Jade Dragon

by James Swallow

  “Project: Juno.”

  He wiped the screen and entered those words, using the highest code from Alan’s secret records.

  “Access Restricted.”

  For a second he could smell her there in the room with him, the warm flowery scent of her perfect skin, the feel of it under his fingertips. Frankie savoured the moment of sensory recall before it faded. If someone was keeping such a close eye on him, it wasn’t hard to imagine that the same would be true for Juno… but why? What possible purpose could there be for such a thing? He and Alan, they were just two unremarkable salary-men, two Hong Kong brothers who’d pulled themselves up off the streets to make a better life. Nothing about either of them warranted such scrutiny…

  Or did it? What if Alan had found something he shouldn’t have? The spectre of his brutal, pointless death cast a chill over everything, magnifying the guilt Frankie felt at their estrangement. If there was a chance that the triads had silenced his brother for a reason, not because of some blind error, then he had to know for certain. He owed Alan nothing less; even after all the distance between them, he was still his blood. Someone wanted him silenced, Frankie thought, and they had him murdered.

  The only question was: how far did it go? Whose finger had been on the trigger?

  The trilling of his phone made him start, and he grabbed it clumsily from the inner pocket of his suit jacket. The motion drew some arched looks from the other execs; it clearly marked him as a new boy.

  His vu-phone was the latest model, a replacement for the one he’d lost, with top-of-the-line encryption and executive level pass codes. On the readout was a name he hadn’t expected to come across again. “Incoming Call: Burt Tiplady.”

  “Yes?”

  “Frankie?” It was rare to hear that tone in Burt’s voice, his usual braggadocio replaced by nervous indecision. Digital whispers across the satellite link to Los Angeles fluttered under the words of his former superior. “Or do I have to call you Mr Lam, now you got yourself promoted?”

  “No… Burt, what do you want?”

  “Been trying to get you for the best part of a day. Seems all your baggage ain’t caught up with you yet.”

  Frankie sighed. “Burt, this is a bad time. I’m right in the middle of something.”

  “Uh, well,” Tiplady’s voice wavered, and Frankie knew what was going through his mind. He wasn’t sure how to react. Lam had been his subordinate for a long time and he was finding it hard to take on the notion that their roles were now reversed. “It’s just that, there was a comm that came in on your old office email here. One time signal, couldn’t forward it.” An embarrassed cough. “The thing is, I kinda accidentally opened it.”

  “Accidentally,” Frankie repeated.

  “Yeah. Uh. Sorry.”

  He frowned. The last thing he wanted was this dolt wasting his time with trivia. There were bigger things at stake than some lost piece of junk mail.

  “It must have got held up in that big server outage last week, delayed in the system I reckon. It… It’s from your brother.”

  Frankie felt his blood turn to ice water. “Read it to me.”

  “It’s not much, just a couple of words. It says, uh, ‘Don’t ever come home.’ Did you piss him off, or something?”

  The room suddenly seemed tight and confined. Too late, Alan, said a voice in his head, I’m already here. “Burt, listen to me. Erase it and close down the line, okay?”

  “Sure, sure,” said the other man. “Say, listen, I was wondering if maybe you could put in a good word for me with head office, now you’re there? Y’know, if you might—”

  Frankie folded the phone shut and sat there for long moments in the darkness, surrounded only by the murmuring of the other users. After a while, he toggled the datascreen’s security protocols menu and asked it to locate Blue Snake for him.

  She was at the docks, it replied, conducting an unspecified errand for the CEO. Frankie studied the area on a digital map, and with careful deliberation, he began once again to dial his old phone number.

  Rikio shoved him into the dark interior of the cargo container and Ko stumbled on the metal floor, his sneakers slipping on damp patches. The cold and rainy weather made the inside of the container feel like an icebox. The youth bounced off a wall and coughed. Every physical exertion made the injury in his chest hurt like fire. The front of his grey shirt was stained purple with blood.

  “I’m bleeding…” he said.

  At the doors, Rikio threw him a pitying look. “That’s the least of your problems right now.”

  Ko shivered, at last a real sense of the depths of shit he was in coming to him. “Are you gonna kill me?” The words came out in a scared little boy voice. Rikio’s lip curled but he didn’t reply. “Dude, we used to play on the street together. You know me. We were friends.”

  “We were never friends, Ko,” the gunman said sadly. “We were just kids. Doesn’t mean I owe you anything. ”

  Ko started back toward the doors. “Riki—”

  The Ushanti’s nickel-plated muzzle came up. “You stay right there. You just be quiet and you stay right there.” Rikio stepped out of the container and closed the hatches, throwing the bolt shut.

  Even though he knew it was pointless, he tried the doors. Ko opened his mouth to call out, but the words died in his throat, escaping as a faint whimper. No one would hear him. No one would care.

  He slumped to the floor and sat against the wall. Chinks of light from rust holes provided illumination as Ko went through his pockets, in lieu of having anything better to do. Scraps of paper and an old matchbook from the Dot. A couple of loose bullets—fat lot of good they would do him now—and a wallet with a handful of yuan. And…

  Ko’s fingers closed around the cellphone in the instant it rang. He snapped it open in panic, suddenly terrified that Hung’s men would hear it.

  “H-hello?”

  “Is that you?” Frankie frowned the moment he asked the question. It was a dumb thing to say.

  “Yeah.” The kid was muted and fearful. “This how you get your laughs, huh? Fuck with me and my family, and then phone up to gloat about it?”

  “Where are you?” Frankie had the digi-map of the docks open in front of him. “Where did Blue Snake take you?”

  “Dancing Dragon Pier. Big Hung’s docks. Like you don’t know.”

  Frankie nodded to himself, running an image transform program. The satellite image became an infrared pattern of cold blues and moving orange blobs. One peculiar shape—green instead of human-red—was standing among a group of others. Tze’s guardian? “Tell me where you are. Exactly.”

  “Inna cargo pod. Freezing an’ bleeding to death. Why are you asking me this shit?”

  Frankie took a breath. What had they taught him in the academy? The best time to negotiate with a hostile source was when you had them on the ropes. “Remember what I said before? I have a job for you.”

  “Huh.” Despite his dire predicament, Ko felt the urge to laugh. “You got great timing, mister wageslave. Pretty soon, I ain’t gonna be in any shape to do anything for anybody.” The soft glow of the phone cast faint shadows around the gloomy interior.

  “I had nothing to do with what happened to the girl… Your sister.” The voice on the other end of the phone seemed genuine, or at least as far as Ko could tell. These corps, they lie for a living. “I could help.”

  Ko fought off a shiver. The cold was leaching into his fingertips and toes. “What do you care? I’m just a thief, neh? A streetpunk for you suits to roll over like some bug. You don’t know me. What d’you want, huh?”

  “You said you had connections with the triads, yes?”

  “Yeah,” he nodded woodenly. “I know people in the Wo Shing Wo, the 14K, others. Not that it has done me any favours.” Ko coughed and spat out blood.

  “I can get you out of there,” said the voice, “if you trust me. In return I want you to get some information. There was a hit… I need to know who ordered it.”


  “You can’t do it yourself, mister big shot?” snorted Ko.

  “I can’t take the risk of investigating myself. I need someone like you. I can’t be connected.”

  “Like me,” murmured Ko, masking a wheeze. “Oh yeah. I see where this is going. You want some no-namer to do your dirty work, someone… disposable?”

  “That’s about the size of it, yes.”

  Ko forced a smile. “Yeah. You got yourself problems you don’t want your boss knowing about, so you gotta come down to the gutter to deal with it.” He shifted, fighting down the pain. “Sure. I’m your man. But I want something else.”

  “I’m going to save your life,” insisted the corporate. “That’s not enough?”

  “No. I want money. After what that rat shit Tze did to my sister, it’s gonna take some heavyweight paper to make her well again. You clean that mess up, too.”

  Frankie choked back a laugh. “You’re in no shape to be setting terms.”

  There was a dry, painful chuckle. “I gotta guy ten metres away from me with a machine gun gonna drill me any second now. I got nothing to lose. Pay up or get some other chump to be your errand boy.”

  In spite of himself, Frankie smiled. This kid’s nobody’s fool. “Okay.”

  There was a long pause. “Fine. Now how you gonna spring me, mister wageslave?”

  A plan began to form in Frankie’s mind as he examined the data traffic streaming in and out . of the dockyards. “Can you swim?”

  “Uh, yeah, but—”

  “Be ready. And don’t lose that phone.” He stabbed the disconnect key.

  “Oh man,” Ko breathed, staring at the silent cellphone. “What did I just do?”

  The steel doors answered him, opening with a clattering squeal. Ko staggered backward, reflexively trying to make himself a smaller target; but there was no cover at all inside the cargo pod. The hatches opened wide and there was Rikio and another one of Hung’s boys, scowling from underneath a sepia-toned punch-perm. Rikio’s face was expressionless.

  “Look,” Ko said, “there’s no need for this.”

  Punch-perm nodded at Rikio. “That blue-faced bitch wants this tyke aired out. You gonna do it, or do I gotta tell Hung you’re not up to the job?”

  “Hey,” said Ko. “Wait.”

  Rikio licked his lips. “Naw. It’s okay. ”

  Punch-perm kept talking as if Ko wasn’t even there. “So, then. You wanna use my gun?”

  “Naw,” Rikio repeated, flicking off the Ushanti’s safety, “I got it.”

  Ko heard a rumbling sound, getting louder by the second. Was that death, bearing down on him? “Please,” he implored, tears spiking his eyes. “Just let me go—”

  Rikio raised the machine pistol; that was about the moment the robo-truck slammed into the side of the container and rode right over the punch-perm guy, wheels grinding the man into the asphalt.

  The empty metal box shifted with ear-splitting shrieks, fat yellow sparks flying from the doors. Rikio tumbled into the cargo pod, narrowly missing the same fate as the other enforcer. Ko slipped and fell, his hands crusted with a film of dried blood.

  He saw the front of the robot six-wheeler as it retreated back a few feet, huffing like an overworked dray horse. Written across the blank-faced prow of the truck were three words: “Yuk Lung Haulage.”

  The vehicle came at the pod again and this time the impact threw it back two metres, pushing it back over the edge of the dock. The machine shouldered into the container and began the slow and steady process of tipping it into the bay.

  Frankie worked the controls, licking sweat from his lips. On the thermal scan he could see the shapes of a dozen men sprinting across the cargo apron toward the truck, the cold shapes of weapons in their grips. It had been simple to open up the automatic navigation controls on one of the many YLHI drone haulers, and reprogramme the dog-smart drive brain to do his bidding; but now Frankie was having second thoughts about his impulsive choice of exit strategy. He could make out the two flailing orange shapes inside the box, so he knew the kid wasn’t dead—not yet. Pinpricks of bright white showed where the triad gunsels were firing on the truck. Behind them, the alien shape of Tze’s Blue Snake stood and observed, motionless.

  The robo-truck smashed into the cargo pod one last time and drove it over the lip of the concrete dock. Vehicle and all, the pod struck the waters of the bay and vanished, the shape fading away into the blue sheen of the cold.

  Ko and Rikio collided with each other and the walls, bouncing around like stones in a rattle. Rikio tumbled underneath him and Ko felt something break inside the Red Pole as he softened the impact against the steel box. Water gushed into the container, buoying up Rikio’s body. Ko noted the new angles in his arms and legs, the freakish tilt of the neck, but found it hard to summon any sympathy.

  Ko pushed at the undertow of the seawater, but the icy cold and the searing bite of the wound in his chest bled the energy from him. Tilting, the box dropped beneath the surface, the tiny pocket of trapped air inside bubbling out in whooping breaths. He tried to swim, but there was nothing in him, not a drop of energy to spare.

  I’m going to die. I’m sorry, Nikki. I let you down.

  “Stupid, weak city boy.” The voice hammered into his head. “You’re not dead yet.” Something tugged at him through the chill water and Ko saw a shape drifting at the mouth of the container, leather cords and a long ponytail floating around him. “Swim, damn you,” snarled Feng. “The drowned never know peace! You want to spend eternity haunting this concrete cesspool? Come on! Swim!”

  Ko’s leaden limbs moved, dragging him forward. The container dropped away toward the dark, and with agonizing slowness Ko felt himself rising toward the bland grey light of the surface. Feng beckoned him from the shadows of the dock stanchions, speaking without moving his lips. “This way! Come up here, quickly!”

  He burst from the depths through oily water, sucking in great wet gasps of air. Ko’s fingers found a rusty rail and he pulled himself hand-over-hand, up and on to the concrete pier. Behind him on the next dock over, he could hear shouting and curses. A gunshot rang out, and a divot of stone cracked near his leg. He felt hollow inside, but somehow there was a secret reserve of energy coining from a place he’d never known of, and it propelled Ko forward, gasping and spitting up acrid water. Ahead he saw a chainlink gate lying open, and beyond that, a service road.

  On the road was a parked car. The speedgeek part of his brain identified it immediately as a Korvette Impulse, one of the ’23 models that had the puny touchlocks on the doors. Ko felt a weak smile forming on his lips just at the sight of it.

  Wild…

  WILD…

  WYLDSKY!

  One Night Only! Victoria Peak!

  The greatest concert of the decade, with the hottest bands and NO RULES!

  There’s no ticket—the only thing you need to get in is freedom!

  Come together and stand your ground!

  Show the world that music can’t be caged!

  It’s not about the green! It’s about the BLUE!

  WYLDSKY!

  Featuring performances by JetSlut! Charlie Fish! Yellow Dancer!

  And a SPECIAL guest star—Who Knows? YOU KNOW!

  The biggest free gig in the PacRim!

  WYLDSKY!

  The future starts here!

  11. Saviour of the Soul

  Fixx let the road do the driving, allowing the turns and changes to come from the world around him, travelling without moving, conscious but unseeing. The black Korvette seemed to understand its new master, and behaved as a good horse should, cantering unhurried through the canyons of the city. Lucy had done him proud.

  There came the point, just as Joshua expected, when the road ended, and there he turned off the motor and let the surroundings talk to him. Hours passed without his notice, instead his mind dwelling on the fragments of time from the mallplex; the pieces of sensory recall from there and the same moments from the Hyperdome collided and me
rged in his mind, an ocean of floating jigsaw pieces connecting, disconnecting, seeking patterns in each other. In the car, in the service road between the concrete warehouses, in the place of silence-such-as-it-was, Fixx recovered the deck of cards his sainted grandmother had bequeathed and began to play out a reading on the empty passenger seat beside him. The patterns started to emerge, and he chewed his lip. All this time, and still Fixx felt like he was unready, like he was waiting.

  “Stage ain’t set,” he said aloud. “Players ain’t ready yet.”

  His mind was so focused on the tarot matrix that the shadow crossing the window by his head was a sudden surprise.

  The Korvette had one-way surrounds of black glass, and with the car dormant as it was, a person might be forgiven for thinking it was empty. Fixx paused, an unturned card in his hand, and studied the raggedy youth working at the door lock. The Chinese kid had his tongue pressed between his teeth in serious concentration. He looked strung out and wasted, a nasty blossom of blood down the front of his shirt, constellations of bruises on his face and neck. He was wet through, his clothes plastered to him; but most of all the fear was coming off him in waves.

  In spite of all that, Fixx took a look at the card, even though in that moment he knew exactly what it would show. The sanctioned operative flipped the latch and the Korvette’s gullwing door rose.

  The thief jerked in shock as he realised the car was occupied. “Oh. Shit.” He blinked and skipped back a few steps as Fixx got out. “Hey, uh. This isn’t my car!” He faked a frown. “What a silly mistake!”

  Fixx handed the tarot card to him. “Here. This seem familiar?”

  The kid read the name on the bottom, eyes narrowing. “Knight ofWands. Huh. He kinda looks a little like me. ”

  “How ’bout that?” Fixx grinned. “Yeah. Curtain’s going up now.”

  There were footsteps coming and they turned to see a group of men in spaciously cut suits approach at a run. All of the new arrivals were carrying guns, and they exchanged confused looks at the sight of the black man and his car.