city blues 02 - angel city blues

by Jeff Edwards

  The waiter was back sooner than I expected, carrying a thermofoil pouch of the sort used to keep takeout food at suitably hot or cold temperatures. He set the pouch on the table with a clunk that spoke of something more solid than bread, condiments, and pickles.

  “Perhaps you’d like to visit the men’s room, and then pay for the sandwich on your way out.”

  I stood up and took the pouch. “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  The waiter gestured toward a door in the back corner of the club.

  I started in the indicated direction, receiving another sonic punch to the head as I left the perimeter of the table’s acoustic suppression field. Damn. I’d forgotten about that. I could almost feel my eardrums start to whither under the onslaught.

  Maybe I didn’t actually need a gun. Maybe I could carry around a recording of this pseudo-melodic train wreck, and use it to paralyze my enemies with ear-shredding racket.

  No… A recording wouldn’t be directional enough. Too much chance of traumatizing innocent bystanders.

  The stalls in the men’s room were equipped with full enclosure vid-screens. As I latched myself into the second cubicle from the end, the walls came alive with windows displaying the many scenes available for my excretory viewing pleasure.

  Feed the door five-hundred yen, and I could do my business surrounded by the rings of Saturn, or the pillars of the Parthenon, or the peak of Mount Fuji under a flawless sunrise. There were also a few dozen porn options available, ranging from basic strip shows, to some truly dark permutations of the eroto-sadism fetish that appealed to certain Japanese subcultures. I selected none-of-the-above.

  The toilet had several odd attachments that I’d never seen before. A few were clearly intended for hygiene operations, but some were so improbable in configuration that I didn’t even want to guess their purposes.

  The thermofoil pouch contained a 9.6mm Nambu-Sendai semi-automatic. Compact, but powerful. The frame, slide, and grips were gray carbon-plastic laminate. I jacked the slide back. The exposed section of barrel seemed to be titanium, or maybe tungsten.

  I released the slide. The action was smooth. The parts were well-machined, and properly lubricated.

  It looked like a military sidearm, but I didn’t know enough about the Japanese armed forces to be sure.

  There were three ten-round magazines, each loaded with frangible ceramic rounds: designed to punch through human flesh and flimsy obstacles, but shatter on contact with hard surfaces. A good choice on a space station, where poking a hole through the wall could leave you sucking vacuum.

  I slid a clip into the magazine well, racked a round into the chamber, and flicked the safety on. The weapon fit into my belt at the small of my back, where my windbreaker would cover it nicely. The two extra magazines went into my right front pocket.

  Assuming that the Nambu worked properly—and based on Sato’s police file, I had every reason to believe that it would—then the waiter had delivered on his end of the bargain.

  I pulled out my wallet, peeled off fifteen-hundred marks, and folded the bills into the foil pouch.

  When I had gun and clothing arranged to my satisfaction, I unlatched the door of the stall and walked back into the auditory anarchy of the club.

  The waiter was still standing by my table when I returned. I stepped into the acoustic suppression field, and handed him the foil pouch. “I already ate the sandwich. The money’s in the bag.”

  He opened the pouch and inspected the contents. “Was the mustard spicy enough for you?”

  “Just the way I like it.”

  He nodded, shoved the pouch into his pocket, and walked toward the bar without another look in my direction. Our business was officially concluded.

  Not surprisingly, the three wannabe’s were waiting for me on the street. They surrounded me the second my shoes hit the sidewalk.

  The one directly in my path gave me his best menacing sneer. “Hey, fuckface… We’ve got unfinished business…”

  I had the Nambu out and centered on the bridge of his nose before the last syllable was out of his mouth. I thumbed the safety off with an audible click. “Let’s take care of it, then. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s unfinished business.”

  They were gone so fast that they practically left holes in the air, vanishing down the street in a flurry of receding footfalls.

  I tucked the automatic out of sight almost as quickly.

  I didn’t particularly enjoy threatening teenagers with guns, but these boys needed to understand that not all trouble is make-believe. The sooner they learned to spot the real thing, the more likely they were to make it home alive.

  CHAPTER 24

  I felt better with the Nambu riding at the crook of my back. If the Nine-fingers gang came after me now, I’d at least be able to express my displeasure.

  The next order of business was my dead phone. The irony of that made me want to smile. I’d spent years avoiding phones where I could, and Priscilla Dancer had never been at the top of my list of favorite people. But I suddenly found myself missing both the convenience of the phone, and the unending stream of Dancer’s smartass commentary.

  I spotted a public access kiosk on the opposite side of the street, so I was able to avoid traipsing the five blocks back to the only other one I knew how to find.

  I crossed the street, woke up the kiosk, and ran a search for electronics shops in the area. There were four or five within easy walking distance, so I settled on one that advertised in-shop repairs, and a “courteous staff, fluent in eight languages, including English.”

  I found the place easily, jammed into a narrow space between two pachinko parlors. The “courteous staff” was one elderly Japanese man with a face like a prune, and tiger stripe dyed hair that might have worked if he’d been four decades younger. He was fluent in English, only by comparison to my fluency in Japanese.

  I showed him my phone. He toyed with it for a while, trying to get it to power up. Then, he popped the back cover off, and plugged test leads into various points on the main circuit board.

  After a few seconds spent scanning the readouts of his test equipment, he dropped the phone on the counter with a clatter.

  “No good.”

  “I know that,” I said. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Shinda.”

  “What?”

  “Is dead.”

  “What killed it?”

  “Nani?”

  “Why is it dead?”

  The old man scrunched up his face. “Field… magnet.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “A magnetic field? It erased the chips?”

  “Hai! Field magnet. Strong field magnet.”

  I snapped the back cover onto the phone and returned it to my pocket. I wouldn’t be getting any more updates from Jackal’s shit-bird tracker then. With a sinking feeling, I pulled out the Turing Scion and laid it on the counter.

  The old man hesitated, as if not quite sure what this new object might be. But he found a fiber optic connector that would mate with the interface port, and he was quickly taking readings.

  “Shinda,” he said.

  I didn’t have to ask what the word meant this time. The Turing Scion was dead. Erased, just like my phone.

  The old guy hadn’t fixed anything, but he charged me twenty-marks for the diagnostics.

  I immediately went in search of the next electronics shop on my list. Not because I expected them to arrive at different results, but because you don’t have a leg amputated without getting a second opinion.

  The technician in the next shop really did speak English. His testing routine was a lot more thorough than what the old man had done, but the results came out the same. Both the phone and the Turing Scion had been completely fried by an extremely powerful magnetic field. Neither device held any recoverable data at all.

  The tech was intrigued by the Scion. He’d never seen anything like it before, and he offered to buy it from me, despite the fact that the unit was dead a
nd had no chance of ever functioning again. He wanted to study the circuit layout, and maybe try a bit of reverse engineering.

  I politely declined his offer. I paid the tech for his efforts, and left the shop with the two inert devices in the pocket of my windbreaker.

  Out on the street, I leaned against the corner of the building and lit a cigarette. Dead. Dancer really was dead now. My clever Lev surfing escape had wiped out her electronic mind just as surely as the brainlock procedure had erased all traces of consciousness from her organic brain.

  The phone was nothing. I could pick up a replacement for a few marks, and never know the difference. But there would be no replacement for Dancer. I had done something careless, and she had paid the price for my stupidity.

  I knew from past experience that digital electronics could be slicked by a powerful magnetic field. I had seen the proof of it with my own eyes, under circumstances that I preferred not to remember. Somehow, that basic fact hadn’t occurred to me when Dancer and I had been rushing to elude Arm-twister and his aristocratic partner.

  Despite my bravado and my self-congratulations, only one of us had escaped. I had come out of that tram tube disheveled and wind-blasted, but very pleased with myself. Dancer hadn’t come out at all.

  I took a long pull off the Marlboro, and exhaled slowly.

  Had she known? Had she understood what the Lev’s magnetic field would do to her? If so, she had intentionally sacrificed her life to save mine.

  And yes, it really had been that. A life.

  Somewhere along the line, my longstanding misgivings about Turing Scions had fallen by the wayside. I had stopped thinking of Dancer as a ‘brain in a can,’ and started thinking of her as just Dancer. Her neural matrices had been silicon, rather than organic, but her thoughts had been real. Her loves, hates, ideas, jokes, inspirations, and petty prejudices had been real.

  I hadn’t recognized it at the time, but she had been a person.

  I would have been much happier if my thoughts had stopped there, but my brain insisted on carrying things to the next logical extension. If Dancer’s Scion had been a person, then the Scion of Maggie had also been a person…

  The implications of that hit me hard.

  I had gotten to know the digital incarnation of Dancer, and in the process I had discovered a vibrant and mischievous personality that was very much alive. But I had never even tried to get to know Maggie in her second incarnation. I had refused to have any contact with her Scion. It had been a thing to me. An electronic abomination masquerading as my wife. So I had turned my back. Left Maggie to wallow in her own memories, gathering dust like some worthless scrap of circuit board.

  What had happened to Dancer’s Scion was a tragedy, but at least that had been an accident. What I had done to Maggie’s Scion was ten times as bad, and I had done it intentionally.

  True, I hadn’t understood at the time that a Scion could be a person. But I should have known. If anyone on the planet should have understood that Maggie was alive—that her gently playful spirit was dancing among the silicon pathways—it was me.

  That opportunity was gone now. My last chance to undo my negligence had gone up in flames with the Neuro-Tech building.

  I couldn’t do anything for Maggie now. I couldn’t even apologize.

  Dancer was another matter, though. I could finish her quest. Track down her third perpetrator, and give the bastard what he deserved.

  I took a last drag from my cigarette, dropped the butt on the sidewalk, and ground it out with the toe of my shoe.

  There wouldn’t be any justice for Priscilla Dancer. It was too late for that.

  But it’s never too late for revenge.

  CHAPTER 25

  “I need to make a secure call to Earth,” I said. “Can you arrange it?”

  Vivien looked up as I entered the room. “Well hello to you too. Had a nice morning?”

  She was reclining on a low piece of furniture that married the general styling of the brocaded saddle chairs with the basic functionality of a chaise lounge. She was still loosely wrapped in the blue kimono, pale silk hiked well up her thighs, and showing quite a bit of leg.

  I tossed my windbreaker over the back of a chair, and laid the Nambu on a side table. “An interesting morning,” I said.

  Vivien eyed the automatic. “I can see that. Anything you care to tell me about?”

  “I ran into one of the thugs from Leanda’s apartment. He was with another guy I didn’t recognize. Not a knuckle-dragger. Refined. Well-heeled. Looked like someone who might get invited to one of your cocktail parties.”

  “You followed them?”

  “Not exactly.” I told her about my morning, leaving out any mention of Dancer’s Turing Scion. I’d never gotten around to telling Vivien about that, and now didn’t seem like the time.

  When I got to the part about surfing the electromagnets of the tram track, her eyebrows shot up.

  “Really? I mean, you actually did that?”

  “Unfortunately, I did. Seemed like a good idea at the time. If I had to do it over again, though, I think I’d take my chances against whatever hardware the bad boys might be carrying.”

  “Still, it sounds thrilling…”

  I shrugged. “If you consider ‘thrilling’ to be an adequate euphemism for ‘terrifying,’ then I’d have to agree with you. Because it scared the living hell out of me.”

  Her eyes traveled up and down my body. “You don’t look any the worse for wear. A bit rumpled perhaps, but no signs of trauma.”

  “On the outside, maybe. On the inside, I’m a quivering blob of jelly.”

  She smiled. “Somehow, I find that very difficult to believe.”

  “You can believe it,” I said.

  Vivien stretched languidly, silk going pleasantly taut across her curves. “So… did you come back for lunch, or for something else?”

  I heard the innuendo in her tone, but I wasn’t in the mood to play flirty games. “I came back for help,” I said. “I need to make a call to Earth. Secure, if at all possible.”

  “Right,” Vivien said. “You mentioned that.”

  She sat up and straightened her kimono. “Excuse me, Shogun…”

  The hotel AI’s voice was male, a gravelly basso profundo that made me think of twentieth-century martial arts vids. “Yes, Vivien-san.”

  “Can you upload a copy of my personal encryption software to Mr. Stalin’s phone? And upgrade his service for calls to Earth?”

  “Of course, Vivien-san.”

  I looked at Vivien. “Can I borrow your phone? Mine is nuked.”

  “What about the one in your carryon bag?” Vivien asked.

  “I’ve only got one phone,” I said. “As far as I know, there’s nothing in my bag but a couple of changes of clothes.”

  Vivien’s expression was something between a grimace and a guilty smile. “I’ve got a small confession to make. I’ve been snooping through your luggage.”

  I still didn’t see what she was getting at. “Okay…” I said uncertainly. “I guess you should consider yourself reprimanded for pawing through my socks and underwear. What does that have to do with making calls to Earth?”

  “You’ve got another phone in there,” Vivien said.

  “I do?”

  “Yes,” Vivien said. “And a wallet belonging to someone named Sora Kai. His ID looks like one of the goons we saw on the security recordings from the lobby of Leanda’s building.”

  Then it clicked, and I knew what she was talking about. I grinned. “I completely forgot that stuff was in there.”

  Vivien waited for me to explain.

  “Just before I caught my flight, I got into a scuffle with one of the thugs—the one I call Arm-twister. I left him lying unconscious on the floor of the men’s room at LAX. I emptied out his pockets, but I never got around to looking through his stuff after I grabbed it.”

  “The same man you ran into at the tram terminal?”

  “Same guy.”

&nbs
p; “We should check out his phone logs and his contact lists,” Vivien said. “See who he’s been talking to.”

  “We’ll do that,” I said. “But first I want to make a call. And I don’t want to use his phone to do it.”

  Vivien went in search of her phone while I dug through my wallet. Luckily, Detective Delaney’s LAPD business card was still in there. I flipped it over and saw his personal number written on the reverse side.

  Vivien was back in thirty-seconds, carrying the turquoise phone I had first seen her use in Leanda’s apartment.

  I accepted it with a nod, and dialed Delaney’s number.

  Unlike my cheap disposables, Vivien’s phone was immune to opportunistic advertising injection. The display remained blank until Delaney’s face appeared on the screen.

  It was clear from his facial expression that he had not been expecting a call from the likes of me. “Mr. Stalin, what can I do for you?”

  His voice was casual, but his eyes were intent, as if he was psychically reminding me not to mention Dancer’s Turing Scion over the phone.

  The green border around the perimeter of the screen showed that Vivien’s encryption was actively scrambling the call. Delaney would be seeing the same security indicator on his phone, but he clearly wasn’t willing to trust his career to someone else’s encryption software.

  “I’m calling from off-planet,” I said. “I need a favor. Unofficial.”

  The communication lag between Chiisai Teien and Earth was about a second and a half, so there was an unaccustomed delay before Delaney responded.

  “What kind of favor?”

  “Can you get me a copy of the police file for the Rhiarra Dancer investigation?”

  Another delay.

  “That case is closed,” Delaney said.

  He was giving me the thing with the eyes again, trying to communicate something other than what he was actually saying.