by Brian Trent
Keiko let several seconds pass, thinking of the disfigured man in the Lunar hospital ward. She cleared her throat. “If…once he has recovered, when can we expect to interview him?”
Drake lifted his head. “We have a query team stationed there now.”
“If he dies…”
“They can perform a DC within seconds of death.”
Keiko nodded and tried not to pace. Suppressing one nervous habit conjured another; her feet clenched and unclenched in her shoes.
They can do the DC now, she wanted to say, but bit her tongue. A Digital Capture took thirty minutes, sometimes longer, and for a man already damaged like Kenneth Cavor, it would cause suffering beyond what the drugs could handle. The company had self-preservation as part of its tripart masthead; but devotion to an employee’s spirit shared that core, as did the ‘pursuit of human progress’. Out of the past and up to the stars, the corporate jingle went.
“Who would have attacked us?” Jack asked.
“Unknown.” Drake hesitated and regained his Zulu calmness. “All PI facilities are on high alert. Curfews are in effect for all arcologies. No one in or out.” He started towards the door. “I want a press blackout.”
Jack was appalled. “But—”
“Do it,” Drake said. And then he was gone.
* * *
The sector chief’s office had a small balcony affording a stunning view of Babylon’s golden ziggurats, geodesic domes, skyways, and commercial enclosures. Jack liked spending his coffee and lunch breaks out here, soaking in the view. The Hudson River was turning scarlet in the rising sun, resembling an artery cleaving the corporate vista of North America’s biggest city-state. Beyond this sprawled the vast agricultural fields tended by bots, and the border spires separating civilization from the Wastes. Jack was immensely fond of maps, and the Babylonian horizon suggested an infinite cartological fantasy. At moments like this, he liked to wonder about what kind of window he would be staring through when he was one hundred, two hundred, even five hundred years old. On what world would he be living? It was a staggering ascent for the Saylor clan, just two generations removed from the Wastes…a bloodline bred as bodyguards for an ancient Warlord, now working as sector chief for the opulent god-city of Babylon.
Keiko joined him in watching the sunrise over the Hudson. Two plush chairs and a glass table were at hand, but neither of the Prometheans bothered to sit.
“It’s good to have you back,” Jack said without looking at her.
She touched the glass, squinting at the fiery hues of Sol. “I forgot how big the sun is here.”
“What do you think?”
“That the base was destroyed by industrial saboteurs, night-dropped on Luna.”
“And the energy stream?”
Keiko pursed her small lips. “I’ve put that question to our own physicists. They tell me they’ve never seen anything like it.”
“If we were attacked, where did the saboteurs go afterwards?”
She pointed to the moon hanging low in the sky. “They might be part of the base wreckage.”
Jack frowned. “But they’d know we’d comb through everything with an electron microscope.”
“Ever seen a golem? No DNA. Just a block of uninfused flesh-gel with enough neural wiring to carry out basic instructions. Stuff them with explosives, wind them up, and set them loose.”
Jack flushed. “Who would risk that? Who would dare?”
“We use them sometimes.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Keiko looked back to the window to hide her faint smile. She was fifty-six, elixired to prime. Saylor was thirty-four, and he was good; the right combination of intelligence, experience, and willingness to act. But he was also amazingly naïve.
Staring again to the moon, Keiko said, “This is about the Trans-Neptunian Outpost contract. Our enemies want to rain disaster on it, convince people that we aren’t responsible enough to handle it. President Song orders a recall on our contract and allows a new bidding war, without us.”
Jack grumbled. “It could just be an accident, Keiko. I doubt Drake really knows what the hell they were doing up there.”
“It isn’t an accident.”
“So certain, are we?”
“An accident at this stage is highly improbable.”
Jack grinned and looked down at her. The height difference made them seem two separate human species out of Gulliver’s Travels. “Talking like a machine again, Keiko…”
“Machines are the enemy,” she quipped, playfully punching him.
“Hey,” Jack suggested, “there is an AI colony on the moon. Maybe they’re starting trouble.”
“Maybe,” she said, but didn’t sound convinced.
Jack scratched his beard. “But you’re probably right about the night-drop. Vector Nanonics. TowerTech. Even the Jade Kingdom. Any one of them would love to see us fail.”
“Agreed.”
“The TNO challenges their power structures. Their very way of life.”
“It does.”
“If we light up the deeps…”
Keiko gave a crisp nod. “Then we rule out there. A truly interplanetary corporation with more power than anyone in history. Sort of paints a target on our backs.”
“We’ll find out who did it,” Jack said at last, bristling at what she was describing; his family knew well what it was like to be targets. “And then…”
Keiko’s pretty face turned even more radiant as she smiled. But the smile gave Jack a chill. “Then we kill them all,” she said.
Chapter Five
Stillness
Two miles from Miguel’s fiefdom they emerged from the underdark into a soggy ravine trilling with crickets. Jamala and Jeff crept up opposite banks, and for several anxious minutes they scanned the countryside for enemies.
The Hudson was just a sprint away. No one claimed turf at the waterway; trade was too important for territorial pissing, and any Warlord challenging this neutrality would be quickly disposed of by arky powers. Even the graffiti was neutral.
The morning was wreathed in a silver haze that stung the eyes. A mist floated above the Hudson River, billowing around the irregular outlines of an invisible vessel in the water.
Celeste touched her ear and sent the message: “We’re home.”
Her vessel instantly materialized, a vivid blue-black craft like a monstrous scarab beetle. It cut the waters in a slow, foaming eddy to reach them.
They piled aboard the loading ramp and hastily secured their dangerous cargo.
[Welcome back, Celeste.] The voice of the Mantid entered her head like chilled liquid.
“Thank you,” she replied. “Set course to Quinn’s and proceed.”
The ship pushed easily through the water, gliding upstream past the agricultural farms that produced for Babylon arcology. Armored bots guarded those fields. Even if a gang war went topside (which they often did) it was forbidden to scrap with arkies. No one wanted to incur the uncompromising wrath of the civilized world.
Yet.
The thought filled Celeste with smoldering excitement. She leaned back in her pilot seat, hands folded behind her head. Two antimatter missiles! She didn’t know how many more King D. was stockpiling. Each acquisition was a terrible risk, another roll of the die. But surely they were in the final stretch. StrikeDown was brewing; she could feel it thrumming like something under high pressure. Was it five years out? Five months?
One thing was certain: the acquisition of two additional antimatter missiles would push up StrikeDown’s secret schedule. It mattered.
Quinn’s compound overhung the river several miles upstream. It was a peeling old warehouse that had once been painted red, containing a marina of six hovercraft. But Celeste knew this quaint appearance masked a subterranean structure of luxury and paramilitary design,
where Quinn kept his sultan’s harem of whores, underground pools, supply caches, telecommunications web, and probably an escape route to one of the many Outland villages.
“Celeste!” Quinn cried once the Mantid arrived and she was unloading the missiles into the shade of his hangar.
Quinn was tall, lank, black-bearded and brown-skinned. He looked so spindly that people often referred to him as the Skeleton – even his face appeared shrink-wrapped over his skull – but his wire-thin body was tightly packed with enhanced muscle. His abdomen showed a chiseled eight-pack that looked resistant to bullets, and his arms were like hardened amber. At this early hour, his portside market was mostly deserted. Bodyguards patrolled the borders, brushing aside gnats, cigarettes hanging loosely from stubbly lips.
Quinn was wearing his usual getup – a gray robe and black pants.
“Great Stars, Segarra!” he cried, pointing to the tarps. “And look at you. Not a scratch!”
He embraced her, but clearly had eyes only for the missiles. Celeste regarded his little marketplace. In the world’s cracks and corners, people traded for arky medpacks, nanonic upgrades, nanoblades, glop transgenics, and tailor-made viruses. Even as she looked, two sail-backed reptilian glops raced past her feet and chased each other around the trading tables, chirping playfully, their ancestors having escaped from markets like this decades or even centuries earlier.
But Quinn didn’t deal in biologics. He was strictly a gun-and-ammo man, with arky meds thrown in for an added price.
Celeste surveyed the market stalls disinterestedly. A balcony was built into the rafters, where Quinn’s private office overlooked his domain. Five men were crowded at the window. They were dressed in shiny green armor like folded beetle wings.
Celeste scowled.
Stillness soldiers.
“You really should work as my permanent retainer, Celeste,” Quinn was saying. “I’ll even buy your recording of the heist, if you’re selling.”
“My tactics aren’t for viewing.”
“Containment is stable, I presume?”
“The Hudson is still in one piece, isn’t it?”
Quinn licked his lips. “Any survivors?”
“Not that we saw.”
“Good.” He gave her a curious look, then motioned to his guards. Two of them came up bearing a metal payment crate. “Before you open it, I need you to promise me something.”
She sighed. “Why is everything so fucking complicated with you, Quinn?”
He smiled weakly, his teeth like pegs in his skeletal jaws. “Promise to be a good girl. Promise you’ll behave.”
She had been talking just to pass the time, to get paid, and then hold still for King D.’s people to make the pickup. Now, Quinn’s strange line of conversation confused her. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.
He knocked on the crate. “There’s a lot more in here than what you were promised. Oh, it’s the same percentage for acquisition, but it’s cut from a much larger pie.”
Celeste’s face hardened. “Get to your point, Quinn.”
He shrugged. “I’ve got a new buyer for the missiles.”
“Excuse me?”
“Got a better offer.”
“Better offer?” she echoed, incredulous. “We were brought on by an exclusive contract…” She stopped, the pieces coming together in her mind. She looked fiercely to the balcony where the green-armored Stillness soldiers were leaning, watching her. “You double-crossed StrikeDown to make a deal with Stillness?”
Quinn sighed. “They contacted me—”
“When?”
“The reps arrived last night with an insane offer. There was no way to ignore it.”
Celeste’s mind spun over at the possibilities. “You backstabbed King D! Just what do you think he’ll do when he hears this?”
Quinn’s veneer of calm melted beneath her vehemence. His playful eyes turned flat. “I’m prepared for the fallout. Stillness has deep pockets.”
“King D. will kill you.”
“He’s welcome to try.”
She sucked in a breath, stunned by this response. Jeff and Jamala strode forward, glowering, and Quinn’s bodyguards brought up their multiguns.
“Call off your dogs, Segarra,” Quinn snapped. “And think this through, will you? You got your money, and there’s plenty more work waiting for all of us. I’m striking deals, looking to the future. Going interplanetary soon. We all need to start preparing for the change that’s coming. Don’t let ideology gum that up.”
“This isn’t about ideology!” she lied, thinking helplessly of the damage this betrayal would cause StrikeDown. The acquisition of antimatter was imperative. StrikeDown needed to happen soon. Pieces and schedules were being juggled with the precision of a chess match. The virtual meetings had a nervous energy now, a sense of joyful inevitability. Sometimes she couldn’t believe it. The whispers had been circulating since her Wastetown childhood.
And King D. was serious. He inspired and delivered. He was going to end the Pax Apollonia (or as he called it, the Faux Apollonia) in the most brilliant coordinated attack on ‘civilization’ ever. Give those lofty fucks a real taste of mortality.
Grab the world and bring it down
steal the scepter and the crown
StrikeDown! StrikeDown!
Burn the arkies to the ground!
StrikeDown! StrikeDown!
Celeste steadied her breathing, struggling to regain her composure. But she was too stunned, rocked to her core, by this betrayal. “You burn StrikeDown,” she heard herself say, “and we lose one of our biggest clients.”
Quinn spat over her shoulder into the water. “Stillness is bigger and they’re growing. They have momentum. Things are happening, Segarra.”
“The IPC will turn your compound into a glass crater if—”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The IPC is about to get challenged from all directions. Stillness is a rising tide that we’re gonna surf, and it’s just the start. I even nabbed us a contract with some tough hombres on Mars called the Partisans, and they fucking despise the IPC. Don’t you see? Now’s the time to earn our fortunes.”
Celeste trembled in fury. But she said nothing.
Quinn turned away from her. “StrikeDown’s days are numbered. Now go freshen up, and fuck one of my boys if you want. You’ll get over this.”
“King D. won’t. Ever.”
“This conversation’s done.”
She surged forward. She didn’t know what she intended to do. Probably grab him by his sinewy arm and whirl him around. Maybe choke the life out of him in front of his boys. All she knew was that StrikeDown was depending on her at this moment and couldn’t be thwarted by a traitorous king-shit local smuggler.
Then she halted. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
Directly above her, positioned on the rafters of the warehouse, a blue-black mech-spider had moved into position. Its eye-cluster studied her with cold, seething malice.
She looked back to Quinn. He smiled.
“You’re in my parlor, Segarra. Don’t forget that.”
Two more mech-spiders scuttled across the rafters.
Celeste marched back to the Mantid. Her posse gathered on the pier, cursing quietly.
Jamala’s hard face was a battle-mask. She pushed the payment chest on its wheels to the edge of the pier; Silent Rajnar’s foot stopped it from going into the river.
“He’s out of his mind,” Jamala muttered.
Celeste stared at her feet.
For four years she had run a tight team, handpicked by her from the East Coast Wastes and Old Minnesota ash bowls. That alone made them an atypical bunch; most gangs were culled from one locality, bonded to one another by blood-ties and provincial history.
But more importantly, all of them were Strike
Down believers.
Jamala hawked and spat into the river. “King D. is going to eat his fucking heart.”
“What do we do?” Jeff asked.
Celeste turned aside, her mind clawing fruitlessly for a course of action.
“Celeste?”
She stared into the water, the sunrise drawing a jagged golden bolt across its coppery undulations.
A private message splashed into her optics. It was a photo of some European villa in the shade of an arky Ringtown. A bustling café set among flowering trellises, two glasses of wine glowing on a candlelit table centered in frame.
But the chairs were empty.
Waiting.
She glanced to Jeff.
He chanced a smile. A second message sprang to her eye:
Tomorrow is ours, my love.
Celeste felt a pang of desire, a mad need to grasp Jeff’s hand and rush off into that mysterious villa, to a place where there were no explosions and death. Memories of the night before the heist pulsed in strobe-light intensity: her lover sliding his length into her, his strong hands latched onto her hips. The hunger in his eyes. The way he groaned as she locked her legs around the small of his back in a fleshy vise, the delirious pleasure as they coupled in the ruins of an ancient office lobby, reception desk ringing a tree and faded corporate logos draped in ivy and mold.
She turned away from him. Tapping secretly on her virtuboard, she sent him a reply:
Tomorrow is ours, but forever you’re mine.
The squad didn’t know about her and Jeff. It was essential that they didn’t. Their working dynamic required absolute trust honed into near-psychic powers; their blips on her map were like extensions of her own body.
A romantic entanglement would adulterate that faith. She’d seen it happen in other tribes. The accusations of favoritism. The resentment of special favors real or imagined. There was even the possibility of jealousy, however unlikely that might be; Jamala and Jeff hated each other, and Allie’s sexual orientation precluded men. But even harmless gossip could poison the dynamic.
“Celeste?” Allie waved a hand to get her attention. “What do we do?”
Celeste blew the hair out of her face and closed her eyes. “We take the missiles back.”
