You’ve got a key. She pulled out her sidearm, got herself on an angle so the pellets wouldn’t bounce back on her, and fired. The shotgun round took out the lock and a chunk of the door. El kicked it open, finding an alley filled with rats and rotting boxes but — thank God, thank God — no Republic soldiers. She broke into a run but tripped on a box, falling. That was what saved her as the back of the bar exploded in a shower of fire and ceramicrete, pieces of burning wood and red-hot metal flying about the alley.
El coughed, dragged herself to her feet. Her shoulder throbbed, and she noted with almost absent surprise that a jagged piece of metal was sticking out of it. She reached a hand to yank it free, and almost passed out from the pain.
No way that the Republic brought all that noise for little ol’ Elspeth Roussel. No, they were hunting bears. Could be Moses, as the man had gone off like he’d been locked and loaded already. Could be any one of the people in that bar. Didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except finding Altman Razor before the Republic did.
CHAPTER SIX
FINDING PEOPLE WASN’T hard for Hope. It was the keeping them that always sucked, and sucked hard.
The street outside the tenement was full of trash. With that came the smell, rust and organic rot mixed like a stew. There were plastic bags, the kind supposed to biodegrade but never did. At least, not before getting stuck in doorways, wrapped around legs, or blown in your face a few thousand times. There was the odd paper bag, sodden, dingy with the recent rain, rendering back to pulp, leaving brown lumps around drains. This much trash meant no one came down here to clean the streets. Sure, the city would have crews on the job, or at least taking the coin, but because doing the actual work was dangerous, they stopped before that crucial step.
Hope could feel that danger, the eyes that watched her, taking in her spacer clothes and her shiny new rig. Those eyes were hard and bright, and she could almost feel the thoughts going through their heads. Does she have anything worth taking? Or, something like, Let’s try shaking that tree and see what falls out.
A woman stepped in front of her. Her eyes had been rimed with black makeup, the rain having made dirty smears of them down her face. Like a raccoon crying. Not like Hope hadn’t seen her, like she was invisible or wearing some kind of chameleotech. She’d been hanging with some friends, or maybe not-friends, by a wall. The woman had detached herself like a shuttle departing a bay, full thrust in zero G, to arrive in front of Hope. A hand out, touching the chest plate of Hope’s rig, right over her heart.
Hope looked out through the rig’s visor. She squinted, as if it would help make sense of the situation. “Hi, I guess?”
“Give us the rig. And your coins,” said the woman.
“Uh, no,” said Hope.
The woman blinked at her. “What?”
“No,” Hope repeated. “I mean, I can see.” She waved a hand at the others of the pack, also detached from the wall, circling her like she was a planet, and they were small, fast satellites. “You’ve got backup. Some people to take from me what’s mine. I get that. But I need it, see? I need it more.”
There were three of them, all men, which in Hope’s math — and she was good, like great at math — made four all up. Four on one would have been easy for Kohl, the kind of thing not worth getting out of bed for, and not more than a hard workout for Grace. Even the cap would have been able to hose the place with blaster fire, leaving pools of bubbling organic matter, and do it with cocked hips and a smirk, even with that metal leg making his movements stiff and cranky. Hope wasn’t like that. She was just an Engineer. Or she had been, before … what had happened, had happened.
“I think that we need it more,” said the woman, a knife appearing from under her vest, like a magic trick. “We’re not spacers. Got no ship. Got no home. Just got a knife and a will to use it. You get me?”
Hope looked at the woman again, really looked this time. Took in that tatty vest, the shirtless chest underneath. Sagging breasts, dirty skin, too young to look like that, but there it was. The only thing of value she had was the knife. A common vibroblade, the edge less about being sharp and more about moving fast. It would cut through most things, given enough time. Metal, sure, it’d go through metal about a centimeter a second. Wood faster, but last time Hope had tried that the air had filled with dust and left her coughing, and regretting that she’d cut up something that used to be alive and had done nothing to her. Those knives could cut ceramicrete too, no problem at all, just a lot slower. Where this was all going in Hope’s mind was that knife wouldn’t have any trouble cutting through Hope’s flesh. An accidental wave of the weapon and it’d part her skin like it was torn paper. The woman wouldn’t feel any resistance through the handle, and Hope would feel a lot of pain, and scream.
That wouldn’t do, because just a building down was Hope’s destination.
The cap was good with people. He understood them, what made them tick. He might have talked his way out of this one, or showered coins on the ground, enough time to get a head start, and that’d be that. Hope wasn’t like that, but she had one advantage. She studied. Looked at the angles. Sweated the odds. Did the reading.
She planned. And her planning had included something like this.
Back when she’d dropped more coins than was comfortable for her to part with on the counter where she’d bought her new rig — she’d looked at that pile, and thought, man, you know, Rei-Rei could use that — she’d figured the money well-spent. Not because she wasn’t getting stiffed a silence fee — she was — but because this new rig was state of the art. It was better than her last one. That rig, she’d had to cobble together herself from broken parts supplemented by a few patterns courtesy of the Tyche’s fab. It was all memory work, things she’d done before, and it was good enough for a little ship like the Tyche. But getting across Earth, in a city where there was a price on her head, took some serious tech. So she’d paid the coin, and bit her lip while the man counted the coins to make sure it was enough.
Once she had the rig, she’d done what any good Engineer would have done: she dumped all the standard programs and put in some of her own. One of those programs she selected now. It was a little something she’d learned back from when people had first chased her with weapons. They’d pointed guns at her, and if it hadn’t been for the cap, drinking at that bar, then getting his fool ass tossed next to her in jail, Hope would have been in a box forever. Never again she’d thought, and so she’d cranked out a program or two.
She let one fly free, like a baby sparrow. It fluttered from her rig, across the comm, and — God oh God please let me have got it right — landed in the vibroblade. The knife was chattering and humming and coming towards Hope, propelled by a hand with mean purpose, and then the blade clanked, made a zzzz zzzzt sound, and stopped.
The woman looked at the blade in her hand, now useless tech. Sure, it’d hurt if you tried to poke someone with it, but it wouldn’t part the meat from their bones like a cutting laser. Those raccoon eyes narrowed, flicked back up to Hope’s visor. “What did you do?”
“Me?” said Hope. “No, no. You’ve got it wrong. I’m just trying to get somewhere. Looks like your knife is out of charge.”
“No,” said Raccoon, face bunching like she was shoring up for a storm.
“You charged it this morning,” said one man, their orbits halted. He was leaning in to look at the knife. “You paid Lorenzo good coin to use his station.”
“Yeah,” said Raccoon, looking back up at Hope. “I paid—”
“You know,” said Hope, “that sometimes people can steal, right?”
Raccoon blinked at her, still holding the knife between them. “What about it?” Because it was obvious, people stole all the time. That’s why Raccoon had the knife, after all, and it’s what had led Hope to be standing here, with a price on her head, and fear in her heart.
“Lorenzo, I don’t know, might have, you know, taken your coins. Just taken them, and only given you a little juice,” sa
id Hope.
“Not enough,” said Raccoon.
“Not nearly enough,” said the man. He was shifting from foot to foot, like he wanted to run. Or he needed to pee. “Lorenzo—”
“Lorenzo’s always done right by us,” said Raccoon. Smarter than the average bear, but about as pretty, thought Hope. “Always.”
“Yeah, so,” said Hope. “I tell you what.” Her visor was still down, and she knew her voice was coming out of a speaker, sounding like a machine. These people couldn’t see her eyes, couldn’t see her fear. “I could fix your knife.”
“Fix,” said Raccoon, “like break it?”
“That’s one option,” said Hope.
“We’d kill you,” said Raccoon.
“I figured,” said Hope, “so I’ve got another option. You see my rig.”
“We’re taking it,” said Raccoon. “After we take your coins.”
“That’s one option,” said Hope again, pressing her lips together behind the rig’s visor. “The other option is I fix your knife, and you let me go, with all my coins.”
“Why would we do that?” said Raccoon. “We could just take all your stuff. There’s four of us.”
“I get the math,” said Hope. “There’s one thing. It’s tiny, but I figure I should put it out there.”
“What’s that?” said Raccoon, an eyebrow raised at half-mast, the bastard child of suspicion and curiosity.
“No one else here,” said Hope, gesturing at the street, “will help you fix the knife. Lorenzo might, but he’d charge you for it. More coins you don’t have, right?”
“That motherfucker,” said the man. “We should fuck up Lorenzo next. Always taking our coin.”
“Sure,” said Hope. “If that works, do it. You’ll need a knife, though.”
Raccoon was still eying up Hope. “You could use the knife against us.”
“Could,” agreed Hope, “but there’s four of you. Right? I mean, four on one, even with a knife? I don’t like those odds.”
“Me either,” said the man. “Try it, and we’ll cut you up.”
“Sure,” said Hope again. “After you get the knife back. That I fix. But you know … I’ll need something.”
“What’s that?” said Raccoon.
“Your promise you’ll let me go,” said Hope. “Got places to be. People to see. You know how it is on the streets.”
“I know it,” said Raccoon. She looked at the knife she held, then spun the hilt towards Hope. “I promise,” she said, her tone exasperated, “that if you fix the knife we won’t cut you up with it.”
“Cool story,” said Hope, taking the knife. She keyed up another program in her rig. The thing with anything — marriage just as easy as a fusion drive — is that it’s always easier to fuck something than to unfuck it. Unfucking something took a special charm with equipment, which Hope had. Less so with people, but one thing at a time. The program she’d fed into the knife had high-grade fuck all the way to the core, and she needed to clean it out, like de-worming an apple. Not that Hope had ever done that, but it struck her as about as annoying.
She sighed. If her Guild could see her now, repairing a knife for some street thugs, they’d kick her out. If they hadn’t already stripped her Shingle from her.
A couple of extra clicks from her rig, and the knife gave a zzzz-click. Not there, but close. Hope raised her eyes, taking in Raccoon and the man leaning in to see what she was doing. Like there was something to see. There wasn’t, but even if there was, they wouldn’t understand it. Not likely, anyway, any more than a dog would understand how a sausage was made. Your basic sausage would still taste fine to the dog, but a little mystery went a long way. While Hope worked on the knife, removing the program that had crawled right to the core of the knife, she prepared another program. She could see two of the thugs — Raccoon plus the wordy guy — right in front of her, which meant two were still behind her. Like a ship’s tugs nosing you in for salvage. Hope didn’t want to be salvage. That meant new programs, and a little guesswork. To buy a little more time, Hope pulled a cord from the back of her rig, a small charging lead. The knife didn’t need a charge, but it would give a little more credibility to the situation. Hope figured most people didn’t like being lied to, but if they never knew they were being lied to, it made the whole thing frictionless, like a good bearing.
There. The whole thing had taken a couple minutes, but those two minutes felt like a long time. The man was agitating from foot to foot, almost like he was a vibroblade shivering in the air. Raccoon looked angrier as the time wore on, like time was a rough surface and her whole body was a callous she was building against it.
“Is it—” started Raccoon.
“Hold up,” said Hope, holding up a hand.
“I—”
“Almost done,” said Hope, looking up through her visor. Which Raccoon couldn’t see, but whatever. Hope clicked the stud on the vibroblade, the knife giving a comfortable buzz in her hand, then turned it off. She unclipped the charging cord, handing it back to Raccoon. “Here. Look, the charge is low, but it’s back up.”
“Great,” said Raccoon, hefting it. She spun it, then clicked the stud, holding it back up. “Now, give us your rig, and all your coins.”
Hope sighed. “No.”
“I—”
“No,” said Hope. “Got things to do.”
“Like dying?” Raccoon’s eyes were harder, her lips crueler. “Like bleeding to death, and hurting the whole time?”
Hope felt her arms grabbed by the two men behind her. Raccoon was laughing, enjoying her joke over a gullible child, and the man at her side was laughing along like this was the greatest show on Earth. The vibroblade came at Hope like a diving falcon, straight at her heart. A blow like that would have gone in, cutting through the shiny new rig. Reduced its value a lot, and coupled with the blood that would be everywhere — Hope’s blood — it would make it worth just a handful of coins. But a handful was worth more than nothing, and you took what you could get on the street.
So, Hope took what she could get. The programs she’d loaded kicked in.
First, the vibroblade: the knife spent its entire charge in the time it would take a fly to beat its wings just once. The vibroblade had a maximum rate of movement, which it went right by — a reactor in the red — in that same breadth of time. The blade heated past tolerance, pieces crumbling to the ceramicrete sidewalk. But the real deal happened next, after the blade was no longer moving. With nowhere left to go, the charge in the handle looped in on itself, a crackle and spark of blue-white curling from hilt to pommel. It was like a ball of lightning, and it hit Raccoon like the world’s angriest taser. The woman’s body was rigid like steel, eyes pinned wide, teeth clenching so hard they’d surely crack. As pieces of the blade fell to the ground, Raccoon’s momentum carried her forward into Hope. The movement jarred Hope, and the two men holding her arms. Hope’s shoulder wrenched, and if she’d had time she might have cried out. It was fortunate her programs had been queued up, ready to go.
Which led to the second thing, her rig: the articulating arms unleashed from the back, all four coming out and around. The rig knew Hope’s shape, the heft of her body, where she stood in space and time. It knew where her arms were, and her chest and her legs, and like a sort of bonus, her head. It needed to know things like this because ship engineering was dangerous work. An Engineer could get caught in the rigging, snared between the spars. Metal or ceramicrete could pin you to the deck like the weight of your life’s guilt. In space, you could be held fast against the hull by broken parts, and without a ship’s skin to save you, radiation or fusion fire could end you in a heartbeat. With this in mind, rigs knew their keepers, held them close, and were ready to save them from entrapment. The arms of the rig whipped out, and noted the hands holding her as artificial constraints, and thus dangerous. Hope’s program told them to free her. On Hope’s left, two waldos grabbed the man’s arms, twisting them away in a crrrrunch of bone. Human elbows and shoul
ders were not designed to go through those planes of movement. On her right, the man holding her was more — or, depending on your point of view, less — canny; he shifted his grip on Hope’s in response to the manipulator arms coming for him, tightening his grip. The rig processed this in microseconds, and brought an arc cutter to bear. In a shower of steam, the man was shorn free from Hope in less time than it took to blink.
Hope sagged, the sudden release from her arms startling. Raccoon tumbled to the ceramicrete at Hope’s feet, teeth still clicking together. Hope looked at the remaining man through her visor. Everything had happened so fast, the man was looking at his three friends, his expression turning from let’s see what this bitch is carrying to what the actual fuck just happened in short order. He was turning his head, looking first at Raccoon, then at the two men lying at Hope’s side. The man who’d had his hands sheared off was making a keening noise; the one whose arms were broken was making a noise that sounded like coughing. Hope realized the man was trying to cry and breathe at the same time.
The rig’s arms whirred and slid back into the panels at her back. She wanted to run, to hide, but neither of those things would help. “Uh, hi,” she said, her shaking voice cloaked by the rig’s external speakers.
The remaining man looked at her, finally looked at her, gave a short, high-pitched scream, and ran down the street. His feet splat-splatted in puddles as he went, little splashes of water flying in his wake. Hope noticed that his shoes were tatty and worn, one of his soles flapping as he sprinted away. Whether he would find more friends, or Lorenzo, or a beer — all good options — Hope didn’t care. She cared about getting off the street.
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