city blues 02 - angel city blues (43 page)

In that moment, I felt my trigger finger start to tighten of its own accord. I found myself struggling not to give in to the sudden and wild impulse. More than anything, I wanted to put a bullet hole right between the astonished eyes of this sociopathic young prince. To share with him the instant and fatal knowledge that no amount of wealth could make him immune to pain and mortality.

Judging by his reaction, he must have seen it in my face. Read the signs that I was milliseconds away from splattering his aristocratic brains all over his beautiful oiled slate floor.

Tears ran down his face, and his voice came out in a wail. “I didn’t order that one… I
swear
I didn’t! Killing the Forsyth girl wasn’t my idea. I was there, but I didn’t lay a finger on her. And I didn’t give the order.”

My finger tightened another fraction on the trigger. “If you didn’t order the killing of Leanda Forsyth, who
did
?”

“That would have been me,” said a male voice from the far side of the room.

I spun to face the door, the Miroku up and ready to fire. Silhouetted in the extra-wide doorway to the outer office were four men. Nine-fingers, Arm-twister, and Messenger-boy all had pistols pointed in my direction. Behind them—standing ten or twelve centimeters taller, and looking immaculate in a flawlessly-tailored cashmere suit—was the man who had spoken… Senator Elden Forsyth.

There was no time to evaluate, or even be surprised, because that’s when the shooting started. My first round took Messenger-boy in the throat. He flew backwards spraying blood, knocking the senator off his feet and out of my line of fire. Then Vivien nailed Arm-twister in the sternum, exactly as he was getting off a shot at me.

The barks of the Nambu and the Miroku were loud in my ears. The weapons of the Nine-fingers gang were strangely quiet by comparison. Just a metallic shushing sound, like someone opening a very long zipper at high speed.

I felt something like a punch to my upper right chest, accompanied by an oddly sharp sting. Not the feeling I would associate with the trauma of a bullet impact. I had perhaps a millisecond glimpse of a squat metal dart sticking out through the fabric of my suit jacket. And then the shriek of discharging capacitors as the dart’s internal circuits dumped some unknown amount of voltage into my body.

My central nervous system overloaded and crashed. My body collapsed to the slate floor, twitching uncontrollably under the onslaught of massive electrical shock.

The world went gray. My vision narrowed to a cone, and my hearing fluctuated wildly, the volume control spiraling up and down in a woozy cycle, so that sounds oscillated between inaudible murmurs and painful bursts of over amplified noise.

At some point, the dart ceased its electrical discharge, but my abused neural circuits were in no shape to rally.

Then someone was standing over me. The senator, looking down at me with those twinkling eyes. Giving me that trademark grin, both dimples in full evidence.

“I told you to walk away from this case,” he said. “You should have listened when you had the chance.”

I tried to say something in response, but my brain couldn’t seem to establish contact with my mouth.

The senator wasn’t interested in hearing from me anyway. He treated me to a final smile, and then kicked me in the side of the head.

Everything went dark.

CHAPTER 37

I returned to a blurred world of shifting lights and shadows, made more confusing by the lack of identifiable reference points.

My one clue was the dropping-elevator sensation in my gut. Zero gravity.

So, I was up somewhere high in the colony, near the axis of rotation, where the artificial pull of inertia was effectively nonexistent.

Every centimeter of my body ached, muscles still trembling from the violent contractions of the electrocution dart, or whatever that damned thing had been. The acknowledgement of my body’s pain, low grade as it was, served as an anchor point for my mental climb back toward rational thought.

I wondered vaguely why my stomach wasn’t churning. I knew from my one and only shuttle flight that I was not immune to the queasiness of Space Adaptation Syndrome. For some reason, my digestive system seemed to be behaving itself.

“Is there an easier way to get there?” a voice asked.

My brain, sluggish as it was, recognized the speaker as Senator Forsyth.

“I’m afraid that there is no tourist-friendly route,” said Jiro. “If you’re uncomfortable in zero-g, you may want to go back down to the habitat level. We can arrange for a vid-feed, so you can watch from remote.”

“No,” the senator said. “I need to be there. I want to see with my own eyes.”

“As you wish,” Jiro said.

A large shape loomed in my field of vision. It gradually resolved itself into a curved and padded wall, moving toward me in slow-motion. As the wall came nearer, my bleary eyes made out what looked like grab bars, spaced at regular intervals.

An instant before the collision would have occurred, someone laid a hand on my left shoulder and gave a shove, changing my direction of drift. The wall receded, sliding past a meter or so to my left.

Cognitive processes were coming back on line now, senses resynchronizing with the world outside of my skull. I was laid out straight, feet and legs together, hands at my sides—my limbs bound to my body by countless windings of some thin plastic filament. Wrapped up like a cocoon, I was floating feet-first down the tube-shaped corridor, my trajectory adjusted by an occasional nudge from someone I could only see as a vague form.

My flight path carried me toward a flashing holographic display that filled the tubular passageway from side to side. The imagery was simple and rendered at very high contrast. A black symbol against a yellow background, showing three overlapping circles laid out an equilateral triangle.

It was nearly identical to the international biohazard trefoil, but the outer perimeters of the circles were not depicted as the curving walls of organic cell membranes. They had an angular industrial look to them, like the jaws of a wrench, or the fingers of a robotic manipulator hand.

I’d never seen this variant of the symbol before, but its meaning seemed intuitive. If the rounded version of the icon represented biological hazards, then this mechanized variation must represent bio
mechanical
hazards.

But what did that mean? What exactly would constitute a biomechanical hazard?

No answer came to me as I floated through the flashing yellow and black hologram. On the other side was a large cylindrical airlock, perhaps four meters across and five deep, its inner door standing open.

I drifted through the opening and into the lock. At the far end, the soles of my shoes bumped against the outer door and I rebounded gently. I got a better look at my handler as he grabbed me and prevented me from floating away. It was my old friend, Mr. Nine-fingers, his face showing unconcealed distaste for the task of carting my helpless form around. He was clearly yearning to get his hands on me, to punish me for the long list of grievances that he was assembling in his head. But his orders—whatever they were—seemed to be keeping his revenge fantasies in check, at least for the moment.

Another cocooned body was wrangled in beside me, followed by two more. I couldn’t see faces, but from the general shapes and sizes, one of them might have been Vivien and the other two were probably Arm-twister and Messenger-boy.

Two other people (of the non-cocooned variety) maneuvered themselves into the lock, gliding from grab bar to grab bar with the balletic grace of humans who are acclimated to navigating in zero-g. Or rather,
one
of them glided. Senator Forsyth’s movements involved a lot of lunging, flailing, and frantic grabs for anchor points. He had apparently left his dignity back down in the gravity zone.

Despite his inelegant method of locomotion, the senator managed to bumble his way into the airlock. The inner door cycled shut behind him with a sibilant thunk.

The outer door of the airlock was marked with the same black and yellow warning iconics, and yellow lights began to blink around its perimeter. Someone clearly wanted us to know that we were entering a biomechanical hazard zone. I didn’t like the sound of that, but I was obviously not going to be given a choice in the matter.

The inner door hissed open, and Nine-fingers gave my shoulder a push that felt closer to a punch. I floated through the airlock threshold, into what appeared to be a large laboratory area.

It was a warren of high-density data cores, cooling units, video display screens, and equipment that was much less familiar to me—all laid out in patterns that baffled the human eye. The lack of gravity made all directions arbitrary, a fact of which the lab’s architects had taken full advantage. Each piece of hardware was oriented to whatever wall or structural member it happened to be attached to, with no attempt to establish a common point of visual or physical reference.

In the center of the room was a clearing dominated by a geodesic sphere of transparent material that looked like glass, but was probably something much tougher. Possibly one of the custom-grown diamond analogs, or some especially resilient strain of polycarbon.

The sphere was crowned at opposite poles by bundles of slender electrical cabling, interspersed with metallic capillary tubing. Bisecting the sphere across its middle were two metal bands with interlinking pyramidal teeth. They were currently locked together, forming what was undoubtedly an airtight seal, but it was clear that the two halves of the sphere were intended to separate. For what purpose, I couldn’t guess. Presumably something having to do with the numerous warnings about biomechanical hazards.

Nine-fingers glided out in front of me and brought himself to a stop by tucking a foot under the metal loop of one of the grab bars. He reached out and dragged me to a halt, using his muscles to soak up the inertia of my motion. His movements had the assurance and economy of someone accustomed to managing inert loads in micro-g.

When he was done cancelling out my drift, I hung in the air, facing the strange spherical chamber.

A few seconds later, another cocooned body drifted in. Nine-fingers employed his skills again, maneuvering Vivien to a spot a couple of meters to my right.

My bindings gave me just enough mobility to turn my head a few degrees in her direction. I wanted to make eye contact, and try to give her a look of encouragement, as ridiculous as that might sound.

There was no need. Vivien met my gaze with calm eyes. She knew as well as I did that our remaining lifespans would probably be measured in minutes. She was rock steady under the knowledge.

I felt the need to say something. Impart some final gem of wisdom or reassurance. Every option that flitted through my mind sounded like a useless platitude, so I settled for the simple truth. “I’m sorry that I got you into this.”

“You didn’t get me into this,” Vivien said. “I got you into this. My fuck-head of a husband got me into this.”

The senator coasted past at head-level, and snatched a grab rail jutting out from a run of pipes. He was moving too fast, and he didn’t have the skill to absorb the extra energy gracefully. His body smacked into the pipes and rebounded, nearly pulling loose his handhold.

“Now, now my dear,” he said. “There’s no need to resort to profanity.”

He was trying hard to project his usual aura of casual control, but I could tell that his collision with the pipes had pretty much knocked the wind out of him.

Vivien gave him a hard little smile. “Pardon me,” she said in an overly sweet voice. “How about my lying, backstabbing, cowardly murdering fuck-head of a husband? Is
that
better?”

The senator raised a disapproving eyebrow. “You’ve been hanging out in bad company, Vivien. It’s affecting your manners.”

He was struggling to simulate an air of confidence that he obviously wasn’t feeling. There was something almost pitiful about his attempted bluster. Especially when compared to the courageous example being set by his wife.

Vivien snorted. “You’re cozying up to the criminal scum who killed our daughter, and
I’m
the one hanging out in bad company?”

A shape sailed past us. Nine-fingers darted ahead to another grab bar, where he repeated his midair catch routine, parking the cocooned body of Messenger-boy close to the transparent sphere.

“I really had no choice,” the senator said. “Once Leanda started talking to that Dancer woman, it was only a matter of time until it all came apart.”

“Until all
what
came apart?” Vivien snapped.

The body of Arm-twister came floating in. Nine-fingers hung the cocooned thug in the air, next to the inert form of his cancelled partner.

Senator Forsyth chuckled. “This is not an adventure vid, my dear. And we have not reached the scene where the villain explains his master plan to the captive heroes.”

A buzzer sounded, and every warning lamp in the lab began pulsing with yellow light as the two halves of the geodesic sphere began to separate. I had no idea what was about to happen, but I knew that I wanted to delay it as long as possible.