Scardown

by Elizabeth Bear

  Footsteps crossed the floor behind her, and Kuai rolled her shoulders back and stretched her neck side to side, easing the strain of hours of difficult and delicate work. She turned and regarded the spare, brown-headed form of her assistant.

  Sally stepped through the connecting door into Kuai's office to pick up the data slices. Balancing the box in her left hand, she peered back around the corner. “All right, Dr. Hua. I can tell from the wrappers in the garbage that you had dinner and breakfast here, and you've already finished one autopsy and three dictations. Did you actually sleep last night?”

  “There's a cot,” the Connecticut state chief coroner and civilian commissioner of the Hartford Police offered wryly. “Actually, I did go home. Twice. My dog needed to go out, and I hate leaving him alone all day.”

  Sally snorted. “How many left today?” She gestured through the observation window to the autopsy theater.

  “That was it. Twenty-three-year-old male. It'll be a DUI.”

  “Good, then you're going home. I'll start the paperwork.”

  Kuai hesitated. And then nodded. “Going home. Indeed.”

  Sally cleared her throat as she turned away.

  “Yes?”

  “No taking work home, Dr. Hua.”

  “Yes, ma'am.” Kuai hung her lab coat on the peg and freed her lustrous dark hair from the braid straining her temples. She collected her HCD, a collapsible notebook computer, and the rest of her gear and piled it into her bag, changed her shoes for sneakers, threw her coat on, and stopped with her hand on the door. The smell of coffee overrode chemical scents as Sally fussed in the break room. Voices in the hallway told her the rest of the day shift was arriving.

  Cursing herself for a fool, Kuai turned back to her desk and grabbed a data carrier marked Case # 835613417, Case # 835613418, Case # 835613419: September 2062 triple homicide Park River Hartford South: Casey, Barbara; Kozlowski, Michael T.; Baobao, Yin.

  She stuffed it into the pocket of her scratchy black wool overcoat, first checking to see if Sally was looking through the glass.

  Evening

  Tuesday 7 November, 2062

  St. George Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  Razorface leaned back in the driver's seat of Maker's battered dark blue Bradford Tempest, grateful for the tinted windows. He'd have to change vehicles soon anyway. The old pickup was unobtrusive, but it wasn't good to take chances.

  He'd parked in the shade of a yellowing pine tree, across a lawn and behind a row of shrubs through which he was watching his target: a cluster of one-story gray brick buildings with wide, semimirrored windows. Shadows of people moved inside, odd disconnected horizontal segments that told him there were venetian blinds across the inside of the glass. Keeping his gaze trained past the discreet green-and-tan sign that he couldn't read, he wondered which office belonged to Dr. Alberta Holmes.

  Her image had been easy to find: a formal head shot of a gray-haired, stern-looking woman in power red appeared several times on the Unitek corporate sites. Simon had told him where the research facility was: almost on the main University of Toronto campus. Now it was just a matter of getting his hands on Dr. Alberta Holmes.

  Except he hadn't seen her yet. He shifted his shoulders and stretched his legs, cramped despite the truck's spacious cab. Good thing Maker doesn't drive a compact car. He drank iced tea out of a disposable and waited.

  Lunchtime came and went, dragged down into twilight. He zipped his jacket another three inches, wondering how late Holmes could possibly work. He had three pricey cars in the parking lot picked out as possibly hers, but all three were gone by the time the streetlamps kicked on. A few teenagers and twenty-odd kids he'd seen go inside at around three-thirty walked back out: all boys except one girl about fourteen with long blond hair peering from under her knit cap.

  Bored, hungry, Razorface leaned forward and thumbed the ignition on. He must have missed Holmes, or maybe she just hadn't come to work today. That movement—and his position across the street from the research center—were the only reasons he noticed a young couple apparently out for a chilly late autumn stroll across the campus pause in the shadow of a great, dying oak. One of them . . . something familiar about the way she moved caught his eye. He couldn't quite see what they were up to, so he killed the Bradford's electric engine, snaked a hand into the glove box, and came up with a pair of slimline night-sight goggles. The kids were fussing with some kind of equipment when he looked back.

  Taking pictures.

  Of the Unitek office.

  In the dark.

  Acting on old instinct—instinct that had kept him alive and in control of a midsize city's underworld until he was pushing forty—Razorface reached up and made sure the dome light was disabled. He slid across the front seat and opened the passenger-side door, letting himself out into the darkness on the far side of the Bradford.

  Cold air caressed his shaved scalp. He set big feet carefully between the scattered leaves and walked away from the office building, away from the not-so-mashing couple. Razorface could still move quietly when he wanted to. They never heard him change course and come up behind them, close enough to tug the girl's glossy black braid.

  Never heard him at all, until he cleared his throat and quoted from an audio site. “Remember, remember, the fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and plot.”

  The boy was quick. Quick enough that Razorface had to put him on the ground or risk having to hurt him pretty badly. The girl didn't say a word, but grinned when she recognized him. “How's your head?” she said, touching her hat.

  “It only hurts when I laugh,” Razorface answered, taking his foot off the boy's chest.

  The kid grunted and got up, shooting him a dirty look through the darkness before bending down to feel around for the digital camera. “You two know each other?”

  Razorface pushed his goggles up on his forehead. They pressed bruised flesh and he snapped them off, grimacing. “We met,” he said. “Didn't catch your name, though.”

  She extended her hand, smiling. “Indigo.”

  He took it. Her hair was so black it shone blue in the streetlight. He could see how she got the handle, if it was a handle and not her name. “Razorface. You blow up many buildings?”

  “A few,” she answered. “If it might do some good. You following me?”

  “Sheer chance,” he answered, and skinned back his lips in a grin. He jerked a thumb at the unassuming Unitek research building. “You need any help?”

  She stared into the disco glitter of his teeth and smiled.

  Night

  Tuesday 7 November, 2062

  Wellesley Street East

  Toronto, Ontario

  Indigo Xu closed a warped panel door silently and leaned against the wall of another scabby apartment, this one reeking of grease from the fried chicken place across the street. Crumbling Sheetrock flaked under the ridge of her shoulder blade. For comfort, she shifted her weight into the indentation and watched Farley Whitney and the big American—Razorface—bent forward on the couch, playing hologames. She thought the American had heard her come in; something about the ripple of tension across mastiff shoulders as he half turned his head let her know.

  “I'm back,” she said quietly, crinkling the take-out bag in her hand. “Let's talk.”

  Razorface tapped the console off, and Major Patterson's Roughnecks vanished in a shiver of pixels. “Smells good.” He got up without looking at Farley and took the bag from her hand. The floorboards creaked as he crossed the glue- and water-marked floor to the kitchenette. “Lights.”

  The overheads didn't click on. Farley slapped an old-fashioned wall switch and bare fluorescents buzzed to life. “High tech,” he said.

  Razorface grunted. Insulating poly crinkled when he opened the bag and lifted thermal take-home boxes onto the breakfast bar. Indigo watched Farley get plates down. In the tiny kitchen, the two men circled one another. She visualized them sniffing warily, and smiled.

  Razo
rface waited while she piled curry and bread on her plate. A little slick of oil pooled and smeared, turmeric yellow, and the sharpness filled the room. Indigo tucked an iced tea into the crook of her elbow and nudged a stool against the wall with her toe. She hooked her heels over the rail and scooped up curry with a torn scrap of doughy bread, scent of capsaicin already stinging her eyes. The American gangster held his plate flat on a huge palm and watched her as she licked grease from her thumbnail.

  Eventually, she looked up, twitching her braid over her shoulder. “Yes?”

  “Just wondering.” He pushed bread through the curry but didn't taste it. “You say you wanna talk. Drag my ass up here and keep me cooling my heels for an hour. So talk.” Level gaze, scowl as he rubbed the meaty side of a knuckle against the bruise over his eye. “Whatcha doing hanging around Unitek?”

  “What do you think?” Farley was drinking beer, not iced tea. The can scraped unprettily across the tile as he shoved it away.

  Indigo wondered if his chest hurt where Razorface had flattened him. She tucked another pinch of bread and curry into her mouth and kept her face smooth around it. It might do Farley some good to be taken down a peg. Not too far, though. His arrogance was useful, and he was her link to weapons suppliers and financiers. She preferred not to know where the money came from, as long as their backers' agendas matched her own.

  “I think you're planning to take the place out.”

  Indigo washed down curry before she spoke again. Unitek was high on her list of Agencies That Should Be Dealt With; one she'd been sneaking up on slowly, testing her mettle against other, lesser targets when Farley had recruited her—a few months before—with promises of flexibility and protection. “Maybe not the whole complex.” She rimmed the plate with a greasy finger, feeling the cracks and flakes in what had been expensive china. The narrow studio was a squat, electricity tapped off a trunk line and water stolen, too. Better to leave no tracks. They'd move on in a day or three.

  She didn't trust the big, bruised American, but she'd been intrigued by his presence in Toronto from the moment she had heard such an important underworld stranger was in town and lying oh so very low. She knew what the American was: a criminal. And an odd sort of criminal at that. Her connections—she hated the term handlers—had told Farley about his history as the top dog in the Hartford underworld. His downfall in a recent coup. And his links to a piece of Indigo's family legendry, and one she'd had Farley's sources working to trace.

  And he hadn't seemed suspicious when she'd arranged the second meeting, the one at Unitek—after the tracer she'd planted on his jacket had shown him waiting there.

  He was associated with Master Warrant Officer Genevieve Casey: one of the reasons why Indigo was so deeply convinced that something needed to be done about Unitek sooner rather than later. It hadn't been too hard to present him with an opportunity to “meet cute,” and Indigo justified it by telling herself that they might have some of the same goals. He might present a chance to meet a woman she'd grown up curious about.

  Maybe do a little more than meet her. Which wasn't, Indigo reminded herself, the point of interfering in Unitek's warmongering. But it was a nice little bonus, nonetheless.

  Razorface cleared his throat, interrupting her plotting. “Why wouldn't you want to take the whole office down?”

  “They do some kind of testing on kids there.” She kicked her feet free of the stool and rose, dropping the plate on the counter. It thudded rather than rang, cracking halfway through. She stood looking down at it for a moment. In the corner of the kitchen, Farley leaned against the wall and ate as if deaf. “It's important to me that the bystanders don't get hurt.”

  Razorface touched his forehead again. Significantly, this time. Indigo put the wall at her back.

  “Nothing's perfect,” she said. “What's your interest in Unitek?”

  “There's a lady there got some friends of mine hurt.”

  Indigo studied his eyes as he spoke, trying to see past her prejudices. There was something about him. The charisma, the detailed attention, the way he owned a room—like he was bulletproof and nine feet tall. The glitter of steel behind thick, sensual lips. She knew not to let herself trust him.

  But it was hard. “What do you want with her?”

  “Not sure yet.” He rolled his shoulders in a long, fluid shrug. “I'd like to know why. But I maybe could get that from another source. And what about you folks? You an organization or just a couple kids having fun?”

  Farley coughed, interrupted. “Your lady. What's her name?”

  “Holmes.”

  The name went through Indigo like a ripple of electricity, although Farley shot her a warning look. “Funny,” Indigo said, smiling her warmest smile. She wanted this big criminal on her side. She could see uses for him already that Farley just didn't have. Let's give him an inch and see what he takes, shall we? “That's the name I was given, too.”

  She expected he'd startle a little and say Given? She watched from the corner of her eye, and he didn't. But she did catch the way his eyes narrowed. The way a conscious moment passed before the knotty muscles along his jaw relaxed. “Who you work for, girl?”

  I work for freedom, she almost said. I do it for my dad. For Uncle Bernie. “Not a damn soul,” Indigo lied, and flicked the edge of the cracked plate with a hardened nail so the china shattered and split. Farley jumped at the sound, hand edging toward his gun. Stupid thing to carry in Toronto, but then he was often stupid.

  Razorface was still staring at her when she looked up. “So. I know a little about you now. You don't like to kill kids. You blow up army offices. What's your beef with Holmes?”

  “You know what Unitek is?”

  “Big corporation.”

  “Yeah. A fucking big corporation.” She wiped her hand on her jeans, fingers arched like she was smearing diesel grease down her leg. How do I play this? He's supposed to be Casey's friend. I think I'll just leave her name out of it. She gathered her thoughts to find the right twist, the manipulative game, and the words that came out were not the ones she had planned. “They just about run the Canadian military. They own the Marsbase outright. Never mind Prime Minister Riel: they're into her to the elbow. And they've been recruiting kids—young kids, thirteen, fifteen—through a massively multiplayer virtual reality game. They pressure the parents in giving consent, use the Military Powers Act to conceal what they're doing, and perform all kinds of fucked-up modifications. And the government rolls over nice because Daddy brings his paycheck home. We've still got troops all the hell over Southeast Asia and God knows where else. They don't call it a war, but we're out there fighting the Chinese every day, and for what? Crippling Canada to defend a bunch of nations that never did a thing for us? My dad died in one of these stupid wars—” Indigo ran her tongue over her teeth, surprised at the taste of her own patriotism. Farley raised an eyebrow and tilted his head to one side, silently amused.

  “What's that mean to me?” But the big thug of an American's eyes were sparkling, his eyebrows arched. An emerald stud glittered in his nostril.

  “It means we can help each other, I think,” she said.

  He laughed a round, slow, rolling laugh and shook his shaved head. “I don't do revolutions, baby. I got better ways to get killed. ‘Preciate the offer of help, though.” He slid his plate onto the breakfast bar, ducked his head, and turned away.

  Indigo pressed her shoulders back. The wallboard was even worse on the outside wall, and the stud bit into her arm. She was careful not to lean back hard. “If you don't do revolutions, what good are you?”

  Razorface stopped with his hand on the doorknob. Shadows caught in the hollows of his face as he looked over his shoulder. “That's a real excellent question.” He turned completely and regarded her, ignoring Farley much as she usually did. His face shut like a door. “I don't know.”

  Indigo opened her mouth, closed it. A sense of something weighed on the air, taste of a storm.

  “I don't know,
girl,” Razorface said, while Indigo wondered what button she'd pushed, what lever she'd thrown to turn him so cold so fast. “What am I good for? Why don't you tell me.”

  She heard Farley lay his dish in the sink. Traffic noise from stories down. Somewhere in the old building, a toilet flushed, and Razorface just looked at her. He couldn't have been that much older. Ten years, maybe. But with the stark light laid across his face, the cold in his eyes seemed bottomless.

  “Does that mean you'll help?” she tried in a small voice.

  He spat through steel teeth. “Fuck. I guess so.”

  0300 Hours

  Wednesday 8 November, 2062

  HMCSS Montreal

  Returning to geosynchronous orbit, near Clarke Orbital Platform

  Restlessness drove Patty to pace the night-shift-dimmed corridors of the Montreal when she should have been sleeping. Or studying. One day more, and she and Carver would be headed home, on the same shuttle as the unfriendly master warrant officer and the Unitek and government dignitaries.

  She didn't want to go home.

  The Montreal made her itch. Everything about it: from the freedom to decide when her lights went out and what order she studied her homework in, to the ability to throw everything aside and just get out of her quarters and walk. It was freedom, in symbol and reality, and the thought of leaving it behind nagged at her as she trailed soft fingertips along the great ship's curving walls.

  She turned right at the next cross-corridor, heading for what would be the sidewall of the Montreal if she thought of it in terms of a wheel. Most of the sunlit space on the forward and aft edges of the habitation wheel was taken up with the Montreal's vast hydroponic gardens—photosynthesis abetted by full-spectrum bulbs.

  The gardens—a fragile artificial ecosystem of vegetable plants pollinated by colonies of giant sulphur and red Mormon butterflies—were off-limits to the crew except the botanists and the staff entomologist. But some of the Montreal's valuable window space was reserved for her crew: astronauts have always been happier when they can see out.

  Patty undogged the hatchway and stepped into the Montreal's forward lounge, which was usually crowded with off-duty crew members. This late in the ship's cycle, it was almost always empty; she could come here and be completely alone. She loved watching the sun spin with the habitation wheel's rotation, looking as if it rolled in circles like a dropped golden coin. She blinked when someone uncoiled from the sofa closest to the large window—exactly where she liked to sit—his white teeth flashing as he smiled. “Carver!”