The Daedalus Code (3 page)

She had a volatile temper and a kill count as high as anyone in the SQ. He just hoped he’d find her in a good mood. Perhaps he should have brought chocolates or flowers.

Chapter Four

Fifteen minutes passed and Mouse found himself standing at the old weather-beaten door leading down into the SQ underworld. A tally graph of vertical carving
s covered its surface. There were fifty more lines since he was last here six months ago. Each line represented a killing.

Despite the place being mostly frequented by criminals and assholes, the old guard who ran most of the business there tried in vain to keep some kind of code. They hated the chaos. Commerce was better when there was a level of respect on both sides. When things got out of hand, people died. This door served as a reminder to all who would enter:

Play the game, or get dead.

Mouse didn’t plan on getting dead anytime soon, so he opened the door, stepped inside, and played it as cool as he could. 

The tunnels were dug during the war. They honeycombed the island and followed no regular grid system. Each one was approximately three meters in diameter, and the only way to tell where you were was by the graffiti on the walls—various gang signs identified their territory, and logos for businesses were daubed on the ceilings with arrows pointing the way to their respective booths.

The only light came from dull green eco-lights—apple-sized orbs filled with organic phosphorescence-like material—installed at five-meter intervals

Those who spent most of their lives there could move around by instinct, knowing the patterns, the sounds, and the temperatures as well as the markings on their own avatar. Mouse couldn’t, so he moved towards the chatter—the low rumble of myriad voices.

Down here in the tunnels, PR units were useless. There were no digital files of the layout, the infrastructure, or of the people that frequented the place. It was entirely meat-based. Which was ironic, considering all the business and dealing that went on was usually for digital artifacts and information.

Mouse rounded a corner, felt the cool dampness of the tunnels seep through his jacket and prickle his skin. The tunnel ahead of him was littered with scraps of paper—receipts for deals and propaganda for the various gangs. A few boys and girls, no older than sixteen, huddled around in small groups, wrapped in dirty blankets, their faces covered in scabs and sores.

Sufferers of tunnel fever. Those who never left the place often picked it up due to a weakened immune system. It was like a pox, and being out of the city limits, very few supplies of medication ever made it across. And those that did always managed to find their way into the hands of the influential and wealthy.

The kids eyed him as he passed but didn’t bother panhandling. No point when you have tunnel fever. Money and information ain’t gonna help you. But Mouse stopped anyway, caught their attention.

“Yeah, mister?” one of the older boys said, while he rubbed at the red pustules on his face. They looked ready to burst. Mouse stepped back, afraid he’d be covered in goo.

“Cynthia still trading?”

“Yeah, take a left at the end and follow the screaming.”

“What screaming? I can’t hear any.”

“Not yet,” the boy said and looked back to his group of friends. They were playing some kind of card game with scraps of paper.

Eager to know what he meant, Mouse jogged to the end of the tunnel, turned left at the junction, and saw exactly what the boy was referring to.

The tunnel opened to a five-meter-wide corridor. He remembered it well from his last time—the dealer quarter. Small shop units were cut into the rear of one side of the corridor, creating a series of booths with counters that the dealers stood behind. Some had wire-meshed glass in front like they used to have when banks had physical locations. Others were open with their dealers casually leaning across their counters, smoking cheaply made cigarettes.

Cynthia, however, stood atop the counter of her booth, her neon sign above it hanging from one edge and flickering on and off, casting strange shadows on her face. She had a strong, hooked nose, and thick lips, which at the moment were curled up in a sneer.

She gripped her katana, held it out in a defensive maneuver. Baying for her blood below her stood a crowd of furious men and women in various gang apparel. It looked like an angry mob out for a lynching. But this was Cynthia! She was a big cheese in this rat’s den, what could they possible want to lynch her for?

Mouse rushed forward, joined the back of the mob. He tried to move closer but a thick-armed man with glowing prosthetic eyes turned on him, slammed him against the wall, winding him instantly.

“Jesus! Okay, angry crowd…got that,” Mouse said to himself, breathing hard as he got to his feet. The gangster turned his attention back to Cynthia. It was difficult to make out the accusations, as the fifty or so strong crowd were yelling at the same time.

Like the prophetic boy had predicted, the screams started.

***

Three bodies lay in various parts against her booth. With quick, accurate slices, those at the front grabbing for Cynthia had lost their hands, arms, and in one person’s case, his head. The crowd backed away out of range of her sword, and the shock of the quick violence dulled their voices, so that the screams of Cynthia’s victims peeled through the thick atmosphere.

An old, grizzled man in the booth next to Cynthia’s sat behind his glass panel laughing his head off with such gusto that his eyes disappeared behind wrinkled skin. He coughed loudly, lungs full of disease. Another tunnel fever sufferer, though he at least managed to last until the latter stages.

“If any of you fucks doubt me again, then I suggest you remember the rules on the door. Anyone else wanna be another notch on the tally?” She waved the katana out with an extended arm to take in the entire crowd.

The group of men and women grumbled amongst each other and a couple of stragglers at the back and standing near Mouse turned and left. Mouse used that as an opportunity and took their place within the tight collection of people.

He pushed his way a little farther until he was in the middle.

One particularly ugly male at the front—wearing the crimson colors of the Red Monoas—spoke up, “You conned me, bitch. You didn’t play the game. You’re without honor!” He spat in her face.

Cynthia jumped down from the booth, gripped the katana’s handle with both hands and thrust forward with such speed it was almost as if nothing had happened. But then the crowd split either side of their apparent leader, leaving Mouse standing in the middle and directly behind him by a few meters. The tip of Cynthia’s weapon exited the man’s back, blood dripped from its tip, pooled on the floor.

He slumped to his knees heavily, gurgled something before the old information dealer pulled her weapon free. His heavy body leaned forward before he crashed to the floor face-first at her feet.

She casually wiped the blood from her blade with a tatty blue rag hanging from a rope around her waist that held together a dirty robe.

“I repeat,” she said calmly, “anyone else doubt me?”

Mouse was spellbound by the events around him. He’d seen a lot of wacky stuff go down in his life, but this was something else. Standing there, in her eye line, transfixed, Mouse suddenly felt exposed. He looked around, discovered the mob had surrounded him, all eyes on him.

Cynthia’s attention finally fell on him, too.

“Have something to say, young man?” She said it like the sweetest, kindest old woman possible. The image somewhat contradicted by the body parts and dead people at her feet.

Before he could answer, he heard a metallic rattle behind him and two low voices whisper something that sounded to him like, “Do it now.” Whether it was some kind of precognition or just a sense of danger he’d built up over the years frequenting shady places, he didn’t know, but he turned his head towards the voices, spotted two men behind the first row of the crowd, huddled together like conspirators.

One, a shrewish-looking gangster, reached into his filthy and torn red duster jacket. In one single movement he’d withdrawn a crudely made gun, extended it, and aimed it at the old woman behind Mouse. Instead of ducking or diving out of the way, Mouse hunched down low and launched himself at a skinny woman in a tight leather skirt and not much else who stood just in front of the gunman.

He shoulder-charged into her abdomen, driving her into the two conspirators, crumbing everyone into a heap. The gun fired. The explosion temporarily deafened Mouse with its sharp reverberations. Mouse felt like he was underwater. A whistling noise obscured the screams and shouts from the crowd. A lump of metal and various wires fell down from the ceiling onto Mouse, the girl, and the gunman.

The crowd broke apart, scattered down the tunnel to their various territories.

One of the main rules of the SQ was no firearms.

For someone to dare bring one down here, and fire it…took more than balls. It took a level of insanity that was frankly suicidal. But maybe that was point.

Mouse stood, turned at a vague call of his name, the sound swallowed by his disorientation and the whistling. A hand gripped the collar of his jacket and pulled him aside, sending him tumbling back down to his knees. The dirty robe around Cynthia’s frail body brushed passed his face, and he caught a distinct whiff of engine oil.

A glint of green light shimmered off the polished steel blade as it arced in a downward chop. It struck the armed man square on his skull and split him all the way to his waist, the two parts flopping aside like a pair of pig carcasses in a slaughterhouse. The spray of blood and liquids caught Mouse by surprise, splashing across his face.

Cynthia’s entire front was red, as if she’d just been showered in paint.

The semi-naked girl slipped and slid on her hands and knees, trying to stand. The second conspirator dove backwards away from the swordswoman before scrambling to his feet and sprinting away down the corridor, screaming as he went.

“What the…holy…fu—” Mouse said, mumbling under his breath, trying to get his heart to stop racing, and for the blood to stop rushing through the veins in his ears, making him feel like he was sitting next to a noisy internal combustion engine.

The old woman turned to him, grabbed him by the collar again and led him to the narrow metal door beside her booth. She opened it, pushed him inside the back office, which smelled vaguely of ripened apples. Which he was thankful for. The stench of the man’s opened guts made him want to retch.

He caught a whiff of the gore as Cynthia hobbled passed him into what looked like a bathroom and involuntarily dry-gagged.

Inside, a cracked mirror hung over a square basin. A stream of dirty water trickled from the rusted faucet. Cynthia casually cleaned the blood from her hands and face.

She turned to him, undid the rope around her stained robe, let it drop to the floor.

“Give an old girl some privacy, huh? Turn around,” she said, catching Mouse staring at her.

He quickly turned, but it was too late. Her skin was almost as horrific to look at as the gore-covered robe. Even with such a brief exposure, the image of her skin—burned, scarred and twisted—burrowed its way into his memory.

After a minute, she tapped on his shoulder and he turned round. She wore a similar robe, thankfully sans gore and blood. She scowled at him. Making him shrink away.

“I assume you’re here about Mikos?” she said, sagging her shoulders in resignation.

“You knew? You were expecting me?”

“Not you specifically. But someone. I know you’re working for IDEA.” She spat at his feet as she walked past him and slumped into a tattered arm-chair. “I always knew you were fucking trouble. I told Mikos not to work for you, told him that you and your kind would get him in trouble. He was just a lad, for god’s sake. Why did you have to get him involved with all this?”

Mouse held up his hands. “Whoa, what the hell are you talking about? He came to me for the job. I had nothing to do with him getting in with this mess. I’m the one trying to track him down. I’m assuming you must know where he is then?”

“If you never gave him that job, he wouldn’t be ... he’d still have a future. Not anymore. I ought to gut you where you stand for not looking out for him.”

“Look, Cynthia, I don’t know what your relationship with him is, but you clearly don’t know a damned thing about him. He was involved up to his neck in various hacking scams before he came to work for me. I gave him the job so I could look out for him.”

“You’re a fucking liar,” Cynthia said, standing, jabbing her finger at him. She trembled with anger, but didn’t move closer, and Mouse saw something else in her face. He couldn’t tell if it was fear, or perhaps loss. “What the hell do you want with me anyway? What do you think I can do?”

“I tracked his location to hear before he went missing. I have no other leads. If you care for him, you’ll tell me what you know. He must have seen you while he was here, right?”

She sighed, sat back down. “Yeah, he came here. Frightened out of his skull.”

“Where did he go?”

“I wish I knew! I wouldn’t be sitting here if I did.” She shook her head, slammed her arm down on the chair. “If he just stayed here, I could of ... Can I trust you?”

“You know me. Would I work for IDEA if this weren’t important? Would I play for the opposition if I didn’t believe it could help me? Would I have helped you back there if I were looking to take you and Mikos down?”

“I gotta be careful,” she said. “Things are changing these days. Things are shifting.”

“Like what happened out there? What was that all about?”

“Let’s just say things down here have taken a turn for the worse. The information business has turned on its head almost overnight. Things aren’t as easy to procure as they once were.”

He immediately thought of the Daedalus Project—the AI that was eating vast sections of the various info networks. He hadn’t considered how it’d affect people like Cynthia, but it made sense.

“So those scrotes out there, well, they were due some info,” she said. “We did a deal, and as usual I included my standard caveats, but the info they sought was…how should we say…hot as the devil’s cock, and in between me being confident that I could get my claws on it, and the emergence of Daedalus, that particular piece of info was now suddenly unavailable.”

“And those bastards didn’t believe you.”

“Quite. They think I stiffed ’em for twenty mill.” She shook her head so that her lank grey hair covered her rheumy eyes. “And being uneducated fools, they couldn’t comprehend what
caveat
meant. I think they might have an idea now, though, huh?”

“I’m sure they’ll remember for a while. But back to Mikos, I need to know what he said to you. I need to know anything you think would be of use because at the moment, I ain’t got nothing.”