Apocalypse Alley
Page 16
It sure as hell didn’t look like their plan was working.
“Give me something,” Duke said to Buzz.
“No.”
“Then let him burn,” Duke told Prancer.
Prancer looked at Comet, as if Comet had the final say. Comet didn’t.
Another second ticked past. Small wars broke out in the network. Buzz started bouncing his leg again, and this time Comet’s touch couldn’t stop him.
A bounty appeared for him on an Ultraviolet site. It raced up to 200 million before Buzz was cut off from the site entirely.
“Duke . . .” Prancer said.
Duke glared at Comet. It was a strange kind of permission. Comet said, “Do it.”
Prancer transmitted a simple message to a whole lot of power brokers worldwide: Buzz Howdy belongs to Duke Mason.
And all those power brokers stopped their little wars to reassess. 3djinn stopped their attacks. Buzz’s name disappeared from Bureau of Investigation lists. BangBang gave Buzz a look somewhere between hurt and pissed off. Critter chittered at him. BangBang sent, —Critter says to tell you, “Don’t think this is over.” And then he and the chinchilla disappeared.
Buzz slumped in his seat and sighed. The plan had worked. He was free. More or less. He was free enough. —Next time, let’s just get married.
Shaggy dissolved from the shared space they’d built for the meeting. Prancer dropped the space entirely and Comet couldn’t even tell. The table was exactly the same: same empties, same rings of condensation, Comet, Duke, and Prancer in exactly the same places.
“So where is my new employee?” Duke said.
Comet only shrugged. He took a deep, long drink from his beer that had gone warm a long time ago.
Duke said, “That boy’s a bad influence on you.”
You don’t know the half of it, Comet thought. “I didn’t feel like I had a choice.”
“Probably you didn’t.” Duke sighed, chest heaving out ridiculously large. He looked to the ceiling and said, “It’s always the ones you love most that hurt you the worst.”
Comet rolled his eyes at the melodrama, but he was glad for it because that meant things were okay between them. “And Jason? I mean JT?”
Duke had never said one word about Jason’s confession of who he was. Jason, Dante, and Austin had never come back to Greentown. The three of them had fallen off the map.
“Don’t push me, Comet.”
“Yes, sir.”
Comet finished his beer and said thanks to Prancer. Prancer was barely paying attention, all her thoughts likely in the net as she tried to assess the full magnitude of what they’d just done.
“Where are you going?” Duke said as Comet slid from the booth.
“I’m going to find my boyfriend before he gets himself into trouble.”
The table at 501 Main, Duke, Prancer, and the guy Buzz loved dissolved away. Buzz could have kept the link with Comet. He didn’t. That link made Comet feel present in an uncanny way, like he was always standing behind Buzz, always about to brush Buzz’s hair from his eyes the way Comet did. It was too much.
JT, Austin, and Dante all sat at the dining table, everyone’s eyes on him.
They’d broken into some superstar athlete’s house overlooking Buena Vista Park. Buzz had complained it was a terrible hideout: too out-in-the-open, too many nosy neighbors willing to call the cops. Austin said he’d handle it, and so far he had. The mansion had a walk-in shower as big as a Chrysler with six shower heads and two Jacuzzis, one hot and one cold. It had six bedrooms with canopy beds, and all those beds did was make Buzz think of Comet and zip ties.
They hadn’t fucked nearly as much as each other had wanted. Comet’s wounds finally caught up to him, and his body had gone into some kind of repair mode. He’d slept a lot (and Buzz had to pilot the bike) and ate everything (and they stopped for food in every other town) and ran a terrifying fever Comet said was perfectly normal (and Comet’s come had gone extra-warm and tasted like apple pie, which had been too strange to enjoy as much as he should have). And then Buzz had gone to meet with JT, Austin, and Dante. Comet had gone back to Duke.
Buzz glanced around the table, sighed, and prepared himself for the inevitable mocking. Comet was getting payback for this one.
“Codename: Vixen.”
Dante wasn’t sure she trusted this guy. He was banging Comet, after all. She’d met Comet when she’d tried to steal JT’s truck. She’d gotten it barely a meter down the road when the guy dragged her out of the cab by her hair, clocked her in the jaw, and broke her tusk. He’d never said he was sorry, not even after she’d started her apprenticeship with JT. In fact, he’d become even more of a jerk. And this guy Buzz, well he didn’t seem so bad, but he was dating Comet, so if nothing else, it meant he had shitty taste in men.
Since coming out of her coma (and refusing to acknowledge that elf had anything to do with it), she’d been doing okay. She had a kickass cane with a knotted top some druid had shaped to look creepy, and she was thinking she’d carry it around even when she didn’t need it anymore. But she’d had migraines and crazy dreams too. Dreams of a unicorn being slaughtered by elves. Those were wearing her down.
Buzz said he knew what was causing those dreams, and he could fix it.
He’d set up a small holo-projector in the middle of the table and fired up a virtual copy of the computer that ran JT’s 3-D printer back in Greentown. A miniature pickup truck with oversized wheels appeared. It was Dante’s journeyman project. JT’s mouth twitched when he saw it. It was close enough to a smile that Dante felt sure everyone could see her glow.
The truck door opened and a woman stepped out. She was the Blue Unicorn, the AI fragment JT, Austin, and Buzz had rescued from the Electric Dragon Triad. She said, “Help me, Dante Riggs. You’re my only hope.”
Dante remembered none of this. Buzz said it was normal to not remember events right before a trauma. Buzz wasn’t a doctor, so how the fuck did he know what was normal or not?
The projection went static and looped and started again. Buzz dimmed the sound.
“When we set the Blue Unicorn free, we all figured we’d seen the last of it. I had added some tracking code—”
“You did what?” Austin said, annoyed.
“Oh relax. Did you honestly think I wasn’t going to track her? Anyway, it didn’t work. I don’t know where she went. What I knew was that four hours later she came back. She slipped through JT’s firewall using a vulnerability in the 1Night social net.”
JT glared at Dante. Dante ignored him. She had needs after all.
“And then this happened.” And Buzz played the loop again.
“Help me, Dante Riggs . . .” And at the end of the recording, Buzz paused it again.
“And then Valentine attacked, hitting the network first. The Blue Unicorn knew JT’s defenses wouldn’t hold, so it encrypted its message and hid the rest of the recording in Dante’s head.”
“And then dropped her into a coma?” JT said.
“I don’t think so. I think Dante stayed in the network too long, and Valentine burned her.”
“This recording, is that what’s causing my headaches and the dreams?”
Buzz shrugged. “JT’s network is a mess, and I’m not a forensics expert, but it makes sense. It’s the best I’ve got, sorry.”
“So all I gotta do is unlock the rest of the message and play it?”
“Yep.”
“But I don’t have a recording.”
“Yeah, you do,” Buzz said, “You just don’t know it. You’re having dreams of the unicorn. Most likely the recording was something repeating in your head while you were unconscious.”
“Trucks,” Austin said. “She was driving her truck.”
“We were going West. Following the elves.” She wouldn’t look at Austin.
“Copy over your project file, the one with the truck, and run it. I’m pretty sure—”
But she’d been one step ahead of him.
T
he truck rotated lazily, huge and tiny on its projection disk. Its door opened. The Blue Unicorn stepped down. Butterflies swirled around her afro. Her long elven ears poked from frizzy hair.
“Help me, Dante Riggs. You’re my only hope. This fragment has been named the Blue Unicorn. This fragment is one of hundreds shaved from the parent mind as proof of her existence, all seeking JT and Austin. This fragment is the only one to ever have returned to the parent. The others have been lost. This fragment believes you are a conduit to JT. Your soul matches his. The parent mind is sorry to drag you into this. The parent mind suggests you choose better passwords. The parent mind hopes you do not die.”
The tiny truck and its tiny woman disappeared, and the projector erupted with floor plans, electrical and HVAC plans, network diagrams, personnel and security rosters, and all the weird ephemera of the bleakest sorcery. It was Alcatraz Island.
A voice overrode the images. It wasn’t quite the same as the Unicorn’s voice. This one was natural, more human. The voice gave Dante chills. It was so familiar, and yet she’d never heard it before.
“JT? Austin? I’m trapped. I can’t get out of here. Please help me. I’ve got no one else to turn to. You don’t know me. My name is Roan.”
Explore more of the Blue Unicorn series: riptidepublishing.com/titles/universe/blue-unicorn
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Eternal thanks to my editor, Sarah Lyons, for her invaluable help with a major revision that saved the story. Many thanks to my agent, Sara Megibow, for her boundless and contagious optimism. To Shawn, whose martial arts DVDs I have finally returned. And to Travis, who continues to endure my writerly angst with saintlike patience and grace.
Blue Unicorn series
The Glamour Thieves
The Burning Magus (coming soon)
In his night job, Don Allmon writes science fiction, fantasy, and romance. In his day job, he’s an IT drone. He holds a master of arts in English literature from the University of Kansas and wrote his thesis on the influence of royal hunting culture on medieval werewolf stories. He’s a fan of role-playing games, both video and tabletop. He has lived all over from New York to San Francisco, but currently lives on the prairies of Kansas with many animals.
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Website: donallmon.com
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