The datapoint was a blunt concrete outcrop two metres tall and about the same wide, swelling from the wall of a commercial unit like some kind of architectural tumor. It was fitted with a solid tantalum alloy door. Heavily grilled LCLS panels set into the top of the structure threw down a pale crystalline light. Carl stepped into the radiance and felt, ludicrously, like some kind of stage performer. He punched his general access code into the pad and the door cycled open. Old memories and scar tissue from Caracas made him usher the girl inside and bang a fist on the rapid-lock button as soon as they were both in. The door cycled again.
The interior was much the same as secure modules he’d used the world over, an iris reader mask on a flexible stalk, a broad screen edged with an integral speaker and set above a wafer dispenser, a double-width chair moulded up from the floor, presumably for obese patrons rather than courting couples. The girl, in any case, stayed discreetly on her feet, looked pointedly away from the screen. She really had been here with clients before.
‘Hello sir,’ said the datapoint chattily. ‘Would you like to hear the customer options available to—’
‘No.’ Carl fitted the iris reader over his head, blinked a couple of times into the lens cups and waited for the chime that told him he’d been read. Idly he wondered what would happen if he ever had to do this with a black eye.
‘Thank you, sir. You may now access your accounts.’
He took the credit in ten limited-load wafers, reasoning that the girl wouldn’t want to trust a clandestine clinic with a single upfront payment. As he handed them to her in the cramped space, he realised that he didn’t know her name. A couple of seconds after that, the second realisation hit home, that he didn’t really want to. She took the wafers in silence, looked him up and down in a way that made him think she might try to give him a gratitude blow-job there in the cabin. But then she muttered thanks in a voice so low he almost missed it and he wondered if he was, after all, just one more sick-headed fuck with an overactive imagination. He thumped the lock stud again and the door cycled open on a compressed sigh. He followed her out.
‘Okay, boy! Get your motherfucking hands up where I can see them!’
The yell was off to his left, the shapes that jumped him came from both sides. The mesh leapt alive like joy. He grabbed an arm, locked it and hurled its owner towards the dying echo of the voice. Curses and stumbling. The other figure tried to grapple with him, there was some technique in there somewhere, but… he yanked hard, got a warding arm down and smashed an elbow into the face behind. He felt the nose break. Pain wrung a high yelp from his attacker. He stepped, hooked with one foot and pushed. The one with the broken nose went down. There was another one, coming back from the left again. He spun about, fierce grin and crooked hands, saw his target. Blocky, slope shouldered, fading pro-wrestler type. Carl feinted, then kicked him in the belly as he rushed in. Sobbing grunt and the solid feel of a good connecting strike, but the big man’s impetus carried him forward and Carl had to dance sharply aside to avoid being taken down.
Then someone clubbed him in the head from behind.
He heard it coming, felt the motion in the air at his ear, was turning towards the attack, but way too late to get clear. Black exploded through him, speckled with tiny, tiny sparks. He pivoted and went down in the crystalline light around the datapoint. His vision inked out, inked back in. Another blunt figure came and stood over him. Through the waltzing colours that washed up and down behind his eyes, he saw a gun muzzle and stopped struggling.
‘Miami Vice, asshole. You stay down or I’ll drill a hole right in your fucking head.’
They arrested him, of course.
CHAPTER THREE
6.13 a.m.
Low strands of cloud in a rinsed-out pre-dawn sky. Last night’s drizzle still sequined on the black metal carapaces of the rap-rep shuttles, evercrete landing apron damp with it, and spots of rain still in the air. Joey Driscoll came out of the canteen with a tall canister of self-heating coffee in each hand, arms spread wide as if he was trying to balance the weight, eyes heavy lidded with end-of-shift drowse. His mouth unzipped in a cavernous yawn.
The siren hit, upward-winding like the threat of a gigantic dentist’s drill.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake…’
For a moment he stood in weary disbelief – then the coffee canisters hit the evercrete and he was running resignedly for the tackle room. Above his head, the sirens made it to their first hitched-in breath and started the cranking whine all over again. Big LCLS panels on the hangar lintels lit with flashing amber. Off to the left, under the sirens, he heard the deeper-throated grind of the rapid response shuttles’ turbines kicking in. Maybe a minute and a half tops before they hit pitch. Two more minutes for crew loading and then they’d be lifting, dipping and bopping on the apron like dogs trying to tug loose of a tight leash. Anyone late aboard was going to get their balls cut off.
He made the tackle-room door, just as Zdena darted out of it, tactical vest still not fully laced on, helmet dangling off the lower edge, XM still long-stocked in her hand from standing in the rack. Wide-mouthed Slavic grin as she saw him.
‘Where’s my fucking coffee, Joe?’ She had to shout over the sirens.
‘Back there on the concrete. You want it, go lick it up.’ He gestured up in exasperation at the noise. ‘I mean, fuck. Forty minutes to shift change, and we get this shit.’
‘Why they pay us, cowboy.’
She snapped the XM’s stock down to carbine length and secured it there, shoved the weapon into the long stick-grip sheath on her thigh and focused on pulling the buckles tight on her tac vest. Joe shouldered past her.
‘They pay us?
Into the riot of the tackle room at alert. A dozen other bodies, yelling, cursing at their superannuated gear, laughing out the tension like dogs barking. Joe grabbed vest, helmet, T-mask off the untidy piles on the counter, didn’t bother putting any of it on. Experience had taught him to do that in the belly of the rap-rep as it tilted out over the Pacific. He gripped the upright barrel of an XM in its recess on the rack, struggled briefly with it as the release catch failed to give, finally snapped the assault rifle free and headed back for the door.
Forty fucking minutes, man.
Zdena was already sitting on the lowered tail gate of Blue One, helmet fitted loosely, unmasked, grinning at him as he panted up and hauled himself, ass-slithering, aboard. She leaned in to yell above the screech of the turbines.
‘Hey, cowboy. You ready for rock and roll?’
He could never work out if she was hamming up the Natasha accent or not. They’d not been working together that long, she’d come in with the new hires at the end of May. He figured – and etiquette said you never never asked – she was probably licensed outland labour, at least as legal as he was these days. He doubted she’d hopped the fence the way he had though. More likely she was across from the Siberian coastal strip or maybe one of those Russian factory rafts further south, part of that fucking Pacific Rim labour fluidity they were always talking about. Of course, for all he knew, she might even be west-coast born and bred. Out here, mangled English didn’t necessarily signify anything. Wasn’t like back in the Republic, where they blanket-enforced Amanglic, punished the kids in school for speaking anything else. In the Rim States, English was strictly a trade tongue – you learnt it to the extent you needed it, which, depending on the barrio you grew up in, didn’t have to be that much.