Katya fired. She got off four shots before a second man coming in behind the monster raised a weapon. He used the bigger man for cover, exposing only his head and shooting arm. Their guns fired within a fraction of a second of each other. She tried to hit him in the face, but missed by an inch. His shot nailed her in the right shoulder, deadening her arm. The big guy seemed to shrug off the effect of being shot multiple times and stormed over.
She slumped to the side, firing twice more with her left hand, hitting nothing but a vase, which exploded in a shower of little blue bits. The big man grabbed her by the wrists and hauled her into the air. He squeezed until she lost her grip on the weapon, then carried her into the living room where he flung her at the couch. Katya grunted on landing, and curled to one side with a hand over her bleeding shoulder.
The oaf, the guy who shot her, and a third man walked around and stood in front of her. All three had medium brown skin and dark hair, though none had any trace of Hispanic in their features. As soon as she looked at their faces, she assumed them ACC. Her gaze drifted to the big guy’s chest, where four slugs nested in shallow, bloody holes, stalled on subdermal armor.
“Greetings, Miss Volkov,” said the center man. “I’m sorry if we’ve caught you at a bad time. I should warn you that Raúl”―he gestured at the large man―”is unaffected by synthetic pheromones. He gets rather upset when people attempt to use them.”
He’s no more named Raúl than I’m going to grow wings and fly. She stared at him.
“Julio”―the center man gestured to the one who’d shot her―”enjoys the sound of women screaming.”
‘Julio’ smiled.
“I have some questions for you. If I like your answers, we’ll simply kill you. If I don’t like your answers, I’ll bring you to the point where you wish for death, and then we’ll ship you back to Vertex Investments.”
She dug her fingers into the skin around the wound, scowling. “Whatever you think, you’re probably wrong. My going to LRI wasn’t political, just a data courier job.”
“An interesting, and effective cover.” He smiled. “No one is doubting you are more experienced than poor Zack.”
“Is your whole team composed of scrubs?” Katya stared at the man on the left. “Julio? Are you serious? You do realize he looks like a Swiss hoverski instructor who’d been left in the oven too long?”
‘Raúl’ laughed. Julio seemed to think her remark less funny. He lunged in to pistol whip her in her wounded shoulder, but she kicked him in the side of the head, knocking him over the armrest to the floor.
Raúl kept laughing.
Julio jumped to his feet, his fake-tan face darkening with rage. She fired back a defiant stare. The unnamed man pointed a gun at her and nodded at Julio. The orange one raised his gun a second time, but she kicked him the head again, knocking him to the side.
“You’re not going to kill me until I tell you whatever it is you want to know.”
“Correct.” The unnamed man shot her in the right thigh.
Katya swallowed the scream, but shuddered from the pain.
Julio roared and jumped on her. Rather than bash his gun into her shoulder, he jabbed his finger in the bullet wound and twisted.
Katya sent her mind back to the same place she’d used when her trainers had her handcuffed to an electrified bedframe, wet and naked. She pictured herself as a serene white butterfly, gliding over a field of endless snow, the skyline of Moscow a distant dark presence on the horizon.
“Enough.” The unnamed man pulled Julio back.
At the sight of the men looking blurry already, she worried. Hopefully, it came from pain and not blood loss.
“Mommy?” asked a tiny voice. “Who are these men?”
No… Eve… what are you doing?
“Go… wait in your room, sweetie.” Katya lifted her head to peer toward the sound.
Eve stood a few feet away in a white nightgown dotted with red hearts, head down. The girl clutched a brown teddy bear to her chest, half-hiding her face behind it. She stared at Katya; for an instant, her sapphire-blue eyes held no trace of childishness, but warning.
Katya glanced at the bear before glaring at Raúl. “You’re lucky you have that dermal armor.”
Eve looked up at Raúl.
The big man picked two bullets out of his chest, sneering at her. “You will hurt soon enough.”
Julio let out a dark chuckle and stomped over behind Eve. She started to look up at him with a wide-eyed pleading face, but squealed when he grabbed a fistful of hair and put his gun to the side of her head. “Best answer the man’s questions. This one’ll bleed out fast.”
“Mommy!” shouted Eve. “He’s hurting me!” She burst into tears, and clutched her bear tight.
“Now, bitch,” said Julio. “How much do they know? How’d you find Zack?” He pulled Eve up onto her toes by his grip on her hair. The girl’s scream didn’t sound faked. “One more thing comes out of your mouth I don’t like, and this one’s brains are on the floor.”
“Don’t kill the little one,” said the unnamed man. “Start in the leg or something. More motivation.”
Katya yelled, “All right! Please don’t hurt her. She’s only eight. She’s got nothing to do with this.”
“Out with it,” said the unnamed man.
“I’m not working for the government. I took a job to smuggle data out of the building, and Zack was thinking with his dick. He wanted to get laid, so he followed me and blabbed all about being an infiltrator. My network techniques are evidently rather obvious, so he thought I was part of another insertion team he hadn’t been told about. I went in to get data, nothing more. It isn’t my fault Zack is an idiot who only got into the OOI because his parents pulled strings.”
The unnamed man stared at her with cold eyes. She couldn’t read him, which worried her. This guy had at least some competence.
Eve sniffled and whine-murmured, “Owowowowow.”
“Gah!” yelled Julio. He released her and jumped back, staring down at his wet leg.
Eve leaned backward a touch and shifted toward him.
Bang!
The bear’s face exploded with a flash of azure flame and a shower of fluff. Julio’s head rocked back, a bullet hole under his chin; the ceiling above him flashed red. She shoved her arm out in front of her and shot Raúl twice in the side of the head before putting a third round into the unnamed man’s chest.
Raúl fell straight down like a sack of dirt. The unnamed man grunted and wheezed, struggling to bring his gun around on the child as he collapsed to one knee. More fluff flew out of the bear’s face as another shot hit the unnamed man in the cheek, knocking him over backward. His gun went off once, but hit only ceiling.
Eve approached Raúl, planted one tiny bare foot on his chest, and shot him again point blank in the forehead, spraying the carpet with gore. She pivoted left, fed the unnamed man two more to the face, and padded over to Julio, who got three in the heart.
Katya grabbed her shoulder with her left hand, her thigh with the other, and stared at Eve. This ‘child’ had killed three men in four seconds, without even sighting over the pistol she’d concealed in the teddy bear.
The girl walked up to her. Urine yellowed the lower part of her nightgown and trickled down her exposed shin. “I wasn’t really scared enough to piss myself. I needed him to get the gun out of my ear.”
“I figured… it worked.” Katya looked at the terminal on the coffee table. “Terminal, emergency services. Police and a MedVan.”
“Confirm emergency services request,” said a digitized male voice.
“Yes. Need police.”
“Transmitting your request for assistance. Please stand by.”
The room shimmered with millions of light dots for an instant as the terminal generated a 3D model of the surroundings, which it probably sent to the dispatcher.
Hopefully, three dead bodies will get someone’s attention.
Eve shrank in on herself, once ag
ain seeming like a frightened child. Snow-white hair hung a little past her shoulders, framing a visage of sorrowful innocence. She peered at her teddy’s mauled face, and thrust out her lower lip in a pout.
“Mommy…? Mr. Bear’s got a boo.”
our faces stared at Nina from holo-panels hanging in the air over her desk. She held a large dark chocolate latte to her chin, letting the fragrant steam waft into her nostrils. Detective Weber’s information identified four individuals who collectively accounted for eighty-three percent of all Harmony circulating in West City. The remainder came from thousands of others. As far as she’d been able to tell, the Syndicate hadn’t touched Harmony or Tao, presumably due to the ready availability and low profit margin. A drug that could, in some cases, keep its user ‘high’ for eight hours and cost a mere forty or so credits per dose didn’t generate the sort of income that would’ve gotten organized crime involved.
Or maybe they knew something.
She locked eyes with the first image: Ricky Barron, a baby-faced twenty-two-year-old with shoulder-length teal hair, emerald green eyes, and a broad grin. Weber’s comments said he tended to stick with tamer chems such as Flowerbasket, Sandman, or Smileys, and consequently had no prior run-ins with Division 1 beyond the usual shakedowns. No charges filed. He lived out of a semi-functional gym in the Sector 71 grey zone, fifteen miles north of the southern edge of the elevated city. Prior to Harmony, he’d been small time, selling the ‘light stuff’ to locals in the area. In the past few months, he’d built up a network of runners and established connections with seventeen other dealers in a vast distribution system. All of it offline, word of mouth, sneaker-to-pavement. That struck her as unusual, since it made for a significant overhead of time. Of course, it also drove Detective Weber’s team nuts since they had to investigate everything on foot.
The second dealer, a thirty-seven-year-old who went by the name ‘Easy’ or ‘JJ’ on the street, real name Jason James Castle, had skin so dark his photo resembled a sniper silhouette target. He lacked Ricky’s smile, but otherwise looked like someone had taken a corporate executive and put him in frumpy street clothes. Easy’s record had a fair amount of arrests, the majority of which related to gang violence rather than chems. He’d done a couple of short prison stints, but had remained under the radar for the past four years. Weber’s notes put him in Sector 7111, about a quarter of the way north from the southern end of West City, over an area formerly known as Modoc County, California. He rented a super-economy one-room apartment about a mile from where Sector 7111 bordered the grey zone of Sector 7059. The location offered him access to a massive blight spot: Three sectors worth of black zones, and fourteen surrounding grey sectors.
Nina shook her head. All those people barely hanging on to survival and they threw a good part of whatever money they scraped up at JJ Castle for Harmony. No wonder he had such a large market share. Even the ‘norms’ from surrounding regular sectors risked a trip near the grey to get his product. Everyone’s so desperate to shake off the weight of their lives. She glanced at another panel, showing a Harmony pill, an ordinary capsule half black, half white. The white end had a black dot at the tip and the black end had a white dot. Cute. Yin and Yang. One small pill and your worries stop bothering you. She shook her head with a sigh. This drug isn’t aimed at addicts and dosers, it’s for everyone else.
The third dealer in Detective Weber’s files went by ‘Mama Fine,’ real name Jen Alvarez. She looked a little older than her nineteen years―Nina would’ve guessed younger twenties―even with the garish hot pink hair. Weber appeared to enjoy investigating her as she did so much business via the GlobeNet, they never had to leave the Police Administrative Center. Mama Fine rarely met clients in person, instead selling Harmony, Racer Dots, Smileys, Narcoderm Ultra (the prescription strength version of the OTC painkiller), as well as Flowerbasket, Sandman, and SandBasket. Nina cringed. SandBasket was the kind of drug that required a user clear their weekend plans before taking it. Combining the super-relaxing placid hallucinogen Flowerbasket with Sandman, a drug famous for giving its users wild dreams so vivid they often believed them real, could ruin a person for days at a time.
Everything Mama Fine did happened via cyberspace. She’d even made her own delivery bot units. Nina cracked up laughing at a note in the file where it mentioned ComTec International, the company that ran most of the UCF’s delivery bot and advert bots, had tried to sue her for using the term ‘delivery bot.’ Of course, they offered to drop the suit if she contracted with them for distribution.
“Wow… Did that shithead even realize this woman’s selling illegal chems?” They saw someone using bots and went into attack mode before they looked. “Unbelievable.”
The final dealer made her quirk an eyebrow. One Fenton Asher, no cute name, sold Harmony out of his apartment in Sector 16612, far in the north end of West City over former Canada. Asher had a high-end apartment in a gated building where each floor held only eight dwellings. The file also indicated he worked as a senior director of marketing for Timmons-Orben hovercars. His Harmony distribution catered to the corporate crowd, and he tended to sell in bulk, presumably to people who re-sold much of it to their co-workers.
“Why did our mysterious source choose these four…?”
She spent the next two hours running facial pattern matches and financial analysis routines, as well as sending sniffers all over the GlobeNet. None of the four seemed to have any involvement whatsoever with the ACC. Mama Fine had been the closest; her grandparents had fled ACC-controlled Mexico as teenagers. Another forty minutes checking into them, as well as her parents, turned up nothing suspicious to suggest they had any lingering connection or loyalty to the Corporates.
“Okay, that’s a big fat nothing…” She scowled at the time display on the terminal. Lunch appealed to her memory of being human, but ninety percent of what she ate wound up going right into the toilet later on. Her body took only what it needed to keep the brain and spine alive. In theory, she could subsist on two tablespoons of nutrient paste twice a day… but ugh.
Upside. I can’t get fat. She ordered a buffalo chicken sandwich before diving back into the terminal. For an hour (except a short break to run to the parking deck to meet a delivery bot), she kept digging into the backgrounds of the four dealers, looking for any common thread.
There’s got to be something. She stared from Barron, to Easy, to Mama Fine, to Fenton Asher. The sixth time she panned back and forth over the pictures, she glanced at their addresses.
Nina opened another panel with a map of West City, and plugged in the four dealers. Ricky almost at the southern edge, a turf-pounder who could get product to users living on the natural earth south of the raised portion of the city. JJ Castle’s territory appeared as a dot about a quarter of the way up, Mama Fine about halfway, and Fenton Asher at a bit past the three-quarter mark.
“Hmm. Geographic arrangement is a possibility. They’re evenly spread out.” She eyed Asher’s picture.
If the ACC used Harmony as a carrier for the nanobots, they’d want to get it into the systems of people who might be able to give them valuable information. It might not even be political in nature… this could be good old-fashioned corporate espionage. She doubted senators would bother dosing a chem like Harmony. What sort of horrible life could people at the top of the food chain have to want something like that? Perhaps a middling-upper military officer might wind up seeking it out, but the odds of that made the ACC hoping for it seem unlikely.
“So they get eyes and ears among executives, engineers, and designers…” Her gaze dropped to Ricky Barron’s pin on the map. “And they know the lower classes will crave this stuff. Right. Take the secrets from the top and ignite the bottom.”
Nina spent a few minutes adding notes to the inquest file. She theorized Harmony had two roles: one, nanobots converting unwitting individuals into mobile recording devices. Two, triggering random violent behavior with a strong anti-authority mindset. Given a probable rati
o on the conservative end of fifty poor users to every one person who might net them useful information, the drug stood a decent chance of triggering large-scale civil unrest.
“Perhaps it is political after all.” She stared at Fenton Asher. “He’s going to take the most effort… If I go after him hard, he’s going to panic and warn the source. If I scare him enough not to do that, the source will probably know something’s wrong. He doesn’t have much contact with his buyers…”
A plan to spend weeks building up a false identity as a director-level employee of some corporation and gradually make contact with him formed and died. Ugh. This will blow up in my face before I get close enough. She opened a vid call to Operations, and got a thirtyish woman with light brown hair who seemed a mix of Chinese and Caucasian.
“Ops, this is Lieutenant Duchenne. I need to own an apartment.”
The woman nodded. “Understood. Target?”
“Fenton Asher.” She slid the file from the ‘Weber’s data’ holo-panel to the one holding the vid connection. “104 CR 30014 Sector 16612. Apartment 64-7.”
“Usual?” asked the woman.
“Might as well, though I don’t need real-time feeds from the bathrooms. Primary objective is locating a source of contraband narcotics. All we have to go on right now is a Caucasian male mid-twenties to mid-fifties, light brown hair.”
“That’s not a lot, ma’am.” The woman nodded. “I’ll send this up. We should have an ops team in the place within twenty minutes, provided he’s not home. Shall I route the feeds to your terminal?”
“I need to check on a few other leads. Find me if whoever gets assigned to monitor this stream sees anything that looks like chems arriving.”
“On it.”
“Thanks, Sergeant.”
“Ma’am.” The woman hung up.
Of the remaining three, Ricky Barron and Mama Fine moved a significantly greater amount of product than JJ. The odds of running into the source with them looked much better. She arranged to have a whispercraft assigned to begin surveillance on JJ as well as Ricky. Mama did everything via remote according to Nina’s research; she never left her squat in the grey zone and Weber’s notes made it clear she never met anyone face to face. The whispercraft could do only so much there.
The Harmony Paradox (Virtual Immortality Book 2) Page 37
