Pop 'Em One (Bubbles in Space Book 3)

by S. C. Jensen

  I pried the zapper out of their stiffening fingers and tested the charge, then I passed it to Dickie. “Keep it. You earned it.”

  “You’re not making me feel any better.” He pushed the button and watched the white-blue arc of electricity jump between the prongs. “But I’m probably less likely to shoot myself in the foot with it.”

  I wandered over to the alley with the cave carved out of the ancient pile of refuse. Without the rain to break it up, the fug of trash hung in the air so thick it stuck to my teeth as I breathed. A piece of biodegradable plastic sheeting hung over the entrance to the cave like a privacy screen. A pair of red pumps stood upright at the door, filled to overflowing with rainwater. I flicked the makeshift door with the fingers of my upgrade, making three sharp snapping sounds that bounced off the walls of the alley. Then I stood back with my hand inside my jacket and my palm resting on the butt of my pistol. Something rustled inside.

  “Drift, you dizzy vetch.” The voice quavered like gelatin, but there was something steely in the centre of it. Something that said it would like to stick me with something sharp and pointy.

  “You been working tonight?” I asked. “You see what happened to Shock-Happy Slappy out here?”

  “Fade,” the voice said, “Before I fade you.”

  Just a kid.

  I fished in my pocket for any loose holocred chips I might have and beckoned to Dickie to do the same. He looked sidelong at the bag of bones on the step and sauntered over with a fifty-cred piece. I said to the cave, “There’s cush in it if you saw anything.”

  Dirty fingers wrapped around the edge of the plastic, and tugged it closed.

  “Hey.” I knelt and tried to see through the murky, decomposing material. “We’re not going to hurt you, kid. But we’ve got to go in there, and if there’s some creep with a blaster waiting, I’d appreciate a heads up.”

  I flicked the fifty cred so that it smacked against the plastic and rolled sideways along the entrance to the cave. The plastic peeled back and the fingers shot out to snatch it up before I changed my mind. I thought I saw a flash of something bright and silver on the kid’s wrist. Some purloined goods he probably thought I was after.

  “If you gotta ask,” he said. “You’re as good as dead.”

  “What about you?” I said. “You’re not dead yet.”

  He said, “I got work.”

  I stood up and turned back to Dickie. He shrugged. I flicked the kid another holocred chip. This one landed in the shoe closest to the door with a plop. It floated on the surface of the water for a second and then sank down into the toe. I climbed the stoop and made a big deal about looking at the body. When the kid’s arm flashed out, it had a cuff-style tattler wrapped around it. Not an implant, but better gear than most gutter punks manage. I wondered what kind of work he was doing when he wasn’t rocking heels on the strip.

  I pushed open the door into the building’s foyer. It had the same dank air, the same collapsing ceiling, the same whiff of compost and lives not lived. But something about the building felt emptier than before.

  I ascended the staircase with the pistol drawn in front of me. Dickie followed with the zapper in his hand. The light bulb hanging above the first-floor landing buzzed like a fly trapped inside a glass bottle. The second floor still spilled its guts out of the ceiling. I was starting to feel at home here.

  No yellow light seeped out from beneath the doors in the upstairs corridor this time. Dickie and I stood at the top of the stairs, breathing shallowly and listening for signs of movement from any of the apartments. Nothing. No grunting or thumping or praying or wailing. Just the funereal stillness of an open grave wafting through the hole in the roof and bringing with it the indelible stench of liquefying garbage.

  I knocked on the first door, gently. So gently the sound disappeared in the rustle of Dickie’s pinstripe suit as he leaned against the door across the hall. He pushed on his door, and it swung inward with the unamused groan of unoiled metal hardware.

  “It’s open,” he said. “Holy Origin . . .”

  “Stop it,” I hissed the words at him and lunged to pull the door closed again. But I caught a glimpse of the inside of the room and froze. Rusty stains smeared the walls and floors. The air smelled like a back-alley, hockmarket butcher. A moth fluttered out of the room and down the stairs, as if making a break for freedom. I pulled the door closed with acid bubbling in the back of my throat. I said, “Don’t open doors.”

  But the acid was transforming into a kind of physical premonition. My scalp tingled as if each individual hair on my head was picking up some kind of electrical charge. What was happening here? The carpet in the corridor had been worn away along the middle of the hallway. Scraps of the old material clung like shrivelled, brown weeds at the edges. But in the centre, scuff marks and dark brown stains dragged along the hallway from some of the rooms all leading toward room #709.

  Despite what I’d just said to Dickie, I pushed on another door.

  It, too, swung open.

  I recognized the room instantly, even without the pile of bodies in the corner. Bigger than the one Dickie had opened. Bigger than #709. In fact, it looked as if the walls of the adjoining rooms had been knocked down to create a kind of gallery apartment. A dark stain in the corner marked months—maybe years—of bodily fluids oozing into the cracks between the plastic plank flooring. Another stain marked where Sal had fallen and been dragged out of the room, still bleeding, into the hall.

  “Let me guess,” Dickie said. “We’re going to follow the trail of blood.”

  “Working with me is starting to rub off on you, Dick.” The words came out strained and husky. “What tipped you off?”

  Dickie attempted to smile, but it looked more like he’d swallowed a wad of green protein and it had stuck in his throat. “It’s exactly the opposite of what I want to do.”

  I inched down the hallway as if I was pushing a concrete block along with my legs. It was like running through a nightmare where you fight and strain your muscles and can’t seem to make any progress. The door to #709 stretched farther away from me with each step, until suddenly my hand was on the door and the door was falling inward and the walls were caving in. My chest rose and fell faster than my lungs filled with air and a black fog crept into the edges of my vision, tunnelling to the lumpen shape on the floor.

  The hunchbacked gatekeeper lay on his belly, exactly where I’d left him, his arms and legs sprawled out like a star. His head twisted around to stare blankly at the ceiling with his eyes bulging like a decorative goldfish, hanging in distended pouches from his cheeks. A glint of silver peeked out beneath his collar.

  Dickie gagged behind me and something wet splattered onto the floor. He panted and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Sorry.”

  “Me too.” I crouched over the body and tugged the greasy collar of the man’s shirt back. A chain was embedded in the roll of flesh where his neck met his shoulders. He didn’t seem like the jewellery type to me. I grabbed his shoulder and lifted his body with my upgrade, ignoring the way his head bent sideways under the weight. At the nape of his neck, hidden beneath the dangling flesh of his chin, a red crystal had grown into his skin. A stringy skim of something sticky connected the gem to his body, as if it was becoming a part of him. I let go of his shoulder and stepped back, rubbing my hand on my pants.

  “What is it?”

  “Tropical Punch,” I said. The high-octane nootropic was supposedly designed by the Mezzanine Rose in order to expand the minds of the purest members of the Last Humanist Church. But the drug had been corrupted and leaked to the streets. Tiny virus-sized computers called nanoids flooded the bodies of users, destroying inorganic implants and upgrades and rooting in the users’ brains. “This guy was a puppet.”

  “Whose puppet?” Dickie said. “Nathanial Price’s?”

  Patti had given me this address. Why
? Had she planned to be here, or had it been a set up?

  Patti proved herself able to control human hosts with the nanoids—she used her own husband as a puppet to help steer my investigation of the Mezzanine Rose. She could have used them to control the hunchbacked man and keep tabs on the room from a safe distance. Or to attack me, like he’d done the last time I was here.

  But she had also provided me with Jimi’s reformulated Tropical Punch and an AI virus capable of killing the nanoids infecting innocent people. Why turn on us now? Unless, as Rae had once warned me, there was an ulterior motive.

  But Rae had been wearing a necklace too. Her behaviour could be explained by the nanoids too. Maybe there was no electronic demon in her brain. My head spun.

  “I hate technology,” I said. Sweat trickled from my hairline and into my eyes. I wiped it away with the back of my flesh hand. “It could be Patti. It could be Rae’s rider or Price. It could be some evil mastermind robot none of us have ever heard of. At this point, nothing would surprise me. Whatever the answer is, it’s not going to be good for us.”

  “What are we going to do?” Dickie asked.

  I skirted the body and approached the dirty mattress, slowly, like it might jump up and wrap itself around my face. I said, “We’re going to find out.”

  “Oh goodie.” Dickie took a deep breath and tiptoed up behind me. “I was hoping that would be your answer. But first we’re going to . . . take a nap on this filthy mattress? Not gonna lie, I’m losing the thread a bit here.”

  “You might want to stand back,” I said.

  “Right.” Dickie backed up and tripped over the body of the hunchbacked man. He fell backward and landed hard on his backside, cursed in a very un-Dickie-like manner, and scrambled to his feet. “Yeah. Sure. Gross. Standing back.”

  I nodded at him. “Ready?”

  He lifted his shoulders and stared around the room, as if looking for inspiration. Then he pulled out the zapper and tested the button a couple times. The blue arc jumped. He gave me a thumbs up.

  I held my pistol at the ready and kicked the mattress sideways. It snagged on a floorboard and stuck. I bent down to lift it with my upgrade. Something scrabbled beneath the floor. I tugged on the mattress. It started to move and then snagged again. “What the—”

  The mattress jumped and lurched toward me. A pale arm thrashed out from beneath it. Long, blackened fingernails swiped blindly at my legs.

  Dickie screamed, a high-pitched warbling noise like an opera singer stuck on a ceiling fan. Then he rushed forward, shoved me out of the way, and stabbed the prongs into the thing’s flesh. It squealed and retracted its arm. The rancid stench of burning hair wafted in the air.

  Adrenaline pumped through my veins, and my skin tingled with the surge of blood. I yanked back the mattress, and this time it lifted easily. A section of floorboards had been removed, creating a small black hole. Rickety wooden stairs—real, ancient wood that seemed to be held together by nothing but rusty nails and streaks of blackened dirt—disappeared into the pit.

  I peered into the hole, heart hammering in my chest. Whatever the thing was, it was gone. I cursed.

  “Did I get him?” Dickie inched up to the edge with his eyes stretched wide as gumballs.

  “You got him,” I said, and my voice shook. “Too bad it was a shocker instead of a bullet.”

  “Sorry.” He hung his head. “I panicked.”

  I clapped him on the back. “You know, most people who panic go running in the opposite direction. There’s hope for you yet, partner.”

  Excitement burned in my guts. We were on the right track. Whatever was down there, it had to lead us closer to Tom. To Price. To revenge.

  “But what if that thing has friends?” he said. “Now they’ll know we’re coming.”

  I put my foot on the first step and tested my weight on the rotting wood. It held. I climbed halfway into the hole, looked up at Dickie, and grinned.

  I said, “They were bound to find out sooner or later.”

  And I dropped into the hole.

  More tunnels.

  The sewers had been bad enough. Now there were tunnels, like the chewed-out passages of giant insects burrowing beneath HoloCity, highways for body snatchers and organ harvesters and pale, naked monsters. Knowing about them, being inside them, made my skin itch.

  The creeping sensation rode on waves of adrenaline, pulsing over my body with my heartbeat. I hated it. But it burned inside me, surging in my muscles, gasping with my lungs, and I felt powerful for the first time in a long time. As much as I hated it, I needed it, too. I needed to harness this rage and frustration and point it away from myself for once. I let it burn and itch and throb through me. I needed it for what would come next. My upgrade flexed at my side, the nerves flaring in my shoulder and all along the synthetic skin. Every molecule of my body wanted to hit something. Wanted to tear something apart.

  I’d spent nearly ten years on the HCPD force and still had no idea of half the criminal enterprises in the city.

  Of course, the police would be the last to know, unless they were on the take.

  I’d found out the hard way just how corrupt the Trade Zone’s method of law enforcement was. For years I’d existed in this city like my own ghost, a shadow of myself strained through the mouth of a bottle. All I’d cared about was my next paycheck and my next glow. The spoils of the Grit filtered in through a haze of drunken ambivalence and self-loathing. I’d seen the evidence of corruption all around me, but I hadn’t been able to feel enough to care.

  I cared now. I cared so much it was like holding the heart of a dying star in my belly. A void of heat and crushing inward pressure that threatened to destroy me if I didn’t unleash it on someone.

  It hurts.

  Let me die.

  Someone like Price.

  “Are we going where I think we’re going?” Dickie panted, struggling to keep up with me. He clutched the zapper in his hand like his fingers had grown into the thing. Like he was absorbing it into his body like a nanoid necklace.

  The necklaces. I should have known. When I’d turned them in to the police, I’d pushed them out of my mind. The HCPD had given them to Libra to analyze. The Mezzanine Rose had been exposed. Nothing to see here, folks. We’ll just give this nice bit of technological weaponry back to the psychos who created it and everything will be just fine.

  How could I have been so stupid.

  Since getting sober, I thought I’d lifted the veil. My work as a private detective had exposed nests of rot and corruption everywhere in the city, not just in the Grit. I’d thought I’d seen the worst of it. I’d thought I’d peeled back my eyelids and seen the city for what it was. But I had known nothing.

  Corporations vied for control of every product, every holocred spent. The criminal underground mirrored their ruthless tactics for the black-market. The HCPD were nothing but pawns played by highbinder politicians and cush-drunk ghetto kingpins. For all I knew, the Trade Zone itself was a pawn in a bigger game. One so big a pitiful little skid like me couldn’t possibly comprehend it.

  But beneath HoloCity’s flashy neon lights and grid zipping with boiler cars, there were tunnels. Underground veins in which the corruption festered and spread.

  I didn’t know what kind of game Libra and LunAstro were playing. Maybe I’d never understand. But they’d made a mistake when they dragged me into it. When they thought they could use my friends as pieces on their game boards.

  Politics were over my head.

  I had never been very good at following the rules.

  But I could hit hard and I could fight dirty and I would make someone pay for what they’d done to my friends. What they’d made me do to my friends.

  I could still feel my metal fist sinking into the side of Rae’s head. The softness of it, like fresh fruit. But when I imagined it now, it was Nathanial Price’
s shadowy face I drove my fist into. If he wouldn’t help me save her, I would kill him.

  “Slow down, Bubs,” Dickie gasped next to me. “My lungs are on fire.”

  My knees ached. I hadn’t realized I was running.

  “If Price is down here,” I said. “Let me handle him.”

  Dickie sputtered in a laugh that turned into a cough. “Silk plan. I can barely handle myself.”

  The tunnel was a tight, black tube of raw dirt and bits of broken foundation from layers of the city’s architectural past. Biolanterns glowed in sconces every few metres, giving just enough illumination to see the edges of the walls. The ground beneath our feet had been compacted into a smooth, shiny path. A highway, all right.

  Pale roots coiled out of the rough walls and ceiling like worms. Roots from the few weeds tenacious enough to grow between the cracks in the concrete. If something wiped out the human population of HoloCity, those weeds would push apart foundations and make way for bigger, newer weeds, crack the city into great slabs of synthetic waste. How long would it take for the city to be consumed? Not long.

  “They think we’re nothing,” I said, mostly to myself. The dirt walls ate up my words like they loved them. I brushed aside a clump of stringy white roots. “They think we’re powerless. But we aren’t.”

  Dickie didn’t say anything. He limped along beside me with his hand pressed against his side. I slowed my pace, but only a little.

  Up ahead, the path widened, and the dirt walls gave way to something darker and smoother. The blue light from the lanterns flickered like water across the sleek black surface. Doors broke apart the otherwise blank, black canvas. Barred doors, cheap prison cells, which exposed more dark walls inside the rooms. Shapes moved inside the cells.

  Pale, human shapes, crouched in corners and pressed into shadows.

  Dickie tapped my upgrade and whispered, “What’s wrong with them?”

  At the sound of his voice, a few of the pathetic creatures slunk nearer to the bars of their cages. Shiny black pebble eyes glinted inside sunken eye sockets. Purple scars marred their emaciated bodies. Bald heads, some with patches of hair clinging like lichen to old stone. Each had a reddish welt at the base of their throats.