Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity

by Robert Brockway

  Not bad. If it had been Albert on point, the move might’ve helped them, but Victoria hadn’t used aim assistance for years. Shit didn’t even work with the unauthorized replica Colt.

  She aimed down the antique iron sights and pulled the trigger.

  Victoria felt the concussion of the shot and the resonance of the recoil, but didn’t hear the sound. She was just as deafened by the noise in the confined space as the targets — almost certainly moreso, in fact — but she was psychologically prepared for it. The threats were not: They all flinched, and briefly broke formation, though the redheaded fellow and the one-legged Arabic girl recovered much faster than she expected. Her ER blipped back up to 99.60.

  Four seconds; Albert should be flanking at any moment. A large hole was blown clear through the girl’s jacket, but Victoria couldn’t tell if she’d been hit or not. She swiveled the barrel of the Colt down and left, and fired again. The two shifted with the gun this time, ready for the blast, and she could tell immediately that her shot went wide.

  Shit. Wait.

  New threat priority: Caucasian female, blonde, no visible weapons, multiple nanotech control panels, lightly muscled, 5’2, 120 lbs. The tertiary objective, Victoria realized, the ‘Loon girl, QC. She must have been hiding around the corner.

  The little blonde ducked swiftly out into the hallway and made as if to throw something upward. A spray of blood spattered from her apparently wounded palm, and struck a bare industrial LED panel. The whole grid went dark. Victoria blinked, and glanced down to Hanover, but saw only a luminous circle with a slash through it under Recommended Actions.

  Damn it. She was never very good at the Guerilla Theorems.

  Victoria swiveled the cannon up toward what she assumed to be the now-fleeing threats, but there came a sound like a metal spring engaging, and the Arabic woman exploded out of the darkness. She closed the distance instantly with two rapid, loping bounds of the prosthetic and two quick, uncertain stumbles from the normal limb.

  Like skipping.

  ***

  Albert was winded.

  He had no excuse to be winded. Not this soon.

  Albert religiously followed all of the strict stamina maintenance schedules laid out for his weight, frame and age – and yet here he was: Panting, red-faced, struggling to drag the giggling Gashead along behind him. His circuitous route through the filtration tunnels was 6,220 modified paces. If Victoria kept to the agreed-upon synchronicity, he would be running thirty-three seconds late.

  Wildly unacceptable.

  Albert skidded to a stop, dropped to one knee, and laid the primary objective on his side in a valve control alcove. He took a single deep, steadying breath, straightened his jacket, and broke into a dead sprint. Albert re-measured his pace: 130% the synced stride. Stopping and discarding the primary had taken eleven seconds. He should be able to make up the time difference with 101 seconds of sprint.

  God, his lungs burned.

  It wasn’t fair.

  They had no right to be so ineffective. He kept to the schedules! Every four and a half hours of off-time, like clockwork, he ran through the 30-minute intensive callisthenic drills. Even his sleep wasn’t safe from that shrill alarm in his BioOS, with its flashing yellow lights. Without fail, he would awaken to his heart hammering in his chest, to the thickness in his limbs, and the panic his throat. Without fail, Albert would push it away, and dutifully, sleepily drop into the first form.

  There was no excuse for this. Some sloppy mathematician somewhere had failed to factor a variable and rendered his entire stamina schedule ineffective. The thought infuriated him, and though he knew it was self-destructive, the anger only made him push harder.

  What use was all of it, if you still just got old?

  Respirocytes were supposed to be super-oxygenating his blood; augmented cellular repair was supposed to triple the effectiveness of his workouts; reserve nutrient packs were supposed to be providing emergency fuel for his body, but when it came right down to it — when it was all out there on the line – Albert was still just a stocky, out of shape old man.

  And Hanover knew it. How could it not? The damn thing was sending him a message. Making him run numbers for yet another lean, vicious, beautiful young punk whose only priority is making him look bad and teasing him with her tig—

  Albert ran flat out into the little blonde girl.

  She rolled backwards with the impact, and his feet got tripped up in her tumbling form, landing the pair of them in a tangled heap at the feet of a redheaded, bookish-looking fellow in a comically anachronistic tweed sportcoat.

  The small man was already moving, even as Albert fell. The rumbling sickness of dismay seized Albert’s belly, as he recognized the man’s fluid movements for those of a trained fighter. For his part, Albert managed to roll with the impact some — his own muscle-memories kicking in a little late, but better than never. He locked his forearms in front of his neck and face, just as something hard and sharp struck his wrist. Albert swung his legs up to kick out, buy some distance, and gain enough inertia to roll to a stand. He hit something soft, and felt his opponent stagger. Albert was already swinging his legs back down from the blow, using the momentum to spring to his feet. As soon as he was upright, he started into another sprint, trying to open up enough distance to pull his woven pistol, but something was pushing on the back of his knee, and he was going down again. Just before he hit the ground, the small man jerked Albert’s head swiftly to the side, redirecting him into the wall.

  Albert felt most of his face break.

  But he recognized the move: That rapid-fire grappling style they used down in the ‘Wells. Mostly about redirecting momentum as force, and using obstacles to strike instead of the fists and feet. They could always count on walls close at hand, down there in the ‘Wells. It was a brutally effective martial art, but there was hope: This corridor was narrow, but still wider than the ones his opponent was likely accustomed to. Instead of struggling to stand, as the attacker would be expecting, Albert went limp, fell to his side and struck backward with his fist. Just as he’d expected, the small man’s knee crashed against the wall, right where Albert’s neck would have been if he’d tried to gain his feet. But Albert’s own strike went low, and he hit only open air. He felt a sudden twinge of embarrassment at the awkward miss, but quickly stored it away, knowing that if he survived this, he’d have plenty of time to dwell on the shame later. Albert would double up his close combat training for a week, afterward. Maybe two. Three.

  Jesus, forever, if he just got out of this alive.

  ***

  The eye was lost. The Arabic girl had gone right for it, as she came bouncing out of the shadows on that prosthetic leg. Victoria managed to get one hand up to block, but her other still held the Colt, and the weight of it slowed her too much to save the other eye. She felt the woman’s thumb part her eyelids and sink straight into the jelly there with practiced precision. But even with only one good eye, she could see that her shot had connected, and the one-legged woman’s strength was swiftly ebbing out of a wet and ragged hole in her abdomen.

  The pair of them fought in silence.

  The other threats had fled while the woman covered their retreat, leaving Victoria alone against an unarmed opponent. Her numbers briefly spiked, but promptly dipped again into the low 70s as soon as she lost the eye. Victoria vaguely recognized the corridor-grappling style, but it wasn’t uniform – spiked randomly with conventional boxing, some fencing and the occasional elaborate flying kick. It was impossible to predict, and hard to counter. The primary threat made a few good contacts with that prosthetic leg of hers, and now Victoria was favoring her own – almost certainly fractured. Victoria was stronger than the primary, and maybe even faster, but she was having trouble adjusting to the trauma and reduced visual field. Every strike was just short, or too long, and the vicious bitch kept circling to her sightless side. Victoria parried a pointed claw strike toward her throat, and shoved a retaliatory elbow into the wo
man’s ribs. But in the process, she’d lost track of the prosthetic again, and now felt it press up between her knees. She was falling. The woman was on her immediately, using the momentum of the fall to augment her own blow, and Victoria felt her solar plexus collapse. She fought back the sudden chromatic explosions crowding the edges of her vision, and lashed out blindly, landing a solid headbutt right on the bridge of the woman’s ample nose. They scrambled backward from one another, each struggling to regain their footing.

  Victoria felt a belt of blood ooze out from the ruined hole in her face, run down her cheek, and trace the path of her jawline before utterly ruining her frilly lace ascot. The one-legged girl was bent almost double, trying to hold her own guts closed as best she could. They stared grimly at one other. She saw it in the Arabic woman’s eyes, and knew it was written in hers: They were both ready to die here. Their blood dripped silent and slick through the grating below.

  “You play rough and I’m telling!” The woman squealed.

  ***

  The pixie-cut blonde and the skinny one in the leather jacket, whom Albert placed now as the secondary and tertiary objectives, didn’t hesitate for an instant when he and Tweed Overcoat started fighting. The two of them turned and sprinted down the access shaft as fast as they could, immediately disappearing around the nearest switchback. The training was keeping Albert alive, but just barely. Tweed Overcoat was younger, stronger, and had some crude but massively effective training of his own. He managed to use the width of the corridors to take some of the effectiveness out of Tweed Overcoat’s grapples, but regardless, Albert’s hand, elbow, and ankle were all clearly, painfully broken. He had landed two good shots of his own, and Tweed Overcoat was bleeding from the nose and favoring his knee, but the small man would recover quickly enough, while Albert could barely stand. Tweed Overcoat feigned high and ducked low, caught Albert behind the leg, then shot upward, flipping his head painfully into the wall behind him. If Albert had been a foot closer to that wall, the impact might have snapped his neck, but his opponent’s depth was off, and so the crash merely sent searing pain crackling down his spine and shattered his two front teeth. He countered Tweed Overcoat’s clumsy follow-up and boxed him on the ears, causing him to pull back in shock. Albert dragged himself to his knees, and tried to line up a tackle.

  In the upper left corner of his vision, a bright yellow light flashed, and a pair of shrill bells sounded in each ear. An alert scrolled across his field of vision in the thin, angular font of Hanover: “2:30AM: 1.1 – Early Morning Calisthenics.”

  Albert laughed, broken.

  He felt the strength go out of his legs, and let himself sag against the cool metal hall. He gestured after the blonde and the skinny fellow.

  “Fuck it,” Albert said, “just go.”

  “Wh-you pulling my leg, mate?” Tweed Overcoat stood straighter, warily relaxing his stance, just slightly.

  “I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to do my calisthenics,” Albert answered glumly.

  “Ha!” Tweed overcoat guffawed, “I broke your bloody brain! Always wanted to do that to somebody.”

  “It’s not fair. How are we supposed to ‘Categorize, analyze, dismiss or neutralize,’ if they can’t even properly formulate a simple workout schedule? It’s shoddy math, is what it is. People just don’t take pride in their jobs anymore.”

  Tweed Overcoat shot him a disbelieving look, but was already turning and sprinting back toward Victoria.

  “Your friends went the other way!” Albert called after him, but if he heard, it did not slow him.

  Albert let his body slide painfully to the floor. He flicked his eyes upward and to the side, dismissing the alarm. His credit account opened instantly, registering the non-compliance fine from Hanover. He closed that as well. Albert opened his control circle, highlighted the compose message box, and focused on Victoria’s avatar. It expanded. The input window blinked eagerly.

  “Victoria,” he thought, and the words resolved almost before he finished thinking them:

  I kind of want to fuck you,

  but you’re just such a bitch.

  Xoxoxo,

  -Ralph.

  He hit send, revolved the circle over to his media browser, and watched cartoons.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Gutshot.

  Sera tried twisting right before the trigger-pull, like she’d practiced a thousand times, but if the bitch in the suit showed a tell before firing, Sera couldn’t spot it. She ran over the fight again, and could find no fault: She had moved the second the blonde slashed her palm open and sprayed the lights with that shit in her blood. Sera had pushed off strong, felt the Bounder flex downward, and hit a perfect approach line, spinning sideways at the apex of each bounce to make center mass as small as possible. But it didn’t matter. The damage was already done by then. She had felt the faint slap and the long, slow burn somewhere on her back right after the first shot; felt her limbs get a little bit heavier, second by second. If there was a better time to act, she hadn’t seen it, and if there was a better move she could’ve made, she didn’t know it. You do the best you can, and that’s all you can do. After that, all that’s left is to die laughing.

  But James had that little ‘x’ between his eyebrows that said he was worried.

  “Zip,” he started, but had nothing to finish with.

  God, fine.

  “Got a owie,” she said, and slapped his hand away. She stood and even managed to walk a few steps, but her knees were shaking, and she knew she wouldn’t make it far.

  “Drop it, Sera. Not a soul around.”

  “Red and the blonde get away?” Sera unclenched her throat and let her natural voice came rattling out.

  “Think so. There was another Gentleman, the Albert, caught up to us in the hall. I punched his bloody mind out.” James fell into lockstep beside her.

  “Bitch threw me, baby,” Sera waved a dismissive wrist, “I saw that suit, and I assumed A-Gent hardware. You know: Those little bullshit woven pistols they got. I figured phosphorous or explosive rounds, maybe, but smaller projectile mass. Darts. Then she pulls out that ancient fucking hand cannon. And it’s like, shit, where do you go? Bullets were the size of my fist.”

  “You got her though, yeah?”

  “Tried. Took an eye and got some quality breaks in, but she said some crap about ratings and took off on me. Couldn’t follow.”

  Her muscles felt dull and unresponsive. She tried to keep moving, but felt herself drifting downward with every step.

  “Jesus, Sera…”

  “This is good though, you know? Always thought I’d bleed out to some ‘Well-rat with a shiv, or maybe the Penthouses would send in a ‘bot-strain for us when they finally wanted the real estate back. Did you see that pistol she had? That was class. It was beautiful, loud, and cruel. If I gotta get got, at least I got got by something pretty.”

  “Oh, bollocks to that,” James snapped. He looped her arm over his shoulders and pushed onward. “Both of us have taken worse than this and still gone out drinking.”

  “Ain’t the hurt, it’s the time. Unless you got some medic friends squatting in this plant, we’re the fuck up and gone in Middle Industry without a work permit.” She motioned around to the narrow, empty corridor, surrounded on all sides by more narrow, empty corridors.

  “Blood loss is blood loss,” she finished.

  Her prosthetic slipped through a thin slot in floor, where two pre-fabricated sections of hallway were shoddily bolted together, and she stumbled. James caught her weight and laid her down easy.

  “I said bollocks,” James smiled, and Sera caught the rhythmic twitching eye movements that signaled BioOS access.

  “Useless. You know it. Don’t be a punk. Don’t let me go out with you spraying fucking punkness all over me.” Her tone was harsh, but she touched his neck while she spoke, and his eyes blurred back into focus.

  He watched Sera in silence for a moment. Then slumped down across from her, and pulled her
feet into his lap.

  “Yeah. You’re done. Even if I knew a medic up here, I’m still bloody lost. Never bought the Mapworks license for Middle Industry – why the hell would I ever need that, right?”

  “You’re gonna kill this bitch for me, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “You take that cannon when you’re done. That shit is way too badass for some uptight accountant cunt. She fought like a god damn math problem; every time she threw a punch I could see her tryin’ to carry the 1.”

  James started to laugh, then lapsed into abrupt, bitter silence. He thought better of it, and laughed again.

  “What am I going to do without you, Zip?” He finally asked.

  “Kill a bitch, steal a gun, get back home and have yourself a drink or twenty, then secure the borders. Same as always.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you right now: I’m not waiting on that drink,” he said, and reached into his pocket.

  James withdrew and unscrewed a small green bottle.

  “This was way too fine a vintage for that bloody boatman savage, anyway.”

  She smiled at him and took the flask. The liquor was soft, brown and warm. Her gut went numb for a second, but bloomed back into agony quick enough.

  “Tell me true now…” James took the bottle back and downed a shot of his own.

  “Sure,” She answered.

  Her legs had been tingling painfully when James first laid her out on the diamond-mesh grate, but they weren’t anymore. They felt like dead weight; like rags that been tied to her.

  “Are you scared, Zip? Every time I think about the ending, I’m so bloody sure that I’m ready for it. But I’ve always wondered if it’d be different, when the time actually comes. Is it?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted.

  Sera felt a sort of fullness behind her eyes, but fought back the surge of tears. She felt the impulse move away and start to dissipate, but then James leaned forward to kiss her softly, and when he sat back, she found his form had gone blurry around the edges.