Ascendancies (67 page)

Lyle pulled his remote control and ordered the shop back down.

The door of the shop had been broken open.

Lyle's latest bike-repair client lay sprawled on the floor of the shop, unconscious. She was wearing black military fatigues, a knit cap, and rappelling gear.

She had begun her break-in at Lyle's establishment by pulling his shock-baton out of its glowing security socket beside the doorframe. The booby-trapped baton had immediately put fifteen thousand volts through her, and sprayed her face with a potent mix of dye and street-legal incapacitants.

Lyle turned the baton off with the remote control, and then placed it carefully back in its socket. His surprise guest was still breathing, but was clearly in real metabolic distress. He tried clearing her nose and mouth with a tissue. The guys who'd sold him the baton hadn't been kidding about the “indelible” part. Her face and throat were drenched with green and her chest looked like a spin-painting.

Her elaborate combat spex had partially shielded her eyes. With the spex off she looked like a viridian-green raccoon.

Lyle tried stripping her gear off in conventional fashion, realized this wasn't going to work, and got a pair of metal-shears from the shop. He snipped his way through the eerily writhing power-gloves and the kevlar laces of the pneumoreactive combat boots. Her black turtleneck had an abrasive surface and a cuirass over chest and back that looked like it could stop small-arms fire.

The trousers had nineteen separate pockets and they were loaded with all kinds of eerie little items: a matte-black electrode stun-weapon, flash capsules, fingerprint dust, a utility pocket-knife, drug adhesives, plastic handcuffs, some pocket change, worry beads, a comb, and a makeup case.

Close inspection revealed a pair of tiny microphone amplifiers inserted in her ear canals. Lyle fetched the tiny devices out with needlenose pliers. Lyle was getting pretty seriously concerned by this point. He shackled her arms and legs with bike security cable, in case she regained consciousness and attempted something superhuman.

Around four in the morning she had a coughing fit and began shivering violently. Summer nights could get pretty cold in the shop. Lyle thought over the design problem for some time, and then fetched a big heat-reflective blanket out of the empty room. He cut a neat poncho-hole in the center of it, and slipped her head through it. He got the bike cables off her—she could probably slip the cables anyway—and sewed all four edges of the blanket shut from the outside, with sturdy monofilament thread from his saddle-stitcher. He sewed the poncho edges to a tough fabric belt, cinched the belt snugly around her neck, and padlocked it. When he was done, he'd made a snug bag that contained her entire body, except for her head, which had begun to drool and snore.

A fat blob of superglue on the bottom of the bag kept her anchored to the shop's floor. The blanket was cheap but tough upholstery fabric. If she could rip her way through blanket fabric with her fingernails alone, then he was probably a goner anyway. By now, Lyle was tired and stone sober. He had a squeezebottle of glucose rehydrator, three aspirins, and a canned chocolate pudding. Then he climbed in his hammock and went to sleep.

Lyle woke up around ten. His captive was sitting up inside the bag, her green face stony, eyes red-rimmed and brown hair caked with dye. Lyle got up, dressed, ate breakfast, and fixed the broken door-lock. He said nothing, partly because he thought that silence would shake her up, but mostly because he couldn't remember her name. He was almost sure it wasn't her real name anyway.

When he'd finished fixing the door, he reeled up the string of the doorknocker so that it was far out of reach. He figured the two of them needed the privacy.

Then Lyle deliberately fired up the wallscreen and turned on the settop box. As soon as the peculiar subtitles started showing up again, she grew agitated. “Who are you really?” she demanded at last.

“Ma'am, I'm a bicycle repairman.”

She snorted.

“I guess I don't need to know your name,” he said, “but I need to know who your people are, and why they sent you here, and what I've got to do to get out of this situation.”

“You're not off to a good start, mister.”

“No,” he said, “maybe not, but you're the one who's blown it. I'm just a twenty-four-year-old bicycle repairman from Tennessee. But you, you've got enough specialized gear on you to buy my whole place five times over.”

He flipped open the little mirror in her makeup case and showed her her own face. Her scowl grew a little stiffer below the spattering of green.

“I want you to tell me what's going on here,” he said.

“Forget it.”

“If you're waiting for your backup to come rescue you, I don't think they're coming,” Lyle said. “I searched you very thoroughly and I've opened up every single little gadget you had, and I took all the batteries out. I'm not even sure what some of those things are or how they work, but hey, I know what a battery is. It's been hours now. So I don't think your backup people even know where you are.”

She said nothing.

“See,” he said, “you've really blown it bad. You got caught by a total amateur, and now you're in a hostage situation that could go on indefinitely. I got enough water and noodles and sardines to live up here for days. I dunno, maybe you can make a cellular phone call to God off some gizmo implanted in your thighbone, but it looks to me like you've got serious problems.”

She shuffled around a bit inside the bag and looked away.

“It's got something to do with the cablebox over there, right?”

She said nothing.

“For what it's worth, I don't think that box has anything to do with me or Eddy Dertouzas,” Lyle said. “I think it was probably meant for Eddy, but I don't think he asked anybody for it. Somebody just wanted him to have it, probably one of his weird European contacts. Eddy used to be in this political group called CAPCLUG, ever heard of them?”

It looked pretty obvious that she'd heard of them.

“I never liked 'em much either,” Lyle told her. “They kind of snagged me at first with their big talk about freedom and civil liberties, but then you'd go to a CAPCLUG meeting up in the penthouse levels, and there were all these potbellied zudes in spex yapping off stuff like, ‘We must follow the technological imperatives or be jettisoned into the history dump-file.' They're a bunch of useless blowhards who can't tie their own shoes.”

“They're dangerous radicals subverting national sovereignty.”

Lyle blinked cautiously. “Whose national sovereignty would that be?”

“Yours, mine, Mr. Schweik. I'm from NAFTA, I'm a federal agent.”

“You're a fed? How come you're breaking into people's houses, then? Isn't that against the Fourth Amendment or something?”

“If you mean the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, that document was superseded years ago.”

“Yeah…okay, I guess you're right.” Lyle shrugged. “I missed a lot of civics classes.… No skin off my back anyway. I'm sorry, but what did you say your name was?”

“I said my name was Kitty Casaday.”

“Right. Kitty. Okay, Kitty, just you and me, person to person. We obviously have a mutual problem here. What do you think I ought to do in this situation? I mean, speaking practically.”

Kitty thought it over, surprised. “Mr. Schweik, you should release me immediately, get me my gear, and give me the box and any related data, recordings, or diskettes. Then you should escort me from the Archiplat in some confidential fashion so I won't be stopped by police and questioned about the dye-stains. A new set of clothes would be very useful.”

“Like that, huh?”

“That's your wisest course of action.” Her eyes narrowed. “I can't make any promises, but it might affect your future treatment very favorably.”

“You're not gonna tell me who you are, or where you came from, or who sent you, or what this is all about?”

“No. Under no circumstances. I'm not allowed to reveal that. You don't need to know. You're not supposed to know. And anyway, if you're really what you say you are, what should you care?”

“Plenty. I care plenty. I can't wander around the rest of my life wondering when you're going to jump me out of a dark corner.”

“If I'd wanted to hurt you, I'd have hurt you when we first met, Mr. Schweik. There was no one here but you and me, and I could have easily incapacitated you and taken anything I wanted. Just give me the box and the data and stop trying to interrogate me.”

“Suppose you found me breaking into your house, Kitty? What would you do to me?”

She said nothing.

“What you're telling me isn't gonna work. If you don't tell me what's really going on here,” Lyle said heavily, “I'm gonna have to get tough.”

Her lips thinned in contempt.

“Okay, you asked for this.” Lyle opened the mediator and made a quick voice call. “Pete?”

“Nah, this is Pete's mook,” the phone replied. “Can I do something for you?”

“Could you tell Pete that Lyle Schweik has some big trouble, and I need him to come over to my bike shop immediately? And bring some heavy muscle from the Spiders.”

“What kind of big trouble, Lyle?”

“Authority trouble. A lot of it. I can't say any more. I think this line may be tapped.”

“Right-o. I'll make that happen. Hoo-ah, zude.” The mook hung up.

Lyle left the beanbag and went back to the workbench. He took Kitty's cheap bike out of the repair stand and angrily threw it aside. “You know what really bugs me?” he said at last. “You couldn't even bother to charm your way in here, set yourself up as my roommate, and then steal the damn box. You didn't even respect me that much. Heck, you didn't even have to steal anything, Kitty. You could have just smiled and asked nicely and ‘I'd have given you the box to play with. I don't watch media, I hate all that crap.”

“It was an emergency. There was no time for more extensive investigation or reconnaissance. I think you should call your gangster friends immediately and tell them you've made a mistake. Tell them not to come here.”

“You're ready to talk seriously?”

“No, I won't be talking.”

“Okay, we'll see.”

After twenty minutes, Lyle's phone rang. He answered it cautiously, keeping the video off. It was Pete from the City Spiders. “Zude, where is your doorknocker?”

“Oh, sorry, I pulled it up, didn't want to be disturbed. I'll bring the shop right down.” Lyle thumbed the brake switches.

Lyle opened the door and Pete broad-jumped into the shop. Pete was a big man but he had the skeletal, wiry build of a climber, bare dark arms and shins and big sticky-toed jumping shoes. He had a sleeveless leather bodysuit full of clips and snaps, and he carried a big fabric shoulderbag. There were six vivid tattoos on the dark skin of his left cheek, under the black stubble.

Pete looked at Kitty, lifted his spex with wiry callused fingers, looked at her again bare-eyed, and put the spex back in place. “Wow, Lyle.”

“Yeah.”

“I never thought you were into anything this sick and twisted.”

“It's a serious matter, Pete.”

Pete turned to the door, crouched down, and hauled a second person into the shop. She wore a beat-up air-conditioned jacket and long slacks and zipsided boots and wire-rimmed spex. She had short ratty hair under a green cloche hat. “Hi,” she said, sticking out a hand. “I'm Mabel. We haven't met.”

“I'm Lyle.” Lyle gestured. “This is Kitty here in the bag.”

“You said you needed somebody heavy, so I brought Mabel along,” said Pete. “Mabel's a social worker.”

“Looks like you pretty much got things under control here,” said Mabel liltingly, scratching her neck and looking about the place. “What happened? She break into your shop?”

“Yeah.”

“And,” Pete said, “she grabbed the shock-baton first thing and blasted herself but good?”

“Exactly.”

“I told you that thieves always go for the weaponry first,” Pete said, grinning and scratching his armpit. “Didn't I tell you that? Leave a weapon in plain sight, man, a thief can't stand it, it's the very first thing they gotta grab.” He laughed. “Works every time.”

“Pete's from the City Spiders,” Lyle told Kitty. “His people built this shop for me. One dark night, they hauled this mobile home right up thirty-four stories in total darkness, straight up the side of the Archiplat without anybody seeing, and they cut a big hole through the side of the building without making any noise, and they hauled the whole shop through it. Then they sank explosive bolts through the girders and hung it up here for me in midair. The City Spiders are into sport-climbing the way I'm into bicycles, only, like, they are very
seriously
into climbing and there are lots of them. They were some of the very first people to squat the zone, and they've lived here ever since, and they are pretty good friends of mine.”

Pete sank to one knee and looked Kitty in the eye. “I love breaking into places, don't you? There's no thrill like some quick and perfectly executed break-in.” He reached casually into his shoulder bag. “The thing is”—he pulled out a camera—“to be sporting, you can't steal anything. You just take trophy pictures to prove you were there.” He snapped her picture several times, grinning as she flinched.

“Lady,” he breathed at her, “once you've turned into a little wicked greed-head, and mixed all that evil cupidity and possessiveness into the beauty of the direct action, then you've prostituted our way of life. You've gone and spoiled our sport.” Pete stood up. “We City Spiders don't like common thieves. And we especially don't like thieves who break into the places of clients of ours, like Lyle here. And we thoroughly, especially, don't like thieves who are so brick-head dumb that they get caught red-handed on the premises of friends of ours.”