by D L Young
In the adjoining room, Tommy pointed to the array of holo monitors with the sticky cam feeds. Police clad in full rhino gear stormed up stairwells, brandishing stubby rifles. There were dozens of them.
14 - Nowheresville
“To the roof!” Beatrice shouted, throwing open the door to the stairway.
Lozano sprinted up the stairs to the awaiting hover. Tommy followed close behind.
A concussive boom rattled the building. The floor shook with such force Maddox thought it might collapse. He looked at the monitors and saw a chaos of fire and smoke and rhino cops running back and forth.
Beatrice tugged at his arm. “A welcome package I laid out just in case. It’ll slow them down but it won’t stop them. Let’s get out of here.” She bounded up the stairs in long, leaping strides.
At the top, she turned around. “Maddox, get up here!” She urgently beckoned him to follow. Behind her sat the hover, where Tommy and Lozano were already climbing in.
Maddox went halfway up the stairs, then stopped. The dataset!
He went back down into the room. “What the hell are you doing?” Beatrice shouted after him.
He grabbed his deck off the sofa and tucked it under his arm. As he ran back to the stairs, the front door exploded, splinters flying in all directions. The blast stopped him cold, as if he’d collided against some invisible wall. Stunned, he watched smoke billow in from the corridor. From the thick cloud emerged a pair of rhino cops, their rifles shouldered.
Recovering himself, he bolted for the stairway. Time slowed as shots rang out, his each lunging step and pump of his arms lasting an eternity. The meat was slow. He focused on Beatrice’s sunlit silhouette above him, waving him on. Gunfire popped in his ears, things around him whizzed and burst and clanged. And then he was up, up, up the steps, climbing the entire staircase in what felt like a single bounding step. A shock of white daylight and cold wind hit his face as he reached the roof. Beatrice tossed a hissing cannister down into the loft and slammed the door shut. A moment later bullets burst through the door’s thin metal, leaving a patternless arrangement of burst holes. Maddox dove into the hover, knocking his head against the passenger door frame. Beatrice jumped into the driver’s seat and yanked down on the door handle.
Turbofans screamed as the hover rocketed away from the rooftop. Acceleration pressed Maddox against the seat. His head smarting, he turned and peered out the rear window at the building, as did Tommy and Lozano from the vehicle’s back seat. A flash of light filled the top floor and windows exploded outward. The blast’s concussion slammed against the hover. Red lights flashed on the dash and klaxons blared warnings as the vehicle tilted sickeningly and lost altitude. They dropped several stomach-churning stories before autosafeties regained control, steadying the hover.
Rocking back and forth like a rowboat on rippling water, the vehicle hung in the empty air outside the transit lanes, its passengers speechless, breathing in heavy gasps as they tried to gather themselves. Beatrice tapped the dash, shutting off the alarms. Then she steered the hover toward the dense traffic of the lower lanes. They merged with the congested flow, hidden like a fish inside an enormous school. Maddox had the deck pressed against his chest.
“What do we do now?” Tommy asked from the back seat.
Maddox peered out the window. In the distance, beyond the City, lay a vast, desolate expanse.
“Now we disappear,” he said.
***
“Well, I’ll be goddamned. If it isn’t the infamous Blackburn Maddox.” Lazlo laughed, his torso jiggling like gelatin. He wore a T-shirt with yellow pit stains and sat with bare feet propped up on the desk in his tiny, filthy office. “What are you doing, giving your friends a tour of your old life?” He smoked a cigar that didn’t quite mask the sour stink of his body.
“Something like that,” Maddox said. He hadn’t seen Lazlo in a couple years, but nothing about the man or his nameless fleabag Jersey hotel seemed to have changed one bit. “Presidential suite available?” Maddox asked.
Lazlo chewed his cigar, gazing over Maddox’s three companions with suspicious eyes. “You vouch for them?”
“Don’t I always?”
“Rooney always did the vouching, the way I remember it. His word was worth something.”
Maddox clenched his teeth. “I’m not here to walk down memory lane, fat man. I just need a key and some quiet.”
A thin haze of smoke covered the low ceiling. Lazlo stared ponderously at Maddox.
“Triple rate,” the proprietor said.
Triple rate. The crook must have been able to smell their desperation. Nothing like a little price-gouging between old friends, was there?
“And a week in advance.” Lazlo grinned, the cigar clamped between yellow teeth. A sheen of sweat covered his face.
“I may not be here that long.”
“Week in advance,” Lazlo repeated, “or you can look someplace else.”
Before Maddox could tell the man to screw himself, Beatrice stepped forward and placed a roll of cash on the desktop. Lazlo deftly swiped it into the top drawer, then fished around and pulled out an old-fashioned metal key on a loop of frayed rope. He slid it toward Maddox. “Need me to show you the way?”
“I’ll find it.” He took the key and left the office, his associates following him down a twisting dimly lit corridor.
He’d stayed at Lazlo’s place a few times, on those occasions when he and Rooney had pulled a job where something hadn’t gone to plan and they’d needed to get off the grid for a while. That was what Lazlo’s place offered: somewhere you could disappear. A crumbling warehouse subdivided into twenty rooms and located in an abandoned New Jersey industrial park, the building had no address, no connectivity, no guest list, and operated on a cash-only basis. Nowheresville was what Rooney had called it.
Maddox found the room that matched the number on the key. The “suite” was a large room that had once been two adjacent smaller ones, the dividing wall between them long since torn down. A single naked lightbulb—Maddox was surprised to find it actually working—hung by a thin wire and glowed yellow, throwing long shadows across the pitted cement floor and bare walls. Four cots with rusted frames lay strewn about, one of them leg side up. A folding card table, an old stained sofa, and some chairs were shoved into a corner. The space looked like a roomy prison cell.
“So I’m guessing no room service?” Beatrice said, closing the door behind them.
“This is a suite?” Lozano made a face like he’d just seen a dead rat.
“It ain’t half-bad,” Tommy said.
They settled in, arranging the chairs in a circle and sitting. “So who’s this Rooney?” Beatrice asked.
“Somebody I used to work with,” Maddox answered.
“Datajacking,” Beatrice said, in a way that made it sound like she was completing his sentence.
Maddox shrugged. Beatrice nodded in satisfaction, as if a long-pondered question had finally been answered. “I knew you were street,” she said.
Salaryman or street datajacker. Low-level corporati or urban degenerate. Privileged or screwed. Sitting there, rolling a cigarette and trying to make sense of the past few hours, Maddox wasn’t sure what his current status was or where exactly he fit in the big machine. Nowheresville was a kind of limbo, an unmoored place, and that was exactly how he felt at the moment. Adrift and uncertain.
He lit the cigarette, blew smoke. When he asked Beatrice and Lozano—trying to make the question as innocent-sounding as possible—what they’d seen in their specs during the attempted call, both gave the same answer. They’d sat there, waiting for a solid connection as the linking app autocycled through fails and retries for several minutes, and then the kid started shouting. Neither Beatrice nor Lozano had seen anything other than a failed call. And since Maddox had subvocalized his conversation with the AI, they hadn’t heard anything either.
Lozano’s knee bobbed up and down, manic hands fidgeted. The hustler was in bad shape. He’d
signed up for a simple break-in, and he’d ended up with two dead ’Nettes and rhino cops and an exploding building. He looked like he might lose it at any moment.
“We have try to get through to Hahn-Parker again,” Beatrice proposed. “Maybe he can get the heat off of us.”
That wouldn’t be Maddox’s first choice. The mercenary woman of course had no way of knowing that was the last thing they should do. No way of knowing the AI would intercept a second call as it had done the first time, sniff out their location again, and this time it would send in five times as many cops.
Lozano shook his head. “I say we split up.”
“No,” Beatrice said, staring him down. “Like I said, we’re not separating until we figure this out.”
“What’s to figure out, lady?” Lozano whined. “You see how many cops were back there? That’s a lot of heat, Bright Eyes. And you probably took a few out with those fireworks of yours.”
“Doubtful,” she said. “They were armored up.”
“Bah,” the hustler said dismissively. “You don’t know that. You don’t have any idea.” He shook a finger at her. “If you put a cop killer rap on Chico, you’re going to pay for it, lady.”
The hustler babbled on. Hahn-Parker had screwed them over, lied to them about the job, and that highfloor bastard wasn’t going to lift a finger to help them. Lozano didn’t know what was on that dataset and he didn’t want to know. All he wanted was out, right here and right now.
Her arms crossed, Beatrice stared impassively at the hustler until he finally ran out of steam. When she spoke, it was with a firm, calm voice. “No one’s going anywhere. Got it?”
Lozano wilted under her gaze, his energy gone, shoulders sagging in surrender. Good, Maddox noted. He didn’t want Lozano running around on the loose any more than Beatrice did. Not right now anyway. Not while he was still panicked and jittery, fretting over a prison sentence. If they let him walk out the door in his current state, he might get picked up by the cops and sell the three of them out for a plea deal. The mercenary clearly didn’t want to toss that particular coin, and neither did Maddox.
A sudden weariness overcame the datajacker, the comedown finally hitting him after running on adrenaline for hours. The three others seemed likewise spent, though it showed less on Beatrice. Ragged and tired, the four agreed to get a few hours of rest and figure out their next move in the morning.
***
Hiverises looked different at night and from a distance. They were silent and majestic like mountain ranges bejeweled with amber points of light. Hovers moved in thin coordinated knots along invisible transit lanes, floating like clusters of stars among the City’s massive superstructures.
The City. The island of Manhattan was its northern tip, the edge of a vast urban archipelago of continuous building clusters grown together like some enormous coral reef, spanning over three hundred kilometers from New York City to Washington, D.C., though you heard those names less and less these days. It was all just the City, the biggest city anywhere. His city. It had reared him on its streets, watched over him with its dispassionate guardianship. It had fed him, fucked him, rewarded him, punished him. The City was glorious and the City was brutal. It was hell and paradise. He’d never lived anywhere else, knew he never would. The City was him and he was the City, for better or for worse.
Maddox sat on the roof of Nowheresville, alone with his thoughts, smoking and watching the slow animation of the City’s light show, some twenty klicks away. Behind him a door opened and shut. He turned to see Beatrice approaching. She sat next to him.
“Where’s Lozano?” Maddox asked.
“Kid’s keeping an eye on him. Told him to yell if he tries to bug out on us.”
Maddox smoked, the deck sitting next to him.
“What do you think its worth?” Beatrice asked, looking down at it.
“Besides four lives, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“No idea.” He blew smoke.
“So just how screwed you think we are?” she asked.
“How would I know?”
“I think you know better than I do.”
“That’s a big assumption.”
“Is it?” she said. “When I said we should call Hahn-Parker again, your face dropped like you’d just lost a wad of money on a bad dice roll.”
Those damn eyes of hers. What could those things not see?
“You don’t trust him at all, do you?” she asked.
Maddox didn’t answer.
She nodded, taking his silence as an admission. “Because if you had any faith in him at all, you wouldn’t be up here right now. You’d be trying to reach him, dangling that dataset in front of him like bait, begging him to get the cops off your ass. But instead, you’re sitting here in the dark chewing over God knows what.”
“Maybe that’s what I’m going to do, and I’m just trying to figure out the best way to dangle the bait.”
“And maybe you know a lot more than you’re telling me,” she said, letting the accusation hang in the darkness a few moments before going on, “about what’s on that dataset, about those ’Nettes back there, and about our employer.”
He smoked, keeping his gaze steady on the distant lights. “So what, those black market peepers of yours can read minds too?”
Yes, he knew far more than he’d told her. He knew, for instance, he could no longer count on the mothership protection of Latour-Fisher Biotech because he was no longer a company man. That gig had ended the second the company AI had called in the cops. He was on his own now.
“What are you holding back, salaryman?” she said. He didn’t turn to look at her, but he could feel her insistent stare. For a moment he considered spilling it, telling her about the AI and the strange parley at the old train station. But then he reconsidered. It was a crazy tale. AIs warring with each other. He hardly believed it himself.
He sat there, smoking and staring out at the City. How we wished Rooney were still around. Rooney could tell him if what he’d been up mulling over up here on the roof was batshit crazy or not. Maybe it didn’t matter. Any step forward, crazy or not, felt like a better plan than hiding out and hoping you weren’t found.
“I know someone,” he said, placing his hand on the deck, “who might know what to make of this.”
“Who?”
“Someone I used to know.” Someone he swore he’d never see again, but now it seemed he had little choice.
15 - Lora
By the next morning, four had become three. Despite the proximity sensors Beatrice had placed along the room’s inner and outer perimeters, Lozano had managed to sneak away during the night.
“Slippery son of a bitch,” the mercenary muttered angrily, shaking her head as she collected the sensors the hustler had somehow managed to avoid setting off.
“How do you think he did it?” Maddox asked.
“Oozed under the crack in the door like the slime he is,” she answered, eliciting a chuckle from Tommy, who was peering outside through the shades.
“Hover’s still there,” the kid said.
Maddox and Beatrice considered going after him for a moment, then agreed it would be a waste of time. They had no idea which way he’d gone or how long ago he’d left. Chico Lozano was long gone, and they hoped he could avoid the cops as easily as he’d avoided the sensors.
“Forget him,” Maddox said, “we’ve got an errand to run.”
Minutes later the trio entered Manhattan airspace, the hover’s engine whining steadily. Maddox shifted in his seat. Coming back to the City unnerved him, like at any second police hovers would come down on him like swarming wasps, blue and red lights flashing. He raised his jacket collar as if this might somehow make him less conspicuous. The hover had avoided being tagged during their escape from Sunset Park (they never could have gotten within a klick of Manhattan if it had), but he still felt as if a thousand eyes were watching him as they flitted through the City’s canyons. Holo ads blinked to life around hi
m. A twenty-story movie star raising a glass of J&B on the rocks. A cyclist thrusting his arms skyward as he burst through a finish line tape. The kid sat in the back, silently watching the City pass by. Greek script scrolled in the bottom quarter of Maddox’s lens. The trio wore the veils they’d acquired from Lozano’s gear man, toggling out of the tourist IDs and into a fresh set of new ones: Greek consulate staff.
“No guarantees,” Maddox reminded Beatrice. “She might know something, she might not.”
“Your optimism’s overwhelming,” she said. The hover descended into the lower, more congested transit lanes.
Maddox rolled a cigarette. “Not in the hover,” Beatrice said. He gave her a disapproving look and tucked it away in his shirt pocket.
Minutes later they docked against a top-floor hover platform at an East Village lowrise. The passenger door rose and the buzz of the City filled the vehicle.
“I’m coming with you,” Beatrice said as Maddox started to get out.
They’d argued the point on and off since leaving Nowheresville, never coming to an agreement. “I told you, she might get spooked if you’re there. Besides”—he tapped his specs—“you’ll be with me the whole time. Something goes down you don’t like, feel free to come and bust the door down.”
The mercenary scowled at him for a long moment. “Don’t screw this up, salaryman.”
She didn’t trust him, and he didn’t blame her. Their connection was a tenuous one, a shared desperation to find out how big a mess they were in. It was the thinnest of bonds, an association more easily broken than maintained. There was no way of knowing, for instance, if the hover would be here when he returned or if she’d take off the moment he was out of sight. Or maybe she’d already decided to take care of loose ends, waiting for him to turn his back so she could put a bullet in his head as soon as he stepped out of the hover.
With this morbid thought lingering in his head, he climbed out of the vehicle and entered the building. He let out a breath as the vestibule door slid shut behind him.
