Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (45 page)

“Perhaps if we join forces, we can find it together.”

At the stairs, they met Carlton who said, “Ah, Ms. Ashe. Mr. Blackwater has asked if he can remove one of the walls of the ballroom.”

Said ballroom was enormous, and smelled like cookies for some reason. It was absolutely choked with Christmas decorations, as if they had done the rest of the house and then realized they still had four metric tons of wreathes, bows, candles, lights, and hundreds of other festive doodads left over, then decided to just cram them all into this room.

A group of men in overalls were already tearing out the far wall with saws and sledgehammers, so Will apparently had just asked permission as a courtesy. Andre came bounding over to meet Zoey and Wu at the door, out of breath. He was in jeans and a paint-stained sweatshirt—work clothes.

“We got a flatbed out there, too wide to get into the garage. Too tall, too. Gonna have to turn the ballroom into a workshop.”

Andre then walked up to the small table near the door, broke off a corner, and ate it. Zoey stared at him, dumbstruck.

“Gingerbread. Every year Arthur did a big Christmas blowout party in here, all his rich friends and their kids. Called it a Wonka party, turned this whole room into a candy palace where everything was edible. See them snowmen in the corners? They're all marshmallow, you could go over and take a bite out of one right now. The tree over there is hard candy branches and chocolate ornaments. Graham cracker shelves over there. There's 'sposed to be chocolate fountains everywhere you could dip the stuff in. Cost over a hundred grand to have it all made. Party was supposed to be the thirteenth but, you know. Got canceled.”

Zoey said, “I feel like you're trying to distract me from what's going on with the wall back there.”

“Budd knew a guy who knew a guy who knew where we could get a fabricator. One like we need, I mean, capable of doing nano-level builds. Tech startup in the Bay Area owned it, was using it to make prototype Blink eyeball implants or somethin'. Now it belongs to us. Fees for the high-speed freight were obscene.”

“Do I want to know what you had to do to get that thing?”

“Let's put it this way. You now own a tech startup in the Bay Area.”

One of the workers along the wall called out a warning and everyone scattered. The wall collapsed inward in a cloud of dust, revealing the night sky and ushering in a blast of chilled air from the courtyard. A pair of forklifts rolled into the room, leaving muddy tracks across the black and white marble tiles. Behind them came the flatbed truck, an enormous vehicle that Zoey figured they probably used to transport airliner parts or something. On the back was a series of round lumps covered in tarps. So this was what it was like, she thought. Whether you want a pizza, bodyguard, brand-new BMW, or a multimillion-dollar gadget-making machine, you pick up the phone and a little later it comes rolling up your driveway.

The machine was the size of a freight train car. It was cylindrical and flat black—identical to the one she'd seen in Arthur's death video that Zoey had thought had looked like a huge, black alien worm, or grub. The workers were buzzing around it, staff from the tech firm they'd bought out who had been paid an obscene amount of cash to make the rail trip from Sunnyvale, California, and work through the night. They were running cables and huddling around holographic displays, tweaking settings. Behind them, a team of men were hauling out wall debris in wheelbarrows and three masons were already bricking up the giant hole with startling efficiency. She figured by sunrise the wall would look good as new, an invisible amount of money deducted from some account to cover it all. It really was like a magic trick, just slower, and noisier.

By the time they finished getting the thing set up, Zoey was sitting cross-legged on the floor and eating the leg off a peanut brittle reindeer while Andre stood over her, gnawing on a piece of antler he'd broken off, devouring their prey like a pair of candy-eating jackals. Andre had found eggnog somewhere, and had been adding an unhealthy amount of brandy to each of their glasses.

Will approached just as Andre was crinkling his forehead at Zoey and saying, “I don't understand, you're sayin' my head looks like a hamburger?”

“No, not a Whopper from Burger King. A Whopper, like the candy. Little chocolate balls? Full of some kind of industrial foam?”

Will—the only person in the room still wearing a suit and tie—gestured to the machine and said, “Congratulations, the ballroom is now a fully functional factory. Feed it the raw materials, and it can weave carbon fiber, manufacture graphene or nano-tubes or aerogel, it can build a working microprocessor or circuit board … almost anything.”

Zoey said, “Tell it to make me a mug of hot chocolate, and a baby goat to cuddle.”

“It's not a Star Trek replicator. It manufactures parts for electronics, and nano-scale components.”

Zoey said, “Right, right. I think it looks like a giant alien caterpillar. Andre says it looks like a turd a giant robot left on the floor. What do you think?”

“Are you guys drunk?”

“Not yet, but we're working as fast as we can. Be patient.”

Andre said, “I don't think she has your tolerance, Will. Not as much practice.”

Will ignored this and said, “Anyway, this is the same model Arthur had in his warehouse, the schematics on the coin drive should be specifically written to work with it. You plug in the instructions at this end, where all the monitors are—”

“And the caterpillar poops out a gadget on the other end,” finished Zoey. “Neat.”

Zoey noticed Echo walking over in a cute belted sweater and tights that she probably thought was her gross-manual-labor outfit. “It's supposedly ready to go. I tried to get a crash course on how to work the machine but the lead tech insisted on talking to me like I was his four-year-old daughter asking him what butterflies are made of.”

Will said, “They can't stay here, they already know more than I'd prefer, and they sure as hell can't see what's on that coin drive.”

Echo shrugged. “I'll figure it out.” She made a noise like she could feel a headache coming on. “I always do.”

As the techs packed up to leave, Zoey nodded toward Will and asked Echo, “You ever seen him in anything but a suit?”

“I've seen him … not in a suit, yes.”

“What was he—oh my god. I'm sorry I asked.”

Once the crew had shuffled out, Will handed Echo the coin and said, “Okay, fire it up.”

Zoey thought that as efficient and futuristic as the fabricator looked and probably was, it was still noisy as hell. It whirred and crackled and thunked, pushing components from one process to the next, assembling, soldering, curing, polishing, and god knew what else. It also stank, the flexible ventilation ducts they'd run to the windows unable to contain the smell of a machine that was melting and cooking various presumably toxic materials. Budd said the fabricator used enough juice to power a small city, but she didn't know if that was an actual amount or just a figure of speech. Somebody would find out when the electric bill came due.

Soon there was a ding and a green light, and everyone gathered at the mouth of the machine, just a chute onto which the caterpillar coughed up the finished product into a cradle lined with black egg crate foam. The object that had slid out was an unimpressive little thing, a little shiny metal pyramid about an inch on each side, with a plastic loop to hook around your hand.

Zoey asked, “So what is it?”

Echo shrugged. “No idea. The device schematics aren't labeled in any way that I can read. I picked the one that showed the shortest estimated production time.”

“Does it go …
inside
you?”

Andre said, “Damn, I hope not.”

Will said, “A lot of what's on here will be test devices, components, early prototypes, and so on. Looks handheld, whatever it is.”

Somewhat drunkenly, Andre said, “Hell, I'll give it a shot.”

Zoey asked, “How do we know it isn't a bomb?”

“It has a handle. Why would you wanna strap a bomb to your hand?”

Will said, “Still, you should take it outside. I don't want you to damage the equipment.”

They took a side door to the courtyard, where a dead pig was suspended from a wooden rig that reminded Zoey of a gallows. Carlton was pulling off a pair of rubber gloves and said, “That is the last of the pig carcasses, I'm afraid.”

Zoey asked, “Why did we have
any
pig carcasses here?”

Will said, “Actually, they're by far the best analog for a human body, in terms of measuring impact and damage from projectiles.”

“That is a
terrible
reason to keep them around.”

Andre said, “E'erybody stop arguing and stand the hell back.”

He stepped out ahead of the group, strapped the gadget to his palm, and held it out toward the pig. Everyone held their breath, standing silently and shivering in the chilled December air. Zoey put her fingers in her ears, for good measure.

Andre squeezed his eyes closed, and pushed a button.

There was a deep hum, no louder than a fluorescent lightbulb that's about to go bad. For a moment it appeared that nothing was happening—the pig remained unharmed and Andre didn't explode in a blue flash.

Then, there was an enraged meow as Stench Machine went sailing through the air, flying toward Andre and slamming into his palm. Andre panicked, yelped, and shook the cat free.

He stared at the gadget in his hand and said, “So it's a magnet for cats? Hey! It's a pussy mag—”

“It's a regular magnet,” interrupted Budd. “It grabbed the metal spikes on his collar. I could feel it tuggin' on the keys in my pocket.”

“You sure you weren't just happy to see me?”

“Anyway,” Will said with a sigh, “this doesn't seem particularly useful. Echo, see what else we got.”

Andre said, “You don't think a mega-powerful magnet would be useful? You cover your whole body in these things and you'd be a superhero who could manipulate all metal. You could call yourself Magnetor.”

“Yes,” Budd said. “Right up until you sucked a car on top of yourself.”

As they passed back into the ballroom, Zoey said, “Just to summarize, Molech already has an entire arsenal of these gadgets, already implanted in the bodies of him and his goons, all of which are presumably working perfectly. Meanwhile, we're going to have at least a week tied up in just figuring out what we've got in our catalog? What exactly are we hoping to find here?”

Will said, “I don't know, a piece of equipment that protects a person against all of the gear Molech has?”

Echo said, “You want a hypothetical protection against a railgun that can fire projectiles at Mach 15, a plasma channel device that can produce enough current to turn a car into a black stain on the pavement, and god only knows what else he's got in his toy box? I can't even imagine what that would look like.”

Will said, “Fine, if the issue is that we don't have enough data about the enemy's capabilities and strategy, then we need to gather more data.”

Zoey said, “Perfect. How do we do that?”

Will said, “Molech's strength has always been loyalty, nobody on the inside of his crew ever turns—it's more cult than crew. The rumors about their initiation process are … unsettling. But you can't build a headquarters with a bunch of meathead enforcers, you need professionals. That means he's had to hire contractors. You want to turn somebody, you shoot for one of them—they're basically invisible to a narcissist like Molech, he doesn't even see them as people. So step one would be to find out who—”

“Rob Winkle Construction,” said Budd before Will could ask. “Brought in from out of town, staying in temporary quarters a few blocks away from the Fire and Ice.”

“So they're never far from the job site,” said Will. “Meaning we'd have to walk right to up to Molech HQ and interrogate his day laborers right under his nose.”

Everyone went silent for a moment, thinking.

Andre took a long look at Zoey and then said, “You know what we need? A massage truck.”

 

FIFTY-ONE

Andre said you could stand near any construction site in Tabula Ra$a and see the “massage” trucks crawl past, stopping to pick up clients at break time. He led them down to the black panel truck and programmed in its disguise—when the graphics faded in, it literally had “massage” in sarcasm quotes (
MADAM LE STRADE'S MAGIC RELAXATION “MASSAGE
”), the logo in pink letters that followed the contours of a naked woman. Prostitution was legal in the city, of course, but the fact that the trucks offered legit massages gave the customers plausible deniability for the wives and girlfriends who should notice their man climbing out of one. Vices were legal, but Blink made it damned hard to indulge in secret.

Andre said, “The construction crew walks over from a makeshift dorm every shift, we just gotta catch 'em on the way in.”

Zoey said, “Guys, this is the single most conspicuous vehicle in America. It literally has a naked butt on it.”

Will shook his head. “The hardest part will be fighting for space with the other trucks, we'll be indistinguishable from the rest of the ass fleet.”

“Really? That many guys want mobile whores at six in the morning?”

Andre said, “Well, the construction dorms have group bathrooms. No privacy, if you know what I'm sayin'.” She didn't.

A short time later they were all piled in the truck, parked about ten feet from a charred patch of pavement where a helicopter had crashed the evening before, and in the shadow of Molech's own headquarters—probably no more than a hundred yards from the man who could vaporize them with the flick of a wrist. Will had assured her that this was actually the one spot Molech wouldn't think to look for them, but Will's good intentioned lies were always the most halfhearted.