Pop 'Em One (Bubbles in Space Book 3)

by S. C. Jensen

  I tried not to think about Oki and the kids. Had they been killed or captured? The self-satisfied smirk on Valentia’s face twisted in the back of my mind. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Her blue eyes flashed like pieces of broken glass, and she snarled. “Because you aren’t special. You’re a dirty little Grit vetch. A nobody. I can’t abide it when the skids get uppity.”

  A flash of the ugliness beneath the careful veneer peeked through her cool exterior. Hairline cracks appeared at the edges of her mask.

  “Is that why you stole Cosmo Régale’s formulas?” If I could drive a chisel into one of those cracks, maybe I could distract her enough that she would make a mistake. What kind of mistake, I didn’t know. I just wanted to get under her skin. “Because you couldn’t stand that a dirty little Grit skid nobody might be better than you?”

  She laughed, a cold, dead sound like throwing stones in an empty, metal bucket. “You think I care about that? Fashion and makeup and people wearing my brand? You really are pathetic.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” She turned her back on me and fiddled with one of the machines. It made a whirring noise as something inside it spooled up. She stood, hunched over it with her shoulders rigid. As if she was ready to pounce on the thing if it made the wrong move. When it stopped whirring, she opened a small compartment and used pinchers to remove a piece looked like glass. Red glass. She turned back to me with the thing held up to the light, grinning manically. “The only thing I care about is power.”

  Red glass. Little red jewels. Had Lorena Valentia been the one behind the Tropical Punch necklaces? My mind whirled and she kept talking.

  “I stole from Cosmo Régale because nobody cared,” she said. “Or they shouldn’t have. And nobody would have cared if it weren’t for you and that little publicity stunt on the Island Dreamer. You may have forced the Trade Zone’s hand, but it was already too late, wasn’t it? Too late for Patti Whyte. Too late for Rae Adesina and Detective Tom Weiland. Too late”—she made a dramatic swipe with her fingers and the screen zoomed in—“for any more heroics.”

  Something flickered across the surface of the buildings, bursts of greenish electricity as thin as gossamer, glowing in the darkness like radioactive spider webs.

  A door slammed behind me, and I whirled around to see a tall, athletic man descending a staircase adjacent to the elevator doors we’d just come through. He was dressed in a slim-cut white suit and was flanked by two muscular bodyguards dressed in androgynous uniforms. They carried electric whips, and their faces were hidden within mirror-shielded helmets. There was no way to tell if they were human or android.

  “Lorena,” Price said with a sing-song lilt. He was so patronizingly calm, a faint smile playing at the edges of his thin lips. The sound of his voice was like rusty screws driven into my soul. The rage was back. I wanted to tear the self-satisfied smirk right off his face and beat him with it. “Enough with the theatrics.”

  A fistful of auburn hair dangled from his right hand. The first thing I thought, absurdly, was that he was carrying a one of Cosmo’s wigs. But there was something attached to the hair. Something heavy.

  It bounced against his leg, spinning slowly.

  Excruciatingly slowly.

  And then too quickly, Patti Whyte’s perfectly symmetrical face stared back at me. Her eyes bulged and her mouth twisted in a rictus mask of horror. A chunk of spinal cord—silver and dripping synthetic blood—twitched beneath her chin.

  “But this is my favourite part,” Lorena Valentia said, whining like a spoiled child. “Let me show them, please.”

  “Patti?” Her name caught in my throat.

  “I’d thank you for delivering the android to me so efficiently.” Price’s smooth voice poured over me like salt water in a fresh wound. “But it seems you allowed the cyber-witch to beat you to it.”

  “Johanna betrayed her?” Something inside me shuddered. I had suspected the witch myself, but I had assumed she and Patti were working together against me. “How could she do that?”

  “People will do anything,” Price said. “When given the right motivation.”

  “Or the right jewellery,” Valentia chirped. “Just ask Mr. Fen.”

  Price smiled thinly at the blonde woman, his eyes tightening with irritation. “The witch was malleable enough without your trinkets, Lorena.”

  “But they were friends,” I said. “Patti saved her from LunAstro.”

  “Perhaps she had other friends.” Price blinked slowly, as if for show. He had the dead, black eyes of a shark. “Family. People for whom she would do anything to protect.”

  Hammett’s words came floating back to me. He may very well have a warehouse full of prisoners.

  “You manipulated her.”

  “It works every time,” he said. “Except with you, apparently. You failed to bring me the android. And the scanner you walked through when you entered this building tells me you haven’t brought me the flash drive. At least, not intentionally.”

  What did he mean by that? Price’s gaze travelled over my body and lingered on my upgrade, as if assessing how dangerous it might be. He said, “I wonder. What exactly did you think to accomplish by coming here? Did you really think you could save him?”

  Valentia clicked her fingernails against the metal casing of one of the computers. The wheedling tone of her voice was so different from when she spoke to me. She said, “Please, Mr. Price.”

  “Where is he?” The shudder became a roar. I bellowed, “Where. Is. Tom?”

  Price smiled lazily and flung something through the air at me, and it landed with a wet smack at my feet. An ear. “Some of him is here.”

  Valentia clapped to get my attention, and I turned as if the air had thickened around me. She said, “And the rest of him is in there.”

  Another holoscreen popped up beside the image of Libra’s facility. It was the same cell he’d appeared in before. His face had been battered to a pulp. Blood streamed down the side of his head where the ear had been carved away. He blinked at the screen with one, half-opened eye, as if trying to focus on something.

  “Betty?” He coughed, and blood sprayed from his lips. Tears squeezed out of his eyes and made clear tracks through the blood. “No.” He forced the words out in a burst of spittle and fell forward on his hands and knees. “No, no, no. Not you too.”

  “Tom?” I stumbled forward like my bones had become liquid. I forgot about the gun in my hand. About Lorena Valentia and Price and the guards. About Dickie. The towers. I gasped. “You’re still alive?”

  His chest rattled, and I could barely hear the words. “I failed.”

  “No,” I said. “No, you didn’t. This isn’t your fault.”

  “I’m sorry, Betty.” He wheezed and coughed like something inside him was broken. “I’m so sorry. It’s too late.”

  Tears burned in my eyes and the back of my throat seized up as I tried to say the words I’d been meaning to say for so many years. “I love you, Tom. I’m sorry. I’m the one who should be sorry. I love—”

  “Times up!” Valentia chirped. “And now for the finale—”

  An explosion bloomed at the base of first one building on the screen, and then the others. Strange green jolts like lightning burst from the cloud of flames and crawled up the towers as if it were a living thing.

  “No!” I screamed. Tom’s screen flickered, and he looked wildly around his cell. Static cut through the image. “Tom!”

  Then the screen went black, and the last vestiges of hope fell with Libra’s towers.

  Dickie broke and ran, bellowing like a wounded animal. He fired his pistol wildly, not even attempting to aim. He rushed at Price and the guards. Price stopped on the stairs and made a subtle gesture with his hand. One of the guards stepped forward. A bullet bounced harmlessly off his suit as he bore down on Dicki
e. He grabbed the pistol and threw it across the room with one hand and clobbered Dickie in the side of the head with the other. Dickie fell like a sack of laundry and lay limp on the floor.

  “How dramatic,” Price said. “I hope you don’t have any similar ideas. The deck is rather stacked against you at this point.”

  He motioned to the other guard. The mirrored helmet turned on me and approached with about as much care as the other guard had approached Dickie. My eyes were locked on the dead screen, the last image I would ever have of Tom, gone. The Libra facility collapsed in a maelstrom of green fire and electricity. The clock in the corner had stopped. My entire body felt cold and tingly. I dropped my gun. The guard seized me.

  “Her arm,” Price said. The second mirrored helmet approached. The first held me while the other methodically snapped the contacts and tore the upgrade from my body. My nerves screamed, demanding I do something. But I just stood there, numbly, and let them take the thing.

  “Don’t look so shocked,” he said. “I did warn you. No points for second place, I’m afraid.”

  The guards stepped back and packaged up my prosthetic in a long, silver box, like a rifle case, just like the one Rae had carried when she gave it to me. It seemed like eons ago. I’d never see her again. The last time I’d seen Rae, I’d smashed the side of her head in with the metal fist she’d given me. She’d lain there, as Dickie did now, broken and bleeding. Because of me. Tom was dead. Sal was probably dead too. Oki and the kids. Patti.

  Everyone was dead because of me.

  Price tossed the android’s head to the guards, who packaged it up in another silver case.

  “You know,” he said, and he strode over to me—brash and confident—and stared down his long nose with his shark eyes, not blinking now, and a feral leer on his face. “I rather expected more of a fight from you. Is it so easy to crush your spirit? I’m disappointed.”

  I hung my head and took a deep, steadying breath. Letting his words sink into me like weights attached to my bones.

  “Too bad she didn’t bring her SecurIntel friend,” Valentia said. “He’d have been a more worthy adversary.”

  “We’ll deal with him,” Price said. “As soon as Fen gives us the all clear. It would be a shame to lose that data.”

  Mr. Fen—under Valentia’s control—had used us to steal data from Libra so that Price could stay off SecurIntel’s radar. All of this was a set up. A lie. My head felt like an empty balloon hovering over my shoulders.

  He pressed the shiny toe of his highly polished dress shoe against my stump and pushed. I fell backward, wrenching my good arm as I tried to catch myself.

  “I told you she was a nobody.” The woman stood aside while the two guards began packing up the machine that had made the red crystal. She turned to me with a glint in her eye like a cat gets when playing with a mouse it has no intention of eating. “You’re a nobody. A nothing. Your life is worthless. The lives of your friends are worthless—”

  I exploded to my feet and slammed into Price, driving my shoulder between his ribs. Valentia shrieked and jumped backwards. Air burst from Price’s lungs and he staggered back. Shock replaced the smug smirk, like a mask drawn down suddenly. I drove my fist into his face and pain seared up my arm. Delicious, focusing pain. Valentia yowled again, more outraged than afraid. Price shouted something and covered his face, and I lunged, knocking him off his feet. I landed on his chest and tried to pin his arms to the floor with my knees, but I was off balance without my other arm. I swung down again and felt bones crunch beneath my fist. He scrambled beneath me, blood smearing his neat, white suit, and I reared back to hit him again.

  But as I drove my weight down on him, I was wrenched backward. Even with the adrenaline and rage coursing through me, I felt my muscles tear. I screamed. A silver guard twisted my arm behind my back, and Price rose slowly off the floor, wiping daintily at his broken face. He looked at the blood on his hand and smiled at me with blood-stained teeth. “You do have some fight in you after all.”

  “You didn’t let me finish.” Lorena Valentia stomped a foot impatiently.

  Behind her, another holoscreen displayed a crowded Grit District hockmarket. People milled through the buzzing lights of clubs and food carts, browsing tables of scavenged goods. A clock ticked away the seconds in the right-hand corner. In the middle of the screen, a narrow building, like an afterthought in the neighbourhood’s design, squeezed in between a dance club and a gambling outfit, flickered with electrical green pulses. Well-heeled pro skirts leaned down from balconies, enticing shoppers inside for a visit. No one seemed to notice the green flickers. But each pulse made the blood in my head throb louder.

  “I’m feeling generous,” she said, and her eyes had the glassy fervour of a pinch on the glow-up, or a diseased animal. “I’m going to give you one last chance to do something that matters. Come here.”

  I dug my boots into the floor and my ankles screamed in protest, but the guard pushed me toward her. He held me with one hand wrapped in my hair and the other crushing my arm behind my back as Lorena Valentia advanced on me with something silver in her hands.

  A necklace.

  “Get away from me!” I writhed against the guard’s grip, but it was as if he was made of solid stone. Lorena wrapped a thin silver strand around my neck and cinched it tight against my skin. She fastened it with something I couldn’t see. When I strained against it, it dug into my flesh, but didn’t break.

  She laughed. Then she tugged on something attached to the noose and it tightened. A black haze crept into the edges of my vision, and I gasped, trying to suck in air through my restricted windpipe. She plugged the end of the cord into a switch on the computer. She swiped her fingers over the holoscreen keyboard, and the clocks on the screens stopped. She said, “There.”

  “What are you doing?” I wheezed.

  “The question you should be asking yourself is what are you doing?” Her lips peeled back in what should have been a smile. But despite the prettiness of her face, she didn’t use it like a person who was used to manipulating others with her looks. She smiled like she was ugly inside and out, like she knew it and didn’t give a rat’s flea-bitten tail end about it.

  She looked to Price and understanding flooded through me. I recognized that look. She was the other woman in the ’gram, the one staring longingly at Price while he wrapped his arm around Rae. The one with the necklace around her neck. I said, “You were the other one to survive. You’re like Patti, aren’t you?”

  She ignored me.

  “Mr. Price and I are going on a little trip up north, back to his homeland. You can try to stop us. You can seek your revenge. You won’t win, of course. There’s only the tiniest chance that you could prevent our escape.” She leaned in close to me and whispered in my ear. I strained against the immovable guard, but there was nothing I could do. Her breath touched my ear, cold and clammy, and sent chills down my spine. She said, “But it might be worth it, no? Revenge is so sweet. Especially when someone has taken everything from you, has ruined your life. Wouldn’t it be sweet? I think so.”

  My stomach twisted. Had all of this been Valentia’s—or whatever her real name was—revenge against Rae for being Price’s favourite? Was it possible that it had nothing at all to do with Libra’s failed projects? Rae was the victim of this woman’s jealous rage. The Grit skid who had risen through Libra’s ranks and caught the attention of a madman.

  My vision blurred.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw Price move toward the stairs, the guard’s fingers dug into my arm like dull knives, digging in but not breaking the skin. I tried to wrench my hair out of his grip, but I remembered Rae’s scalp tearing away in my hand and my stomach twisted. I couldn’t do it.

  Valentia sliced through the air with her hand, like an axe severing a limb, and the guard let me go. My hand tingled as blood rushed back into it and my hair felt like it
was lifting off my head without the tearing downward pressure. But the noose around my neck remained. My breath wheezed. Black spots danced in front of my eyes. I didn’t dare move.

  Behind me, I heard Dickie groan, and a small shot of relief mixed into the cocktail of emotions flooding through my brain.

  “The wire around your neck is attached to a switch,” Valentia said with a purr in her voice, like she was telling a lover how she liked to be pet. On the screens behind her, the flickers of green caressed the brothel as if responding to her voice. “If you pull the switch people will die”—she slipped a scalpel into my hand and stepped gingerly out of my reach—“but you will have a chance at revenge. Or you can let us go and save the—”

  I growled deep in my throat. “I get the idea.”

  Any one of the people walking or working the strip that night would have thrown me to the wolves for the promise of an extra stack of holocred at the end of the month. They were pinches and dealers, liars and thieves. They were pathetic. Their desperate scrabble for survival made them more animal than human. Like the kid who’d sold me out to the hunchbacked gatekeeper for the privilege of living unmolested in a pile of trash. Like the pro skirts who forgot your name and face the second the cred pinged their tattlers. Like the feedreeler who threw a bowl of boiling noodles in my face for a cheap entertainment bounty in Lorena Valentia’s name. I knew them. I’d lived among them my entire life, and I didn’t owe a single one of them a second thought any more than they did me.

  “I thought you might.” Lorena Valentia smiled her ugly smile again and sent the guard to pick up the other case and strode confidently toward Price, who watched from the bottom of the stairs, her long, blond hair jauntily bouncing as if she were on her way to a party in her honour. As if she already knew what I’d do.

  Or rather, what I wouldn’t.

  Impotence burned my skin beneath the cutting wire as I pictured Tom’s beaten face. Rae’s torn hands. Tears burned behind my eyes but they didn’t fall. I swallowed, my throat dragging painfully up and down the wire. But I couldn’t make myself go after the people who’d done this to them. I stood, helplessly, as Lorena Valentia ascended the stairs with the guards carrying away the arm Rae had given me, and what remained of the android, Patti Whyte.