The Solid-State Shuffle (Sunken City Capers Book 1)

by Jeffrey A. Ballard

  "Change them," Hayes says.

  I almost say "hunh?" to Hayes before catching myself. "We start at ten."

  "Nine," Hayes says.

  "Nine-thirty," I counter. "You didn't say there was a pace maker."

  "Pace maker," Puo says thoughtfully. "What's on a timer ... ?" he trails off. "Falcon, is Queen Bee alone?"

  Finally!

  "Fine," Hayes says. "Nine-thirty. But we need to meet elsewhere to discuss details."

  "Falcon?" Puo asks. "You there, copy?"

  Sounds of the diner fill my ears. Waitresses and waiters threading their way between tables, taking orders, delivering food with clunks as they set the hot plates down. Forks and spoons scrape against plates with clinks. The low din of conversation. Chairs rub against the floor as patrons sit down or get up. But nothing through the comm-link in my ear.

  No Winn.

  Years of training keep my outward appearance normal. I divert the would-be panic from going into my muscles and into an imaginary void instead.

  To Hayes I say, "Nineteen hundred tonight at the bar—" No need to say which one.

  "Queen Bee," Puo says, "When was the last time you heard from Falcon?"

  "About time," Hayes says. He must really like Korum's.

  I say to Hayes, "Once there, you'll receive instructions on where we'll meet."

  Hayes exhales, rolls his eyes, and then fusses with his jacket. "You better be worth all this." He doesn't wait for a response and slides out and leaves.

  While I wait for enough time to pass for Hayes to leave, I start humming "Pop Goes the Weasel." I don't trust Hayes to not leave something behind.

  The song calms Puo, let's him know I'm okay and that I'll get to him as soon as I can. We used to sing this to each other as kids, but with much more inventive lyrics.

  I wait a few minutes, then I leave some cash on the table and head out. The sidewalk pavement is warm below my feet. The stone and concrete absorbing the early afternoon heat.

  After I determine I'm not being followed I say to Puo, "Toad, Queen Bee here. I need a pickup."

  Puo says, "Already en route."

  * * *

  "When did you last hear from Winn?" Puo asks me as soon as I shut Pelican's door behind me.

  "He gave me the ten minute warning," I say, "right before Hayes showed up."

  "That's who you were meeting with?" Puo asks surprised.

  East Pine Street drops away below me as Puo guides the Pelican up into the air traffic. The whole process feels much too slow.

  I twist and crack my back in the seat, stretch out the extra energy in my various limbs. "Yeah." I take out and check over my comm-link, and then pop it back in my ear. "Falcon? Falcon you there?"

  No response.

  Puo guides us back toward Queen Anne Island without having to be told. The fly over of Valle's boat just fell way down on the priority list.

  I ask Puo, "Did you disable the phoning home capabilities?"

  "Yeah," Puo says. "To be safe I also set up an electro-magnetic detector—" He holds up a dark-brown metal case the size of his palm. "—It'll tell us if the devices are pinging or if anything else is trying to reach them."

  "Good." I try to check back in with Winn. Nothing.

  "This can't be a coincidence," Puo says.

  I don't think either of us ever believed that for a second. "Do a fly over of the house first."

  "They'll have Pelican marked."

  "Is there anything back there that can help us?" I gesture to the back of Pelican. We removed the back seats out of the air vehicle to extend out as a staging area, and put in a trap door for entry/exit when we're wearing the anti-gravity suits. It also holds a number of Puo's and my inventions to make our reclamation lives easier. The whole area is closed off from the front cabin through a thin door.

  Puo nods. "Take the controls." He shifts forward in his seat and heaves himself up. The thin door flops open.

  I hold the wheel and check the gauges in front of me as we zoom toward home.

  Puo is clanking around in the back when I hear a burst of static on the comm-link.

  "Falcon?" I say.

  "Falcon, here—" Winn comes on the comm-link.

  Puo stops his rummaging to listen in.

  "—Lost you for a bit," Winn says calmly. "Everyone all right?"

  Puo tromps back into the front cabin.

  "We're fine," I say. "What happened?" Look at me not swearing at him.

  "The power flickered and I lost comms—" Winn says.

  Puo and I share a look.

  Winn continues, "—It took a bit for things to come back online."

  Puo opens his mouth to warn Winn that the power just doesn't randomly cut off. And even if it did, we have generators for just that purpose. I motion for Puo to keep his mouth shut.

  "Everything's fine now," Winn says. "What's your status?"

  Puo looks at me in alarm. Everything is certainly not fine. Whoever is setting us up tried to take out the power and when that didn't work, cut out the nearest comm tower. What was their angle?

  To Winn I say, "Understood. We're both on the way back. Coming in dark."

  "Roger," Winn says a little uncertainly.

  Both Puo and I take out our comm-links and turn them off. Puo takes back control of the Pelican.

  "Why didn't you tell him?" Puo asks.

  I squirm in my seat. "I may not have mentioned that we think we're being set up to him." Whoops.

  "What!" Puo asks surprised.

  "We've been busy!" I say defensively. "This whole thing is a big steaming pile of wet poo that's been tying up all our time." Besides, every time I'm alone with Winn now, it's been a silent minefield to navigate with him.

  To Puo I say, "It just hasn't come up with him." This plays right into Winn's you-don't-include-me nonsense. I don't want Puo to be the one to out me to Winn. "I'll bring Winn up to speed in person."

  "Isa," Puo admonishes me, "We're a team. He's got to know these things—"

  "I know! And don't lecture me! I made a mistake, okay." I can feel the heat rise to my face. Winn is going to be royally pissed. There's going to be another fight. My heartbeat and breathing are already rising.

  Puo regards me, but ultimately keeps his mouth shut. After letting me stew a minute, he asks, "Want to do some recon on the comm tower?"

  It's an olive branch, a chance to give me some time to settle down. "No," I say, "We should include Winn on that." Otherwise he'll likely get more pissed. "But let's do the fly over of Valle's boat." We were supposed to do that anyway.

  Puo guides Pelican back east.

  We left Valle's boat on the western edge of Mercer Island, one island east of the Center Island, in an urban cove that wasn't frequented too often.

  I had planned to just leave a tip with the local cops for them to come collect it (I had killed the GPS on it), but now that Colvin's directly interested, we'll have to think of something else.

  The ride over is mostly silent: Puo lets me dwell in my own thoughts. Eventually, as we near Mercer Island, Puo says, "Have I ever told you the tale about the butt-nosed pygmy gorillas of the Serengeti?"

  I snort. "No. This should be good."

  "Quite, so," Puo says. "Now the pygmy gorillas— You do know what pygmies are, don't you?"

  "Yes, Puo," I say. "I know what pygmies are. I may not have gone to a fancy college, but I do know some stuff."

  "Okay, okay," Puo says. "Just checking. You don't have to get all defensive. I didn't go to no book-learning college either. It's important to the story is all."

  "You don't know the story do you?" I needle him. I think he was just trying to make me laugh, but now I want to know. "You're just delaying."

  "What! Of course I know the story. See, the pygmy gorillas were always lower on the totem pole than their regular sized cousins, and they resented this. So they tried to domesticate lions—"

  "What?"

  "True story—" Puo holds his hand over his heart. "—They want
ed to ride the lions around like war horses. Use them as battle steeds to elevate themselves above their bigger cousins."

  "How do you—?"

  "Shhh! I'm telling it, I'm telling it. Well, naturally, this didn't go over too well with the lions and quite a few pygmy gorillas were turned into lion poo. So, the pygmy gorillas regrouped. They decided they couldn't get a fair shake and decided they needed new territory. At the time, a couple of Christian missionaries—they had just read Tarzan—were in the Serengeti on a quest to teach religion to the jungle animals—"

  I can only shake my head.

  "—and showed the pygmy gorillas the 1933 King Kong movie to try and find common ground between them. Upon the movie's completion, the pygmy gorillas immediately slaughtered the missionaries and headed north where they now control a hundred square-mile section in south Kenya. To this day, the pygmy gorillas decide who is the alpha male by how many termite mounds they can climb up and punch down. It's a timed event."

  "You are such a bullshitter." But I say it with a smile on my face.

  "You can go visit the monument to the fallen missionaries in Bloomington, Indiana if you don't believe me."

  "What was the point of that story?" I ask, trying to see his hidden moral for me.

  "Ah, poo," Puo swears distractedly.

  "Shit?" I ask, automatically decoding Puo’s nonswearing swearing. "What kind of shit?" I look over at Puo to understand what he means.

  He's looking out of the cockpit window down below us.

  I follow his gaze.

  "Shit," I agree.

  Valle's boat is gone.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  "YOU THINK WE'RE being set up?" Winn asks to clarify.

  We're in the upstairs bedroom that's empty except for the room divider in front of the window and foldout tables with computers on top of them. Puo and I are bringing Winn up to speed on everything that's happened and that we think might be happening.

  "Yes," I say.

  Puo nods as he sits at the computers scrolling through the logs to try and determine if anything happened when the power flickered off.

  "When did you decide that?" Winn asks, an edge to the question. He stands just behind Puo, not moving from where he stood up to let Puo sit at the computers. The graphic on the front of his moss-colored T-shirt is obscured by his crossed arms.

  Of course he would focus on that. I don't lie. "Last night, while you were sleeping."

  He doesn't say anything. His blue eyes just narrow on me. His jaws clench.

  I look between the Puo and Winn, uncertain where to look, wary that if my gaze lingers too long on Winn I might invite a full-blown (not entirely undeserved) mansies-tantrum.

  Puo slows what he's doing. He jabs a finger against the old-school flat-screen monitor sliding his finger down the screen as he reads the displayed log.

  I use the opportunity to divert some attention from the swirling tension. "Find anything?"

  Puo nods again slowly to himself and then says, "Yeah. We were probed—"

  Probed. And I've got nothing to say to that. Winn's brewing attitude has sucked all the fun out the room.

  Puo continues, "—Someone used the power spike to try and hide a ping-back. They were trying to get a read on our system without us knowing."

  "Do they know we know?" I ask.

  "Nah," Puo says. "That's the purpose of the power spike, to hide the ping. They can't know we have backup generators in place to smooth that out."

  "But," Winn cuts in with his arms still clenched in front of him, "they cut the power to the comm tower at the same time, right?"

  "Yeah," I say.

  "So they knew we were communicating," Winn says.

  "They were testing us," Puo says. "The comm tower dropout was made to look like an overload. They're watching us. They know when we're separated."

  "Hayes," I say to myself. He just "happened" to drop in on me alone.

  "Did you get a read on him at the diner?" Puo asks.

  "No." I shake my head.

  "What? Why not?" he asks incredulously.

  "I was preoccupied by the drama in my ear, Puo!" First Puo declaring Christina is the Guild Master and then Winn going unscripted dark. Why are both of them turning on me?

  I continue in a huff, "Hayes knew we were at The Owl Bar. He knew about our modified citizen chips. He knew to show up at the diner, and Winn was cut off after that."

  Winn says, "He's not being very subtle, is he?" The intensity in Winn's eyes hasn't lessened at all, which is increasing my irritability.

  "No," Puo says, "So it's either Hayes, or—"

  "Or someone else," I say, "calling the shots behind the scenes."

  The upstairs bedroom is starting to get warm from the afternoon sun, which isn't helping the uncomfortable feeling from Winn looking like he's going to burst into a tirade.

  I come to a decision. "From now on," I say, "We focus on Hayes and finding out what's on that solid-state drive."

  "What about Valle's boat?" Puo asks.

  "What about Valle's boat?" Winn asks in an angry confusion.

  "It's missing," I say to Winn and then continue in a hurry to step over Winn's angry retort. "Nothing," I answer Puo. "We tell Colvin we can't find it. If we find who's behind setting us up, then I bet we'll find it."

  Winn jumps in, "When were you going to tell me about Valle's boat missing?"

  "We just did, Winn!" I'm fed up with him. "It only just happened on the drive here. You cut me off before we got to it—"

  "You didn't tell me we were being set up!" Winn yells. "You're constantly doing that. Deciding things, discussing them over with Puo, and then never informing me. I'm a toy to you, a prop—"

  "We can go to the neighborhood party," I say sullenly, interrupting him.

  "Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Winn asks. "An apologetic carrot? A gesture to make up for always holding me on the outside—"

  "Hey," Puo breaks in. He looks upset; he's staring at Winn none-too-kindly.

  Winn eases off the aggressive posture he was subconsciously starting to take.

  I realize then that Puo's probably never seen us fight, never actually seen me fight with any romantic interest before.

  Puo continues, "She didn't decide to go as an apology. We worked that out last night—"

  Thanks, Puo. Way to read the signs.

  "Another thing you decided without me!" Winn takes a step forward.

  "You were resting from being zapped," Puo shouts back.

  "This isn't your concern," Winn answers right back.

  "Yes, it is!" Puo pops up out of his chair, and looks as angry as I've ever seen him. "We're all in this together. We've thrown in. The fact that you two have something on the side affects all of us. So don't give me, 'It doesn't concern me.' It concerns me very much. Someone is out there, trying to set us up for the Boss to take down. So we need to stand together."

  Winn doesn't answer. I stay silent. When Puo starts yelling, sensible people shut up.

  "Now," Puo says into the uneasy silence. "I don't know everything going on between you two. But you need to start working it out. So—" He gestures one-handed between us. "—say you're sorry to each other and give each other a hug."

  "Puo," I say calmly, "We're not six. An apology and a hug isn't going to—"

  "Now!" Puo shouts.

  The suddenness of Puo's shout jerks me and Winn toward each other. We come to stand a pace away from each other and mumble "Sorry" without actually looking at each other.

  "Now hug," Puo commands.

  We shuffle forward and give each other that stand-off hug you give family members you haven't seen in a long time.

  "Good," Puo says. He looks to me. "So, what's the plan?"

  I'm feeling petulant, and my cheeks are still hot from the whole encounter with Winn. "Find whoever's responsible, and force them to hug."

  Puo just continues to stare at me patiently.

  Winn, for his part, also holds his tongue and r
egards me.

  We need to figure out who's trying to set us up and why. And we need to figure out what's on that drive so we can know how to safely dump it.

  "You've disabled the phone-home chip on the solid-state drive?" I ask Puo.

  "Yup," Puo answers.

  "You sure?" I ask.

  "Yeah, why—? Oh."

  "Plug in and figure out what's on it. I have to meet Hayes in less than three hours at Korum's. The more information I have, the better."

  "What about me?" Winn asks.

  What about you? I want to ask. Are you done being a pent-up ball of frustration?

  Puo says in my hesitation, "Quiet Third."

  Grumble, grumble. Winn will be with me acting as security on the ground in a hidden capacity. Watching the watchers. Not bad. "Nice try, Puo. But still one step behind me as usual."

  I explain the role to Winn and then say, "After the meeting we'll transition directly to running a shadow game on Hayes. Puo will run support from here, and we'll leapfrog if necessary. Understood?"

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  KORUM'S IS TECHNICALLY a rathskeller, modeled after the classic ones in Germany. I may have been a little unfair earlier in calling it dank.

  The entrance on the street level has two heavy wood-planked, iron-studded twelve-foot doors set into a stone archway. Past the doors is the landing of a wide white stone staircase that leads down below street level—it's where the muscle stands to prevent laci's from entering and to send the signal below in case of the cops.

  The first sensation that strikes when you walk in, besides the sight of the grand staircase, is the stench of smoke, which is the first reason I don't like the place. Smoking indoors is illegal, except at cigar clubs, of which Korum's is not. Not that I care about the legal part, but it stinks. And although you smell it, you don't see it. They vent it out. Otherwise I think they'd all suffocate at the rate at which its patrons like to suck down tobacco, which is too bad.

  The stairs themselves are a bare white stone that has weathered into a distinguished gray from the footsteps and smoke over the years. The stairs curve as I descend, and I run my hand over the railing made of the same stone carved into the shape of ivy. The stone is cool to the touch with a fine grit to the sensation, but no residue is left on my hand.