Pop 'Em One (Bubbles in Space Book 3)

Pop 'Em One (Bubbles in Space Book 3) Page 10

by S. C. Jensen

  “Maybe we can meet,” Patti said, turning to me, “Once you accomplish your assignment.”

  Rain bounced off the shuttle in a steady percussion of sound, creating a hazy pink aura of light reflected from the control tower’s beacon. I said, “I don’t see how anything will be different then.”

  Johanna glared balefully at me from behind Patti. The android shrugged. Resignation made her wilt as if she were a paper doll in the rain. She could have been a Grit District pro skirt working the early morning crowd behind techRose, melting in the pointlessness of it all.

  “Here,” she said and held out her hand to me, a thin white card pressed against her palm. I took it. An address was typed on one side of the card. The back side was blank. She said, “In case you change your mind.”

  “This is where I can find you?”

  “That’s where we’ll find you,” Johanna said. “Don’t bother coming until the job is done.”

  “And what if I don’t come back?” I said.

  “Then it doesn’t matter what we do,” Patti said. “Because everything will be lost. You must do everything you can to keep Rae out of Libra’s clutches.”

  I will, I thought, and tucked the card into the pocket next to Hammett. Then I turned away from the two women and walked further into the darkness and the rain. Gore waited for me, as he’d said he would, on the other side of the fine, chain-link fence. He held it open for me and I stepped through with my bag held out in front of me.

  “She say anything to you?” he asked.

  I hefted the bag back on to my shoulder and stuck my hand in my pocket. I wrapped my fingers around Hammett’s sphere and felt the sharp edge of the card bite into my finger. I said, “About what?”

  “They don’t trust me,” Gore said. “’Cause they know I don’t trust them. I thought one of ’em might let their guard down if it was just you. What did they say?”

  “Nothing.” I fingered the card in my pocket. Gore needed to keep his mind on saving Tom. I’d worry about Rae and Patti and the deal with Nathanial Price. If Plan A failed, I wanted to have Plan B ready. “Johanna gave me a hard time about not trusting them. Patti seemed to understand.”

  Gore studied my face with no expression on his own. He said, “Okay.”

  I swallowed and cleared my throat. “Where are we going? This place is a dead zone.”

  A wide dirt road—completely off-grid—stretched as far as the eye could see with nothing on either side but more bare, chain-link fencing. Behind the fence, the squat black shadows of unlit warehouse buildings crouched like ambush predators, completely still and endlessly patient. A pale sign, barely visible in the gloom, hung on one side of the fence, Max BioHax: Organic Upgrades.

  “Please don’t tell me these warehouses are full of body parts,” I muttered.

  “I didn’t take you for the squeamish type,” he said. “We got a job to do, and it’s not gonna get any prettier.”

  “I can do the job,” I said.

  And if I can’t, I thought, I’ve got an ace in my pocket.

  “She didn’t give you nothin’?” His eyes searched mine.

  What was he, some kind of mind reader now?

  I stone-walled him with my best cop face, irritation flaring that he still didn’t trust me. I thought we were supposed to be on the same team. I hadn’t done anything to deserve his distrust. Never mind that I actually was keeping something from him. The card was none of his business. “What do you think? They had a good cackle and revealed their plans for world domination?”

  “Just askin’ a question,” he said.

  “They seemed genuinely sorry they couldn’t help.”

  Gore nodded and swung the body bag onto his back. He shuffled away from the fence and said, “Come on, it’s gonna be a hike.”

  I tugged the hood of my jacket out from under the strap of my bag and pulled it over my soaking wet hair. Too bad I hadn’t thought of that fifteen minutes ago. Rain splashed against my upgrade, sending a cool sensation along the artificial nerves. I hustled after him. “Are we safe to talk now?”

  “Safe as we can be outside a quiet box, I’d guess.” The rain pummelled his slumped shoulders and the top of his bald head, but he didn’t seem to mind. “We’re gonna need to get a team together.”

  “A team for what?” I said.

  “We’ll talk about it when we find a quiet box.”

  “So it’s not safe.”

  “I don’t like to take too many chances,” he said.

  I asked, “What if Libra already knows we’re coming?”

  “Oh, they know we’re coming,” he said. “And they’ll be waiting for us.”

  I grimaced. “I love a good motivational speech.”

  We marched on in silence. The shadowed buildings on either side of us seemed to keep an ominous watch on our progress. I kept one hand in my pocket, safely wedged between Hammett and Plan B. Something a little like guilt twinged at the edges of my mind, but I wrote it off as a symptom of the cold and damp. Despite the rain, my throat felt as dry and scratchy as a stale cracker. And I was hungry enough that thinking about stale crackers made my stomach growl.

  “You have a quiet box in mind?” I said. “I know a place.”

  Gore glanced at me over his shoulder, one of his fat non-eyebrows wrinkled into an arc above his eye. “How quiet?”

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “Despite appearances to the contrary, I am a professional. Semi-professional. At least, I have connections.”

  “It’s not that I doubt you,” he said. “I just worry that you and I might have differing definitions on some key words.”

  “Like what?”

  “Professional, for one,” he said.

  My stomach growled again, loud enough to be heard over the rain.

  “And quiet,” he said.

  “I’m not inter-corporation button man,” I said, and I pressed my palm against my midsection. “But I have my sources too. And they have noodle bowls.”

  Gore grinned, his flat gorilla face folding into an unnerving number of wrinkles. “You’re not completely useless after all.”

  “Do you always flirt with your partners in crime?”

  I kicked at a puddle. A rooster tail of mud sprayed up and speckled the back of his fancy hit-man suit. Gore stopped dead in his tracks and turned around slowly.

  “Only the stupid ones.” He wiped a glob of mud off his shoulder and flicked it at me. “Watch it. You can’t afford to replace these threads.”

  “Relax,” I said. “The way the rain is coming down, it’ll be clean again before we get downtown.”

  “Presentation matters in this racket.” Gore smoothed his lapels with the hand not carrying the body bag. “Slick threads is half the job. You don’t mess with a man’s suit.”

  “I’m sorry, okay?” I said. “I’ll pick up the dry-cleaning bill. But how are we going to get downtown? We’re about nine clicks from nowhere as far as I can tell.”

  Gore pointed at a black gap in the fencing between two different lots full of warehouse buildings. A hole in the ground, surrounded by a hip-height barricade, revealed stairs descending into the earth.

  “A slug station?â
€ I said. “Out here?”

  “I guess even corporate organ grinders have to take the subway sometimes,” Gore said. He waved an arm dramatically in front of him and ushered me into the pit. “After you.”

  “What a gentleman,” I said, peering down the stairs to where they disappeared into the inky blackness below. “Too bad Johanna isn’t here to see those manners in action.”

  “Thought I’d let you scare up the rats,” he said. “The more remote the stops, the bigger the vermin.”

  “I’m more worried about human vermin,” I said, and I swung my bag onto my flesh shoulder. I flexed my metal fingers and grinned at the hit man. “But if I catch a rat, I’ll get Sal to fry it up for your protein.”

  “Tough guy, huh?”

  “This is my city, gorilla boy,” I said, descending the stairs. “You can’t scare me on my own turf.”

  “Watch your step,” he said, and dropped his bag on the ground. “I’ll grab a light.”

  “Can’t I use my tattler?” I asked.

  “Better not,” he said. “I’d like to run scans on everything once we’re in the box, just to be safe. But I have a torch.”

  The darkness enveloped me like I was submerged in a pool of black water. I waited for my eyes to adjust, groping my way deeper into the hole. They didn’t. I swallowed hard against the thick, dry worm of my tongue, wishing I’d grabbed a can of NRG for the road. Keeping one hand on the wall, I slid each foot carefully down to the next step. An uneven drop made my heart lurch, and for a second, I was convinced Gore had led me to the mouth of a pit. I gripped the wall and reached down with my toes until I found purchase again.

  “Any luck?” I called up the stairs.

  Gore grunted something, but I couldn’t make it out. It sounded like he was struggling with the bag. Maybe there was a body in there after all. Maybe he was making room for mine.

  I shook my head. Something scurried in the depths. I pictured Gore’s monster rats and regretted my earlier bravado. I actually hated rats. I said, “These stairs feel like they were built by a barrel of drunk monkeys.”

  My voice echoed strangely in the darkness. I turned my head toward the top of the stairs, expecting to hear some snarky reply. But Gore didn’t say anything. The top of the stairs were illuminated faintly in the darkness, even the night outside was brighter than the pitch of the tunnel. I couldn’t see him. The rain still came down, creating a steady drone of sound in the staircase. I couldn’t hear him anymore either.

  Another noise, louder than the first, rustled near my feet. I stumbled backward up the stairs a couple of steps and landed hard on my backside. I said, “Gore?”

  The words came out cracked and nervous, bouncing off the walls as if mocking me. But he didn’t reply.

  I cursed under my breath, turned myself around on the stairs and, with a creeping feeling at my back, I climbed up to the surface. Water streamed in the mouth of the tunnel and ran in rivulets down the stairs. From this angle I could see the skim of slimy green mildew covering each step. I didn’t think they got a lot of use, despite Gore’s quip about the organ grinders. As I got closer to the opening, I said, “What’s the big idea?”

  Still no reply.

  My heart drummed in my chest as I came the rest of the way out of the tunnel. Gore’s duffle bag lay open on the ground at the top of the stairs. Puddles collected and pooled where the dirt road made way for the concrete barrier. Thick patches of mud surrounded the puddles where footprints trampled over one another as if there had been a scuffle.

  Two parallel lines trailed away from the slug tunnel and back down the road the way we came.

  Something heavy had been dragged away from the staircase.

  Gore was nowhere to be seen.

  I said as many colourful words as I could think of and made up a couple of new ones for good measure. Shielding my eyes from the rain, I scanned up and down the road as far as I could see, but there was no sign of Gore or whoever had presumably attacked him.

  It was possible that Gore had gotten the upper hand, and it was someone else’s heels dragging away through the mud, but he would have said something, wouldn’t he? Maybe I should wait and see if he came back?

  No, that would be stupid.

  Whoever had gotten Gore could be coming back for me. I had to move and move fast. My hand ached as I bent to inspect the bag. My throat constricted against a wave of panic welling up from my belly. I could run back to the shuttle. Patti and Johanna would still be there. It wasn’t too late to ask for help. They had wanted to help, right?

  No. Stupid again.

  It could have been the android and her cyber-witch bestie who clubbed my goon. And even if it wasn’t—if it was someone from one of the surrounding organ grinder warehouses—I’d have to waltz right past them in order to get back to LunAstro’s launch pad.

  I cursed again.

  I rifled through the bag, trying to find anything that might be a flashlight, but it was too dark to see properly. I reached into my pocket and wrapped my fingers around Hammett’s sphere, trying to calm my breathing. I closed my eyes and listened, straining my ears for any hint of sound beyond the drumming of the rain.

  Nothing.

  Gore was out cold, or he was dead.

  No footsteps.

  That meant I still had time to get away. But there was no way in Terra Firma’s mouldy underbelly that I was climbing back into that hole without a light.

  Gore had all kinds of things in the duffle bag. Equipment, he’d said. But none of it seemed big enough or heavy enough to warrant the body-bag-sized sack. Pieces of moulded synthetic body armour were pushed out toward the sides of the bag, which must have been the bits that looked like the arms and legs of some unfortunate soul. But the rest of it was small and techy. Expensive looking.

  And completely useless to me. I didn’t know what any of it was.

  I stuffed my own bag inside the duffle bag, sealed it up, and slung it over my shoulder. Heavy but manageable. The gorilla must have been playing up the old heave-ho just to make himself look tough.

  Idiot.

  How could he let this happen? He was supposed to be the professional. My stomach sunk like a body tied to a cinderblock and tossed into the harbour. Now it was just me and my bad decisions left to complete LunAstro’s mission and save Tom. Hopeless. I groaned. But I had to keep going. Maybe I did make a lot of bad decisions, but I wasn’t going to give up on my friends. That had to count for something.

  I held my upgrade out in front of me and said, “Sorry, Gore.”

  I shot a low-beam flashlight from my index finger into the darkness and started down the stairs again, pausing every once in a while to listen for footsteps up above. But the only sound was the beating rain and the trickle of water as it poured down the stairs.

  With the light, I could see where parts of the stairs had crumbled away over years of disuse. Entire steps were missing, disintegrated into rubble and spongey green moss. When I cast the beam down to the bottom of the stairs, little eyes flashed back at me and scrabbling noises carried the creatures farther into the darkness.

  They were little eyes, though. Normal rat-sized eyes. No monster rats.

  No sewer gators.

  Holy Origin, I wished Dickie were there with me. Felt it like a hole in my chest, an unbearable ache. With Tom captured and Rae possessed by the electro-demon, Dickie was the only one I had left. Dickie would shriek about the rats and babble nervously about alligators and generally be a pain in the backside . . .

  I missed him so much it hurt.

  I had to get myself to Sal’s Soba & Sake Bar. Dickie had said he was
going to scatter at Sal’s. Sal had quiet boxes. He had black-market connections to anything a person might need. And he had noodles. My stomach growled loudly again.

  The stairs ended and opened to a cavern of pitch black. The light of my finger flash cast a grey pool of slightly less-than-pitch-black wherever I pointed, but as far as I could see I was in a huge empty chamber with no walls or pillars or anything else in sight.

  I scanned my memory for the layout of other slug stations, trying to imagine where everything should be. Ticket booth up front and to one side, turnstiles in the middle. Toilets on each end. I pointed my light to where I thought the ticket booth should be and walked farther into the room.

  The rustling noise of my hood disguised the rustling noises of the rats, and I pulled it down so I could hear better. Water dripped from the ceiling somewhere, landing in a pool of water with an echoed plip-plop. The smell of rotting vegetation, damp concrete, and rodent piss mingled together in a fine soup of aromas wafting toward me on a cool breeze.

  There had to be a slug tunnel out there somewhere. The air was stale, but the currents felt right. I scanned the area, but the grey circle of light revealed nothing but crumbling concrete and bits of trash. Something ran through the light, and I jumped.

  Just a rat.

  Gone as soon as it had appeared.

  But something lurked just at the edge of the light. Something big and dark.

  My heart pounded in my ears, and I could feel it throbbing beneath the strap of the heavy duffle bag. I slowly moved the light toward the lump. It wasn’t moving. That was a plus. My stomach churned and made noises that echoed unsettlingly off the invisible walls and ceiling. I let out a long breath.

  The ticket booth.

  There was no one inside, of course. The safety-glass window, imbedded with wire mesh, had been smashed inward by something big and heavy. A concave well of shattered glass broke in toward the register, which had been left hanging open like a broken jaw. On the side of the booth, an ancient paper poster was plastered with the slug schedule. 0215, 0345, 0515, 0645 . . .

 

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