METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  “Who else?”

  He shrugged. “You tell me. Someone, somewhere meant something by the name Lightbull, but by the time I thought to ask, the bird-watcher who’d named it had died in prison. Nobody else had any idea what he meant by that.”

  “Damn it, a dead end.” Not that she wasn’t used to that. Her working life was defined by dead ends. That was the nature of cold case files. In the past few hours, she had secured more evidence on the Cascadiopolis bombings than Cascadia LEC had accumulated in four decades. It wasn’t really a dead end, then.

  Her phone chirped again.

  “You going to answer that?” asked Bashar.

  “Hadn’t planned on it. They’ve all been junk calls this afternoon.”

  “Somebody is looking for you, a lot.”

  He was right. She might as well find out. With a sigh, Mindy glanced at the display fob, then tapped her earbud. “Fleischer here.”

  “Greetings, Officer Fleischer.” She didn’t recognize the voice. “My name is Hubbard. I am an expert system in the employ of Mr. William Silas Crown. I have been trying to reach you on a matter of some urgency.”

  “Crown? Oh, really?”

  “Are you still in the Mt. Hood forest, and have you made contact with an individual named Bashar?”

  * * *

  Excerpted from Western Economies in Multi-Generational Transition; Arlo Hutton; self-published via Internet, 2062:

  Several economic and industrial sectors survived the collapse of the Western economies and the concomitant power shifts to the southern and eastern hemispheres. Low-budget research, especially in the so-called “soft path” technologies, actually grew in scope and scale, especially in western North America. The pace of military and space hardware development also increased, as those remained among the few hard money exports the vanished Western service economies were still able to produce. Competition from the old Soviet sectors, East Asia, Australia and Brazil only stimulated a metaphorical and literal arms race. Ultimately a shortage of cash money buyers altered the big budget mentality, so that by 2030 deeply alternative launch systems and space vehicle profiles had emerged onto the market, while military hardware became more miniaturized and disposable. In effect, even those sectors went soft path.

  * * *

  “You are walking death. The Lord of Bones.”

  Crown awoke again. There was a new pain in his chest. He knew the catalog of familiar pains, largely ignored them with the aid of drugs, concentration and, sometimes, sheer force of will.

  This was more of a stabbing sensation. He wondered if one of the many clusters of tumors had entered that Stage IV swelling, where they began to take on water and could quadruple in size within a day or two.

  Whatever the source, his new pain hurt like a stab wound.

  He set himself to ignoring it, and pushed the button to raise the bed. The virteo screen on the wall was scrolling through his usual selection of news channels, muted, as almost always was the case. He saw a container ship burning just off a plain beach that could be anywhere in the temperate zones, a power plant under siege by armed Greens in someplace Asian, an angry man apparently talking about whales if the infographics were correct, and a whole series of economic charts being presented by a very old woman with eyes like diamonds, cold and hard.

  A typical news day, in other words. At this point in what was left of his life, Crown didn’t care unless a city was aflame or a currency had flatlined. He kept most of his assets in Euros, but some liquid funds were held in US dollars, loonies and winos, for various local and regional purposes. All four currencies were vulnerable to market gyrations, each in their own way. He was fondest of the wino; a time-delimited, wine-backed open source currency invented just up the road from Portland, but it was also the least useful for most of his needs.

  “What do we know today?” he asked, and was dismayed at the feeble croak his voice had become.

  “I am setting aside your usual briefing to cover three top-priority items.” Kornbluth’s tone was especially short. The expert system had been quite upset about Protocol Beria, both Crown’s use of it, and the findings that Heinlein and Hubbard had reported against Kornbluth.

  “Go ahead,” said Crown, wishing his voice would clear up.

  “One, we have located Bashar. As of yesterday afternoon, he was with Officer Fleischer of the Cascadia Law Enforcement Collective. She was not placing him in custody, and has indicated a willingness to meet. We are awaiting a callback from her regarding Bashar’s response to our request.”

  Crown was somewhat impressed. “I had not … expected … such swift results there.”

  “Neither did we,” Kornbluth answered.

  “Mmm.” A deep breath, then: “Go on.”

  “Two, our monitoring found another transaction attempt overnight through the trapdoor in my systems.”

  “That cannot … possibly be … a coincidence.”

  “No,” said Kornbluth. “We believe that Bashar’s visit to Cascadiopolis stirred something up. Or possibly Fleischer’s, if our adversaries have her under monitoring.”

  “What was … the spending order?”

  “Three hundred and fifty thousand Euros to activate a security contract with an Edgewater subsidiary called Prince Solutions. They are known for swift resolutions to hard problems, with no attempt to minimize body counts. Cascadia LEC has tried to have their operating permits revoked several times, but Edgewater money high up in the political process has successfully quashed each attempt so far.”

  “Contract … for what?”

  “Rapid deployment against soft exurban targets.”

  “I am supposed … to be hiring people … to kill Greens.” Somebody wanted the Cascadiopolis daughter-cities angry at him. Possibly very angry. “And their basic … security protocols … designed by Bashar.”

  “An obvious trap, sir. We believe a decision made in unseemly haste.”

  A reasonable analysis. “Backtrace?” Crown was trying to be as economical of his words as possible.

  “Partial. With enough routing information to launch a countersearch. We have the path of the security exploit traced as far as a privately managed router in Mexico City, sitting on top of an OC-1024 data pipe. An anonymous gateway operates that, but we are currently negotiating with our gray-hat hacker contacts for assistance past that point.”

  “Codeword present?”

  “Tauroctony, yes, sir.”

  “Cocky bastards …” Crown tried to imagine who the bull-killers might be. Old friends? Older enemies? This was well-trodden ground by now, but he couldn’t shake his thoughts. “Third?”

  To his mild surprise, it was Hubbard who spoke. “We have identified a company outside of Vancouver, BC—Musewerk—that is beginning to place prototypes of a self-managed exoskeleton called ‘Gold Man’ into the field for beta testing. One significant application is medical mobility for the severely disabled. Should you need to leave this room prior to your death, Gold Man represents a potential opportunity.”

  Heinlein added, “Given current circumstances and the issues at hand, our opinion is that you will feel the need to do so, regardless of advice from your physicians or from your expert systems.”

  A rush of knowingly stupid optimism overwhelmed Crown. “Get me one … now.” With a surge of energy, he added in a croaking rush, “Even if you have to buy the company.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Hubbard.

  Somehow, Crown suspected negotiations had already been under way before they’d told him of this Gold Man. He hated being so transparent, but given how limited his options for, well, anything had become, how could he not leap at the chance.

  To move once more, to be in the world, even for a little while. To die in sunlight.

  But only after rooting out the bull-slaying bastards who were messing with him.

  They were tied to everything, these mysterious adversaries. Patriot, Inc., The J. Appleseed Foundation. Hell, he wouldn’t be surprised if the bull-slayers weren
’t tied to the Cascadiopolis bombing.

  Paranoia? Or wisdom? Crown hoped that the folk wisdom about imminent death bringing clarity of thought was something more than wishful thinking or vapid legend.

  Otherwise he was in a lot of trouble.

  Trouble. Time do something about that, too. “Do we have … any hard security assets … under contract? And … locally … available.”

  “Do you require bodyguards, sir?” asked Kornbluth. They were in a highly secured floor of a highly secured hospital building, and Crown hadn’t been significantly mobile for months.

  “Troublemakers, more like it.” He paused a moment as his chest pain shot through him like an arrow on fire. “I will not … meet with … Bashar … without backup.” A long, slow rattling breath, then Crown sipped some water to try to bring order to his cracking throat. “And our bull-worshipping friends … may have long arms … if they detect our backtrace.”

  “I assume you do not wish to engage Prince Solutions,” said Kornbluth.

  “Over my dead body.” Which would be all too soon, unfortunately. “Trusted freelancers only.” Pause. Deep breath. “LEC contractors … if any will take the work.”

  “Launching a search now, sir.”

  “And no call yet … from … Asset Chi?”

  “Sir?” Kornbluth was clearly puzzled.

  “I’m sorry.” Crown’s brain felt muddled. Time seemed to be folding in on itself like an old blanket as he grew closer to death. “From that Fleischer woman.” Asset Chi had been one of his Cascadiopolis operatives, balancing Asset Tau, who was of course the infamous Tygre Tygre himself.

  He closed his eyes and dreamed again, of burning forests and old men running naked away from bulls with bloody horns.

  * * *

  “I am not willing to meet with this William Silas Crown,” said Bashar for the third time.

  “Look …” Mindy was growing exasperated, and she couldn’t even say why. They moved low and slow through some rhododendrons, approaching the Unimog from the east after Bashar had absolutely refused to cross the canyon she’d come over on her way up. “Let me take you back toward Portland. I’ll drop you off wherever you want—Damascus, Boring, Clackamas.”

  “And try to convince me on the way?” His voice was sly, a sort of tonal smile.

  “I just think we have an opportunity to tie a lot of threads together on the bombings. Crown must know something. You said he came up to the city the day before the attack. If he knows things we don’t, and vice versa, we could be on to a good set of leads. Or at least cross-checks.”

  “Once a cop, always a cop.” Bashar waved her to a halt and crouched, duck-walking into a denser clump of rhododendron. He didn’t move easily. She followed.

  Mindy wondered again how old he was. Eighty? He’d apparently walked seventy or eighty kilometers over the past few days to get here, taken her prisoner, then released her only to hike another half dozen kilometers in their circuitous detour back to her truck.

  “It’s not safe,” Bashar said, his voice so low she had to strain to hear him from less than a meter away.

  “What? My truck? It’s fine.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Mindy stared at the Unimog parked in the shade of the trees right where she’d left it. She slipped a hand into her belt pouch and retrieved the remote, keying through the status menus. The antipersonnel defenses were down. “Huh.”

  “Do you believe me now?” Bashar asked.

  Mindy looked up from the remote. “How did you know?”

  He nodded toward the vehicle. “Too much crushed moss and fern around it. You’re not paranoid enough to have walked two or three perimeter inspections. Somebody’s been close to it. Can you start the engine from here?”

  “It’s a fuel cell conversion,” she said absently, wondering about Bashar’s powers of observation. “But yes, I can power it up.”

  “And get it into gear?”

  “It’s got limited autonomous navigation. Not much better than self-parking, frankly. The core vehicle is over seventy years old, so pretty much everything’s a retrofit.”

  “Start it,” said Bashar. “Then move it at least two full rotations of the tire.”

  “Why?” she asked, fascinated. “Car bomb?”

  “Yes. Possibly triggered by a pressure sensor tucked into the tire tread.”

  Mindy toggled through the remote’s menus.

  “Have your firearm ready,” Bashar added.

  She paused for moment, then unholstered her riot pistol, as well as a short-barreled needler. Then she dug into her thigh pockets and pulled out spare clips for both.

  “Those will take down a few dozen people at close range,” Bashar observed. “What do you do at long range?”

  “Call for back-up.” The flaw in that plan was immediately obvious to Mindy even without the old man’s withering stare.

  He reached into his own pack, extracted several metal components, and swiftly slapped together a rifle that looked like it had been made in someone’s high school shop class. Possibly by special education students.

  It was Mindy’s turn to stare. “That’s an improvement?”

  “It’s a tube. All the smarts are in the ammunition.” He popped a bulbous bullet out of a ratty old clip decorated with sham-rock stickers, the protest music of the generation before Mindy’s school days and well after Bashar’s own childhood. “Martini-Sakura self-guided munitions, stripped, reprogrammed and reloaded by some people I know who live in the woods. I can shoot around corners from a hundred yards away.”

  Yards. It said a lot about this old man that he didn’t even think metric. “If you think they’re out there?”

  “These boys are all about watching things blow up. I doubt they know or care who you are.”

  Mindy thumbed the Unimog to life. The fuel cell system was utterly silent, of course, but the driveline was not. She had the truck back up the trail twenty meters. That would be enough for half a dozen tire rotations, at least. She still wasn’t quite sure if she believed Bashar or not about the car bomb, but it couldn’t hurt to check.

  The Unimog crunched in reverse, tires grumbling on the mix of gravel, clay and deadfall that made up the remnant railroad bed on which her trail had ended.

  One revolution, counting by the spin of the hub’s quick-release.

  Two revolutions.

  Three revolutions, no explosion.

  Four. Five. Six. Seven. Almost eight, as the truck squealed to a halt.

  She counted slowly to ten, then turned to Bashar. “Nothing—”

  The explosion cut off Mindy’s words and sent them both flat to the leaf mold beneath the rhododendrons. She looked up a moment later, past the magenta flowers, to see her Unimog collapsing in a pile of twisted metal and flames.

  “Damn it,” Mindy growled. “That was a good truck. Set up the way I like it.”

  “Not to mention being an antique Mercedes.” Something in Bashar’s voice suggested he remembered the past a little too well. “Not easy to replace.” He shouldered his strangely frail rifle. “They’ll be along in a minute or so.”

  Angry—no, ‘pissed’ was more accurate, she realized—Mindy picked up her riot pistol, keeping the needler close. Bashar had been right, they were about thirty meters from where the Unimog had been parked, a little more than forty from where it had exploded. Extreme range for the riot pistol and beyond any usefulness for the needler.

  It all depended on what direction the perps approached from.

  Moments later, three men cautiously rose from the ferns on the far side of the truck. Bashar had been right again; they’d been placed to cover her backtrail from the canyon. Neo-hippies, from the look of them, with tie-dyed hemp fiber body armor and flower appliqués on their blue jeans. Two older men, fifty-ish, one fairly young, perhaps twenty-five.

  White, all three, as nearly every neo-hippie she’d ever heard of was. They were a weird intersection of Green ethics, drug runner opportunism, and good old-fash
ioned Pacific Northwest white supremacy. Nut cases who’d run so far out the political and cultural spectrum that they’d fallen off the edge and come back up the other side.

  Mindy was wondering whether to do the whole “Freeze, police,” routine when Bashar took his first shot. His flimsy rifle made a pop like a burst balloon, without any of the echoing snap-crack she associated with unsilenced longarms. One of the older men grew a third eye, crimson and weeping, in his forehead, and dropped like the proverbial sack of hammers. The other two neo-hippies dove for dirt. Bashar’s second shot took the other older man at the shoulder of his body armor, so that a cloud of dust, fiber, blood and flesh blossomed over a stifled scream.

  Mindy sighted on the top of the young man’s head, reminded herself these people had just tried to kill her twice over, said a brief curse against Internal Affairs, and squeezed off three rounds in a swift succession of metallic burps.

  The wounded man slid back into the ferns under the cover of the spray of blood and brains she’d sent up. Bashar leapt to his feet to gain a firing angle and snapped off a third, oddly quiet shot.

  A meaty thump and a groan were their only answer.

  He waved her off to the right, pointed at himself, then left, and made a circling motion.

  Right, she got that. And there might be more.

  He loped away, low to the ground, moving like a coyote.

  Most of her hard-case experience came from urban environments, but Mindy figured she could use the trees like walls. She juked from cover to cover, more worried about speed than silence—though somehow Bashar had moved with almost no noise through exactly the same terrain.

  Was he using her to draw fire?

  Did it matter?

  Mindy reached the gap in the trees made by the remains of the railroad bed and looked back toward the canyon she’d crossed that morning. Nobody visible on the other side, though a child could have camouflaged herself in the deadfall over there.