The Scorpion Game

by Daniel Jeffries

  He flipped to smart slugs, his gun arm breaking apart and reconfiguring into a scattergun. He blinked a command at his bag. A smoke grenade popped loose. He snatched it out of the air, yanked the door open and tossed it into the hallway. It exploded, spraying smoke and cling-gas.

  Footsteps pounded towards him. He touched the door open and dropped to one knee. Two shadows were coming hard through the smoke, both of them stealthed, their outlines betrayed by the gas that stuck to them like metal to magnets. Hoskin fired. He hit the first one in the chest and the body flew back.

  The second one leapt at him with a cheetah’s speed. Hoskin swiveled, the attacker just missing and crashing down the stairs, hitting the wall hard. He popped up and charged, but Hoskin blasted him, one in the chest and the second in the face, the man’s head exploding in a brilliant pink spray.

  Hoskin stayed low, listening: nobody else in the hall, just the canister hissing.

  He couldn’t move or the gas would give him away too. He blinked the canister to shut down, but a huge amount of smoke already filled the hallways. He could just see his apartment door was open through the twisting haze, a body sprawled at the entrance way.

  A thunderous assault exploded from his apartment. His ears auto-adjusted, but not fast enough. A sharp ringing now drowned out every other sound. Silent flashes of brilliant light spilled from his apartment.

  No time to wait. He raced through the smoke and pressed against the wall.

  The ringing echoed incessantly. He popped his head around the corner just in time to see a bright flash of light from the hand of a stealthed attacker. Hoskin fired. A figure appeared for a second as his shield shorted, but he didn’t go down. The attacker whirled on Hoskin and started shooting. Hoskin barely got into cover. Two more blasts ripped from his apartment and exploded against the opposite wall, chunks of coated wall-flesh erupting.

  He stayed focused on the door, his gun arm tight, his muscles tensed. He held his breath, not wanting to give away his position, knowing that the cling-gas already did.

  He stared at the door. Still nothing.

  Then a brilliant flash of light revealed the attacker for a split second, and Hoskin pounded him with three shots, two in the chest and one in the shoulder. The force of the blasts spun the attacker and he collapsed, his shield shorting.

  Hoskin stayed low, still deaf. He couldn’t tell if there were any more coming. He looked behind him. Nothing. He crept toward the door. Nobody else came through. He stepped over the body in the doorway and looked inside.

  The apartment was trashed. He blinked his AP to seal the door, but it was offline. The lights were knocked out, only the emergency glow strip on the ceiling was illuminated, casting a low light over his overturned furniture. He could feel the air pulsing around him, charged with energy.

  His panic room was in the bedroom. He pressed forward, going slow, knowing he was at a serious disadvantage, even as the ringing started to die down a little and bits of fragmented sound slipped through.

  Sakura appeared in front of him suddenly and fired. The shot tore past him. Hoskin raised his gun to shoot her, but stopped himself short at the last second. She fired again and Hoskin turned to see another body blasted back against the opposite wall.

  She said something, but he could barely hear her. He pointed to his ears.

  She came to his side. He could feel her body heat radiating towards him. She shouted, “If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it already.”

  He lowered his gun arm.

  “Any more?” he shouted.

  She shook her head. She was only inches from him. He stood up and looked at her.

  “We can’t stay here though,” she shouted. “More will come.”

  “Come on.”

  He grabbed her hand and led her quickly to the roof. They got in his car, stealthed and took off. A thick blanket of drones was out now, scanning the skies and the streets. It was going to be hard to move around freely. Hoskin pulled up his police feeds. The city had erupted: scattered gun battles all over as people resisted martial law; a battle at the Farm as cops tried to shoot their way out; a riot and a huge surge of people moving towards the northern city, the rich part, police and soldiers unable to slow them down.

  The ringing slowly faded to a low throb.

  “This is what he wanted,” Sakura said softly.

  “Where is he?”

  “Here,” she said, pointing to the northern part of the city on the map. “Most of him anyway.”

  She blinked an address at it. Hoskin confirmed and the car took off, moving at top speed through the restricted zone. Hoskin let it fly on full auto, resisting the urge to seize manual control. Assault drones were already pounding them with warnings to get in their homes, but the car’s ID let them pass.

  “I’ll drop you somewhere safe. I know a place not far—” he said.

  “No. No way. I’m coming,” she said with a sudden fury. “It has to be me. I’ll kill him.”

  Her eyes filled with a dark wrath.

  “All right,” he said. “He’ll know you’re coming though.”

  “I don’t care. It’s got to stop. Tonight. All of it. I’ve been trying to keep him out. I think I can keep him out.”

  Hoskin thought about it. “Even if he does get into your head, maybe we can use it to our advantage.”

  “How?”

  “Can’t tell you now in case you can’t keep him out. But he’s not getting away,” he said.

  He waved the feeds across the window and muted them. The dark images played silently: a gunman firing from cover before a drone ripped him apart; a crowd overwhelming a Sentinel; the President speaking, surrounded by solemn advisors; a huge crowd surging towards the citadels of the rich as riot drones pounded them with rubber bullets.

  “They’re heading right for where we’re going,” she said, pointing at the massive crowd pushing to the north.

  “We’ll get there first.”

  The car blazed through the night, the city blurring around them, but to Hoskin it couldn’t move fast enough. They were still twenty minutes out and the Tangles were offline. Sirens screamed outside, coming from a thousand directions.

  “Thank you for believing me,” she said softly. “You didn’t have to. I’m not even sure why you did. I wouldn’t believe me.”

  He looked at her but didn’t say anything. She couldn’t meet his eyes. She just stared at the floor. She could still be lying. But why go through all this? No. He would trust her.

  “When I was little, momma taught me the scorpion game,” she said, her voice changed, childlike. “She fried up a black scorpion, not enough to kill it, just enough to make it terrified, fill it with pain, enough to make it lash out at anything that came near it. She put it under a bowl and made me pick one ‘cause I’d stolen something from the lady down the hall, a little stupid thing that didn’t mean anything to anyone. Pick wrong, get stung. I got stung.

  “I figured it out later. She put one under every bowl. She wasn’t so smart. Not so smart at all. I found those dead scorpions in the trash tube. I got the idea then. Don’t know how, but I just thought, if I could be in more than one place at once, I could always win. I didn’t know nothing about Polymorphs then. They didn’t exist. But I saw those smashed scorpions and I just had this idea that was crazy. Is that crazy? I’m crazy I know. I killed her. I’d kill her again. I don’t feel bad about that. That one I don’t ever feel bad about. No. I’d kill her again.”

  Hoskin touched her face gently. “What happened to you wasn’t your fault. But what happens now is. Now you make your own choices. We put a stop to it tonight.”

  “I know. I’m tired, so tired of being angry all the time. Just because there’s evil people in the world, doesn’t mean there aren’t good ones.” She looked up, her eyes big and hopeful. “Like you.”

  She looked down again.

  “What else?” he said. “What did we miss? What do I need to know
?”

  “Our real name’s Salaris Venadrik. We made up Daniels. Faked our death. Created a new life. Lots of new lives. We want to punish everyone for what happened to us, but it won’t ever be enough. I know that now. It’ll never, ever be enough.”

  Venadrik: the system’s tech, son of the whore. Daniels must have been checking for loose ends when he went to see his mother’s friend. That’s why she wound up dead.

  “And the other Daniels that died, just another Morph, to throw us off the trail?” said Hoskin.

  “Yeah.”

  “And the backbrains? How did you get in?”

  “We’ve been attacking them for twenty years. But we also worked on new programs. We see things sometimes,” she said, hanging her head. “We see numbers. And the numbers tell us things. We wrote programs that worked faster. But most of them took a long time.”

  He looked at Sakura. She looked stunning, but a little different, not like any woman he remembered from his past now. No more illusions. This was her now, unfiltered. And he still wanted her. He wouldn’t lie to himself about that. Just looking at her sent a charge through his whole body.

  He’d slept with the killer. He wanted to have an opinion on that, but he didn’t. Not now, because there was something much worse that he had to face: Quinlin.

  In a way he didn’t want to know about Quinlin, but that wasn’t his way. He always had to know. Not liking the answer didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting the right one. The rest would work itself out.

  “And Quinlin’s one of you too?” he said. “He just doesn’t know it?”

  “Yeah.”

  And there it was.

  “How’s that possible?”

  “Memory implants. Early on we tried lots of them. Figured it would make us better able to hide. We tried lots of different memory combinations, hoping to make the right personalities, people who weren’t like us, but who we could control. But they rebelled. They were different people. They didn’t know they were Venadrik. We killed most of them. The others got away and we lost track of them, like your friend. We couldn’t see or hear them anymore and they didn’t know us. At least not until recently, when there were more of us. That seemed to amplify our mind. Then they started to open to us again. We could see your friend. And in little pieces he could see us too.”

  Her words made his heart drop. He could be one too. His memories could be a lie. He could ask her. No. He knew himself. He was sure of it. He didn’t need to ask. He already knew himself.

  “Why not just kill them all as soon as you found them? Why let Quinlin keep going?”

  “Figured anyone who escaped might be useful later. We might find a way to bring them back.”

  She looked to her right suddenly and shouted. “No I won’t. I won’t. Leave me alone. Don’t try it. It’s done. I’m doing it.”

  Hoskin watched her warily. She seemed to blur for a moment. It was obvious she was still at war with herself. She looked back at him, and then cast her eyes down.

  “Sorry,” she said, not looking up. “I’m trying.”

  “So Quinlin thought he was going crazy — seeing things, hearing things — but he was just hearing the rest of your thoughts?”

  She nodded. There was nothing else to say. Now they just had to finish it.

  They’d reached the massive barrier portal at the north of the city. Its swollen energy turned bright red and squeezed the car. It read his ID and peeled back to let them through.

  He looked behind them. His eyes zoomed. He saw the crowd not far off, surging up the main artery of the city, like a superheated river of lava, a million people marching. A cloud of drones and nano blanketed the sky above them. He could see the drones firing relentlessly, their muzzle flashes brilliant in the dark. And these weren’t rubber bullets now. They were shooting to kill. Bodies dropped and disappeared but the people just kept coming. The drones couldn’t kill them fast enough. They’d come to fight. Hoskin could see little energy shields everywhere, the people holding them together like a phalanx. They weren’t going down easy.

  “They won’t get through the barrier,” she said.

  “They will. They’ve been pushed too far. They’ll find a way to bring it down. We don’t have much time.”

  The car charged forward, into the valleys of the mega-buildings, many of them blacked out or dimly lit, locked down by defense protocols. Invisible drones pounded Hoskin’s car with increasingly paranoid scans. Hoskin knew it wouldn’t take much for them to start firing on anything that moved, no matter what some ID read.

  The streets were deserted up here. Everyone had retreated inside their fortresses or escaped the city. His car spotted visual anomaly after anomaly as terrified families in personal starships took off into the night, trying to escape the angry public.

  They made it through the second barrier. Hoskin’s car twisted and swerved, and then suddenly it was slicing through the sky over the black forest around the building Quinlin died in.

  “He gonna run?” said Hoskin.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Part of him thinks when everyone sees what we did, they’ll make him king. No. I won’t do it. No. No. No. Shut up,” she shouted. She turned back to Hoskin. “I’m sorry.”

  “You gonna make it?”

  “I’m fine. Let’s go do this.”

  They landed on the road, the dark trees looming all around them. They flicked on personal stealth, stepped out cautiously and got low. Up ahead Venadrik’s building stood, blotting out the sky, waiting for them, its windows ink black, its organic body armored like a scorpion’s segmented exoskeleton.

  Catching Scorpions

  Hoskin and Sakura crept around the back of the building, moving through the trees, both of them invisible. They’d shared personal signatures so he could see her ghostly outline on his innervision. All around them they could hear the sounds of conflict: gunfire in the distance, getting closer, a tide of voices, even with the industrial sonic dampeners the rich used. Hoskin was sure the crowd was at the energy barrier now.

  “If they get through, that’ll complicate things,” she flashed.

  “We worry about that when it happens. Right now we round up the rest of you,” flashed Hoskin.

  “There’s a lot in there.”

  “How many?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Walk in the park.”

  It took almost ten minutes to breach the tree cover. The seconds ticked away in Hoskin’s eye. He wanted to go faster, but the trees were so thick and knotted it was like threading a maze. Sakura moved like a jaguar, lithe and agile, but as they got closer he noticed her movements getting increasingly erratic. She’d shake or turn around suddenly or one of her arms would shoot out and then drop back to her side.

  “You all right?” he flashed.

  “I’m fine. Harder to keep them out, closer I get.”

  Finally they broke through the trees and stood before the energy door at the back of the building.

  Hoskin’s arm broke apart and reformed into a powerful smart rifle, jagged and yet smoothly curved and biomechanical. Sakura let the door scan her with a stab of red light. It peeled back. She hesitated, then turned to Hoskin.

  “There’s something waiting for us. If I know me,” she flashed with a smile.

  “Lucky I come prepared then.”

  Hoskin grabbed a portable fire shield from his arm bag and tossed it into the doorway. It flared up brilliant purple. He stepped in behind it, Sakura following.

  “You are trespassing,” said a maid, a delicate young girl in a black and white lace uniform, her body subtly distorted by the shield. There were six of them, perfect clones.

  “House defense drones,” Sakura flashed, and her hands exploded suddenly with white fire.

  One of the maids flew back, her green guts spewing as the blasts tore into her.

  Hoskin dropped to one knee and fired, his smart rounds swerving and weaving around the shield.

>   The maids’ bodies ripped open from their heads to their torsos. They split right down the middle and thick, gnarled vines studded with weapons burst from where their spines had been a second before. Their right forearms broke open, revealing heavy laser assault rifles, dark and brutally ridged.

  The maids fell back behind cover in the huge first floor. Their small frames gave them an advantage. They moved easily behind things, while Sakura and Hoskin were pinned down behind their shield. Sakura was firing in crazed bursts, shredding a red couch that one of the maids crouched behind, the blasts ripping through the thin fabric and tearing apart her synthetic body, exposing clustered white tubes and nervewires.

  The maids moved well, using guerilla tactics, popping up, shooting, ducking, spreading out. They hit Hoskin’s shield from multiple angles, with rapid, precision volleys. The shield flared yellow, warning that it would short out. A few of the maids fell back through open doors. Hoskin caught two of them trying to get to higher ground, his smart rounds curving up the stairs and tearing into their backs. They collapsed and slid down, leaving a trail of white slime.

  Two maids still held their ground. Hoskin’s fire shield turned bright red. It was going to give out.

  Sakura suddenly dashed from behind the barrier, moving with astonishing speed, charging forward, her hands brilliant white light. She leapt on one of the maids, ripping and tearing with searing hands.

  Hoskin popped up and unleashed a furious volley of explosive rounds that destroyed the second maid’s right arm and blew apart her chest. With Hoskin’s shots still pounding her, she staggered towards Sakura, managing to get close. She collapsed and exploded, sending Sakura flying.

  With all the maids down, Hoskin rushed to Sakura’s side, still scanning through his holographic sight, ready for more. Nothing. He got to her and crouched down. She was still invisible, her thermoptic-camo holding up.

  She was alive. Her jacket and pants were shredded in spots and he could see cuts and shrapnel riddled her body. He grabbed a medspider syringe from his bag and injected her arm and leg.