Up The Tower (8 page)

A half an hour was too long by a lot. He was going to have to ride this quake out no matter what.

Time to get Oscar, then.

Overhead, a police transport flew by, copbots hanging down on mechanical tethers. Spotlights shining through the smog. Did they know about the quake, readying themselves to help?

Robots were probably driving the transport. Did a robot know anything?

Did a clone?

Useless thoughts.

Carefully, Victor tossed a stick and then a rock across the threshold of the small fortified shack. No response. If he had the time, he would have perhaps picked up someone off the street and bribed or coerced him to move through, catching all the trap flak. But he didn’t have the time.

With a bit of unintended flourish from his makeshift tarp-cloak, he rolled through the opening. Nothing. Okay. He let the tarp fall. No more need now that he was inside.

He turned a corner and something stuck hard into his side. Thrums of movement reverberated in his body.

Some kind of spike. Victor groaned, sliding himself off of it. It went in about the length of a thumb joint, which was more than enough to send feelings of queasiness to his belly. It popped out slowly, little trails of blood following and leaving red drool down his side. His rib cage on that side was all metal, lucky for him, otherwise the spike might have broken something.

In front of the stairs was another tripwire—connected to a bomb or another set of spikes, maybe. He cut the wire with his force gun: thup thup. Downstairs he found Oscar, already with his hands up. He looked a lot like Victor, just with messier hair and a massive collection of acne around his cheeks, trailing down his neck.

Oscar had set himself up a nice little base. Computer equipment lined the walls, built into the foundation of the earth. Hard to detect with sensors—but not impossible. There was enough computer tech there to do almost anything—including spy on Tri-American for a very long time.

“You don't have to do this,” said Oscar. Sweat beaded down his forehead.

Victor shook his head. “Come on. Really?”

In Victor's world, Oscar was known for his slippery loyalties. This meant a lot of rationalization, and a lot of rationalization meant a lot of bargaining with the world. And Victor was the entire world, approaching on Oscar, expecting its due after far too much debt had built up.

“You shouldn't even be
able
to do this. I mean, I knew someone might came after me, but someone from the Alphabet? You can't even hurt me.”

Victor had two guns. His other was strapped to his ankle. They were both of the same design. The guns fired small pockets of very dense air coated with clouds of carbon. People called it a force gun. It made a very tiny sound, thup thup, when Victor shot Oscar in the knee. To follow, Victor tossed Oscar's head against a nearby cabinet. His teeth fell out in droplets.

“Oh god.” Understanding lit up in Oscar’s eyes. “You're Victor. I thought maybe Charlie o-or
Kilo
at most, but...hey man, I'm an investment! You can't just
kill
me...”

Victor shook his head. “Of course I can. Where's the data?”

For a few moments, Oscar looked as if he was going to play dumb. Victor raised his pistol up, ready to hit him.

“God, okay. There. Right there, in the drawer.”

Victor found the collection of black slabs and attached a small disc to the top of one. A green hologram floated up. Approval. Task completed.

“You chose the wrong team, Oscar.”

“Man, don’t you get it?” Blood seeped down his clothes, filling up his shoes and then puddling outward. “I wasn’t playing for anybody. Just playing the two teams against each other, that’s all. What else do we got? What else does anybody have except trying to pull just a little bit of wool over their eyes? They own
all
of us. Every part. I just...” Oscar shook his head, spitting out blood and another tooth. “Fingers in everything. Even if you didn’t come to kill me, they were gonna kill me.”

Victor had heard it all before, and he didn’t have time for this.

“Okay, then.”

Overhead, he heard creaking and shouting. Busting, breaking noises. Then the wall caved in. He dived out of the way, dodging the two falling bodies, but the debris knocked against him hard all along his left side.

Victor, groaning, stood up, favoring the one side. Oscar groaned too, the two fallen idiots right on top of him. A man and a woman, both young and bleeding from scrapes they took in the collapse.  The woman had one eye and tech all along one arm. The two had been fighting, maybe, and came in through the bad masonry of the wall.

It was time to get out of here. He shot Oscar in the head—the blood and bone softly shuffling out of his skull—and limped quickly to the stairs.

“Oh my god!”

Victor stopped. At the hole, where everything had caved in, was a beautiful young woman, hand to her mouth. But she was beautiful in...in a way Victor didn’t understand.

In the course of his job he had come across many women who were probably more beautiful than most of the others in the world. At the one-percent of the one-percent mark, beauty entered into an arena where even the slightest flaw marked someone down for being chosen by the most wealthy. Trillionaires never had wives over the age of thirty, and if they did, these women were supported and surrounded by such an amazing array of implants and tech that they could have funded the GDP of whole countries, back in the day when countries actually existed.

This woman wasn’t that kind of beautiful. Her hair wrapped around her shoulders, a loose tangle. She was...she
reminded
him of something. In the way that a sunset would sometimes tug at his heart, in the way that he could not listen to rock and roll without pushing down the sensation of his bouncing legs. Something about her was wrapped around him, already, and seeing her had only woken that part of him.

He put his gun away.

“You need to get out of here,” he said up to the woman. “You need to do it right now.”

She stepped down through the rubble, staring at Victor with a challenge in her eyes

“Or what?” she asked. “Are you going to kill me? Fine. Kill me, then. I’m poor forever. I don’t care. Nothing matters when you’re poor. Haven’t you heard?”

“No. There’s...there’s an earthquake. Very soon. We should go.”

It struck him, this “we” he employed so casually. Still, she didn’t move—the young man underneath her in the rubble tried to glom onto her leg. Victor stepped forward and stomped down on his face.

Watching this, the woman half-sprouted a protest, and then stopped. She smiled for a moment, and then stopped that as well. Victor grabbed her.

“What’s your name?”

“Ana.”

“Okay, Ana. You really want to die?”

“No. I was being—”

“It doesn’t matter. You want to get out of this town?”

“Yes.”

“Then follow me, and let’s go.”

She cooperated without any trouble or backtalk. A woman well-accustomed to being told what to do by a man in charge. He knew this about her; instinctively, he knew it.

Outside, he put a hand to his ear. “Mike? Mike, are you there?”

There was no response. The debris had probably damaged the circuitry somehow. Sometimes excessive noise overloaded the circuits. That wasn't supposed to happen, but that was the way with technology. Always frequent with wonders until it was dead weight in your head.

“Mike, I'm heading to the rendezvous. I have the data. I'll see you in thirty minutes.”

This was, he knew even then, rather wishful thinking.

* * * * *

“T
his is my room,” said Samson. “Don’t break anything.”

“No way.” The copbot slapped its metal fists together. “Only if there’s a bad guy’s face, huh partner?”

Samson’s room was larger than most others on the floor but still smaller than he wanted it to be. The ideal would be a whole floor, maybe, or even a whole building. Just some cave of a warehouse where he could build whatever he wanted with no interruptions. If he could have an entire floor, man. He would have whole assembly lines set up, and working ones too, not like that junk down in the slums. Weapon after weapon, armor after armor, and Crash would never get hit by anything nor worry about anything neither.

But he had a room, layered and layered again with circuitry and with parts, with jars full of free-floating nanos eating away at each other and reproducing like mad. Nanos were the lifeblood of tech, all its uses. The way it integrated with the human body, the way that it could rebuild and adapt.

Long systems of pipes and vacuum tubes ran across the ceiling—Samson needed cooling, heating, freezing, boiling at different intervals and all of it immediate. The room next to his produced climate creation for the entire floor, but eighty percent of its usage was dedicated to Samson’s work.

Long tables, all of them loaded down with metal scrap and organizing bins of nuts and bolts and screws and so on, bordered the walls. He loathed that he had to have space for a toilet.

He did not have a bed. He did not want one. Most of the time he slept on the floor, clearing away whatever rubbish was beneath him. Crash could die while Samson slept, so why risk enjoying sleep? He might do it too often.

Samson had been sleeping, after all, when the men came in and killed his parents.

No sooner had Samson closed the door than did someone knock at it—slammed, really, demanding entry with physicality. Directly after entering, Samson had piled junk in front of the door to make room for Partner. Now he had to move it aside again.

Crash. It would only ever be Crash at Samson’s door.

Jackson Crash was the type of man who filled every room he entered, even one already overfilled like Samson’s. In a crowd of hundreds, he would be noted by nearly everyone as the most important person present—this even if no one knew who he was. In a one-on-one conversation, he elevated himself to something like an avatar, a deity, a demigod—knowing and handling. Seen it all, done it all. Show me what you got. His charisma wrapped others in his wake.

His nose was just slightly too big for his face, hanging down like the edge of an executioner’s axe. The rest of his face—his jaw and eyes—seemed streamlined in toward the middle, angling out his head. He had a tall, wiry frame, covered over in an expensive suit that looked made of silk. Samson knew it was really all tech—knew that in an instant, the silk appearance could alter into a series of interlocking plates that offered Crash complete protection.

It was a one-of-a-kind item, and because it was the
first
of its kind, it had so far broken down often. So many moving pieces couldn’t help but get in the way of one another sometimes. The suit required updates and maintenance almost every day, but that was okay by Samson. He liked the work, and it kept him useful to Crash. It kept Crash alive.

“You need to clean this mess, baby.” Crash kicked at the junk still piling over the door entrance. “You gonna get buried in here.”

“It’s all right. I’ve got plans for all of it.”

“I can hire someone for you, baby. Someone good with this. Someone careful.”

“It’s all right.”

Crash frowned. He disapproved, but it was not a topic where he was willing to exercise his will. He had enough on his mind without worrying about Samson’s mess.

“My hand’s locking up again. You’re gonna fix it for me.”

“Sure, Crash.”

Clearing a table off, metal clanking and dinging, he put Crash’s hand down. It was half-formed into a long, piercing blade. This had been a problem in the past. As armor, it was almost flawless, but Crash had wanted to weaponize it as well. That was harder.

“Goddamn, baby” said Crash, looking up at the copbot. “I heard you had a morning. I didn’t believe it, to tell the truth.”

“We both had mornings,” said Partner. “They ended thirty-eight minutes and forty-two seconds ago. Forty-three. Forty-four—”

“—I got it, baby,” said Crash. “That thing all right?”

“I think so. Its processor seems to have been altered in some way. It’s...friendly.”

“Friendly? A copbot?”

Samson finished with Crash’s hand, whirling his tools back into his belt.

“Tell ‘em, Partner. You’re friendly, right? A good dude?”

“
Yes
. Anyone who is a
Good Dude
also has nothing to fear from me.
Gangsters
abound though. We are in The Tower, where from the bad men of the city come.”

“Is that what they tell you?” asked Crash. “Who’s the baddest of them all?”

“As in, most dangerous? Nicolai Petrov, by most accounts. A thought-criminal, capable of much revolutionary action. His methods are exacting and cruel, and—”

“That wet sock? Ah, baby.” Crash clanked the shoulder of the copbot. “You see what they tell folks? Petrov. Who’s second-best?”

“Second-baddest?”

“Yeah, same thing.”

“Second-
best
is indeterminable from my data. Samson here is clearly the first best that I have seen. Second-
worst
would be Punchee Wallop. Seventy-two murders are suspicioned under him in the database, and—”

“That’s enough.”

Samson, unable to stop himself, asked, “Do you want to ask him who’s third?”

A dangerous glint entered Crash’s eyes.

We all gonna die. You could die just later today.

“You know what, Partner? I gotta talk to my boy here. That all right, baby?”

“Yes! Privacy, very important.” It leaned over to Samson, in a voice that was no doubt intended to be conspiratorial. “Do not worry. No doubt your privacy is being secured at a database in North Dakota.”

Partner stepped out of the room. Crash turned and slapped Samson. It was slow, cold. With as heavy as the suit was, he did not have to put much force behind the blow.

“Third, huh? That what you say, baby?”

“I’m sorry, Jackson.” Samson tried to stand up, head ringing. Crash would get even madder if he stayed on the ground. He’d call Samson a coward.

You could die just later today.

“What, baby?” Hand raised up again, this time with tech spilling over the fingers. “What? What you call me?”