The Lucifer Deck (6 page)
Yao
stood up, motioning his friend forward. He took the trideo camera from him, then spoke quietly to him. Anwar grinned, then loped out of the restaurant.
"I want you to take me to the spot where it happened." Yao told Pita. "I’ll interview you there, on location, while Anwar monitors the uplink. We’re using a portable dish to go live. Save your story until we get there. That way it’ll sound less rehearsed. When I give you the sign, you start from the beginning and don’t leave anything out." He smiled grimly as he motioned for Pita to follow. "This could be just the story we need to spark the uprising."
"Uprising?" Pita echoed, trotting along behind Yao. He walked quickly, threading his way through the crowded corridors. She had to hurry to keep up.
"Look around you." Yao said, lowering his voice. "The overcrowding, the condition of these tunnels. You don’t think we orks are going to be penned up in the Underground forever, do you? The day isn’t far off when we’ll rise up into the city and push the weaker races aside. When we’ll take what’s rightfully ours and pay the fraggers back for what happened in ’39. The Night of Rage is going to look tame compared to what’s coming."
"My parents told me about the Night of Rage." Pita said. "I was only two, but Mom used to tell a funny story about how Dad made us hide in the basement, then sat at the top of the stairs with his shotgun to protect us. It wasn’t until the next morning that he realized he’d forgotten to load the gun. When I was little, I didn’t understand what could have sent him into such a panic. But now I realize he was afraid of the—"
Pita stopped herself. She’d been about to say, "of the metahumans." Thinking back on it now, she wondered at her father’s extreme reaction. Seattle’s metahumans had responded with violence to the city’s attempt to forcibly relocate them outside of its boundaries, but that violence had been tightly focused. Their rage—and the burnings, lootings, and attacks it sparked—was triggered by a series of explosions in the warehouses being used to hold the deportees. A militant wing of the Humanis Policlub was rumored to be behind the bombings. Pita knew her father sympathized with the Humanis Policlub, but now she wondered just how deep those sympathies ran. Was her father a member of the racist group, and thus a potential target for the metahuman retaliation?
"Yeah, the Metroplex Guard were even worse than Lone Star." Yao said, interrupting her thoughts. He glanced at Pita. "You weren’t at the warehouses? Then your family hadn’t been rounded up yet by the Guard when the trouble began."
"Uh, no." Pita realized that Yao assumed her entire family was ork. Given the arrogant, hostile tone he’d used when speaking to the waitress in the noodle bar, she was afraid to tell him she’d once been a member of the "weaker races" herself.
"You were lucky, then." Yao continued. "My father died when the first explosion hit the waterfront. My mother was never the same afterward. She tried to reverse the confiscation order on our house, but the city appealed every court decision, and eventually our money ran out. After that, she didn’t have the strength to do much but sit and cry.
"Governor Schultz glosses over the whole thing now, and talks about our current ‘racial harmony.’ She seems to think the Night of Rage could never happen again." Yao’s smile tightened. "Well, she’s soon going to find out just how wrong she is. When your interview hits the air, the sparks will fly."
The street kids were clustered near the base of the Space Needle, listening to a simsense deck, and it looked to Carla like a Sony Beautiful Dreamer. Two of the teenagers were simming the music directly, via datajacks slotted into their temples. They jerked in time with the music, eyes focused on some distant point as the deck pumped sights, sounds, and other sensory input directly into their brains. The rest of the kids heard only the music that blared from the speakers. Some lounged about, smoking, too chill to acknowledge the driving staccato beat. Others danced, arms flailing, occasionally knocking foreheads together like wild rams. One of the kids—a troll dressed in black leather pants and a Japanese kimono hacked off at the waist—even had the curling horns necessary to complete the picture. Overhead, the night sky was a solid black, devoid of stars.
Carla shouted over the din from the speakers. "Do any of you know an ork girl named Pita? She came looking for me at my office the other day, but left before I had a chance to really talk with her. The last
bunch of kids I talked to told me she hangs somewhere
down here, at
The teenagers stared at the imager, their eyes a mixture of boredom and suspicion. "You her social worker?" one asked. By the way his nose flared as he looked up and down Carla’s expensive Armante jacket, he wasn’t impressed with her corporate image. Maybe she should have dressed down before trying to interview street kids. But the Armante was bullet-proof as well as stylish.
"I’m not a social worker." Carla answered. "I’m a reporter. Carla Harris of KKRU Trideo News. Pita had a story for me. A story we’re willing to get behind. Be sure to tell her that if you see her."
The troll stopped dancing and ambled over to stand behind Carla. He loomed over her like a building, throwing her into shadow. She resisted the urge to back away, even though he reeked of sweat.
Never
let
a
dog
see
that
you’re
afraid
of
him,
she thought.
It
only
encourages
him
to
bite
.
"Unless you got some credit to spend right here, lady, you’d better just frag off." he grumbled.
Across the parking lot, a car horn beeped twice. That would be Masaki. He had cut the tint on the windows of his car, and was gesturing frantically inside it.
Carla met the troll’s eyes and smiled. "I’d love to stay and chat." she told him. "But my father doesn’t like it when I stay out late, and he’s quite particular about which boys I talk to. That’s him in the car over there. Perhaps you’d like to meet him?"
Carla almost hoped the troll would call her bluff and say yes. If Masaki saw the huge brute shambling toward his car, he’d wet himself. He’d been working the lifestyles beat too long, and had gone soft. He’d rather spend the evening behind the multiple locks of his apartment door than chasing down stories. Carla had practically dragged him out tonight. She would have gone on her own, except that Masaki knew more about the background to the piece, including the background of the mage who’d wanted to spill the beans on Mitsuhama’s special project. But the way Masaki
was acting, she wasn’t sure if her fellow so-calle
d "reporter" still deserved a byline on the story.
The troll shifted his kimono slightly so that Carla got a good look at the Streetline Special pistol tucked into the top of his pants. She knew better than to flinch.
"You got
cojones
coming out here at night, lady." he said grudgingly at last.
Carla smiled sweetly at him. "Ovaries, actually." Behind her, Masaki honked the horn twice more. "Remember," she told the other kids as she turned to go, "if you see Pita, tell her Carla Harris of KKRU Trideo is looking for her." She handed the kid her business card.
Carla strode across the parking lot and wrenched open the car door. She and Masaki had been trying all that afternoon and evening to find Pita, but none of the street kids would admit to seeing the girl. She’d disappeared into thin air—and taken the Mitsuhama data-chip with her. Their producer had given Carla and Masaki one day to dig up some proof that there really was a story. So far, all they had were dead ends. And now Masaki was acting like an idiot, honking the horn like a frightened kid. He even had the engine running, as if fearing that a fast getaway would be imminent.
"What the hell are you doing?" Carla asked Masaki angrily. "Trying to wake up all of Seattle? If you weren’t such a timid—"
Masaki didn’t wait for the insult. "Look at this!" he said, pointing urgently to the compact trid built into the dash of his car. "I was channel surfing and stumbled across this pirate broadcast. Looks like they’ve found Pita for us."
Carla climbed hurriedly into the car, thumbing the volume key beside the tiny trideo screen. Pita’s voice crackled from the speaker and her image wavered. At first Carla thought it was just the trideo unit acting up, but then she saw the channel display. The broadcast was coming in on Channel 115—a channel that should
have been carrying nothing but a blank blue field. This
was clearly a pirate broadcast, fed illegally through a cable booster into a "dead" channel. The pirates were probably transmitting via remote feed to avoid getting caught, should their input be traced. The resulting distortion had caused the color to shift; Pita’s face was distinctly green. But her voice was coming through, loud and clear, despite the occasional pop of static.
"This is where it happened." she said in a quavering voice. "This is where my friends were killed."
The camera pulled back from Pita, revealing the wall behind her. The words that had been painted in the orks’ blood were faint but still legible, thanks to an overhang that protected them from the rain that had been falling steadily throughout the day: "Human Power!", "Goblin Scum Must Die!" and "Keep Our Human Family Pure!"
Carla jabbed a finger at the screen. "That’s
"It’s live all right." Masaki said, wheezing with excitement. "But the pirate would be a fool to broadcast from an identifiable location. Lone Star would be all over him before he’d even finished his intro.
"See this faint blue line?" He traced Pita’s outline with a finger. "The kid’s image has been inserted over a shot of the corner where the kids were killed. The pirate is shooting with two portacams, one slaved to the other. He’s using a mixer to paste the two images together."
"So how do we find him?" Carla asked.
"The portacams can’t be more than a few hundred meters apart." he said. "He’s got to be within a block or two of that corner or else the signal would suffer too much distortion and the images wouldn’t match up. And he must be shooting outside to capture traffic noise. We’ll find him." Masaki put the car into gear and punched the accelerator. "Now what was that name you wanted to call me? A timid what?"
"Shh!" Carla hissed. "I’m trying to listen to this. Has the kid said anything about the dead mage?"
"Not yet." Masaki rounded a corner, tires squealing. "It’s been nothing but intro so far. After introducing Pita, the reporter went into this rambling spiel about the coming revolution and injustice against the metaraces. Usual bulldrek. About what you’d expect from amateur propagandists like
Orks
First!
They’re eating up the kid’s story with a fork and—"
"Quiet!" Carla leaned closer to the tiny screen. The camera was back on the ork girl, locked in a closeup that showed the tears at the corners of her eyes. Carla made sure the machine was set on record, for review later in case she missed anything.
"We were stopped outside an apartment a few blocks from here," Pita began, gesturing up the street, "by two Lone Star cops. There were four of us. Me, Chen Wah . . ." She paused, blinking furiously. "And two younger orks, Shaz and Mohan Gill. The cops took our simsense headset and . . ."
Carla glanced up as the car came to a halt. They were stopping for a yellow light. Cross traffic was light. "Let’s move, Masaki!" she said impatiently. "The pirate is going to wrap this story and disappear."
"This intersection is monitored!" Masaki protested. "I don’t want to risk getting a tick—"
Carla grabbed the wheel, slid across the seat, and punched her foot down on top of Masaki’s, depressing the accelerator. Masaki gasped in fear as the car leaped across the intersection, narrowly missing the oncoming traffic. Horns blared, but then they were through and racing along Rainier. Masaki glared at Carla as she released the wheel, then drove on, grinding his teeth. Carla was pleased to see that they were at last making some decent speed.
She returned her attention to the trideo screen. The pirate reporter was standing beside Pita, one arm draped protectively over her shoulders. He was talking earnestly into the camera, his eyes glittering with intensity.
"Most of us have gone through what Pita has just described." he was saying. "Lone Star seizes our property without warrant, stops and questions us without due cause, and talks to us in the most derogatory way they can think of. We live our lives in the Underground, afraid to venture onto the streets of our own city, shut out from the homes we once owned. Governor Schultz and Lone Star Chief Loudon have promised to ‘clean up’ Seattle. They pretend they’re talking about street crime. But anyone who remembers the events of 2039 will read between the lines and realize that the ‘housecleaning’ these humans are talking about is far more serious than the round-up that triggered the Night of Rage. We at
Orks
First!
are about to bring you the true story of the links between our city’s ‘security’ force and the policlub that was notorious for—"
