Son of Sedonia (15 page)

“
T-nine-ty-nine-soldiers, our-blood-for-our-own!
” Oki pushed his face close to Matteo’s as he yelled. Matteo took the mag. Wide eyed and smiling, he rejoined the chant as he fumbled with the weapon.

“
DIE-EXO-DIE-EXO—
!” The roar of hover-engines drowned them out and panic ripped through the crowd. Some, mostly T99s, leaned out and fired at the gunship. Others turned and ran for low ground, scrambling down ramps and stairwells, or climbing down wall ledges. A few jumped. Matteo tried. He pulled himself up onto the side railing and looked for a place to land in the alley below. The ship was on top of them, the air thick with a deafening hum and the smell of ozone.
That pile of tin. I’ll get cut, but it’ll break the fall
. As he lunged, Oki grabbed his hood and yanked him back into the balcony. Dazed, Matteo watched Oki’s pinched face contort as he soundlessly screamed something. Matteo couldn’t tell what. From his place on the balcony floor, he saw a shiny dome of metal come out of a belly panel on the gunship. Bullets plinked off of it as it started to glow...and shake. It shook so hard and fast that it blurred into a shape twice as big.

The hum gathered into a high pitched squeal over crushing vibration. Oki released Matteo as both of them pressed palms over their ears. Matteo felt like he was screaming. Couldn’t be sure. It all suddenly paused in a moment of charged silence. Time enough to look up and then—

BOOOOOOOOOooooooommmm
.
A pale blue wave of light burst from under the gunship, spreading instantly over the entire block. The shock of it threw Matteo back into the wall, buckling the flimsy metal. His vision flashed stark white. Then black.

13

News

“SHIT SHIT SHIT
shit SHIT!” Liani pressed the yellowed elevator button half-a-hundred times, watching helplessly as the lit numbers crept toward her floor. Normally, she added some ‘elevator wait time’ to her morning routine, but nerves and caffeine had caused some difficulty in the outfit selection process. First the black top with the white blazer. Then the purple sport coat and white dress shirt. Then the maroon blouse with black slacks...the blouse had looked cute in the store, but in normal light it made her look like she had love handles. She had torn it off and barely fought the urge to stuff it into the incinerator chute before returning to the black top and blazer. The meltdown had taken at least a half hour.

The memory chip in her purse stayed fixed in her mind’s eye. It had taken the better part of a week to work up the nerve to contact GSBC Channel 17 with the story. The ‘past due’ notices from her landlord spilling out of her inbox gave her the final nudge.
This whole ‘doing-the-right-thing’ shit had better pay off.
GSBC was already skeptical of her, and being late wouldn’t help her cause.

After a long pause on the floor below her, the elevator doors slid open. She nearly barreled into an elderly man as he stepped off.

“Excuse me!” she blurted. The man, unoffended, looked her up and down and whistled. It sent a chill up her back, but was it’s own kind of reassurance. She flashed a crazy grin at the man and hammered the button for the fiftieth floor lobby. He gaped at her, smiling. Thankfully the doors shut before the pervert could put whatever crossed his mind into words. She fussed with her troublesome reflection in the elevator walls for the entire thirty floors down to the lobby.
Better this than obsessing over the clock
. She did anyway.

Finally, the doors opened on the fiftieth floor. The lobby looked nicer than it had any right to, especially considering the apartments in the place. A broad arcade of windows looked out over the main landing pad and Superway terminal beyond. They’d even sprung for shrubs, pathetic though they were. Her heels clacked a furious rhythm on the linoleum floor as she sped toward the front entrance. At the front desk, the block manager’s head snapped up at the sound.
“Ms. Ray! Ms. Ray!” he called after her. She pretended not to hear, entering the revolving doors. The bald squat little man pursed his lips then held a button behind the desk. The revolving doors stopped, trapping Liani inside.

“Ms. Ray,” he cleared his throat loud over the intercom in the entrance, ”you
are
aware that your account is fifteen days delinquent?” Liani pushed at the door.
Over 300 tenants in his block alone, and he remembers everyone’s name and rent status.

“Well aware, Mr. Korvan! I’m on my way to an interview right now so I can fix that!” She folded her arms so she couldn’t yank out her carefully styled hair. In the long pause that followed, she thought about trying to break the glass with one of her heels.

“The full balance, including rent and late fees, is due by the end of the month, or eviction will follow.” A buzz came over the intercom and the doors resumed spinning. They almost knocked her down. She stumbled out onto the sidewalk then stormed off toward the terminal.

The train arrived as she did. A long, snaking row of segmented cars hung from the mag-lev rail. The Superway network could take you across town in minutes, but you had to pass security, pay for entry, and catch a train first, a tricky business in this part of town.
Eff these heels!
Liani retracted them, ran flat-footed to the turnstyles, and passed her forearm over the scanner. But instead of the good beep, it screeched with the bad beep. Text flashed red in her Neural display.

“Overdraft Warning,” a digital voice said in her ear, “press ‘Accept’ to withdraw the funds from savings with a surcharge, or ‘Decline’ to—” Liani punched ‘Accept,’ hoping that she might somehow break the simulated button. The usual tiny vibration of a button press was all she got. Liani pushed through the retracting gate, sprinted through the closing train doors, and found a seat.

She didn’t have much time to enjoy the commute. Only three minutes to cross the twenty mile span from her building into downtown. All the same, she kept her eyes glued to the clear bubble canopy of the train car. To the left and right of the suspension rail, the off-white, stained buildings of her Inner Ring neighborhood passed. Liani’s place would have been considered a high-rise a few decades ago. Her floor might have even been penthouse level. But as the final alley of scrapers passed in a blur, the glowing blue splendor of the midday Center Ring appeared. In its beating heart, the Trade Mesa. A gargantuan, flat-topped structure that sat lower than the thicket of shining towers around it, but dwarfed them all in scale. Only Sedonia Tower stood above and behind it in grandeur. The curves of over a hundred different superway rails converged on the Mesa, and steady streams of air traffic filed in and out of thousands of open ports.

She missed Mesa Park. The three-square-mile green preserve that stretched out from the southern base of the Mesa. Trees, shrubs, boulders, gardens, ponds, and lakes. She could almost smell the fresh air through the Plexiglas. Each day before a shift at GloboMetro, she’d been able to steal an hour to go running through the elaborately woven paths, passing Sedonia City’s best and brightest as they did the same. For the first time, she had felt comfortable. Confident. At home.
And now because of that fucking stunt, I’ve got one last shot at it all. Then it’s back to bartending...or jail.
Bitterness and nerves crept back in, spoiling the sight of blowing leaves and shimmering blue pools. She took out her compact mirror and fidgeted with her makeup for the last minute of the trip.

The Superway rail banked left and dipped out of Mesa Plaza, heading into the sweeping grid of towers. The GSBC Channel 17 headquarters appeared, twenty blocks or so from the Plaza. It’s angular structure and shining windows would have made it impressive on its own, but it looked sadly average in this sector.

Another ten blocks flew by before she reached the connection station. She hoped her luck would continue and there would be at least one shuttle waiting for her to just grab and make it to the office. She waited at the door for the train to stop, glancing feverishly at her watch.
9:58 AM...come-on come-on COME-ON!
Finally, the train hummed to a halt and the hatch flashed open. She bolted out onto the platform toward the shuttles. Watched helplessly as a passenger entered the last one, closed the gull-wing door, and floated away.

She felt the second meltdown of the day boil up into her temples, but by now people were noticing her. From TV, she hoped...not because she’s a crazy lady in an ugly blazer on the verge of leaping from the platform to end it all as a bloody stain a hundred meters below in the Foundation levels. The arriving troupe of shuttles yanked her from the whirlwind in her head.

“Ooh ooh OOH!” She ran as fast as heels could go to the first one in line and hopped in.
10:01 AM
...
maybe their clocks are slow...or mine’s fast? Mine’s fast. Calm down, Liani.
She sat up straight and smoothed the wrinkles from her outfit.

In front of her pounding heartbeat, Liani Ray was all charm and smiles on her way through the megalithic GSBC lobby. The morning sun streamed in through towering arches, bathing the vast flowing chamber. She felt good. Scared shitless, but good. It would be nice to finally toss off the weight of the conspiracy.
Wait ‘til they see this. It’ll be like a dropped a bomb on the place...this is just the beginning.
An intern almost ran her over on his way through the doors. He was gone before she could think of something passive-aggressive to say, but then she noticed the rest of them. Other interns, reporters, fact-checkers, managers, art directors, cameramen, crew-men. All ran to and fro through the lobby. Some babbled into Neural screens or to one other as they rifled through floating interface. She caught bits and pieces of conversations as she wove her way to the high front desk at the back of the room. They added up to something big.

“What the hell do you mean, it’s still raw?! We need those shots cut together
five
minutes
ago!”

“Are we sure about this wording?”

“If you don’t have final approval, then put me on the line with someone who does!”

“No way we can air that!”

“...well figure it out! ‘Massacre’ doesn’t exactly have the best connotation...”

Massacre?
She waved off the sinking in her chest as she approached the front desk.

“Excuse me,” she said. The receptionist didn’t seem to hear. She almost said it again when the woman reached over and pointed to the scanner panel on the front of the desk.

“Check in here then have a seat, someone will be with you as soon as possible.” The woman tapped a few icons on her Neural and started talking to a face on a screen. Liani fidgeted for a second, then rolled up her sleeve to scan her forearm. Her profile appeared on the receptionist’s display followed by the text: “
4.678 minutes late.
” Liani grimaced until the receptionist shrank the profile window and stuck it into a queue of other profiles.

“Thank you,” Liani said, attempting to be cheerful. She turned and strode toward the colony of circular sofas in the center of the lobby. Halfway there, everyone in the room froze at the sudden burst of intro music and soundbytes. On the high wall behind the desk, GSBC-17 anchor Garen Todd appeared on a massive physical screen. His sharp blue eyes and chisel-cut features stared solemnly down at the lobby.

“We interrupt today’s broadcast of ‘Inter-Lunar Freighters’ to bring you this Special Report. At 5:03 SST this morning, the Sedonia Border Police Department executed what Commander Gorman of the EXOs referred to as the ‘largest, most decisive strike against organized terrorism within the Rasalla District in the history of the SCPD.’ The majority of the SCPD EXO division’s aerial combat and infantry were mobilized in a single, organized raid to decapitate leadership structures of Slum terrorist factions plotting violence on the Border and the Outer Ring territories. Chief Gorman confirms that all major operations have concluded successfully with the capture or death of every top-ranking target. Our safety, however, has apparently come at the highest of costs, for, and it is difficult for me to share this information with you,
twenty-one
EXO officers lost their lives in the effort andthirty-six were wounded. We have correspondent Byron Youngblood coming to us live from the Southwestern Rasalla District. Byron, what is the current situation?”

Liani dropped to her knees in the middle of the floor as she stared up at the screen. No one seemed to notice or. Some even joined her in their own displays of grief, real or faked. The screen changed to show a grizzled, world-worn correspondent against a backdrop of fire and smoking debris. Gunships patrolled overhead and, to the reporter’s right, EXO Cops loaded unconscious dwellers onto a carrier.

“Garen, the mood here is definitely a somber one. The official casualty report came over the Net roughly an hour ago, sending a shockwave through the men and women of the SCPD. Their friends and brothers have made the ultimate sacrifice in this morning’s events, Garen, and every officer I’ve spoken to carries the weight of that loss. Yet there is also great relief and pride, and as you can see behind me, their mission is all but accomplished with the elimination or incarceration of over
twenty-five-hundred
individuals throughout the district, the majority of which belonged to the notorious Triumph-99 or T99 crime syndicate, a group the Sato Administration has dubbed ‘a threat to civilization’—”

“Thanks Byron, but I’m going to interrupt you briefly so we can show some of the images coming to us from all over the Rasalla District. For those of you joining us, I have to issue a warning about the graphic nature of these images.”

I’m....I’m too late. God, I didn’t mean to—
Liani’s stomach turned. A slideshow of well composed, color-corrected footage appeared on screen. A ragged gash rippled through a neighborhood, collapsing its buildings into piles of smoldering debris. Women wailed in the streets as EXOs walked by with prisoners in tow. Bloody faces. Broken corpses. The last image made her turn away. On screen, a row of children stared down at the destruction from a nearby rooftop. Liani felt their eyes on her.