Division Zero: Thrall (46 page)

he schematics of a PGM Model 14 long-haul cargo transport bathed the patrol craft in a calming shade of cyan. Hovering next to the NavMap console, the image of a sixty-foot long truck rotated to face her and then to profile―an animation it had been doing for the past fifteen minutes. Text nearby gave details about the maximum load capacity, turning radius, armor thickness, and top speed of the vehicle. The only stat Kirsten cared about was the transponder value.

“Damn nice of Sam to hack into Intera’s system and find the transponder code for you.”

Kirsten felt an upwelling of indignant rage as she glanced at Dorian, but also sensed its abnormality. Rather than blurt at him, she settled for a giant moth in her gut. “Yeah.”

“You’re sweating. You never worried this much about armor before.”

“It’s not the armor.” She banked the patrol craft into a rightward descending turn. “It’s the stress. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me or how much more I can take this case. You’d think after what Mother did to me, a little stress wouldn’t change my personality so much. I feel so guilty for how I’ve been acting to you.”

“Can I say something at risk of starting an argument?”

She flicked the control to deploy the ground wheels. “Sure.”

“I think you don’t feel like you are part of Konstantin’s world. Sam is closer to your societal comfort zone. He doesn’t make you feel like part of the upper crust you have so much contempt for.”

The glare he expected happened, but rather than scream at him, she started crying and holding her stomach. Dorian reached over and gripped her shoulder. The tears subsided in less than a minute, leaving her gasping.

“Ow. I might be getting a stomach bug or something. I’m getting so sick all the time. Feels like I have a little monster clawing me up inside.”

“It hurt enough to make you cry?” He shook his head. “That’s not good. The doctors didn’t find anything when you were in the tank.”

She got angry, but not at Dorian this time. “I keep having this sense something is following me. There’s gotta be a spirit somewhere messing with me.”

He glanced through the back seat. “Yeah, I feel it too sometimes.”

“Figures,” she grumbled, staring at the NavMap. “Ditched in a grey zone.”

“Well it’s not like whoever stole the transport is going to park it where we’d just trip over it. They did not want it to be found.”

“Good point. I’m gonna stash the car out of sight.”

A Nippy-Nom convenience store occupied the entire ground level of a four-story building on the corner. One face abutted the grey area and had the bullet holes to prove it. She set down on the roof and jogged the fire escape to the street level. Bathing in the garish pink and orange light of the sign made her hungry for an instant burrito, her old staple. It remained an appetizing thought for several more seconds until worry about the case took over.

Her armband display relayed the tracking information from the patrol craft’s computer. A yellow thread traced its way through the dark blue wireframe model of the city, leading her toward the transponder.

“Keep alert, this is still a grey zone,” said Dorian.

She did not look up from the map. “Evan said I’d be fine.”

Dorian tugged at her shoulder until she glanced up. “Kirsten, even if he
is
a precog, it is far from infallible. They see a most-likely future that assumes you proceed with due diligence. If you go carelessly stumbling around and inviting trouble…” he grumbled.

Kirsten bit her knuckle, glaring down the street. “I’m terrified he might be a precog. So far, when it seems like he’s seen the future, it’s always been something happening to me. Not even himself.”

“Maybe it was more than chance he happened to be astrally wandering the alley that night.” Dorian grinned.

“I don’t wanna start talking about that. If I start throwing the word ‘precog’ around, C-Branch is going to interview him and test him, and…”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. He might have a little bit of precognitive ability, but remember. Something on the order of one percent of psionic individuals do. Of the one percent, only three percent of precogs receive untagged visions.”

“Yeah.” She exhaled.

“All of Evan’s supposed bouts of pre-sight have been tagged to you. There is a strong emotional bond.” Dorian interlaced his fingers in front of his chest, tugging as if he could not pull his hands apart. “He hasn’t seen acts of random violence or anything regarding total strangers. If all he can see is
your
future, they won’t be interested in him. Plus, he seems to be getting visions in real-time. He freaks out when you’re in danger.”

Beep
.

Kirsten had walked off-route, distracted by the conversation. She doubled back and jogged around a corner to find the street blocked off by destroyed ground cars. Thirty yards past the barrier, the lower floor of an old parking garage flickered orange in the glow of several fires and thrummed with heavy techno music. Enough of a gap in the impromptu wall remained for a person to slip through; it gave her the impression the locals created it to bar vehicles. Dark buildings walled in the street to her left and right. Two blocks ahead, the road ended at a T where an enormous statue of a stylized metal hawk flew through a ring of circuit-inscribed metal. Firelight glimmered over the wet street surface, brighter in patches of silvery plastisteel where the traction coating had peeled away.

With a hand on her weapon, she crept through the flickering shadows toward the source of the light and noise. A ramp wide enough for three cars abreast led from the street level down to a basement garage. Repetitious bass thrummed through the poured concrete walls, using the large open space as a great resonance chamber. Kirsten looked up as she descended, wondering if the vibrations would threaten the integrity of the building.

At the bottom of the ramp, she stopped at the edge of the wall and peered around at an assembled crowd. Ten men, ranging in age from later teens through early thirties, arranged themselves around a number of metal cargo boxes filled with fire. Most of them held containers of synthbeer and dressed in the uncoordinated manner of street toughs who could not agree on a common theme. Their hair represented every shade of color imaginable. They bobbed their heads in time with the beat; one guy with black and red streaked hair shouted over it asking about someone they had sent off for food. Dark grey metal horns, about an inch long, jutted out from his temples.

A little further away, a group of four women sat around a table―rather, a repurposed industrial wire spool―cleaning rifles and pistols. The oldest, maybe twenty, held a partially disassembled rifle up to the light with a metal arm. The limb’s contours, defined in shiny grey plastisteel, were no larger than a woman’s normal musculature. It struck Kirsten as creepy, like the skin had been removed to reveal metal underneath. Engravings of winding ivy covered the entire limb from shoulder to fingertip.

The missing cargo transport took up the remainder of the ground floor beyond them, parked sideways along the rear of their encampment. Cloth fluttered from the open trailer like a shy spirit peeking around the edge. Kirsten took a deep breath and walked toward the group. Acrid fumes rolled by in clouds from whatever they burned for heat. Plastic sheeting scratched at the walls up at street level to her left, a somewhat futile effort to make the area more habitable.

One by one, the fringers took notice of her. Kirsten stopped as the awareness of her presence spread back through the crowd, an impulse racing along a nerve to their collective brain. One of the women at the table grabbed two pieces of rifle; the metal-armed one held her hand down and gave her a shake of the head.

Kirsten waited until a fat man in a long coat cut the music. “I’m not here to give anyone a hard time. I’m just trying to track down what was on that cargo transport.”

She weathered appraising stares, while the off-gridders appeared to search for a wordless consensus on how to deal with a solitary police officer. The man with the red/black striped hair slid off the hood of a wrecked car, tugged a crimson leather jacket tight to his shoulders over a dark turtleneck, and sauntered over.

“You got some set on you, chica, coming here alone.” A slow hand reached up and picked at the strip of black plastisteel on her chest with her name and rank etched on it. His roundish face and short hair made him seem boyish. “Wren… That’s a little bird, isn’t it? What’s the zero for?”

The thought Dorian could appear and likely scare the room empty in seconds brought a smile to her lips.

“Careful, Ink, them is psionic cops,” said a voice from the crowd. “Gonna melt your brain.”

“How bout it, chica? You gonna melt my brain.” He touched his fingers to his jacket and flicked his arms to the sides.

“Ink? You must have a lot of tats.” Kirsten kept an unimpressed face.

“Short for Incubus.” He winked, a trace of red light glowed from his eyes.

Kirsten swiped the lash through him from crotch to face. His reaction was a mere shiver. All the bravado fled from his face at the glowing energy strand. A few of the fringers dove behind stacked boxes or destroyed cars.

“Fuckwazat?” he squeaked, body motionless, eyes locked on the white light trailing from her hand.

“I’m also trying to send a couple of demons back where they belong. Incubus is a kind of demon. I didn’t want to take a chance. Did that hurt?”

He swallowed, still frozen. “No. Little cold actually.”

The lash receded as she stopped concentrating. “Good, that means you’re just a poser with cybereyes and not a real demon. We can be friends.” She patted him on the shoulder, and stepped around him. “Look, people. Barring Lace, I really do not care what drugs you have stashed around here or what small-time bullshit skimmers you’re running.”

Dorian stifled a chuckle.

Incubus faced her with a slow turn, cybernetic vampire fangs retracting out of sight as he smiled. “Uhh, yeah. So, about that. She said it was fine. Was supposed to be out of the system and empty. We wanted the truck not what was in it.”

“Who is
she?
”

“ Skittles,” said the woman with the decorative arm, pointing it at the truck.

Kirsten nodded, edging in the direction of the truck. “Everyone just calm down, okay? If I was here to make trouble for you, I wouldn’t have come alone.”

The fringers traded stares as she slipped into the shadow of the cargo-mover’s cab, past a primary drive wheel half again her height. Inch-high letters spelled out Peterbilt-Grumman-Mack along a strip just below the windscreen. She glanced at the handholds where the operator could climb the stationary central hub to the door nine feet in the air. Someone had used them as storage bins for small bits of electronica. The heavyset kid turned the music back on, but at a less oppressive volume.

“Dorian, keep an eye on them, please.”

He nodded, letting Kirsten turn her full attention to the massive transport. Behind the huge drive wheels, the truck had two axles of load-bearing tires as tall as her chest. Fifty feet of trailer stretched toward a square of light on the concrete wall, within which the shadow of an enormous cat hovered. She expected to find a housecat sitting close to a lamp.

Kirsten peered around the corner of the truck, under the wavering cloth that acted as a door. Bunk beds lined both walls, reminiscent of the sleeping quarters of a military starship. A small crew ladder on the left side took her up to the cargo deck, six feet off the ground. As soon as her face cleared the level of the floor, she froze. Next to the second pair of bunks on the left, a slender woman sat cross-legged as if meditating, perched on a pile of dingy pillows, wearing nothing but the hair draped over her chest and prominent ribs.

Her slate grey mane was long enough to reach the floor and sprouted two large cat ears that twitched in time with the beat of the music outside. The woman was fashion-model thin, with a delicate doll-like face that looked as though it would crack at the slightest touch. Fangs peeked out of her parted lips, and her eyes―right one gold, the other green―were half open, the left much wider than the gold. Vertical feline pupils closed to thin streaks of black amid the color, and drool fell in drops from the end of a tongue resembling a larger version of a cat’s.

Kirsten looked to the side, embarrassed as though she’d walked in on someone in the bathroom. On the floor behind the cat girl, a grey-furred tail swished, crinkling through plastic wrappers. A standard M3 interface wire continued from the end of the extra appendage, circling the lower bunk where it plugged into a battered cyberspace deck. Large and boxy, it had the appearance of military surplus hardware. The words
Titan Alchemist
ran across the front in steel letters made to look bolted on.

“Be nice to the kitty.” Evan’s voice filtered through her memory.
Son of a bitch.
Kirsten shivered with worry.
He is a precog.

“Excuse me?” whispered Kirsten. When the girl did not react beyond twitching ears, she repeated it, louder.

The slender woman shook her head as if shrugging off the effect of a sedative. Her eyelids equalized level, slit pupils widened. After a few seconds of woozy staring, metal claws sprang out of her fingers. Ten six-inch blades glimmered in the light of a portable electric lamp. The woman raised her arms and, much to Kirsten’s surprise, hissed.