rest picked up their pace and hurried on to their destinations. Several people had noticed Sun li’s blades and given her worried looks but the rain was more of a concern to them than reporting a rogue blade wandering the streets of the Junket district.

  Except, apparently, for one man. Sun li saw him emerge from what looked like a trading center with a massive Delegation soldier at his side. The guard was armed with an enormous static neutralizer, at least a foot long, embedded into his arm. He must have been a foot taller than the man he was with. The shorter man pointed directly at her and said something to him. The uniformed soldier picker her out at once and began running towards her.

  “You there!” he shouted, “Sheath those blades.”

  But Sun li paid no attention to him. Her eyes were fixed on the figure he had left standing in the doorway. It was hard to make out many of the details of his face through the dark and the rain. The one thing she could see clearly was the shimmering gray cloak he wore. There was something about it that struck her as familiar. And then it hit her. When her father had first taken ill they had spent half of their savings to call in a specialist to visit their home. The physician had been the one who had told her about the arcoiris cure, shaking his head at the same time, telling her that she would probably never be able to afford it and urging her to simply make her father as comfortable as possible during his final days.

  The specialist had been wearing the same sort of shimmering gray cloak. Was this stranger down the street a doctor as well? More to the point, was he the Doctor, the man she was looking for?

  Sun li sprinted towards the trading center, mee
ting the Delegation soldier in the middle of the now deserted street. This was all about timing. The larger neutralizers used by the Delegation did not require contact with the victim’s body. They could fire out a burst and down a person at short range. The soldier would be counting on his ability to paralyze her before she could ever get close enough to strike him with her blades. She had only one chance.

  She kept her gaze fixed on her enemy’s eyes. A man’s eyes may speak when he is silent. The words from the Code came back to her. She clung to them once more as her only hope. She waited to see if the soldier’s eyes would betray him.

  His left eye narrowed slightly. She dove, feet first, onto the rainy pavement just as an arc of white energy burst from the end of her opponent’s weapon, filling the air above her. She slid along the ground with her blades extended, slicing straight through the neutralizer barrel, parting it in two lengthwise.

  The soldier reacted to Sun li’s maneuver in time to save his hand, jerking it aside as the blades swept forward, but he was too massive to miss her strokes entirely. The blades slashed down his left side as he twisted in vain to avoid them. The soldier cried out as he tumbled to the ground and lay writhing on the pavement, wounded and bleeding.

  Sun li could have stopped and finished him there, but that was not the Kamido way and this soldier was not her real enemy. The man in the medical robe had not waited to see the results of her confrontation with the soldier, however. He had taken off back towards the alleyway behind SlowJams. The soldier now dealt with, she leapt to her feet and took off after him.

  The man was fast for someone who was not an auger, but Sun li was driven by desperation. She could not let him reach that alleyway again. She had no doubt that the snipers were working for the Doctor and though she had deflected their pulser beams before, there was no guarantee she could do so again. If they had changed positions or shot her from a direction she was unaware of, she would suffer the same fate as Brit.

  She lit down the street like she was trying to outrun the lighting that was rippling through the clouds above Bracken. She caught the Doctor from behind a few feet before he reached the entrance to the alley. The two of them went crashing onto the unforgiving pavement, but Sun li was the first to recover. In a flash she had one blade at his throat. She kept the other held above her head, ready to strike, but also as a precaution should the snipers move to the edge of the roof and try to shoot her from above.

  “You owe me some flowers,” she said, gritting the words out between clenched teeth.

  The man fixed his eyes on her threateningly, as if she were the one who had been caught and not him. They burned with a cruel, hollow light that sent shivers down the back of her neck in spite of the anger coursing through her.

  “Now!” she shouted. She could hear the soldier moaning in the street. It was only a matter of time before more soldiers showed up or the snipers arrived.

  “Are you certain you have the right person?” the man’s voice croaked in a low whisper. She recognized it at once as belonging to the Doctor.

  “I could just kill you and just take the rubricon and sell it for myself,” she threatened.

  He shook his head knowingly. “An honest blade would not do that. It would be against the Code.”

  She didn’t have time for this. She gave him a disgusted look and dropped her other hand, letting the blade disappear while keeping the other one at his throat.

  “Fine. Since you seem to know the Code,” she said, ripping open his robe with her free hand to reveal the large pouch he wore underneath. “Tell me what it says about how to treat cowards who dishonor their word.”

  “‘The coward shall go limp among you as a warning to all who see him. His name shall be a byword in the streets.’” The Doctor’s face lost none of its self-assurance as he quoted the words.

  “Right,” Sun li replied, pulling out the rubricon from the Doctor’s pouch. “So I won’t kill you. I’ll just leave you hamstrung. You being a doctor and all, I’m sure you’ll be able to fix yourself back up eventually.”

  She rose to her feet, preparing to follow through with her threat, but at that moment someone came hurtling down on top of her from above.

  It was so unexpected that she could not react in time. He smashed into her with terrible force, knocking the wind clean out of her and sending the black box flying. She jerked herself out from under him, gasping for air as a second man bounded down from the roof and kicked his foot out to step on her arm, pinning the one active blade to the ground.

  She fired up the second blade again, but her wild swing stopped short, her arm caught by the other sniper who wrestled it to the ground. Air rushed into her lungs at last but it was too late. They had her trapped.

  The Doctor rose to his feet and wiped off his robe. The rain did not seem to have dampened it in the slightest, nor did his coat show the faintest traces of being soiled.

  “Kill her and dump the body in the trash with the jammer,” the Doctor instructed the snipers, two men with navy blue coats and short black hair. They were almost as big as the soldier she had faced in the street but showed no outward signs of augmentation.

  She jerked her arms and tried furiously to twist free but there was nothing she could do.

  “Our pulsers are out of charges,” explained one of the men.

  “Help!” Sun li screamed. “Somebody, help me!”

  One of the snipers kicked her but she kept shouting. Down the street the voice of the soldier called out weakly.

  “You three, stop…this is a matter for the Delegation.”

  “Get her out of the street,” the Doctor ordered. “I’ll take care of this soldier.”

  They dragged her screaming into the alleyway while the Doctor scooped up the rubricon and headed back down the street.

  “Let go!” Sun li yelled, hoping that someone might still hear her. But her voice was lost in the thundering waves of rain and the blaring sounds of the club.

  One of the men reached down and placed his thick fingers around her throat.

  “It’s all right, Chay girl,” he said in a low voice. “No need to fuss.”

  She felt the pressure building inside her lungs. She clawed at the pavement as if she could dig through it and release some air for her to breathe.

  I’m sorry father, she thought as the world grew dim around her.

  * * *

  Brit leaned over Sun li, his mouth stretched into a grimace.

  “So you made it after all?” he said. “I thought you might be dead. 17 outcomes out of 28 said you wouldn’t make it. Or maybe my stimulator is just going bad.”

  Sun li felt a terrible pain around her throat and her lungs ached but she found that she could sit up. Brit rolled over and collapsed on the ground. His face was terribly pale.

  “You're alive. But how?” she asked.

  “Augers don't go down that easy,” he replied, grimacing. “My autolyte system jolted me back to consciousness after I went down.”

  “What happened? Those men—where did they go?”

  Brit cast his eyes behind her. “Over there,” he said. “What’s left of them.”

  Sun li looked and saw at the base of the trash pile what looked like a mixture of boots, navy cloth, and a tangle of arms and legs unattached to any body as if the staff at SlowJams had thrown out some mannequins with the latest batch of trash. It was a bloodless sight, but none-the-less gruesome.

  “You did that?” she asked, glancing back at him.

  He nodded and closed his eyes. His breathing was raspy and shallow. He pulled down his sleeve and showed her the mantid gun, collapsed into a bracelet on his wrist.

  “But I checked before,” she said. “You weren’t wearing it.”

  “I wasn’t about to wear a weapon out in the open with the Doctor…I kept it in my pocket, just in case.”

  The music seemed at last to have died down and the thunder as well, but the rain still continued to hammer the pavement. Brit writhed on the ground, clutching at the
terrible gash on his chest.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why did you save me?”

  “Because I—I ran the outcomes. You’re the only one who could possibly avenge my death,” Brit replied, his voice strained. “All that talk about justice in that code of yours. You have to make the Doctor pay…for what he did.” He shuddered in pain and his eyes opened wide. “All I wanted was to be normal again,” he mumbled, “to reverse…the procedure…the Doctor promised me, but—” he winced, doubling over in pain.

  Sun li moved over to him and grabbed his hand. “Brit, hold on,” she said. She wished there was something she could do for him, but all she could do was watch as the pain contorted his face in a silent scream.

  “Here,” he said. With an effort he slipped the mantid gun from his wrist. “It’s an experimental prototype…Must be worth a few flowers at least. Just kill the Doctor.”

  Sun li glanced back down the alley but she could see nothing in the pouring rain. The Doctor was long gone.

  “I will,” she promised him. “‘He who takes a life apart from Kamido, forfeits his own,’” she quoted. But Brit did not hear her. His eyes closed and his breathing stilled. He may not have been an honorable man in life, but he had saved her and she vowed to find the Doctor and carry out his request.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. Then, rising to her feet, she turned back down the alleyway and disappeared into the relentless Kessian rain.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Cure

  She could only get forty thousand lira for the gun. For someone raised on the backstreets of Bracken, she was an awful haggler. She would have brought her sister along—that was what Li li was best at, but there wasn’t any time. She had gone straight from the alley to the underside market.

  It took her the rest of the night to track down a merchant who actually had any arcoirises and was willing to do business at such an inconvenient hour. She might have had more success in the day and gotten a better price, but she was desperate. Her father needed the cure and she was willing to pay anything to get it. The merchant apparently realized this as well.