I tried hard to stay out of the public eye – I meant what I said to the Intendancy, and by and large, they’d worked hard to hold to their side of the agreement, so I was doing the same. I wanted to be a nobody, no-one, someone who had the means and power to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, with whoever they wanted… and I was well on the way.
One afternoon in late July, 2136, a polite knock at my door got me out of my desk to answer it.
# # #
4:58pm, July 23rd, 2136:
Breaking News: Arkscraper proctors have been called to the aid of a man who has been shot at the end of the work day today, in a suite at the top of the America arkscraper. We’ll have details on that shooting, and more, at the six o’clock newscast!
#
Acknowledgements
As you might have already guessed, yes, there are a few bits of actual history in this book. No, I’m not telling you which, but I will leave a few hints to those who care to read right to the bitter end.
First and foremost, thanks to Leo Champion. While I didn’t bully him into letting me write in the Streetsverse, I did bully him into publishing it. If you haven’t read it yet, Streets of New York City has one teeny tiny little blurb about James Wolf. That’s where this whole thing came from. It was originally going to get cut out, but then I wrote R&F, and I think that spurred him into keeping that one little snippet in the original book.
Michael Williamson graciously granted me permission to blatantly rip off his “Oath of Blades” scene – which was first introduced to me when I read the first of many of his books, “Freehold.” If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it. That and Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” are two books I read annually, and seem to get more out of each, every time I read them.
Michael Breshears, a former airborne trooper, gave me some great input and direction for the air ops scenes. That was fun, even if what you read here is HIGHLY improbable. Right arm over left arm, left leg over right leg…
Doug Bradburry, an actual (retired) colonel, has given me all kinds of good advice in the past. It was only appropriate to have him give my protagonist some good advice here, too.
Alex Hopple and Matt Reinhart, for input about UCMJ.
“Private” Jeremy Ma, gave me some great stories about armor operations – ie, “HEEELLLLP! LETMEOUT!”
Brice Pangan, for helping clarify some of the differences between Enlisted and Officers, since sadly, I never had the benefit of seeing the other side of that divide. Pangan’s
also notoriously difficult to pin down; he saw a copy of this book BEFORE IT WAS EVEN DONE and never did get back to me. I shoulda killed you in the book earlier…. j/k, thanks, man.
Other characters in this book are loosely patterned after real people. Who they are is between them and me. If you think you’re one of those people? Reach out and ask. Maybe you are. Maybe you aren’t. Maybe you are and I’m not gonna bother answering your phone call, because, well, fuck you.
Discerning whether or not the names in the book are real people, I’ll leave as an exercise in near-futility for the reader. Any resemblance to actual people is purely coincidental.
Rage? Exists. Rage is a Blackwater Ursa 6 that sits in my gun safe, and I see it every time I go to pull out toys for the range. Ohio law enforcement frowns on carrying a blade that’s obviously designed for wetwork.
Fury? Fury doesn’t exist, but it should. The ATF should be a convenience store, not a government agency, and the NFA (especially the Hughes Amendment!) oughta be repealed.
I owe a lot of thanks to a lot of people. My wife, Beth, put up with me cranking out a lot of words in a very short timeframe (the actual writing of this book – 130,000 words - took me 30 days). Eric Esper, Debi Breshears (yes, HIS wife), Sandy Bradburry (yes, HIS wife!), and Christopher Nuttall, another VERY prolific author who was my inspiration to do that much writing in that little time. Mark Wandrey, an author who showed me it *WAS* possible to do this while still maintaining a day job, and who graciously reviewed a copy of it for his professional ‘take’ on my effort.
Last, and perhaps most importantly, I want to thank Sensei Kim Marshall (April 4, 1956 – October 2, 2016). He was more of a father to me than my own was, and yes, he made me promise him to remember not just my intent, but my purpose. I remember, and I am keeping that promise.
BANZAI Sensei!
And now check out the book that inspired Rage & Fury – Streets of NYC.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076YP1NT9
In dystopian 2184, gleaming arcology-skyscrapers tower above hellish industrial slums, streetgangers killing each other for trash in their shadows. Inside the arkscrapers life is said to be luxurious; on the abandoned streets it’s vicious and short.
Airborne gang leader Jeff Hammer is an intellectual and a mercenary, surviving from contracts in the wars the tenement bosses wage amongst themselves. But he’s fed up with just dreaming about arkscraper luxury; it’s time to take action.
When he’s set up to die and his gang is wiped out, his hand is forced. It’s rise or die, and Hammer doesn’t plan on dying. He’s going to set Manhattan on fire – and threaten the very arkscrapers themselves.
Chapter One
New York City, New York; August 2184.
From two hundred feet above, as Hammer approaches on his attack run, all of Hell’s Kitchen looks like it’s on fire. Screams and yells are distantly audible, but the combatants on the streets below his hang-glider are no more than darkly illegible running shapes. Blades reflect in the firelight and the omnipresent glare of the third-of-a-mile high arkscrapers.
There was fire on the rooftops and in the streets, fire set by Molotovs or bombs or just the butane burners of unaligned streetgangers. It was late August, the fiercest time of year in the city because shortly the hurricanes would begin and warring tenement bosses could consolidate what they’d taken now.
Jeff Hammer dipped his glider’s wings slightly, identifying the target. He liked fire, so long as he wasn’t too close to it. It gave updrafts, which kept you in the air. It meant you could go in lower, stay in the area longer, maneuver more freely without losing unregainable height.
He could feel the heat flowing across his body now as he went in lower, leading his gang toward the objective. Occasional bits of hot ash rose up from that one building, probably some kind of combustible industry, that was really blazing a few hundred yards to his north, thick black smoke pouring up from it. Smoke was bad news – smoke choked you, fucked with your visibility and got you killed – but this building was far enough away that it wasn’t a problem.
His objective was a fortified building on the corner of Forty-Fifth Street and Tenth Avenue, intersecting two free roads and therefore inherently well defended. That was why the client had paid Hammer to soften it up first. Taking a fortified building from the ground was hard – you took casualties doing that. It was hard to take a fortified building from the air, too, but you could fuck with them.
The roof wasn’t lit, but the towering arcology-skyscrapers threw off plenty of ambient light and he could see people there. A place like this, in the heart of tenement industrial country, would have electricity. Except for a single spotlight focused down on Tenth, scanning for trouble, they weren’t using it. Didn’t mean they didn’t have it.
The wings of Hammer’s glider wiggled slightly as he descended now, by eye about a hundred and fifty feet above street level, exchanging height for speed as he went in. There didn’t seem to be much fighting in the immediate area, at least not right now. So the objective was rear-area; that made life a little easier. There would be fewer muskets and bows aimed upwards, or ready to be.
Tonight’s wind came from the east-northeast, a light breeze coming off Long Island Sound. Directly in his path after Tenth Avenue was the dark Hudson, but a sharp left-turn would bring him to the Javitz Building and its heat outtakes. It wasn’t a big one, but you didn’t always need big. Outtakes meant warm air meaning height. You al
ways knew where the nearest outtakes were, and the next-nearest just in case.
A hundred and twenty feet above street level, descending. Wind whipped past Hammer’s tanned, brown, scarred face, through his short-cut black hair. A glance back showed the rest of the Hawks in line behind him, following his lead as they were supposed to. Six gliders in all, airbornes on the attack.
Going in low was dangerous; it was also the only way to be a hundred percent sure your payload hit where it was supposed to. There were at least a dozen people on the target rooftop, one of them talking into a headset and jabbing at a lantern-lit map on a table. The others were mostly at the edge, looking down onto the streets. Grappling hooks, fast climbers and surprise – that was one way to take a building like this, although if you lost the surprise it could get messy.
Airborne assault was another, and Hammer had met other airbornes who specialized in that kind of thing. They’d come in, make short landings and go hand-to-hand. Or use guns – those specialists charged a fortune and could afford that expensive hardware. But over his twenty-nine years, a long life in the gangs, Hammer had come to consider that insane. Flying low was an acceptable risk, part of the job. Doing dirt intentionally was incomprehensible. He’d been to street level exactly once in his life and that hadn’t been by choice.
A hundred feet above the ground, thirty or forty above the rooftops, and the target was a hundred feet ahead of him as Hammer’s dark glider swept in at eighty miles per hour. His body moved slightly, fractionally, unconsciously, stabilizing and balancing with experienced muscles.
He glanced back again for a moment, seeing the other five gliders all there in formation at his back. Everyone seemed fine. Random incoming was a normal fact of life this low; grounders hated airbornes. Too often your bombs missed, killed someone they weren’t meant to. A lot of people shot at you on sight. The street-made hang gliders were a tradeoff between weight and strength, not particularly resilient. A musket ball could cause a rip through the stretched plastic that would sink you. An arrow might do worse.
He leaned his wiry body in a little more, coming in on the target at no higher than forty feet above rooftops that were green with potted plants, local food production.
In front of him to the left was a wire bomb rack. It held eight two-pound bombs, the size and shape of the large soda bottles they filled. You could dump them as a load or throw them individually. Four of the bombs were nitroglycerin, four were Molotovs with cheap magnesium-ignition fuses. The glicks didn’t need fuses; they exploded on impact. Glick, nitroglycerin, was unstable as hell.
It was an occupational hazard. You lived with occupational hazards – or died by them, if it was your time. Hammer had survived almost three decades. This probably would not be his time, tonight.
But then, you never know when it is, he thought. It would be sometime.
Seventy feet to target.
Who was this guy? The contractor hadn’t volunteered and it was bad form to ask. Obviously some tenement industrial boss, a rival or enemy of the guy whose man had paid Hammer, half up front as per the usual arrangement, for the mission this morning. His title was perhaps City Councilor, maybe Ward Chair or District Services Administrator; old names of an ancient government from before civilization had moved up into the arkscrapers.
Sixty-five feet to target.
To Hammer’s right on the glider’s makeshift aluminum rack was a heavy repeating crossbow on a hundred-and-eighty-degree pivot, left and right up and down. It contained five bolts, each with a third of an ounce of glick coating their barbed tip. Underneath that was a one-shot flashgun, a foot-long barrel holding what amounted to a large shotgun shell.
The client had asked for strafing. Hammer had replied Maybe, meaning no. These weapons were for self-defense, in case predators showed up. Strafing was dumb on a bomb run, because it gave warning. It was tactically imbecilic.
Lizard used to like strafing, Hammer remembered.
Lizard had never understood tactics.
Lizard had been blown screaming out of the sky three years ago.
Hammer hadn’t been there, but Ubi had told the story. Certainly the old gang leader had gone out and never come back. Ubi barely had.
That night, Hammer had refused. He’d lived, although it had nearly killed him afterwards. But he’d moved first, and he was gang leader now for a reason. The others followed him.
Fifty feet to drop release. Tenth Avenue opened up below him, wide and dark. His eyes were focused on the target as the wind swept past his goggled face, no time now to think of anything else. His weight shifted, keeping balance. His left hand reached over as math went through his mind and he hit the master safety switch on his bomb rack. Armed.
Someone on the roof looked up and saw him. They pointed and screamed.
Shit.
Hammer banked left, a couple of yards, losing almost that much height. Down this low, he couldn’t afford that.
Somebody started to manipulate the spotlight up towards him. The people on the roof were scurrying like panicked ants.
“Get below!” someone female shouted.
No time to think about anything but hitting these fuckers and then the sharp left-turn he’d make. That’d get him to the burning rooftop a hundred and fifty yards away, which would give enough lift to make the Javitz outtakes. The others would follow his lead. Being smart had made Hammer gang leader. Being good was what had kept him around long enough to have the chance.
His mind was calculating bombardment vectors. It was all math. The payload had a certain weight, fell at a certain speed, moved forwards as it fell. You could calculate it with a pen and paper. Hammer was an intellectual – he’d done just that. That was another reason he was good: you did the math on your roof, then flew in and applied it. The scratches you made on a pad ultimately determined how you came in to drop your bombs. The idea was nuts but it worked, so he didn’t talk about it. He just did it.
He pushed the release switch, yanking the fuses of the Molotovs and disengaging the rack. Then swerved hard left, because he did not want to be just fifty feet from those things when they went off.
The sound of ripping plastic. A long, feathered arrow had gone vertically through his wing.
Shit, said Hammer’s instincts.
An entirely survivable wound, said his mind.
“I said to get below! He’s got friends!” the woman yelled.
The fires were where he thought they’d be: scattered across the rooftop.
Boo-boo-boo-BOOM went the glick shockwaves. Bits of debris flew. Something slashed his leg, somewhere between where his shorts ended and his old sockless runners began.
His eyes scanned around, saw the others on their run. No time to glance back at the target; Ubi, the last man, would count the bodies.
The updraft from a rooftop fire gave him another couple of feet of height. Everything counted. He angled slightly upwards, trying to exchange momentum for more height. Scanning for threats. You couldn’t spot a sniper, but you could spot other airbornes. The predators liked to fly high and in formation, because they could. At this point Hammer wasn’t up for an air-to-air fight, or a pursuit. Not with his height and that arrow through his wing. Not against some bastard in an ultralight.
A brief check of his wings: oh shit. Something had gone through the other side too, a bit of shrapnel or a musket ball. It had made a small rip. Small rips had a nasty tendency to become big rips.
The Javitz outtake was about a hundred and twenty yards away, in the light of the massive light-studded arkscrapers. He was still losing height, about thirty feet above the rooftops. Gaining a little with minor updrafts, but on balance losing.
Without the injuries he’d make it to the outtake, no probs. With them it was dicier. But everything was dicey. Eventually your time would come. Statistically Hammer’s should have long ago.
The Javitz scraper was about average sized for an arcology-skyscraper, six hundred yards high. It was in the middle of high-building count
ry, which meant gangland. The tenements occupied lower buildings, generally three- and four-story ones. But the outtakes were only a couple of stories off the ground, and – thank God – there was clear line of sight to them.
Javitz was part of the big arkscraper network, but it stood on its own. Skyways led to the big clusters – Soho, the Midtowns, Lower and Upper East and West Sides, the Downtown ones. You could walk from Battery Park to Harlem or the Bronx and be indoors the entire way. For that matter, there were enclosed bridges and tunnelways under the Hudson and East Rivers, from Manhattan to Long Island and Jersey.
Most gangers didn’t believe in the tunnelways because they’d never seen them. Most gangers, even airbornes, were morons who didn’t think beyond the next fight, the next meal or the next fuck. Hammer read books, listened to radio, had watched TV. A guy he ran into occasionally liked to call him ‘Professor’.
The outtake was there now. Warm air blasted up out of the scraper from a dozen large vents, and Hammer was so low that it almost hurt. He began circling the massive arkscraper slowly, enjoying the beautiful, beautiful height. He could go up to six hundred feet on these drafts if he wanted to. A thousand feet.
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