Hardwired (47 page)

“But new instructions came in from Colonel de Prey. Coherent Light had concluded that Magnus was ready to stab OutVentures in the back. We were ordered to join Derrotero and Magnus in a new offensive. Even with our united commands we had only about eight hundred men left. The Captain had fifty who’d been with him. The grunts, support people, and scientists had either joined us or died. The winter was supposed to be coming to an end, but there wasn’t any sign of it.”

Griffith shook his head. “There was another face-off with Singh. He wouldn’t give in. He had faith, he said. CL knew what they were doing. This time the Captain wouldn’t give in, either. He assumed command. Just took over. Major Singh didn’t have anyone left who’d follow him.”

“Just like that,” Steward said. His own voice sounded loud in the still apartment. Inappropriate. He thought about Singh. Intelligent. Hard. Not an easy man to know, but a fighter. Tenacious. Steward couldn’t picture Singh giving up that way.

“No, not just like that.” Griffith’s eyes opened. He was staring at the ceiling. Steward couldn’t read his expression.

“I was there,” Griffith said. “I was right behind the Captain when he took out his pistol and shot Major Singh in the head. Then I held my gun on the staff while they were disarmed and then split up and sent to other units. I didn’t—I didn’t see any other way. The whirlwind had us by then, and Singh was trying to stand against it. He didn’t understand that everything had changed. That was when the Captain gave himself a promotion. After that, he was the only officer we had. The only one we needed. He got us through.”

*

“NeoImagery,” said a recorded voice. “More than a philosophy. More than a way of life.”

A NeoImagist street carnival burbled in one of the streets. Sullen girls in brocade handed out literature. They belonged to an affiliated gang, Steward assumed. Displays, live and on holo, showed orbital second-stage habitats, smiling people, sleek zero-g humans modified for space, models of the DNA helix that you could alter yourself to new configurations.

The Pink Blossom logo rotated over the street. Major contributors to the cause.

“We are reconstructing the human race,” the voice said. It was female, friendly but authoritative. A software construct, designed to attract attention and inspire trust.

Darwin Days. Steward thought about people on top of glass towers hurling windows into the void, unconscious agents of evolution. Reconstructing the human race in their own irreverent fashion—
that
was as close to messing with the gene pool as Steward ever wanted to get.

*

“The Captain knew that Magnus was going to hit Outward Ventures pretty soon, allied with Derrotero. So he let Magnus know he was joining them, and as he made plans with Magnus, he established covert relations with OutVentures and let them know exactly what Magnus was up to. Magnus noticed OV making their preparations and accelerated their own schedule. Then we just stood back while they preempted each other. They blew each other apart while we hid in the tunnels. We weren’t a part of it. We were on the move all the time, nibbling at the enemy, stealing their equipment so we could live. When they’d come after us in the tunnels, we’d ambush them, then come up again somewhere else. The Captain called it
eating the dead
.”

There was a hologram running over the counter.
Our business is run on trust
, it said.
we trust you will pay in advance.

There was an advanced scanner in the doorframe that would detect any weapons that weren’t actually implanted in the body and precision lasers hanging from the ceiling.

The sign on the outside said
loans, sporting goods
. The interior said pawn shop.

Trust, Steward thought. Right.

A thin woman with bad skin, about thirty, stood behind the counter, her arms folded across her chest.

“Monowire,” Steward said, pointing. “The Officier Suisse.”

She looked up at his French pronunciation, then reached behind the counter and took out the weapon. It was about the size and shape of a switchblade knife. “Hold on a second,” she said. “Gotta hit the deadman. Stay inside the tape.”

“D’accord,” he said.

She stepped behind a clear plastic shield and pressed a button on the floor with her foot. If the pressure was removed, the house lasers would cut him up in a fraction of a second.

Steward made certain he was inside a ten-foot square marked with duct tape on the floor, then pressed the On button on the end of the wire, then pressed the thumb toggle. The stabilized monofilament line, with a little lead weight on the end, extruded from the handle to about two and a half feet. Steward whipped the sword through the air.

It made no sound at all.

Steward rocked the thumb toggle back, and the monofilament lost its rigidity, hanging from the handle by its weight.

“I don’t take any responsibility for what happens next, jack,” the woman said. “You cut off your own head, it’s nothing to do with me.”

Steward began to move the whip, gently at first until he got his reflexes back. Icehawk reflexes. He’d never had the nerve to try these when he was a Canard. The possibility of damaging himself with the unpredictable weapon was too high.

He began to move faster, whirling the line through long arcs, changing from whip to sword to whip again. The woman watched, expressionless.

He turned off the monowire and put it back on the counter. He stepped away. The woman disarmed the deadman.

“How’s it go through detectors?” Steward asked.

The woman shrugged. “Depends on the detector. Don’t try wearing it through
my
door.”

Steward glanced at the lasers above his head. “Okay,” he said. He put a credit spike on the countertop next to the monowhip, then stepped off to look at something beneath the glass top of one of the other counters. Nautical flares, the kind that burned even underwater. “I’ll take the flares, too,” he said. He’d been thinking of making a trip to the oceanfront for just this item.

In a boutique next door he bought a tote bag to carry them in. It was made in Malaysia of white linen, with an abstract black pattern on one side and the words fine white appreciation set of wheels on the other. The first three words were in black, the others in red. Steward had no idea what it meant.

He hitched the tote bag over his shoulder. His T-shirt talked to the metal streets.

He began to spiral inward, toward the club that was his destination. Picking up vibrations, the Zen of the city, as he went.

*

“Gorky came back, allied with Far Ranger. It was their last shot. Their landing force got beat off, so they just took the moon and held it. Captured asteroids with their mass drivers and started dropping them on the planet, wherever they saw life. Magnus and OutVentures tried to throw atomics back at them, and some got through. There was no real spring on the planet. Too much shit in the atmosphere. All we had was a kind of half-winter, sleet storms instead of ice storms. With dead people in tunnels, piled in the drifts.”

*

Steward put the tote bag in the slot outside the club entrance. The machine accepted the bag and gave him a chit, a piece of paper with magnetic code written on it. He put the chit in his pocket and walked in.

He’d concluded that it would be embarrassing to walk into the club and have every alarm in the place go off. It was the sort of thing guaranteed to start him off at a disadvantage. He decided to check the monowhip at the door instead.

The holo outside said club bag in letters that looked like molten bronze, and he could see through the open doorway that the interior featured concrete floors and walls of sprayfoam, both painted black. Tables were clear plastic on chrome stands that doubled as computer terminals. About half the people inside wore Urban Surgery or at least made a bow in that direction.

People at tables looked at him as he walked through the doors. Tattoos, drinks in strange colors, heads nodding to music. Steward looked back at the crowd for a moment and then walked to the bar. The bartender was a middle-aged man with a massive chest, vast arms, and the hoarse voice of an old prizefighter. “Star beast,” Steward told him.

Trebles shrilled off the walls. The bass was lost somewhere in the void. People were dancing to recorded music in front of an empty stage. None of them looked very interested.

The night was young. Things really hadn’t started yet.

*

“I wonder why we never surrendered. It would have made so much sense.” Griffith rubbed his mustache. “Because our loyalties were so strong, I guess. The Icehawks had esprit. We couldn’t disappoint each other by surrendering. And after a while, there was no one to surrender to. We were all living in the tunnels like savages. Fighting over food. We couldn’t accept surrender because there was no food for the prisoners, and we couldn’t surrender because we’d be killed for the same reason. So we’d kill everyone, there being no choice. A lot of them were just corporation grunts, cannon fodder. Little girls from Korea, street kids from Rio. Just there to get swept away.” He shook his head. “We would have eaten one another, eventually.”

*

Steward sipped his beast and watched the crowd. More people had come in. The level of conversation had risen, sometimes drowning out the music.

He thought he knew which one was Spassky—a small, active kid dressed in blue jeans, half boots, a bright yellow short-sleeved jacket with lots of zips and straps. His hair was done in black cornrows that turned into jagged vertical tattoos that marched down his face. He had pointed metal teeth, sharpened and staggered to fit into sockets in the gums so that he wouldn’t bite himself every time he closed his mouth. He wore glasses with video screens set into the backs.

There were a girl and two boys at the same table. The girl hung onto the small boy’s arm, ignoring the fact that he paid her no attention. Her forehead was tattooed and there was a bandage across the middle of her face. Steward figured she’d just had her nose altered.

The boys were big, six and a half feet tall at least. Heavy boots. Shaved heads with tattoos. One was fat, one was thin. The fat one wore video shades, the thin one had transparent eye implants that let you see the circuitry inside. Steward wondered if they had combat thread woven into their brains and concluded that they probably did.

Steward could see their heads turn slightly every time the door scanners flashed the green light for someone to come in. They never looked at the door directly. It would have made them seem anxious. But they were clearly waiting for something.

The music stopped abruptly. The people who were dancing stopped, hesitated, and returned to their chairs, looking lost.

A pale boy, about fifteen, walked onto the stage. He had a spotty, sunken chest and wasn’t wearing any clothes. He carried a pouch in one hand. There was scattered applause. A microphone lowered itself from the ceiling. Colored floods turned the boy’s skin pastel green. He shouted into the mic, “The deathworm coils in their hearts!” His voice broke on the last word. The boy took a six-inch alloy needle from his pouch. Holding the needle in his right hand, he put it through the middle of his left palm. Blood gleamed on the alloy. The applause became general.

Steward felt the tang of metal in his mouth. This was interesting.

“In the hearts of the dog pack that eases through the tear-streaked streets,” the boy said. He bent and picked up another needle. His skin was pastel pink.

There were cheers. Steward watched carefully to see how it was done. It was possible, with the pastel lights, that there was a trick here. The boy put the needle through the loose skin under his arm, chanting his poetry. More needles went in. Steward decided it was real. After that he lost interest.

Instead of being a technician with an interesting trick, the boy had become another fool who couldn’t think of a way to be famous other than to hurt himself in public.

Darwin Days, he thought. Natural selection, right here on stage.

Steward ordered another star beast and waited for the bartender to bring it. He pointed at the table with the people who looked like they were waiting for someone. “Is that Spassky?” he asked.

The bartender gave him a wary look. “That depends on who you are,” he said.

Steward took his drink. “Thanks,” he said, and walked to Spassky’s table. Video shades turned toward him.

“I’m from Griffith.”

“Sit down.” Spassky’s voice was alto, so young that Steward was surprised. He chided himself. The reflexes hadn’t come back yet. When he was a Canard, when he was Spassky’s age, this was the sort of thing he dealt with every day.

Steward gazed at the boy as he sat down. He saw that the glasses had two tiny cameras set above the nose bridge, and mind-interface pickups in the bows so that Spassky could change channels by thinking about it, without having to go through the bother of pressing buttons. Mind and video grown together.

Steward tasted his beast. Fire touched his palate, made him wary.

On the stage, the boy was bending over to put a needle through his foot. His fingers were growing slippery with blood and he was having a hard time. His head was down, away from the mic, and his voice had faded away, but he was still talking.

The girl on Spassky’s arm was watching the show with pleasure. Steward saw bruises around her eyes, revenants of recent surgery.

He looked at Spassky. “You have my Starbright?”

Spassky nodded. He moved his chair back. “Let’s go to my place. I have it there.”

Steward shook his head. “We do this in a public place. That’s the agreement.”

Spassky gazed at him in an odd way, as if he was dialing new settings on his spectacles, looking at Steward in as many ways as possible.

“I don’t have the money on me.”

“Maybe I don’t have the package, either,” Steward said.

The boy on stage was beginning to breathe hard. The pain grew raw in his voice.

“You and Griffith,” said Spassky, “are both too old to be in this business.”

“Do you have the money or don’t you?” Steward asked.

“Come to my place and I’ll give it to you.”