by Leo Champion
She pulled on a pair of thin-soled black leather boots, then began arming herself. From one hook she took her main belt, covered in sheaths and large pouches; it was heavy but the weight was well distributed and she would have been uncomfortable going any further without it.
This included her favourite blade, an eleven-inch Bowie-like knife whose edge and point she religiously kept honed to razor sharpness. It was not her only weapon.
She bent down to Velcro a black-handled punch blade in its soft black leather sheath to the inside of her left calf; she strapped sheaths to her thighs and forearms, glanced at a pair of throwing knives she’d recently acquired. She wished she was better with those; it would be an incredibly useful skill that would give her ranged lethality. But it was a skill that took a lot of practice and there was nowhere inside the arks or outside of them where she could put in the necessary hours.
For the same reason she disdained the three pistols in their hanging holsters. Handgun bullets simply didn’t have the sheer up-close stopping power that a well-placed blade to the same location did, and there was absolutely no way to practice with them inside the arkscrapers, where there had not been such thing as a legal private firearm in over a century. Propellants on the streets were low-quality and temperamental, and she nursed a horrifying memory of almost dying when her gun had jammed dead in an early melee with sewer vermin. And of course, they were noisy. She had nothing moral against firearms, they just didn’t work so well with her style.
Other items in her armoury included a customized lightweight crossbow and several quivers of bolts for it; a pair of short spears of the type vermin liked, and a number of captured vermin blades that had been particularly well-made and, although she was the absolute opposite of a sentimentalist when it came to tools of violence, had been useful at one point and might be again. The vermin blades were all short and curved, but with sharp points useful also for stabbing in confined sewer environments.
Diana Angela ran a hand through her hair, wiping a few loose strands back as she turned down the corridor. She was good to go; she was armed, equipped, and lethally ready for whatever she might encounter down here. Her body tingled with ready adrenaline; her senses felt sharper, her mind clearer. She stepped forwards with the confidence of a successful predator, heading down the corridor to the cave-in that led to the sewers.
* * *
Her passageway led through a narrow crook down into a sewer drainage way heading north and south, tall enough to stand up in and running approximately northwest-southeast. It was relatively cool down here – a quick check of her implant showed that it was in the low sixties above ground, more or less, despite it being night in the middle of winter. Arkscraper conglomerations were huge heat islands, their constant air circulation sending megatons of waste heat into the city around them.
At every soft step she listened and at every intersection she scanned, flicking her vision to thermal for a moment just to be sure. Wisps of light came through from above not far away, but there was no sound other than the trickle of water and the scurrying of rats.
She crossed a long-abandoned subway tunnel, smoothly rusting rails remaining. Nobody on the streets salvaged from under the ground, after all. Faint light came through from cracked grates above. This far from the arkscraper she was definitely out of its sensor range, and so she opened her implant to communicate on a private channel as she crouched in a short dead-end.
Connect, she told it.
Her data assembly software package was a nice bootleg, and she’d connected it to hundreds of stationary sensors. She put them where she thought they’d be most useful or programmed the termites to seek out voices; it was always relevant to know where the vermin were congregating, what their numbers were and what they were saying to one another.
The computer itself was cheap civilian-grade, running that network from where it lay physically buried deep in a hole between bricks of the passage she’d crawled into.
Connecting, lit up in front of her eyes. Implants existed nowadays that could project directly into your mind and some people did that, unemployed people living their lives away through ultra-immersive virtual worlds. But Diana Angela had always rejected artificial realities, be they technological or chemical, and her own implant projected to her lower field of view by default and center only when she wished it to.
You could do anything with mental commands from an implant that you could do with a keyboard and a mouse on a desktop or laptop computer; for that matter, most people had sensors in their fingers that would allow them to type as though on an invisible keyboard, context accurately putting the letters together into words. Of course, right now Diana’s was very deliberately disconnected from any official networks, connected only to her own relatively small private network of sensors and signal repeaters here.
It would be practically invisible even to modern detection, since the sensors were almost entirely passive and sent their signals by hypercompressed bursts to each other, the repeaters and ultimately the computing package that stored and analyzed everything. So far as she knew, and she was by now very certain, hers was the only sensor network down here.
The arkscraper governments were fixated on themselves and barely acknowledged the millions of people outside the scrapers; because pretending they don’t exist while our economy depends on them is easier when you don’t care about intellectual honesty. Observation outwards wasn’t worth even the minimal time it would take; mediating international conflicts was the job of the United Nations, but even their top executives, the US-21s and -22s who ran the planet, did not give a shit about the world directly below their own feet.
She absently scraped another handful of cool slick mud across herself as, in front of her eyes, keywords lit up in order of relevance to past interest patterns. There were hundreds of conversations that had occurred, and the software transcribed all of them and sorted them given context for keywords.
The underground networks below Manhattan had, over five hundred years, become deep and three-dimensional. When society had effectively abandoned those outside the arkscrapers to what was even then becoming violent subsistence, they’d abandoned most of the old infrastructure. A few robotically-maintained water and power conduits served the tenements, a basic concession to ancient obligation and a requirement to keep the street economy functioning so it could recirculate matter back into the arks.
The arkscrapers’ own infrastructure was deep in the bedrock half a mile below, totally separate and entirely serviced by robots. Her underworld was the sewers, the subway lines, the basements and steam tunnels and old drainage ditches, as well as the many more recently-dug tunnels. It was complex and three-dimensional and it had taken her years to learn, many thousands of hours spent carefully probing new areas, always alert for danger and ready to kill.
Tonight, though, there was nothing that piqued her interest in the latest recordings. She dismissed the active connection and headed north, the way she’d had in mind absent anything of relevance from the monitoring. She stuck to the lesser tunnels, carefully avoiding the bigger ones or subway lines as she moved, always listening and very alert.
Rats skittered past her a few times, but she’d long since overcome her initial shock and disgust at those. They were at the bottom of the food chain down here; she was at its top. And it was time to go hunting.
* * *
She flattened her back against the damp side of a wide pipe, deep underground, when a sensor warning lit up in her implant. She’d placed a few around here, because this was an area she’d been visiting on and off for about the past month, picking them off one or two at a time and then melting into the darkness. Whittling away at the tribe.
Now she paid a moment’s attention to the indicator, which she knew was in an intersection about a hundred and fifty feet from here. She was somewhere under southern Central Park. This sensor couldn’t do voice, just heat and motion, but it told her that three human-body-heat objects had just stopped in the draina
ge way intersection it covered.
A carnivorous grin spread across her throat as she slipped forward. They were patrolling in threes now, were they? It was definitely a patrol because she knew where their lair was, in a subway station not far from here. She’d cautiously looked for outer patrols, seen no sign or trace of them as she approached; this close it would be an inner patrol.
She knew these sewers but she didn’t know the direction the vermin had gone in. But many hours of cautious lurking and spying, learning her prey’s routines before she killed them, had given her a suspicion. If they were passing through that intersection, in that direction, there was about a two in three chance of—
Diana Angela turned right, through a long-ago hand dug tunnel that went through a collapsed basement. There was some kind of a sub-basement underneath and she trod carefully across the ancient concrete as she made her way across a short cut that led to another hand-dug tunnel that opened onto a sewer drainage way. A peek out and—
Yes! They had just turned into this drainage way, definitely three of them. Of course, three at once without any particular edge, the wary part of herself warned… but she thrust that aside. Fuck that shit, she grinned as she drew her knife. This was going to be fun!
They were lighting their way with a brazier that the middle one was carrying, walking warily forwards and glancing back every so-often. She sank back in the narrow tunnel, slick earth and bits of old brick on either side of her, and crouched out of sight as they came past, moving with graceful silence. They were ankle-deep in running, not-too-clean water but they were careful enough not to splash as they walked, and all three were armed with spears.
She was far enough back inside the tunnel that they didn’t see her, although the one with the brazier pointed it into the tunnel for a moment to check, its flames flickering as she pointedly looked at the ground.
Such a wonderful thing, fire, she thought as she crept out after them. It birthed civilization. And it destroys their night vision!
She willed the implant projection away for a moment. The three sewer vermin were slowly moving along what to the un-augmented eye was a very gloomy passageway tall enough for most people to stand in, ankle-deep water at the sides probably going to knee-deep or so in the center. Their path and immediate vicinity was lit by the gently flickering brazier.
Her feet were as silent as theirs as she slipped up behind them, ready to act immediately if any of them turned, as they seemed to be doing every so-often. Her heart raced, her throat was a little dry and every part of her body and soul was loving this. On tiptoes she reached forwards, took the last vermin by the neck and sank her fighting knife into its throat, drawing deep as flesh and veins parted.
Thick red blood fountained across her hands and arms, then stickily across the rest of her body as the dying vermin fell backwards at her feet, thrashing its legs. And the other two began to turn, the one with the brazier waving it in front of its face as though warding off a mythical beast.
Thank you, she thought, you can’t see me through your own fire.
Thanks for this opportunity, too!
With her free left hand she took hold of the stick of the brazier and shoved it into its owner’s face, ramming the burning oil into his eye sockets. There was a terrible scream and he fell back clutching the flickering flames over his eyes, as her left foot slammed into his groin. He doubled over fetally as Diana Angela turned toward the last one.
The lead vermin had had more than a couple of moments to be alerted and, with the brazier behind him, his night vision hadn’t been ruined so much as the other two’s. He raised the spear and saw her, crouched bloody in the drainage way above his throat-cut friend and his spluttering, gasping, blinded one.
He was turning ready to fight. She wasn’t here for that, just to kill, so before he could react further she lunged forwards, jabbing a foot brutally into his kneecap and grabbing at the spear, wrenching it away from his hands. He fought to keep it as he staggered sideways from the kick, but she slammed her empty left palm into his nose, feeling it crack. In a backhand swipe she gutted him with her knife, flesh and insides giving way under her razor-edged blade as she opened him up across his stomach.
Blood and viscera exploded onto her, drenching her top and shorts and spattering across her legs as she brought her knee into his groin, the vermin collapsing double under the groin strike and falling forwards. She skipped back and stomped the vermin’s neck, feeling it snap through the heel of her boot. There was no such thing as overkill when it came to vermin; she’d kill every last one of them ten times over if she could.
The one she’d blinded screamed again, clutching its face as the flames flickered. Diana turned, crouched, her free hand wiping bits of human insides off her blood-soaked, clingy tank top. She stepped over him in the gently flowing ankle-deep water that was now warm with blood.
Eyeless, he still sensed her as she leaned in to mercy his throat.
“You—you’re the Devil, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she murmured as her blade softly sent him to hell. “You call me that.”
Chapter Four
Traffic moved on the city streets at night, but carefully. Enclosed vehicles or semi-enclosed ones, modified with hand rails and running boards so that escorting troops could ride on their outsides. Sometimes they were led by advance bikes whose role it was to spot or trip any ambush; those guys tended to be twitchy with their flashguns. Foot traffic – anything that couldn’t outrun a streetganger or sewerganger ambush had better be prepared to avoid or fight it – moved by stealth or in numbers.
Stealth had always been fine for Diana Angela; streetgangers were practical and eminently self-interested, and probably wouldn’t bother some cloaked loner who looked like they could put up a fight but didn’t look wealthy enough to justify risking death over. Her implant’s thermal vision let her spot and avoid lurking groups of them anyway, because you could never be too sure. She carefully walked around more than one potential trouble spot as she made her way through the uncontrolled country of uninhabitable high buildings south of Times Square.
As she’d surfaced she’d taken a dark silk skirt and shawl from the biggest of her pouches, cloaking herself as the crones and the crippled did. People would assume she was one, unless they scanned her or noted her boots. The dark shrouds, which would rip easily if someone grabbed them in a fight, gave her a degree of anonymity without compromising agility, and she moved swiftly through the dark streets.
Floodlights covered the approaches to Times Square, though. It was familiar enough at night, but still unsettling in her sudden vulnerability to the snipers on the wall that blocked most of Eighth Avenue immediately south of Thirty-Eighth Street. She fell in behind a three-vehicle convoy – some VIP in a black town car, guarded by two pickup trucks whose trays were loaded with musket-armed tenement soldiers who seemed relieved to have made it to safety.
Just behind her, and she hustled to get in front of them, was a convoy from some other tenement, a hundred ragged and starving tenement workers pulling five wagons, guarded by a company of several dozen musket-toting tenement troops who seemed just as happy as the ones in the pickup trucks to have made it safely through the dark streets. The industrial slaves of the convoy who could crowded ahead to get in sooner, moving around her through the one-lane-wide gate in the wall across Eighth.
Midtown’s guards wore black body armor, shined boots and black-visored riot helmets, and carried better weapons than most tenement soldiers’ pipe muskets. Two of the four soldiers posted just inside the barrier had pump-action shotguns; the other grunt had a scoped rifle and the sergeant, with three gold chevrons pinned to each shoulder of his chainmail T-shirt, cradled a drum-fed submachinegun. They didn’t bother to disarm the tenement soldiers riding guard on the convoy ahead of her; in fact, they didn’t even bother to sneer at the convoy guards, which in the past the Association’s troops had. It would go badly on the visiting guards’ home tenement if there was trouble here.
Diana Angela was fairly certain that if the sergeant didn’t have an explant under that riot helmet of his, he had an implant scanning for whatever metallics people had under their clothes. But her weapons were nothing special for the city, so the Midtown guards paid no mind.
Sometimes they did stop her, mostly when they realized she was a pretty young woman they could feel up. Slapping them wasn’t a good idea but you could buy your way out of a search; it would just be cash she didn’t appreciate having to put in some randy thug’s pocket. And she had to be careful about dismissing them as randy thugs; Roman Kalashov’s men had murdered the writer John Kiska four years ago, burned him screaming alive on the steps of the Public Library not far from here. They were not to be taken lightly.
But this time they either didn’t notice or didn’t care that she was no raff crone. She was in amongst the neon and the noise of Times Square, a party that ran twenty-four seven inside the gates of Midtown. There was the hustle of the markets to the left, through what had once been the Port Authority bus terminal between Fortieth and Forty-Second Street, the Independent Hotel rising up to her right on Forty-Second through Forty-Fifth.
From street level to tenth floor the Independent was the same garish blaze of neon and digital billboards as the rest of Times Square, some of them advertising products that had not been affordable on the streets for a century. Above that, the hotel reached a hundred and some stories, half the size of the shorter arkscrapers but connected by skyways to their network while still accessible from the street. It was the only building on Manhattan that allowed arkies and streeters to meet face to face and it was the most secure, most neutral place in the conurbation because of that.
