Jade Dragon (10 page)

Second recovered and sneered. “Don’t give it to her, spooky. She pays
for it.”

Ko threw himself at the bigger youth and swung out, his anger making the
attack clumsy and poorly aimed. Second deflected the blow and landed a
heavy fist in Ko’s stomach. Ko recoiled, coughing.

“Is this guy not the dumbest fucker in the world?” Second asked the
assembled gangers. “Brains of a wooden duck!”

Ko spat and hauled himself up. Second beckoned him to keep going. In the
back of Ko’s mind there was a voice that begged him to do what he always
did whenever he ended up facing off with Second. Let it go. Walk away.
If he took his licks and went home, if he stayed off the streets for a
couple of weeks, they would take him back in and nothing would change.
It had happened before, it could happen now. If he just walked away. If
he just let Second keep his top dog place, if he just took the easy way
out. He glanced at the others. They made no move to intervene, content
to let the conflict play out and follow the dominant alpha.

“Be smart, spooky,” said Lei, licking his lips. “Just walk away.”

“I am
sick
of the easy way,” said Ko, earning him a confused look from
his opponent. With a jerk of his legs, Ko spun about and struck Second
with a spin-kick that hit like a tornado, knocking Lei off-balance. Ko
heard Gau swear under his breath.

The other ganger hit out blindly and Ko caught it, air blasting out of
his lungs in a whoosh of sound. Lei’s girls released a short twin
scream, like the bark of a vixen. Second came up and retaliated with a
showy foot-sweep that missed by inches; Lei’s fighting was all style and
no substance, based on the repeated viewings of a million fight films.
Ko, on the other hand, had been sent to a Jeet Kune Do school by his
father when Second Lei was still in shorts watching
Seizure Monster
anime. Ko’s style was all about application of force, hard, direct and
instant. He threw punches inside the “gate”—the zone of body mass where
the nerve points congregated—and felt a satisfying crunch as a dozen
expensive plastic ampoules shattered inside Second’s pocket. He shouted
at Ko and hit him across the cheek with a glancing, sideways blow.

Ko rocked back, stars of pain glittering in his vision. He chewed them
down and sent a sharp kick at Second’s shin. The bigger youth shrieked
as Ko’s shoe tore open the skin and fractured bone. Ko followed up with
a strike that impacted Lei on the cheekbone and slammed his face into
the driver’s side window of his emerald Kaze. Glass shattered and the
car alarm began to wail.

The sound was the cue for the gang to disperse, and suddenly Gau and
Poon and the others were running for their vehicles, but Ko was ignorant
of all that. He was on Second as the drug dealer tried to stagger away,
hands clutched to the cuts on his sour moon face.

“No—” Second said, but Ko ignored him. Ko’s mind was somewhere else now,
in a place where every insult and hurt he had ever weathered was now
being paid back tenfold on his tormentor.

By the time the police pulled Ko off and tasered him, Second’s expensive
Soloto mocksilk shirt was a blood-streaked ruin. The greenjackets threw
him in the back of the drunk-tanker and the robot patrol wagon drove him
into the holding cells.

Fixx got to the fence of Barksdale Field without tripping any of the Air
Force surplus scent-sniffers that ringed the compound. Like almost
everything within the chain link barrier, Barksdale was a junkyard of
elderly and dysfunctional leftovers from the American military machine
of the Nineties; barely fifty per cent of the hardware worked correctly,
but the trick was knowing which half did and which didn’t.

The sanctioned operative left nothing to chance. His quick communion
with Papa Legba on the approach road led him off into the shallow scrub,
and presently brought him to the fence at the north-west end of the
airfield. Fixx removed his flexsword from its holster inside the long
coat and gave the weapon an experimental twirl. It looked like a fat
dagger in its collapsed state. He pushed the rocker switch in the hilt
to “active” and held it horizontally in front of him. The blade warmed
up and began to unfold, clicking and twitching. The memory-metal
remembered the shape it had been forged in and became a long, thin
streak of dull titanium alloy. It reset itself in less than ten seconds,
and when Fixx was happy with that, he made two fast cuts in the fence,
the blade blinking in the lacklustre starlight. No alarm bells rang; no
barking e-dogs came running. He smiled and slipped into the compound,
crossing the end of the runway in low, loping steps. He made a zigzag
course towards the hangars, where harsh sodium floodlights bled their
glare into the sultry Louisiana night.

There had been a time when a man would have been stripped and on his
knees for daring to penetrate the security at Barks-dale. Forty years
ago, the USAF had flown fighter planes, bombers and tanker jets out of
this concrete nest, going about the business of defending the United
States of America. That had been before the Fuel Crash and the Food
Crash and the Welfare Crash and… well, before it had all gone to shit.
In a time when it was hard enough to keep Americans secure from other
Americans, the military turned their power inward and left everything
they couldn’t afford to maintain rotting in the sun. Overnight, military
bases became scrapyards as the government burned what they wouldn’t
recycle. It was only when the corporations stepped up to bail them out
that places like Barksdale went from defending the nation to being a new
piece of commercial real estate.

The energy cost meant that these days only the rich had wings; but there
were still things that needed shipping transglobal, still cargo that had
to get to the other side of the world and not with silk napkins, glasses
of champagne and dinky little meal trays. SkyeCorp made that happen.
They were the company that the companies went to when something had to
make it around the globe, no questions asked, no damn passport control
or t-wave cameras peering into the crates. SkyeCorp made a billion a day
shipping “tractor parts” to greedy dictators or “baby milk” to covert
gene labs. They owned a string of decommissioned air bases across the
continental United States, and with them a fleet of ex-military
transport aircraft in various states of disrepair. SkyeCorp lost one
flight in every thousand; but there were plenty of mothballed planes out
in the Nevada desert, their clients had insurance, and it was tough to
complain when the manifest said that all that got mislaid were “machine
tools”.

Fixx hesitated in the lee of a rusted barn and studied the aircraft. One
of them was a giant, a huge C–5 Galaxy, heavy like a pregnant albatross
and low to the ground on a cluster of fat wheels. There was no cockpit
to speak of, not in the sense that Fixx thought of it. Where the Galaxy
had been built with a cabin for pilot and crew there was now a blank
banner of plastic and steel, pockmarked with sensor pits and twitchy
antennae rods. SkyeCorp didn’t use human pilots for the most part. It
was far more cost-effective to engineer out that whole part of the
system and replace it with cheap logic circuits and bio-matter
processors—that is, brain tissue harvested from high-order primates. The
four-engine plane had its nose lifted so that container trucks could
drive aboard and deposit their loads. He could see from his vantage
point that the last items of cargo were already being secured; soon the
nose cowl would drop and the Galaxy would amble out on to the runway.
The jets were already spinning at idle—this flight was running late.
Fixx dropped to his knee and rolled the bones on a patch of weed-cracked
concrete. The pattern brought another smile to his face. Good choice.
This bird would take him where he wanted to go.

There were a few men milling around the front of the hangar, some
running cursory checks on the aircraft, others smoking and drumming
bored fingers on the barrels of their rifles—aging Gulf-vintage Colt
M–16s, as third-hand as the base and the transport jet. Fixx kept the
sword close and moved in toward the hangar. He could have killed every
man here with the SunKings switched to deep reticule mode, but that
would have brought the house down. No. Tonight he wanted to move in
silence, leave nothing but footprints and take nothing but advantage. If
he had to make a kill, it would be quiet.

The op kept to the pools of shade, shifting in and out of them under the
cowl of the black long coat, a piece of the night moving here and there.
He reached the back of the hangar and got in through a broken window. A
hooter sounded from the front of the Galaxy, and he smothered a dart of
surprise; but the alarm was only a warning as the transporter’s nosecone
began to droop, yellow hazard strobes flashing across the concrete. The
cargo doors at the back of the plane were already shut, but a side hatch
was still half-open. Fixx frowned. Shut or open, yes, but halfway? That
seemed strange, but he had no time to consider the reason. The flight
would go if he dallied, and there were things unfolding in distant
places that needed him to be there. His free hand dipped into his pocket
and worried the bones a little. Yes, he had to act, not think. Fixx
sprinted from cover and launched himself at the hatch. He was in and had
it shut just as the hooting siren fell silent. The jets were growling up
to power and he felt a lurch as the Galaxy taxied from the hangar.

He glanced around. Cargo modules two stories tall crowded around him,
and items that were loose inside made desultory clangs against the walls
of pressed steel. There was an alley between them that he could make it
down if he held his breath, and with the sword leading the way, Fixx got
to the front of the jet. What light there was came from the dull yellow
glow of biolumes on the cargo gantries and the handful of plexiglas
portholes in the fuselage. The Galaxy rattled and howled as it took up a
waiting position at the end of Barksdale Field’s Runway Left.

Fixx glanced around for some corner where he could seat himself and that
was when he noticed the door. The cargo container on the starboard side,
yellow with a red pennant that said “Tao Ge Shipping”, made a creaking
noise. The metal doors that sealed the contents in were unlocked, and
one of them hung open. Each fresh vibration of the engines made the door
shift a little. Fixx considered the guns again, then ignored the
thought. A stray round might punch through the fuselage. Bringing the
sword to guard, he approached. He was maybe a metre away when he saw
that there was blood on the handle, and more in a spatter pattern on the
deck. Fixx lashed out and yanked the door hard. It came toward him with
a squeal of poorly oiled hinges, revealing a sea of dirty, terrified
faces.

At the front of the women—and they were all females—there were two girls
in prison-surplus jumpsuits. They looked at Fixx like secret lovers
caught in a tryst, and between them they held on to a man whose throat
leaked red, whose struggles were getting more and more feeble by the
second. The man had his trousers and underwear halfway down his legs.
One of the girls held a bent piece of metal in her fist, the end of it
wet with gore.

Fixx lowered the sword. The container was full to bursting with human
cargo, thin and emaciated girls, all of them oriental. Joshua would have
said Korean, if he was pushed, but he was no expert. They stood there,
the jet screaming around them, the unlucky guy bleeding out, watching
each other. Fixx knew the look in their eyes well enough. These women
had gone beyond the point of no return.

The would-be rapist burbled something and went slack. His killer went to
work stripping his body for anything useful. The other girl—the intended
victim, he wondered?—had a nasty wound on her arm. Fixx finally sheathed
his weapon and dug out a pocket medipack from his coat. “You speak
English?”

The girl shook her head and took the packet, tearing it open with her
teeth. The plane shuddered and began to move, picking up speed. Fixx
sniffed and sat down, bracing himself against the hatch. The women, some
of them fretting, copied him. In moments, there was the gut-wrenching
motion of take-off. Cold crept into the cargo bay as they ascended into
the night.

Fixx had a couple of packets of Insta-Kibble
(Swells In Your Stomach!
Easy On Your Wallet!)
that he’d intended to eat on the way. He tore
them open, and with great care, broke them into enough pieces for
everyone. The erstwhile passengers sat there in the rattling chill,
chewing on morsels and regarding each other with wary eyes.

Fixx settled back and drew in his coat around him.

I will tell you, if you care to listen, something of cruelty. It is a
uniquely human conceit; you will not see animals indulge in it. What of
the cat, I hear you ask? The cat that torments and toys with the mouse?
Ah, but Brother Cat is only training himself, using his prey to stay
quick and deadly. He is no crueler than the virus that strikes down the
newborn, or blinds the artist. This is simply the manner of nature. As
it is the manner of man to be cruel.

And so my story. Look around in the shops selling effects of the past
to visitors from over the oceans, the places that overflow with bowls in
black lacquer, careworn jade and the litter of a thousand years of
history. Inside one day you may see terracotta warriors, the clothes
sculpted upon them the same as those worn by the swordsmen of that era.
Some date back to the Qin Dynasty, when China was a feudal land and
ruled by the blade and the pen.

In that time, there was a man, an Emperor, who greatly feared the world
beyond death. He had killed so many of his enemies that surely they
would be waiting for him when he perished, a war band of ghosts with the
curse of his name as their last earthly memory. This man, this Emperor
ordered an army of the red stone men made to accompany him into the
other world when death came to claim its price. More than three thousand
of the pottery soldiers were forged—regiments of footmen, archers,
soldiers with spears or crossbows, charioteers and horses—all of them to
be buried with their dead lord in a great tomb that was planted with
trees and grass so it would appear to be a natural hill.