city blues 02 - angel city blues

by Jeff Edwards

  “What really happened to your brother?” I asked. I put my best sneer into my voice. “Ichiro’s shuttle accident was awfully convenient, wasn’t it? He was your father’s favorite son, right up until his flight burned up on re-entry. A half-dozen cracked tiles in the heat shield, and suddenly you were Daddy’s favorite boy. Or at least his only boy.”

  “Shut your filthy mouth!” Jiro hissed.

  “Or what? You do to me what you did to your two buddies just now?”

  Nine-fingers made no move to intercept me as I drifted past the sphere. Jiro had to dive through the air to chase me down. It took him a minute or so for him to check my movement, and bring me back around to a stop between the separated hemispheres. He shoved the detritus of Arm-twister and Messenger-boy aside. Shoes, clothing, and innumerable loops of filament spinning and undulating through the air like so many freeform sculptures.

  “Did you handle the heat shield yourself?” I asked. “A little space-walk with an EVA suit and a hammer, maybe? Or did you let one of your expendable friends take the risk?”

  Jiro’s jaw muscles tightened, but he had apparently decided to ignore my jibes. He launched himself in Vivien’s direction.

  I called out to his receding back, “I’m guessing that somebody else did the dirty work for you. Because you don’t have the guts to do it yourself.”

  Jiro didn’t respond as he flew to an anchor point and shoved Vivien’s cocoon toward me. This time—aware that he wasn’t going to get any help from Nine-fingers—he coasted along close behind, ready to handle the braking maneuver himself.

  He brought Vivien to a halt next to me. “I’m doing this myself,” he said.

  Vivien’s laugh dripped with condescension. “Oh, yes… You’re doing it yourself… after somebody else has rendered your enemies helpless. You were practically pissing yourself when we pulled you out of that shower. You only get brave when there’s no risk involved.”

  She shifted to Japanese. “Tansho! Konjö nashi!”

  Jiro leaned closer, until his face was only about ten centimeters from hers. His grin was nasty. “Kono joro!”

  He raised his voice. “I killed him myself, you stupid bitch! I wrecked his heat shield. And then I laughed as my dear brother hit the atmosphere and fried. Beautiful Ichiro. Wonderful Ichiro. My father’s perfect son. The hope and future of our family. But I brought the little bastard down. Burning across the sky like a falling star. Ashes scattered across half a continent.”

  Jiro pushed off from the rim of the sphere, and floated back outside of its perimeter. “Now, I’m afraid it’s your turn.

  The buzzer sounded, and the spherical chamber began to close around us.

  This was it. The end of things. All of my clever deductions, stalling tactics, and divide-and-conquer strategies had come to nothing. My final and only weapons, my words, had failed. It was over.

  The geodesic hemispheres met and latched together with a heavy thunk.

  Jiro extracted the nano containment pod, or whatever the gray pistol-like gadget was called. He darted to the table with the rack and swapped out the used device for a new one.

  He was back a few seconds later, inserting the nozzle end of the object into the fitted receptacle in one of the metal bands that bisected the sphere. The inside surface of the band was pierced by hundreds of parallel vents, the opening of each shaped like a crescent moon or a fingernail clipping.

  Jiro pulled out his data pad and finger tapped his way through the routine that would presumably program the nano-machines.

  We were seconds away from being devoured by microscopic robots. But unlike our predecessors in the chamber, we were not already dead. I didn’t even want to think about what this was going to feel like, so I decided to distract myself, and (hopefully) Vivien as well.

  The cocoon wouldn’t let me turn my head very far, so I had to make due with looking at her out of the corner of my eye. The first thing that popped into my head was stupid and banal, but I said it anyway. “Any regrets?

  Vivien raised an eyebrow. “Yes, as a matter of fact. I regret not fucking you after I got this great Kabuki-girl makeover. I think I look pretty hot right now.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “You look damned hot right now. I can’t believe we didn’t get around to that.”

  “Maybe next time,” she said softly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe next time.”

  I heard the beginnings of a low whistling sound, and the air around the crescent shaped vents took on a shimmer. The nano-bots were flooding into the sphere now.

  I could see the mist forming around us, restless plumes of darkening haze, their myriad movements announced by the rising wail of a miniature cyclone—just a couple of meters in diameter. Barely large enough to engulf two helpless humans.

  And then the cloud of hungry machines converged on us, and I felt a million microscopic touches on my body.

  Vivien screamed.

  Or maybe it was me.

  CHAPTER 38

  We were at the center of a swirling maelstrom of voracious robots, each of them ripping, tearing, gobbling one molecule at a time. The pain hadn’t hit me yet, which probably meant that the nano-bots probably hadn’t bitten in deeply enough to hit nerve receptors. But I knew that agony was not more than a second or two in my future.

  “Look!” Vivien shouted.

  I frantically scanned the nano-cloud, wondering what new threat she had spotted. “Where?”

  “Not in here!” she shouted. “Out there!”

  I shifted my plane of focus to the laboratory outside of the sphere. Even through the cloud of teeming nano-bots, I could see what she was talking about. The display screens throughout laboratory had come to life, and they were all showing the same thing: the grinning face of Priscilla Dancer.

  What the hell?

  Somehow, on every screen, Dancer was looking directly at me. As soon as she was sure that I had noticed her, she threw me an exaggerated wink.

  It was hard to know which was more bizarre: seeing the face of a dead woman who could not possibly be here, or being winked at by an electronic ghost while I was in the process of being devoured by a swarm of nanoscale robots.

  Although, come to think of it, the little monsters didn’t seem to be doing much in the way of devouring. I glanced over to Vivien and saw the outer layer of her cocoon filaments eroding. Strands were fraying, parting, and falling away. I couldn’t tilt my head far enough to look down at my own body, but I still wasn’t feeling any signs of pain. The nano-cloud wasn’t eating us. It was eating the cocoons.

  “It’s Dancer!” I yelled. “She reprogrammed the nano-bots!”

  We were not going to be eaten! We were not going to be eaten! We were not going to be eaten! The litany of unexpected survival was cycling through my brain so rapidly that I nearly missed the opening of the next act in our little drama.

  It started with the senator slapping the side of his neck, like he was trying to swat a gnat or a mosquito. Apparently, he wasn’t very well anchored, because the sudden motion spun him away from his foothold and he began rolling through the air, swatting violently at himself.

  Then, Nine-fingers and Jiro got in on the act, both men slapping at their arms, faces, necks, and any other stretches of exposed skin. They maintained their footing longer than the senator had managed, but their swats were no less frantic. A few seconds of increasingly wild convulsions jerked them loose and sent them tumbling through the zero-gravity environment.

  I glanced over toward the table where the nano containment pods were racked. The air fumed and wavered around the nozzle end of every device. Dancer had apparently triggered them all at the same time, and the laboratory outside of the sphere was rapidly growing darker with teeming nano-machines.

  I was suddenly glad to be inside the chamber, instead of out there, where the nanos were getting down to their nasty business.

  It was a thousand times worse than what had happened to the bodies of Arm-twister and Messenger-boy
, because the two thugs had already been dead. The three men outside of the chamber were alive, at least for the moment. Their cries rose to shrieks. They thrashed, and contorted, ricocheting off walls and equipment, flinging sprays of blood droplets as their flesh eroded away. The nano-bots guzzled down each drop, scouring the lab for every mote of human tissue.

  Either Nine-fingers or Jiro (it was no longer possible to tell which) floundered into the side of the chamber and bounced off. As the pitiful figure rebounded away, one gnawed arm slapped wetly against the transparent surface, leaving a red hand-shaped smear on the faceted diamond analog. That was when I closed my eyes, and tried to ignore the mewling wails of the three dying things that had once been men.

  I didn’t open them again until I was sure that everything was over. When I did, the last vestiges of the cocoon filaments were gone, and the sphere appeared to be empty of nanos.

  Vivien floated beside me, her eyes still closed—legs drawn up, and arms wrapped around her body.

  Out in the lab, I could see odd bits of clothing drifting about, but no sign of the senator, or Nine-fingers, or Jiro.

  The buzzer sounded, and the sphere began to open.

  Vivien flinched at the sound, and her eyes snapped open. I knew she was feeling the same rush of panic that I was experiencing. We both began scanning the area outside for signs of the nano swarms. I couldn’t see any, and Vivien didn’t call out any warnings. Nothing came surging through the widening gap to eat us, so apparently the lab was clear.

  The noises of the whirlwinds had died away now. The only sounds were the cooling fans of some of the laboratory equipment, overlain by the ragged breathing of two people sliding down the back side of an adrenaline crash.

  Dancer’s sardonic smile showed from every display screen. Her voice came out of speakers all over the lab. “Sorry about the lousy floorshow. I tried to get an orchestra and some juggling monkeys, but it’s tough to find quality entertainment on short notice.”

  I kicked off from the inside surface of the sphere, and launched myself in the general direction of the nearest jumble of drifting clothes. “Not funny,” I said. “You saved our asses, and we’re damned glad to see you, but we’re not in the mood for joking.”

  “Cop survival mechanism,” Dancer said. “When you walk into a really nasty crime scene—something you know is gonna give you nightmares—out come the bad jokes. It’s how you keep from curling up into a fetal ball and crying your eyes out. And in case you didn’t notice, some spectacularly horrible shit just went down in here.”

  I caught a grab bar with one foot, and jerked myself to a stop with a lack of dexterity that made the senator’s blunderings look positively graceful by comparison.

  Reasonably anchored, I pawed through the floating constellation of clothing until I found the Nambu and what appeared to be one of the electrocution dart guns.

  Vivien caught on to what I was doing, and launched herself toward another one of the bundles of clothing. She swam through the weightless environment with the aquatic elegance of a mermaid, further highlighting my own awkward movements.

  A few seconds later, she had the Miroku and another of the electrocution guns. With the latter tucked into the waistband of her skirt and the former held firmly in her right hand, she looked around to me. “What’s the plan, boss?”

  “You’re the boss,” I said. “And my only plan is to get the hell out of here.”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said.

  I made eye contact with Dancer on the nearest display screen. “Can you show us the way out?”

  Dancer nodded. “Sure thing.”

  The screens all went dark, and her voice came from somewhere to my left. “Follow the yellow brick road.”

  I turned and saw the data pad, revolving slowly near a different bundle of clothes. Dancer’s face now occupied the pad’s rectangular display.

  I launched myself toward it, misjudging my trajectory, but passing close enough to snatch the thing out of the air as I drifted by. It took me a moment to make it to a grab bar and steady myself. When I was situated, I flipped the pad around so that I was face-to-face with Dancer’s image.

  “I never expected to see you as a Jap,” she said. “That’s not a half bad look for you.”

  I bit back a reflexive comment about the racial epithet. “Pleasantries later, please. We need to get moving.”

  A green flashing arrow appeared near one corner of the data pad. “That way,” Dancer said.

  I looked in the direction the arrow was pointing. “The airlock?”

  “Yep. Only exit from the lab. Once we’re on the other side of it, we’ve got options.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  I shoved off in the direction of the lock. With her superior maneuvering skills, Vivien got there ahead of me.

  Despite my utter lack of coordination in zero-g, Vivien managed to shepherd me through the airlock and into the cylindrical corridor beyond.

  “Alright,” Dancer said from the pad. “We can take one of the public elevators down to the common areas, and try to get out through the front entrance or the tram station. Or we can take the executive elevator down to the landing flat and try to boost one of the hover-limos. Or we can stay up here in zero-g land, and make our way over to the shuttle docks. Try to bribe or sneak our way onto one of the private shuttles, without going through the terminal.”

  “We won’t have to sneak,” Vivien said. “My husband never travels on public transportation. He’s got a charter shuttle waiting right now, I guarantee it.”

  I looked at her. “Can we use it?”

  “Why not?” Vivien asked. “He’s not going to need a ride home, is he?”

  “I mean, can we get aboard?” I said. “It’s not chartered in our names.”

  “I’m his wife,” Vivien said. “Or I was. And I control a hell of a lot more of the family fortune than he did. I can get us on board. If I have to, I’ll buy a controlling interest in the charter company.”

  “Not to point out the obvious,” Dancer said, “but your face doesn’t exactly match your ID chip at the moment.”

  “I’m Ms. Pampered-Rich-Bitch,” Vivien said. “You think this is the first time I ever went on vacation and came back with a different face?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Dancer said. “I never had the money for shit like that. My idea of a vacation is three days on the couch watching vid, with an endless supply of chili-cheese fries.”

  “I should get you to plan my next vacation,” Vivien said.

  “Later,” I said. “First we have to get out of here alive. Are you sure you can get us on the shuttle?”

  “Yes,” Vivien said. “Reasonably sure.”

  “I guess that’ll have to be good enough,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  An hour later, we were ensconced in a luxurious private lounge, waiting for the flight crew to finish prepping the shuttle for departure. Vivien had worked her usual magic: schmoozing, bribing, and threatening in approximately equal measures, until we were somehow transformed from uninvited intruders to VIP guests of the uppermost rank.

  One complete wall of the lounge was a gently curving vid screen, dedicated to showing a high-resolution view of the starscape as seen from the colony’s axis of rotation. The image was stabilized for spin, so the stars didn’t wheel around in dizzying circles. The sight was both beautiful and unsettling, as if someone had peeled away an entire wall of the room, leaving it exposed to the vacuum of space.

  Prolonged viewing tended to give me vertigo despite the stabilization, because my brain wanted to interpret the lounge as a box with the bottom torn out. I felt twinges of an irrational fear that we were all going to topple into the abyss, and fall away to infinity. The lack of gravity didn’t help.

  I looked around the lounge. “Is there a remote for that thing?”

  “You mean the wall screen?” Dancer asked. “You want to watch porn or something?”

  “Anything,” I said. “Scenery. News. Old vids. C
ommercials. Anything but that.”

  The wall changed to a watercolor seascape that I probably should have recognized, but didn’t.

  Dancer raised an eyebrow. “Is that better? I can get you porn, if you need it.”

  “This is fine,” I said. “How did you do that?”

  The lights in the lounge dimmed by about twenty-percent. “Same way I did that,” Dancer said. “Spook in the circuits, baby. Ghost in the machine…”

  Vivien yawned. “I’m pretty sure that’s not what Ryle was talking about.”

  Dancer cut her a sideways glance. “What? Who the fuck is Riley?”

  “Ryle,” Vivien said. “Gilbert Ryle. He was a…”

  She let the idea drop, and waved a hand in dismissal. “Never mind. Not relevant to the conversation.”

  She yawned again. “Ms. Dancer, I apologize. You’re the queen of the ghosts. And you can haunt my machines any time you want.”

  “Speaking of haunting machines,” I said, “how did you cram your ghostly ass into that data pad? That thing can’t possibly have more than a couple of petabytes of capacity. I don’t know much about Turing Scions, but I know they’re a hell of a lot bigger than that.”

  Dancer cut her eyes at me. “Are you trying to say I’m fat?”

  She cut me off before I could answer. “I’m not in the data pad,” she said. “I’m just using it as an interface device. My actual code is still in the station’s data cores. I’m working on ways to download myself to some Earth-side network without setting off every bandwidth alarm in the place.”

  “I still don’t understand,” I said. “How did you get into the net to begin with? Surfing the public sites is one thing, but the Akimura Nanodyne networks are bound to be hardened against jackers, viruses, AI’s, and every kind of penetration attack and intrusion tactic imaginable. But you just waltzed right in, and set up housekeeping. I want to know how you did that.”

  “I let her in,” said a voice from the far end of the room.

  I looked toward the wall screen. In the middle of the huge display, superimposed over the watercolor seascape, was the face of a middle-aged Japanese man.