Virology

by Ren Warom

  “Only three,” Prism tells her. “There were four but one went back to the bays and lit off out around ten to, just before we set off to meet up.”

  Vivid damn near drops her next mouthful all over the table. “Tell me you shoved a tracker up in their business!”

  Rolling her eyes, Prism says, “Like we wouldn’t. No chance we’ll get exact location info for their boss, but at the very least we’ll know where the hell they came from. Starting points are not to be sneezed at.”

  Thinking of the leg work involved in that, Vivid groans. “Combing the streets of yet another hub seriously does not appeal.”

  KJ reaches over and steals a mushroom from her ramen bowl. “Options, bitch. Someone gave ours cement boots and dropped them in the ocean back on the Gung.”

  “I’ll slurp to that,” says Sandro, raising his bowl.

  Deuce drops in Vivid’s IM then, sans chime, which is unlike him enough to make her momentarily assume something horrible’s happened to Amiga.

  Do not give me bad news, Deuce. I am not in the market for bad news.

  He pokes her through their connection, which he knows she hates. Cool it, Viv. No casualties here. A few minor injuries and Shock’s still KO, but that’s it.

  You find the Cartel? Please tell me you found them.

  We did.

  So we’re free and clear? His silence tells her way too much. She places her chopsticks down, before she’s tempted to stab her eyes out with them. They’re in Tokyo, aren’t they?

  Sorry, Viv. He sends a data packet she’s really not buzzed to open. Big-ass ’scraper, VA’d to the hilt. You guys can handle the jacking but the hit… I’m not sure I’d advise. Maybe best to watch and wait them out.

  Screw that. There’s not a no hard enough to throw at that suggestion.

  Viv…

  Deuce. We’re not going in on our lonesome. We’ll rustle up some back-up. I have ideas. Options. Not ones I like much… but we’re the beggars in this scenario.

  You wanna wait on us?

  Hell no. You have other things to hunt out. We popped a track on the bastards who hit Shandong. She hooks the tracker sig from Prism and tosses it to him. Gift exchange. Go get ’em, tiger.

  Gotta wait for Amiga to get home first.

  She knows that tone. He’s trying not to worry and failing miserably, but when it comes to their mutual pain in the ass, he’s hopeless. The second he met Amiga, all bets were off. Even after she broke his heart, she owned it. She always will.

  You said all was good.

  It is. It is. Just… pending on the homecoming. Be savvy,

  Viv. Anyone who might be situated to help you might want to get to Shock.

  Masterful subject change, bud, and I know. You leave me to my conundrum, I’ll leave you to yours.

  So kind.

  You know it. Don’t be a stranger.

  Just be strange.

  His ancient sign off, reminding her of the early days of Hornets when Deuce was half a foot shorter, skinny, still in Tech, and doing J-hack shit part-time, makes her want to stop, drop everything, and cry her heart out. That life was stolen wholesale, dumped into a street can and set on fire. All that’s left of what they were then is ash and memory. When will they have time to mourn that? It’s necessary to mourn.

  Finishing her noodles, she shares the terrific news that no one thinks is terrific and her equally terrific plan for getting help to bring them down, which again, no one thinks is especially terrific. But they do agree it’s necessary.

  “We can sleep first though, right?” KJ says hopefully, stealing another mushroom, this time from Prism, who slaps his hand with her chopsticks. “Ow!”

  “No, Kneejerk,” Vivid drawls. “We’re gonna up and hit ’em right now.”

  He narrows his eyes at her. “I’m sharing your pod.”

  “Oh hell no.”

  “Hell yes. I’m gonna get nightmares now for sure. You owe me.”

  * * *

  Waiting in the bustling fish market, surrounded by shouting and lines of fish resting on ice and wondering how Tokyo manages to grow this much fish in farms anyway, Vivid rethinks her terrific idea several dozen times over. Last night, forced to share a pod with KJ and therefore miss out on a few hours of good sleep, she’d already begun to worry. In the light of day, freezing her arse off in the market despite the tropical heat on the rest of the hub, she’s thinking she might have executed a frying pan to fire type leap.

  That KJ refused to come, leaving her to rock up with Sandro, hasn’t really helped, despite KJ’s forever edginess about every damn thing.

  Then again, this idea is one that relies on a lot going very right, when current circs are all about shit going very fucking wrong.

  Given their monopoly on Tokyo, their general dislike of competition, and the Cartel’s recent, unwelcome prominence here, Vivid’s taken a chance that the Yakuza of Tokyo Hub might be interested in removing a tick from their city’s flesh. Chances are high that outside business, especially anything Gung related, are of no concern to them but still, the looks they’re getting as they wait are disconcerting to say the least.

  Vivid’s links to the Yakuza are non-existent, but the Hornets were hired for some work on the Gung by a Tokyo-Hub-based Corp several years ago and remained in contact with the man who hired them, Hanshiro—the son of the CEO. A year after the job, Hanshiro quit Corp to become a chef, something he’d trained for in his youth and had to leave. Now he’s head chef for the kumichō of the Yamaguchi-gumi family. Talk about useful.

  Being head chef, Hanshiro visits the fish market with a bunch of chaperones to buy fresh seafood every morning. Which is why they’ve been here since four A.M. And why they’re now waiting whilst he IMs to see if they’re allowed to meet with the head of the Hub’s foremost Yakuza family. His chaperones are watching them as if they plan to attempt to deprive their kumichō of his favourite chef, as if they’d be anything like that stupid. They need help, not more trouble.

  Hanshiro steps out past his chaperones. “Your interests would appear to intersect. He requests that you join him for breakfast. I will finish my purchases and take you back with me, hai?”

  Vivid tries not to sigh relief. “Hai. Arigatōgozaimasu.”

  He bows. Brief. Terse. Almost impolite, not that she can blame him. This favour was not small. “Nani demo animasen.”

  The kumichō of the Yamaguchi-gumi family lives in the five top floors of their Corp ’scraper in a level of luxury that, prior to her stint at Shandong, might have impressed her. Now it reminds her of all they lost—the safety, the comfort, and worst of all, the Hornets. Viv commands herself to stop thinking about sad things. Sadness is like water; you can drown in it, and there isn’t time to drown.

  Having never met a Yakuza, Vivid has no idea what to expect, but the small, slightly overweight man with silver hair and a jovial expression is light years from anything she’d have anticipated. Introducing himself informally as Oniji, the kumichō greets them warmly and leads them to a tatami room with a long, cedar-wood table, traditionally low to the ground.

  “Please,” he says. “Sit.”

  A genuine geisha brings the food, pouring tea and serving nattō, raw egg and rice, miso soup, ginger pork, seared tuna and marinated tofu into tiny bowls. It’s surreal to be sat eating fine food by a window giving premium views of the Tokyo skyline, the curve of Earth beyond the hub, and the black of space.

  “You admire my view?” Oniji’s English is prep-school perfect, with only the flavour of a Japanese burr on the edge of some letters.

  “Very much.”

  “It is a delight. The only flaw is that somewhere amongst the architecture beyond my window, flaunting the ability of his Archaeologist to hide his headquarters from discovery and his wilful refusal to do business with those whose business is Tokyo Hub’s wellbeing, is Lucian duPont.” He helps himself to more tuna, waving the geisha away. “He came here a year ago, which is, I believe, when he took over the Cartel. Manner
s dictate a hand extended, but he did no such thing. Instead, he has tried to systematically steal our business. He wishes to take the Haunt, I suspect, to press his agenda here. He is not welcome.”

  “Are you interested in the Haunt?”

  Oniji holds her gaze. “Why would we need such a creature? Our power here is not contingent upon gimmicks. We Yakuza are businessmen. Men of honour. All we require is the information you hold.”

  “Will we be granted the right to join your attack on their headquarters?” She needs to ask this; you don’t assume anything with the Yakuza.

  Oniji sips his tea. “You have outstanding issues with them, I understand?”

  “We do.”

  He inclines his head by a fraction but doesn’t respond, busying himself with the pressing business of breakfast instead. Vivid tries not to panic. She eats her nattō, mixing it in with her rice and egg to make it somewhat palatable. Nudging Sandro to stop picking at his. He makes a face she hopes Oniji hasn’t seen.

  This is gross.

  It’s fermented. Acquired taste. Try to look less disgusted, or you’ll offend him.

  Will he let us in on this?

  No telling. Eat your food.

  Ugh, the things I do for Hornet-kind.

  When Oniji speaks again, it’s as if they haven’t been talking about the Cartel at all. He regales them with stories from the twenty-year war he’s led on Tokyo Hub, uniting the hundreds of Yakuza clans who went rogue, frustrated by the restrictions of the Hub’s size. After their last cup of tea, he bids them goodbye, clasping them both by the hand rather than bowing. Vivid’s dying to bring up the Cartel hit, but it would be poor etiquette to mention it again when he hasn’t.

  After he’s gone, Sandro says, “What now?”

  “If you would please come with me.” At the entrance to the room is a small, delicate woman. She bows her head. “I’m Umi, Oniji’s waka gashira, and his eldest daughter. I will be leading the assault on the Cartel.”

  Umi leads them through to a boardroom on the opposite end of the floor. Inside, awaiting them, are a group of men and women she introduces as the leaders of all the clans in this district—and the rest of the Hornets on Tokyo. All of them. Including the injured Hornets left behind on the shuttle in the care of Jules, the only other Hornet with medical skills. Jules treats her to one hell of a look—eviscerating. That, and the tension in the room, the uneasy stance of the Hornets, clues Vivid in to what was going on at breakfast. A test.

  She turns to Umi. “Did we pass?”

  Umi smiles. “You are alive, so what do you think?”

  Vivid breathes deep. “And the Cartel hit?”

  Umi gives an incremental bow of the head. “My father would be honoured to have you accompany us as we bring down our mutual enemy.”

  As Above

  Explosions suck: the noise and the dust and the smell, the general sense of disorientation and sensory deprivation. The way everything rings for hours afterwards. That stuffed feeling, as if your head is in a dirt-filled burlap sack. On the plus side, there’s no way of being able to tell if you’re about to die horribly. Blinking grit from her eyes that genuinely feels like it’ll still be there in a million years, Amiga’s last to jump through the hole Aggie blew in the floor of the Cartel HQ basement.

  She finds them all waiting like idiots.

  “Didn’t we go through this already?” she snaps. “Run like hell. Mush. Scram. If you weren’t in my way I’d be running already.”

  The sentiment’s a grand one, but the practicality leaves a lot to be desired. These tunnels are not built to run in; they’re too cramped, wet and stinking—a mustiness and sort of sewer undertone that snags at the gag reflex. Beyond grim. It takes about seven minutes of scrambling for Amiga’s boots to get caked in mud right up to the ankle, adding an extra fifteen pounds to her feet. Naturally at this point, her thigh decides to send frantic SOS signals to her brain. Fucking hell. Literally hell.

  Snarling at the uselessness of her body, she tunes out the squawking of her thigh and pushes herself on, not quite convinced that the unfurling map in her head really does lead to Deuce. All she can see is tunnel, more fucking muddy stinking tunnel with no end in sight.

  Faint sounds of water dripping echo around them as they run, adding to the ringing in her ears, giving it the distinct maddening edge of tinnitus, and from deep below comes a thrum like a heartbeat—the machines of the Hub.

  Amiga’s seen streams of urban explorers sneaking down into the guts of hubs, filming the huge, intricate engines holding the hub in orbit and the centrifuge whose spinning keeps everyone from floating up to the glass dome. You can’t get to that, but you can see it. Mind bending that it works, that it even exists. Some of the explorers climb the engines to get a closer look, and more than one has fallen in, blown to a brief burst of bright red.

  No one speaks of it. No one stops doing it.

  The streams though, they go viral, especially if they end in death, and some kids are inspired to copy. Seems crazy, but people get bored, they do dumb shit. It reminds Amiga of the Gung’s XTs, both stupid and dangerous, a lethal combo. The anti-J-Hacks, breaking rules simply to break them. There’s a certain beauty in that, a synchronicity. You can’t have things without their equals and opposites. The world balances itself, like it or not.

  If she hadn’t met Deuce, Amiga might have ended up an XT. Or dead. One or the other.

  After a solid hour of struggling to run, they spark clean out of energy. Slow to a walk to catch their breath. A few dozen more tunnels at this pace brings them to the catacombs proper, the miles of tunnels with bones stacked against the walls, the remains of ancient Parisians. They look nothing like the pictures Amiga’s seen, with religious symbology. The patterns here are more like geometric fractals, a touch disorientating, painted bright colours and fixed behind glass or plastic.

  “This is not how I imagined the catacombs.” Raid trails a hand along the plastic. “It’s all very pay-as-you-go hub attraction or art exhibition.”

  “Probably is,” Amiga says, because really.

  “Yeah, but who the hell would come down here?” Aggie’s walking along arm in arm with Sim, who blends oddly in her catsuit, a human-shaped collection of neon skeletal parts. “It’s dark and muddy and it literally stinks.”

  “They were moved decades ago. Rearranged. We make it our own down here. The gendarme don’t care to come down. We are out of sight, out of mind, but we don’t disrespect history; we make history for ourselves. If we don’t, history will forget us.”

  The voice echoes all around them, too loud, reverberating off the plastic and the roof like surround sound, humming in the air. It makes several Hornets yell, and most of them jump. Having no normal fear reactions to anything, Amiga has her gun out and pointed at the woman standing in the gloom of the tunnel ahead. Appearing out of nowhere, so not good for your health, especially not around Cleaners. The only reason the woman isn’t already dead is Amiga’s general lack of ammo.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  The woman looks at her gun, as if it means nothing. “Ebon. I live down here. I’m guessing you’re lost and could do with a guide?”

  Amiga eyeballs the Hornets. Dislikes the willingness to trust she’s seeing. “We have a map,” she snaps.

  “Map or not, you shouldn’t come down here without a guide like this.” Ebon appears genuinely concerned. “How are you so dusty? Did you get caught in a collapse?”

  “Nope, an explosion.”

  Ebon looks appalled and Aggie holds up a hand. “My fault. No regrets.”

  “The explosion under Rue de Soupirs?”

  “Is that what it’s called? The Cartel have an HQ there.”

  Ebon’s mouth twitches. “You blew up the Cartel?”

  “We blew a hole in their floor. It may have set a few things on fire a little bit.”

  “Then you need to make a quick getaway. A guide will serve you better than a map; your feet can be misdirected here even wit
h GPS. Come.”

  Ebon leads them through tunnel after tunnel lined edge to edge in painted bones locked behind plastic, until they flare out to pockets and caves. Cramped spaces lined with mis-matched rugs and filled with beds, chairs, chests of drawers and tiny shelves; lit by bio-sconces, the walls tiled in patches with mosaics of stars, planets and mythical beasts. Works of art as much as the bones surrounding them.

  “Why do you live down here?” Amiga asks, because there’s no way she could, not with the dislike of being underground written into her DNA. “No offence but this is hell.”

  “You are from the Gung, yes?”

  “That easy to see?”

  “Your discomfort in these tunnels is unusually profound.”

  “Well, shit.” Amiga’s sure she doesn’t like being this transparent, but she’s not the only one looking queasy. There’s not a Hornet in her team not so obviously gagging for daylight they could be wearing it as a fucking neon sign. “Fear of being underground is a cultural thing for us, yeah? It’s not real, but try telling that to decades of propaganda. I’ve known since I was old enough to listen that the ground is dangerous. I can’t just switch it off.” She trails a hand on the tunnel. “This. Living like this. It’s pure horror to me.”

  Ebon smiles, but it’s filled with sadness. “We live down here,” she says, “because there is nowhere else for us to live. When they take your home to build their terrace mansions, either you go to the slums, or you come here. Even with your horror of the ground, of being beneath it, if you were left the same choice, would you reject it?”

  Amiga thinks back to their time in the tunnels with the earth engines. To how quickly they readjusted when they had no choice. Thinks what happened then. How they turned it around. Became weapons. Reset the status quo. Brought it to its fucking knees.

  “I think,” she says softly, “that I’d do whatever it took to show the world it has no fucking right to tell me what I can do or where I can go. I’d burn it to the fucking ground for daring to try.”