by Kaleb Schad
One hundred fifty meters to get into Elia. There was no way to run and gun that far. Not with the kid. Not if he wanted the kid alive, at least. But maybe that was it? Everyone wanted the kid alive.
The security guard was returning now, trying not to look at the SLS men, but failing, then watching Tyler, probably hoping Tyler hadn’t seen the approaching men yet. Tyler could smell the fear on him, could hear the short breaths. Maybe he was asking himself what Tyler had been wondering most of his life: why me?
“Please return to your vehicle,” the guard said.
Tyler snapped open his MK-9’s drop-leg holster.
“There’s a mix up with your ID. It’ll only take a minute.” Tyler would have thought a High Laner could lie better than that.
The guard came around the front of the jeep, his left hand up. When he was within arm’s reach, Tyler pulled his pistol and shot him between his eyes. The gunshot bellowed down the tunnel, declarative. Final. The boy screamed.
Before the SLS men could react, Tyler had the boy out of the jeep and the barrel of the MK-9 grinding against his temple.
The SLS men ran now, reached Tyler, formed a perimeter. Twelve of them, shoulder to shoulder, and he alone. Tyler envied their camaraderie, their backs covered, not threatened. A shared purpose. He envied their togetherness.
A siren cawed and red strobe lights spasmed across the tunnel walls. At each end of the passage, hatches slid open and two heavy gun turrets lowered, swiveling towards them, like starving bears wakened from hibernation.
“It’ll never work,” one of the men said.
Tyler wrapped his arm around the kid’s neck. The boy was trembling.
“You know what I am,” Tyler said. “You know I can kill this kid and seven of you before you even fire a shot.” He walked backwards toward the end of the tunnel, the kid’s feet barely touching the ground.
The SLS men kept pace; armed satellites waiting, waiting.
“He’ll do it,” the boy said. “Please help me.”
“Shut up,” Tyler said.
They had neared the end of the tunnel and Tyler was starting to feel like this could work when the crawlbot appeared. It looked like a crab, but instead of pincers were two railguns and its face was a cyclops-like sensor under an octagonal hood. The four-legged mech stepped over the SLS van and settled into position, bearing down on Tyler. The traffic was forced to stop.
“This is it,” the SLS soldier said. “No further. We have two success conditions for our mission and neither of them require you leaving alive. Let the kid go.” The guard’s breath steamed between them, as if his threat had shape, lingered in the cold.
Tyler looked over his shoulder at the crawlbot and as he did so, spotted a small propane truck three lanes over. It was of the old style, with an exposed steel tank.
He reached behind him and pulled out one of his E15 incendiary grenades.
To the boy he said, “Cover your ears. This is going to hurt.”
Using every bit of speed his JACKK would give him, Tyler armed the grenade, skated it under the cars towards the propane truck, holstered his MK-9 and dove on top of the kid.
The soldiers began shooting, careless if they hit the boy. Tyler felt the rounds smack into his melmoth vest, flattening out, the fibers rippling. One went through his right thigh, another through the vest into his side. Hot, ripping pain. His JACKK kicked into overdrive, smothering the pain. To Tyler’s enhanced perception, it felt like he laid on that boy for an hour being shot, waiting, counting heartbeats until—
The grenade went off.
The concussion ripped apart the tank and the burning shrapnel ignited the fumes, turning the lower tunnel of Cerebus Gate North into Hell.
The things you think about at a time like this, flying through the air, gripping the child. Thinking how burning rubber and burning humans could smell so similar. The roar of the conflagration. The last time you were in a concrete building that exploded. Heat, searing and merciless. Hopeless. But you did hope, didn’t you? Let this be the end. Let this erase your sins. But it didn’t, did it? How could you think you would be let off that easy?
They hit the wall of the tunnel. Tyler couldn’t quite hear yet, his nanocellotics still protecting his eardrums. He tried to leap to his feet, but the bullet in his thigh raged. He limped to the boy, scooped him up and shuffled to the end of the tunnel. Smoke swirled around them. The flames were searing Tyler’s beard and face.
At the mouth of the tunnel, Tyler set the boy down as gently, but quickly as he could. Dead or unconscious? The crawlbot was trying to regain its footing, rocking back and forth to extricate its front leg from a logging truck that had rolled up on it. It spotted Tyler coming and opened up with its railgun, an angry chainsaw sound as thousands of superheated slugs exploded at mach seven from the rails, the bullets’ metal casings melting and burning in gouts of flame. The rounds zipped over Tyler’s head and decimated the wall behind him.
Tyler hobbled under the railgun, up the front leg and around the ammo box, to the pilot’s hatch. The crawlbot bucked like a crazed bull. It took a full magazine and wild hopes of not being hit by a ricochet to puncture the latch. Crawlbot pilots had to lay on their stomach inside the mech using a combination of a synmap helmet and joysticks for navigation and weapons control. By the time Tyler had the hatch open, the pilot had rolled on his side, trying to get his sidearm aimed upwards, but pinning his elbow with his own body. They both shot at the same time. Only Tyler’s rounds found their mark.
The smoke was starting to thin when Tyler got back to the boy. He was moving. Not dead, then. Tyler told himself the relief he felt was at knowing he could still finish his mission. Nothing more.
The nanocellotics were finally working and he was able to throw the kid over his shoulder like a sack and run, reloading his assault rifle with his other hand. The automated traffic coming through Cerebus had begun to move again, probably under commands to clear lanes for LCP security. He sprinted across the highway, stuttering screams from the semis’ brakes as they tried to avoid him, and leapt over the concrete barrier to a culvert. He put down the kid, took cover behind the barrier and leveled his Mark 37 at the smoldering tunnel waiting for them. But, maybe there wouldn’t be any “them.” Nobody had been moving after the explosion. And if anyone did survive, they wouldn’t know which way he went. Sit tight for a few seconds and then slip away.
Like ghosts, covered in concrete dust and fury, five SLS security soldiers limped out of the tunnel and stopped near the wrecked crawlbot. Four took defensive postures aiming in all directions while the fifth knelt and consulted some display on his rifle. After a second, he peered across the highway. Through the traffic. At Tyler.
“The hell,” Tyler said.
The five soldiers began moving towards them.
Up and running. For his life? How do you save a life that is already dead? Days from dead. Been dead for years. Carrying a life? Maybe, maybe not. A boy. But also a weapon. Just a little further. Just let him get a little further and then he’ll figure it out. Tyler knew there was an “it” to figure.
Tired was something the syncasts made you feel after synthesizing you at a job, or helping you pretend you’d chased a criminal in an action story, or won a game of tackle splats. What Tyler felt, running from the SLS men, two bullets burrowing their way through his body with every bounce, was desperation. He’d checked the boy. Dammit, he’d checked. There were no cybernetics, no signs of implants. Was he in over his head? Was he alone enough to do what needed doing?
A bullet fizzled past his head, then the grunt of the shot followed. Pieces of the concrete culvert flicked up around his feet as more bullets landed close, but not quite.
They reached a metal ladder and Tyler slung the boy around his hip and used the other hand to scale the rungs, two at a time. Once out of the culvert they were in the Lower Skims. Plastic buildings with bloody rust-pocked steel doors pressed against each other like fake books on a shelf. Few people came out into the s
treets in the Skims. Why would they? What was there for them out here? Everything they needed was delivered to their door: nutrient sacs, synmap parts and syncasts, narcotics. It was the desperate — those who needed medical help or had overdrawn their narcs and nutrients or who were on a mandatory six hour relapse — it was desperation that drove those who ventured into the wild. But wasn’t it always?
At the moment, Tyler wished there were more people on the streets. When he was a kid, he’d loved having the streets to himself while everyone else dreamed under the synmap. Now, he needed cover.
Down an alley between two residence towers. Dozens of ventilation fans spun in a hypnotizing pattern and conduit veined the buildings, crawling over gangways and service balconies. At the far end Tyler saw a garbage compactor. He ran to it and opened the hatch and told the boy to climb in. Maybe it would dampen whatever signal they were tracking the kid with. At the least it might slow a bullet. Desperate. But wasn’t he always?
He watched from inside a ventilation shaft on the second floor above the kid’s compactor. He’d torn out the grating and wedged his knife into the fan to stop the blade and slid into the tunnel, exposing just enough of himself to aim down the gangway toward the alley’s entrance below. If they were coming, they’d be here any second.
Two grenades twirled into the alley, then exploded. The first was a flashbang. Tyler shut his flesh eye and turned his head and even so still watched the back of his eyelid go from red to pink to near white in an instant. The second spiraled, spewing some kind of gas.
The key to a soldier’s strength and endurance is the efficient use of oxygen and thus was the first thing the Joint Autopharmaceutical and Cybernetics Kinesis Kit had to address. Tyler could hold his breath and function for upwards of nine minutes, fifteen if he was sitting still. This would be over in two.
The first four died quickly. Pop, pop. Pop, pop. Tyler had waited until all five were clear of the street, the first ones almost to the compactor, before he’d fired. They knew—thought they knew—that Tyler and the boy were in there. The fifth one, the one with whatever sensor they were tracking the kid with, fired back at Tyler before taking two rounds to the stomach. He grunted and sprawled backwards.
Tyler scrambled out of the tunnel.
The soldier was reaching for his rifle when Tyler stood on the gangway and fired twice more, blowing the man’s arm apart. The soldier screamed.
Tyler pulled his knife out of the ventilation shaft and the fan began spinning along with the dozens of others. Already they had cleared the gas.
As he climbed down from the gangway, the kid was lowering himself out of the garbage compactor. Scarlet swelling from the gas rimmed his eyes. When he saw the soldier leaning against the wall, hugging his mutilated arm, a grisly blend of fabric and flesh smeared across the soldier’s stomach, the kid whimpered and covered his face.
“How did you find us?” Tyler said.
“You have no idea,” the soldier managed through clenched teeth.
“Let’s go,” the kid said, pulling on Tyler’s sleeve.
“How are you tracking him?”
“He’s not just a science experiment. They don’t mobilize a crawlbot for nothing.”
The man was right. A crawlbot. Military mech operating inside the Gates—technically illegal. And all for this kid. What was Tyler doing? He didn’t even know how the kid worked or if he’d be able to activate whatever it was that the kid did? If he was going to make it the rest of the way through the city, he was going to need help. The city where Staern Life Sciences and the other Big Seven operated with impunity and the Liberty Conglomerate Province military could move on a moment’s notice.
“Let him go, okay?” the boy said. “Let him go and we can run. We can go now.”
“Look at you,” the soldier said. He had softened his voice despite the pain, as if to say, be reasonable. “Shot to hell. Barely able to stand. Even a JACKK can’t take on the whole LCP military alone. Leave the kid and go. Maybe save yourself. Why do this? It’s not worth it.”
Worth. That was the word. To be worthy. When Tyler’s watch ticked to zero, that word would be the difference.
The boy tugged again at Tyler’s sleeve. “Let’s go,” he said. “Before more bad guys come.”
“Bad guys?” Tyler looked at the boy. “Kid, that’s all there are.” He put his rifle to the soldier’s forehead and fired once. After all, be reasonable.
The kid yelped, but didn’t run. Already, then? A little less bothered by death?
There was a cable twisting from the soldier’s rifle to a synport behind his right ear. Tyler picked up the rifle, then unplugged the jack from the dead soldier’s head and connected it to his own synport. A spinning circle lit up in his vision as it synced with his Sakanaya. The monitor on the rifle blinked on and Tyler could see in his heads-up display, what was being shown on the monitor—a satellite view of the street with a blue dot labeled S04 and a red dot labeled C17 blinking behind him. Tyler turned to face the boy and as he did, the display reoriented itself, the red dot now in front of him. He walked up to the boy and the two dots touched.
The look on the boy’s face. Fear? Guilt? Did he know this whole time?
“Where’s the fucking bug?” Tyler whispered.
A MAN
Elia. Spanning what had once been fourteen different states and even parts of Canada now smudged together into a staccato city, citizens living near each other, but never knowing one another. Sharing space, sharing air, but nothing else. The wall loomed behind Tyler and the boy as they hustled through the Ottawa Ward. A city that spanned thousands of kilometers and still Tyler saw too much of himself everywhere. There the tower that Little Fit and Tyler had broken into for Tyler’s first Ten-run with the Red Lithiums, there the tower that was Culled in ’28. The relief they’d felt then, like a bolt of lightning so close they could feel the static charge, but death dodged. Soon they’d be near Liberty Heights. The place where he’d lived with his mother. Next to each other, but never knowing each other, not really. Not even at the end.
A burning afternoon sun colored the sign that said LCP Sanctioned Medical Provider. Painted over the words “medical provider” were the words “Meat Doctor.”
“I can’t…” the boy dropped to the concrete steps while they waited. Tyler let go of the boy’s arm so he could lean against the railing. He’d been towing the boy along for five or six kilometers.
“They’re going to come again,” the boy said. He was breathing heavy. “They’ll never stop.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“My head hurts.” Deciding what on the kid’s face was dirt and what was blackening bruises was pointless. Part of his left eye looked misshapen because of the swelling around the cheek and a crust of blood rimmed the inside of his ears.
“That makes two of us,” Tyler said. “Not much longer and it’ll all be over.”
Tyler could sense the green courage budding within the boy when the child said, “Those soldiers were people.” He nodded, as if testing the idea. “Real people.”
“So was I,” Tyler said. He pressed the call button again. Looked at the security camera over the door. “So was my—”
A man from Eastern Eurasia with a wide nose opened the door and stood looking at Tyler, then at the boy, then back to Tyler and said, “I thought you’d be dead by now.”
“There’s something laced around his left ulna, but it’s beyond anything I’ve ever seen.” The boy was laying on a bio imager in the clinic. He was naked and they’d taken a couple minutes to clean him up as best they could. So he doesn’t get my scanner dirty, the doctor had said.
Dr. Valadinar Makasihiro — Snip to his paying customers — the Red Lithiums. He wasn’t very good at his job, but he was a cool cucumber when it came to blood and guts and gunshots. And he worked off the grid, so to speak, which made Lithium folks happy and had been key for Tyler after Liberty Heights.
“It’s like a sleeve on the bone.” The doctor hand
ed Tyler a datapad. “It connects to his IV port at the fistula in his left elbow. Secondarily, there are millions of tiny packets lining his arteries. I thought they were a kind of malignancy at first, but imaging shows they are synthetic.” He said it as sin-tetic.
Tyler rotated the view and zoomed in on one of the sacs.
“If you magnify enough, there is a protein strand connecting the fistula, the sleeve on the ulna and the sacs. Like a web or something. It seems the sleeve has both a receiver and transmitter built into it.”
“Can you remove it?”
“Can you stop doing that please?” Tyler was tapping his MK-9 against his leg, a clicking sound as it hit his drop-leg holster.
“No,” the doctor said.
“Can’t or won’t?”
“C’mon. This is the Lower Skims. My job is to give them a little extra portion of whatever narcs they need while letting them die. Even if I had the equipment for that kind of surgery, I wouldn’t know where to start without taking the whole arm off.”
“Okay. That.”
“What? No. Stop.” He put a hand to Tyler’s chest. “I have no idea what will happen if you cut into that thing. You said he’s a Cull? Whatever is inside him is how he executes his Culling. Those sacs are throughout his body.”
The man was right. He’d end up killing himself and a stupid meat doctor for nothing. But that meant they were going to be tracking Tyler from here on. And that meant if he thought he was under a time crunch before…
“Is that thing right? Three and a half days?” The doctor was looking at Tyler’s watch. “You look like shit. Are you feeling any Denoument Effects?”
“I need a fast way into the Veil. And don’t say the Red Lithiums.” Then, to the kid, “Get up and get dressed.” The doctor had found new clothes for the boy, a t-shirt with the LCP President’s seal on the front and the words “Together in Hope.”
