Soda Pop Soldier (43 page)

“Meet me a block east of this address on Via Siporino,” I tell him. “You might want to bring a tactical unit. There's a good chance you'll get a shot at Mercator.”

“Okay.”

I hang up, and shave, and shower.

I order a cappuccino from the café in the lobby to fight off any lingering game hangover. I step out onto the freshly washed pavement, squinting at the bright morning light. I've spent too much time playing games; I need a week on the beach. I step back into the hotel and buy a pair of vintage Ray-Ban sunglasses from an expensive jewelry store. Two thousand bucks. Then I walk to where I'll meet Inspector Larssen and whoever he decides to bring with him.

The TAC team is there in body armor and bulletproof vests and carry wicked little machine guns with all the laser sight trimmings one can possibly strap to such things.

Inspector Larssen is a tall, mop-haired Swede with a potbelly, wearing man-of-steel-incognito rimmed glasses. He wears a tan jacket.

“We've had developments all morning,” he says. “We're not sure, but Mercator may have escaped a nightclub shootout this morning. We don't know . . . so he might be one of the dead to sort out, y'know . . . but we have to run your hunch down just in case. Who's in there?”

“One of his operatives. A girl. A woman.” I sketch the layout of the apartment for the TAC commander on his CommandPad. I note all the danger zones for him. He seems grateful for the info. Or he thinks I'm a wanna-be-hardcore-soldier-gamer fanboy. Which I am.

I turn to Larssen. “What happened? Why do you think he got away?”

“I'm not supposed to say . . . but it looks like things are so out of control right now, who cares. This case is a mess. We think he's also behind a colony ship hijacking that went down about four this morning, OST.”

“Why do you think it's him?”

“It's his only option. No place left for him on Earth. Plus he jettisoned all the caskets. Sleeping colonists and convicts. Real nice guy . . . but that's his style.”

I watch the raid go down while nursing another cappuccino from across the street. There's a loud bang, and five minutes later, they rush Tatiana out and throw her in the back of an armored truck and speed away. I don't think she sees me. She looks frightened and confused.

A few minutes later, Inspector Larssen comes out. I cross the street and approach him, dodging mopeds and bread trucks.

“She was waiting for you,” he says gravely, then pulls out a pistol with a silencer. “She opened the door ready to fire this. Bounced a bullet off the helmet of our point man. He's okay. Then we flash-banged the whole place and searched it.”

There's a silence between both of us as noisy Italians all around begin their day.

Life goes on.

“Did she say anything?” I ask.

He starts to say something, then thinks better of it and walks away.

“Did she say anything?” I ask again, louder this time.

He continues to walk, shaking his head. Then he turns back.

“She said Mercator was coming to get her. She said . . . he would take her with him as soon as you were dead.”

A bread delivery truck passes, honks frantically at some acquaintance on the street, then speeds off in a cloud of exhaust.

Larssen sighs, then says, “As soon as he could . . . he was coming to get her. That's what she thought. All the way up until she opened the door. Maybe even now she still thinks he's coming for her. She has no idea he's hijacked a colony ship that's headed for the forty-year burn to Alpha Centauri.”

“What'll happen to her?”

I can tell he's a good man who doesn't like his job for all the right reasons. He seemed on the verge of constant indigestion.

“If we can't locate Mercator . . . she'll probably face the whole thing alone. I suspect she'll get colonization. Someone has to pay for this mess.”

He turns and walks down the sidewalk to the TAC team as it sheds its armor and weapons, chattering happily in Italian and laughing about the bullet that bounced off the point man's helmet, I guess.

I'm done. I go back to the hotel and take the Gauss and put it in the SamuraiLeather messenger bag. My remaining clothes I pack into the titanium briefcase. I sling my trench through the messenger bag strap and leave. I sit at a café for a while. I try to order another cappuccino, but the waiter politely tells me it's after noon now and Italians do not drink cappuccinos after noon. Then he suggests an espresso. I order a double. He says, “Doppio,” and smiles. It's a genuine smile.

I'm at loose ends. The Cola War with WonderSoft is over for now. The Black game has gone dark, for now. There'd be others. And Sancerré? Somewhere, probably in Paris or some other beautiful city, she is waking up to the rest of her life.

And I'm not part of it anymore.

Trixie? I don't care. I think about RiotGuurl . . . not Tatiana. I knew I'd miss her. I knew I'd think about her. She'd been my friend.

Tatiana had said I was like a Samurai with a gun. Like having principles and fighting for a cause were bad things. Alien things to her.

RiotGuurl had simply been my friend.

Morgax, whoever he is . . . I guess he's a friend too, like Kiwi, like JollyBoy.

Callard was just the schizophrenic avatar of some long-lost writer who kept on writing even after he was dead. An avatar who'd lost his mind and gotten lost in his own world trying to keep it alive. Like a singer who sang a song that got so popular everyone forgot who sang it first.

And then there's me. I wasn't going to play any games for a while. I'd forget about myself. Maybe I'd just be an Italian.

I knew that at any moment Lola, Giuseppino's mother, would pull up in a tiny Italian sports car, wearing a scarf and dark sunglasses. I knew she would take me to the Amalfi Coast. I knew, standing there at the edge of the street waiting for Lola, that I would forget about Sancerré for a while. Maybe forever. But who can say. I'm just a Samurai with a gun.

Like that's a bad thing.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NICK COLE
is an army veteran and working actor living in Southern California. When he is not auditioning for commercials, going out for sitcoms, or being shot, kicked, stabbed, or beaten by film-school students, the author of
The Wasteland
Saga
can often be found working as a guard for King Phillip II of Spain or in a similar role in
Don Carlo
at Los Angeles Opera.

nickcolebooks.com

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ALSO BY NICK COLE

The Wasteland Saga

The Road Is a River

The Savage Boy

The Old Man and the Wasteland

Nick Cole Comic Con Bundle

CREDITS

Cover design by Richard L. Aquan

Cover illustration and title type by Bastein Lecouffe Dehame

Author photograph courtesy of the author

COPYRIGHT

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Harper Voyager and design is a trademark of HCP LLC.

SODA
POP
SOLDIER
. Copyright © 2014 by Nick Cole. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST
EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-221022-7

EPub Edition AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 9780062210234

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