by Leo Champion
She’d fine-tuned the implant’s software based on physics and known capabilities of airborne gliders – the weight was the big variable, since wingspan could be read and factored. What the software wasn’t factoring was those blimps and the ropes holding them up!
One after another, the oncoming airbornes slammed into the ropes. On her implant it showed as the probabilistic trajectories materializing rapidly into sharp right-angles downwards. Mostly the ropes didn’t stick, but just the few seconds it took for the rope to slide off the leading edge of the gliders’ wings… were enough to turn them, to slow them down, to cost them height.
And that one was heading, low, straight in on her!
She turned slightly, zooming to see a bare-toothed death snarl on a crippled pigeon’s goggled face as he aimed himself straight at the balloon crew on the seventh-floor rooftop overlooking this one. Instinctively she fired the crossbow at his centre of mass but it was too late; his bomb rack—
She threw herself flat on her face and forced herself to slowly exhale as the bomb-riding airborne made impact on the rooftop no more than fifteen meters from her. There was a tremendous explosion and then, as the blast wave hit, everything went black.
* * *
Sally Denonile had been the last of those going down the hatch from the Chapel roof, and she hadn’t gone all the way – she stood at the top of the steep stairs watching her project successfully stop the glider attack.
Could have been the Marauders being wiped out like that, she thought in horror, her empathy more with the Wolves right now. She was a fellow airborne, after all. Her mouth kept up a running commentary to the crew, and some of the precinct’s top officers including Hammer, immediately below.
“And one of them just rode it down,” she gasped in horror as a red glider kamikazed into Peter Ingram’s station across Elizabeth Street, exploding in a blaze of whipping shrapnel a hundred yards away. “Boss, three of my guys…”
She’d only known Peter Ingram and his two assistants for a couple of hours, she didn’t even know the assistants’ names. But the fucker in the red glider had taken all three with him, and that was really putting a damper on her empathy for the Sky Wolves.
But that was the fifth and last one. No more bombs were going to fall.
“I think it’s safe to come up now,” she said as she started to move out. She wanted to survey the damage, praying she hadn’t lost any more crews: these tennies died because of me.
Behind her, Hammer was pulling rank and taking the next place at the bottom of the stairs, ready to go up after her.
“Hold on!” came Santos’ voice. “Look south for Billy Umashev! They contracted two gangs!”
* * *
Billy Umashev was a beak-nosed nineteen year old new to the gang-leader business. The three Ubersmashers behind him hadn’t precisely coordinated their launches and so they were running a couple of minutes behind. They’d intended to cross paths with the Sky Wolves over the crossroads, unload the cumbersome, temperamental frag bombs and collect a big bonus. Plus double that again if they scratched Jeff Hammer!
Being late would probably cost him that bonus, he realized, but he’d been paid to do the run regardless and he wasn’t going to be taking the frags home. He was four hundred yards from the tenement when suddenly balloons jumped up into the sky from its rooftops, creating a forest of ropes that the Sky Wolves ran into like tripwires.
In horror he watched all five of his friend’s gliders tumble from the sky, explosions rippling across the tenement rooftops as most of them jettisoned their loads in desperate snatches for height. And then he was bearing down on the ropes…
Up. He angled his body to trade speed for height, knowing there would be few good thermals this far from any scrapers. There was industry below that often provided heat to make up for it, but this was Sunday and a lot of that stuff wasn’t operating. There wasn’t enough lift, there was enough, there wasn’t—
Flashes from below reminded him that the balloon ropes weren’t his only danger. The tenement had had warning, and every musket in the precinct was being aimed up at him.
He jettisoned the bombs, not caring where the forty pounds went, as he swept toward the ropes, trying desperately to climb above the balloons—
A spray of shotgun fire blasted through his left wing and instead of climbing above the nearest balloon, he slammed directly into it with a force that punched it forwards but slowed him significantly. Lift was still possible though, he thought as he angled the glider and fought free of the obstacle—
He never felt the musket ball that went through his jaw and out the back of his skull.
* * *
Her head rang. Her head rang and she saw the world through a dazed, spinning blur. How long had she been out?
Less than a minute, her implant told her as she struggled up. Biometric sensors across her body reported minimal damage, but the blast had shaken her. She had to get out of here, she thought as another explosion came amidst a growing clatter of musket fire across the precinct.
Hands on her knees, bent over, she made herself struggle across the rooftop, no longer worried about immediate observation – the people in the best position to do that had been at ground zero of that explosion, which she at least had been shielded from by the concrete and rebar of the rooftop that had been hit.
Breathing hard, she got to the fire escape, took the ladder in both hands and began to climb down as rapidly as she could. Her balance was off, she would not be any good in a fight right now, but there were more bombs coming down and it had been only luck that had kept her from getting vaporized so far. Every molecule in her skull seemed to be vibrating. A part of her wondered if there was something she might have forgotten, but she didn’t have the mental bandwidth to care, right now, about anything other than just getting the hell away from here while she still could.
There were people screaming in the alley. There were people screaming all over the precinct, she realized as she made the final drop from ten feet, rolling and running for the safety – ha, only in this immediate specific context was it that! – of the manhole and the sewer it led to.
The last thing she heard, as she disappeared down out of the precinct, were the screams of the injured and dying.
Chapter Fourteen
“Boss,” a corporal with a radio reported to Hammer. “Guard Post Three reports they’ve got two crash-landings with live ones. Lieutenant Haskins wants to know whether you wanna peel them or can he, sir?”
There was an angry murmur from the senior officers in the Chapel.
“Give them to the raff,” someone growled.
“Tell Haskins they’re mine,” Hammer said, then turned to look at Santos.
“You said two gangs. Sure it wasn’t three?”
Santos shook her head.
“They’re to be kept alive and unhurt until I get down there,” he said. “That goes for all others who land alive. Any soldier who lays hands on them gets a flogging – and their officer loses their rank. Spread that now.”
There were a couple of grumbles, but the corporal with the radio relayed the order. Hammer checked the revolver at his hip and, with a ‘follow me’ gesture of his head, went downstairs.
* * *
Justin Canis grit his teeth in pain as he sat against the guard shack he’d been dragged to after the crash landing. Not so much the beating he’d received after being pulled from the wreckage of the glider, but his legs. Both were broken and Oh God it hurt.
He wished he had his flashgun, or even his knife. Quick suicide had all the appeal in the world right now. But the tenement guards had roughly stripped him of everything resembling a weapon, administering more than few blows while doing so.
A group of soldiers shoved Goyette next to him, to collapse next to Canis and junior ganger Timmy. None of the three airbornes were really in a condition to walk, and Goyette’s left arm was bent in a way that no unbroken bone would have allowed.
“Just kill us now and
get it over with,” Goyette snarled at the green-shirted tenement guards. “Assholes! Groundside punks! Dirt-eating bitches!”
Through his pain, Canis could see what his number two was trying to do; bait the tenement guards into giving them quick deaths. Everyone had heard the stories of what could happen to airbornes who fell alive into hostile hands. It really didn’t help that they’d been carrying frag bombs to a precinct gathering, specifically trying to kill as many people as possible. That had been an abstract fact, just another job, to Canis five minutes ago. It was bad, bad news now.
One of the tenement soldiers did move to buttstroke Goyette, but another one grabbed his musket before it contacted the number two’s face.
“Hammer says unharmed.”
A crowd of angry people were gathering, coming out of their buildings now the raid was over.
“Give them to us!” someone demanded.
“The boss wants them,” said a tenement soldier.
“They’re ours! We want them!” members of the growing crowd yelled, angrily shaking fists and spitting at Canis, Goyette and Timmy. “Pigeon fucks! Die!”
“Squad!” shouted a woman with sergeant’s stripes pinned to her shirt. “Form line! First of you raff bastards who comes close gets a faceful of buckshot!”
The other guards formed up in a line between the downed airbornes and the angry crowd, which was growing every moment. They made throat-cut gestures, or eyes-poking gestures, or spat, at Canis and the other two. He was terrified, realizing through his pain that this was really it, he was on the ground and he was going to die probably in the next few minutes.
If he was lucky.
“Make way!” came shouts. “Make way for the boss!”
“Kill the fucking pigeons!”
But the crowd reluctantly parted. Flanked by another squad of green-shirted soldiers appeared a man Canis had shared beers with at the Airedale. Tall and wiry and brown-skinned, Jeff Hammer placed a hand on his hip and looked down at Canis.
“Just kill us already,” said Canis. “For the sake of old times.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” said Hammer. “For now, I’m not going to hurt you beyond the injuries you’ve already taken. Doc, check them out.”
Soldiers appeared carrying stretchers. More troops, some of them with riot shields and baseball bats, were showing up. A balding man in a frayed white labcoat came along, squatted by Canis.
“Do better if we can get ‘em into the hospital,” he said to Hammer.
“Get them into the Chapel sick bay,” Hammer directed. “I’ll talk with them there.”
* * *
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Jacopo Benzi breathed. “You know how many those fuckers killed, between the bombs themselves and the stampede? Thirty dead, twenty-plus more critical, more than a hundred injured, and that was with warning. If there hadn’t been a couple of minutes to clear the crossroads, or your contraptions hadn’t been there, it could have been ten times that! And you’re going to let them live?”
Hammer met his number two’s angry eyes..
“Yes. You’ve got a problem with this?”
“Hammer,” said Benzi furiously, “I… yes, I do have a problem with this. Are these ones your friends? They were still trying to murder a gathering of civilians. I don’t give a fuck whether they’re your friends or not!”
“Canis was an acquaintance of mine, not a friend,” said Hammer. “I knew the guy, but barely. The other two I don’t know, although I guess I might have run into them at some point.”
“They’re fellow airbornes,” Benzi snapped. “You’re not going—”
“Colonel,” Hammer interrupted him. Was this a mutiny? But there were half a dozen people around, Lock and Don Karstein and Ali Benzi and some lower-ranking soldiers, and as tenement boss he could not allow himself to be disrespected this way.
“Colonel. You have said your piece and I have listened to you,” he said, loudly and slowly over Jacopo. “But it is my decision to make, not yours. Who runs this precinct? I do.”
“I want to talk with you in private,” Jacopo Benzi hissed.
“Not now and not about this. Consider this matter decided,” Hammer said. He needed to make damn clear, right now, who ran the precinct.
The phone on the reception desk, on the fourth floor of the Chapel, buzzed. Ali Benzi picked it up.
“Doc? Yeah, OK. Gotcha.”
She put the phone down and turned to Hammer.
“Doc says all three are stabilized and good to talk.”
“Boss Hammer, a moment,” said Jacopo Benzi. “Please.”
“I’m not going to kill them just yet,” said Hammer, and headed down the stairs. “And that is final.”
The colonel glared at him. Good.
* * *
There was a bigger precinct medical station on Prince Street, what was called ‘the hospital’; the upper two stories of a three-story building whose ground floor was a precinct store. Right now that place was full of streetgangers and a few raff who’d been hurt in the fighting on Friday, and it wasn’t as secure from lynch mobs as the other option.
The Chapel’s sick bay was on the ground floor, a small room with four more comfortable beds and a location he could keep angry people out of. As Hammer entered he was aware of the mob shouting outside, though. The people of the tenement wanted blood just as much as Jacopo Benzi did.
Heads looked up, Wolhrab and his assistant and the three downed airbornes, as the group came in; Hammer followed by the Benzis and a couple of junior soldiers.
“I could kill you,” Hammer said flatly to Canis, whose legs had been splinted. “My second in command wants to flay you alive – they call it peeling, down here. So do most of my people.”
“Man, it was just a job,” said Canis. “Business is business.”
“I knew that,” Hammer said. “You know that. But you hear my people out there yelling for your blood? It’s not just-business to them, and it’s not just-business for me any more. You want to know how many people you killed today? How many of my people you and Umashev murdered?”
Canis looked down.
“It was just a run, man. These guys came to me and paid half up front. You know how it works. Boss Hammer, did Fezzy and Reynaldo at least make it out?”
“Nobody made it out,” Jacopo growled with cold satisfaction. “Your lot hit the ropes and the second wave ran into a wall of gunfire avoiding them.”
“And now you’re – Boss Hammer, what are you gonna do to us? Be honest. Please. Old times sake. Those beers at the ‘Dale.”
“I haven’t completely ruled out hanging you, for one,” said Hammer. “That is still completely on the table and it would make a lot of people very happy if I did.”
“Damn straight,” Jacopo Benzi muttered.
“But first, you can tell me who sent you. What did the guys who hired you look like?”
Canis described them.
“The Captain and it sounds like John Moncreve,” said Jacopo Benzi.
“One of them said that was his name,” Canis agreed. “John Moncreve.”
“And they specifically told you to load up with frag bombs and go for the Assembly.”
All three airbornes enthusiastically nodded.
“This can be verified, you know,” Hammer said coldly, as cold anger welled in him. He’d never liked the Reverend, but what kind of a monster would bomb his own people?
“He’s going to answer for that,” he growled. “Man, is that son of a bitch going to answer for that.”
“We don’t have the Reverend, or John Moncreve,” Jacopo Benzi said. “We do have these three fuckers. You want popularity, boss? Forget worker committees, just skin these three. Or hang them. I’ll kick them off the platform myself.”
“I might,” said Hammer, “but I’d rather ransom them. Canis, how much is your life worth to you?”
“Not much, without my glider,” that man sighed. “But I’d pay for a quick death.”
; “Your life and your glider,” said Hammer as though Canis hadn’t said the second part. “Most of the gliders crashed on our territory and we have them. We have grounders who can repair them. An armed escort will take you up to the Marauders’ rooftop where you can recover safely. What’s that worth to you?”
“Everything,” said Canis’ number two, who was a couple of years older than his gang lead. “Everything, Mr. Hammer. What do you want?”
“It is established,” Hammer said, “that I have your lives in your hands. It would serve my purposes just fine, politically, to kill you.”
In fact, there was going to be a political cost not to kill them, but he was aware that he had to think beyond the immediate present toward assets he’d need in the future. The future would become the present soon enough, and the Reverend was out there making more of his own plans.
All three of the downed airbornes agreed.
“You’ll recover, I’ll sell you back your gliders, and you fly for me. All three of you,” Hammer said. “You owe me fair market price for the gliders, twenty-five thousand dollars each for your lives. I cover your ordnance and pay what bonuses I see fit for what runs I order. You can also do your own, if you can hustle up the work and I don’t need you.”
All three airbornes made enthusiastic noises of agreement.
“Do that and I’ll suspend your executions. You check with me before you do accept any third-party work, because you’ll be representing West Bowery Precinct now.” That still felt odd to say, but he’d get used to it.
“Mr. Hammer,” said Canis respectfully, “thank you.” He extended a hand for Hammer to shake. “That is a really, really good deal, sir.”
“I know.”
* * *
“You could have told me what you planned to do,” Jacopo Benzi said between bites of a pastrami sandwich.
“And have you play bad-cop less convincingly?” Hammer asked as he finished his own lunch. The Chapel had a good kitchen; as boss he could order whatever he wanted made. So far that had mostly consisted of subs to be eaten at his desk.
