Cauldron of Ghosts (28 page)

The deeper and ultimately insoluble problem was that even in the best-run seccy quarters, the people who really ran things had no formally recognized claim to that position.

“Authority” was a term that the human race had seen abused more times than anyone could remember, but it was still not just a name. The term meant
legitimate
power, not just power as such. And what defined legitimacy was that the power so held was formally recognized and accepted by everyone as rightfully obtained and established.

There was no such formal legitimacy in the seccy quarters, not even the best-run ones. True, there was an approximation. Each district had what amounted to an informal council of the crime bosses, overseen by the most powerful of them. In Neue Rostock, that top boss was Jurgen Dusek. All of the major crime bosses maintained contact with each other through yet another informal council. Membership in that council was tantamount to being recognized as one of the top circle.

The council preferred to keep conflicts under control and as a rule, managed to do so. But should one of the great crime lords die or simply lose their grip, with no clear line of succession, struggle and conflict invariably erupted. And not struggle waged by established legal norms kept within tightly defined boundaries, either. What usually resulted was warfare. Sometimes under the surface, sometimes out in the open. Sometimes resolved by a few killings, sometimes by slaughter. Sometimes of short duration, sometimes seeming to be endless.

If Neue Rostock embodied one extreme, Lower Radomsko embodied the other. Half a century earlier, the crime boss who’d controlled the district had been assassinated by a rival, who’d in turn been assassinated within two hours by another rival, who’d then been assassinated less than a day later by yet another rival—who’d died herself the next day from wounds incurred in the fighting.

Thereafter, the district had dissolved into anarchy, from which it had still not recovered. The neighboring bosses didn’t like the chaos, but they preferred it to the risk of letting another boss gain even more influence and power in the region. Lower Radomsko was a byword in Mesa’s seccy areas for what happened if you didn’t have a capable and tough boss running the show. The district remained the most violent area on Mesa—and the poorest.

* * *

She was now in the lowest traffic lane in a commercial thoroughfare, as she’d been since she descended the access ramp. Subterranean commercial thoroughfares were normal in cities the size of Mendel. The population density that resulted from modern urban construction, with its emphasis on counter-grav-supported towers, had many advantages from an economic and ecological standpoint. But it did pose huge challenges for traffic. One of the standard measures was to assign commercial traffic to special underground avenues and only allow them to join above-ground air traffic when they were ready to make a delivery—and, as much as possible, to situate the delivery entrances below the surface as well.

The thoroughfare she was in had four vertical lanes and she was in the bottom one. Another lorry suddenly emerged from an intersecting feeder lane and turned sharply, going into a sudden descent right above her. Her lorry’s computer program reacted by doing an emergency landing and coming to a stop, just centimeters above the ground surface.

“Bastards,” she muttered. The pejorative wasn’t aimed at the other driver so much as it was at the people responsible for the situation in general. Normally, traffic control programs would have automatically prevented such an occurrence by changing the velocities or lane levels of the two vehicles as needed. She’d already noticed, however, that the control programs had seemed a little ragged for the past half-kilometer or so.

Another lorry came out of the same feeder lane, swerved into the lane set aside for traffic going the other way—luckily there was no one there—and then cut directly across in front of her. The lorry came to a stop, also at ground level, forming the crossbar of a T with Thandi’s.

She glanced at the rearview screen. Not to her surprise, a third lorry had come up from behind and blocked her from going backward.

She didn’t bother checking the sides of her vehicle. She was too close to the wall on her right and the vehicles ahead and behind were so close that she didn’t have room to maneuver the lorry around them to the left. Instead—perhaps belatedly—she checked her position on the location screen. It took a moment to interpret what she was seeing, since the locator program didn’t recognize or use the unofficial names for Mendel’s seccy quarters.

Sure enough. She’d entered Lower Radomsko. Just a corner of it, which the traffic program would have taken her through in a couple of minutes. But that had been enough, it seemed.

Most likely, someone in traffic control had been bribed to steer her this way. Thandi’s air lorry had been bought, not rented or leased, but in the short time since they’d arrived on Mesa she hadn’t had time to fix a logo to the vehicle. She had the logo ready to be applied, even—“Komlanc Intermodal Transport, Ltd.”—but it was sitting in the cargo hold along with the goods she was hauling to Steph Turner’s boutique-to-be.

The absence of identification on the lorry probably didn’t matter, though. A quick check, which anyone working in traffic control could have been able to do, would have turned up the fact that Komlanc Intermodal wasn’t a registered freight hauler. It was a so-called “gypsy outfit”—very common in Mesa’s seccy areas, but without any sort of official legitimacy. Or, more to the point, official sanction and protection.

In most seccy districts, that wouldn’t have been a problem. The “worst” that would happen was that representatives of a local crime boss would have shown up soon enough and arrangements would have been made in a reasonably amicable manner. Bribes going one way; informal sanction and protection the other—which was exactly what Victor had figured on doing anyway. He’d been planning all along to infiltrate himself into the seccy areas by using the existing criminal networks.

But this was Lower Radomsko, not one of the well-run districts like Neue Rostock or Ayacucho. Someone was just planning to hijack the lorry. And, most likely, kill her in the process.

People were starting to emerge from the vehicles ahead of and behind her. Two men from the front vehicle; a man and a woman from the rear one. All of them except the woman were armed with pistols. She was carrying a small packet that probably contained explosives.

“You
stupid
bastards,” she muttered, then keyed a signal on her com.

* * *

Victor was four blocks away and five levels up when he got the signal. He immediately pushed the button that instructed his special program to turn control of the vehicle over to him. More precisely, that allowed him to take control of the vehicle without that fact being broadcast to a traffic control center. The air car slipped out of the level he was in, went down to the uppermost of the commercial levels and headed toward Thandi’s location just behind a lorry.

Unless the lorry driver was completely inattentive he’d spot Victor in his rear viewer. With a commercial vehicle under automatic control, it was possible he wouldn’t be paying attention, but that wasn’t something to be counted on. It wouldn’t matter anyway since Victor would be leaving his vicinity in another block and a half. The odds that a lorry driver in this area—he was almost certainly a seccy himself—would report a fleeting traffic violation to the police when he wasn’t personally affected were almost nil.

The real risk was that the program that controlled traffic in the area would immediately spot the violation—two violations; in fact: entering a commercial lane with a private vehicle and taking personal control of the vehicle in an area designated for automatic traffic—and alert the authorities. But the program Victor had used to override the automatic controls had been designed by Anton, whose cybernetic skills vastly exceeded those of whoever designed the traffic program. It would fool the traffic controller into thinking Victor was still under automatic guidance. For all practical purposes, Victor had simply vanished from the grid—except the grid thought he was still there.

Anton had also given them all scrambling programs for their coms which would shield their conversations from any but the most high-powered decryption efforts. Such efforts could only be done by Mesan security agencies and
would
only be done if they were directly suspicious—in which case, they’d almost certainly be doomed anyway so there was no point worrying about it.

Thandi gave him a quick sketch of the situation.
“Biggest problem is with the lorry overhead,
” she concluded.
“There’s no movement from there at all.”

“I’ll handle that,” Victor said. “You just deal with the ones coming at you. Speaking of which, survivors would be handy.”

“Yana was right. You’re no fun at all.”

* * *

Yana entered the central chamber of the
Brixton’s Comet.
The chamber had an official title which she didn’t remember. She just called it “the salon.”

Anton called it “Xanadu.” When she asked, he’d refused to explain what the term meant on the grounds that it would be too embarrassing. But she didn’t believe him. Zilwicki was about as prone to embarrassment as a lava flow.

Anton was where he almost always was when awake—at the computer terminal he’d set up in a corner of the salon. Using the term “corner” loosely, since the chamber bore only a vague resemblance to anything rectilinear. So far as Yana could tell, the
Brixton’s Comet
had been designed by a lunatic. She could only hope the ship’s engines and controls were more coherent than its interior and furnishings.

She crossed the salon and went into the chamber which Anton had set aside as her living quarters. He called that chamber “Shangri-La.” A term which he also refused to explain on the same spurious grounds.

The bed in that chamber could have been used as the playing field for at least four sports that Yana was familiar with, except the footing would have been too treacherous for any of those sports except the most ancient one.

She came back out of the chamber, planted her hands on her hips—which were now way too ample, in her opinion, albeit not as grotesque as her bosom—and gave Anton a disgusted look.

“You’re not going to be any more fun than Victor was, are you?”

Chapter 30

The man who seemed to be leading the four robbers was now close to the cab of the lorry. “In there!” he shouted. “Open up!” To give emphasis to the demand, he brandished the pistol in his hand as if it were a sword. What did he think
that
would accomplish?

For that matter, what did he think the pistol itself would accomplish? A military grade pulse rifle would certainly be able to fire projectiles into the cab. So would the most powerful sidearms, at least if the shots struck squarely. But the piece of crap he was wielding? It had no chance at all of doing so. This was a relatively modern cargo lorry she was driving, designed and built for heavy work, not a flimsy and lightly designed personal sport vehicle.

It was presumably because they understood that much that the female robber was carrying a sack with her. Thandi was pretty sure that sack held explosives of some kind with which they could breach the cab door. She could hole up in the cab for a bit, but not more than a minute. Less, if the female robber was proficient with explosives.

“I need a timetable,” she said into the com.

“Give me ten more seconds, if you can. If not, try for five.”

Victor was without a doubt the most nerveless person Thandi had ever met. In times of stress, his demeanor was calm; his expression, impassive; his voice, level; even his pulse remained steady. Still he was human, not a robot. It was a sign of Victor’s tension that he’d answered her in complete sentences instead of a few words. By the time he was done, three seconds had already passed. She figured it had taken her another three seconds to contemplate the matter.

One one thousand.

Two one thousand.

The lead robber pounded on the cab’s door with the butt of his pistol. “Open up, goddam you!”

Prisoners be damned. Stupidity that profound carried the death penalty.

Time.

She unlatched the door and slammed it outward, using all her strength and what mass she could bring to bear while still seated. Her tremendous strength hadn’t been affected at all by the body nanotech transformation and while the few extra kilos that had been added might slow her down a bit—though not much—they also added a little mass to the equation.

The edge of the door caught the robber in the middle of his face. The impact crushed his nose, shattered his jaw, knocked out most of his teeth, broke his skull and neck in the doing and sent his body flying for several meters. The corpse almost completed a back flip before it hit the surface of the street.

One of the robbers started firing almost at once. Thandi was impressed by his alertness and readiness.

His marksmanship, on the other hand, was execrable. All the darts sailed way too high, some of them not hitting the cab at all. Even the ones that did would have gone over Thandi’s head.

If she’d been dumb enough to leave her head there in the first place, which of course she didn’t. As soon as she felt the impact of the door on the robber she’d thrown herself out of the cab.

Out—and down. Essentially, except for the fact that her motions were controlled, she fell almost two meters.

But everything was controlled. She immediately rolled under her lorry when she hit the surface—there was just enough clearance—came to a prone firing position and started shooting with her pistol. Which
was
military grade, thank you very much.

Her marksmanship was . . .

Almost perfect. Not quite, though, because she fired as soon as the first target came to bear rather than waiting an extra split-second to aim more carefully. So, her first double-tapped shots went wild.

But that was only by Thandi Palane’s values of “wild shots,” which most people would have considered ridiculous. Instead of destroying the target’s kneecap, the pulser darts severed the anterior tibial artery and shattered the upper fibula. The robber screeched, his lower leg was instantly soaked in blood, his pistol went flying and he collapsed.

That didn’t stop Thandi from cursing herself. But it also didn’t stop her from taking down the other two robbers. Both with knee shots. Perfect knee shots.

The second male robber screeched also; and, also, fell to the street surface. But unlike the first one she’d shot, this robber held on to his pistol. Thandi took care of that problem with a shot that disarmed him. It might be better to say, dis-handed him. The habit of double-tapping when she fired was too deeply ingrained to control in combat conditions. And what two pulser darts fired from a military-grade handgun will do to a human hand, with its nineteen bones and multitude of tendons, nerves and blood vessels, doesn’t bear thinking about.

The female robber just stared at her, mouth agape. She remained standing, too. Thandi thought she didn’t realize what had happened to her, since it had all happened so quickly.

For a moment, she was tempted to put an end to the woman’s confusion, either by shooting out her other knee or putting an end to her existence altogether. But that seemed excessive, since the woman wasn’t holding any weapon except the packet of explosives—which she’d obviously not armed yet. Besides, Victor wanted prisoners.

So she just rolled out from under the lorry and sprang upright. Pointing to the woman’s shattered knee with her pistol, she said: “Fall down, you dimwit.”

The woman, her mouth still gaping, looked down at her knee. Her lower leg was completely blood-soaked by now.

“You fucking bitch!” she screeched.

Then she finally collapsed. The explosive packet fell on the street surface a meter away from her.

Thandi strode over and kicked it out of reach. To be on the safe side, she kicked it far enough for it to fall into a stairwell leading down to what looked like the entrance to a warehouse. If it exploded at this point, unless the robbers had used an insanely powerful charge, the blast would have no effect except on the outer surface of the building.

Now, where was Victor? From the sounds coming from above, Thandi knew he’d been busy. But doing what, exactly?

She looked up and didn’t know whether to laugh or snarl.
Cachat, you—you—

* * *

Victor’s task had been trickier than Thandi’s. Overcoming four people on the ground, for someone like her, was fairly straightforward. But overcoming one or more people behind the controls of an operating commercial lorry positioned in a lane that was ten meters in the air was a different proposition altogether.

Victor was a firm adherent to the KISS principle. So he initiated the encounter by ramming his own vehicle into the lorry. His vehicle was a personal air car and the target vehicle was a lorry massing at least seven times as much. But he wasn’t trying to destroy the lorry—and on the flip side, he didn’t care how much damage he did to his own vehicle. He had more than enough funds to buy another one—or another twenty, for that matter. All he needed was the element of surprise.

The impact was jarring, for him much more than for the occupant or occupants of the lorry. But he was expecting it and he, she or they weren’t. The protective equipment in modern vehicles was more than adequate to keep everyone involved in the collision from being seriously injured. What such equipment
wasn’t
designed for was to keep them from being confused and startled.

Then, when the lorry was driven a bit forward and into the side of the adjacent building, very startled. Then, when a maniac emerged from the air car—literally,
emerged
: the crazy idiot was already on the vehicle’s hood and—

Pointing a weapon at the lorry.

A magazine-fed grenade launcher, to be precise.

Profoundly startled.

There were two robbers in that lorry, one male and one female. The female was the driver and the male was in overall charge of the high-jacking.

High-jacking
attempt
, rather.

“Hey!” the driver yelled. “That son of a bitch has a—”

It really wasn’t fair. The thirty-five-millimeter, pulser-driven grenade was designed to deal with much tougher targets than a commercial air lorry. It punched straight through the driver-side door and detonated in almost the exact center of the cab . . . whose windows (and a substantial portion of the supporting structure) blew abruptly outward. The detonation of thirty-two grams of highly advanced chemical explosive gutted the cab and shredded its occupants.

At that point, the lorry’s automatic traffic program gave up the ghost. It analyzed the situation as one of complete vehicular disorder and gave a signal that caused all the lorry’s machinery to shut down. Which it did instantly, except for the built-in delay procedures that allowed the counter-grav to bring the lorry down in a reasonably gentle manner and select a spot on the surface below that was reasonably unimpeded.

“Reasonably unimpeded,” given the current condition of
that
street surface, was a very relative term. So, the descending lorry landed right on top of one of the robbers and crushed him to a pulp.

Fortunately, that was the robber who was already dead.

Meanwhile, Victor’s own vehicle’s traffic program had come to the same conclusion. With all systems shut off, the air car’s counter-grav brought it down in reasonably controlled manner. On an empty patch of street, this time around.

Victor hopped off the air car. “Good work,” he said.

“And where the hell are
your
survivors?” was Thandi’s response.

He grinned at her. “I knew I could count on you. How many do we have?”

“Three. None of them are exactly in tip-top condition, you understand.”

“As long as they can talk.”

“Talk about
what
? And why did we need any survivors at all? The way I see it—”

She glanced around. Sure enough, there were at least a dozen onlookers that she could see. The subterranean commercial thoroughfares had slidewalks also, although they weren’t as heavily trafficked as the ones in residential areas—and judging from the evidence, didn’t work as well either. At least one of the slidewalks was completely out of order. She could see a couple of people walking on their own power.

Quite a bit of power, now. They weren’t quite running, but they weren’t wasting any time, either. Clearly, they didn’t want to stay in this vicinity any longer than they needed to.

“Dead assholes tell no tales,” she concluded.

“Tell tales to who? We’re in Lower Radomsko, Thandi. Nobody gives a damn what happens here. Well, that’s not quite right. A lot of people give a damn, but the only ones in position to do anything about it are whatever local gang is in charge. And those assholes, as you put it—”

He indicated the dead and wounded bodies lying about. “Are mostly right here. At least, I’m pretty sure they are. That’s why I wanted prisoners. To find out.”

“To find out . . . why?”

“So we could decide if my provisional change of plans makes sense, what else?”

And with that, Victor went over to the nearest wounded robber. This was the second one Thandi had shot, as it happened.

“Who’s your boss?” he asked. “And where can we find him?”

The man, who’d been doing his best to staunch the blood flow from his knee with a mangled hand, looked up at Victor and snarled. “Fuck you!”

“The name of your boss,” Victor repeated. He pulled out a small pistol. “And his or her present location.”

His tone of voice was neutral in all respects. Calm, level, even—seemingly devoid of any emotion.

Thandi knew him very well by now. At times like this, Cachat was utterly lethal.

“Tell him,” she said to the man on the street, moved by a vague humanitarian impulse. Very vague—in all likelihood, the robbers had been planning to kill her after they high-jacked the lorry. “Tell him right now.”

“Fuck you too!”

Victor shot the man in the head. Then, moved over to the woman.

“Your turn. The name of your boss. His or her location. You have”—he glanced at his timepiece—“five seconds.”

“Oh, for the love of God,” said Thandi, moved by another humanitarian impulse. “Give the poor woman at least ten seconds. Look at her. She’s in shock.”

There was no expression on Victor’s face, “If you insist.” To the woman: “You have ten seconds. Starting . . .” He glanced again at the timepiece. “Now.”

Thandi sighed. “Tell him. If you don’t, he’ll kill you and move on to the last guy and do the same. If he doesn’t get the answer from him, he’s dead too.”

That had taken about seven seconds. Victor started counting off. “Three seconds left. Two. One.”

“Stop!” the woman yelped. “For Chrissake, stop!” She held up a bloody hand and used it to wave Victor away. Tried to, rather. “You already killed the fucking boss! He’s in that lorry you—you—what the hell did you do to it, anyway?”

Victor ignored the question. “How many are left in your gang, then? And where’s your headquarters?”

“Left?” She choked down a hysterical laugh. “
Left?
There isn’t anybody left, you—you— Whatever your name is. You already killed everybody. Except me and”—she glanced over at the other gang survivor. He’d finished jury-rigging a tourniquet with his belt and was staring at them.

“And Teddy, over there.”

Victor nodded at the man. “Pleased to meet you, Teddy.” Then, looked back at the woman. “And what’s your name?”

She hesitated for a moment. Then, shrugged slightly. She could only use one shoulder to do so, because her right hand was still occupied keeping pressure on the wound in her knee. “I’m Calantha Patwary. People call me Callie.”

“Pleased to meet you also, Callie. I’m Achmed Buenaventura and my partner here”—he pointed to Thandi with a thumb—“is Evelyn del Vecchio. Now that we’ve all become acquainted, how would the two of you like to come to work for me?”

He looked around the area. “Seeing as how the neighborhood obviously needs someone new in charge.”

Callie and Teddy stared up at him. Callie’s mouth was gaping again.

Thandi knew how she felt. She was almost gaping herself.

Victor Cachat and his damn improvisations. Otherwise known as the maniac’s wild ride. And . . . here we go.