Digital Chimera

by J N Chaney

  Jones donned a forced smile. “Sure. I’m always happy to educate. The main thing you need to know is that the Kagebushin are bad news.”

  “I thought you said Geneicide was bad news,” I pointed out.

  “Would you say you had a great time in Pretorius? I didn’t think so. Geneicide are killers; that’s their reputation. But the Kagebushin are something else.”

  “In what way?”

  “Geneicide to the Kagebushin is like a hand grenade to a tactical nuke.”

  “Oh.” I slumped against the wall of the train. “Well, this just gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

  Jones seemed to be in a challenging mood. The blood from his gashes had finally stopped flowing, but his shirt was stuck to his stomach. “Hey, look, you could have stayed a civilian.”

  “I wasn’t a civilian. I was an Arbiter.”

  “Then you could have stayed an Arbiter.”

  “No, Jones, I couldn’t. I was wanted for murder.”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, okay. I guess you’re stuck being a spy, then.”

  I didn’t have the energy for his little games. “We can’t get out at that train station.”

  Veraldi frowned. “Why not?”

  “Because it would be walking into our own graves. Even if we didn’t have the Kagebushin to deal with, it’s a natural ambush spot. It’s where anyone who wants us dead is going to be waiting.”

  Jones turned to Veraldi. “I have to admit, the new guy has a point.”

  The “new guy.” Alright. At least he was agreeing with me.

  Veraldi shook his head. “We’re getting off at the station. The danger from the Erinyes is a bigger risk than any syndicate.”

  Jones didn’t look convinced. “Maybe so, maybe so. But with these guys? I’m not really sure. Just tell me one thing, though.”

  Veraldi was staring at him. “Yes?”

  “What exactly is the plan? We do have one, right?”

  Veraldi pointed at the sign overhead. “Is Fuji 2 a big station? I mean, that sign is listing multiple transfers.”

  Jones nodded. “Sure. Fuji 2 is a major transit hub.”

  “Okay, so that’s the plan. We leave with the crowd and mingle with all the people on the train platform. We use the other passengers as cover and move with the crush of people.”

  “I don’t know.” Jones shook his head. “I don’t think that’s going to work. Stations are monitored. Facial recog would pop us.”

  While we were talking, the train was passing over rooftops and winding between buildings. East Hellas is so densely populated that levels are stacked up on top of each other, and “the ground” is a relative concept. Above and below, I saw everything you would expect to see in a major city thronging with millions of human beings repeated in a dozen layers. Everything from small produce markets to glittering storefronts selling all the latest items. People going to work and people lounging around in front of coffee houses. People singing in front of temples or pacing back and forth with guns. Here and there, I saw the riots. When you see a riot on the news, you always imagine it as this raging firestorm consuming half the city, but the reality isn’t always like that. At least as often, there’s a full-fledged battle on one street while normal life continues undisturbed on the next street over. It looked like the riots were spreading, though.

  Up ahead of us, I saw the shapes of huge apartment complexes—white plasticrete and tinted windows, with flat rooftops about nine meters below the level of the train. That gave me an idea.

  Jones and Veraldi were still having it out, so I started to walk up toward the front of the train. “What the hell are you doing?” asked Jones.

  I raised a hand. “Hold on. I have a better idea.”

  As I went up front, I heard Jones repeating his question to Veraldi. “What the hell is he doing?”

  I’d been treated as the new guy ever since I’d joined this unit, and I was never going to get past that by playing along with it. There was no time to debate this; my plan would work, and it would work without requiring us to use the other passengers as human shields.

  I crossed from our car to the one ahead of us, and from that car up to the engine car at the front of the train. When I reached the engine, I pulled out my skeleton key and inserted it into the door interface. It hacked the train car’s system, using its built-in exploits to bypass or disable any security features it ran into. The whole process took maybe a second, then the light went from red to green and the door slid open. Behind my back, I heard someone saying, “What the hell is that guy doing?” It made me laugh. Everyone seemed to want to know what I was doing today.

  I slipped into the cab then located the switch for manual controls and used it to disable the train’s AI system. Then I engaged the brakes, causing the train to glide to a halt directly over one of those big white apartment buildings. No platform ambush, no human shields. Once we’d made our escape, someone else could come and get the train restarted. It was the perfect plan.

  The one thing I hadn’t counted on was all the irritated people. When I came out the door, they were all staring at me with their mouths open. One of them said, “What?” and another one put his hand on his gun. I put my hand on mine, which was much larger. He gulped and stepped aside, but that’s when someone decided it would be a good time to panic.

  “He’s going to blow up the train!”

  Once these words had been said, the mood in the train car went from irritation to wild panic. People rushed to get away from me, assuming I must be wearing a suicide vest. One person fell over and was immediately trampled. He screamed in pain and anger, but that just made the panic worse. People were jumping over seats, pushing each other savagely aside, and screaming things like “oh my God” and “get out of my goddamn way!”

  In less than two seconds, there were so many people at the end of the train that it started rocking slightly on its tracks as they jostled each other for space. They were all trying to get through the door at once, but I was seriously worried they were going to derail the train, sending us crashing down onto the buildings below—an experience I hadn’t really been planning to repeat anytime soon. One of them managed to get the door open, and they all went stampeding through.

  Every single person who came screaming out of our car and into the next one spread the panic further, until everyone who had been on the train when it stopped was crowded down on the far side in a desperate attempt to avoid the bomb blast they were all convinced was coming.

  The only people who didn’t join in the panic were Sasha Ivanovich, Andrew Jones, and Vincenzo Veraldi. I poked my head through the door and saw them staring in disbelief, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. The look on Veraldi’s face was particularly satisfying, like he couldn’t imagine what that crazy new guy was up to now.

  “Well? You coming?” I asked them.

  Jones turned to Veraldi, his face looking almost awestruck. “Panic. His new nickname is Panic.”

  Veraldi nodded.

  Tycho “Panic” Barrett. I could live with that.

  As if in a daze, Vincenzo walked up to the front of the train with the other two in tow. Jones was shaking his head, and Sasha just looked confused. He was saying something to himself about Terrans, but I couldn’t hear what it was exactly.

  When we were all in the front car, I pushed the red bar along the window and held it until the lock disengaged. The emergency exit pushed out, and we were looking down onto the roof below us.

  “See?” I pointed. “We can get out that way. Avoid the ambush.”

  Veraldi spoke at last. “That’s a nine-meter jump.”

  “A nine-meter jump on Mars,” Jones pointed out. “With the lower gravity, we should be fine.”

  I was sick of talking about it, so I clambered up and sat on the edge of the window. When I pushed off with my hands, the ground came up at me like an approaching fist. Or not the ground, the roof, but like I said it’s a relative notion. I didn’t jump all that skillfully. L
anding hard in place, I skinned my knees when I hit the roof. It stung so badly I didn’t even notice who was jumping next because I was too busy holding onto my knee and swearing inwardly. It turned out to be Ivanovich, who landed cleanly in a forward roll.

  He was on his feet before I was, waving up at Andrew and Veraldi. “Come on, my friends. It’s really not that far!”

  Veraldi grimaced but jumped down to the roof without any difficulty. He glanced at my knees, which were scuffed up and speckled with gravel, then shook his head without a word. Andrew landed last, also without any difficulty. He saw me and laughed quietly at my lack of grace. “You know, Panic, that was a clever idea. You’ve bought us another hour to live. Too bad you don’t know how to jump, though.”

  12

  Veraldi looked out across the rooftops as soon as he was back on his feet again. “First things first. We need to get away from that train before they send anyone to check it out. We’ll head for that temple over there.”

  The temple he was talking about was on the other side of the apartment complex. Based on the syncretic Asian architecture, it looked like we were in Fuji Section, but that didn’t mean the Kagebushin knew we were here yet. If we were careful—and lucky—they might never find out.

  We took off at a run, jumping the short distance from one rooftop to another until we reached the temple. This was something I’d had plenty of opportunity to do before, and it is part of standard training for both Arbiters and Section 9 agents. Unfortunately for me, my hard landing on the way out of the train was still affecting my jump. When we landed on the temple roof, my foot smashed one of the clay tiles and knocked it out of place. It slid down the side and shattered loudly in the alley below. So much for discretion.

  Andrew’s teasing must have been getting to me, because everyone else made the jump just fine. I ducked my head to avoid looking at anyone. Even Sasha was doing better than I was, which didn’t make any sense. On Tower 7, jumping from rooftop to rooftop had been one of our main ways of getting around.

  “Finish what you started, Barrett.” Veraldi pointed at the hole I’d made, and I realized what he was saying although I didn’t like it much. We had to get out of sight, and if StateSec investigated the stalled train they’d probably approach from above. Conclusion? We should smash a hole in the temple roof and hide in their attic for our council of war.

  “I…I don’t really want to do this.”

  Veraldi’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  I didn’t know how to explain it to him if it wasn’t obvious. “Vincenzo, this is a temple. Sacred space.”

  “What are you talking about?” Sasha glared. “Superstitious fool.” He smashed the roof with his heel, and the small hole I had unintentionally created became large enough to stick your head through. A few more savage kicks and we were able to drop through the hole and out of sight.

  The temple attic was a dark place, but the looming faces of angry statues still seemed to leer at us from among the shadows. Shinto demons or Tantric gods, I didn’t know enough about the religion here to guess, but either way they looked like bad news. I could only hope they would turn their wrath on Sasha instead.

  “Why are the gods in this place so angry?” I asked, reaching my hand out to touch the three-inch tusk of some ferocious deity wielding a six-foot halberd.

  “They’re pissed about your shitty urban traversal skills,” said Andrew. “But more to the point, what are they all doing in the attic?”

  Veraldi leaned in. “That doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters right now is planning a route to Great Wall. What’s our best option, Andrew?”

  “Well I’d say we have two options. One will take less time but poses more risk. The other is less risk but significantly more time.”

  Veraldi didn’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about that one. “As far as I’m concerned, time itself is the biggest risk we face. The longer we stay in East Hellas, the greater the chance we’ll be hunted down and killed.”

  “Look, you do whatever you think is best,” said Andrew. “You’re the commanding officer. But just so you understand exactly what we’re dealing with here. The long route would take us out under those train tracks and into Byzantium, a section that’s mostly controlled by the East Hellas Orthodox Church. The short route takes us straight through Fuji Section, which is entirely controlled by the Kagebushin.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. East Hellas was so backward. A government with no real authority but a team of cyborg killers, and a patchwork feudalism of gang territories and theocracies. To find anything equivalent, you’d have to go back in time to Renaissance Italy. This wasn’t a city, it was a lesson in how not to learn anything from history.

  Veraldi stuck to his position. “I know you’re not happy about it, but I still think we need to take the fastest route. The Kagebushin is just a risk we’ll have to take.”

  “Ah, well,” Sasha mused. “It was nice while it lasted.”

  “What was nice?” I asked him.

  “Being alive.”

  Jones laughed at that one, but his laugh didn’t sound humorous at all. “Okay, then. Fuji Section it is. I think we’ll make it; we’ve fought our way out of worse situations.”

  What he said was true enough. In Tower 7, we’d shot our way through a virtual army of infected Nightwatch guards and killer androids. The only difference—and it was a big one—was that there weren’t just three of us back then. With Bray’s heavy machine gun, Young’s mastery of computer systems, Sommar’s sniper rifle, and Andrea’s combat leadership, we were in a much better position on Venus than we were right now.

  “What’s this?” asked Sasha, standing up from the storage box he’d been sitting on. He pulled out something from inside it then started to laugh. “This is no temple. Maybe once upon a time, but—”

  Andrew looked at whatever he was holding. “Holy shit, Sasha. That’s enough product to buy yourself a new house.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Veraldi. “They’re storing drugs here?”

  Andrew laughed nervously. “This isn’t salt. Vincenzo, we need to get the hell out of here while we still can. We’re not hiding in a temple; we’re hiding in a syndicate safehouse.”

  Right at that moment, I heard voices from downstairs. Then the sound of footsteps.

  Veraldi stood up. “Talk about bad luck. Let’s get moving. We’ll stick to the rooftops as much as we can. That way we won’t have anyone looking down at us from the windows.”

  Jones stuck his head out through the hole in the and then called out to the rest of us. “I think we’re good. The train’s just pulling out.”

  “They must have started it again remotely,” said Veraldi. “That would be easier than coming in from above.”

  I heard the click of a latch and realized someone was trying to get into the attic. “Shit! Where’s the trapdoor?”

  There was a ray of light, and the door started to push open right below my feet. Without even thinking, I stood on it to keep it closed. A voice called out angrily. “You up there, what do you mean by breaking into a temple?”

  Sasha dropped the drugs back into the crate. “This isn’t a temple. Who do you think you’re fooling?”

  “Open this door!”

  Jones intervened in his role as our infiltration expert. “We just wanted somewhere to sleep… your holiness.”

  He sounded drunk, his words slightly slurred. The priest just got angrier.

  “Do you have any idea who you’re stealing from?”

  “He knows we’ve seen the drugs,” Veraldi whispered.

  “I know, your holiness. I know all about it...” Jones sounded even drunker, hamming it up for all he was worth. “We’ll shust be going now…”

  “You let me in! Or I’ll call—”

  “You won’t call anyone.” Andrew’s voice got cold. “They’d only kill you for not protecting their product.”

  Nothing further came from the priest, so he must have gotten the
point. Andrew pushed the container of drugs over to weigh down the trapdoor, freeing me to step off.

  “Let’s go,” said Veraldi.

  We crawled out to the rooftop and resumed our run across Fuji Section. Even though the shadows were lengthening, it was still daylight, so we had to make the run in short bursts. We’d break from cover behind a rooftop maintenance shack or environmental control unit, then sprint and jump, and then we’d hide again.

  It reminded me so much of Tower 7 that it would have made me melancholy, thinking about my dead friend Gabe and his equally dead widow Sophie. I’ve lost my share of people, but the memory of those two carried with it an ache that ran through my bones. I say it would have made me melancholy, not that it did, because I just didn’t have time to give too much thought to it. It was a passing feeling, like a ghost brushing my face on its way by. That’s all it was, and then I was running and jumping again. Life is like that sometimes.

  We were once again in the back alleys, which made it possible for us to travel a long distance without having to descend from the rooftops. I didn’t see how it could last more than a little while. Someone would have to look up and see us at some random point, and then the word would go out to the neighborhood gangsters. We couldn’t avoid them forever, but Andrew seemed to think we ought to try. Crouching behind the condenser on a big, square apartment building, I decided to get him to tell me a bit more.

  “So, what makes the Kagebushin so different from all the other syndicates?”

  Sasha whistled and shook his head, but Jones took the question seriously. He was probably just happy to get the chance to share his wealth of knowledge. “Glad to see you taking an interest. What about it, Vincenzo. Can we spare a second?”

  Veraldi was watching the street. “Yeah. It’s not a good time to move yet.”

  “Here’s the rundown.” Jones turned to me. “Unlike many of the other syndicates, the Kagebushin became powerful through force instead of wealth. See, you get different kinds of syndicates. A group like the Hive is really just a street gang; a group like Geneicide is maybe a step or two up from that but it’s still about the same. You take something like the Leary Group or even the Roach Syndicate, that’s a different matter. We’re talking about major criminal organizations there. They have their fingers in everything—smuggling, human trafficking, drugs, you name it. It’s big business, and like any other big business they got their start because certain people had money to invest.”