by Leo Champion
Warlord of New York City
by
Leo Champion
Dedicated to A.F.
Thank you for the inspiration and the guidance.
Published by Henchman Press
Cover by Lydia Kurnia and Worlds Beyond Art
Warlord of NYC, copyright 2019 Leo Champion
Cover image copyright 2019 Leo Champion
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Published in Australia.
This is the land that fought for liberty /
Now when we fight, we fight for bread
-Look Down, Les Misérables
Chapter One
As she ran on the treadmill, Diana Angela refused to look at Greenwich Village. That would have meant thinking about what had happened there four years ago this Spring, and the part of her mind responsible for maintaining sanity prohibited that. From the ninety-sixth floor of the One Building she had other options anyway, her eyes drifting past the Village’s five-arkscraper cluster across to the sprawl of Jersey. Thousands of square miles of tenements and uninhabitable abandoned buildings stretched past the horizon toward Philadelphia, the conurbation’s sprawl punctuated by two-hundred-and-fifty floor arcology-skyscraper clusters interlinked by freight and transit skyways whose very highest points reflected sunset’s last rays in a faint glitter.
She was twenty-seven minutes into a fast run, the treadmill set to a steep slope that alternated with random virtual hurdles, her body feeling the strain. Another hurdle, a meter high, appeared in front of her on the virtual track at a fifty percent transparency; she leapt over it, sensors in the treadmill noting that she’d cleared it easily. Its belt stopped for the moment it took for her to land, then resumed with a start that almost jerked her off her feet. But there was another hurdle coming up, then an obstacle that she had to duck under, all the while keeping her speed at a constant fifteen kilometers per hour minimum.
Change Music, she told her implant. Neurodes embedded in her skull picked up the directed surface thought and put a song-categories menu hovering in front of her; with another instinctive mental command she made that window seventy percent transparent so she could see the upcoming hurdles of the virtual track. The images were cast onto her eyeballs by microscopic projectors embedded in the skin cells around her eye sockets. The bouncy, happy pop song she randomly selected to start the playlist with, was played similarly onto her eardrums. To an outsider it was as though she was staring into space and bobbing her head randomly, just like every so-often she leapt up in response to an invisible hurdle, or crouched to get past a roof barrier.
The classier gyms on the higher levels had full parkour machines, but this was less than halfway up a not-so-prestigious building, a fighting gym where serious people hung out for that purpose; the weights and the treadmills were incidentals, not the point of the place.
Serious fighters by arkscraper standards, at least, but Diana Angela had to admit that some of these people might last more than five seconds on the streets. She herself was here to fight; the running – she ducked another barrier, then leapt, ducked, leapt, ducked and then put on a few seconds of sprint – was just to make that more realistic. Training for worst-cases was how you survived them.
At exactly thirty minutes the display showed a ribbon for her to burst through, the treadmill slowing down under her feet. Her stats appeared in front of her; she glanced at them and told her implant to save them to file. She was breathing hard, having just run and jumped a dash over seventy-eight hundred meters. It was a good start to the workout session, an impulse after a particularly stressful day at work.
As the treadmill lowered itself, the angle of the floor-to-ceiling windows changed and they became mirrors. She noted herself for a moment in them; a tall and sharply beautiful blonde woman of five foot eight with intelligent green eyes, in a zipped-up tracksuit drenched with sweat. She was thirty-three but looked mid-twenties thanks to good health and rejuvenation treatments, which at her level of the Intendancy could slow but not stop aging. As she got off the treadmill she took her bottle of water from its holder and allowed herself a deep swig.
On the fighting mats, pairs of men were sparring. Two of them were eyeing her as she lowered the water bottle. She met the eye of the older one, a shaven-headed man in his early thirties who she knew as Jimmy Cloyd; he was a regular at this place, wearing black fighting shorts and not much else. He had a second-dan black belt in muay thai and from how they’d been sparring, the other man was comparable.
“You down for a fight?” she asked them.
“Now, after that run?” the man with him scoffed. He looked a couple of years younger than Cloyd, with rakish black hair and a pair of red shorts. Nice abs, Diana Angela thought absently as she looked him up and down. A man whose glutes said he didn’t miss leg day, either. And she smiled as she appreciated his pecs, which were toned and had just a fuzz of black hair.
“You too,” she said to that man. She’d felt his eyes on her during the run.
“You’ve just spent the last half an hour running,” the man objected. “Wouldn’t be fair.”
“The girl runs to make the fight harder,” Master Harding said. He was a stubby white-haired black man in his late fifties, supposedly a retired Army master sergeant. “Let the girl fight as she chooses.”
“Unless,” Diana Angela challenged, “you’re afraid of losing to a girl.”
“This is Christopher Stollmeyer,” said Cloyd. “Down from the Bronx.”
“Hey,” said the good-looking man. “Nice to meet you, Ms…?”
“Call me Diana Angela,” she said. “Come on, all you’ve got to do is grapple me.”
Stollmeyer looked at Master Harding, then grinned at Diana Angela and stepped onto the mats.
“Doesn’t sound like a fair fight, but OK.”
Of course it wasn’t a fair fight, she thought as she unlaced her sneakers one at a time. Neither was going up against two rested guys after that hurdle run, and her sweaty socks weren’t going to have much traction on the smooth mat. That was the point, because real shit was inherently asymmetrical. You practiced for when the other guy had the advantage. Multiple advantages. And she was parched; she wanted another sip of that water. That was reason enough to deny it to herself – she could fight thirsty too.
She stepped onto her end of the mat, five meters across from Stollmeyer and now Cloyd. They made careful head-bows to exactly the limit specified by cultural appropriation law for Caucasians, which all three on the mats were; Master Harding, whose ancestors had come from Africa, inclined his head a little differently. You never knew who might be watching; in fact, Diana Angela was recording the whole thing to her own implant for the sake of after-action review.
Her body was heaving from the strain of the run and she shifted her weight from one leg to the other. In the real world this would be a worst-case – facing two bigger, skilled opponents aware of her presence in a confined area, all while completely unarmed. And tired. The end of a long chase, say…
She looked at Cloyd, appearing to turn slightly toward him, giving him her attention. Then whirled on Stollmeyer with a flying kick that the man dodged. But that was only the first in a series of rapid attacks – stabbing high-chops, low kick, knee strike, slashing punches in toward his stomach – that the younger man had to furiously block, while out of the corner of her eye she was aware of Cloyd moving quickly in on her.
She abandoned the attack sequence and rolled, putting Cloyd in between her and Stollmeyer. Now they were in each others’ way, which was where she’d wanted them.
She recovered f
rom the roll and struck forward. Attack, attack, attack; Harding was not the only master – sensei was illegal cultural appropriation nowadays – who had drilled into her that a woman in her position could not afford to lose the initiative for more than a moment, if that. It was illegal to say so, but there were real physiological differences between men and women that counted on the mats, where a strike was a strike regardless of identity. The undeniable reality of it, to the extent that pulled strikes counted as reality, was a big part of what had first drawn her to the mats as an unhappy teenager.
Cloyd was fast, but she was faster. He deftly blocked her first rapid strikes, closing in – but then she feinted left as the man closed in, struck right with a blow that she pulled at the last moment to softly draw two fingers across the man’s throat. It was barely a touch, but Cloyd recoiled.
“Kill,” said Harding softly.
Diana Angela didn’t have time to give Cloyd the respectful nod that warranted, because a ‘kill’ in a multiple-person fight didn’t interrupt it and Stollmeyer was still moving in, obviously ready to take a few hits if he could get within grappling range. As he almost was, thanks to Cloyd’s distraction.
She stepped back, stepping becoming a rapid sideways roll before she leapt to her feet in the sweaty tracksuit. It and the slightly sweat-slippery socks limited her somewhat, but that was the point – minor handicaps to make things harder. To make herself better.
Stollmeyer ran at her, but there was precision behind his charge as he swung a flying high-kick at her face. She ducked under it and returned with a sweeping low-kick that didn’t knock him off his feet but did shake him as she pulled it at the last second. She turned her duck into a sideways-forwards roll to the man’s left, rose in the same move and, inside his range now – it was what he’d been aiming for, but he’d aimed for it on his terms – brought a knee into his groin, pulling it at the last moment.
“Kill,” Harding’s voice came as Diana’s hands chopped in on the younger man’s unguarded left side. Throat-strike, eyes-strike, both pulled at the last instant. Elbow into his temple that would have knocked him cold had it been a real blow. Real blows like that into the throat and eyes left you gasping and blinded.
“Kill, kill, kill,” Master Harding declared softly.
Diana made herself step back, as Stollmeyer did the same thing. The younger man was now almost as covered in sweat as she was, and even the pulled blows had had some effect. More psychological than anything else; being told you’d been killed had that effect. It had on her, enough. She’d gotten good the hard way; how many thousands of times had she had her ass kicked in practice over the last twenty years?
“Rematch,” said Cloyd after a moment.
“You’re on,” Diana Angela smiled immediately. She looked at Stollmeyer. “Come on.”
This time the two men were warier, looking at one another more. And working smarter together. She attacked Cloyd, knocking him flat and chopping a ‘kill’ stroke to his throat, but Stollmeyer had taken advantage of the distraction. Before she could fully recover, Stollmeyer’s foot was in her jaw, pulled barely in time to avoid more than slight contact; ouch that would have hurt if it had been real!
“Kill and out,” said Master Harding as she stepped back.
Diana Angela, breathing hard, grinning, went over to the men.
“Good teamwork,” she said, extending a hand. “Best of five?”
By the third fight Cloyd and Stollmeyer were starting to get a feel for one another’s movements. She attacked Cloyd, Stollmeyer moved behind her, she rolled to avoid Stollmeyer and Cloyd got her with a chop to the neck as she dropped to engage the other man.
A smile broadened across her face – she’d just learned something.
“Good fight, guys,” she said. “Best of seven?”
* * *
“Who is that woman?” Chris Stollmeyer asked as he chugged a nutritional drink. The drink had come from a vending machine that had scanned microscopic sensors across his body and determined the optimal nutrient mix for his body at that particular moment in time. It tasted like fresh strawberries and had cost him $150, about an hour’s pay for his job as a robot repair specialist, pay grade three-hashed US-5 Associate First-Class on the Unified Schedule.
“She’s one of the regulars here,” said Cloyd, with a sip from his own drink. “You’ll see her again if you come back.”
“I saw some krav maga influence there. What else does she know?” asked Stollmeyer.
“Judo and muay thai,” said Master Harding. “She does escrima at a high level. She’s versed in others.” For a moment it looked like the master was going to say something else – it looked in his eyes like he knew something else – but he didn’t.
“What belts, you know?” Because there had to be at least a couple-dan blacks in there.
Master Harding shook his head, a brief sideways motion you’d have missed if you’d blinked.
“No belts. Just a green in karate fifteen years ago, when she was a teenager. They track those things,” he said.
“And she’s someone who doesn’t want notice?” Stollmeyer understood that, and instinctively looked around for any dragonflies that might be hovering in the vicinity listening. There were none, but it never hurt to check. You could never assume the others weren’t actively recording on their implants, for that matter.
“She’s high-up enough that… you’ll see,” Cloyd said.
From out of the shower rooms strode a striking blonde woman in an elegant black skirt-suit. Stollmeyer instinctively, on seeing the businesswear, checked its shoulders – and froze. On each shoulder board of her jacket were three open silver circles, the circles meant a present rank of Under-Intendant First Class, pay grade US-13. The fact that they were open meant she was a heir, most likely to US-17 Senior Intendant First Class.
Shit. He’d been sparring with an executive? Had anything inappropriate slipped his mouth? And there he’d been thinking about asking her for a drink… the bullets you dodged!
“Lady Under-Intendant,” he acknowledged her respectfully with a bow of his head.
The woman sighed. “You fought well, Chris. My friends call me DA.”
“Yes, Lady Under-Intendant,” Stollmeyer said reflexively to those three circles. Calling upper Intendancy – he was very much lower, himself, on the grunt-worker pay grades of the Unified Schedule system – by their first names seemed wrong. The hereditary executives demanded respect from working guys like him; sometimes they demanded more, like obsequiety. And here he’d been fighting one?
“Chill, Stollmeyer,” said Cloyd, who didn’t seem too much off ease. “She’s alright.”
“Just wanted to thank you guys for a good fight,” she said, and drained the last of her own nutrient drink. “Didn’t mean to make anyone uncomfortable. I’ll see you.”
“Work on your blocks,” said Master Harding to her. “I’ll append implant notes for you tonight.”
Their opponent – the Under First Stollmeyer had practically beaten up, shit! – gave all three men bows to the limit allowed, thanked him, and headed out the door.
“You could have warned me,” Stollmeyer muttered to Cloyd. “US-13?”
“She wasn’t wearing the insignia when you fought,” Master Harding observed.
That was a good point. Upper Intendancy liked to wave their circles, wreaths, or stars around. You could – and they did – buy even casual clothing with shoulder boards for that purpose.
“Not all the big shots are pricks,” Cloyd observed.
“No,” Stollmeyer replied immediately. He didn’t know what Cloyd did for a living, but he was Unified Schedule. The social courts held tolerating hate speech to be almost comparable to making it, and criticism of the most virtuous people in society was almost the definition of sinner hate speech! “Sorry, I misunderstood your meaning for a second – I agree, the stars and the wreaths are good people.”
Cloyd must have remembered that Stollmeyer himself wore silver hashes an
d might in theory rat him out – he wasn’t going to, of course, but you never knew. And they weren’t the only people in the dojo right now. “That’s what I meant,” he agreed quickly. “They’re the very best people and we’re lucky to have them in charge.”
* * *
Diana Angela strode up another steep double-floor escalator, advertising sensors pinging her implant and pulling her social media profiles. That data, cross-referenced with her pay grade and estimates, based on facial analysis, of her mood, informed the bombardment of advertisements her own implant threw at a thirty-percent transparency in front of her eyes. It was interspersed with bits of news, mostly celebrity gossip.
It had been a rough goddamn day, enough that she’d dropped into the gym afterwards to work the stress off. Now she was headed home – and from there, downstairs for the weekend!
The arkscrapers were split into elevator districts of twenty to thirty floors, depending on the building and where you were in it. This allowed multiple elevators to run along the same shafts, with concourse floors like the hundredth and hundred-and-first being comprised of interdistrict mezzanines. They’d been planned that way – everything in the arkscrapers was planned, although needs had changed over the last hundred and twenty years.
Now, though, the hundredth floor interskyway concourse of the One Building was a commercial and transit district, and it was thronged with people. At six thirty on a Friday it was crowded with various types – late workers like herself mixed with early partiers, many of them in work clothes themselves with squares or circles on their shoulders, a few of them already intoxicated. Or perhaps, she thought as she passed a sniffing, red-nosed, coked-up couple in one of the bars whose tables faced the concourse, more than intoxicated. Her society was permissive on some things.
Through the center of the concourse ran four flat conveyor belts, a fast and a slow one going in each direction and separated from the walking area by escalator-like handrails. Diana Angela threaded her way through the crowds and stepped directly onto the fast one, heading for the skyway that would take her to the Enterprise Building.
