Black Glass (20 page)

Candle bowed to Kenpo, in the traditional manner—something he rarely did—and hurried across the deck. He pushed through the gate, went pounding down the stairs. He had to call Shortstack. Or Nodder. He patted his coat pockets. He didn’t have a fone yet. Then he remembered his blueglove. He dug it out of an inside coat pocket, as he hurried down the sidewalk, looking for an auto-cab. The driving mechanisms were mostly
not programmed to pick up people waving at them, they went along with dispatch.

Heart thudding, he activated the glove, paused on the corner to stare into his palm. He tapped it, found the speed dial, called—and got the message that both Shortstack and Nodder were offline, and unavailable. He left a message—
Emergency, danger, call.

Swearing, he called for a taxi.

“You got it blocked?” Grist asked. Or Grist’s semblant.

Halido glanced toward the monitor with Grist’s face on it. “Yes—if they have people on the street outside watching for a raid, they won’t be able to call in. And they’re having a ‘temporary problem with their server’.”

“Where’s Benson? Didn’t I assign him to work with you?”

“Yeah, he went out for a smoke and never came back. I tried calling him, no reply.”

“Why the sleazy little troll. What’s he up to? Any indication he could be working for one of our competitors?”

There weren’t many competitors. But Halido understood him to mean other people on the Slakon board who were trying to wrest control from Grist. “He’s too clueless to do that kind of work, Mr. Grist.”

“Then never mind. We got the flying guns in place?”

“Yes, we do. It’s all in place. You on top of the feed for our surveillance Mr. Grist?”

“Yeah. I am.”

Could a semblant monitor something like that? Halido wondered. He wasn’t sure why he thought he was talking to a semblant. It was pretty much impossible to tell. “You’re waiting for Candle to show up, right, sir?”

“Yeah, ideally. But we get them today no matter what. We don’t seem to be able to get anything more on what they’re doing, who they’re talking to. So we’re just taking them down fast and dirty.”

“That guy Nodder isn’t there at the market.”

“Well it’s that ‘Shortstack’ asshole who’s the big fish, how’s that for irony. We’ll go for it. Once Candle gets there. He is coming to the party, isn’t he?”

“We don’t have him right now, Mr. Grist, so I can’t confirm. But I heard them talking. He’s expected ...”

“Alright—I’ll call you back. I’m going to stay on top of this. We’re going to hit them soon and we’re going to hit them hard.”

Grist clicked off and Halido took a long drink of his rum-topped coffee.

Halido was looking forward to this. He pictured himself personally chasing that pretentious, bullying gingered up dwarf with a flying gun.

Might do it that way. Chase him. Wound him. Chase him some more. Let him bleed awhile. Force him to crawl along in front of the gun. Then kill him.

Could be real satisfying.

There was no use trying to talk an auto-cab into going faster. No human driver to bribe. Just that superfluous steering wheel, moving by itself, like in an old ghost movie. A iNews display on the back of the front seat showed a couple of talking heads yammering about “the semblant controversy.”

“Okay you can argue that it’s good for the economy, execs—or their semblants—working all night, and so on. But is it good for society
?”

He’d tried calling Rina, get her to go in person to warn them. But she wasn’t answering. He thought of calling someone else, maybe Zilia, but she’d never get there before he did. He was only a quarter mile away now.
I could be wrong
, he thought.

But he didn’t think he was wrong. If the place was under surveillance did that mean they were going to raid it today? Probably not. Yet he had a strong intuition that that the surveillance was preliminary to a raid—and the raid was soon.

One factor was what he’d learned about Grist, before the UnMinding. Grist had been all about decisive moves. If he had set up surveillance right inside the undermarket he’d be ready to file the papers, send in his privatized police, raid the thing hardcore and heavy. The underground cost Slakon pennies, nothing much—but Grist would want to send a message: This is what happens when you try to cut us out of the action.

And now all contact was blocked. Which was suspicious in itself. So chances were—Grist was ready to move.

They’d see him coming. They’d be hidden on the street, maybe in vans or trucks, and they’d see him coming and they might grab him right then ...

“From what I’ve heard,”
a talking head was saying,
“the semblants aren’t really that efficient. What’s happening is, people put them out there to do their work for them, like they’re telecommuting, and half the time they don’t bother to get debriefed by the semblant and they get behind on the deals the semblant is doing, they don’t find out what the semblant knows.”

“Oh come on, the semblant calls them and it informs them if anything important is happening–”

“People are beginning to tell it to just handle whatever comes up. People going to their brother’s wedding with a semblant that’s watching from a rollmo. The whole society is in greater danger than ever of isolating–”

Pundits dithering away. And the cab was in traffic ... but they were almost there. He could get out and run. But if he ran, Grist’s people, if they were there, would know he was trying to warn the market.

Most likely he was being paranoid, he told himself. Not much chance they were raiding today, even if he was right about the surveillance.

But when he saw the semitrucks, three on the same block, he knew. Same old jumpout-style cop technique, privatized or not. They were in the back of those trucks. And there on the right, self-driving car with two bored looking ladies chatting in the back. Only he had seen that technology before, he knew what to look for. If you looked close—and most people wouldn’t—you’d see the bored-looking ladies were not quite fully dimensional. They were an image in the glass of the side window; a digital film appearing in nanocells embedded in the opaqued silicon; in the black glass. Roll down that window and you’d see heavily armed privatized cops sitting inside, probably young and male.

Candle tried calling again as he got out of the cab. Still couldn’t get through. Surely Shortstack or the ever-suspicious Brinny
would take the sudden cut-off in communication as a warning sign and get out ...

He rushed toward the building. Heard the metal doors on the back of the trucks rolling open behind him. Heard the whir of flying drones emerging.

“What the hell are you worried about, Brinny, our communication’s gone down before,” Shortstack said, pacing, toying with his asthma inhaler.

“Same time as our phone goes?” Brinny shook her head.

“It’s all the same company ...” Shortstack used the inhaler.

“’Stack I don’t like it. And where’s that Candle of yours? How come this happens when that big useful tough cop pal of yours just disappears for no reason?”

“She got a point,” Pell said. “Timing’s funny.”

“Oh come on—coupla paranoids–” He put the inhaler in his mouth again.

That’s when Candle shoved the camouflage desk aside and pushed into the room. “Evacuate, now!” he shouted as he moved about the room, staring at the walls near the ceiling. “Go!” Not there. Not there. Not there. Not there ...

Shortstack gaped at him—the inhaler falling out onto the floor. “Why—what’s going down? We got some people watching the street–”

Candle was searching the wall above the entrance. “Then your people didn’t feel like telling you about the unmarked police trucks. And here–” He found the small metallic insect-shaped drone, plucked it down with index finger and thumb, showed it to Shortstack: a tiny flying camera. He crushed it in his fingers. “That bigger birds-eye in the bar was a decoy so we didn’t look for this. So we’d miss the little one.”

Shortstack turned to shout orders at Pell, Brinny and Monroe, but they were already pulling out the backups, activating the inner-melt chemicals that’d make cold lava of the inside of their machines.

As the police drones began to bore through the walls.

RUN, DAMN IT! HURRY—BUT WAIT! FUCK! ISN’T THIS—