Necrotech (3 page)

She shook her head again, this time pointedly. He wasn't. Relief swamped me.

The room behind her disgorged three men in the same black uniform I was almost wearing. I hit the glass over her head. “Look out!”

Her eyes widened. The whites tinged gray, another sign of nanos at the breaking point. Maybe like mine. I couldn't tell. The black spots popping in my vision looked too much like the black sludge at her eyebrow.

She spun around, arms wide as if she'd shield the glass I stood behind. As if she were tall enough, strong enough.

Whole enough.

She wasn't.

Ice splashed into my stomach, froze fury and fear into a wad of nausea so thick I couldn't breathe around it.

Metal shaped her spine, thrust from her smooth flesh like alien vertebrae, precisely machined. Tubes and wires looped from joint to joint, then screwed into her skull in an immaculately clean shell cupping the base of her head. Jacks dotted the plates, drilled into each side like some kind of nightmarish hook-up. The flesh around the implant was perfect, seamed into the metal like it had always been there.

It hadn't. Yesterday, Nanji had been one of the few SINless on our team who'd sported nothing more technical than nanos and a chipset capacity for photographic memory. Her back had been smooth, unmarred but for the lotus tattoo between her shoulder blades, twin to her brother's.

That ink was gone now, swallowed by the kind of cybernetics that earned a runner a bullet on the street. Her shoulders hunched like the weight was too much for her to carry. The wiring along her back rippled, reflecting back blue sparks in the shattered light.

Never. She would
never
get this kind of tech
.
It was all wrong, too obscene.

Too inhuman.

Horror froze me to that spot. Locked me down into a whirlpool of confusion, anger, chaos. What the hell kind of universe did I wake up in?

Nanji looked back at me, saw my face. Saw my revulsion.

I couldn't hide it.

Her mouth twisted. Sealed against a tremor. She didn't break down, she was too strong for that. She sucked in a ragged breath as tears pooled in her eyes – black like her blood. Her nanos had passed mine, launched beyond the point of overcompensation. Dead units leaked out of her body wherever they could. Ears. Nose. Eyes.

And she knew it. We both did. This was our world – our risk.

She wasn't the only saint to lose her shit to tech corruption.

But she was the only one I cared about who'd done it in front of me. I needed to get her to a street doc, and
fast
.

“Nanji,” I said, knowing it wouldn't help. Knowing the sec-goons behind her wouldn't let her go.

All I could do was watch as she fisted one hand and punched the glass. It dusted to a layer of shattered white, but didn't break. Red and black smeared where her knuckles had cracked, backlit by the lab lights and blue flame. The black sludge in her eyes leaked over, mixed with the blood and sweat already caked on her cheeks.

My girlfriend was already corrupted. And I could do jack shit about it.

The three men behind her fanned out, weapons trained. A good strategy – one I would have employed if it were me and my team. If Nanji charged one, the other two could take her down before she reached her target.

But that was just tactics.
She
was my team.
They
were the well-trained enemy, and if they were prepared for something like
this
, then that meant they were in on whatever the shit this was. It was their fault. Theirs, and the spunk-sucking corporate tool that funded them.

I would murder every last one.

One of the faceless tools gestured, and Nanji jerked like he'd said something that mattered. I punched the glass Nanji had already weakened, snarled when only one faceplate turned in my direction. “Don't you fucking touch her.” Rage crackled. “Nanji!”

Her whole body shuddered. Something I'd never seen before flickered to life behind her stare, roiling under her skin like something alive pushed against the shell of her body. Her blue-black eyes flicked to the side.

Pain sliced through my head – a struggling, writhing pressure centered somewhere near my chipset and echoed in the bruised palms my nanos were too far gone to mend.

Her lips moved, easy to read this time.

Get out
.

“No!”

Her mouth curved up. She had that habit, smiling even when she was sad. She touched her lips with two shaking fingers, pressed those fingers to the powdered glass.
I'm sorry.

My jaw clenched.

The men behind her signaled.

I pounded the glass with fists, forearms. White dusted off the surface, but it held. I didn't have the strength that spinal replacement had given her. “Where's the door?”

Her eyes closed, black lashes so thick, she'd never needed makeup to darken them. Now caked with blood and the sludged remains of her nanos. Her hands rose, two fingers tilting to my right, dipping twice.

Two down.

When her eyes opened again, the irises were almost entirely black. She sucked in a breath; maybe she'd meant to say something, but they didn't let her.

The 877s aren't subtle weapons. Orange and white flared from the muzzle as three Saugers spat out a spray of bullets so fast, so chaotic, that the glass vibrated under the strain of catching them all. The panel went shock white, like a sudden frost too thick to see through. All I saw of Nanji before the screen went blank was the way she dropped to the ground, dug her bare toes into the floor and scuttled for cover.

I'd never seen her move like that, like her joints weren't limited by the same restrictions mine were. Her fingers spread too wide, nearly a full circle of contact with the floor. Alien. Predatory.

The truth, harsh and terrifying, took my breath away.

She'd waited too long.
They
'd waited too long, or maybe this was some kind of fuckedup corruption study. Whatever it was, they'd succeeded in one thing – Nanji wasn't just corrupted. She was going full necro.

Even if I hauled ass, even if I managed to get to the door in time, the only thing I'd be able to do for her was put a bullet in her head.

I was too fucking late for anything else.

But somebody had to. Somebody she trusted.

Fuck.

With the soundless echo of bullets throbbing and thrashing inside my skull, I slammed my synthetic hand against the window and took off. She'd indicated two doors down. I barreled for it, nearly bloodied my nose on the door when it didn't open. I hammered on it. I kicked it. I backpedaled, and missed the actual second door she'd indicated twice before I thumped a fist against my hammering heart and forced myself to
stop
and
fucking look
.

The door was all but invisible, a seam two feet from a plain black square.

I slapped it, swearing as if the vicious words could slow down time. Slow down bullets. My vision turned into a narrow tunnel of focus.

Save her.
Could I?

No. Lucky had ingrained that in me from day one – don't tempt corruption, don't fuck with the converted. Necros didn't care. They killed.

By herself, Nanji wasn't likely to be much of a match, but the tech they'd wired into her spine was a whole different story. They could have put anything in it, and based on the way she'd moved, they'd done something with her whole nervous system. It could have been medical testing, could have been some kind of illegal meat lab trading in human subjects, but it didn't matter. Even mobility tech wired into a body's base nervous system – spine, brain, whatever – can go off the reservation.

A body that moves because of technical help can be pushed beyond human limits when the brain powering it no longer cares about human thresholds. Tech doesn't feel pain, remember? Nanji probably had the strength to tear a body limb from limb.

I had to get to her. I had to be the one to put her down.

A compulsion, maybe. A need to see things through.

A way to cover my ass when I looked her brother in the eye.

I sprinted through the door when it was wide enough, clipping my shoulder, and found myself in a four-by-four square that reeked of stale piss and sour sweat. The door closed behind me, locked me in – or out.

By the time I grasped Nanji's deceit, it was too late. The elevator jerked upwards, and the reeking shaft absorbed my ragged, furious scream. I pounded on the now faceless wall. Hammered it until my metal fist dented the interior, but it wouldn't open. Wouldn't give.

The car eased to a stop. Behind me, a second set of doors parted, spilling me into a fetid, filthy alley. The hot night air rolled into the cramped space. It filled my nose and lungs, shocked my system for the last time.

The narrowed tunnel my vision had become went utterly black. The lateral display guttered once, twice, neon green values rippling before turning muted gray and flashing a stern
000
.

I collapsed into a pile of rotting refuse.

T
he unsteady
click
-click-click
of the overhead fan filled the dingy interrogation cell. No pattern. No rhythm. Just unending amounts of irritation undercut by the derisive stare of the cop watching me.

We'd been playing this game for the past hour.

Jamming my thumb into my own eye would be more fun. Not that I could. My hands were manacled to a nanofactory steel ring embedded in the table in front of me. If I tried hard enough, I could budge the whole thing
maybe
an inch. As it was now, I could only brace my forearms on the surface and pretend like I wasn't ready to keel over on the spot.

I'd woken up in a police transport with my hands and feet immobilized in rotocuffs. They must have jammed some kind of emergency recharge between my teeth; cops and medics keep shit like that on hand for nanoshock cases. Wouldn't be enough to get me through much more than a few hours – less, if I kept getting into fights – but I'd take it.

Cops are government men, at least on paper, but bought and paid for by the corps that run the city. They keep the peace where they can, watch what they can't change, and occasionally come up with a serious case of something contagious when they're paid off to. They're underfunded compared to private security and overworked everywhere else, but they don't dick around when it comes to SINless. Especially ones running on the verge of corruption.

The jerkoffs had cut my sleeve away to fasten a bolt directly to the surface of my synthetic arm. It shorted the circuitry, turned the limb useless – and cost me a perfectly good skinsuit, on top of everything else.

It could have been worse. Back in the day, they planted the circuit bolt right on top of the chipsets at the base of the skull. The frequency it emitted shorted the whole thing, which also happened to trigger systemic failure of any life support. Countless perps with illegal tech had died in custody, a hazard of the lifestyle, but when a suspect with an advanced credit line and connections up the corporate ass had flatlined, the cops wised up.

After being sued into the cunting ground, naturally.

Now, they planted the bolt directly on any exposed tech. Lucky me. I got off with a forty-pound paperweight dragging on my shoulder, a two hundred-pound table attached to my wrists, and a three hundred and sixty-pound beefjock in city blue breathing down my neck.

I was exhausted, starving, filthy, and so far into nano meltdown I wasn't sure I'd ever crawl out again. I'd apparently been found wandering around, out of my goddamn mind, somewhere in the Third Junction. Not my usual haunt. The place was mostly tenements, lowball gangs and slum lords.

Not to say I didn't operate in those circles. Just not in that particular area.

No matter how hard the beefjock grilled me, I had no answers – none I'd give him, anyway. Nanji's black-sludge tears carved bloody furrows through my patience.

Was she dead by now? Probably. I hated that I hadn't been there when it happened. Hated the thought of those security fucks in black filling my girlfriend full of enough lead to drop her, tech and all. I hated the lingering guilt sucking on my conscience, and sitting here in this hotbox interrogation room replaying it over and over was pissing me off.

I couldn't remember what got us in that hellhole. And the only man who might have a clue was the same man who'd be completely justified in putting a bullet in me for the trouble.

This little side trip to coplandia? Frosting on my fucking day.

Officer Fagan, he of the perfect tan and spectacularly shiny badge, didn't care. As if he had all the time in the world, he leaned back in his chair – it creaked alarmingly beneath his bulk – and twirled a tablet stylus through his meaty fingers. A wedding ring glinted on his left hand. Most people didn't bother with them. Old fashioned guy, this one. “Let's give this another shot,” he said, with a hell of a lot more patience than I had. “Tell me what you were doing prior to arrest.”

Aside from taking a dirt nap? “Floss my balls,” I said to the ceiling.

The harsh lights glared down at me, judgmental as hell. I got it, all right? This was my fault for ending up in police custody. The worst of it was that I hadn't even done anything to end up here – no police shootouts, no high-speed chases, no corporate fuckery. I may actually be the first runner in history to wind up in a cop shop because street uniforms had found me in the trash.

That was some bullshit I'd have to play down before it made the rounds across the network. It also meant that even if I had the juice to try and contact anyone on my roster for help out of here, I couldn't. Any saint who led a uniform to another runner would be so much paste by the time it was over.

“Come on, little girl.” The officer's thick lips tipped up – too much a sneer to be a smile. “Just tell me what I want to know and I'll get you something to eat.”

Tempting as it was, no. I didn't play with cops. Well, usually. “Should I use smaller words, Officer Fagging?”

The loose flesh at his jowls tightened. “It's Fagan.”

“‘Course it is. Hey, what gay parlor has a tanning bed big enough for your fat ass?”

A vein popped out in his forehead. He very carefully smoothed back his hair.

Like I'd let that go. “You an all-over-shine boy or do they make cock socks in your size?”

He grunted. “You think you're so cute.”

“Nope.” Nobody in their right mind would ever slap that label on me. I was too mean for cute, too edgy for pretty. I wore clothes that showcased my build, sleek and lean. Cute girls got more leniency than I did.

And less fucking.

He didn't seem to care for my honesty. “Last chance to get this straight.”

“We both know that's beyond us,” I said, lifting my eyebrows suggestively. “Does your wife know you like dick?”

His left eyelid twitched.

I sniffed, then rubbed my nose along my shoulder. “Seriously, it smells like dick in here.”

His hand came down on the table so hard, the sound echoed like a gong. I jumped, the cuffs locking me in place snapping taut, but no give. He leaned over the table. “Enough of your games,” he growled. “Cough up your network, or I'll make sure you never see daylight again.”

My legs tensed. My stomach cramped so hard, it was all I could do to remain upright – I didn't dare show him how badly I was hurting. No way I could kick this table into his gut. Much as I hated it, I needed
him
to come at
me.
It was the only shot I had.

They'd left my feet unlocked, which was stupid. If he got close enough, I'd get a crack at his weapons – and the personal recharges all cops kept in their tool belts for long days. One of those would do me until I could get somewhere I could crash. I needed sleep before I did anything else. Nutrients. Then I'd begin the hunt for whatever it was that put me and my girlfriend down in that nightmare lab.

It wasn't lost on me that I'd spent the past four hours trying to get out of shit I didn't remember getting myself into. Weird lab, police station – what next? I didn't dare ask, even as a joke. The universe was such a bitch.

So I smiled. I wasn't exactly a friendly smile type. Generally, my expressions slanted towards mean or hungry. This one didn't reach my eyes. It showed all of my teeth. It telegraphed things I'd bet Officer Fagan, with his clean uniform and softening gut and do-right haircut, had only ever seen on his torture porn subscriptions. I injected every ounce of violence, every inch of desperation, every kill I'd ever made into a smile that told him exactly how much of a psychotic mercenary he had on his hands.

I was definitely
not
cute.

That eyelid flickered like the wobbling fan overhead. Sweat beaded on his forehead, turning his red skin splotchy as the last fat-swaddled glimmer of professional pride buried in his psyche screamed at him to outstare the bitch.

“You know what we call beat cops?” The left side of my nose hiked, turning my smile into a soundless snarl. “Street
meat
.
Guess why.”

He jerked back from the table. Caught himself and gave me a long, deliberate sigh. It didn't fool me. I'd wiggled under his roasted skin and jammed my fingers into a place he didn't like to think he had. He straightened, sucked his gut up into his chest. Like I needed a reason to know how much bigger he was than me.

Hard to miss. His straining uniform shirt, short-sleeved in deference to the blistering heat outside and the struggling fans in this cramped interrogation room, fought to hold his bulk.

I also knew that I was on thin, very fragile ice.

As a SINless, I'm something between a bogeyman and a chlamydial sneeze to anyone working the standard life. One part threat, one part figment, seven parts
avoid at all costs
.

Everybody knows we exist, but we're the Other in their world. Your jobbers, your bums, your corp shills, your kids dripping snot and howling for attention; these are the everyday residents of the city. Sinners, every one of them, nailed to the corporations that supply them with an endless supply of gimmes. Their SINs are wired into the bandwidth, complete with visual set-ups much different than mine. While you can find apps for just about everything – if it isn't jammed into your brainmatter via carrier – every connection serves up two main courses of bullshit: bloatware and spyware.

One keeps you busy by throwing an endless supply of entertainment, lifehacks, and waste-of-time games challenging you to achieve best score, highest rank, achievement after achievement. Victories come with all kinds of rewards, from points spent at the local crankbar, VR time, maybe an uplink orgasm with three times the kick and none of the formalities. Anything to dull the pain of living, the pressure of working, the need to feed on something better than what they sell their bodies and minds and souls for.

All noise, no signal.

Which means they get your everyday worries: where to eat, who to bang, how to get the latest shine from whatever shopping vid they obsess over. Who has what, how to get it, work, work, work, play, play, play. Fester, fester, fester. Blinded by the bandwidth that feeds them, leashed by the SIN that promises protections and delivers fuck-all, the people just… exist. Unaware – willfully ignorant – of the fact that every achievement logs another entry in the corporate databases that track them all.

Enough creds will get rid of most of the bloat, but never lose the framework it's all built on. There are tiers, VIP and fuckingly expensive packages, but that's all top percentage shit. I've never been close enough to smell the ballsweat of a corporate shark wo could afford that kind of privacy, much less ever seen it.

Meanwhile, those of us without SINs take it one-hundred percent off the radar, which pisses off just about everyone who traffics in SIN tech. Our HUDs are streamlined to spec, lacking in all the bloat most chipset networks are frontloaded with, and completely off the registries. I don't even keep track of the days. Who cares? I'm not that hooked up on where I have to be; I have a linker for that.

SINless don't have to be any more dangerous than your average social failure shooting up a busy street, but it pays to be smarter. Losers and idiots die fast, so those of us that survive the entry process end up with a network of like-minded illegal mercs with talents for murder, mayhem, theft, espionage, and whatever else makes the corporate douchefactories piss their pants.

Which is my point. And Fagging's.

As a working runner, I'm worth my weight in credits. Or at least this cop's weight in cleared paperwork. Not quite worth a medal, but definitely a promotion. Big bad Officer Fagan, taking down his very own merc. If he could sweeten the pot with my contacts, he'd skate right from street meat to a desk.

I bet he'd swing his copper-toned dick around for years.

I never did much care for authority. Part of the reason I left home. It made me lippy. More, it made me forget that I was running on empty, which wasn't doing me any favors. “So let's get real here,” I told him, drumming my only functional hand on the table. “I die in this box, you haul in a corpse. We both know your bosses want me alive.”

A bit of a stretch, but I was banking on the fact Fagan didn't know that. Alive meant information, after all. Possible datadump from my chipset, possible informant. Dead means a runner's chipset goes nova and eats its data. Fuck you, forensic coroners.

“You can stroke your civic cock all day long,” I added, waggling my eyebrows. “Maybe I die while you take your money shot. Maybe my nanos push me over the edge and then you got a fucking necro in your station.” He blanched at that. Smart man. Time was on my side here. Sort of. I mean,
I
cared if I died, but he didn't know that.

Most everyday wage slaves figure SINless are one step away from batshit insane anyway, which is more or less true, but we still favor survival over reckless suicide. Whatever else the corps like to say about us, we ain't in it for the kicks.

Just
for the kicks, anyway.

Perspiration rolled down his jaw. He wiped it away with a hand. The hair on his knuckles was thick and wiry. Darker than I expected.

A sausage-link finger jabbed at the air between us. “You talk, but you don't exist, do you, little girl?” Well, damn. Officer Gorilla-Hands found his courage. “There's nothing stopping me from jamming a recharge down your throat to keep you stable and hauling you off. You could...” He tried for a snap, but his sweaty digits wouldn't cooperate. “You could disappear, and who'd come looking? Your illegal pals? Bullshit. You're the dumb cunt that got caught by
street meat
.”

All obviously true, which was why I needed him to come at me.

“Okay, Officer Fagan.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “I got a question.”

He frowned. “What?”

Oh, man. It's like he was asking for it. “How often do you scope out the other guys' junk in the locker room?”