by Alex Scarrow
Karl was done doing business. The sooner he left the better. 'Look, I don't normally deal with-'
'Fanatics? Terrorists?' The young man narrowed his eyes. 'Child killers?'
Karl took a deep breath. 'I didn't know who I was dealing with. Until now. That wasn't made clear to me.'
'You disapprove of us?'
Be cautious Karl. These people are insane. He'd witnessed with his own eyes the immediate aftermath of some of their handiwork; a vest-bomber on Liberty. The bloody ragged fragments of people; and yes, the pieces of what were once women and children amongst the smoking carnage on the rubble-strewn street.
'I…I understand what you people want. What you're fighting for. Sure, that's none of my business. But it's how you people go about it that disgusts me.'
'We have no choice how we go about it. We have no standing army like The Administration. All we have is our faith. Our determination. Our resolution. Without us humanity will be eternally doomed. Only we can save-'
'I really don't need to hear your religious crap.' Karl spread his hands. 'I don't want to hear you try justifying what you do.'
Be careful Karl. He softened his voice to a more conciliatory tone. 'I'm not a believer. Okay? I'm just a businessman.'
'Yet I can see clearly you look down on us.' The young man smiled coldly. 'You think of us as barbaric animals? Don't you?'
Karl was cautious enough not to agree openly. But he couldn't bring himself to deny that either.
'Clearly you do.' The young man nodded ruefully. 'We do what we have to, because it must be done. There is simply no alternative.'
'There's a better way to fight The Administration than blowing up innocent people.'
'Humanity is dying.' The young man shook his head sadly. 'People don't want to hear that. They see nothing but the day or the week ahead. They are dull-eyed and deaf. So, we have to scream for them to hear the message.'
Screams. Karl remembered screams alright. Children's screams. A girl wandering across a smouldering city plaza looking for her missing arm.
'The difference between us, Karl…is that we do what we do for the sake of future generations of humanity. On the other hand, you do what you do…for money.' The young man shook his head. 'And yet we're the bad people here?'
'Generally I don't judge, not where work is concerned. But, terrorists? He shook his head. 'If I'd known…?'
The young man sighed. 'So you don't want to do any more work for us?'
'We're done.'
The young man considered that, then nodded. 'I'll tell my teacher.' He offered Karl his hand. 'We're not bad people, you know? History will one day show that.'
Karl studied his offered hand. A question occurred to him. Something he wanted to ask before they finally parted company. 'Tell me….what's that girl all about? Why is she so damned important to you people?'
He was pretty certain the girl wasn't a believer, certainly not one of these Awoken nut-jobs. In fact, from the two brief interactions he'd had with her she seemed to be a perfectly ordinary girl.
The young man slowly retracted his hand. Not offended, but perhaps a little disappointed. All the same he offered Karl a courteous nod. 'Something incredible, something wonderful is going to happen soon. Then you'll understand how incredibly special she is.'
He wondered if the unfortunate girl was destined to be sent into some crowded place one day, wearing a vest stuffed with explosives and shrapnel. He hoped that wasn't what 'special' meant.
Karl stood up. 'I don't work for your kind. Not terrorists. Don't contact me again. is that clear? I'm not interested.'
The young man nodded. 'In that case, Karl, God be with you.'
'God?' He shook his head. 'Yeah, right.'
He turned and crossed the tacky plastic dance floor. He pushed the heavy plated door open and exited the small flesh bar, stepping once more out into the noise and the crush of the crowded alleyway. Perhaps that young man was right about one thing; these people out here, all these people, were exactly what he said they were, dull-eyed, small minded….and yes, in many ways quite dead inside.
He sucked in a deep breath and let it out. He had his money. Good money too. And all he'd had to do was aim an inch too high when it had counted. But that was it. Not again. He wanted nothing more to do with them. Crazy fanatics. Zealots. Dangerous. If they attempted to contact him again, he'd ignore it. He'd walk away from them whatever money they offered.
He turned right, heading against the stream of pedestrians, eager to get back to the cube he was renting. His other employer, The Administration, were a far safer bet. A knowable entity. He'd already pushed his luck enough offering his services to two paymasters at the same time.
Karl didn't need to shoulder his way forcefully through the crush of people, most of them judged his battle-scarred face and killer's glare as warning enough and parted before him.
CHAPTER 17
'He's on the move again, Deacon,' said Leonard, watching a shifting glowing blip on the display screen of his WristBuddy.
'I can see him.' Deacon watched the man, a head taller than most of the other slouched pedestrians, as he strode away from the night club. Quite confident, it seemed, that his little liaison had gone unnoticed by anyone.
Now, who the hell have you just been to see, Karl?
'Aren't we going to follow him?'
Deacon stared out through the grimy window of the tiny zlotto-viddee parlour. The cashier stood nervously behind his wire-mesh service counter, wide eyes rolling from one heavily armed soldier to the next, all ten of them crammed into the man's tiny stall.
'We've got him tagged, Leonard. We won't lose him.' The device was a nano- mite, the size of a grain of sand and would stay inside Karl for another few days before he eventually pissed it out.
He's just a hired gun. Deacon was far more interested in who he'd been to see. Presumably whomever had hired him to let the girl get away. He turned to one of the colonial marines crammed into the stall. They were all wearing hastily appropriated civilian clothes; cheap day-glo coloured, baggy, offworld fashion-garb that looked wrong on every last one of them.
He nodded at the officer to get his attention. 'Captain Hollander?'
'Yes, sir?'
'Have two of your men follow that man.' He pointed out of the window. 'See the tall one?'
'Short blonde hair? Dark green top, sir?'
'Yes, him. Follow him. If at any point he looks like he's on to your men and tries to make a run for it…take him down.'
Hollander nodded. 'Understood.' He passed the orders on. The door to the stall was wrenched open, the noise of overhead traffic, floating ad-billboards and the thump of passing music, swept into the stall. Then a moment later the cacophony was cut off again as the door clattered shut.
Deacon watched the soldiers go quickly making their way through the throng of people, eager to narrow the gap between themselves and the receding head and shoulders of the soon to be ex-freelancer.
Deacon's eyes were back on the door of the flesh bar. He imagined the place would probably be empty at this time of the day. No doubt that was why the place had been chosen for a rendezvous. Quiet. Empty. Discreet.
But how empty was it? If the door opened again and another patron stepped out, would that person be the one he should have these men follow? Or would it be the next one? He cursed under his breath. Then reassured himself silently.
I'll know. He told himself. I'll bloody well know.
With twenty years of serving The Administration behind him, he had an eye for the tics and edgy mannerisms of someone wanting more than anything else to blend in with a crowd.
Instinct, trust your instinct.
Just then the door to the flesh bar swung open. Deacon pressed closer to the grimy perspex window, squinting through the fog of scratches and grease smears. He saw a young man emerge. Short brown-black hair, cheeks tinted with a half grown beard, a slight build and wearing dark drab, tidy clothes. The dress sense of someone who couldn't ca
re less about such frivolous things as fashion. A mind preoccupied with far weightier matters.
The young man looked out onto the passing pedestrians, then quickly up, then down the alleyway.
Edgy. Wary.
Finally, cautiously, he stepped into the stream of people, joining them.
Him. Definitely him.
'We're following that one,' said Deacon, quickly pointing. 'The one that just stepped out.'
'Young male?' said Hollander. 'Default-grav body build? Dark clothes?'
'Yes.'
The officer quickly shouldered his weapon and aimed its laser sight through the window and onto the back of the young man's head. He glanced at his remaining men. 'Target marked. See him?'
They all nodded. He lowered the gun again and rattled out a stream of commands. 'Standard diamond pursuit pattern. Weapons concealed. Team Comms channel is on six. Reese, you're diamond tip. Go! Go! Go!'
One of the marines, pulled the door open and rushed out into the crowd.
'Kahn, Foal. Left and right flank.' Hollander watched Reese jogging up the alleyway, sprinting like some errand boy running late, overtaking their target then finally slowing down ahead of him and adopting the same shuffling pace as everyone else.
'Go!' He barked. Two more of his men hurried out of the stall.
'Corben, you're taking up the rear.' Hollander waited until his flankers were just behind the target, among the tightly packed crowd, hugging the walls either side of the alleyway. He nodded at his rear-marker to go.
Deacon looked at the officer. 'And?'
'We're the long tail, sir. We hold back a bit and then follow with the rest of the team at a distance.' He pulled down a pair of glasses that had been sitting on his forehead. They looked identical to the popular GameGuy-Huds and similar expensive headsets that some of the richer, tower-top kids in this city liked to show off.
'I'll see exactly what they see, sir,' he said tapping his glasses. Deacon recalled they'd all had a pair of them on their heads or dangling round their necks. 'And I'll be coordinating them from behind.'
Deacon nodded. 'Very good.'
'Your orders sir…are we to just follow the target?'
'To follow…for now.' Deacon opened the door and beckoned Leonard to come along. 'I want to see where he leads us.'
CHAPTER 18
Deacon caught a glimpse of the back of the young man's head. He was fifty yards ahead of them and quite unaware that he was moving along the crowded street trapped within a surveillance 'box' just a dozen yards wide.
He studied his body movement. Not the confident swagger of a seasoned veteran like Karl. But certainly markedly different to the others around him. Taller too, which was helping matters. He was looking nervously from side to side. Unaware that he was already 'boxed', he was almost definitely looking out for any random military checkpoints.
We don't want that. We don't want him panicking.
'Captain Hollander,' Deacon said to the young officer beside him. 'Call in a command, on my authority, any marine checkpoints, any patrols in this sector are to withdraw immediately. Understood?'
The officer nodded. 'You don't want him spooked, sir.'
'Precisely.'
The young man turned left, off the street, into one of the 'unofficial' black market zones. Not that much of New Haven was particularly 'official', the law enforcement agency here was a joke. He entered the shadowy area beneath an overpass; a sloping walkway that led up to a higher street level plaza fifty feet above them. Nicer shops, better behaved citizens, less trouble; the sort of area where the law marshals were happy to make a token effort and show their amply-fed faces.
But beneath the large circular overhang of the plaza, in an eternal twilight of cast shadow, was the unlicensed market; a labyrinth of tightly packed stalls, and makeshift skeletal 'buildings' of stolen scaffolding and pegged plastic sheets. Some of them two rickety storeys high. It was busy with black market trade.
The captain discreetly muttered commands into a concealed mic. The box was going to need to rotate orientation. The left flanker would now be the front tip of the diamond. And the box needed to deform to fit the narrower spaces here. No longer one either side, but two behind, one ahead, one beside.
Deacon watched the soldiers efficiently juggle positions. One of them feigning interest in a stall of stolen goods, another making a show of checking out a floating holoscreen showing a low-gee hardball game broadcast from Gateway. He noted Leonard beside him, grinning with admiration at the well rehearsed proficiency of the men.
'They're well trained for this kind of operation.'
Leonard nodded.
They should be. Deacon had sequestered a squad from the regiment's elite first company; usually deployed for covert ops, locate-n-snatch sorties, surveillance stakeouts.
He looked around the dim labyrinth and realised it epitomised the Human Universe's true dark underbelly. Down here, out of sight of any officials of the city, in this twilight world there existed an alternative eco-system of people; those that had fallen off the radar, through the cracks and into this netherworld. The homeless begging for scraps, headstim-gum addicts, traders in stolen and black market goods. Illegals that had somehow managed to bypass immigration, and lose themselves beneath the dome.
And mumps.
Here and there. Quite a few of them, he noted. Some of them very clearly suffering from disfiguring aberrations. Others, managing to hide milder deformities beneath baggy clothes, makeup or headwear. Or even in the cautious way they moved, carefully trying to disguise a limp, or awkward gait caused by some malformed part of the body.
Places like this were where the 'unmentioned' ended their days when something in their body started to go wrong.
That's the lottery we all face, isn't it? A late stage mutation can happen to anyone, at any time.
Deacon suspected though, being thirty-nine years old, that he was probably quite safe now. If a mutation was going to happen, it usually happened in childhood, often during puberty, sometimes in early adult hood - the misfiring of some tiny fragment of genetic code. It was the time-bomb ticking inside every young adult. In most cases it just ticked. In some cases, it quietly exploded. Dumb cells silently receiving erroneous instructions and immediately setting to work industriously building monstrous creations inside an otherwise healthy human body. Most often a mutation led to a simple, ultimately fatal, tumour. But sometimes they led to a functional mutation of the human form; extra fingers and toes, extra limbs or limbs that changed form into useless articulated mis-growths.
Mumps….was the street name used for those unfortunate souls.
Deacon had witnessed, in his time, some macabre and disturbing mutations; a young woman who'd developed a second face on the back of her head. A wrinkled crone's face, a version of herself fifty years older. C-scans had indicated that the face had grown a network of nerve endings that had reached out and tapped into the rear of her brain. The face muttered and whispered. Occasionally leered. Although the milky glazed eyes were non functional, they seemed to stare with a malevolence.
He recalled the young woman had been really quite stunning. From the front an attractive, gene-neutral beauty, however, from the side, she became a monstrous Janus. She'd pleaded with him to euthanise her. The muttering of that face, the wicked monstrous suggestions that it whispered to her as she tried to sleep every night had driven her towards a breakdown.
She'd begged Deacon to end her life. Grasped his hand tightly as she lay strapped to the gurney of a diagnostic medipod and whispered into his ear - as if she didn't want the evil passenger on the back of her head to hear - that she wanted an end to it. For some reason, of all the mumps whose euthanasia he'd overseen she'd been the one he'd remembered most vividly. So young. So very beautiful and so smart….a life that might otherwise have been so full of promise and future, but robbed of it all by a simple line of corrupted deoxyribonucleic code.
She'd been the rare exception. Most other mumps preferred
to struggle on. Prepared to live for as long as possible with their disability or disfigurement. But she - Hermione - had decided her's was too much.
Hermione. One name Deacon was certain he'd never forget.
*
The young man had spotted someone ahead of him absently putting a hand to his ear as he'd walked past a stall blaring thumping music.
It could have been an entirely innocent gesture; someone trying to listen to his own music on a sonipod. But he didn't think so. He saw the man turn, and glance back at him briefly. They made eye contact, just for a second, then he'd look away far too quickly.
He saw the man's lips move.
Talking to someone?
His heart suddenly racing, he'd taken a sudden left turn into an illicit market place beneath an upper street plaza, to see if the man was going to follow him. He turned, walked a dozen yards into the maze of stalls then casually hesitated beside a viddee vendor, making a show of casually browsing the offworld imports. He caught sight of the same man again. And this time he noted the buzz-cut hair, no tattoos, no studs or enhancements, an athletic body carelessly draped in fashion garb. The man was wearing a pair of expensive looking GameGuys over his eyes. Nobody but a fool walked around brazenly wearing something like that in a place like this. All too easy for some shav or a desperate gum addict to snatch them from the bridge of his nose and do a runner.
Nobody but a brazen fool, or….? Or, somebody trained to react quickly, trained to snap some gum-head's waisted, bony wrist with a sharp and savage twist and not give it a second's thought.
Oh, God. He bit his lip. The Administration! How? How the fregg did they manage to pick me out of the crowd?
The answer was immediately obvious.
The freelancer. He must have betrayed us!
The young man's mind raced. He was out on the street with nothing on him that could compromise the others in his cell. No tech on him. No ID, nothing at all to link him to his teacher. He'd already ditched the data-card. There were no creds on it anyway. Just him and the clothes he was standing in. Nothing that would lead them to the others.
