Up The Tower (7 page)

The copbot stood ramrod straight for a moment, its eyes blinking and rotating through the color wheel. Then it stopped and shook its head.

“I cannot. I’m afraid we’ll have to get that fixed. Can you fix it? You fixed me.”

“I fixed you?”

“
Yes
. Everything was scanning and colors and sirens, and you shouted that you would fix me, and I
was fixed
.”

“...Right.”

Samson, despite all his knowledge of the artificiality of the intelligence of the copbot, felt a little bad. As far as he knew, copbots were designed to kill on command. He had guessed already that somehow it relied on its communication with its headquarters to be directed around. Now it was following Samson in order to...

“Why are you following me?”

The copbot frowned. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, but you were caught in an explosion. I saved your life. It is my duty to ensure that you remain alive.”

“But, I fixed you already, right? Doesn’t that make us square?”

“To save a life is a great responsibility, Partner-Samson. It is not a game of tic-tac-toe.”

That was enough resting. Samson stood up and they continued.

Samson wouldn’t call himself any sort of an athlete, but he was in good shape. The first thirty floors of the Tower had no elevator. Samson lived on the hundred and forty-fifth floor. Anytime he wanted to go outside—which was several times a week, trying to scrounge up more tech for Jackson (and to a lesser extent, the other Five Faces) to use—he had to climb up and down those thirty floors, step by step. Sometimes the stairs got awful crowded with people. Over thirty thousand people lived in the Tower.

More than twenty-nine thousand of these lived above the thirtieth floor. Almost all of them worked in The Tower as well. Some of them worked direct for the Five Faces, creating drugs and tech and lewd entertainment videos, or running finance and inventory. Everyone else had satellite offices with Tri-American.

Everything beneath the thirtieth was a sort of slum, a sub-slum to the slum outside in Junktown. It was safer, maybe, than living on the streets, but there were no rules and no one was technically allowed to be there. Every few months, Petrov and Crash would organize a raid, usually using Petrov’s attack dogs, and flood out anyone they didn’t want around. Drug addicts, mostly, pushed back out on the streets. Over time, the addicts would land enough money to bribe Storey to let them back  in, and they’d have a place to use in peace. Then they would run out of drugs, be unable to leave without having to bribe Storey again to return, and so they would resort to mugging the Tower residents for cash. Then, Petrov and Crash would organize another raid.

So far, in their ascent, none of the addicts or the tent-living tenants had bothered Samson and the copbot. They did not live in the stairwells, though, so avoiding them was not so much trouble.

There had been a pulley system on the outside, once upon a time. It cut down on the travel time up the stairs by half. Petrov didn’t approve of it though—too big a security risk—and wanted to have it cut down. Jackson Crash agreed with him, as he often did, and in typical Jackson Crash fashion, he cut the pulley ferry down in the middle of a particularly busy day. Nineteen people fell to their death. Six more were crushed.

Crash was big on supporting Petrov, and so he was big on security. The elevator at the top of the thirty floors—the gateway to the rest of The Tower, was guarded by his absolute elite. Samson was on good terms with them, as he had provided and installed all of their tech. They had no cyber-rejection, no slim-shingles, none of the normal and expected adverse consequences of getting street cuts. No skin loss, no muscles growing up over the skin around the edges of the tech. So, even if Petrov’s guards didn’t like Samson, they protected him.

At the next floor, Partner pointed at a warning sign that said the structure of the stairwell was weak.

“We must stop here.”

“No,” said Samson. “Don’t sweat that. I went down them this morning.”

“I can see them,” said Partner, scanning. “They will fail soon. My weight will be too much for them. We cannot go up this way.”

Frowning, Samson looked at the door that opened into the seventeenth floor.

But on the seventeenth floor, there were no squatters, no drug addicts, no muggers. There were just dogs.

Petrov kept them starved. That way, anybody he needed torn apart would get torn apart.

True to the crime lord’s intent, Samson feared Petrov. He was, unofficially, known as the Face of Fear. Why wouldn’t you fear him? Just last year, Samson had installed a brand new face mesh over the caved-in half of the horror of Petrov's head.

In his time in Junktown and The Tower, Samson had witnessed many living nightmares. Petrov’s head, the way it was, the left eye all sunk into the bridge, sitting on a sea of scar-tissue, was one such nightmare. Samson had installed the new face mesh with some trepidation, knowing Petrov would not hesitate to torture and then kill him if he made the slightest error with his tools. Nicolai Petrov was the only one of the Five to be named Face for life. All the rest had to regularly run for re-election. As such, he had little fear of making new enemies.

Technically, he was the Face in charge of enforcement, but in Junktown, good enforcement came down to fear. You were not to call Petrov the Face of Fear, not in person. But even so, Samson had heard around the Tower that Petrov would get angry if people
stopped
referring to him like that when he was not around.

Everyone was a contradiction.

Samson didn’t like meeting the dogs, but he had done it plenty of times. He had read that dogs could be friendly, so long as you treated them right. And Samson was always at a loss for something that was friendly to him. He carried treats in his pockets. They would sniff at his hands and lick him sometimes. Even hungry, they weren’t so bad, just temperamental.

He opened the door, slowly, and then stopped.

“Listen,” he said to Partner. “There’s going to be dogs in here. You can’t kill them, okay? No shooting. No matter what.”

“Do not shoot the dogs!” Partner boomed. “Okay!”

Now the dogs were awake. Wonderful.

As they entered, heads began to perk up, curious. The dogs wouldn’t attack straight off unless Petrov ordered it, or if they were bothered, or if they were really hungry. Samson had seen all three in his time—had seen the way the dogs worked together to take down grown men, tearing away their calves and ankles while weighing them down at the arms. Then teeth in the throat, and then the hot spray of blood everywhere. He was in Petrov’s presence often, fixing his tech and taking notes on ideas that Petrov wanted implemented. Being in front of Petrov for any amount of time usually meant watching someone die. He could be severely cruel when he wanted to, though there was never any pleasure in it. People respected cruelty, that was all.

There was blood across the floor. Bones, too. It was always a gamble coming this way.

One dog approached him—a tall shaggy mastiff, ribs showing. Something twisted in Samson’s chest, seeing the clearly defined bones of the big dog, but he could do nothing about it. He didn’t even dare give the dog a name, as dogs died so often. But he knew the dog, and it clearly knew him.

He held out a treat. The mastiff barked at attention, pushing forward. Giving the mastiff the treat, Samson reached forward and scratched it under the ears. The little morsel was gone in a flash, swallowed without even being chewed.

Partner, following suit, tried to pet the dog as well. The mastiff yelped and then bit at Partner. Its teeth scrapped over the metal forearm, drool slobbering down. The dog seemed surprised even as it continued to clamp its jaw. Partner looked up at Samson and then back down at the dog, jaw open in a sort of crooked metal smile.

Samson took Partner’s free hand.

“Come on. There’s a ways to go yet.”

* * * * *

V
ictor found Oscar’s hideout in the middle of Junktown, as he was told he would.

He stood across the street from the small, sturdy-looking shack, which was reinforced with steel beams and windows made of bulletproof-glass. Every so often, sounds of shouting would spill out—indecipherable gibberish, the kind that a drug addict would yell out in a rage. Or, the kind of fearful polemic that someone would make a recording of to keep people away.

The sense he had of Oscar’s location—something buried in his head somewhere, letting him know in a distant way where Oscar and twenty-three others like him were—was strong but not exact. The intel he had was similar—inexact. Victor’s headquarters had a general idea of where to find Oscar—and so in this way were not much more useful than Victor’s own homing senses.

But Victor’s instincts told him that a normal shack in the middle of the town—buried beneath pillars and rows of other such shacks and apartment complexes—would not have steel support beams on its outside, nor bulletproof glass windows, nor complex tech made-up to look like decaying wood lining the doorway.

“I think I’ve got it working now. Hot damn! Victor, are you there?”

Victor pressed a hand to his ear. “Hello, Mike.”

He could talk without speaking, moving his vocal chords at very low frequencies. This was something trained, something bred, into Victor. One of many such capabilities.

Buried in his ear was a very small transmitter. It permitted Victor to communicate with his base, which orbited in the stratosphere around St. Louis. No doubt, Tri-American knew the Groove aerial fortress was there, just as Groove knew of all the Tri-American aerial fortresses around their own cities. It was a common business practice—a gentleman’s courtesy—to allow the fiction that all these fortresses were hidden. Victor always operated in a rival territory with the assumption that his presence was well-known to said rivals. Even so, it often didn’t matter. Corporate bureaucracy limited security officers from acting on rival corporate agents without quite a lot of paperwork.

Sometimes Tri-American didn’t even need to try to sabotage Victor’s missions. With so many corporate devices competing for wavelength in a given area—and with Victor an employee of Groove, chock-full of Groove technology—often his transmitter wouldn’t work on its own in a Tri-American zone. Luckily for Victor, he was mostly biological. Even the bits of him that weren’t living tissue were powered by his biology. Not much of his body relied on software or transmission.

But some, yes.

“You are right on top of that mothersucker, as far as we can tell. Good on you, son,” said Mike.

“I know.”

“Smart man! Nothing past you. Okay. Also, there's another thing I gotta tell you.”

“I already know about the data slabs. I’ll have them for you.”

Oscar had been spying on Tri-American for Groove, which meant he had a great deal of software and information about both corporations. In the world of bi-corporate dominance, selling out to the other side was a given. It was understood. It was downright encouraged. The higher-ups didn’t know how to trust someone who wasn’t bought off.

But Oscar had done something taboo—he started selling to a third party. Someone outside of Groove, outside of Tri-American.

That had to stop. And in the meanwhile, all the data he had mined from Tri-American from his time in St. Louis was still worth quite a lot.

“Good, good. But there's another thing.”

“Okay.”

“It's a doozy.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe you should sit down. Are you sitting down?”

“Tell me what it is.”

“Hot damn! Always on task. I
like
that about you, Victor. Okay, get on task with this: there's a quake coming.”

Victor almost stood up. It had been a long time since he had been surprised. “What?”

“An earthquake. Off the charts huge,
goddamn
! The whole San Madrid fault is sinking to hell and back. That city is going to be a disaster area.”

“You couldn’t have figured this out before you sent me down?”

“No, Mister Smarmy Pants, we could not have. That is why all eleven billion dollars of you is down there currently.”

Matter-of-fact Mike. Mike the Moderator. Middling Mike.

“The alarms are going to go off soon. Five minutes? Ten? Son, you don’t have a lot of time. We’ve tampered with the systems a bit. They should already be sounding, but we needed to give you more room to work. Hot damn,” Mike chuckled, “it is going to be a wild
goddamn
place down there. The alarms’ll cause a big rush of folks everywhere. Madness! Pandemonium. Slowing you down, what not, all of that. Explosions, I expect.”

“Right.”

“How many explosions you think? We're putting in an over-under. I can mark you down for fifty.”

“Don't bother.”

“All business!
Goddammit
, that's good. All right, son. Once those alarms go off, it’ll be too late. The quake’ll be here. Well, not here, thank god! Down there. With you. So, hurry.”

Less time for alarms meant less people evacuated. The fact that more people were going to die for this mission—for Victor, essentially—slid right down his back like the deaths of so many others had in the past.

Victor considered for a moment. “What about extraction?”

“What a question! The answer is that we’re working on it. Something—a new defense code, maybe, or maybe the incoming quake? It’s messing with our systems like hell. Normally, we’d have it figured out in a few hours, but you don’t have that much time. You’ve got to get out of range of the interference. Up, most likely.”

“And Oscar’s body?”

A valuable commodity, potentially.

“Don’t worry about it. He’s likely just to slow you down. We don’t want to lose two investments today.”

Victor could put it together pretty easy from there. “Take out the target. Get the data. Get to high ground.”

“Hot damn! You got it.”

There was a short blip, and the small pressure of the open line faded from Victor’s skull.

High ground, huh?

The highest ground around was the Tower, of course. It would take him a good half-hour to get to the top if everything went as well as possible.