Hammered

by Elizabeth Bear

  If I’m as sick as he says. Because that leads us back to the main reason I’m in this car—the data she beamed to my HCD, the case histories and the unhappy prognosis. And Valens’s recorded assurances that there was a treatment now for progressive neurological atrophy brought on by the primitive cyberware, and that the other three surviving recipients of the original central nervous system devices he pioneered were doing just fine with their upgrades.

  He even said that in his recorded message. “Upgrades.”

  “We can reverse a lot of the scardown now, Casey. You’ll be amazed. Obviously the data aren’t in yet, but I’m theorizing we can get you another thirty years of mobility if everything goes well. And we’ve learned something about pain management, too.”

  Just so much software and hardware, wired into the wetware. Rip it out. Replace it. Whatever doesn’t work is trash, throw it away.

  I glance sidelong at Barb. “I heard you were trying to get ronin to go after me. You could have just put the word on the street that there was trouble and you needed to talk to me. I would have found you.”

  “And let the sharks know my baby sister might be less than able to defend herself?”

  It wouldn’t have stopped you back then. It didn’t stop you back then. I remember what you were like, when Nell died. Or before I left home. But that’s water under the bridge now, isn’t it? “How did you know where to find me, Barb?”

  She turned back and shot me a grin. “I put a tap on your buddy Castaign’s phone, of course.”

  Just like that.

  Except the numbers still don’t quite add up. And that’s not what she said this morning.

  Seven Years Earlier:

  1430 hours, Monday 12 July, 2055

  Scavella-Burrell Base

  Hellas Planitia

  Mars

  Charlie ran a hand across his clipped, thinning fair hair, scrubbing at the back of his skull. He lifted his shoulders and grimaced, then placed both hands on the edge of his desk and levered himself to his feet, blinking his contacts clear. An armed guard—taser only, in the airtight confines of the station—fell into step behind him as he left his lab. One more thing to thank John for. A guy can’t even take a piss around here anymore without an escort.

  As he was leaving the head, Colonel Valens stopped him in the hall. “Charlie.”

  “Evening, Fred.” He couldn’t remember how long he’d been on a first-name basis with the base commander, and wondered occasionally how he had ever found the man forbidding. “You look like a man with a mission, sir.”

  Valens bobbed his chin down, half a nod and an ironic smile. “All work and no play. How are you doing on the DNA sequencing?”

  Charlie fell into step beside him. “It’s not exactly DNA, although it is a long-chain organic molecule. And I’ve gotten distracted by something interesting, frankly.”

  “Interesting, or interesting?”

  “Yes.” He held his lab door open for Valens, noticing that the guard was standing just far enough away not to seem to overhear.

  Valens preceded Charlie into the room. “Tell me more.”

  “Have you been reading my weeklies?”

  “I’ve been up to my ass in paperwork, and a little brinksmanship over the salvage vessels. The Chinese have decided that testing our perimeters is not enough, and they’ve actually been sending in surface teams. But that’s neither here nor there; tell me what is interesting.”

  Charlie kicked his chair to one side and perched on the edge of the desk, away from the interface plate. “We’ve been using a scanning electron microscope on some of the samples from the shiptree. Consensus is, it was in fact grown. And then reinforced. Let me show you something.” With deft fingers, he tapped up the holographic display and pulled up an image queue.

  “Surgical nanites,” Valens said promptly. “Q class. Neurosurgical. I’ve used them.”

  “Right. Look at these.”

  “Holy … oh.”

  Charlie felt the grin pulling his lips wide when Valens came the last five steps to lean in close to the projection.

  The colonel poked one finger into the hologram, singling out one magnified image among crawling dozens. “Those are from S-2? Are they as small as this indicator shows?”

  “Yep. And still active.”

  “I can see that. Well.” Valens leaned back on his heels, head shaking slowly. “These are responsible for the microreinforcement of the shiptree’s hull.”

  “And what appears to be a sort of artificially enhanced nervous system. Which hooks up to the cables I had theorized were VR links. Yes.”

  The silence was gratifying. Charlie looked up from the display. Valens’s face was still and pale. “You’re suggesting,” he said, “that that ship was—alive? That it still is?”

  “Well”—Charlie tapped the interface off—“no. Or, more precisely, somewhat less alive than a sea squirt is, after it becomes sessile and eats its brain. No—”he held up a hand to forestall questions. “That was a digression, and never mind the biology lecture right now. What I’m saying is that the thing has a rudimentary nervous system. What it means? Well, there’s still research to be done. More interesting—”

  Valens cut him off. “More interesting, you’ve discovered something that could revolutionize the treatment of spinal cord injury patients, if we can figure out how to use it. Is that where you were going with this?”

  “Yeah,” he said with satisfaction. “If we can figure out how to make these things, and make them safe for human use, not only can we fix what’s broken … but, Fred. We may very well be able to make people smarter or faster, cure or fight a whole raft of neurological conditions … These babies are hot.”

  “So I see.” Valens clapped him on the shoulder. “Send me the report. I’ll contact Dr. Holmes at Unitek, and make sure you receive the credit your work is due. Charlie …”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you.” The colonel turned, springy on the ball of his foot in light gravity, and left.

  8:30 P.M., Sunday 10 September, 2062:

  Hartford, Connecticut

  Sigourney Street

  Abandoned North End

  Razorface stopped under the rust-red metal awning, left hand on the pull of the big blue door. Derek and Rasheed waited across the street, leaned up against the brick of a tenement building beside the parked Bradford, which Razor planned on wheeling inside as soon as he got the bays open. The three of them should have been the only people around.

  Razor glanced right, where three rolling metal bay doors were closed and locked in the cinder-block wall of the shop. Flaking paint scrolled across them. Razor knew the mural said something about auto body and appliance repair, but he wasn’t sure exactly what.

  “Might as well come on outta there,” he said, taking his fist off the handle. And damned if it wasn’t that cracker detective, Mitch, with the Polish last name, stepping out of the shadows of a doorway down the street and strolling up Sigourney with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his ratty corduroy pants and a cigarette hanging off his lower lip like he’d been intending to come over and say hi any minute.

  Razorface felt his nostrils flare, and grinned. Goddamned cops in my neighborhood. What is the world coming to? The pig didn’t even look him in the teeth when he smiled, and he had to give Kozlowski that. He was cool.

  “Razorface,” the cop said, drawing first one hand and then the other slowly out of his pockets and showing them empty. “Seen your boy Emery over in West Hartford the other day talking to a 20-Love. You keeping a close enough eye on him?”

  Fucking cops, just trying to stir up shit. Razorface grunted and turned away.

  Mitch kept talking. “Maker isn’t home. And I need to talk to you about Mashaya Duclose.”

  “I got nothing to talk to nobody about,” Razorface answered, setting the key card Maker had given him to the reader. The lock flicked back and Mitch’s brow crinkled. Razorface’s boys started moving forward from their place across t
he street, and Mitch took a slow step forward.

  The pig’s voice dropped and leveled, dead calm. “Where’s Maker, Razorface? And how did you get her key?”

  Razorface paused with the door half open. “Visiting the fam,” he said. “I’m feeding the damn cat. Gonna bust me for it?”

  “Her family.” Mitch reached up and caught the door before Razorface could quite step inside and pull it shut behind himself. Over Mitch’s shoulder, Razor saw his boys coming up on the cop. He shook them off with a minute jerk of the head, turning his attention back to the weedy little policeman, who was still talking. “Sister maybe? Black-haired gal about so tall?”

  Razorface snarled silently, stepping through the door. “How much trouble Maker in, piggy?” Damned if he wanted to care, but he owed her. Owed her enough to come down himself to feed her goddamn cat because he knew she wouldn’t want anybody but him poking around in her stuff, when by rights he’d rather set fire to the stupid animal.

  The cop shrugged. “Let’s go inside and talk about it, shall we?”

  Their eyes met, pit bull and terrier coming to some unspoken agreement that didn’t involve either one backing down. Ten long seconds later, Razorface stepped away and gestured Mitch through the door. There was no way he was turning his back on a cop.

  Inside, he entered the code Maker had given him into the security system. A pressure seemed to come off his eardrums when the sonics powered down, and he made sure the door was locked behind them. Then he followed Mitch into the shop.

  It looked just as it had before they left for New York. He saw Mitch examining things in that cop way of his, and grunted, bending down to unlock the ratproof safe holding the cat food. There was still a couple of days’ worth in the automatic feeder, but Razorface topped it off anyway, ignoring the cop. He suspected Mitch was trying to get under his skin.

  It wouldn’t do to show it was working.

  Boris came out from under the Cadillac and started winding around the cop’s ankles, and Razor shook his head. Typical. Who was doing the feeding? And who was getting the thanks? He saw it as more or less a metaphor for the workings of the world, now that he thought about it.

  Course, it might have something to do with the cat smelling Razorface’s Rottweiler on his pants. Maybe.

  “So what the hell do you want?” Enough quiet time. He wanted to get the conversation over with and get home to Leesie, although he wasn’t about to let any of the boys know that. His jaw ached, as it did more and more these days, and his chest ached, too, no matter how much iron he lifted. The air sucked, was all it was. Better here in Maker’s shop, though—she kept the scrubbers going.

  Mitch opened his mouth to talk, met Razorface’s eye dead on—and stopped. His jaw worked twice, and just as Razorface was about to turn around on his bootheel and stomp out, words followed. “Can we quit bullshitting each other and work together on this?”

  Quiet and sharp. And Razorface started to snarl something about not needing no help from no fucking cops, and Maker’s gone, she’s gone with somebody she hate. Somebody she scared of. Scared for me because of.

  He heard his own voice saying, “Fuck yeah.”

  Mitch got real quiet then, and looked down at his loafers. “It’s bigger than street level. I think there’s a fucking corporation involved. That won’t stop my boss, if he can get good evidence—the chief is a straight-up arrow, and the commissioner, Dr. Hua—Well, you know about her. She’s a bulldog. But I’ve been flat told to keep my nose out of this before I wind up fired and dead, not necessarily in that order. And I know—I know in my bones, man, this all has something to do with Maker, and we need to figure out, you and me, we need to figure out what and why and how. Because I don’t goddamned know if we can trust her, and I don’t know either if we can solve this without her. So we’re on the same goddamned side.”

  Razorface thought about it, hard and slow, rubbing at a cramped muscle along the left side of his neck. Wrong to let this cop in here like this.

  My kids’re dying. My baby’s aunt, this cop’s old lady, she dead, too.

  I thought she was working with this cop. But he’s worried what she was up to.

  Maker gave me the key. She trust me, I should trust her. But maybe she want me to look, couldn’t explain. ‘Cause some things you can’t explain.

  “Right,” Razorface answered. “You inferrin’ we should toss this place?”

  “Yeah. Yes, sir, I am.”

  It was a nice thing, Razorface reflected a few minutes later, bending to pull a steamer trunk out from under Maker’s cot, to hear a cop say sir and sound like he actually meant it. It was a big trunk, the ridged high-impact plastic shell battered and gouged, and it was secured with a thumb lock. “What about this?”

  “Looks as likely as anything.” Mitch was rooting through the roughly hung cabinets under the hand-built wooden table in the far corner. The cop sat back on his heels and Razorface heard a thump. “Damn!” Standing, rubbing the back of his head with one hand, Mitch walked back. He winced and leaned down. “Thumb lock.”

  “No shit,” Razorface growled. “Tell me something useful.” He shot a sidelong glance at the smug young cop. Mitch didn’t even have the decency to grimace a little as he squatted down beside the trunk and the gangster.

  Mitch ran stubby fingers over the surface of the lock. “Dusty,” he muttered. Boris, finished with his dinner, wandered over to scrub his face against Mitch’s knee, and the cop scratched the cat absently with his other hand. “There’s a trick to these old ones.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  The cop shot him a grinning glance. “Watch this.” Mitch slipped a cash chit and a switchblade out of his corduroys, flicking the latter open. He slid the thin slip of plastic into the crack between the lid and the body of the trunk until it butted up against the catch. Razorface watched the long narrow knife blade with interest. Odd thing for a cop to have.

  Holding it by the black rubber handle, Mitch levered it behind the thumb lock. A fat blue spark jumped clear, and Mitch jerked his hand off the knife, which clattered to the floor. “Fuck!” he hissed, and then he cackled. “Hah!”

  The bolt had disengaged for a moment when the lock shorted and reset, and Mitch’s cash chit was now caught between the shaft and the lockplate. Grinning, he shook his shocked hand once and flipped the lid of the trunk back. “Holy …”

  Face frowned at a sea of forest-green wool, fumes of cedar and camphor stinging his eyes. He had no idea what he was looking at. “What the hell is that? Uniforms?”

  Mitch reached out and ran his fingers across the nap of the fabric, frowning for a long time before he nodded. “We shouldn’t be in here, Razor,” he said quietly.

  “I know,” Razorface answered. “You gonna tell me what I’m looking at?”

  “Master Warrant Officer Casey.” Mitch shook his head, letting the cloth fall back into tidy folds. “Damn. That Honda was registered to a Barbara Casey. It is her sister. Or sister-in-law, I guess.” Razorface watched as the cop lifted the clothes out carefully, one stack at a time. They were dusty and creased along the folds: these things hadn’t seen sunlight or air in a very long time.

  One layer down, and Mitch found other things: an unlocked flat tin with a stack of papers in it, two powder-blue berets, and a cardboard box. One of the berets was torn and bloody: the other looked as if it had just been pressed and packed away. The cop set those aside, also.

  With a gnawing sensation that he recognized as nostalgia, Razorface reached out and touched the undamaged beret. “Seen those before,” he said, thinking of acrid smoke and a slim young woman scrambling around piles of burning trash to drag his twelve-year-old self under cover. “What’s in the box?”

  “I bet I know,” Mitch said. “Master Warrant Officer. That’s a big deal, Razorface. Some kinda expert rank. I figured she was a sergeant or something.”

  “Private, when I met her.” A moment too late, Razorface realized that he had broken the cardinal rule and v
olunteered information. “Box.”

  “I bet I know what that is. Hah. Yep.” Mitch folded the flaps open and started lifting smaller boxes up into the light. “Shit, look at that.”

  A full hand of little flat cases. Razorface picked one up and angled it toward the light. A medal or something, hanging on a striped ribbon. “So?”

  “I don’t know what the half of these are for, Razor. But I bet the baby blue on these here is for U.N. combat service. And look at this. That one—the red maple leaf on the star. I know what that one is. That’s valor in the face of the enemy. And a lot of these others just plain say what they’re for … South Africa, Brazil. New England. She must have been here when Canada loaned us troops during the food riots back in the thirties.”

  “Yeah,” Razorface said. “I told you I knew her from way back.” Something uncomfortable writhed in his gut. This was a betrayal. It was wrong, and he knew it, but he shoved the thought back. Son of a bitch. It’s not like she’s been telling me shit.

  Mitch was paying him no attention, fascinated with holding one bit of cloth and metal after another up to the light. “Ah. Here’s another one with a maple leaf on it. Those must be the important ones, you think?”

  “I guess.” Less interested in military decorations, Razorface lifted the cardboard box out of the trunk and laid it on Mitch’s lap. Underneath were a series of crumbling colored paper binders, and two poly bubbles with holographic data storage devices packed inside. The bubbles were marked with a caduceus, a maple leaf, and a green-on-beige spiral that Razorface didn’t recognize.

  “Jackpot,” Mitch gloated.

  Razorface felt his bowels clench at the note in the cop’s voice. This is the wrong thing to be doing, he thought. You don’t do this kind of shit to your buds. “Whaddaya mean, jackpot?”

  “Medical records, Razor. And her service records, too. This is exactly what we needed. Fucking A good job, man. Fucking A.”

  There was something tucked in among them. Razor jerked his chin at the cream-colored bundle, as long as one of his own massive hands. “What that?”