Digital Chimera

by J N Chaney

  We passed through that last alley, which felt darker and narrower than any of the others. At the end of it, the lights of a broad street gleamed cheerfully ahead of us. They had escorted us through, and now they were letting us leave the maze.

  As I stepped out onto the sidewalk, I heard a voice behind me. It was the only time in that entire journey I heard one of them speak. In a mocking voice, one of the gangsters called out to us.

  “Y'all come back now, you hear?”

  8

  It was early morning, and the streets were just starting to come alive. The section walls would cast deep shadow into all but the highest levels of the city until midday, but the pink glow of Martian dawn was visible through the ice overhead. Across the street from us, a restaurant serving the local breakfast specialty was turning on its lights. The smoke from the train crash in Med Lab had reached Fast Bend, creating an unnatural early morning fog.

  “Be careful from here on out. We’ve entered Geneicide territory.” Veraldi was glancing up and down the street, discreetly scanning for potential threats.

  I blinked in confusion at him. “What?”

  He pointed to a graffiti tag on the wall across from us. It showed a stylized GC with a crude drawing of crossed thighbones.

  I pointed back to the way we had just come. “So, whose territory was that?”

  “You should be reading the briefing supplementaries before entering the field. Or did you not read the graffiti?” He looked a little bit irritated that I hadn’t already done so.

  Jones spoke up. “Those guys were from the Hive. This section’s split between the two of them. They aren’t at war yet, but it’s tense.”

  “So, why do we need to be more careful now than we were before? I mean, they shadowed us the whole way.”

  “Right.” Veraldi nodded. “They only shadowed us because the Hive’s main concern is to protect their territory. Geneicide’s different; they have a reputation.”

  “I take it we’re not talking about a good reputation.”

  “Depends.” Jones shrugged. “They’re supposed to be good at killing people.”

  “They have no reason to want to kill us,” Veraldi added. “We’re on the street now, not wandering around in the back alleys where we might see something we’re not supposed to. Don’t do anything to give them a reason and we should be fine.”

  If there was ever a less encouraging pep talk, I’m glad I wasn’t there for it.

  Veraldi started walking, so I followed.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “The station. You don’t think I’m trying to walk to Great Wall, do you?”

  Having survived a train derailing, he was ready to hop onto another train less than an hour later. I formed a reply dripping with sarcasm, but Ivanovich asked the next question.

  “When do we eat?”

  Veraldi stopped and looked at Sasha like he thought the man must be intentionally messing with him. “This isn’t a guided tour.”

  “I need energy. I need food.” Sasha’s body language had a stubborn intensity that suggested he might be about to make a problem for us.

  Veraldi gave a hard stare before answering. “Okay, then. Let’s get some breakfast.”

  We crossed the street and went in through the door of the restaurant. Back on Venus, Gabriel Anderson and I had come across a breakfast buffet in which the owner had been murdered. Like a lot of things in Tower 7, it was a somewhat over-the-top interpretation of its Earth counterpart. The colonies on Mars are much older, and Hellas is the oldest among them. Because of that long history, the city has several distinct culinary traditions of its own.

  One of those is red porridge, a gruel colored and flavored with ground red peppers and cinnamon. It’s warm and nourishing, but spicy enough to burn the back of your throat. A few years back, there was a bit of a fad for red porridge breakfast places back on Earth. If I still had any friends there, I imagined they’d be envious. I was about to enjoy the authentic red porridge experience. Unfortunately for me, I hated red porridge.

  The owner was listening to the news, but I couldn’t hear it clearly. They were talking about the train disaster, and something about potential suspects.

  “This stuff is glorious,” Sasha rumbled, taking his bowl from the counter and walking to a table with it. At the table next to him, a young man with a shaved head and mismatched eyes was savoring a bowl of his own. I took my breakfast, knowing I would need the energy, and sat down across from our defector.

  “How does it taste?” asked Sasha eagerly.

  “Like wet sand drenched in spice.”

  The scientist frowned at me and went back to enjoying his own meal.

  “I don’t know.” Jones shrugged and put a heaping spoonful in his mouth. “At least it sticks to your bones. Oh wow, yeah that’s hot.”

  “Don’t take all morning.” Vincenzo had already eaten his and was scraping up the last little bits from the sides of the bowl. “We need to get moving.”

  “You people have no appreciation for Martian cuisine.” Sasha finished his bowl and stood up as if to get another one.

  Veraldi put a hand on his arm to stop him. “We need to go now.”

  I forced another few bites of the red porridge down my throat, drank some water to cool myself down, and pushed my bowl away. I was getting tired and would have liked a break, but Veraldi was right. We all stood up and were back on the street within five minutes of having stopped. Once we had crossed the street, I saw the young man with the mismatched eyes slip out of the diner and start walking in the same direction.

  “We can’t take the line we were on,” Veraldi mused. “It will be closed all day. We’ll have to take the 67-V and then the 452-H.”

  “No way.” Jones caught up to him, and they began a vigorous debate about the best way to get to Great Wall. “If we take the 325-H to the 89-V, then—”

  “Nobody ask me,” Sasha grumbled. “I’m only the local.”

  They took his advice. Behind us, the guy from the diner was joined by another man. I couldn’t afford to turn full around, but from the brief glimpse I had I thought they both might have shaved heads.

  I sent Veraldi a dataspike message.

  Behind us.

  He was still debating the route with Jones, but he answered me anyway.

  Yeah. Three more just joined them. Take Jones and peel off with the genius.

  “If you don’t want to listen to me, I’ll go my own way!” Jones snapped at Veraldi and turned angrily toward me. “Come on, guys. This prick doesn’t want to listen!”

  That’s when I realized the argument about how to get to Great Wall was fake from the beginning. They’d spotted the tail immediately and started setting up the split-off. Sasha didn’t get it, though. He just stood there with his mouth open.

  “Come on.” I put my hand on his arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Is this professional, to behave this way?” The researcher stopped in his tracks. “Does it really matter so much which way we go?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it. Come on.”

  He finally listened, allowing himself to be dragged along. The point of the exercise was to confirm the tail. If they were really following us, they’d have to either split up or decide who they wanted to follow most. Either way, it would tell us something. Sasha, Jones, and I turned right at an intersection, heading for the train station Jones had vocally preferred.

  Two stayed with Veraldi, three went with us. Unquestionably a tail then, and they wanted all of us.

  Jones sent me a message. Stay ready.

  As impressed as I had been with the way they’d handled the tail, I wasn’t exactly helpless when it came to this sort of situation. As we continued walking, I looked for any place where I could force the men following us to split their numbers again. At first there was nothing. The streets were broad in this neighborhood, and there weren’t too many people out and about yet. The tail was gaining on us, and I began to suspect that
Jones was right. The goal wasn’t just to see where we were going, or to make sure we didn’t cause any trouble. These guys were stalking us, and they would move in for the kill as soon as they were ready. In fact, they could just as easily be driving us toward someone else waiting in ambush up ahead of us.

  Then I spotted my opportunity—a farmer’s market where people with their own greenhouses could sell their produce. Sellers were already out, setting up their tables with whatever they had. I split off to the right, while sending a message to Jones.

  Don’t follow. I’ll take this one.

  He did what I asked him to do, but he didn’t seem too happy about it.

  You left me two of them, dick.

  One man stayed on me and the other two stuck to Jones and Ivanovich. They were walking through the center of the farmer’s market and I was off to one side. Between the tables and the buildings there was a little stretch of sidewalk hidden from view behind the booths. I hurried down that way, knowing that there would be a blind spot where my tail couldn’t see what was up ahead of him.

  I turned around, and the seller noticed me. “Don’t make any trouble, man. I’m just trying to make a living,” he said.

  “Get out,” I told him. “Come back in five minutes.”

  He scowled at me but scurried out of the way before the trouble started. I waited in place, half-concealed behind the booth. A few seconds later, I heard hurried footsteps coming close and was relieved. My tail had lost sight of me and was trying to catch up as quickly as he could, oblivious that I’d made him.

  When he came into view, I could see it was the guy with the mismatched eyes. They went wide when he saw me, but it was too late for him to stop what was coming. I grabbed the back of his head and slammed his face into the market stall counter. He lost his balance and fell to the ground on his back. I straddled his chest and started hitting him with short punches to the jaw. The goal was to keep him from getting up again without having to kill him, since I didn’t know for sure that he meant to kill me.

  The guy turned out to be a lot tougher than I would have liked him to be. Despite being surprised, he was able to come up from under my attack and grab my ankles. I went over hard, and the next thing I knew he was sitting right on top of me. It would have been a simple matter to pound my head into the pavement until my brains came out my ears, but that wasn’t what he tried. He had a weapon of some kind, and he paused long enough for me to realize he was trying to use it.

  I twisted under him and grabbed at whatever it was to hold it away from him. He kept lifting his weight up, then slamming it down as hard as he could. It was hurting my ribs, but it was also a huge error on his part. People without any formal training tend to make tactical mistakes like that. When he went up again, I bucked and rolled him off me. He fell sideways on the ground, and I pulled his weapon hand into an armbar.

  Still fighting for the weapon, he couldn’t do anything to prevent it. I arched my back against the joint and felt his arm break. He gave a shriek and stopped struggling against me, curling into himself in pain. I rolled up behind him, wrapped my arms around his neck, my legs around his waist, and pressed with all the strength I had. Despite his broken arm, he still thrashed violently from side to side. He was a surprisingly tough guy, but none of that matters when your brain isn’t getting any blood. He slumped in my arms, unconscious, and I stumbled to my feet at last.

  I checked the weapon he had slung around his neck, and it turned out to be a semi-auto shotgun with a suppressor mounted to it. Not exactly the sort of thing to just carry around, even as a gang member. Either someone had handed him the weapon when they got the order to tail us, or he’d been looking for us all along.

  He must have spotted us in the diner and called in help from his buddies. But how did this guy know who or what to look for? I rifled through his pockets but didn’t find anything that could answer that question. I pulled the strap off from around his neck and took the shotgun for myself, figuring it might help me get out of this section alive at least. Then I got to my feet and went to look for Andrew and Ivanovich.

  I expected them to be in the immediate area. According to my schematics, they had already gone much further ahead. So far ahead that I couldn’t even see them. No Andrew Jones, no Sasha Ivanovich, no shaven-headed gunmen. Just a bunch of farmers setting up their market stalls.

  I stood there for a few seconds with my mouth hanging open as a wave of exhaustion passed through me. I’d been awake for too many hours, and most that had been spent in the thick of it. I shook my head and snapped out of it. They had gone ahead, but I could catch up if I ran a few blocks. Jogging away from the farmer’s market, I started a message to ask Jones his status. Before I could finish subvocalizing the sentence, I heard a cluster of shots.

  POP POP.

  POP POP POP.

  I ran in the direction of the sound with my new shotgun at the ready. By the time I reached them, I knew the fight was already over because there hadn’t been any more shots. Had the gunmen gotten the drop on Andrew, or had Andrew surprised the gunmen? Either way, the fight had been entirely one-sided.

  Two blocks from the farmer’s market, I had my answer. Sasha Ivanovich, of all people, was standing over the dead body of one of the men who’d been tailing us. Andrew Jones was standing a few feet away over the body of the other one. Both men were holding handguns, which could only mean that Jones had handed a weapon to Ivanovich just before everything kicked off. I was surprised to see that, but then again, I had left him facing two to one odds. Apparently, he had decided that asking Sasha for help was better than facing these guys alone.

  Of the three men who’d been behind us when we split off from Veraldi, two were now dead and one was out of commission. I should have been relieved, but something about what I was looking at made me uncomfortable. As I approached, Andrew gave me a sour look. “I take it you dealt with your guy?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, I thought that would go a little easier.”

  He shrugged. “It went easy enough, I guess. Thanks for the assist, Ivanovich.”

  The scientist smiled grimly. “No problem, my friend. I told you there was no need to be scared of these people.”

  “Who was scared?” Jones held a hand out. “Now give me my gun back. I didn’t mean for you to keep it.”

  Sasha sighed. “So little trust. Couldn’t Ivanovich have a weapon of his own? We’re all in this together.”

  “Just hand it over. And stop talking about yourself like that, it’s creepy and weird.”

  Sasha handed the gun over, shaking his head at the world and its tragically untrusting ways. What was it about the scene that bothered me? I couldn’t put a name to it, but something just seemed a little tilted. Incongruous.

  Andrew turned back to me. “Veraldi will be done by now. See if you can get him on the line.”

  I sent a message asking Veraldi if everything was okay. When I accessed the list of contacts for Section 9, our three missing friends were still grayed out. They weren’t available, meaning they were either dead, unconscious, or keeping their heads low. The overwhelming likelihood, under the circumstances, was that all three of them were killed in action.

  Vincenzo replied. Get their dataspikes and meet me at the rendezvous point.

  The rendezvous point was a blinking dot a few more blocks away. When I turned to tell Jones, he was already taking the dataspikes from the two dead men. I hadn’t thought to do the same.

  He looked at me. “In this kind of situation always get the dataspike. Big intelligence source, yeah?”

  “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “Of course it does.”

  At that moment, I happened to glance at Ivanovich just as he relaxed and resumed his role of human luggage. This is the most typical demeanor for a high-value asset. They’re passive because their situation is powerless; they’re just being carted from one place to another. That’s what clued me in. With a sense of vague disquiet, I recognized what had been bothering me about the a
ftermath of the gunfight. It had something to do with how comfortable Ivanovich had seemed to be at that moment, his stance square, his grip on the weapon relaxed but firm. Nothing in his file suggested military or StateSec experience, but to my eyes, Ivanovich had the look of a trained killer. And now that the fight was over, he had just changed back into an irritating if harmless researcher with information about corporate crimes.

  Who were we dealing with here? We caught eyes and he gave me a little wink before he turned away. There was more going on here than what I’d been told, but I might never know any more than that. Resigning myself to that fact, at least for the moment, I turned to Andrew.

  “Veraldi’s waiting for us.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I see it. Okay, let’s go.”

  For the next few minutes, I was more than a little paranoid, if that’s the word for going from the nebulous idea of danger to knowing with absolute certainty that people really do want to kill you. I scanned every shadow and turned my head as we walked, looking for any sign of another threat. Despite the lethal violence we’d just inflicted, the buildings around us were still and silent. No gunmen on the rooftops, no spies peering out from dark apartments. The streets were almost dead, though they couldn’t possibly stay that way for long.

  Despite my impatience, it didn’t take us long to reach Vincenzo. He was cleaning blood from his knife as we approached, examining the blade with a critical eye. Apparently satisfied, he returned it to its hidden sheath beneath his coat.

  “Any ID?” he asked.

  Jones shook his head. “No, nothing. We do have the dataspikes, minus the one Tycho dealt with.”

  Veraldi threw me a look, then continued. “No ID on mine either, but I did have a conversation with one of them.”

  “Yeah?” asked Jones.

  “Yeah. He told me that he works for Geneicide. Low-ranking gang member. I don’t know why, but the local syndicate is after us.”

  “Okay, I figured. So, what’s the next step?”