“Not a fan of the grease huh? Ha ha.”
I slammed my hands on the table. “Dude, fuck sake. Come on. Can’t we just fucking eat?!”
It was way worse than I wanted it to be. I immediately felt awful. Marine was looking at me like I’d slapped the guy.
“Wow. Sorry, man. Sorry. I’ll just… go.”
The waiter seemed entirely human to me and then I felt even worse. He’d left before my brain had worked through everything I was thinking.
I was exhausted. “I’m sorry, Marine. I know that was… It’s been a rough little bit.”
She frowned, looking down at the pizza in front of her. “I should be the one apologizing. I mean… I just keep dragging you with me. You lost your hand, that guy in the jail… I can’t even thank you right, really. And I can’t apologize right.”
It was finally dark outside. The day had seemed so long that I’d lost track of it somewhere. And we weren’t done.
“I don’t think you need to apologize. Maybe work on thanking me, though.” An exhausted laugh was all I could manage, but I forced a decent smile. “I signed up. And I don’t regret any of it. Plus we’re not done.” I felt my energy return a little, thinking that. I got up from the booth. “I have to go do a horrible thing now.”
I walked over to the counter and looked into the back. The waiter was just sort of standing there, not really doing anything. There were decent odds that he planning on living back there until we left.
“Hey! Uh… hey man! Waiter guy.” He came to the swinging door to the kitchen and pushed it open without a word. “Look, I’m really sorry. I just…” I held up my hand. “I lost my hand and this guy tried to fuck my mouth and I have a chip in my ass—”
“Not anymore.” Marine decided to be helpful in keeping me factually accurate.
“Well, I had a chip removed from my ass after one got put in there. And I’m sorry. Like, properly sorry.”
He looked at my hand and then Marine and then me. “Apology accepted.”
“Yeah?”
He gave that waiter smile again. “Yeah. And just to show there’s no hard feelings, the pie’s half price.”
“Great… half price pizza. Thanks, man.”
“Don’t mention it. Ha ha.”
He went back into the back room and I went back to my seat.
“I now have regrets.”
Marine raised an eyebrow as if to say “oh?” as she took another bite.
“I regret apologizing to the lizard man.”
The savage responded with her mouth full. “But half price pizza.” She held up her slice.
“But at what cost, Marine?”
We finished the pie and I made her pay. She’d promised me dinner. I waited outside. When she came through the door I was quick to turn around.
“This doesn’t count as dinner.”
“Bullshit, half price pizza is still pizza. And you left me in there with that guy.”
The latter part of that argument was sound, but the former was unacceptable.
“Who says I wanted pizza for my lost-a-hand-for-you dinner?”
“Who says getting to pick was implied in my paying for a dinner for you?”
“You’re a terrible person.”
“At least I pass for a person. Pizza guy…” She shook her head.
We started for a bus stop and caught one just before it started to pull off. Somehow, in defiance of all sanity, the bus was empty when we got on except for one private seat. I wanted to run up and down the middle aisle, but I restrained myself because I was an adult now and, honestly, I felt a little bloated from the pizza.
I flopped down in the seat next to Marine and let out a massive groan.
“The meatball was a bad choice. And I have to piss.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“All part of the plan.” I gave an exaggerated wink. “So, what do we do after we slap that thing into a wall?”
She looked at the box for a second and shrugged. “No idea.”
“You stole my plan.”
“It’s a good plan.”
Chapter
SEVENTEEN
We were outside the Vircore offices again. Weirdly, instead of that sinking feeling, I was really energetic and enthused. Too energetic almost. I was bounding around like an asshole. Marine had immediately headed around the side of the building, which seemed prudent though I wasn’t sure why. She stopped as soon as we were out of sight of anyone inside who might get curious what we were doing there at that time of night. The lobby was still lit, but after hours visitors coming through main reception likely weren’t going to be quietly watched while they just did whatever they wanted, so presumably that was out.
I looked around the tiny courtyard and spotted a few sockets in the stone of the building exterior. Those would likely be as good a place as any to plug in the blotto. Marine motioned to them.
“That’s the plug we’re using. We’re going in the front.”
Well, I was wrong. “Won’t they lock that down?”
Marine shook her head. “The opposite.” Her voice was a little shaky, but it seemed like it was more from excitement than fear. “WorldGov ordinances don’t allow it. Any floors accessible to the exterior have to unlock and unlatch everything in the event of a fire or blackout.”
“Well, we’ll definitely have one of those.”
“Yeah…” She pulled the blotto box from the metal container. “We’ll definitely have something. Ready to maybe die?”
“Might as well,” I said, with a surprising lack of sarcasm. I was starting to like it all the more I lived with it. The robot hand, the near death experiences. Maybe not as a weekly sort of outing.
She put the metal box down on the ground and walked over to the wall outlet. I stayed close, watching with way too much interest as she plugged it in. Immediately there was a buzzing noise from the sphere and heat started pouring out the vents. A few sharp beeps sounded the start of the timer The Earle had mentioned. We both scurried away from it, making ridiculous “please don’t explode” faces. The kind where you dig your chin into your neck and go all wide-eyed.
Neither of us had any sort of timer, but Marine was walking toward the front of the building with considerable purpose.
“How will we know how long it’s going to take?”
“I don’t know. But they might post guards at the doors when it pops.”
“Smart, smart. So wait, we’re going in while they can see us?”
“I don’t see much alternative. They’re going to know we’re in anyway. Only the bottom two floors will unlock.”
She had clearly given this more thought than I had. “Yeah, right. So we go in the front.” I pretended to be on the same page but I was scrambling through possibilities to catch up. The elevators would be out, almost definitely. And even if they were on backups we couldn’t afford to wait for them in a lobby full of Virsec goons. “The stairs.”
She nodded wordlessly as we came around the front of the building. There were at least a dozen SWAT type guards waiting in the lobby, weirdly at the far side. This was likely a fair sign that their facial recognition cameras had seen us approaching. Maybe they had beanbag guns. I heard those weren’t so bad. And I had a robot hand so maybe it was fine.
“So where are the stairs?”
Marine was already halfway through the door and had ignored my question. I kept in close behind her, not letting the door even come close to closing. If we got separated this whole thing was going to go bad for one of us at least. The door shut behind us and I heard an extra metal clicking noise. We were locked in. For a few seconds anyway.
“Hey! It’s the butt guy!”
Oh man. This is instantly less badass than I had hoped. They were all laughing. Marine laughed. The secretary laughed. I was the butt guy. Fuck me. I
changed my mind, this sucks. All of this sucks.
“Hey! Butt guy! We’re really gonna do it this time.”
They all laughed harder. At him promising to fuck my butt. See, this is the class of people you get when you run a shady company full of poorly trained police goons. They were still laughing when the lights died all around us. It went pitch dark. I assumed they were all shouting to one another but any sounds that might have been happening were drowned under a disturbing, ear numbing moan.
I couldn’t see anything in the immediate black. I felt a warm, soft hand grab mine and reasoned that it was either Marine or a guard with religious attention to moisturizing. Assuming the former, I went with her when she tugged me toward where the guards had been. Flashlights began to click on as guns came from holsters but they were shined at where we had been and against the walls. We’d headed directly through the center of their mass and were beyond them by the time they had decided to scan the side walls.
We came to a jerking stop against the doorway leading to the stairs and I ran into Marine’s back. The door came open and we went into a red-lit stairway.
“How high up are we going?”
“No idea, just run.”
She started up the stairs and I kept behind her for, and I’m very proud of this, four flights. She had started to pull away from me and that’s bullshit because she’s a robot and that’s cheating.
“Hey!” I wheezed the words more than said them. “Slow… slow.” I kept clambering up steps.
She’d been checking the doors at every landing, all of them open. We were nearing the eleventh floor when she finally decided that we’d done enough climbing. Good for me, because there were about ninety-six floors left to go and I was going to die if she even suggested that we climb all the way.
She pushed into the floor proper and it was laid out basically the same as the one we’d imagined we were sneaking into the day before. It really baffled me trying to think of what people could possibly use so many floors for. It was my understanding that Vircore had two headquarters, so I guess if they were running half the world from each of them, they really needed plenty of leg room for their workers to get up and cackle maniacally while wringing their hands. That seems like the bulk of what their employees did aside from staring at people being carried through the office. That and make untoward comments about violating handsome mens’ butts.
“What are we thinking? Jericho has the thing?”
She was walking past doors, looking into each office. “If he doesn’t, I’ll be surprised. But I don’t know which floor it’s on. Or which elevators go there.”
There was enough light pouring in from the buildings across the way that it was easy to see in general. Not enough that you’d want to be doing any detail-oriented work, but I could navigate the desk-made corridors just fine. She rushed into one of the offices and snatched a still-powered laptop from the desk. She pulled open a couple of desk drawers, annoyed when she didn’t find what she wanted.
“What’d you need?”
“Wireless is out.” Oh right. “We need a fiber cable.”
I looked around at the desks nearby, but none of them had anything other than power cables running out of them. I noticed something. They were all bodiless units. Just heads.
“Hey, these are just head terminals. There’s probably a server room on this floor.”
I climbed up onto the desk, noticing the conduits for each desk cluster ran up into the drop ceiling. I punched one of the boards out and looked up into it. A large, distinctly colored pipe ran to the far end of the floor and turned right. Looking down, there was a hallway where it turned. I pointed.
“That way.”
Marine took off without me and I climbed down from the desk, wanting to jog after her but mostly just doing a noodle walk. My legs were just completely dead. I got to the server room behind her. It was uncomfortably warm, the dormant servers having quickly overpowered the cool left in the room when the air conditioners shut off. This was really not helping me. First aerobic exercise, now a warm room? I decided that I understood the plight of those who lived among the harsh deserts. I was their honorary brother now. I had been chased by the cheetah and scorched by the sun. We were as one tribe.
“Floor number ninety-nine. The whole thing is his office. It’s on closed-circuit power. Along with the basements and a few other things.”
“Typical, really. He doesn’t understand how hard it is for us men of the sands.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Shut up. What?”
She shook off the distraction. “There are two elevators that run to the office. Can you run?”
I had flashbacks to my time in the Serengeti and the Gobi. They were lean times, harsh.
“Laze, stop being a moron. Can you run?”
“I mean, technically, yeah.”
“Good. I’m calling them both. We’re going to the far one in case they know where we called them from.”
“Super.”
She got up, tucking the laptop under her arm. “Ready?”
“No?”
“Good.”
She jogged to the door and looked out of it before breaking into a sprint. I did my best to keep up with her, convincing my brain not to worry about the pain in my lungs by focusing on the slight shimmer of sweat on Marine’s skin. She could sweat. I mean, that was just a ton of work to make something like that. Why would you even do it? Did she have stink makers too? Artificial ass funk? Or was it like a delightful rose garden?
I thought about the specifics of that for longer than most men would be proud of. But I knew I wasn’t most men. And when times got tough, I got… also tough? Forget it.
We were at the elevator. I could hear it moving somewhere inside the giant shaft. Marine bounced up and down impatiently watching the lights. There were no numbers on the thing, and really, it was fairly discreet to begin with. The sort of thing a real prick would step out of, hoping to terrify everyone in the office. “Oh no, Jericho’s on the floor.” Jesus, I bet he jerked off to it.
The door made no dinging noise, it just slid open, revealing a marble floor and blue lighting, reflected in the mirrors on the wall of the thing. We got in. There was a number pad with all the floors and a dedicated button for the executive office. Marine pressed the button, readying the laptop. The doors closed and I stepped close to her, both of us staring at the keypad.
“No code?”
She narrowed her eyes at the thing. “I… guess not? Did they think it was that secure? There was a code to call it. But it got sent in plaintext. It was an old system. No lateral movement.”
Whatever was happening, the numbers on the counter inside the elevator were climbing, and the inertia certainly made it feel as though the readout was accurate. It was a fast climb, at that. Unnervingly fast. The sort of feeling that really makes you consider the sanity of ever having invented elevators.
The elevator shuddered as it slowed down, preparing to stop. I got a sudden dump of adrenaline and the pain in my legs just disappeared. My brain started running through survival scenarios. I’d push Marine out of the way if there were guards waiting. I’d run out and tackle Jericho if he was there. I’d probably piss myself in most of those situations as my bladder was entirely full at this point. The door dinged and I crouched into my action pose, ready for whatever. But there was nothing. A well-lit room. More a house, almost. There was a kitchen immediately outside and to the right. A sofa and a fireplace past that. All of them modern and stark and basically the sort of thing you’d expect a guy who called himself Jericho to own.
I walked out ahead of Marine and looked around. It was quiet, and there was no real indication that anyone was home. We walked the various rooms until we found one that looked like Jericho’s office. The door to it didn’t have a lock. Or a scanner. In fact, it operated on a motion sensor.
&nb
sp; “Eggshell security, yeah?”
Marine nodded, a disbelieving look on her face. “Are they really that confident? I guess there should be a half dozen other things that stopped us from getting here.” She walked into his office, her attention returning to the reason we were there. The building beside brightened as lights came back to life inside the Vircore tower. They’d managed to unplug the blotto. Or it melted.
That’s the problem with eggshells, really. Once it’s gone, you got yolks for days.
As soon as we were in, she dropped the laptop and practically ran to Jericho’s desk. He’d actually had his name etched into the front of it. With a period at the end. What a real disappointment this guy was.
“That it?”
She was holding up the box, examining it. “I think so.”
“Can you check it?”
She was so overwhelmed that the question caught her off guard. She seemed to snap to realization a half-second later and she ran over to the laptop.
I casually opened the drawer to Jericho’s desk, the big bottom drawer, and unzipped my pants.
“Whoa, what the fuck are you doing?”
“I made a promise Marine, just do your shit. And don’t look. It’ll make it weird.”
“Oh yeah, that’ll be what makes it weird.”
I shouted. “I’m peeing in this desk, Marine.”
“Fine, fine. Pee in the desk. Fucking pervert.”
It was hard to get started but once I did, the stream was solid and the feeling, physically and morally, was delightful. It must have been a really well-made desk because nothing was leaking out onto the floor. I was well past the point of clipping off the stream when a bookshelf behind me opened.
“Holy shit, holy shit. Marine. Guard my penis.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding.” That was Jericho’s voice. He was angry. “You’re actually pissing in my fucking desk? You know, I was going to wait until your little adventure was done to come out and spoil the fun, but good fucking Christ, you are a real fucking mess, Charles.”
Cyberpunk Trashcan Page 13
