Escapology (10 page)

The Guns lead her through the house into the Solarium at the back, a fragile pod of glass and metal. Twist’s twist as he likes to call it, its Neo-Gothic ornamental spikes and lancet arches so at odds with the ancient Japanese elegance of the rest of the house. Twist waits there on a spindly Louis chair.

He doesn’t offer her a seat, though the Solarium’s full of more of the same, which Amiga takes as a bad sign. As they approach, he raises a finger and the Guns move away. Amiga tries to pretend the loosening in her back is unrelated. Yeah, right. And she’s not on the verge of puking either.

“So. Better late than never,” he says, and this time there’s nothing in his demeanour to reassure.

She restrains her tongue from going into overdrive on apologies and nods, keeping up that pretence of who he thinks she is.

“Yeah.”

“You look a bit worse for wear. Everything okay?”

“Dandy.”

Twist looks at her gloved hands.

“Injury? Again?”

“Misjudged my exit. No one saw and zero evidence left.”

He tuts. “You’ve a habit for clumsiness these days, Amiga. Lucky you’re one of my best. Get it seen to, eh? Wouldn’t like anyone thinking I don’t take care of my family.”

“I will.”

“See that you do.” He tilts his head in the direction of her shoulder. “Something of mine in there?”

“There is indeed.”

Amiga hooks the black sack out of her bag, trying to conceal the overwhelming relief she feels at finally being rid of it. Placing it on the table, she loosens the ties, revealing a half squashed human head, neatly drained of blood and missing eyes, ears and nose. The resulting holes are sewn up with coarse black thread. In life, this head belonged to a lowdown piece of drug-running shit called Nero. Delusions of grandeur. His real name was apparently Terence. And now it’s mud.

Twist’s mouth twitches. “Nice touch with the thread.”

“I like to improvise.”

The twitch briefly widens to a smile. He reaches out, flicks the sack back over Terence’s remains.

“Okay. Okay, Amiga. You pass this time. But…” He leans toward her, those excavating eyes of his drilling for black gold in her brain. “Look, you’re an asset to me, but I’m not blind. I know there’s shit going down and you’re up to your pretty little neck in it, you and that J-Hack rabble you call friends. All I ask is that you don’t drag me into it. Don’t make me have to Clean a favourite. Understand?”

She nods, her heart slamming into her ribcage, hard enough to crack bone.

“Understood.”

“Good. Now get that in my vault.”

Summarily dismissed, Amiga grabs her bag and leaves the Solarium, heading toward the living areas and the vault. Twist’s money has bought the kind of vault some of the wealthiest oligarchs in Foon Gung would give their eyeteeth for: a set of rooms armoured like tanks and armed to the teeth.

And she’s got to steal from it.

“This had better be worth it,” she mutters, moving into the maze of storage as it allows her egress.

First things first, she places the head in the show case, standing clear as it plops gently into its glass aquarium full of preservative and using the glass rod to nudge it until it rests neck down. It’s a pretty gallery of the dead this, everyone who ever crossed Twist, or thought about trying.

“I’ll be here soon,” she says to Terence. “Probably look even prettier than you. Won’t that be a treat?” He doesn’t reply, not even in her imagination, but then his mouth is sewn shut, and she’s a pragmatist all the way through.

Activating surveillance interference supplied by Deuce, she throws her physical signal so it looks like she’s still at the tanks and races to the data-storage facility. Deuce also gave her means to access it without detection, a piece of Hunt/Collect software cluttering her neural drive she can’t wait to purge. Jacking in, she lets the H/C do its work, rooting out the package Fellows insists is here.

Amiga can hack to a degree. She was on track for Corp and has a fair working knowledge of Slip, Tech and code, but Deuce’s shit is way beyond her knowledge, so she’s doing this on trust. Not her strong point. It makes for uneasy waiting. But just as Fellows said, the package in question is there, and Amiga works quickly to DL a copy of it, hearing the ticking of the clock loud as death knells.

It takes literally seconds, which does precisely nothing to make Amiga feel less likely to puke up the entire wet contents of her ribcage, and two minutes later she’s walking out through the gates, waving her usual flippant middle finger at Geo and resisting taking the shoot. Twist may not immediately grasp his storage has been accessed. He may even take weeks to notice, as Deuce insisted would be the case, but he’ll click in a light second to unusual behaviour. So she’ll walk back down and all the way to the mono, no matter how exhausted and frightened she is right now, because that’s what she always does.

Anything to keep breathing, that’s her motto, and it’s precisely how she’s lasted long enough to be risking her stupid life all over again.

Her wheels ploughing up sixty-foot sprays of brine and foam,
Resurrection
sweeps across open water like a cyclone. She’s sailing what used to be the East China Sea, triangulating in on a distress signal, some unfortunate perhaps worked over by pirates or come a cropper on the spikes hidden beneath the ocean around the East China Ranges. Serrated masses of solid rock that, due to a lack of basic sonar equipment, take two or three ships per year.

Once upon a time there were almost one and a half thousand land ships on the ocean, now there are only a few hundred. Give it another century, maybe less, and this way of life will be nothing but a memory. So much of the old world has been lost; it seems a shame that the new might follow it into history so soon.

This signal is loud and will have been heard by others.
Resurrection
’s aiming to be first on the scene. If the ship they find is a total loss, they’ll grab whatever they can before it’s claimed by the sea and rescue any survivors. If it’s not, they’ll help it regain sea-worthiness and fend off anyone who might have followed the signal with less honourable intentions.

Perched on his crow at the prow, doused in errant spray and sweeping the horizon through his ’scope for signs of their ship in distress, Petrie spots a glinting in the sky on their port side. Now what in hell is that?

Incoming sou’west
, he roars at the port crows.
Who’s got eyes out there. C’mon!

He looks back through his ’scope. The glinting is larger now, bright as lens flare, and trailing an unmistakable smoking tail. Monkey-agile, he leaps to the ropes, clipping on to spin down, and as he heads for the port side sentry shouts arouse the attention of Cassius Angel, his captain, perched atop the crow at the centre today instead of his customary position on the crow base beneath.

A tall, rawboned man of Nigerian descent, covered in patterns of tribal scars like the flowering chaos of migrating birds, Cassius jumps from his perch and slides to the nearest walkway on frayed ropes. He reaches port side at a flat run just as Petrie does.

“What gives?” he shouts to Petrie over the churn of the wheels.

“Looks like a sec-drone,” Petrie yells back, struggling to see the thing through the bright halo of sunlight refracting from its shell as it plummets toward the ocean.

Cassius raises a brow. “All this way out?”

“Can’t be anything else. Only birds, cities and drones fly these days.”

Acknowledging that with an incline of the head, Cassius says, “Unusual to be sure.”

“More’n that. Drone from the land being this far out in the drink. You for taking a look or taking it out?”

“It’s not firing,” Cassius replies thoughtfully, his more reasoned approach being why he’s captain and Petrie’s second in command. “Looks like it’s damaged, coming in smoking like that. I want a look at it. A careful look. Just to be sure we aren’t in for some kind of trouble.”

“Aye.”

Spinning his clip clamp to max, Petrie clips on to a thick side rope and leaps over the edge, spinning down to join the men and women on the gantries below. The whole of
Resurrection
is encased on her upper level in a steel framework, within which rest her wheels, her schooner bays and her loading gear, including rank upon rank of grappling hooks ready to use in all their retrieval and rescue operations.

Unravelling the hooks ready to pull in the drone, they’re soaked by the impact wave. The drone hits with a sucking roar of sound as whatever’s on fire in its tail is deprived of oxygen. Gasping through freezing water as the hooks splash in, snagging purchase, Petrie begins to haul.

He’s only ever seen drones in the distance under lights and sun and when it finally breaks clear of the water, he’s stunned by its beauty and surprising elegance. Shaped like a ray and see-through, the shell and innards something like glass but tougher and reactive to touch; intricately sectioned wings writhing helplessly within their grasp as they pull it up the
City
’s rearing side onto the flat.

“Unexpected,” Cassius murmurs in his deep drawl, running a curious hand the length of the body section and watching as the segments roll together smoothly, rearing away from his touch. “Looks like it belongs in sea, not sky.”

“I don’t like it being here,” Petrie mutters.

His captain looks at him. “You in favour of blowing it sky high, Bosun?”

“Depends. Drones don’t allow themselves to get taken like this, not even damaged. Their weapons systems are designed to self-heal. It being out here, and helpless to boot, is probably no coincidence.”

“Agreed. But I want it examined to see what’s going on.”

Swaddled in a sling and attached to the winch, the drone’s hauled to the workshops by crews of men and women, all shouting out the count, their muscles gleaming under sunlight and water drops. Inch by inch they lower it in through the access hatch where the workshop crews work swiftly to fasten it safe to two heavy machine benches.

Cassius and Petrie arrive in the workshops as the last straps are being secured. Scratch, Chief Tech of the
Resurrection
, bounds over enthusiastically, his dog, Samson, trotting at his heels, panting clouds of foul breath into the hot confines of the ’shop. Petrie moves downwind, waving a not so discreet hand. In his opinion Scratch smells as bad as the mangy mutt attached to his shadow and has about as little shame.

“Opinions, Scratch,” Cassius demands, before the Tech’s even had a moment to lay hands on the vast machine taking up two of his benches. “Petrie here says this thing can self-heal its weapons systems, so why aren’t we taking fire?”

“Bosun ain’t wrong.”

“So…?” Cassius moves back a pace, his hand falling to the spike-gun at his hip.

Scratch flips down his visor. A soft whirring comes from within as he accesses schematics, checks general safety. He sniffs. Shrugs.

“It’s not broken, just mostly offline. Stripped to bare functions and disconnected from the collective. Helpless.”

Petrie and Cassius exchange deeply interested glances.

“How’s it here? Coincidence?” Cassius asks.

“Not a bit of it. It’s been tasked to find us. I’m seeing specs for a ship that has to be this one, and a package, locked up with quite the crypt payload. Uh… and it’s got Volk’s name on it.”

“Volk?” Cassius frowns.

Petrie’s stomach clenches, a shot of acid firing up into his throat.

“Refugee. I er… took her on at the Gung when we docked for our server check. She’s been working between Tech crews. Very knowledgeable. Very useful. I knew she was on the run from something, but this…” He swallows. Shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Captain. I made a mistake.”

Cassius reaches out a large hand to grasp Petrie’s shoulder.

“Hold hard there, Bosun. We have no idea if this is trouble or not yet. Let’s gather the facts before we leap.” He turns back to Scratch. “Anything you can see right now to suggest why a new crew member’s name might be there?”

“Beats me,” he says. “For what it’s worth, Cap, I like the woman. Knows her stuff, like Petrie said. Bit remote like and weird eyes from all her implant tech, but she fits. Does more’n her fair share. Smart as a freakin’ whip. Can’t say as I look at her and think
trouble
, knoworramean?”

“I hear you, Scratch. Duly noted. What about the damage?”

“Low-range EMP knocked out some of its propulsion systems. Reckon we got pirates.” Scratch flips up the visor. “I figure since their first shots failed, they’ll not be far behind.”

And, as if he’s conjured them by speaking, the attack sirens out on the lookout crows begin to howl.

“Anything against saying that right off?” Petrie yells, furious, and receives one of Scratch’s eloquent shrugs in response.

Side by side, he and Cassius sprint from the workshops as the ship responds to the threat with a well-oiled, much-practiced routine proven in many a previous battle. Citizens drain downward back onto the living deck via specially designated free routes, hurrying to safety, calling in children too young for school and bolting their doors.

Whilst they disappear, the ship’s crew comes from every level and hits the sides to work the big fifty-cal guns and the harpoons, or take up smaller arms. There are thousands of active crew members but this takes place in mere minutes, the guns clanking and rising to aim before the first round of attack sirens has run through.

Approaching on the port side are three pirate schooners. Sixty-footers, riddled with guns and armour. By the time they’re within range, the
Resurrection
’s heavy artillery is locked in and loaded and begins a smooth, relentless barrage of ammo made from alloys smelted and moulded in Scratch’s workshop. The sea around the schooners churns wildly with heavy impacts punctuated by cataclysmic explosions of wood and steel.

Given no time to properly respond, the schooners manage only a few rough return shots that barely make it to within fifty metres of
Resurrection
’s sides and then they’re panicking, trying to turn. They won’t make it. These are advance ships and they’re too small to have any chance whatsoever against the might of a land ship of
Resurrection
’s size.