by Damien Boyes
All around the room the other animals tense to attack.
McMillian has a bead on Yellowbird, but the flash of one of his animals dying catches his attention, causes him to hesitate, just enough. His face sags and his screaming mouth rounds to a ‘Noooo.’
The AMP fires at one of the animals crouched above Copeland just as the airborne creature hits it, full in the chest. The AMP’s shot misses by centimetres, but it misses, then the bot is staggering, reaching up to deal with the beast clawing through its armour as I tuck and roll, land next to the table, snatch the Tz remote and press ‘resume.’ As the system winks on and begins to catalogue the various eyeballs in the room, including the animals’, I swing my weapon up at the suspect.
I fire just before he does, catch him in his gun hand and blow two of his fingers off.
His weapon flies out of his hand and the shot goes wild, punches a hole through the drywall beside Yellowbird. I’d briefly aimed for his head, but I want him talking. And in pain.
The animals launch their attacks as the Tz finds all the retinas it can and hits each pair with whatever was playing last. I’m out of the system’s view, can’t see what it is, but the not-cats freak out, twisting and squirming in the air to avoid the confusion of images beamed directly into their sensitive eyes. There’s a chorus of mewling hisses as they scurry back into their hiding places.
I track down and put three shots at the animal digging into the convulsing AMPs throat. The first one knocks the animal free and the second I fake a miss to keep the AMP from suspecting I’m Revved. The third goes in its eye and kills it.
The room grows silent, except for McMillian in his bed, moaning for someone named Daisy, and the bot feebly whirring on the floor.
Copeland’s staring at the room quizzically and Pendelton’s yet to lower his gun, keeps sweeping it around the room, reacting to whatever the Tz’s showing him. I’m not sure if they even knew what almost happened.
“All clear,” I say and check my display. From breach to ‘all clear’ takes eleven seconds.
“What the hell was that?” Copeland says.
“Animals don’t like Tz,” I say, show them the control tab, then slide it into my pocket. “Back up and give me an overwatch from the door. If one of those things so much as pokes a whisker out, blow its head off.”
“Sir,” they say, and back up toward the entrance, weapons raised, covering the places the animals disappeared to.
The bot’s out of it. Motionless on the floor.
“I’ll follow on audio,” the AMP says in my ear.
Now for some answers.
I stride over to McMillian’s raised bed, reach up and drag him off, let him hit the floor. He lands in a heavy heap of blankets and limbs, screams as his bloody hand slaps the concrete.
“Ahh—fuck!” he wails, cradling his wounded hand. “My fingers! My fuckin’ fingers are gone.”
I grab two handfuls of stained t-shirt and haul him to his bare feet, slam him back against the sliding metal door, it echoes with a hollow thud and he moans in complaint. He barely weighs anything. His skinny legs dangle out of loose-fitting boxers.
“Florence McMillian?” I ask.
“You killed them,” he stammers, wiping his eyes with his good hand. “Daisy. Cupcake.”
I jerk him back, slam his head off the door.
“Are you Florence McMillian?”
“I didn’t do nothing. You need a warrant. You can’t just smash into a man’s home and kill his pets. That’s Facism, brahm.”
I angle my head back at the animal carcass slumped against the couch. “That one Daisy?”
“She was a good girl. You didn’t have to kill her.”
“Daisy secretes neurotoxin.”
He looks at me, his nose wrinkled in disgust. “For my personal safety, I got rights.”
“Your personal safety tried to kill my friends. And it’s in contravention of seven Nature Standard laws that I can think of off the top of my head.”
“You were trespassing,” he whimpers. “I know the law. Whatever you think it is I did, I didn’t do it.”
I slam him back against the door again and let him go. He lands in a heap.
“Oww,” he cries, rubbing the back of his skull with the skinny fingers of his good hand, nails bitten to the quick. “I need a medic. This is brutality.”
“Fin—Detective Gage,” Yellowbird calls from the doorway. “He’s right. We should call a medic.”
That works. Get the team out of here, leave me alone with McMillian.
I turn around to answer and the Tz finds my eyes and transforms the room into a dungeon. A half-naked woman is chained to a wall and a robed figure is lashing her with a stick, screaming at her to repent. I lift my hand to shade my eyes and McMillian’s apartment returns.
“Good idea,” I say. “Go do that. Then spin Omondi up, let him know we’ll need him. I’ll deal with Florence.”
She takes a few steps forward, stops beside the chewed up bot, glances at McMillan, back at the TAC officers.
“I think I should stay,” she says.
Shit. I want some alone time with my man here.
“Go,” I say to her, “I’ve got this. Pendelton, Copeland, you head out too. Take the bot and evacuate the building. Get Standards in here to wrangle these creatures before they get loose and kill someone. Don’t worry. They’re no threat as long as the Tz’s on.”
The two TAC officers nod and drag the bot out the door. Yellowbird stands her ground.
“It’s the rules Fin, I’m staying. I know you’re angry about Galvan, I am too, but we don’t even know if this is who we’re looking for.”
“Yeah,” McMillian says, perking up on the floor. “Listen to her, you got the wrong guy.”
I grab the vertical handle bolted to the sliding door and heave it to the side, reveal the room beyond. It’s about the same size as this one. The lights are low and indirect, but it’s bright enough to see that it’s set up like a small factory. A pair of clean white bio-printers dominate the center of the room; tall refrigerated units with clear doors filled with rows of neatly labelled bottles line one wall; a bio-reactor and bank of half-meter high medpods lines the other—two of the pods contain gestating versions of the cat-creatures.
Fleshmith gear. Just like we saw destroyed in the drone yard. The contents of this room likely cost more than I did.
A rumpled cot lies next to the door on the opposite side of the wall from the loft bed, and a SenShare cable, still connected to a dedicated link router, lies on it.
“Oh, man,” McMillian mumbles from the floor.
“This is our guy,” I say to Yellowbird, then drive the toe of my boot into McMillian’s kidney. “On your feet.”
“Ahh, fuck—” he moans, but slides himself up the wall, one hand against his side, the other cradled, bloody, against his chest until he’s more or less standing.
“Tell me about Xiao,” I say.
“I don’t know what you—”
I hit him in the solar plexus, fist closed, knuckle raised. Won’t leave a bruise.
He clutches his chest, groans in pain.
“Fin!” Yellowbird says, taking a step toward me. I ignore her.
“What were you doing in the drone yard?” I ask, my voice just shy of yelling.
“What yard, brahm? I was—”
I hit him, hard in the jaw, open palmed. It wracks his head to the side, drops him flat.
That might leave a mark.
“Fin, you can’t just—” Yellowbird puts her hand on my shoulder and I wheel around, fast enough that Yellowbird jerks back.
I temper my voice, put a lid on the anger. “I told you to wait outside. Either do what I said or be quiet and let me do my job.”
Her face drops, but she doesn’t say anything else.
McMillian’s pried his face from the dirty floor, managed to get to his knees. His breath rasps in his chest. I crouch down, bring my face close to his. He’s ripe with the acrid stench
of fear.
“Did you know, Florence, a Cortex, outside a functioning skyn, is just another piece of evidence as far as the law is concerned?” His eyes shift to me, back to the floor. “Say you’d accidentally been hit when your ‘pets’ attacked, worse than you are now. Say you bled out before the paramedics arrived. We could take your head back to the lab and pull what we want from it. I could tear your life apart, memory by memory, find all the shit you’ve done—you’ve ever done—and charge you with every inch of it. I’m sure there’s enough to ensure you’ll never see the inside of a skyn again.”
“Fuck you,” he whispers. “Do your worst.”
“I’d advise caution against further physical intimidation, Detective Gage,” the AMP nudges in my ear. Yellowbird’s too. She squints her eyes at me.
I take a breath. Fine. No physical intimidation.
Instead I grab him by the scruff of the neck, drag him up, pull a chair out from the workstation under his bed, and push him down into it. He doesn’t seem to care much about his own well-being, and I’m not allowed to test it, but those animals…
I pull the Tz control tab from my pocket and cycle the projector back to standby.
“Fin—” Yellowbird says, nervously backing toward the door. “What are you doing?”
With the Tz gone, the animals begin to creep back out.
“Fin!” Yellowbird’s yelling now, nearly out of the apartment.
The animal closest to us, the one that had been hiding on the bed, rises from the tangle of sheets and leans over the mattress, looking for a throat to chew.
“Buffy, no!” McMillian cries and I put a bullet through the animal’s neck, severing its spine. It slides from the bed and lands with a crunch on the hardwood at McMillian’s feet. It’s eyes dart around the room, helpless but still looking for something to attack.
I turn the Tz back on and the other animals retreat.
Buffy looks up at me in anger, shows me its useless teeth. I walk over to it, lock eyes with McMillian, raise my foot and bring my heel down on its head. The skull collapses with a satisfying crunch.
“Nooo!” McMillian screams.
“Talk.”
He squeezes his jaw together, shakes his head.
I turn the Tz off again and that’s enough for him.
“Okay, okay,” he relents. “I’ll spill. Just don’t hurt anyone else.”
I restart the Tz and he takes a deep breath, then another, as if waiting for some kind of intervention, but there’s nothing coming.
“I was there, at the drone yard,” he admits.
“You work for Xiao?”
He nods his head, quickly.
“Tell me,” I say, my breath rasping.
He winds up and starts talking. “I got an invitation, a year ago, a little more. No ID, no identifying detail at all, said they’d been watching me, offered me a deal. They wanted me to make skyns. They’d provide the materials, the equipment, as long as I delivered them one a week to their specifications, I could use the facilities for whatever other work I could get, and all for only a twenty-five percent commission. It was like being handed the keys to the fucking castle.”
“Did you know who was asking?”
He shakes his head. “Not at first, but shit, I didn’t care. An offer like that? You know how hard it is to get your hands on a human-grade Cortex? I can freelance a skyn that’ll sell for high seven figures, and all it costs me is twenty-five points? I outfitted this whole place with the money I made in the first three months alone.”
“When did you find out who you were working for?”
He shrugs. “One of his girls, the ones in the identical skyns they kept having me make, they were talking about him and I guess they didn’t figure I spoke Chinese. Not that I cared. Xiao seems like a stand up guy to me. And I’d just made more money in a month than I’d made in the six years prior, why rock the boat, you know?”
“What’s he doing with the skyns?”
“You think anyone tells me anything? The scaflabs in the shipping containers travel around the country. Open it up, there’s just medical equipment and bioSkyns inside. I cast in and work and when the skyns are baked it lands at a yard and two guys come and take the skyn away, give me new supplies and I make another one. That’s what was happening last night when you came in like a fucking riot, they were refilling the stock.”
“Where’s Xiao now?”
He shrugs. “How the hell should I know? I never met him, never spoke to him. I never even saw him. I don’t even know where that yard was, exactly. It was here, in the city. Out near the airport I think but I only ever cast into it. I’ve never actually been there.”
This is getting nowhere. “What about the supplies, where do those come from?”
“I. Don’t. Know. I put in my requests, the next time I cast in, the stuff is waiting.”
“And you’ve never saw or overheard anything, nothing at all?”
“Nothing, I swear.”
I flip the Tz off. Once again the animals emerge. But slower this time. Suspicious.
“Go ahead, brahm,” he says, his eyes flashing defiance. “I got nothing else to say. At least it’ll be quick for them this way. Merciful. Standards won’t be.”
Fuck this guy. He knows more than he’s saying and I don’t give a shit what the AMP thinks.
I reengage the Tz, swing my hand out, and backhand him across the face.
“Detective Gage,” the AMP warns.
“That all you got?” McMillian says and spits blood on my shoe.
I silently draw my weapon and level it at his forehead. His eyes blaze.
The AMP can’t hear my gun in his face.
“You gonna shoot me now?” McMillian says. “Go ahead. All those other cops, they know I was still alive when they left. I’ll come visit you in the stocks.”
“What gun?” I ask, pressing it into his skin. “My gun’s in its holster.”
I haven’t activated it yet. The AMP can’t prove anything.
“It’s over,” Yellowbird says from behind me. I hadn’t heard her come back across the room. “That’s enough. We’ll bring him in, interrogate him at the station, get FIS in here, they can scour the place. They’ll find something.” She locks eyes with me. “They will.”
There’s nothing here to be found. If I leave here without anything to go on, that’ll be it. He won’t say another word. He knows more than he’s telling, I know it. I’m not going to give up.
He’s hiding something.
There’s a heavy mason jar on the floor, next to my foot, brown food pellets half-spilled out.
“You’re right,” I say, my voice artificially loose. “Let’s take him back to the station.”
Her shoulders drop. “Good call,” she says.
“Yeah, ‘by the book,’ right?” I need her back turned, just for a second. “Hand me that tea towel, would you?” I say, pointing to the yellow and blue cloth hanging over the oven handle. “Let’s stop this guy’s bleeding.”
She turns, walks toward it, taking a detour around the downed animal, and just as she’s about to reach it I crouch, snatch up the heavy jar from the floor, and smash it down against the side of my head.
The pain starts slow, piercing at the site of impact, crackling through my head like fissures spreading on the surface of a frozen lake. It barely feels like pain at all, it’s muted, almost pleasant.
Yellowbird spins, slaps her hand over her mouth.
Her word against mine.
I round on McMillian. The side of my face is warm, blood dripping from my chin.
“You just assaulted a police officer,” I tell him.
“Help me, this guy’s a psycho!” he screams at Yellowbird. “I don’t know anything else!”
“I guess we’ll find out.” I say, and raise my weapon.
Sirens howl in the distance. The Medevan on its way. FIS’ll be right behind. I need him to talk.
Now.
“I need a status update, Detecti
ve Gage,” the AMP says in my ear. I ignore it.
“I’ll lose everything. My reputation…my babies,” McMillian cries. Tears scour tracks through the dust on his cheeks. “I’ll never work again. I was supposed to be using a privacy screen—but all those routing jumps—they delay the signal. With the priv up, the lag is impossible. I can’t work like that,” he’s pleading now, “I need precision, and I figured, with that secret weapon of his hiding everything, who’d know the difference anyway?”
He didn’t figure on me disrupting Eka and dropping Xiao’s protection. The sirens are louder, just outside. I’ve got sixty seconds.
“You talk now,” I say “and maybe you get the luxury of worrying about your next gig one day.”
He slumps, but starts talking, low, like he’s afraid he might be overheard. “One time, I cast in and the girls were already there, restocking supplies. But they forgot the heparan sulfate I’d asked for, and had to go back for it. They were only gone for twenty minutes.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where?”
“They didn’t tell me, but it couldn’t have been far.”
I stomp over, crack him across the face with the butt of my weapon. Blood oozes from his nose.
“Detective Gage,” The AMP says. “Unless you or Officer Yellowbird are in danger of imminent harm you must stay the use of force.”
“That’s all I know,” McMillian wails.
“Fin,” Yellowbird says, her voice soft. “That’s enough.”
“This guy nearly put Galvan in a body bag,” I say, my voice as loud as her’s was quiet. “Nearly killed you.” Then to McMillian, “I find out you’re lying, you’ll wish I’d shot you.”
“Fuck you,” he screams, blood and saliva spraying from his mouth. “Fuck you, you’re fucking crazy.”
I take an involuntary step, fist raised. I want to brain him. Hit him until my hand’s reduced to shards of bone in his skull. Then Yellowbird’s gentle fingers wrap my arm, turn me around, drag me across the room. The anger remains where I was standing, opening space for shame and guilt.
“Stay,” she says to me, stuffs the tea towel in my hand, goes and cuffs McMillian, reads him his rights then opens a medkit and starts treating his wounds.
