He tuned it out and chased the machete boy, as close as the sparse night-time crowds would allow.
He’d long ago learnt that when the untrained are chased, they look back a lot in the early stages of the pursuit, but rapidly gain confidence if no pursuer is readily apparent. He supposed it was evolved tendency – if the big predator doesn’t get you in the first few minutes, you’re probably clear. In any event, the trick was to hang back and let your quarry build up that confidence, then tighten up and follow until they take you where you want to go. It rarely failed.
Of course, he would have liked more cover. The late shoppers were a thin crowd and to make matters worse a typical Rim mix, which meant black or white faces were a lot less common than Asian or Hispanic. And the boy with the machete seemed curiously fixated on Carl’s skin colour. That might just have been standard, antiquated race hate – the boy was after all from Jesusland and spouting religious gibberish to match, so anything was possible – but even if it wasn’t, machete boy would be looking back for a black face, and there weren’t that many in the crowd. Carl needed him to see a few, suffer the jolt-drop of terror and then the relief as he wrote the sighting off. The more times that happened, the more the boy’s adrenal response to a black face was going to decay, and the more he’d relax.
He hung back, he used the mirrored surfaces, the camera playback-and-display narcissism of the mall space, and he watched as his quarry’s frantic, spinning, backward-staring run damped down to a slower, purposeful threading through the crowd. The full body turns became frequent over-the-shoulder glances, and then not so frequent. Carl eased forward, keeping behind knots of shoppers and going bent-kneed where there was no one tall enough to give him cover.
Then the shops ran out.
They’d been dropping levels slowly but steadily, taking gleaming marbled stairways and the odd gleaming jewel-box elevator, all consistently downward. At first Carl thought they might be heading back to Daskeen Azul, but they’d already gone too low for that, and he didn’t think the boy had the skills or presence of mind to lay a double-back track. In the frontages, prices came down. Empty rental space began to interpose itself between the taken units. The holodisplays got ragged, the merchandise and the way it was sold took on an imitative quality, a not-quite-good copy of what the upper decks carried. The services on offer became less wholesome, or at least less smoothly packaged. Killbitch available, he saw in cheap neon, wasn’t sure what it referred to, wasn’t sure he wanted to. Elsewhere, someone had spraycanned a huge empty rectangle on the glass front of an untenanted unit and filled it with the words: BUY CONSUME DIE – ARTWORK TO FOLLOW. No one had cleaned it off.
The boy flickered left out of the flow of shoppers and took another staircase. This time it was a utilitarian unpolished metal affair, and no one else was using it. When Carl got to it, he could hear his quarry’s steps clattering down in the well.
Fuck.
He waited until the metallic footfalls stopped, then went down after them, trying to make as little noise as possible. At the bottom of the well, he found himself in a low-rent residential section, simple green security doors set in bleak grey corridor walls whose ragged graffiti scars were almost a relief. A steady thrum in the structure suggested heavy duty engines somewhere close. The floor was dirty, stains and patches of dust that crunched underfoot, neat lines of detritus swept to the sides either by mechanical cleaning carts or possibly the residents themselves. Clear evidence, if he’d been in need of it, that the nano-hygiene systems didn’t make it down here much. Nor, he supposed, did anyone else who didn’t either live here or know someone who did.
Which, of course, made it perfect for Merrin.
The corridor was deserted. Receding rows of closed doors and no sign of machete boy anywhere. Branch corridors up ahead to left and right, the same story again when he reached them and peered down the dingy perspectives they offered. Meshed-up tension sagging slowly into the realisation that his quarry had gone to ground. He held off the settling feeling as best he could, prowled down the left hand branch passage, ears tuned past the engine thrum for the sound of voices or footsteps. Well aware – I know, I fucking know – that the doors would have security cameras and that each one he passed upped the risk of being spotted if his quarry was in one of the apartments behind, watching the screen.
He did it anyway. Maybe machete boy had got hold of another weapon and was up for another shot at killing the black man.
He found a zone plan screwed to a wall at the next intersection, studied it and got a sense of how the area was laid out. The wall next to the map offered the deadpan grafitto’d legend: You are Here I’m afraid – Deal with It. He grinned despite himself and prowled back the way he’d come, aiming to start a proper search pattern. Something to do until RimSec got there in force. He’d have to hope the lockdown worked.
Behind him, the clank-punt of a door disengaging its locks. He spun about, combat crouch in the making when he saw the woman backing out of the open doorway. She wore nondescript coveralls, some logo he didn’t recognise, and had her corkscrew-unruly hair gathered up in a tight band. Mestiza complexion, unlit spliff tucked into the corner of her mouth. By the time she’d fully turned, he was casual again.
‘Hey there.’
She appraised him with a head to foot look. ‘What’s the matter, you lost?’
‘Next best thing.’ He built her a smile. ‘I’m supposed to meet some guy down here works for Daskeen Azul, think either I’ve taken a wrong turn or he has.’
‘That right?’
She was looking at the S(t)igma jacket, he realised. Maybe the corporation and what it did wasn’t standard knowledge out this far west, but unless you were immune to continental American news digests, it was hard to misunderstand the style of the jacket and the bright chevrons down the sleeve. He sighed.
‘Chasing a job, you know,’ he said, faking weariness. ‘Guy says he can maybe get me some hours.’
Another flickered assessment. She nodded and took the spliff out of her mouth, turned and gestured with it, back to the corner with the map. ‘See that right turn there. Take that, two blocks straight then one left. Takes you through the bulkhead to starboard loading. Think Daskeen got a couple of berths there. You’re not far out – probably just got the wrong stairwell down off Margarita thoroughfare. ’
‘Right.’ He let the renewed pulsing of the mesh leak through as eagerness. ‘Hey, thanks a lot.’
‘No problem. Here.’ She handed him the spliff. ‘You get the work, celebrate on me.’
‘Oh, hey, you don’t have to do—’
‘Take it, man.’ She held it out until he did. ‘Think I’ve never been where you are now?’
‘Thanks. Thank you. Look, I’d better—’
‘Sure. Don’t want to be late for your job interview.’
He grinned and nodded, wheeled about and stalked rapidly back to the corner. As soon as he rounded it, he broke into a flat run.
‘Who is this?’
‘This is Guava Diamond. We are blown, Claw Control. Repeat, we are blown. Heaven-sent is endangered at best, fully exposed at worst. I don’t know what the fuck you’re playing at over there, but this is out of nowhere. We have no cover and no exit strategy I can guarantee. Request immediate extraction.’
The bulkhead was a lustrous nanofibre black, raw and shiny and as distinct from the grey walls of the residential section as his Hilton-bought shirt was from the inmate jacket he wore over it. Bright yellow markings delineated the access hatches. By the look of it, they could be simply coded shut at a molecular level, hinges and locks turning to an unbroken whole with the surface of the hatch. He passed through, stabbed suddenly with memories of Mars. It hit him that ever since he’d got down from the shopping levels, that was what this place brought to mind. Life on Mars. Right down to the camaraderie of the helpful mestiza, the freely offered spliff.