CLAIRVOYANCE: Part 23
Rolling his wheelchair down the kitchen, Simon rifled through the drawers in search of some aspirin. His head pounded like a jackhammer even while his legs were numb with morphine. The sudden stabbing pain had started about an hour ago, and it simply refused to go away. His overworked implant seemed to be doing fuck-all about it. It sat there like a dark cloud, muddling his thoughts and destroying his concentration, until he couldn’t put up with it any longer.
His search wasn’t going well. The kitchen was a showpiece more than anything, an empty shell built to look pretty. He could find no trace of pots, pans, containers or anything else food-related. Even the refrigerator contained nothing but microwave meals and water. Simon couldn’t really judge, though. He was no chef.
At last he discovered a first aid kit hidden away in a corner. It yielded a few small sachets of generic painkillers. He pushed out a double dose to account for his pumped-up metabolism, swallowed them all dry, and then concerned himself with the matter of food. Right now his body needed constant refuelling in order to keep the healing process going.
He shovelled a tray of soggy rice and chicken-flavoured protein into his mouth without tasting a single bite. His mind sifted through plans and plots for his escape from Bilbao, and his greater campaign. After getting out of here he’d find Gina and take her to Geneva, link up with the resistance cell they’d been supposed to meet, and make damned sure Gabriel never got his hands on her.
Not again, anyway . . .
A jab of cold hatred went through him, and his meal turned to ash in his mouth. He still felt her betrayal churning in the pit of his stomach. She’d fucked Gabriel, sold out everything they’d fought for. But then, when the chips were down, she’d turned and saved his life from the telepathic psycho. That had to mean something.
It was strange. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt so much emotion about anything. There must have been a time when he wasn’t numb inside, but that was another life altogether. Right here and now, he’d give anything to be at her side, keeping her safe.
A loud pinging noise sounded from the elevator, and Simon watched as a big black car rolled off the ramp. It parked itself in its assigned spot with computerised precision. Toledo got out, twirling his key ring around his finger, and sucked on a cigarette as he saluted Simon.
“Feeling any better?” he asked, gesturing the lit end at Simon’s legs.
“That ain’t a concern. How are we doin’?”
Toledo shrugged his shoulders. “Same as before. Europe’s still dead to the ‘Net, no wire, no satellite, nothing. The banks and governments are scrambling to get their old paper-and-ink systems back up. Riots have broken out in Paris, but that’s nothing new.” A lopsided smile crossed his lips. “What is it about you, Caine? How in hell do you make somebody this mad?”
“Ask him,” Simon said coldly. “I don’t care about the daily news, Toledo. I need to get back in touch with my people in Laputa. I need to find Gina.”
Silent except for breathing, Toledo looked at Simon like a schoolteacher with a particularly dim pupil on his hands. The unspoken message was clear: Don’t push your luck. Simon inclined his head, conceding the point. There was no room for emotional outbursts in this relationship.
“I talked to someone who might be able to patch us into a Federal emergency transmitter. The satellite network seems to still be working, might be our only option. It’s a good lead, but we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime there’s a couple other things I want to do. Take a more proactive strategy, if you read me, more than gathering forces and establishing communications. Unless we want to play by Gabriel’s rules, we need to seize the initiative.”
“How?” Simon asked, but was cut off by the insistent buzz of a mobile phone. Toledo reached into his pocket, pulled out a smooth black cylinder no larger than a pen. It extended a tiny plug which he stuck into a socket at the back of his ear. A small anti-noise field made his conversation completely silent, but Simon could read lips pretty well.
“Go ahead. Yes, I understand. Avenido de Santiago. Six o’clock. We’ll be there.”
He squeezed the phone in his hand. It retracted its plug while he took another drag of his cigarette, looking insufferably pleased with himself.
“What?”
Toledo expelled smoke from his nostrils and grinned. “The first part of my plan, and more proof that I am the most amazing human being that ever lived. I just booked us a clinic to take care of your other problem.” He waved at Simon’s crippled, wheelchair-bound body, saying, “We’re gonna grow you some new legs.”
The fading sun cast its red-gold rays over everything on the Avenido de Santiago. Orange buildings, orange roads, orange trees over orange grass. In this light the whole street looked more like a simulation programmed by someone who loved sunsets a little bit too much. Simon sniffed the air, caught the faint bitter tang of chemicals. Their composition told a lot to his boosted senses. Somewhere in this complex was an illegal pharmaceutical plant, hiding under the emissions of a legitimate one.
From outside the clinic didn’t look like much. Just an ordinary medical establishment with a white sign and a small carved fountain jutting up in front of the entrance. The only materials were whitewashed concrete and polished chrome. There was even a group of ancient-looking patients hanging around the doorstep, muttering to each other in a bastard mix of Spanish and Conglom. Except for the smell it could’ve been just an innocent local medical centre in suburban Bilbao.
Toledo rolled Simon through two sets of automatic doors and an X-ray weapon scanner to get to the lobby. There they came face to face with the clinic receptionist, a sour old woman who couldn’t stop eyeing the trenches the wheelchair had made in their nice blue carpet.
She asked if she could help, clearly resenting her duty to greet and serve anyone. Toledo smiled at her and said, “Here to see Dr. Guillermo, appointment at six.”
“Down the hall, door five on your left. Someone will be waiting there.”
He thanked her and drove the chair to their destination. Door five was marked with a big silver plate screwed to the front. Toledo made sure there were no prying eyes to watch them go in, and carefully shut the door after them. A dark-haired woman waited inside, her back turned, making notes on a clipboard.
“Leg regeneration?” she asked with sharp impatience.
Toledo grunted agreement, and she motioned to follow. She pulled out a small plastic key on a chain around her neck, fumbled it into a hidden lock behind the fire alarm. As she turned it, the wall in front shimmered, dull painted plaster crackling with snow like a broken TV. Some kind of door opened behind it and vomited wafts of bitter pharmaceutical-waste stench into the room.
The woman walked right through it. The hologram swallowed her up with a violent flicker, and Toledo wheeled the chair in after her.
A large angular room waited on the other side, sandwiched into the leftover space between the clinic’s other rooms. All kinds of lab equipment were arranged around the place, bits and pieces all clustered together as if looking for safety in numbers. Lights blazed everywhere. The heavy, humid air weighed down on Simon like lead.
The woman led them to the centrepiece: a large, circular steel tub half-hidden by a jungle of wiring and pipework. Six spindly robot arms were mounted along the rim like upturned spider legs.
“Finest tech the Federation has to steal,” Toledo whispered into Simon’s ear. “Ever hear of the old Basque nationalists in the twentieth century, all the bombings? Same damn people. Occasionally they’ll hire out equipment to a few selected guys they trust. Fuck that up for me and I will kill you.”
Pulling up next to the tub, the woman said, “This is high-level regenerative gel similar to that used by the Federal Police. We hang your legs in the bath and target specific regions of injury with tailored viral-bacterial injections and electric shocks. These can promote tissue damage repair, breakdown of bone fragments, nerve regeneration and other functions. There will be some lasting nerve damage following the procedure, but in time you should recover almost your full range of motion. Strap into the harness and we’ll begin.”
Toledo tipped his hat to her and rolled Simon towards the waiting robot arms. Without hesitation Simon undressed himself and fastened the nylon straps around his pelvis and under his arms. Pretty soon he was struggling, disabled as he was, and Toledo moved in to help. The implant deadened the nerves in his legs but the fractured bones wouldn’t take his weight even for an instant.
It don’t matter, he thought, burning inside. Nothing matters as long as I’m walking again.
With the last strap in place, electric motors began to whine. He felt himself leave the ground as the arms lifted him up, then left him suspended waist-deep in the empty tub. The doctor’s voice echoed over a loudspeaker somewhere, a rapid-fire stream of Spanish which Simon completely failed to catch. Blue goo began to fill the tub from underneath.
Within seconds the level climbed up to his ankles, then his knees, crawling and sucking its way up his body. He might as well have been sliding feet-first into a giant bowl of jelly.
“This’ll take about six hours, eight on the outside,” said Toledo. “I hope you’ve developed a taste for Spanish TV, Caine.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got things on my plate besides helping you.” He smiled, a wide predatory flash of teeth. Then he tipped his hat and walked away, called over his shoulder, “Be good!”
Simon said nothing as he watched the sticky gel swallow up his hips and waited for the injections to begin.
Simon’s muscles twitched and spasmed as the robot arms hauled him out of the vat. The doctor was there as they set him down, and she undid the straps without a hint of embarrassment at his nakedness. He tried to help but his shaking fingers couldn’t hold on to anything. Finally he had to give up and let her get on with things, teeth chattering, hands covering his painful electricity-induced erection.
“You will be unstable,” she said in her cool businesslike tone. “Stand if you feel you can, use the bath if you need to hold on to anything, or just sit down.”
She undid the last strap and lowered him to the ground. His legs slowly took the weight, twitching and swaying but pain-free. He couldn’t help but smile at the sheer pleasure of standing. It had almost become unfamiliar. He was in a position to fight back again.
He said, “Thanks. What about walkin’?”
“Your nerves are still raw, but practice will help them form new connections. Don’t push too hard. No matter how much hardware you have, you’re still human.”
She straightened, stretched out her back and yawned with genuine exhaustion. Simon couldn’t resist a passing glance at her figure. She was easy enough on the eyes, but skinnier than Gina, with less in the hips and the chest. There was a kind of cold detachment in her body language which paled before Gina’s fiery, sinuous grace . . .
Simon caught himself. Every woman he looked at nowadays ended up getting compared to the pretty redhead who occupied most of his thoughts.
Get a fucking grip, he told himself, and tried to put her out of his mind.
Tentatively Simon started to walk, both hands clamped onto the edge of the tub. His legs moved only in stiff jerks, and he had to carry much of his weight on his arms, but they worked. They worked. If he’d gone here straight after his fall, he might have been up and about again in thirty minutes.
“Your clothes,” said the doctor, pointing at the heap lying on a plastic chair next to the tub. “If you need help dressing, I can get you a male orderly.”
Simon shook his head and fell into the chair. Through stubborn determination he managed to get himself dressed and upright without anyone’s help, despite his knees’ refusal to bend. For a moment that was the greatest feeling on Earth.
“My friend ain’t here yet?” he asked the doctor, who was checking the tub’s electrics, and she shook her head. “In that case, I think I’ll take a little stroll. Tell him to wait. I’ll be back.”
“You should be resting,” she pointed out with supreme disinterest. She didn’t care whether he followed her advice or not as long as the advice was properly given.
He didn’t care either. Every minute he could feel the control coming back to him. His implant helped, kickstarting the fried nerves, and it would keep working until his body was physically perfect. The only limit to his recovery was his brain’s ability to learn and get along with the new nerves.
He limped a few more steps to practice, then went to the door. The doctor shrugged and let him out, muttering something about food and how he’d need it. He ignored her. He had other things on his mind.
I’m gonna find you, he thought at Gina, wherever she was. He hobbled out the lobby and stepped into the night, looking up at the sleeping city in front of him. The yellow glow of street lights stretched far into the distance. Maybe you can hear this. Doesn’t matter if you can’t. Just sit tight and don’t get yourself killed, not before I get to scream at you for what you did.
Far in the distance, flashy holographic advertisements played between the skyscrapers of Bilbao. Individual sequences ran together in mid-air until they seemed like an endless running battle between the different fantasies. Suddenly the sparse trees and open parkland felt threatening and exposed. He wanted nothing more than a helicopter to go up in, something familiar and comforting, but failing that he’d settle for a sturdy wall at his back.
He started to walk. It was stupid considering the circumstances, he shouldn’t present Gabriel any opportunities for an easy shot, but he pushed that thought to the back of his mind. After weeks cooped up in a nuthouse and a bachelor flat, wheelchair-bound, he had two choices: either go get some fresh air, or tip over the edge into murderous insanity.
The streets were deserted so far away from the city centre. Lone, desultory cars made up the only traffic, just glossy aerodynamic blobs on minimum-friction wheels. Their only sound was the faint crunch of tires on tarmac. Simon enjoyed the quiet. On a whim he searched the sky for stars, but they had already disappeared behind a smothering blanket of clouds. Pollution made the sun an infrequent visitor here, and it only got worse further east.
Slowly his stumbling gait became smoother, more natural. He started to jog. The implants and augmentations in his legs volunteered status reports back to his conscious mind. They happily announced that access to his nervous system was restored and his body was starting to recover from all the abuse.
He sped up, running, leaping across the pavement in superhuman bounds. A desperate need for freedom overcame him. As he came off the main roads into residential housing, he really cut loose. Feet pounded against the pavement. He barely noticed when he overtook a car. His weakened muscles ached from the strain, but his implants flogged them and dumped some more rocket fuel into his bloodstream. Then he spotted a little bungalow with a particularly good rooftop, flat and low to the ground. He grinned and took a running jump.
Both legs tensed, he took off like a missile, and slammed stomach-first into the edge of the roof. All the wind got knocked out of him. He barely managed to catch the edge and save himself from kissing the ground. He grimaced at the pain in his ribs and hauled himself up hand over hand until the last of his limbs reached the safety of the roof.
The doctor’s cautions rang sourly in his head while he lay panting, a little bit deflated. Just takes time and practice. Almost my full range of motion.
Flat on his back on the dry roofing tar, he breathed deep to calm himself, and watched the city night go by.
Simon rarely stopped to think about the past. Even when he assumed a different alias, as it became necessary, he trained his brain to start thinking of himself by his new name. He became that name, and blocked out everything before it.
And then Gina came along. She . . . changed things. Where he used to shut down his emotions, now he couldn’t seem to stop thinking and feeling, and it was always about her. She reminded him so much of Sarah that it hurt to even look at her. It hadn’t started out that way, but after getting to know Gina, he recognised the same kind of toughness in her. A resilience that he couldn’t help but admire. She’d survived a lot. She was tough enough to fight when she had to, and smart enough to know when to run like hell. Her aversion to killing mystified him, but even that was a firm choice on her part, not cowardice. She turned every weakness into strength.
Just like Sarah.
His mind tortured him with memories of desperate sex in a sweltering hut in Africa. Afterwards Sarah lay up against him and hummed tunelessly to the rhythm of his heartbeat. Incense prickled his nostrils from the smoke pots which kept the mosquitoes at bay, and together they listened to the monsoon rains torrenting down outside. Thunder boomed in the distance. Within hours they would go up on another hopeless guerilla mission against the ever-expanding Federation, not knowing if they would both come back alive, but Sarah wouldn’t have it any other way. She believed in nothing if not the rightness of her cause. Her whole country might capitulate but she would never stop fighting.
As a last act of remembrance, the last step in his mourning, he’d taken her name. Caine. He got comfortable in it. Complacent. He let his guard down, sure that no one could follow the long chain of identities he’d left behind him, and that complacency had allowed Gabriel to find out as much as he did. Too much.
Plus, thanks to the mess in Hong Kong, Simon Caine was a Federal hot topic again. They’d find out the truth eventually, and that meant he simply couldn’t wear this skin any longer.
“Caine!” called a voice from the street. Simon looked down directly into Toledo’s eyes. He waved and began to climb down from the roof.
Impressive bit of detective work, he thought to himself. There was no sign of any surveillance equipment and, even more interestingly, Toledo didn’t move like he had boosts. Any boosts at all. How could a normal human be so effective?
“That was stupid,” Toledo pointed out as Simon approached. His tone was calm and clipped — there was no personal anger in him, only a hard analysis of the facts that did not favour Simon. He continued, “There could’ve been an ambush, snipers, anything. You should’ve waited. I want to get paid with more than your dead body, Caine.”
“I agree,” said Simon, which took the smaller man aback. Simon smiled. “It won’t happen again. And please, let’s drop the formality. Call me Bomber.”
Toledo quirked an eyebrow, recovering. “Fine. I’ve got some information you’ll be interested in, ‘Bomber’.”
“Show me,” Bomber replied. He got halfway to the car before his brain exploded and he fell down with a wordless scream.
CLAIRVOYANCE: Part 22
A scream, echoing far off. Simon looked up. Gina looked up. Four eyes saw and failed to comprehend.
Gina shook her head violently and buried it in her arms, tried to banish the spectres of other places out of her mind. She was in her own head again, really, and she shouldn’t be seeing out of anyone else’s eyes in the first place. Anyone else at all.
She was still breathing hard by the time the visions had gone. Her heart thumped in her throat. She sat curled up as tight as she could, trying to make the panic go away. It wasn’t the trip that scared her. Being in other people’s heads was starting to become a common feature in her life. It wasn’t the fact that she’d actually been Bomber doing these things, thousands of miles away, or the fact that she could remember every sight, every sound, every thought.
It was because, for a few terrifying moments when she’d opened her eyes, she couldn’t remember who she was.
It’s getting worse again, she thought, cold to her core. The artifact in the back of her brain, the little piece of insanity picked up from her traumatic out-of-head experience with Gabriel, hadn’t weakened at all. It was just affecting her in a different way. Pretty soon I’ll be going completely mental. Christ.
When she uncurled to get out of bed, she almost jumped to find Mahmoud standing in the doorway. He looked at her with eyes half-hidden under his thick black eyebrows, his expression like a statue, unreadable. He waved at the stack of clothes in the corner.
He said, “I’ve spoken to someone. I think we have your VR access, but we need to go now.” With that he turned away and stepped out again to give her some measure of privacy.
Gina shuffled hastily across the floor, trying to force speed into her weak and unfamiliar muscles. She pulled on a frayed pair of jeans with jerky motions, men’s trousers that were too tight around the backside, but the only thing she had time to get into. She followed it with a black t-shirt and an ancient leather jacket, brown polished to white around the elbows, covered with old Recommunist emblems; hammers and sickles, red and yellow stars and crescents, pickaxes and eaves of grain, slogans in Russian and Ukrainian. The name ‘Omar’ was written in the neck with a black marker.
At last, she stumbled into a pair of faded trainers and ran out the door.
“Hey, what’s the rush?” she asked when she caught up with Mahmoud.
“The less time we spend in this company, the better our chances of getting out of it unnoticed. Not the sort with whom you would want to associate yourself.”
His voice was flat and urgent. Gina decided to take him at his word, following silently as they hopped onto the jetty and made their way to the tram station at the bottom of the Potemkin Stairs. Mahmoud said nothing to her while they rode up, past old brick houses and gnarled trees, afternoon colours muted by the thick cover of clouds.
They changed trams at the top, and Gina soon noticed a change in the city’s mood. These had to be the backstreets. Paint peeling, cracked plaster and timber rotted through, shattered windows leaning precariously out of their frames. Abandoned buildings in the middle of a busy neighbourhood. Everywhere, men going around with their eyes down and their hoods up.
They probably think this place is pretty hard and grim, Gina chuckled to herself. They ought to try living on the Street of Eyes for a few years.
She automatically reached for the Mk5 in her purse before she realised it wasn’t there anymore. Suppressing a slight pang of regret, she made a mental note to get a new one. God knew she could do with the firepower given her new and amazing lifestyle.
Mahmoud helped her down at a small station deep inside the bad part of town. Some kind of shopping street, most of the signs malfunctioning, smashed or missing. A short walk around the corner brought them to a small set of steps down, to a heavy wooden door with a high-tech security scanner down the side.
“This is where you must go on alone,” he said in a dull voice. “I could only afford one ticket. Go on in, I’ll wait here for you.”
She was about to argue and demand explanations, but his frown convinced her to let it go. She nodded, thanked him with a kiss on the cheek, and marched down the steps. Mahmoud stood waiting for her to be admitted.
“Let’s get on with it then,” she said and put herself in full view of the scanner. A laser sprang to life and probed her from head to toe. After a few seconds the door unbolted with a clang, and she pushed inside.
Her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. She stood in the middle of a small, tidy lobby which gave no sign as to the nature of the establishment. It was empty except for a few potted plants and a registration desk off to one side. The elegantly sculpted clerk behind it, a miracle of modern plastic surgery, stared at Gina and slapped a ticket down on the counter without a word. As soon as she picked it up, her face appeared on the front beside a timer display. The red LEDs indicated four hours, and started counting down the seconds while Gina watched.
“You’d better get moving,” said the clerk. “Go inside and grab a table. Relax. Your guide will join you presently to take you up to the private section.”
She wanted to argue, to point out she didn’t have time to wait around, but she remembered Mahmoud’s words. She was a long way from the City. Out here, she had to play by their rules.
She pushed through a set of big double doors into the establishment proper, and found herself in a playground of flashing neon. Multicoloured light from every direction filled the massive cylindrical hall, and a tall spiral staircase led up to two separate mezzanine levels above.
On the ground floor people were dancing, a mass of bodies moving awkwardly to a rapid monotone beat. Old men in suits danced with young women who wore barely anything at all. Probably paid escorts, either brought in by their customers or provided by the club. Everyone on that dance floor was either rich or selling something.
Gina’s senses picked the place apart one detail at a time. She knew clubs almost as well as she knew streets, and this one could have been any large nightclub in the world, if it hadn’t been for the egg-shaped plastic chambers jutting out of the walls at regular intervals. They made it all click together and revealed the underlying purpose of the place. A VR fantasy shop, selling people their own dreams and imaginations. Or, more pessimistically, renting them back at a premium. The egg-shaped VR booths were capable of catering to every possible human desire, every piece of storybook magic and every sick, sordid fetish imaginable.
The City had thousands of fantasy shops, but the difference between those downmarket rat-holes and the club here was like night and day. In the City they catered to everyone who wanted to escape their lives for a little while, but always under the strict articles of Federal law. Here . . . Anything was possible.
Sitting down, she was immediately delivered an ice tea without asking, at the cost of a ten-minute hit to her card timer. She shook her head and drank it. Then, out the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a man approaching her table.
“Settling in already, I see,” he began, appearing out of the coloured lights and shadows, and she stood to shake his hand. Then, as their fingers touched and they looked into each other’s faces for the first time, they both froze like statues.
“You!” she hissed, looking into the eyes of the telepath from Hangzhou airport, one of the thugs who’d nearly kidnapped Rat. “You slave-mongering bastard–” she started, but he cut her off without hesitation, put one hand over her mouth and grabbed her arm with the other. He jerked her along through a side door and into a tiled corridor between the bar and the toilets, ignoring the kicks to his shins with iron determination. She struggled as hard as she could but his strong wiry arms overpowered her and pinned her against the wall.
“Shut the fuck up if you want to keep breathing,” he said in a low monotone. His warm breath touched her face, smelling of mint and cloves. “You don’t know the people I work for, so let me explain very clearly, you do not want them to hear about you being the crazy bitch who cost them a real sweet customer back in the City. They run places like this from here to Hong Kong. They catch you, you’re dead.”
Gina looked at him, baffled. “You’re helping me?”
“Yeah, call me Mother fucking Theresa.” He glanced around to make sure they were alone, then moved in closer and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Cards on the table. I’m not gonna rat you out, I owe you that much for getting me out of a shitty assignment. I don’t like doing abductions. But you also cost me half that pay cheque, so don’t expect any more favours, got it?”
She nodded dumbly. There was a strange intensity in his eyes when she met them. His pupils were dilated, the corners of his eyelids twitched in response to some input Gina couldn’t see. Her eyes narrowed and she said, “Are you on Spice or speed?”
“Little bit of both. It’s my job, ain’t it?”
Suddenly his expression changed into a big smile and he put an arm around her shoulders, leading her back into the main room, talking exaggeratedly at her about nothing. They were like salmon swimming upstream of a river of bodies. Gina followed him up the spiral staircase all the way to the top.
He leaned in and whispered to her, “I’m not supposed to bring you up here until I’m convinced you’re on the level. Don’t fuck up. And here’s your booth!” He made an ostentatious gesture at the VR pod, open and waiting. “We don’t normally allow GlobeNet access, our systems restrict users to the house network, but we’ve set it up just for you as you requested.”
“Good,” improvised Gina. “I’m very impressed.”
He laughed heartily. “Oh, don’t say that until you see the inside. Please, take a seat!” He helped her into the booth and punched in a passcode to release the VR crown from its locked cradle. The crown was bigger and heavier than any Gina had worn, more of a mask, with integrated goggles and electrodes touching every part of her head. She could sense its untapped power even just fastening the straps.
The telepath was all smiles, still fawning over her. “Now, if you’ll just wait right there, I’ll go plug myself in and we can begin.”
“Plug yourself in?” she blurted in alarm.
“Of course,” he said, “nothing but the best service for you.” With that he shut the canopy on the egg, and the real world disappeared.
Colours flashed in front of her eyes, the crown testing her visual response against her brain waves. They disappeared soon after, replaced with absolute greyness. She looked but found no hands, no feet, not even a face. She was a pair of eyes staring from nothing into nothing.
Then she was moving, as if zooming in on a distant scene, and she came to an abrupt sickening stop in one of the alleys off Main Street. Just like her first time here, the entrance was a stupid little gazebo with a park around it, leading onto Main Street on one side and extending out into infinity on the other. She didn’t recognise the skyline from her last trip. The fantastic architecture nearby was geared more towards private owners, with dragons circling a mountain aerie, a pyramid with a great eye at the top, and a Greek-styled marble statue hundreds of metres high. Various spaceships of incredible design hovered in the sky, extending symbolic entrance tubes or teleporter beams down to the surface.
“We’re not monitored here,” said a voice by her ear. She turned around to see an impossibly broad action figure of a man standing there, shoulders twice as wide as his waist, wearing camouflage trousers and a green tank top with an ammo belt. He was one of several identical clones in the entrance area, so Gina deduced it to be a default avatar, automatically chosen for him by the system.
When she looked down at her own outfit, all she could see was black leather, skin-tight and shiny. Fingerless gloves creaked when she clenched her hands. Weird, she thought, but it’ll do.
The telepath was still staring at her, waiting for her to adjust. He said, “I’m sure you have questions before we go in.”
“Yeah, I got a question,” she replied. “What’s your name?”
He snorted. “What’s in a name? It doesn’t matter anymore, not these days. But if you insist, you can call me Darius.”
“Right.” She looked hard into his eyes, annoyed at his chummy tone of voice. “So what’s the deal here, Darius? Just a good old blue-collar workaday job? Got tired of the slave trade, or did it just not pay enough?”
“Fuck you,” he said without much venom. “I told you, I don’t like doing those jobs, but they make me. Pray to fucking God you never see all the shit I’ve seen. I just have to take what I’m given. At least while I’m working this place,” he threw up his arms to encompass the space around them, “the shit happens in VR, not to anyone real.”
“Is that how you rationalise it? I was there, remember? It does happen to real people, thanks to the scum you work for.”
“We don’t create the demand, we just cater to it,” he replied stubbornly. “Look, I didn’t come here to argue morality with you. I don’t have the patience, and you don’t have the time. There’s three hours and forty-five minutes left on your card. I suggest you start using them.”
“Fine,” she hissed, then stomped down the garden path onto Main Street.
When she joined the endless crowd of figures on the street, she found a relatively noise-free spot and barked for a guide. An automated genie appeared in front of her in a puff of smoke, asking how he might serve her.
She remembered talking on the phone, so long ago, and what Rat had said to her: “If you manage to get into VR, go up to the nearest street guide and tell it what you said to the Emperor in Hangzhou. Then we’ll be able to find you.“
“Dawn over Chang Jiang,” she told the guide in Mandarin, and Main Street stopped in mid-step. It was as if the whole world had frozen in time for one fragile moment. Then the street tore away from her with a huge ripping sound. She didn’t know how she was moving, but a nauseating sense of distance overcame her.
She arrived unceremoniously in a blank white room with four walls, the most basic space possible in VR. Nobody else was there except Darius’s stupid avatar, riding on the same connection. He wore an expression of complete bewilderment.
“This ain’t authorised,” he moaned. Then he turned on Gina. “What the hell? You were only supposed to go out for some stupid joyride! They’ll fucking kill me!”
“What a loss.” She balled her hand into a fist and banged on the wall. “Jock! Rat! Are you guys here?”
Behind her, Darius’s arms jerked spastically as he tried to move in ways that his basic avatar couldn’t illustrate properly. He was tearing at his head, emitting a growing whine of frustration. “I can’t jack out! Why can’t I jack out?!”
A sudden flash of light obscured half the room behind its brilliance. A new avatar came almost reluctantly out of the white, a Korean teenager in a stereotypical hacker get-up — expensive trainers, trousers with too many pockets, a small mobile VR rig woven into a sleeveless vest, plugged into a tight leather cap stuffed with hidden electrodes. The androgynous avatar stopped dead when the visitors came into view. Eyebrows frowned over a pair of thick goggles, and it said, “Gina?”
Warm tears rolled down Gina’s face. The voice was Rat’s, and it was the sweetest thing she’d ever heard. She rushed forward and hugged the girl underneath the avatar. None of it was real, every touch just a computer-generated phantom in her nervous system, but she could feel the body in her arms and treasured the sensation as it hugged her back.
“I can’t stay long,” she said softly. “Haven’t got much time, and I might be in big trouble when I unplug.”
“I gave up on you,” Rat whispered in a small voice.
“It’s okay. Listen, where’s Jock?”
“He’s been at some stupid meeting all day, I can’t reach him. I’ve tried.”
“Shit. Okay, give me a phone number, anything that’ll let me contact you again without having to go through VR.” When Rat didn’t respond, Gina grabbed her by the shoulders and shouted, “Now, girl!”
Rat nodded dumbly. She seemed halfway into shock, but she moved, producing a small slip of plastic out of thin air. When Gina focused her eyes on it, a series of stroboscopic flashes assaulted her retinas, burning a long phone number into her memory. Rat’s voice sounded a little more normal when she said, “Call that as soon as you can. I’ll be waiting with whatever help I can get.”
Suddenly Darius stormed in between them and shouted, “What are you doing? I demand to know what’s going on here!” Then he did a double take as he absorbed Rat’s face for the first time. “I know you.”
Quick as a rattlesnake, Rat turned and kicked him in the chest. Sparks flew where her foot connected. He went flying backwards, hitting the wall with a grunt of real pain; Rat had remotely turned up the gain on his sensory gear. Gina didn’t understand how that worked, she just knew, absorbed the thought straight from Rat’s mind.
“What is this thing doing here?” asked Rat, with a sudden surge of anger and hate so fierce that Gina flinched. The girl kept Darius pinned halfway up the wall while he wailed as if he’d been impaled on a spike.
Gina shook herself, tried to take control of the situation again. She could feel panic creeping up the telepath’s spine. One unauthorised change to his software indicated the possibility of much more unpleasant things, and torture was well inside the realm of possibility.
“Rat, I need him alive, okay?”
The dark little smile on Rat’s face made Gina’s skin crawl. With a single thought, the walls of the box fell away with unimaginable speed, replaced by an infinite sky stretching out in every direction. Gina’s brain ached from looking into the perfect blue, because no matter how far away you looked it never dimmed or whitened. It wasn’t an atmosphere. It was a blue version of interstellar space.
Then the ground disappeared. Gina felt a moment of sudden, sickening weightlessness — and then found herself floating in perfect safety next to Rat. A mouthful of bile lurched up her throat, and she grimaced as she swallowed it down again. She’d caught sight of the ground far, far below, and suddenly understood anyone who had ever been afraid of heights.
Finally the invisible shackles holding Darius dissolved. He floated for a moment, suspended in mid-air, and then plunged downwards with a fading scream. Rat laughed, grabbed Gina’s hand and put them into a controlled descent eye to eye with the telepath.
“Is that not just the scariest thing you ever saw?” Rat asked him cheerfully.
“Cheap theatrics don’t fool me,” he spat back, but then cried out as a sudden too-realistic gust of wind tumbled him head over feet. Simulated air whooshed past him as he fell, tugging at his avatar’s clothes and hair.
Rat scoffed, “I don’t need to fool you, man. Your heart‘s gonna know when you hit the ground. It’s gonna know that it’s about to smash into pulp against a couple billion tons of planet. Imagine all that fear blowing straight through your optic nerve into your brain, triggering dose after dose of adrenaline until that little muscle in your chest just. Stops. Beating.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
Grabbing his hair, she pulled him to within an inch of her blazing blue eyes. “Say that again while you’re looking me in the eye, guy.”
He swallowed. “Oh, fuck . . .”
“I’ve already traced where you are, what you’re calling from, every bit of detail about your little club. I already know all the names and addresses of the people you work for. I don’t think they’d be very happy to hear some of the stories I could tell ’em. Hey, they might even kill you!” She giggled with black amusement. “I guess for you it’s a lose-lose situation. You might say that I own you.”
“I don’t–” he began, but Rat cut him off.
“I own you,” she boomed in a voice like thunder, amplified beyond anything human. “Say it!“
“Y-You own me,” he stammered, speaking more out of reflex than any conscious choice.
“You’re gonna do what we tell you, or in a few seconds you’ll be a red stain down on those rocks! Say it!“
His teeth chattered as he screamed, “Jesus, yes, I’ll do it! Okay?! I’ll do whatever!”
Rat snapped her fingers and the fall stopped. The rush of air disappeared, the white box popped back out of nowhere to enfold them all, and Darius slumped to the floor soft as a feather. He glanced around with wild wide eyes, pale as death and drenched with cold sweat. Rat meanwhile put a serious hand on Gina’s shoulder.
“He’s all yours, girl,” she whispered. “Now get out of that dodgy place you’re in and hole up somewhere safe. Then you can think about how to fill me in on everything that’s happened.”
“I’ll try,” said Gina. She wanted so badly to talk to Rat, to tell her every gory detail of the past few weeks, but they didn’t have time.
She closed her eyes and lifted off her VR crown. The blank interior of the VR pod was always a crushing disappointment after the wild spectacles of the ‘Net, too much like having to wake up after a wonderful dream. She pushed open her canopy and stepped out into a semicircle of scowling men who wore poorly-concealed guns under their clothes.
Gina identified them in a single glance as thugs, nothing but muscle. At the front, however, was a man in a pinstripe suit and a bowler hat who stared at Gina in the same way that a human being might regard a fly.
This is new, she said to herself. But nothing Gina Hart can’t handle, right? Right.
The suited man opened his mouth to speak, but Gina headed him off with a broad smile and adopted a pose that made the very best of her outfit. Most of the attention shifted from her tight jeans to her breasts where she allowed the jacket to fall open ever so slightly. “Gentlemen,” she said in a voice as sweet as honey, “what can I do for you?”
The suited man looked her up and down, appraising her with cold intelligence. His gaze lingered in all the right places to put him a little off his guard. Gina had spent years using her looks as a weapon and she knew how to play these people like a fiddle.
“Get him out of there,” the suited man told one of his flunkies as he jerked his head at Darius’s VR pod. He spoke with a generic American accent devoid of regional connotations, an obvious second language. “As for you,” he turned back to Gina, “I would like a word. In private.”
She nodded and was escorted through a pass-coded door into the back of the club, into a dark little office containing only a set of chairs. The man sat facing the door and gestured for Gina to join him. No one spoke, as if he was waiting for Gina to start volunteering information. She sat calmly in the middle of the room and smiled.
Eventually the suited man shrugged and hung his bowler on the back of the chair. His face was a deep bronze, with strong eyebrows and massive bone structure visible through his skin. He looked like he wouldn’t have been out of place riding with Genghis Khan.
“I want to make very clear,” the man said, “that your business is important to us. However, we expect our customers to obey certain rules and live up to certain standards while using our premises and our equipment. We allowed you an open line under the proviso that you wouldn’t attempt anything illegal or take any action that would bring undue attention upon this establishment, its owners or its patrons.”
“I wasn’t aware I was doing anything illegal,” she said, which was mostly true, apart from using a hacked Main Street guide to run unauthorised programming.
The man nodded and produced a sheet of digital paper, filled with scrolling figures and blinking lights on a stylised world map. “You established a connection with an offshore gateway in Laputa,” he tapped his fingernail on a small island halfway between China and Japan, “with a constantly high volume of data pouring across the line. Encrypted. Why?”
“A secure conversation with my employer,” she lied with a smile. He furrowed his eyebrows but offered no rebuke.
“Do you mind if I ask the nature of this conversation?”
“I can’t disclose anything confidential. You of all people must understand that.”
“I do,” he replied, and now he was smiling as well, but there was nothing warm or friendly in his eyes. “Let’s get to the point then. You explain to me why, ten minutes after you plug in, something comes tearing down Main Street and forces its way into our system, goes through our security like it isn’t there, and sniffs out your exact brain wave patterns out of a hundred other users. There is only one thing in the world that can do that, miss, and that’s an AI.” He leaned back in his chair while Gina’s blood froze in her veins. “Explain it well enough and I might consider handing you over to the Feds alive.”
When Gina remained silent, white with horror, the man added, “There are guards outside this room, and everywhere through the building. Don’t even think of running.”
“I . . .” Gina swallowed the hard lump in her throat and tried to regain her mental balance. Fuck, she said on the inside, cursing herself for getting caught off guard. Should’ve seen it coming.
Without even realising it, she had focused on the suited man so intently that she could sense his thoughts, distant and distorted but getting clearer every second. He was quietly furious about the trouble and the damage to the club’s computers but at the same time excited at the prospect of capturing a fugitive worth a fat reward. Another, lower part of him wondered what she would look like with her kit off. That was good. The more he thought about money and sex, the less he could think about violence and suspicion.
She could still turn the situation to her advantage. It was just a matter of how.
She found her voice again and said coolly, “Have you ever heard of Gabriel Lowell?”
The mere mention of the name made him jerk upright. He was about to press her for more when the lights blew.
Every lamp in the room blasted apart in a cascade of hot sparks. Gina cried out and threw up her arms, heat scalding her exposed skin, and she ducked down behind her chair. Screams of surprise and panic echoed outside the office. Moments later they were joined by hurried footsteps thumping off in both directions.
“What’s happening?” barked the suited man, disoriented in the sudden pitch-blackness. Gina couldn’t see a hand in front of her face but to her surprise she could tell exactly where he was. The minds and thoughts around her were so clear. She couldn’t help reaching out to touch them, and bit her tongue against the scream of mental feedback as she hit Darius. He was trying to read her at the same time. For a moment they could see inside each other, and she caught a glimpse from his eyes into red emergency lighting. There was a big circuit breaker switch in his hand.
You’re not on Spice, he thought in shock. What the hell are you?
“I’m out of here,” she replied out loud. Her business here was done, and Gabriel might already be on his way to Odessa to find her. That, or she was getting as paranoid as Bomber.
It didn’t really matter. She wasn’t ready to face anyone again, not yet.
Anger flared from the other side of the room as the suited man pushed himself to his feet. Sharp click of a pistol hammer being cocked.
“Don’t you move,” he growled, throwing a chair out of his way. “Whoever you are, you’re worth money to somebody. You’re not going anywhere.”
She felt his finger tighten on the trigger as if it were her own, and in that cold plastic moment she knew he wasn’t going to stop. Terror shot through her, paralysed her limbs and rooted her to the spot. Death was only half a heartbeat away.
Then the animal panic took over, replacing thought with instinct, cutting through her fear with blind action. Gina didn’t even know what she was doing when she put her mind against the pistol barrel and pushed.
Muzzle flash lit up the bullet as it drilled into the suited man’s knee. Blood erupted from the wound where the steel penetrator went in, tearing flesh and cracking bone. The leg suddenly lost the ability to support his weight, and he slumped to the floor, the gun flying from his slack fingers. Meanwhile Gina found the door and wrenched it open. Dim emergency light from the hall spilled into the office, just enough to see by, and she ran down the narrow corridor as fast as her legs would carry her.
She saw no one as she emerged back onto the top level of the club. The emergency lighting kept everything one step short of total darkness, but washed out all the blues and purples of the patterned walls and elegant tables. Now it was just a vague monochrome maze full of obstacles at shin level.
Once she found the mezzanine railing she followed it hand over hand towards the big spiral staircase. A frightened mass of people was milling around down below, and Gina hurried to join them. There was no one in the world better at hiding in a crowd.
Nobody noticed her limping down the stairs, just another confused customer to join the throng. From there she just let herself drift towards the doors. For a moment it almost seemed too easy.
Then she came within sight of the exit and her face fell. The club had been locked down with big slabs of corrugated steel. Someone was having an angry conversation in Russian on the intercom, but Gina couldn’t understand a word of it.
It was clear she couldn’t afford to waste time here, not with the suited man and his gangsters after her. She had to act now. Breathing deep, she tried to remember how she’d felt before; how she pushed the suited man’s gun away in the office, how she made Rat let go of the ladder in the Fed building, one finger at a time. At the same time she searched for the man behind the intercom grille. It was easy to pick out his presence by comparing the sound of his voice to the sound of his thoughts, and she reached for him without hesitation.
The touch was like lightning. Suddenly she knew where he was, how secure he felt ensconced in his little cubicle by the lobby, what his hands were doing at the controls of the security console. It felt like a current ripping through her, abrasive and painful, but everything was so clear . . .
She pushed just then, and the man’s hand slammed down unexpectedly on the big red emergency button. The alarms started to howl and the automated doors ground opened to give customers a clear path to the exit. Club security had tried to set up a checkpoint by the door to let the people out one by one, but the stampede went right over it. People flooded through the corridors towards daylight and ran out into the streets, chattering with elation.
Gina drifted with them, then found Mahmoud on a tram towards the docks and jumped on. She’d done everything she came to do and now she was home free, safe and one step closer to getting out of Odessa.
It was all she could do not to giggle with relief the whole way back to the waterfront.
“That did not go as I had planned it,” Mahmoud said dryly as they climbed off the busy tram. His expression belied his casual tone, fixed into a frown, and he wrung his hands while he walked. “You are alright?”
“I’m fine, Mahmoud. Thanks.” Gina smiled and took his arm, walking back along the pier in the shadow of the great concrete and steel warehouses, under cranes and other vast machinery rusting in the wet air. She had been here enough times that they were beginning to look familiar, almost like home. A strange sense of rightness bubbled in her heart, something buoyant unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Everything was starting to come together.
Mahmoud rumbled, “I take it something went wrong.”
“Something always does, but I got what I came for. I have help now. I can pay you back for everything you’ve done.”
He stopped suddenly and placed a hand on her shoulder. His piercing brown eyes looked into hers for a long time. She felt naked in front of that stare, but nevertheless she drew herself up and met him with as much dignity as she could manage.
“What price did you pay?” he asked quietly.
“I . . . don’t know what you mean,” she lied with the best of intentions. She didn’t want to worry him. Gabriel, Bomber, telepathy and all that shit, he didn’t need to carry any more of her troubles on his shoulders.
Mahmoud nodded and resumed walking. He wasn’t fooled for a moment, and Gina knew it. She silently thanked him for backing off. If he’d asked, she would’ve told him everything.
In the distance the Son of the Wind came into view from behind the larger boats, and Gina bit her lip. The sense of rightness turned around and became an ache, knowing she’d have to leave this place behind. She forced a smile on the outside while her heart broke.
She told him, “I’ll have to go into hiding for a while. Those people from the club might try to come after me. I should probably get out of Odessa, and I’m going to try. It’ll be okay, my friends will help.”
There was a second of silence before Mahmoud responded. “You realise I have a boat.”
Gina snorted with laughter, “I wish it were that simple, Mahmoud. Even if we left now, it would be obvious we cast off after the trouble in that club. They’d come to search you.”
“Then don’t go,” Mahmoud suggested with utter pragmatism. “We can hide you. No one knows where in Odessa you are, and . . . I would like it if you stayed.” He shrugged awkwardly. “I’ve grown fond of you, as has Maryam. There’s so much here you still haven’t seen.”
There was no time for her to answer. Skirts heaving, Maryam came running down the gangplank, and swept them both into a bear hug. Then she marched them both inside, towards a big plate of sandwiches and cans of unbranded cola. Gina’s stomach jumped at the sight of food, empty but for an iced tea, and she dug in.
She also gave no sign that she’d felt Maryam’s hand slipping into her pocket, depositing a small foil packet of familiar-shaped pills. In case you need them, the woman said mentally, and Gina understood. Don’t tell Mahmoud.
A pang of bittersweet happiness throbbed in Gina’s breast as Maryam guided her husband out on deck, to give her some privacy. It couldn’t last, she couldn’t stay here, but these people made her want to. Tears stung the corners of her eyes. She wiped them away with a sleeve of her jacket, then slipped out of the heavy leather and went back to her room.
She stripped down to bare skin, showered in the shared booth across the hallway, then crawled into her hammock and passed out from exhaustion.
CLAIRVOYANCE: Part 21
She tossed and turned in her sleep. Dreams haunted her, nightmares of rushing air, falling, tumbling through nothingness.
She woke up with a scream, in a different place from where she lay down. She looked down at a pair of hairy, muscular arms and scratched her head. Why had she dreamt she was a woman?
Probably best not to think about that, he decided quickly. Just one of those dreams.
He hauled his battered body out of the bunk, checked the splints on his legs with a vague sense of annoyance. Still broken. Still pissed off. Simon, he added mentally, next time you jump out of an airship, you bring a parachute, you fuckin’ idiot.
With terrible effort he lowered himself into the old wheelchair he’d been using. Two weeks, two endless maddening weeks with that stupid chair as his only way to get around. As if he didn’t have enough problems.
Diffuse sunlight greeted him as he wheeled into the hallway. A great slanted skylight occupied much of the ceiling here, showing solid clouds as far as the eye could see, pure and bright and white as snow. Every time Simon glanced out into the skyscraper-dotted sky of Bilbao, his stomach churned with the thought of everything he’d left unfinished. Jobs that needed doing. Scores that needed settling.
“Up early, Simon?” came a man’s voice from the corner. He glanced at the source, a small desk protected by bulletproof glass, smiling faces behind it dressed in white coats. Simon smiled back. They wouldn’t be so damned happy if they were in the same room, legs or no legs.
“Didn’t sleep well,” he answered truthfully. To be honest he hadn’t slept well in a long time, but nobody else needed to know that. “You know the story. Fallin’ dreams.”
“Do you want any more meds?” the orderly asked, a thick-set man in his forties who — when he thought no one was looking — fingered his shock-baton as if it were something sexual. “You know you need sleep to get better.”
Simon shook his head. “I’m okay just now. Hungry, though.”
The orderly looked at one of the others behind the desk — Dr. Abrida, the top headshrinker — who nodded in response. Abrida must’ve been somewhere in her fifties from the crow’s feet around her eyes, but her body looked barely half that. She always filled her outfits disturbingly well. Her secret was that she was screwing half the patients in the isolation ward, where nobody could hear or see. Probably would’ve tried it with Simon if his legs had been in better shape. Fortunately, she was not his type.
She murmured, “That’s a good sign. I’ll have someone bring you a hot meal.” After a slight pause she added, “Don’t forget our session later. I don’t want to hear any more fairy stories about this ‘Gabriel’ person or the Federal Police. Let’s get down to the truth for once.”
“Okay, doc.” He gave a cheerful thumbs up, which seemed to please the crowd immensely, and they dispersed. Soon the only person left behind the desk was the orderly on duty, watching the isolation ward corridors like a hawk.
Dr. Abrida could look forward to their session all she wanted. It wasn’t going to happen today. As much as he enjoyed messing with the headshrinkers, he wanted out of this popsicle stand, and he’d laid careful plans to that effect.
Although the doctors kept him confined to the isolation ward, Simon had been such a model patient that he talked them into giving him run of the corridors. After all, even if he could find a way to get outside, the chances of him escaping on broken legs were low. Simon couldn’t deny that. However, they didn’t know who he really was, or just how apt the nickname ‘Bomber’ could be.
A sliding noise indicated a new tray of food at the desk, so he wheeled over to pick it up. It was a good thing he never intended to eat it; the shit they gave the inmates was two steps below dog food. The tray sat on the arm of his chair while he made his way back to his room, closing the door tight behind him.
Big day today, he said to himself. He glanced at the clock opposite his bunk. Thirty minutes. Better get started.
First he dug the stolen cigarette lighter out of the rusted hollow in his bed frame, followed by a black rod of melted plastic. Then he choked the smoke detector on his ceiling with a pillow cover and used the last remaining juice in the lighter to mould the plastic into a crude lockpick.
Nobody would’ve suspected the scale of his plans. If he’d let his regeneration implant go full tilt he might’ve been walking already, but that would’ve raised suspicion after only two weeks in hospital. It was not something people did without major medical intervention. He had only reactivated the implant yesterday, after his daily physical, which ought to be just enough time to give him some mobility on his feet.
Two weeks in this hole. It was hard to accept that only sixteen days had passed since his big jump, since he lost track of Gina, since he’d been rushed to hospital and then transferred here for no clear reason. Two weeks spent, wasted, learning all the dirty secrets of this nuthouse and using them to create this opportunity.
You’d better have read that damned piece of paper, Jose, he thought as he grabbed the yoghurt drink from his food tray and unscrewed the cap. Otherwise this is gonna be the shortest escape attempt I’ve ever made.
He poured the goo out onto the floor, wiped the bottle clean as best as possible, and pulled several styrofoam cups from underneath his dresser. Just a few household chemicals salvaged from the night cleaners. He poured them together into the bottle with care, then screwed the cap back on and shook it.
The mix inside started to fizz violently, and the bottle creaked in his hand. He wedged it between the windowpane and the metal bars blocking access onto the courtyard at the heart of the hospital. Then he took cover.
Shards of glass, plaster and concrete chips flew in every direction. The explosion tore out the bars, shattered every piece of glass, and pulverised most of the concrete around the window. Alarms all over the building started to wail.
If Jose was out there, that would be his signal.
Simon ground his wheelchair towards the newly-created hole, briefly enjoyed the feel of wind on his face, and then hauled his semi-functional body up into the walled recreation ground. Behind him he could hear thumping feet in the isolation ward corridors. The orderlies would be through the door in seconds. He dragged himself hand over hand onto the hot tarmac, then pushed himself up onto his legs.
The muscles felt strange, as if surprised at being able to support his weight after all this time. He started to move on fragile half-mended bones. Each step brought him into a new world of grinding agony, but he clenched his teeth and blocked it out. Just pieces of information. Unemotional and irrelevant.
A rush of white uniforms gleamed in the corner of his eye, more orderlies coming onto the grounds from the far side of the hospital. They were too far away, Simon judged, they wouldn’t be able to overtake him before he reached the wall. Hopefully.
“Come on, Jose,” he rasped under his breath as he reached the north wall. A rusted steel fire door stood defiantly in his path. That was where Jose was supposed to come in, opening the way onto the main road. Of course there was no sign of him. Simon listened but heard nothing on the other side of the wall.
A cold wind blew through his heart as he turned to face his pursuers, drawing the lockpick from his waistband. It was hard and sharp enough to double as a shiv. He dropped into a traditional knife-fighter’s stance and let them come closer. The orderlies weren’t allowed to kill, but Simon wouldn’t hesitate. Recapture meant failure. He wouldn’t get another chance. That couldn’t happen.
Suddenly the door behind him swung open and rough hands pulled him through, onto the vacant road. For a moment he saw nothing except yellow grass, tumbleweeds, black tarmac and an unmarked white van by the side of the road. The man beside Simon slammed the door shut and locked it again. Simon almost didn’t recognise him without his white orderly’s get-up.
“There,” the man said curtly as he helped Simon into the van. “I did what you wanted. We’re done. Now you can’t tell anybody. We’re done.”
“Oh, Jose,” clucked Simon, smiling a terrible smile, “we’ve only just begun.”
They pulled up in one of the ugliest parts of the city, at a run-down flat block where the streets had a palpable air of menace about them. Broken glass littered the pavement and thick rust ate away at exposed metal. Every drain, every door handle, every wrecked car standing abandoned at the kerbside.
Simon looked around, but it was all the same. Slums as far as the eye could see, lifeless and desperate. Nobody walked these streets. They didn’t dare. The only living thing in sight was an emaciated dog that stumbled along the pavement with something bloody in its mouth.
“This’ll do,” he said, impressed by the sheer squalor of it. “You need to get back to work. I know how to find you when I need more.”
Jose looked up, glowering. The greasy black locks dangling down his forehead obscured his eyes, but the hate and fear in them was clear as crystal. “You said we’d be done. I don’t want this.”
“Then you shouldn’t have stolen all those drugs, should you?” Simon snapped back. “That reminds me, give me your credit card. I need some local funds. Should be plenty in there, right? Two years liftin’ psycho shit off the hospital left you well off, huh?” He grinned as Jose’s face fell, took the card and pocketed it. “But don’t you worry. In a few days I’ll be done, gone, won’t need you anymore. Then you can go right back to helpin’ yourself to the supplies. I really don’t give a shit.”
“And what if I don’t wanna help you no more, yeah?” asked Jose with a pugnacious sneer. Somewhere inside himself he had found a vile little spark of courage, something to be crushed as quickly as possible.
Simon reached over and grabbed him by the throat, pulled him closer and squeezed tight. His arm didn’t move no matter how much the Spaniard wrenched and hauled at it. For all Jose’s size, he was a gnat to Simon and his augmented muscles.
“You must be pretty dumb, Jose, already forgettin’ where you helped me bust out of. I crazy, yeah? You do anything I don’t like, I come back for you, yeah? We have ourselves a nice little get-together, yeah?” The silence that followed was deafening. Sweat beaded on Jose’s forehead, ran down into his bulging eyes. Simon grinned, “Maybe you’re the crazy one for thinkin’ of goin’ against me. Maybe the only thing separating us is which side of the glass you’re on.”
He threw Jose back, wiped his hand of the man’s sweat, and shouldered his way out of the van.
He crossed the empty street without looking back, stepping as lightly as possible. No appointment was worth the risk of fracturing again. He was vulnerable here in no-man’s-land, making tracks which Gabriel could pick up on. The ability to run might be his only advantage.
A low brick building resolved out of the forest of flats, a neon martini glass mounted over the door. The sign was broken so that only the yellow bubbles inside the glass lit up. The steel-plated doors were closed and probably barred from the inside. If Simon didn’t know any better he might’ve thought it was closed, except for the low beat of music vibrating through his feet.
As the van screeched off behind him, he rapped his knuckles against the door and waited. Seconds passed, making him wonder if he had the right address. Finally a voice crackled through a tiny speaker in the middle of the door, “Name?”
“Simon Caine, here to see Toledo.”
A grunt. “Not on the list.”
Simon flashed an ice-cold grin at the door. He suspected that the guard had some way of seeing him, some peep-hole or camera or square of one-way material, but it wouldn’t have mattered. When he spoke next, his voice purred with unspoken threats and promises.
“We seem to have stumbled into a terrible misunderstanding here. You seem to think that just ’cause you’re on the other side of the door, you’re in charge, you can jerk me around. We both know you haven’t had time to look at the fuckin’ list. Now I’m tellin’ you to let me in before I reach through this shitty Taiwanese pig-iron and snap your fucking neck.”
There was a brief pause. Then the deadbolt sucked itself back into the wall and the door creaked open, nobody on the other side. Simon stepped into the dark hallway, stooping so as not to bang his head against the low ceiling. It was like walking through a cave, only to emerge into the many-coloured lights of the common room, breathing in the smoke-laden air.
“Please be seated,” said a small, thin man beside the entrance. “Senor Toledo will join you soon.”
Simon did as asked, finding a table along the wall. The solid wooden bench stuck to the back of his borrowed jacket and jeans. All Jose’s clothes, fortunately, so he would probably burn them afterwards.
Without any sign of the guy he was supposed to meet, Simon updated his tactical assessment of the room. People crowded at tables and at the bar, half-seen through the blue haze and flashing strobes. Somewhere at the far end of the room, he could just make out a stage and a pair of silhouettes in the smoke, women bumping and grinding to the sound system’s lazy beat. Bits of their outfits seemed to disappear every few seconds.
The whole table leaned slightly to the left when he put any weight on it. Its rusted bolts were all but completely detached from the floor. Funny. This was a caricature of a disreputable bar, not someplace he could take seriously.
A man appeared out of the fog and pulled up a chair at Simon’s table. Two bulging men in business suits flanked him on either side, restless and on guard for trouble. Simon examined them first; he immediately noticed the tell-tale purple stretch marks running down their necks, where crude and too-rapid muscle boosting had strained the skin to paper thinness. Probably shot up with berserkers every morning. Simon was quite literally half their size.
I could still take them, he told himself. Probably.
“So, Mr. Caine,” the leader said pleasantly. “I’ve heard of you. Big-time mercenary down in the Far East, is what I’m told. Never thought I’d have the pleasure. What can humble Toledo do for a man like you?”
Simon shrugged. “Got some bad news on my trail. I need help. Specifically, I need your help.” He paused for effect. Then, “I need a place to hide, a ride out of the city, and some secure way of gettin’ a message onto GlobeNet. Additional services, unspecified. I’ll put down a retainer.”
Toledo’s expression never changed. He listened in silence until Simon finished, then asked, “Exactly how ‘bad’ is this ‘news’?”
“The worst. It’ll be a challenge. That’s why I came to you.” Simon leaned in closer. “I hear about Toledo, you see. I hear you know everybody who’s anybody. I hear you can get done anything you want. I hear you’re the most dangerous guy in this town by a long mile. Am I right?”
“You’re entirely right, Mr. Caine,” said a voice from behind him, “but that’s not me.”
Simon was out of his chair in an instant, wheeled about to see– something he didn’t immediately comprehend. Toledo stood a few feet behind Simon’s chair, levelling a shotgun at the group. And, on the opposite side of the table, Toledo sat looking at his own doppelganger with vague surprise on his face. Gotta be a holomask, Simon thought momentarily. But that can’t be right, I would’ve known!
One of the big thugs lowered his brick-like hands onto Simon’s shoulders and squeezed, a misguided attempt to try and restrain him. Simon shrugged out of the grip with superhuman ease, dropped into a squat and drove his elbow as hard as possible into the man’s groin. It hit with a sickening crunch, bones breaking like matchsticks, and the man’s legs went slack.
“Clear firing line!” barked the newcomer with the shotgun, and Simon reacted with military reflexes. He dove and rolled clear of Toledo’s field of fire and plugged his ears. The blast of buckshot rattled his teeth, and behind him the second thug flew backwards in a spray of blood. People everywhere jumped out of their chairs, started screaming, throwing the whole bar into chaos. The other Toledo was nowhere to be seen.
The shotgun-toting man offered his hand to Simon, saying, “No time to argue, we need to withdraw.”
“Lead the way,” Simon said. Short of time and short of options. Adrenaline alone kept him on his feet while his legs slowly disintegrated underneath him, speeding back towards the claustrophobic entranceway and freedom.
Bullets whistled past Simon’s ears as he sprinted across the paved stretch of ground outside the bar. The mystery man claiming to be Toledo kept pace beside him. The guy pressed a hand against the pocket of his jacket, and out of nowhere a dark red Ferrari screeched to a halt on the road in front of them. Its electric doors flung open, and Simon realised it was empty inside, lacking even a driver. The resting engine purred like a wildcat.
“Inside!” Toledo shouted superfluously. Simon altered his course and ran for it even as he felt his bones cracking, shaking free of the fragile glue that held them together. He’d almost reached the car. He willed his legs to hold for a few more steps. Then there was a dry, horrible crack, and he collapsed under his own weight.
Pure agony fogged his vision. Still he refused to give up, dragged himself hand over hand into the passenger seat. Toledo jumped, slid over the top of the car, and landed behind the wheel.
“You got some interesting enemies, Caine,” he said as he hit the accelerator, turning the car into a rocket on wheels. It roared from a standing start to its top speed in the blink of an eye. “You need to tell me all about that. You really do.”
Simon smiled through the pain. “You’re hired.”
“That’s presuming I take the job. We’ll talk.” He took his eyes off the road for a second, had his first long look at Simon. There was a calculating cast to his eyes. “I’m taking you to my place, other side of town. Any objections?”
“As long as we’re movin’, I’m happy.”
The Ferrari’s acceleration pressed him back in his seat, causing the shards of bone in his legs to scrape and saw together, but he barely felt it now. His body was flooded with endorphins, anything his implants could release to dull the pain. The regeneration systems were hard at work salvaging what they could, but they could only work so fast.
The buildings outside all blurred together at these speeds, a constant barrage of tinted glass and mirror reflections as they raced down the quiet streets. They pulled a sudden left turn and catapulted into a vast parking garage, zig-zagging around stationary and moving cars alike, upwards into the towering structure.
Simon had to brace himself to keep from being flung left and right by the G-forces. He wondered what the hell Toledo was up to, until he realised that the Spaniard wasn’t looking for a place to park. Instead Toledo drove straight into one of the waiting car elevators and slotted an unmarked square of plastic into its card reader. The elevator doors closed behind them with a metal clang, and the whole carriage started to climb.
“Are you sure this is safe?” he asked Toledo. “If somebody tracked your car going in here, they’d know where you went.”
“I own this building. There’s anti-bug devices everywhere to screw up trackers, and three identical copies of this car sitting in random spots around the park. Anyone would reasonably assume we’d abandoned the car and slipped away on foot.”
Simon kept quiet as the elevator arrived, and they drove out into a brightly-lit motor pool with at least twelve different cars sitting under plastic in their spaces. Some were slick, new and attractive, others carefully rusted and covered with dirt so as to be nondescript. Simon looked around with satisfaction. He had never seen someone so organised about stealth and security.
“Where are we?” he asked. “I must’ve miscounted the floors.”
“In a space between the fifth and sixth stories. Custom-made, not on the blueprints. Do you need help getting out?”
Simon nodded, and Toledo stepped out for a minute, returning with an old foldable wheelchair. The man was clearly prepared for anything.
“What happened to your legs?” he asked as he worked Simon into the chair. His wire-thin body must’ve been half the weight of Simon’s, and he had difficulty getting any movement into him.
Simon explained sourly, “Only half-healed when I came to the bar. They’re fucked now, it’ll take weeks to fix.”
Gears turned behind Toledo’s eyes as he rolled Simon through the doorway, into the hideout proper. Plans were being adjusted in his head, assessments re-evaluated. Finally he said, “Makes things a little more complicated, but we can adapt.”
Meanwhile, Simon took in his new surroundings.
The place seemed to consist solely of clean white lines and black furniture. A sofa the size of a small country took pride of place in the centre of the room, made of genuine vat-grown leather. It sat opposite a TV screen so vast that it took up the entire north wall. The only semblance of colour was a large painting, coloured cubes on a black and white grid. A soulless masterpiece of early 21st century design.
“You’re lucky I’m a suspicious guy, Caine,” Toledo said into the echoing room. “Your friends managed to delay me to the rendezvous by a couple of minutes before I realised what was going on. Almost enough. You could’ve been a red stain across the wall by now. So,” he smacked his lips, “how much money were you planning to spend?”
Grinning, Simon held up the borrowed credit card between two fingers and answered, “However much you want.”
“Good. That buys you just enough time to tell me who these enemies of yours are,” Toledo parked Simon beside the sofa, flicked a cigarette into his mouth, “and exactly how you were planning to send a message through GlobeNet when every network in Europe is down the tubes. Nothing going in or out, local comms only.”
“Shit,” breathed Simon. He never expected Gabriel to stop hunting him, but the blatant scale of it was a shock. Knocking all of Europe off the ‘Net just seemed wrong for Gabriel. Lacking in subtlety.
Toledo smiled, the cigarette hanging from his lips as he lit it. “Yeah. Happened almost the same day you said you landed here. Interesting, ain’t it? Kinda makes you think there’s something more to it than ‘unusual power fluctuations’.”
“I’ll tell you about it after I’ve crashed,” Simon yawned. Sudden exhaustion was making itself felt as the excitement flushed out of his system, and his eyes drifted closed in the chair.
Toledo left him mercifully alone, offered the sofa to sleep on with some blankets. That suited Simon just fine. Beside the R&R, it would give him a little time to tackle his next challenge. Thinking up a way to explain the greater problem called ‘Gabriel’.
Without sounding completely out of his mind.
