Archon's Queen

by Matthew S. Cox

  Her new umbrella exploded in a pop of nylon; she jumped at the sudden sound. It had taken a moment to figure out the precise nature of how to squeeze the handle to make it deploy. Anna walked out from under the awning with her new portable rain-shield and brought a merciful end to the terminal’s incessant inquiries about a ride.

  “That’s a big ‘un. How you fancy that? BT ‘as their own police ya know.”

  “I got it sussed. Was expecting Carroll to send me a leg-breaker despite being told I needed a nimble sort. Wasn’t expecting a bird… That actually works out. How good’s your drunken tart?”

  She glared under flattened eyebrows, her voice as cold as the wind. “I think I can fake it well enough.”

  “Good.”

  He lifted his left arm, case and all, and peeled back his sleeve. Upon the forearm, a small black panel lay bedecked with buttons and a holographic display unit. A few finger taps later, a field of light formed around his face. Pixels and streaks of green orbited into a cyclone of data that coalesced into an altogether different person.

  Anna blinked at the sixtyish silver-hair looking back at her. It had to be a hologram, but it was a damn good one. Unable to resist, she touched his cheek, fascinated at how the image rippled away from her fingertips. He took her arm by the wrist, pulling it away from his face and holding her hand.

  “Don’t touch it, that’ll give it away.”

  She gasped. The voice had changed; Mr. Orange now sounded like the old man he appeared to be.

  “Vox unit… What, do you live in a cave or something?” He frowned. “I thought Carroll was sending a pro.”

  She grumbled. “I am. Just not a fan of implants…” and I’m a little rusty.

  “Nothing at all? You’re not even armed, what is it exactly you expect to do if we run into problems?”

  Anna flashed a wry smile. “I’ve got it sussed.”

  “Touché.” He regarded her again. “Before I stick my neck out, I need a little more than that.”

  “Can I trust you?”

  He gave her a look. His mere presence on this job proved he worked contrary to the law. The reminder of that made her look at her boots.

  “Yeah, sorry. Silly question. I’m… Unregistered.”

  “Oh.” Orange seemed to grow tense. “Right then, I guess that’ll do.”

  Anna took his elbow, not having to work too hard to emulate an intoxicated stagger. She added incoherent babbling about the latest Frictionless match, complaining the ref had made a bad call in favor of Arsenal―by virtue of the claim any call in favor of Arsenal was a bad one.

  Orange grumbled at having to support so much of her weight. but she did not care as it made the disguise more real. Her legs ached. More effort went into her ability to speak than she allotted to locomotion, and having him there as a leaning-walking post helped.

  He dragged her through the lobby of the building across the street, some manner of financial services firm. She babbled on about never having been with a man his age before and hoping he would be able to keep things lively enough for her. Two security officers, a man and a woman, at the front desk looked up and smirked at the unlikely pair, their glares carried the type of disapproval that could be aimed only at someone they recognized.

  At the elevator, he held his fingers up to the wall as tiny mechanized struts extended from his coat sleeve and arranged an electric field over his hand. Orange moved it near the palm reader, and waited until the light turned green and the door slid open. No reaction from the security desk; it seemed they didn’t notice the mechanical assistance.

  “Oh, I can’t wait.” Anna dropped to her knees, grabbing at his fly in the elevator.

  The security officers looked away, the woman blushing.

  “What the feck are you doing?” he whispered.

  She continued for several more seconds until the door closed. “They looked away, didn’t they?”

  “You can wait till we get upstairs. They’ve cameras in ‘ere.” He pulled her by the jacket back to her feet and whispered, “Are you acting like a wreck or are you ripped?”

  Wobbling, she made a dizzy face. “Awright, but you better be good for the credits, luv.”

  Leaning into him again, she held on for support, hoping he would think she still acted like a strung out whore―not actually was one. The clarity that came with the absence of zoom filled her with sufficient shame. She wanted to leave that life behind. For Penny, for Faye, perhaps even for herself, the coming hours would be six shades of hell.

  Damn it all, why did I buy more? I’m gonna cave.

  The chromed panel walls mocked her with how red her eyes had become; she struggled to find the energy it took to keep them halfway open. A hand squeezed into the jacket reminded her where the zoom waited; she had three ready to go.

  It’s right here. This hurt will stop if I want it to…

  Daydreams of zooming kept her floating on the elevator ride. Anna debated the seriousness of her desire to quit. The fear of the CSB battled with the sense she had gotten from the art students. She wanted to be the girl on the paper, not the girl sitting on the pedestal, and definitely not the girl in the cage. Before she knew it, tears of shame soaked into Mr. Orange’s shoulder. The subconscious squeezed her hand tighter, trying to get to the zoom beyond the barrier of plastic and cloth.

  He glanced at her sniffle, lifting an eyebrow at the look on her face. “What the feck is wrong with you? So help me, if Carroll’s buggered me…”

  The elevator door pinged and opened.

  Anna wailed, clutching at his lapels. “I’m sorry guv’na, please, I need the money. Okay, fine… I’ll let you give it in the bum, please don’t send me away.”

  A few employees working late looked up. A Nicohaler dangled from the lip of one man; somewhere out of sight, a light object dropped to the floor with a plop. Several pretended not to notice anything. One woman in a clinging sea foam dress gaped at him in abject shock, shifting in her chair from sympathetic discomfort.

  “Don’t just sit there gawking, you’re quite welcome to join us.” Orange held his other arm to her.

  The woman flushed crimson, aghast at what had been said to her in the workplace. Anna spun, rolling her back into Mr. Orange’s chest like an affectionate cat. Her tears turned into giggles.

  “Look at ‘er gov’na. Bets ya she likes the rug instead.”

  “Subtle.” He muttered into the top of her head.

  The woman got up and stormed past them to a different elevator, muttering about going to HR in the morning. Mr. Orange led Anna by the arm through the open area full of desks, past a cube farm to the far end of the floor and a row of offices along the outer wall. He ducked through a door bearing the label ‘R. Sturgis ― VP Operations,’ and moved with haste to the window. Outside, the BT tower glowed against the indigo night across the street. The other building was shorter than this one, the roof in plain sight from here.

  Once the door closed, he pushed her into the wall. “You better have your head on.”

  Anna swallowed. Everything hurt, her throat was dry, muscles sore, and the burned spots from the Crossmen fight throbbed. She gazed into his eyes; her attempt at a confident face became a pleading one. He turned away, cursing Carroll’s name.

  “I just need a minute. Look, I’m fine. I… I had a bad night. Pushed myself too far and I’m sore. Took some painkillers.”

  “Painkillers?” Orange shook his head. “You’re a lousy actress.”

  She frowned shame at the floor.

  “That’s not what I mean. Okay, fine, you’re a lousy liar. If you’re wrecked, we need to get out now.”

  “I’m good.” Anna took a few breaths and composed herself.

  Orange moved to the window and focused his stare at a four-foot white obelisk streaked with threads of red light. It perched atop a metal box with large wire-guides leading down into the building. Anna had seen enough hardware to recognize it as some kind of network relay transmitter. It was powerful; the ener
gy inside it called out to her from here.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” Orange patted her on the shoulder. “That’s what I’m looking for.”

  “Yes.” She glanced back at him. “But it’s over there and we’re over here.”

  “I’ve got it sussed.”

  From under his coat came a rifle-like device with a large black box at the rear end. An e-mag protruded from the pistol grip. She followed him through a back exit of the VP’s office, down a hidden hallway past the executive washroom, and out onto an open-air deck.

  As soon as they went through the door, holographic images formed at the edges of the patio, simulating a tropical beach. The effect was good, aside from a square of pitch-black night sky directly above them. During the day, the illusion would be perfect.

  “End holo.”

  Orange’s utterance dispelled the swaying palm trees. With the light source out of the way, he moved to the railing and sighted the strange rifle at the BT tower. A pulse of energy ran down the length of it like a rail gun, only the projectile had a fraction of the velocity of such a weapon.

  The whirring of unspooling cable broke the still air for a few seconds before it ended with a distant metallic clank from the other side. Orange backed up to the wall, holding the butt-end of the ‘rifle’ against the plastisteel panel. With the flick of a switch, it energized and electromagnetically adhered to the structure. It whined, a belabored mechanical moan, as the cord tensioned.

  He took a smaller device from his coat, a small black box with two rubberized grips. One side had a lever like a motorbike brake. Clipping it to the wire, he smiled at her.

  “Off ya go then.”

  “Are you serious?” she stammered. The thought of sliding down a wire in her current state added the nausea of fear to the milieu of her misery.

  “You are the protection, are you not? This spot is safe. You need to go first in case there’s some unpleasantness waiting on the other side.”

  “I know, I know. That’s not what I’m worried about.” She plucked at the near-invisible line. “I haven’t done wire work in about two years.”

  “Is it the painkillers?” Orange cocked an eyebrow. “Or the lack of ‘em?”

  She scowled. Screw it. I’ve lost weight since last time, should be easy peasy.

  Anna jumped up and grasped the handles; the wire, elevated as high as it was, kept her toes off the ground. Not trusting her life to her grip, she swung her legs up and crossed her boots over it.

  Orange grinned. “That button changes direction. It’s motored. Squeeze the lever to move.”

  “Yes, yes… I’ve done this before.” She sighed. “Not that you’d know it by looking. What’re you grinning on about?”

  “Trying to understand how someone so small can protect anyone.”

  “I’m a psionic, doesn’t matter how tall I am.”

  She clutched the metal handles. With an almost imperceptible whirr, the contraption pulled her forward along the wire, out over the street some ninety stories down.

  Anna kept her eyes closed; trying not to think about her sore muscles or how difficult it was not to degenerate into a shivering wretch. The zoom was right there in her pocket, but her will to remain alive bound her hands to the grip, preventing her from reaching for it. Venturing a peek, she gurgled at the sight of being only half way across. The mechanized handle took no effort on her part, but the belabored pace with which it crept down the line made a manual climb almost feel welcome.

  A blaring horn tricked her into looking down. Involuntarily, her body convulsed and her gaze followed a sluice of what remained of her dinner on its way to a soon-to-be unhappy motorist. The stripe of greenish-beige slime fell as a column for several stories before it broke apart into a shower of tiny droplets, which faded into the backdrop of the distant lights of traffic. She coughed, spat, and coughed again before looking up at her hands.

  Before the zoom, something like this would have been fun. In her time working for Carroll, she’d done a few high-altitude jobs with the full works: thermal-masking bodysuit with armored panels, goggles, climbing rig. The man had even talked her into carrying pistols in case she’d found herself needing to kill someone without a handy source of power nearby. Carroll’s assurances his connections with the government would protect her if things went pear shaped never comforted her much. The man was not the sort to be sentimental; as soon as she went from asset to liability, he’d forget ever knowing her. Going over a line in her street clothes felt as reckless as doing it nude. Granted, this was BT, not exactly a high-security installation. The odds of them having thermal cams on the roof were slim to none.

  Tonight, in possession of muscles she had to beg to obey, and wracked with the pain of a phantom beating, she had all she could do to cling for her life and pray for the ride to end. The presence of scraping across her ass snapped her eyes open. She pulled up a second before a perimeter of concertina razor wire shredded her new pants, and dropped to the roof once she cleared it.

  Anna frowned at the hand carriage as it shot back to Mr. Orange, wondering how she would get back onto the bouncing wire a distance above her best jump. Ahead, the presence of electricity in the machinery sang to her. Eight feet tall, the gloss white shell of the obelisk brimmed with wire bundles that fed the massive transmitter. Glow from fiber optic piping seeped through the gaps in the panels, creating the red lines that segmented its otherwise featureless sides.

  She paced, gathering her jacket against the rain and severe wind she had not noticed on the way over, too petrified of falling to care about anything other than her grip. Her new pants were lovely in terms of protecting her from prying eyes, but did little against the cold, especially when the wind held the fluttering material so tight against her legs it looked like black paint.

  When she drifted around the corner of the relay, her heart skipped a beat at the appearance of an automated sentry turret unfolding up out of the roof. It emitted a harsh chirping buzz and swiveled to aim in her direction. About the size of a human head, its spherical body elevated on a robotic arm while a three-barrel cannon extended through of a pair of hatches and spun to a stop with a sharp click as it chambered a round.

  Absent of conscious thought, her old instincts drew the power out of the mechanism before it could fire, leaving it slouched and twitching. Her hands trembled as she stared at it. With fading panic came the reality she could not stand there concentrating to keep it dead; she had to deal with it. Filaments of amber light parted to her mind’s eye, searching for its power uplink. Her gut tightened as she beckoned the surge, pulling power from the building through the sentry gun in amounts beyond its limit.

  The turret arm shuddered, sputtered, and smoked before falling against the concrete roof panels with a note like an out of tune bell, its Myofiber muscles limp. Mr. Orange sauntered around the edge, the cable rifle over his shoulder, and glanced at the smoking remnants.

  “Not sure how you managed that. P’raps Carroll was right about you.”

  “Guess it didn’t much fancy the rain.”

  Anna had gotten her fair share of practice at lies, but she cringed inwardly at the weakness of her response. She rubbed her forehead and leaned against the transmitter array. Carelessness would get her killed or put in a cage and poked by the intelligentsia. Of course, the zoom had also put her in a cage. She debated which kind of poking was worse.

  Light glimmered in the corner of her eye with the opening of an access panel. Orange flipped it upward into an awning against the relentless downpour. Glowing bunches of optic cable wound over each other inside, looking like a brain made out of red light; groups of fiber as big around as a man’s arm went in every conceivable direction. Individual threads within the clusters shimmered at random, flickering here and there as millions of conversations, images, sounds, and other traces of the modern age scurried across the GlobeNet.

  Each nanosecond flash could be a hundred messages going to a hundred people. Daydreaming about the information made
her head hurt. She took the umbrella she had bought from the sad little orb out of her jacket and popped it open, relaxing against an HVAC unit as if she waited at a tram stop.

  Orange worked at a feverish pace, picking at the bundles to expose single threads of fiber. He appeared to be searching for a specific one. Anna squatted, peeking over his shoulder.

  “How can you tell them apart?”

  The old man was gone. Orange’s normal face, complete with glowing eyes, looked up at her and blinked once.

  “I can see the data in real time.”

  That made her head hurt even more. She stood again, ignoring him, drifting between attempts at watching for danger and trying to tamp withdrawal back down into a can she would open later. Orange spun thread after thread betwixt his fingers, smirking at each for a second or two before discarding it to the side. After what felt like forever, he drew one out from the rest, farther than any other, and grinned. She straightened up, taking her weight off her back.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Good, my ass is getting numb.”

  Somewhere in the dark, a hovercar whined its way across the sky. Light orbs from the ion drives didn’t appear anywhere in sight; it was a good thing the weather was so poor. Whoever was in it couldn’t see them either.

  Orange removed a one-inch black sphere from the case. It split open like a clamshell and he clamped it around the fiber, squeezing a button on its side as he closed it. White light appeared in small seams for several seconds before it dimmed to lime green. Once the color changed, he connected the wire lead from the splicer into a cyberspace deck, safe from the rain inside his armored black case.

  “Ok, lass. Here’s the dangerous part. I’m goin’ inside now. I’m gonna be like a corpse out here―”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m not a total blonde. I’ve done this before.”

  “You’re not blonde at all.”

  He winked. With a flick of a thumb, the M3 wire clicked in behind his right ear and he sagged forward like a Samurai after committing seppuku. His arms fell limp at his sides, his black coat fanned out over the roof behind him. A dead man knelt upon sheets of rain, awash with dark crimson light glinting from each droplet beaded on his shoulders and arms.