The Bridge Chronicles Trilogy (38 page)

It was a full minute of stunned silence before Danton could move again, and by that time, the battle was all but over. Horrified by Horrifiewhat she had seen, she couldn’t help but feel a little jealous. What would have taken the normal CLED officers half-an-hour of hard fighting to overcome, these three insane cybercops had dispensed with in minutes. Only Wall seemed to have taken any real damage, though from his movements it was hard to tell if he felt the pain at all. The gangsters outside the warehouse, the ones who’d survived, surrendered easily, most unable to put up much of a fight. The Gun Club congregation had to be convinced by bullhorn to put down their weapons. Pollock had to grab the bullhorn at one point to keep L.T. from losing it and assaulting the place. The flack had quieted the situation down with promises of the corporation footing the bill for repairs and funeral costs. Once resistance had died to a low simmer, the Special Squad chopper had returned, retrieving all three of the cybercops from the roof by zip line. As the crew flew away, Danton followed them with her eyes, her mind a tumult.

Pollock handled the press with the slick ease of a car salesman, deflecting questions and turning the narrative to his favor at every opportunity. Danton was flabbergasted as she overheard multiple reporters ask why their video feeds had stopped working the moment the chopper had flown in. Again, Pollock deflected with aplomb. She would find out later that not one piece of video existed of the event, despite the army of reporters camped around the police cordon. Danton could only assume the chopper had deployed some sophisticated form of anti-electronics jamming, something that clearly wasn’t standard department issue. Everything about Special Squad, even the name, was expunged from the news reports that night. Heroic efforts by the CLED became the overarching narrative of the news feeds, and Gina had to laugh inside. CLED had been reduced to spectators in the event.

A brutal aftermath awaited her in the warehouse. As bad as the body count outside had been, with severed body parts littering the street and at least one body trapped between a car frame and the wall, the interior of the warehouse was worse. Those blades that Mask had used cut with deadly efficiency. Blood splatter, two missing arms and a disembowelment proved Mask’s skill and ruthlessness. Getting an accurate listing of the bodies and reconstructing the events that led to their deaths proved problematic. In all, Danton counted fourteen bodies inside. She noted the deaths of Gabby and his brother Castro plus two other from
Diablos
, none of whom were as big a fish as Goyo outside. She recognized a few of Goyo’s men among the ten dead
Magos
inside. Three
Magos
survived the pitched battle outside, including one of the up and coming Shotcallers, Carlos Baggy Pants. A trail of blood leading to a broken window in the back of the warehouse indicated at least one had escaped the scene, but a search of the surrounding blocks turned up no injured perps.

The sun barely peeked above the mountains in the distance when Danton’s shift ended. Drowning in thought, she rode back to the station in silence, thoughts about Special Squad and her place in CLED. The new corporate attitude had opened her career path more than the three years she’d spent busting her hump in LAPD, but she still felt stifled. Assholes like the L.T. still held much sway among the ranks, and until the new culture weeded out guys like that, she’d never get ahead. Her dad had made Lieutenant by the time he was thirty-two. At 29, her prospects of getting any higher than Officer doing the kind of beat she was doing were dwindling. Getting cybered up might have helped her a little bit with corporate guys like Pollock, but binocular eyes weren’t going to get her much more than a pat on the back and a sidewayand a sis glance from her immediate superiors, most of whom viewed cyber enhancements as thug trophies. But those Special Squad guys; they had been walking tanks, and they had been sent in to the worst type of firefight while CLED got to sit around pulling their puds. That kind of collar got the promotions, not busting corner Trip dealers and evicting tenants on the so-called “Gang Streets.”

After a quick shower and change of clothes at the station, Danton hopped on the bus. She ignored the claustrophobic press of stinky bodies on the crowded vehicle, her mind still racing. Special Squad. That was where she wanted to be, given the toughest cases, taking down the over-armed bastards without quarter. So the crew she saw today might have gone a little overboard with the ultraviolence, but surely that couldn’t be department policy. That kind of gear intrigued her. The takedowns she could make with cybernetics like that would be legendary. She decided to ask Pollock about joining Special as soon as she could.

The walk to her rental house was three blocks through a deteriorating neighborhood. Gina never felt unsafe along this walk despite the crime. After all, she was a cop. This area had been hit hard by the riots, and the city seemed unwilling to put the money into rebuilding it. Every third house was a bombed out ruin, some burned down to the foundations, leaving only charred skeletal remains poking up from the charred slab. Six of the houses on her street were undamaged but had been confiscated by CLED due to their proximity to gang activity. The latest victims had been her next door neighbors. Their eviction had been an ugly one and now the house sat in ghostly darkness as mute reminder of the screams of its former tenants. Had Danton not been a cop, she would probably have lost her home too, and she still wasn’t sure how she felt about that. The neighborhood really was a mess. She knew at least three homes in the three block radius that had been rightly busted for gang activity from drug houses to whorehouses.

Lost in her thoughts, she did not notice the man following her until she’d reached her house. He was big and dark, practically mountain-sized, but the reassuring weight of her service revolver against her left breast kept her calm. His stride grew quicker as she neared her house. The pool of light and the waist high walls of her porch would provide good cover if the man wanted to attack her. She bounded up the steps and whirled, gun coming up as she fell to one knee, sheltering behind cover.

The man raised his hands. “Whoa, Officer Danton, it’s me. Aristotle.”

Gina could see his face clearly in the light coming from her back. “Marcus? What the hell are you doing at my house?’

“Can I put my hands down?”

She waved the gun in a downward motion before holstering it. “Yeah, go ahead. You shouldn’t follow a cop like that, you’re liable to get shot in this neighborhood.”

“My sincere apologies, Officer. I could not exactly speak to you at your workplace, but I require your assistance.”

Gina scowled. “You and your damn boss already got more than enough assistance from me. What does Bridge want now?”

“This is not a request from Bridge. This is about Bridge. I think he’s dead.”

Interlude

Aristotle

March 10, 2029

12:50 p.m.

Waking was a slow, painful process, a gradual working from the attenuated surrealism of dreams to the casual realization of the dividing line between fantasy and reality. Aristotle had been dreaming of something he couldn’t quite grasp now, but he felt its loss intensely, a single tear streaking down his cheek. Sniffing, he wiped his face and sat up, unsure of his location. His back creaked. The couch, of course. Never good for his back. He’d ended up in his apartment after all. Running a hand over the greasy stubble on his bald head, memories folded back into his brain as each wrinkle of skin bunched and unfolded behind his passing hand. Bridge had taken that ride with the mayor, leaving Aristotle to make small talk with Mu at that dingy little coffee shop. Aristotle had become rather fascinated with Mu, despite all the reasons he might have to hate the Chinese technomancer. It turned out Mu was thoroughly versed in Confucian thought, something Aristotle had not had the time to study in school yet, so he’d picked the wizard’s brain as much as allowed. Whether because of Aristotle’s admittedly deteriorating job performance or some form of rivalry over their shared duties, Mu always seemed to keep Aristotle at arm’s length.

Once the call from Bridge had come telling them to head home on their own, Mu had spared no seconds for small talk, leaving Aristotle alone with his thoughts swirling like the rivulets of creamer in his coffee. His grandmother had not been far from his thoughts since her disappearance in Boulder. Aristotle refused to say “her death” even to himself, though the technomancers had assured him that there could be no hope of her return from wherever their experiment had banished her. He cut his eyes left and right, making sure none of the late-night patrons were observing him, then reached in his back pocket for the flask. The clear liquid trickled into the lukewarm coffee and swirled in an oily whirlpool before settling. Aristotle drank heartily from the acrid, bitter liquid, feeling the warmth of the alcohol spreading throughout his limbs, dulling his thoughts almost immediately.

The bottle he’d finished before passing out that night rolled off his lap and thudded dully onto the floor. He watched its lazy motion as it bobbled across the carpet until it stopped against the previous night’s refreshment with a delicate
tink
. Aristotle’s eyes examined the dusty carpet, spotting a total of six bottles scattered around the coffee table, its own top littered with chip wrappers, takeout dispensers, sticky unwashed glasses and discarded bottle caps. His philosophy 101 book lay open teetering on the very edge of the table, its pages e, its pstained with dried alcohol. He turned it around to read the headline on the leading page, chuckling at the quote paraphrasing. “The abyss gazes also – Nietzche” it read.

“Don’t it ever,” he muttered to himself.

He gazed around the room, trying hard not to see the mess there. Finally, he found the clock, an old-school alarm clock sitting on the kitchen counter. It had long since gone silent, its alarm ignored hours ago. He shook his head. The time could not be right. Usually when he slept this late, the pounding of the door would awaken him, followed by Bridge screaming at the top of his lungs. Instead, the only pounding was in his head, which throbbed with every beat of his heart. Bridge was very, very late, though that wasn’t an event completely without precedent. Aristotle stood on wobbly legs, steadying his dizzy fumbling with a hand on the couch. His stomach flopped before settling into an acidic sourness signaling an unattended hunger. The empty fridge laughed in his face. The sink gargled from a mouth full of crusty dishes. Frowning, he waved a dismissive hand at the debris and stalked into the bedroom.

The bedroom blasted cold air back into his face, a full two or three degrees cooler behind the closed door than the rest of the apartment, its air dusty with disuse. In contrast to the living room, every inch of the bedroom was immaculately kept, a rigid order for every single microbe maintained. The pristine state of the room shocked memories back to the surface of Aristotle’s mind. Every time he saw this room, especially these days, he thought back to prison, the regimented stringency imposed by prison life somehow a painful comfort to the turmoil in his mind. He hadn’t used the bed in months, since shortly after returning from Boulder. The bed brought back too many bad dreams, and he would wake just as he had every night in prison, feeling the walls close, so close, too close, pressing in on his thoughts, his mind, his very goddamn soul with judgement. Only by obsessive ordering of his prison cell had he kept his mind focused on sanity, keeping away the fear and sadness and despair that he breathed in from all around. That strict routine had carried over into civilian life, focusing his thoughts on order when the thought of the chaos of every day life hemmed him in. Now though, his thoughts always fell on his grandmother and the struggle to control the anger he felt at her disappearance. He tried hard not to place that anger on Bridge, on the man who helped cover up the disappearance of thirty thousand people including his grandmother, on the technomancers like Mu who had caused the whole thing. But the anger made him feel unworthy of using the bedroom, unworthy of that room’s order. So every night he would drink to steel himself for the walk into the bedroom, to numb the anger and loss as he curled up into those painstakingly tucked-in sheets and crisp blankets. Since his self-imposed exile to the couch, he’d failed to stay conscious long enough to make it to the bedroom every single night.

Pushing aside the thoughts, he quickly moved to the bathroom with a clean towel and shorts. The steaming shower helped clear the cobwebs in his hungover mind, and halfway through he began to wonder about Bridge. By now, there should at least be a message on his voicemail from the boss. He finished and quickly dressed. Dialing Bridge’s number from his antiquated cell phone, he closed off the bedroom quietly.

Bridge didn’t answer.

Worry began to creep into Aristotle’s stomach. Bridge’s cell phone wasn’t an old school hand unit like Aristotle’s, it was part of his cybernetic interface package. It rang quietly in Bridge’s skull. There existed no possibility that Bridge, if conscious, had not heard the ring. He couldn’t claim to have missed the call without claiming to have been decapitated or dosed. That meant Bridge must be screening calls or unconscious to a dangerous point. Neither option proved palatable. Not wanting to jump to the worst conclusions, Aristotle figured that Bridge was engaged in proving a point about his recent job performance. Aristotle knew he would need to apologize profusely, perhaps even promise an improvement he wasn’t sure he could achieve. Point taken, he called a cab immediately and ran to the street to wait for his ride.