Prime City: A Science Fiction Thriller (Neon Horizon Book 2)

by Michael Robertson

  Marcie held her arm out.

  The woman paused for a second before scanning the area of her implant. A timer began to count down, the digital reading glowing red through her skin.

  “You have four hours,” the woman said.

  “I can see that. Now if you’d kindly get out of my way, I can do what I’ve come here for.”

  “Careful, Marcie,” Slip said. He and the Eye were in her ear, watching the world through her eyes. Before she’d left their shitty hotel, the Eye had connected Marcie’s microprocessor to Jasmine. The glasses had a small speaker that pressed against the bone above her ear and allowed her to hear them with crystal clarity.

  The small woman—her hair tied back in a tight ponytail of jet-black hair—jutted her chin out as if daring Marcie to say more. But one of the other guards opened the gates, the woman remaining rooted to the spot, forcing Marcie to skirt around her. She said, “I hope your time runs out while you’re in there. I hope the bounty hunters give you hell.”

  Marcie nodded at the guard who’d opened the door for her, and slipped into Prime City.

  If anything, Prime City stretched even farther away than it had the previous time she’d entered. How long would it take someone to learn the streets without a map or a guide? Crewcuts and jocks moved through the crowd like pickpockets. Scavengers, they were desperate for someone to slip up so they could profit. The jocks talked non-stop, broadcasting their lives to anyone who’d pay attention.

  As she walked, Marcie reached back and felt for the knife on her belt. No way would she get caught by one of these gangs again. No way.

  A large blue arrow appeared in front of Marcie. About a metre long, it floated in mid-air. “Can you see that?” the Eye said.

  “That’s where the bounty is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How are you doing that?”

  “Satellites. Unlike the Blind Spot, Prime City has total surveillance, including GPS from satellites. It’s rather handy, I must say.”

  “How far is the bounty from here?”

  “Half an hour at the most.”

  “I have time.”

  Slip said, “For what?”

  “I want to find out the price of lungs first.”

  “Why don’t you do that when you have a longer visa?” the Eye said.

  “You’ve just said we have time. Besides, what if I don’t get a longer visa?”

  “We only have time if everything runs smoothly. How often does that happen?”

  “Are you going to help me or not? It’s going to take a hell of a lot longer if I have to do this on my own. And I’m guessing you know where the surgery is.”

  A few seconds later, a large red arrow appeared close to the blue one. The people on the street walked through the graphic, oblivious to its existence. It pointed the opposite way to the blue arrow.

  Marcie broke into a jog, barging her way through the crowd.

  “This is it?” Marcie said.

  “Apparently so,” the Eye said.

  A plain black door, and about one of the only buildings on the street that didn’t have a brightly lit sign above it. When Marcie knocked, it swung open, revealing a waiting room with several people already in the chairs. The digital red numbers on her forearm showed she had three hours and twenty-eight minutes left.

  The man behind reception had chrome eyes and teeth. He watched her approach, his face blank. Muzak played through floating spherical speakers, which buzzed around the room like dragonflies.

  “I-I, uh …” Marcie fixed on her own reflection in the man’s eyeballs, and then her reflection in the reflection of her blue glasses. She shook her head before she got dragged away by the infinite images.

  “What have you come to sell?” the receptionist said.

  “Sell? I’ve come to see how much lungs cost.”

  The man sat motionless as if he’d shut down. But before Marcie spoke again, he ripped a ticket from a small metal machine bolted to his desk and handed it to her. It had the number thirteen on it. The screen on the wall showed the number ten.

  “Marcie,” Slip said, “are you sure we have time for this?”

  Too many people in the waiting room for her to reply, so Marcie found a spare seat and sank into it.

  A duck quack of a buzzer and a white door opened. Too dark inside for Marcie to see, an elderly woman with a limp emerged. What appeared to be a mother and her son entered the room next, the number eleven now displayed on the screen.

  Quack!

  The loud buzzer jolted Marcie where she sat. The red digits on her arm showed she had two hours and forty-eight minutes left. The mother who’d walked in with what had appeared to be a fit and healthy son about half an hour previously now pushed him out in a wheelchair. They approached the main desk, the silver-eyed receptionist handing their payment over in the form of a credit card.

  The next group of people stood up. A mum, dad, and their little girl. The girl couldn’t have been any older than four. Her dad hugged her for the entire time. He held her tightly, like he’d never let her go. What were they about to do to her?

  The Eye and Slip had hassled Marcie for ten minutes straight before giving up. But now they started again, the Eye saying, “This is taking too long.”

  “I’m next.”

  The family of three turned to Marcie, the mum scowling at her. “You need to be more patient, young lady. You’ll get your turn.”

  Slip said, “The last lot took over half an hour. You can’t afford for your time to run out, and you can’t afford to not deliver on Mads’ bounty.”

  “I can’t afford to return to the Blind Spot empty-handed.”

  Where the mum of the family had clearly wanted to swing for Marcie, she now lost her rage, instead shaking her head as she followed her partner and child into the room.

  “Also,” Marcie said, “like I said earlier, we don’t know how much time I’ll get on my next visa.”

  Two hours and six minutes displayed in red digital numbers on Marcie’s arm by the time the next loud quack blared through the room. Three more people had come in, and they now waited on the seats.

  The white door opened and the mum carried out a wailing daughter. Still too dark to see into the room, Marcie flicked to night vision a moment after the door closed. She turned it off again.

  Like the couple before them, the mum and daughter took a loaded credit card from reception and left. What had happened to the man?

  The number twelve changed to thirteen and the door opened again.

  A small glow from a lamp on a table, Marcie kept her night vision switched off so she could see the surgeon’s face. Black lens implants covered his eyes. He wore a crimson-stained apron, and the room had the coppery reek of spilled blood. A red target encircled the man and the Eye said, “He looks more like a butcher than a fucking surg—” His words were cut off mid-sentence.

  “I’m sorry,” the surgeon said, an eerie lilt to his words like a tormented child singing a nursery rhyme, “but we have to shut down any tech in here.” He raised his thin eyebrows as he stared into her eyes. “Including enhancements and recording devices. So who are you, young lady?” He tilted his head to one side as if holding it off-kilter felt more comfortable.

  “Marcie Hugo.”

  “Should that mean something to me?”

  “No.”

  “What are you here for?”

  “I want to get some lungs. A friend needs a transplant.”

  “And what do you have to offer?”

  “Credits.”

  “No services? No influence higher up?”

  “No.”

  “Fifty thousand credits, then.”

  “How much?”

  “Do you know how much I just had to pay that little girl for her father?”

  Marcie baulked and shook her head as if it would clear what the man had just said. “I don’t want lungs from someone who’s sacrificed themselves for money. What about the lungs of someone who’s recently died?�
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  “One hundred thousand.”

  “Jeez.”

  “You’re welcome to find someone else if you want.”

  “There’s someone else?”

  “No.” The man smiled. The rest of his face didn’t.

  “Thanks for your time.”

  When Marcie got outside, the Eye said, “You have less than two hours remaining, and it takes forty-five minutes to get to the place where the man is.”

  “I thought you said it took half an hour?” The people in the waiting room watched Marcie as she left.

  “It does from where you started, but you’ve gone fifteen minutes the wrong way.”

  As she left the place, back out into the packed street, Slip said, “How much were the lungs?”

  “One hundred thousand credits.”

  “Shit!”

  “Right?”

  “Now’s not the time to be talking about it.” The blue arrow swelled as if mimicking the Eye’s impatience. “You need to get moving.”

  Every street busier than the previous one, Marcie slammed into more bodies than she avoided, half her focus on the arrow’s guidance. She had no chance of getting to her bounty if she remained on the ground. A tight alley on her left, she ducked into it.

  Twenty or so people in the dark space, several of them spraying the alley with luminous paint. All of them paused when she jumped and kicked off the nearest wall. She’d done it a thousand times in Scala City, hitting one side and then the other, higher with each kick before she climbed onto the flat roof of the ten-storey block. Shops and apartments below her, she took off in the direction the arrow had last shown her.

  As she jumped from the roof of one building to the next, the Eye lifted the blue arrow guiding her to make it easier to follow.

  “So what’s this guy done?” Marcie said.

  A small screen appeared in the right corner of Marcie’s vision, one centimetre square. The Eye offered her a commentary. “Roger Johns—nicknamed Ro Jo—was caught up in a shoot-out. He’s the one with the silly blond hair.” An overweight man in a poorly fitted suit, his fluffy hair flopped around on his head. His image would have been comical had he not worn a scowl as dark as the devil’s arsehole. He held an automatic rifle in both hands and stood on one side of the street with several people dressed in similar suits. Another gang outnumbered them, and they were closing in. “As you can see, Ro Jo was backed into a corner.” The shooting suddenly stopped when a pram rolled across between them. What must have been the mother of the child screamed as she ran to retrieve it.

  “Don’t tell me …” Marcie said.

  The Eye sighed. “He tried to take the shot.”

  Marcie mistimed her jump as Ro Jo pulled the trigger. Her foot caught on the corner of the next building, but her momentum carried her forwards. She windmilled her arms as she regained her balance. Ro Jo released an indiscriminately wild spray of bullets. Red mist burst from the baby’s carriage and then from the side of the mum’s head.

  “The other gang went to the mum and baby while Ro Jo and his crew took off. There’s a suspicion he did it on purpose to get away, but the fact is, he’s been missing since it happened. There are plenty of people who want to question him.”

  Several open mouths and wide eyes stared up from the street as Marcie made her next leap. The gap at least four metres wide, she landed on the gravel on the other side with a crunch. “Seems like a small payout considering what he did.”

  “Incarcerating him would look good for the city. It would show them to be tough on crime, especially because a baby died, but his arrest won’t save them many credits. The big bounties are often backed by private money. Those in the sky pay if it means saving either a fortune or their reputation. As far as the wealthier contingent in the city are concerned, this is scumbags killing scumbags. Sure, they want them off the streets, but they live in such different worlds to one another, they don’t see what happens on the ground as a threat to their decadent existence. Ironic, really.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He used to be one of them. Was in the running to be Prime City’s mayor. But his true colours shone through and they ousted him. He was even too vicious for the snake pit that is Prime City politics. He made enemies all the way to the top and fell short at the last, failing to secure anywhere near enough votes to gain power. Were it not for a domestic violence case where he beat his mistress into a wheelchair, he might have made it.”

  “And they want me to bring him in alive?”

  “The city would like to see someone like him punished. They want to hear him scream.”

  One hour and twenty-six minutes remained on Marcie’s forearm when she halted her run. On the roof of a residential block at least fifteen storeys tall, she overlooked the slightly shorter block the Eye had guided her to. It stood in the middle of an estate of smaller houses.

  “Ro Jo has control of the entire apartment block,” the Eye said. “He did what so many wealthy landowners did before him; he brought property on the cheap and evicted all the tenants. He had intended to rent them all out again at extortionate prices, but when he got kicked out of politics, he lost his leverage to develop them however he saw fit. Any attempt he now makes to regenerate gets tied up in red tape and buried beneath a mountain of paperwork. He’s now turned it into a bolthole. He has sentries watching everyone in and out of the place. As you can see, all the apartment windows on the outside of the building have been bricked up.”

  “What about going in through the roof? The place looks like it’s hollow through the middle.”

  “It has a courtyard, but see those black boxes lining the roof?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They’re explosives. The second you step on one, they’ll blow.”

  “And he’s definitely in there?”

  “Yep.” A police drone hovered around the top of the block of apartments. “He’s in the courtyard.”

  “Is that you?” Marcie said.

  “Controlling the drone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yep.”

  “Can you see anyone in the apartments? Anyone not connected to Ro Jo?”

  “He took over the entire block, evicted everyone, and knocked through so it’s one tall building, completely private for him. Even those in his employ live in the estate surrounding it.”

  “Good.” Marcie moved to the edge of the roof she currently stood on. Falling like a rock, she dropped into a dark alley below, her cybernetics absorbing the shock of her landing.

  “The second you enter the estate,” the Eye said, “they’ll be on to you.”

  One hour and fifteen minutes left. “How long to get back to the Black Hole?”

  “Forty minutes.”

  “I suppose I have to go in hard, then. It’s not like I can wait for the right moment.”

  “Just be careful. We don’t want your visa running out.”

  “If it does, at least I’ll be able to run. It can’t be worse than having a collar pinning me to the ground.”

  “Let’s hope not. That cost you three grand.”

  Marcie charged into the estate. One, then five red targets came into view. Teenagers and young kids ran through the walkways of the smaller apartment blocks. They were clearly running to tell someone what they’d seen.

  The blue arrow steered Marcie through the rat run of roads towards the large block in the centre. Once or twice, the directions went against her instinct, but she trusted the Eye’s guidance. Armed with just a knife, she charged at the entranceway leading to the apartment block’s courtyard.

  Five guards stood between Marcie and the door to the courtyard. While they readied their guns, she slammed into them, knocking them aside like a bowling ball hitting the kingpin. Without breaking stride, she kicked the door in with a crunch.

  The man sat in the centre on a chair, his back to her. While the guards got to their feet and yelled behind her, she drew her knife and grabbed their leader. As she pulled the man to his feet, his
blond wig fell off and he screamed through his gag.

  Beaten and swollen, this man clearly wasn’t a friend of Ro Jo’s. “Shit!”

  Marcie stood in the middle of the courtyard as an army flooded in. Men, women, boys, and girls. About thirty of them inside with her, all of them marked red targets. Twelve-storey walls on all four sides of her, balconies from the ground to the opening at the top. Only one way in and out because of the explosives on the roof. She used her knife to cut the man’s ropes and shoved him away from her. “Find somewhere to hide.”

  Although Marcie had kicked down the wooden entrance to the courtyard, a large steel door slammed shut where it had been, blocking her way.

  A crackle ran through her ear, and the day darkened from where the roof began to slide closed.

  “Hello?”

  But the Eye had gone. Although he still had control of the drone, the shutters must have been blocking their communication.

  The army closed in on Marcie, watching her through the sights of their guns.

  Chapter 34

  The Eye’s police drone continued to hover above the apartment block, the gap growing smaller as the roof closed, shutting Marcie in. The small army must have seen it, but they’d obviously worked out it had been hijacked, because they opened fire on the hostage Marcie had freed. The different-coloured blasts in his back sent blood exploding away from him. His arms flailed before he collapsed dead on the ground.

  The shutters might have blocked Marcie’s comms with the Eye and Slip, but it didn’t shut down her enhancements. She read the blaster attack, her microprocessor guiding her through several backwards somersaults, the blue, red, and green beams missing her by centimetres each time.

  The daylight shining down on the courtyard closed off with the shutting roof, the police drone shooting from one side of the gap to the other. Two large steel halves, they moved to meet in the centre, cutting off her escape.

  One of the gang members—a girl of no more than about ten years old—got carried to the front, riding a Gatling gun. She sat in a small seat behind the large barrel and gripped the two handles. The end of the gun rested on a tripod. The second they planted her, she let rip, the rapid multicoloured fire making her cheeks judder.