Pop 'Em One (Bubbles in Space Book 3)

by S. C. Jensen

  “Could be,” Cosmo said. “Could be about a million other things with these types. I don’t know what floats mega-corp boats.”

  “Oceans full of cush,” Dickie said.

  Cosmo tsked. “Give me a nice pair of booty shorts any day. Though I never object if some highbinder wants to slide a little cush into my back pocket, you know?”

  Objects in the room started to regain sharp edges, and I blinked a couple times to clear the last of the dazzle from my eyes. My friends faced me, looking as discordant with one another as the sweet music of a cat sharpening its claws on an electric guitar. A row of wigs in all the colours of a VR sunset sat atop white-pillared pedestals behind them like a blank-faced audience.

  Dickie still wore the classic pinstriped duds, his homburg tipped back on his head like it was waiting for the answer to an important question. He worried at a hangnail with his teeth, a habit he’d supposedly broken after intensive hypnotherapy and an awkward period where he wore rubber gloves around the office for months.

  Next to him, Cosmo stood with his hands on his hips, and one shoulder cocked saucily backward to thrust his chest forward. Strips of black leatherette and lace wrapped his arms and torso like he was some kind of mummified S&M enthusiast.

  “You like?” He did a little runway twirl. The outfit ended just shy of the bottom of his buttocks so that dark cheeky crescents peeked out beneath the last strip of fabric. Highly polished, military-style combat boots gleamed up at me from his feet. Shiny black tights with straps and pouches on the thighs ended at a pair of hot-pink garters that slipped inside the booty shorts like a promise.

  I cleared my throat. “Are those . . . tactical nylons?”

  Cosmo grinned and winked at Dickie, tossing his head like a wild colt. “She likes.”

  “Wow.” I shifted my bag over to my upgrade shoulder and ran my flesh hand through my hair. “You’re really ready for anything, aren’t you?”

  “You know it, Pinky.” He gnashed his teeth at me. “When this is all over, you’ll let me show you exactly how ready I can be.”

  “If I survive what I’m about to do, Cosmo,” I said, “I might just be willing to give it a shot.”

  Cosmo stood as if someone had grabbed him by the toes and whipped him like a towel. He whirled on Dickie. “You heard that, right? I have a witness?”

  “What I just heard sounded more like a suicide note,” Dickie said.

  “Life’s too short for that kind of negativity.” Cosmo planted a palm of his in Dickie’s face and pushed him away. “You said if. If is good.”

  I puffed up my cheeks and blew out slowly. “Look, Cosmo, I need you to do something for me. I know I’ve already asked a lot, and I haven’t given back a lot in return, but—”

  “Are you kidding me, you dizzy vetch?” Cosmo snorted and stomped one of the combat boots so hard that a yellow wig slipped off its pedestal and landed on the floor like a chunk of radioactive roadkill. “Since I met you, you’ve helped me put my archest of nemeses behind bars and taken a bowl of scalding noodles to the face for it, right? You’ve introduced me to a Cerulean Goddess and her mystically vicious muse of a mother, okay? You’ve included me in a sci-fi, action-adventure, role-play game wilder than my wildest fantasies—maybe not my wildest, but we can talk about that later when we get back to those maybes and ifs—Anywhichway, my point is this.” He stomped again and a fluorescent salmon wig slipped precariously off its egg-shaped host. “I haven’t had this much fun in ages. And that’s worth more to me than the wads of cush most people try to buy my company with.”

  “I don’t want to put you in danger,” I said.

  “I am an artist.” Cosmo waved his arms around the room of faceless toupee stands as if proving a grand point. “Comfort never inspired greatness in anyone. Let’s push some boundaries. Let’s get uncomfortable. What better way to soar the cosmic miasma of creativity than by dangling one’s life before fate like a lolly before a baby, you know? What do you need me to do, Pinky? I’m ready. We gonna sneak into another R&D facility? Blow up a highbinder tower? Storm the bangtail stations? Just name it.”

  “I hate to disappoint you now that you’re all dressed for the occasion, Cosmo,” I said. “But I need you to stay here.”

  Cosmo deflated. “But they’re tactical nylons!”

  “I know where Tom is,” I said. “I’m taking Dickie as back up. I need you to stay here and watch Gore. I want to know exactly what SecurIntel is stealing from Libra. He won’t expect you to understand.”

  “It’s the glitter,” Cosmo said. He made an attempt at a wink but couldn’t keep the disappointment from his voice. “Fools them every time.”

  I grinned at him and squeezed his arm. “That’s right. And most importantly, I’m putting you in charge of our escape plan.”

  Cosmo brightened again when I described everything I needed him to set up while Dickie and I went on the rescue mission.

  “I’ve got it, girl,” he said. “Your squishy pink behind in safe in my hands. Now get going. I’ve got to go get my spy on before gorilla boy starts to suspect something.”

  Cosmo waved a hurried goodbye and pranced past the statue and up the hidden staircase.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Dickie asked, still chewing his fingers. “The escape is kinda the most important part.”

  “Never underestimate the resourcefulness of a bootstrapping fashion mogul,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We ran out of the room, across the balcony, and downstairs into the gleaming white and gold foyer. We were nearly out the door when I noticed a trembling pile of gold sequins hiding behind the fountain. An unmarked private boiler—black for once, rather than the signature pink—already awaited us at the bottom of the crystalline stairs outside. Relief flooded through me. Cosmo and his team worked fast. I wanted to run into the boiler and never look back. But I gave Dickie the bag and told him to wait for me.

  “Mama Adesina?” I approached the woman slowly, giving her enough time to dry her eyes and get her usual scowl on before she turned to face me. “Are you all right?”

  The old woman glanced back at me. The sequined gown slipped off of one shoulder, revealing crinkled brown flesh like discarded tissue paper. She wasn’t scowling. She hadn’t dried her eyes. She said, “Betty Marlowe? Is that you?”

  I crouched down beside her. “It’s me, Mama.”

  “Do you know where my Rae is?” Her voice was made of flaked salt and desert wind. “I feel like it’s been so long since I’ve seen her.”

  “I know where she is,” I said. “And she wants to come back to you.”

  “No she doesn’t,” the old woman said, barely a whisper. “She’s got her own life to live. She doesn’t need an old bag like me ragging on her over every little thing.”

  “She misses you, Mama. I’ll bring her back for you if I can.”

  “I don’t know where I am.” She sounded like a child, separated from her mother. “I don’t know these people.”

  “You’re safe here, Mama,” I said. “These are friends. You give ’em hell. Especially that Cosmo Régale character.”

  Mama Adesina reached out and gripped my hand with fingers like gnarled old tree roots. She squeezed. “You’ve always been a good friend to her, Betty. You’re the only one who stuck around. Guess you’ve proven yourself, huh? Guess I can stop scaring you off now?”

  “I’m still sticking,” I said. “Either way.”

  “You tell her I love her.” The old woman’s cheeks crinkled in a sad smile. “And I’m sorry.”

  She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the fountain. Her nurses appeared from the other side of the marble font and lifted her into a waiting hoverdisk. One of them rode the cart out through the unicorn doors and into the next room.

  “Is she going to be okay?” I asked the nurse who’d stayed behind.


  “She’s a tough one,” he said. “Physically she’ll be fine. We’ll give her something to help with the confusion until her daughter comes home. She is coming home, isn’t she?”

  I swallowed the rock I had lodged in my chest and nodded. “I hope so.”

  Cosmo’s stealth boiler dropped us in the gritty liminal space between the warehouse district and the Grit’s grimier clubbing strip. The neon lights and translucent HoloPops reflected in oily puddles and gave an ethereal glow to the coils of thick mist that slithered between buildings. Spectral snakes lazily hunting for their next meal.

  Early evening purpled the few patches of smoggy horizon visible where the fog broke. The hours we’d spent in Cosmo’s palace getting everything set up for the A-team’s Libra excursion had whiled away the daytime. It wasn’t raining. It wasn’t dark or light. I had forgotten to ask Hammett about the timestamp on Price’s video, but by my rough estimate we had about half a day left before he started hacking pieces off of Tom.

  As Dickie and I stepped out of the boiler and the damp fingers of mist left trails of moisture clinging to my skin and clothes, it felt like we had mistakenly stepped between worlds.

  I shivered.

  The strip flashed and flickered. Music thumped through the pavement with a hum that beat in my chest like an arrhythmic heart. A woman screamed and a chorus of shrieks and laughter followed like the burbling of a drunken stream. People, barely shadows in the soupy fog, moved like wraiths between pools of varicoloured light that bled into the mist as if from the arterial pulsing of an open wound. The fog diluted everything—shape, sound, colour—until the strip seemed to be something seen through a veil, hidden. Forbidden.

  Opposite the strip, the shuttered warehouses were like ancient relics to a world that existed only in memory. An inherited nostalgia for a city that no living citizen of the Grit District could claim to have known but which everyone dreamed of in a kind of mass hallucination of past grandeur. Here, the mist didn’t coil and twist. It wallowed, waiting to swallow up anyone foolish enough to step within its grey borders, for anyone naïve enough to believe the buildings represented anything but death. The death of production, prosperity, of an entire people made obsolete by technology that treated human life as an afterthought in the pursuit of power and holocreds.

  This was the blackened core of HoloCity, the death at the heart of all the glitz and glamour of highbinder politicians, high profile research and development facilities, flashy Biz District marketing campaigns, and the illusion of prosperity that kept on pumping cush through the greedy veins of the consumerist beast.

  HoloCity wasn’t so much a living, growing metropolitan organism. It was nothing but a corpse, a puppet reanimated by the tugging of political strings.

  The rotting limbs couldn’t keep dancing forever, though. A hard pull in the wrong direction and the show was over, the star exposed as a fraud. A pretty face stitched together out of defective parts, with grease paint melting under the stage lights until pop, the electricity surges and the lights die and the puppet collapses into bits of twitching flesh and bone and the blood and sweat of generations of forgotten people.

  Maybe with a silver necklace and a glittering, red jewel around its neck like a noose . . . I shook my head.

  “I hate them.” My jaws ached like rusted joints in a seized-up machine. “Libra and LunAstro and SecurIntel and all the rest. They treat us like stock animals to be fattened up and then bled dry.”

  “We’ll find Tom.” Dickie took my hand and squeezed it.

  I didn’t squeeze back. Rae’s bloodied fingers and torn scalp rose tauntingly in my mind. The voice that wasn’t her voice speaking with her tongue, her lips. I said, “We might not recognize what we find.”

  “We’ll deal with that if we have to, Bubs,” Dickie said. “And you won’t have to deal with it alone. Okay?”

  The inside of my mouth felt like I’d been chewing on asteroid rocks. I swallowed a mouthful of gravel and swung the bag off my shoulder. I opened it and shoved a clip into a small black handgun from Sal’s collection. I shoved it at Dickie and said, “Here.”

  Dickie laughed nervously. “You always said you’d take me target shooting someday. I didn’t think you meant live targets.”

  “For emergencies only,” I said and gave him a quick run down of the essentials. “But if you have to use it, don’t hesitate. I’m not going to lose another friend to these bastards.”

  “Where are we going?” he asked, eyes darting toward the warehouse graveyard.

  I reloaded my own gun and stuffed it into the holster inside my jacket. I flexed the fingers on my upgrade and threw a couple of practice punches into the mist. I said, “To the other side, Dickie. And once we peek behind the curtain, I don’t think we get to come back.”

  “But we stick together?”

  I gritted my teeth and glared into the mist between the buildings, half expecting to see the pale, naked bodies of Price’s monsters lurking in wait. “Until the bitter end.”

  “Chief Swain, the Mezzanine Rose, now this Nathanial Price creep. Not to mention mega-corps,” Dickie said, shaking his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who can make enemies quite like you.”

  “Everybody needs a hobby,” I said.

  “Sometimes I wonder if your old life was actually safer for you,” Dickie said.

  “You and me both.” A dry bark of a laugh escaped my chest. “Are you sure you want to come?”

  “I might not be the best lookout or fighter or strategy guy, or . . . well . . . anything,” he said. “But I’m your partner, Bubs. And if you need me, I’m coming.”

  “You are the best partner.” I punched him on the shoulder and said, “I’ve always had better friends than enemies. Must be some kind of cosmic balance.”

  “I hope so.” Dickie grinned, his half-moon eyes waning to crescents above his round, pink cheeks. “It wouldn’t seem so desperate to be down here, hurling stones at giants.”

  I shouldered the bag and jogged into the waiting mist, leaving the flashing lights and music and semblance of life teeming in the strip behind like a fever dream. Dickie followed. Empty, broken windows glowered down on us like black eyes. The stillness of the place enveloped us like a damp, smothering blanket.

  The heels of my boots hammered the dead pavement—no kinetic-energy-absorbing materials here, no rainwater collection, just cold, dead synthetic stone from a bygone era—and sent jarring pain into my knees.

  “You know, I agreed to busting Tom out.” Dickie huffed beside me, pressing a hand to his side. “Not sure I agreed to running.”

  The Creep Stacks oozed out of the misty haze ahead of us, like sentinels in the fog. The pale glow of the warning signs gave the impression of teeth jutting in the maw of a waiting beast. I said, “Tom’s in there.”

  “Actually,” Dickie said, “It’s starting to grow on me, the running. I could keep going. Probably won’t kill me.”

  “If you have to fight someone bigger than you, Dickie, you’ve gotta pop ’em one when they aren’t expecting it,” I said, drawing my handgun. “Before they even know they’re in a fight. Then you run like hell.”

  “I should have practiced the running part.” Dickie bent over his knees and sucked in a deep breath. “And the popping ’em part. Can we reschedule the exam, Ms. Marlowe?”

  “My mom used to drill me on fighting dirty,” I said. “Eyes, groin, throat. Nothing’s off limits when you’re the underdog.”

  Dickie did a double take. “You have a mother? For some reason I always pictured you emerging, fully formed, from a slimy pink pod made of old, chewed-up bubble gum and oozing ruby gimlets.”

  “I built that on my own,” I said. “After she left.”

  We contemplated the Creep Stacks from the shadow of a crumbling factory. Nothing moved, no lights flickered. The mist settled around the base of the buildings like a
held breath.

  “How are we going to find him?” Dickie said. “There’re hundreds of apartments in there, thousands of rooms.”

  “And I doubt any of them are empty,” I said. “Do you remember where we saw the light in the window?”

  “Not well enough to find it again,” Dickie said.

  “We’re not going to find our way in on the surface,” I said. “We need to locate the tunnel they’re using.”

  Dickie removed his hat and smoothed back his hair, staring into the apartment stacks as if paying his respects to the dead. “I don’t want to be a killjoy here, but this doesn’t look good, Bubs.”

  “It’s not supposed to look good.” I picked at the crumbling mortar between the ancient bricks of the building we sheltered beneath. I flicked the pieces into an oil-slicked puddle on the cracked pavement of a long-disused road. I said, “It’s supposed to look hopeless. It’s supposed to be too much for us.”

  “And what if it is?”

  “They think we’re nothing, Dickie,” I said. “You and me. Tom. Rae. Everyone. But we aren’t nothing. And we aren’t hopeless. And we’re going to hit them before they even realize there’s a fight.”

  Dickie turned to me and narrowed his eyes. “You know how to get in, don’t you?”

  “I have an idea,” I said, and I grabbed him by the pinstriped sleeve and dragged him into a slow jog away from the Creep Stacks.

  The sagging apartment building on the old Anderle strip was as we’d left it, except for the pile of multi-coloured fabric on the front stoop. The wizened landlord clutched the electroshock weapon in a hand like a lump of sticks held together with mud from the gutter. Thin, wrinkled flesh was strung between the bones in sheets that had been stretched out for so many years it couldn’t shrink back down with the rest of the aging body. A pool of blood coagulated in a black puddle on the stair beneath their scarf-wrapped head.

  “Is this the old bugger that zapped me?” Dickie lifted a piece of fabric and looked at the wizened apple face. “I coulda gone without knowing that. Bit embarrassing, yeah?”