Old Ironsides

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Forty eight years,’ came the reply. ‘Never once set foot on Earth and the best I can afford for my family is a weekend on another station just as crap as this one. Even the view’s the same.’

  Nathan felt a twinge of sympathy for the driver as he imagined what it must be like to spend one’s entire life in space, that doing so was now considered something endured by the poor.

  ‘If you were a drug runner…,’

  ‘Hey, cut that out! I’m not fallin’ for any police attempts to frame me for anythin’!’

  ‘I said if,’ Nathan replied, ‘then what would you consider the most likely route in and out of Earth orbit for those drugs?’

  ‘Thought you said you were the cop?’

  ‘I said I worked for the police,’ Nathan corrected him. ‘So, what’s the local supply line? Where does stuff like Shiver come in and out of the city?’

  The driver shrugged.

  ‘I guess they’d use North Four via the landing bay terminals, but beyond that I wouldn’t know. It’s not like runners advertise their lines – if they did the police would shut them down real fast, assumin’ they were off their asses and actually doing something around here.’

  ‘You don’t like the cops,’ Nathan observed.

  ‘Wow, you really are a sharp tool ain’tcha?’

  ‘What about Shiver?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You ever used it?’

  The driver sighed. ‘I can’t afford to raise my kids proper. D’you think I’d be using some lousy street drug?’

  ‘I’ve seen worse.’

  ‘No, I haven’t used Shiver and anybody who does is an idiot,’ the driver relented. ‘It’s a fantasy drug, takes you to places you’ve always dreamed of, so they say. Trouble is you have to come back and some folks can’t hack that so they take more of it. Word is, once you take too much your brain shuts down and pours out of your skull. Nice way to end it all, I guess – it beats a blaster to the head.’

  Nathan thought for a moment. ‘And it’s grown on earth, right?’

  ‘So they say, but who the hell knows? Do I look like a damned drug lord or something to you?’

  Nathan looked outside and saw that the glossy buildings of the south side had changed now, were darker and more foreboding, the streets even more crammed with people and a faint drizzle streaming down from the glorious vista of the Earth above in diaphanous veils.

  ‘Here we are,’ the driver announced as the cab began to descend toward a narrow ledge perched on the edge of a large tower block, ranks of market stalls arrayed below it on the streets. ‘They say that North Four is the great equalizer, because everybody gets pissed on just the same.’

  The craft glided down toward a vacant lot, swivelling in mid-air and slowing as it passed over the heads of pedestrians streaming through the streets below and then settled onto the landing pad. Nathan leaned forward and placed a hand firmly on the driver’s shoulder.

  ‘Sorry for the choke hold,’ he said as with his other hand he grabbed a glossy electrocard from a stash in the front of the cab. The flimsy, thin film of plastic was emblazoned with a glowing emblem – Phoenix Phlights Taxi Service, New Washington.

  ‘Phoenix Phlights,’ Nathan said as he looked at the card.

  ‘So I ain’t a poet,’ the driver uttered.

  ‘You’ll get paid, I promise.’

  The doors to the cab opened as the driver looked at Nathan suspiciously. ‘I don’t know whether to thank you or hope I never see you again.’

  Nathan opened his mouth to reply and then a shower of plasma bursts rained down on the landing pad to screams from the crowds below, a deafening series of blasts erupting with searing waves of heat.

  ***

  XXII

  Nathan hurled himself clear of the cab and rolled through the rain along the wet landing pad as he looked up and saw a sleek, glossy black craft soar overhead. From its interior a man with an assault rifle fired round after round at Nathan, the blasts hammering the pad.

  Nathan scrambled to his feet and dashed for cover as he yelled at the cab driver.

  ‘Get the hell out of here!’

  The black craft rocketed overhead and began to swing around for another pass. Nathan saw the yellow cab lift off, rotating in mid-air as the gull wing doors closed and it accelerated away from the landing pad into the flow of traffic.

  Nathan rushed for the elevator doors and hit the button but nothing happened, the doors emblazoned with gang tags and other graffiti. He turned and saw the black craft swing around, its nose pointing directly at him.

  Nathan pushed away from the doors and rushed across the landing pad directly at the charging vehicle, saw the man with the rifle lean out of the side and take aim. The craft loomed larger but Nathan kept running straight at it, knowing that the rapid closure would make him a harder target to hit as he waited for the craft to turn so that the gunman’s weapon could come to bear.

  The craft banked over and turned to the left and Nathan immediately dashed to his right, increasing the relative motion. The gunman fired, bright blue-white streaks of plasma rocketing past Nathan and splattering in smoldering smears of hissing molten fluid across the landing pad. Nathan kept running, the edge of the pad just a few meters away as he sprinted and then saw the yawning drop onto the milling pedestrians below, many of whom were scattering for cover from the gunshots.

  Nathan reached the edge of the platform and jumped out into mid-air.

  The leap was one of faith in his memory and he felt his guts tingle as they rose up toward his chest and he plunged downward. The roof of a small market stall loomed up and he crashed heavily upon it, slammed his hand down as he deliberately rolled forward to absorb the impact.

  Nathan’s momentum kept him moving and he rolled off the edge of the roof and dropped again toward the street below. He hit the ground hard, straight down this time, but managed to avoid twisting an ankle or breaking a leg as he sank down to his haunches and looked up for his attackers. The black craft had vanished, the stream of traffic above returning to normality once more and the pedestrians closing back in as though shots fired once every now and again were just another fact of life on North Four.

  Nathan stood up and began moving, joined the flow of people heading through the streets. He looked back at the landing platform expecting to see his attackers touching down ready to continue the pursuit, but the craft was not there. Drive by, he figured to himself: either they hit the target or they don’t but either way they leave and fast.

  Nathan noted that he could hear no sirens from approaching police cruisers, could see no officers on foot rushing to the scene of the crime. In fact, it was as though nothing had happened. The cab driver’s insistence that the police did nothing on the ground at North Four began to ring in Nathan’s head as he hurried through the crowds toward a particularly ugly tower block rising up out of the mass of humanity clogging the streets around him.

  *

  Foxx eased her way inside the tenement block’s darkened interior, one hand on her holstered blaster as she sensed the odor of stale urine and sweat, the stench of closely packed and unwashed humanity dense in the aged building. Vasquez and Allen were close behind her, tense as she was and alert for danger.

  The block’s interior was a far cry from the offices of most buildings on the south side. Built long after the construction of the station itself and with cheap materials, there was little in the way of modern luxuries incorporated into the design. Doors were solid and manually operated, reducing the load on the city’s power generators, and the air conditioning system was basic air-flow augmented by giant fans in the upper floors that drew both cool air and humidity in from ground level and expelled it out further up. This unfortunately was combined with the inadequate dehumidifying qualities of the north side to produce large patches of damp across the walls of the interior, years of neglect degrading the prefabricated walls.

  ‘Just like the kinda place I’d expect to find somebody like Vi
ggo,’ Vasquez said.

  Foxx led the way up the stairwell, the building devoid of elevators. It was probably somewhat reminiscent of the world from which Ironside had come from, Foxx realized, a time when humanity was still in the throes of global conflict, mass crime in the giant cities that once blanketed so much of the earth, and all of it occurring under the spectre of nuclear annihilation that had haunted so much of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

  ‘Up here,’ Allen said, and looked up to the third floor level.

  Foxx could see the entrance to the level, the door long since kicked down, the hinges still hanging from their mounts. Likely they had been battered off by police on one of the routine drug raids that used to occur down here before the force became too weakened by budget cuts and the volume of crime to hunt down the runners through North Four’s myriad streets.

  Foxx eased her way through the door and onto the third floor, where a row of doors stretched away either side of a squalid corridor. She could hear an argument coming from one of the homes further down, a woman screaming and a man yelling back at her. In another, a baby was crying, the sound muted and accompanied in sombre spirit by a woman’s quiet sobs.

  Foxx blinked, forced the sounds out of her mind and the images that accompanied them as she edged her way down the corridor and slipped her pistol from its holster. A sudden bang from further down the hall as a door opened and a man stormed out, pursued by a woman’s screaming voice.

  ‘You leave now and I’ll never let you back in again!’

  The man yelled back, his features twisted with rage. ‘That’s kinda the idea you idiot!’

  He turned and then his eyes locked onto Foxx and her heavy pistol. His anger collapsed into panic and he whirled and dashed back into his apartment, the door slamming shut behind him.

  ‘Number seventeen,’ Allen whispered, and nodded toward an apartment door just in front of them.

  Foxx could see the faded paintwork where a 17 had once been attached to the door but had long since fallen off. Like most doors in blocks across North Four it was made of steel layered with a sheath of graphite that looked as though it had been hammered many times by police in forced entries. At least the steel and the graphite precluded anybody shooting at them from within.

  Foxx stood beside the door as Vasquez covered Allen, who produced the warrant and held it up to the door’s locking mechanism. The mechanism beeped once and an internal lock clunked as it automatically switched off as the warrant was presented.

  Foxx turned as Allen stood back and she drove her boot into the door and rushed in with her pistol aimed before her, both Allen and Vasquez rushing in behind and sweeping the interior with their weapons. Flashlights mounted beneath the barrels ignited automatically in the low light to sweep the room with bright beams.

  ‘Clear,’ Foxx whispered as Allen and Vasquez moved swiftly through the apartment’s cramped interior. They searched the bedroom and kitchen areas before hurrying back as Foxx pressed her palm against a wall panel and the lights came on.

  The lounge was a mess, a battered looking couch sagging in one corner and a table in the centre littered with empty alcohol canteens and tobacco stubs. The air was thick with damp, smoke and the stain of human sweat, but there was nobody home.

  ‘They must’ve taken off,’ Allen said. ‘Don’t know how they figured we were coming, I only just got the warrant.’

  ‘Could just be bad luck,’ Foxx replied, ‘or something’s happened since to spook them. They must’ve been here recently, judging by the stench.’

  ‘Within an hour or two,’ Vasquez confirmed as he picked up a tobacco stub and examined it. ‘This one’s still damp.’

  Foxx frowned and looked about her, and then she saw something poking out from behind the couch. She stepped around the clutter on the floor and saw several stacks of boxes partially concealed there.

  ‘Could have something here,’ she said as she moved cautiously forward.

  ‘Easy there,’ Vasquez warned, catching sight of the boxes.

  Foxx moved closer and from her belt she unclipped a small scanner that she held up and swept over the boxes. The display screen showed no evidence of explosives or active electrical fields around them.

  ‘They look clean,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Vasquez said, ‘that’s usually the last thing somebody says before something goes bang.’

  Foxx holstered her pistol and crouched down alongside the nearest of the boxes. Made of simple but thick card, they looked unremarkable enough and were covered in smeared fingerprints.

  ‘I’ll sweep them,’ Allen said as he moved in with his own scanner and switched it to a new setting before sweeping the boxes.

  Moments later, the device pinged and a holographic display glowed into view with two faces upon it.

  ‘Viggo,’ Foxx said as she saw the man still being held in custody back at the precinct. ‘Who’s the other guy?’

  ‘Somebody called Arwen Minter,’ Allen replied. ‘Dealer, low-life scumbag. I guess their genes must spread real easy down here.’

  The voice that replied didn’t belong to Foxx. ‘He’s my relative.’

  Foxx whirled to see Nathan Ironside standing in the door of the apartment.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?!’

  ‘I got shot at,’ Nathan said.

  ‘You got what?’ Vasquez asked. ‘By whom?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nathan replied as he stepped into the apartment. ‘Two guys in a vehicle, did a drive-by on me when I landed. They took off before I could do anything about it.’

  Foxx stared at Nathan for a long moment and then at the image of Arwen Minter. ‘What do you mean this guy’s your relative?’

  Nathan looked at the image being projected from Allen’s scanner. ‘Doctor Schmidt and I did some work back at the office after I began to wonder whether the attacks on me might be something to do with my father’s fortune, which was left to my family when he died. Nothing showed up, but then Schmidt did a search for signs of my DNA in the database and a link turned up to this guy, Arwen Minter. Turns out I’m a distant relative of his.’

  Foxx frowned. ‘What does that have to do with anything?’

  ‘They must have known who I was, who I really am,’ Nathan replied. ‘They used the drones to search for my DNA, which Schmidt claims has been under lock and key for centuries. The only way they could have known about all of that is if somebody on the inside has some connection to what’s going on. Only they could have predicted that I’d show up at the graves of my family.’

  Foxx’s brain was already working fast.

  ‘If they knew that, then they’d also know where you might go next, and if Viggo also has a connection…’

  ‘Then they’d know that we’d come here,’ Nathan said in concert with Foxx as she finished her sentence.

  ‘Guys?’ Allen said from where he crouched alongside the boxes.

  Nathan and Foxx turned to him, and Allen held one of the now open boxes in his hand as with the other he lifted a deactivated sentry drone out, the ugly black insectoid machine covered in a thin film of dust.

  ‘I think we just connected Nathan here to the drug running business,’ he said.

  Foxx was about to speak when shrieks of alarm went up from outside the building. Vasquez whirled even as smoke tumbled into the corridor from outside, flames snapping like rabid dogs at the walls.

  ‘Fire!’

  ***

  XXIII

  ‘Run, now!’

  Foxx launched herself past Nathan and he ran after her out into the corridor, thick smoke billowing up from the lower floors and obscuring the exits as flickering flames illuminated the swirling, choking fog like strobes in a nightclub. A screaming baby carried by its mother and several other residents spilled in a panicked crowd onto the corridor as Foxx yelled at them all.

  ‘Get to the upper floors, now!’

  The civilians began scattering for the stairwell exit as Nathan turned and dashed back
into the apartment.

  ‘Ironside!’ Foxx yelled, coughing now in the thick smoke.

  Nathan staggered through the apartment and dropped down alongside the boxes containing the drones, and he grabbed two of them. He ran out of the apartment with the boxes under his arm and let his breath rush out as he turned and stumbled down the corridor in pursuit of Foxx and the others. The smoke was already thick and seemed to cling to him like a hot, heavy blanket as he burst through a door onto a stairwell. More smoke billowed up toward him, hot and choking, an infernal glow of flames penetrating the smog from the floor below.

  Nathan set the boxes down and shrugged off his jacket and sweater, tied the latter about his head to protect his mouth and nose from the thick smoke as he picked up the boxes again and struggled up the stairwell through the thick smoke toward the roof. Beyond the walls of the building he could hear thumps and bangs as the fire spread, explosions that seemed to threaten to bring the whole building down around him.

  It took every ounce of his effort to make it to the top, his eyes streaming and his throat burning from the smoke as he burst out of a doorway and onto the open roof.

  The city around him was a vista of glittering lights seen through the shimmering veil of a dense heat haze as thick smoke and flames seared from the lower floors and twisted in towering columns into the sky. Sirens screeched across the city toward the building, flashing lights rocketing between the towering spires as fire-fighting crews rushed toward the scene, and almost as soon as he saw them he saw the body of a man sprawled across the roof, a smoldering black cavity where his chest had once been.

  Nathan heard Foxx scream at him.

  ‘Ironside, down, now!!’

  Nathan dropped to his knees and ducked his head even as he heard explosions and saw a spray of plasma flame rip across the roof. He twisted sideways and ducked around the side of the roof exit as the blasts hammered the roof and the glossy black vehicle he had seen earlier rocketed overhead. He saw a salvo of plasma shots splatter the rear of the craft as Vasquez, Allen and Foxx fired back from their hiding places nearby.