He switched to another corridor, and padding along with his Techrim up by his cheek, moved through the almost complete darkness. Steam shifted around his boots. Somewhere, through solid-merc wire-work grilles purple lights strobed and flickered tiger-stripes of shadow across his face.
Keenan stopped, his entrance blocked by a concrete wall. Beyond this lay the corridor through which soldiers moved to the rooftop chamber: their prison. He pulled a neutral PAD free and drilled a hole through the concrete, slowly, easily, carefully, using its cool laser. The wall was a metre thick; Keenan inserted a tiny digital spy mirror and gazed down onto the ranks of soldiers that were advancing, heavily armed, towards their rendezvous with Pippa’s mini-guns.
“Where are you?” muttered Keenan. He shifted the mirror subtly, altering its angle, scanning the wide steel corridor. There: McEvoy, face twisted in a grimace of fury, finger gesticulating and lips spitting as he instructed his soldiers, drilled them with command, and spat curses at advancing heavy artillery SIM support. His white wispy hair was more unkempt than before, as if he’d been dragged from sleep. A light sheen of sweat bathed his brow.
You might be the leader of one of the Seven Syndicates, thought Keenan, but you’re just as human as the rest of us: just as weak, just as flappable, and just as fucking expendable
.
He set the five tiny Pebble Charges and moved five steps back down the narrow corridor; at the flick of a thumb-switch the directed detonation howled, fire flowing out into the corridor like magma, and half the wall caved in, crushing, compressing and instantly killing ten SIMs. Dust rolled out like atomic fallout. Keenan leapt free of the sudden opening, smashed a right hook against McEvoy’s jaw, stunning him, and took the man’s gun like candy from a child. Slowly, he pushed the barrel of his Techrim under the old man’s chin. Keenan slammed his back against the wall amidst sounds of choking. He grinned. It was an evil expression, without humour.
“I remember you,” said Keenan, voice soothing, mouth touching McEvoy’s ear. “It’s all come flooding back like a bad dose of syphilis. I tracked your exploits until intel missions got in the way. You’ve been responsible for everything from gun-running to child pornography, you deviant piece of shit.”
McEvoy said nothing. His breathing rasped on the dust. His face twitched nervously.
“Tell them to lay down their guns and back away, or I’ll shoot your jaw bone through the top of your fucking head.”
“Weapons down!” screamed McEvoy. Keenan could feel the man’s sweat slick under his grip. “Retreat to Central, I repeat, retreat to Central.” Slowly, the soldiers and SIMs started to withdraw. Their looks burrowed with fury and hatred into Keenan. He shrugged away their animosity like dandruff and jabbed his weapon tighter against McEvoy’s flesh.
“Good boy,” he growled.
He walked McEvoy towards the roof chamber, stumbling at first over the debris from the channelled explosion, then past a litter of bullet-riddled corpses surrounding the entrance in a cadaver arc. The steel doors were pock marked, dented, buckled by the fury of the Apache’s mini-guns. Keenan peered cautiously through the smoke.
“Coming in, Pippa,” he bellowed.
“All clear, boss.”
The chamber stank of cordite. Franco had just finished loading the Apache as Keenan, keeping close to McEvoy—like a lover—inched forward. “Found me a pretty plaything,” he said.
“We need to go.” Urgency raped Pippa’s voice. “They’re regrouping.”
Keenan nodded. “Franco?”
“We’re on. Rebekka’s in the chopper. Let’s move.”
Franco boarded the ramp, grabbed McEvoy and hauled him up, and Keenan kicked away the steel, which clattered. Pippa flicked several switches and motors jerked, whining.
She turned to stare at McEvoy, whose eyes glared malevolently at his captors. “What are the codes? To unlock the roof?”
“Go to hell.”
“I could strap you to the front of the mini-gun and try to ram our way free?”
McEvoy considered this; he stared at her for long seconds, then relinquished and gave her a stream of digits, which she punched into the Apache’s console. Above, locks made slick grinding noises, like iron filings in grease, and the roof began to fold open, revealing a fresh spread of black sky. Stars glittered, crystals of frozen hydrogen sugar.
The Apache lifted, engines roaring and fire flickering from underbelly jets. It escaped the confines of the chamber as a flood of soldiers burst in, sub-machine guns roaring, and shot vertically into the great black, banked, and disappeared like a ghost into the night.
The Apache hovered at three thousand feet above an expanse of cold black sea. Far, far below tiny tracers of white chased one another over the waves. Keenan slid open the door, pushed McEvoy roughly to the edge and placed a short black blade against his throat. Behind him, Pippa and Franco exchanged glances but said nothing; something was burning Keenan, and they knew better than to step in from a position of ignorance.
“I found out allabout you,” said Keenan, at last.
McEvoy had lost his cockiness; a man realising death was staring him full in the face, and that none of his billions of hoarded gold and jewels, and dollarcards, ultimately, mattered. None of his arms and armies could help him here, in this place, at this time. No GG AI was there to protect him; no PopBot to pull him back from the dangerous brink. For probably the first time in fifty years McEvoy was totally alone.
“I have money, Keenan, more money than you could ever imagine! I could give it to you! All of it!”
“Dirty money,” snarled Keenan. The knife jerked savagely, and a thin trickle of blood appeared at McEvoy’s throat. It bubbled around the knife-blade, then ran in twin rivulets, creating glistening trails of guilt. “Money made from selling kids to perverts, you sick little fuck.”
“All flesh is a commodity,” said McEvoy stiffly. There was no point in denial. Keenan had worked the files; he knew what he knew and there was no denying the Syndicate’s appreciation of the paedophile trade. It was one of its claims to fortune.
“If I could hunt down every sick little bastard, and cut out their hearts, I would. I know, I understand, we live in a sick place. I have acknowledged the way things work, but I will never comprehend, McEvoy. How can you seek to understand the workings of a deviant? By definition, it is corrupt.”
“I am not a deviant,” said McEvoy, voice made hoarse by the pressing blade.
Keenan increased the pressure. Blood flowed. His eyes were dark coals. His sanity teetered on the edge of a razor. “The human organism is like any other organism,” said Keenan, “and sometimes it becomes wounded, diseased, deranged. Sometimes, the human grows on a diverted path; a place where it can no longer be classified as human, no longer be classed as life. That’s where the paedophiles belong: the deviant, non-human, non-life. And then there’s you
,
fucker, the bastard who makes their dreams come true.”
Keenan heard Pippa’s intake of breath. But it was too late: too late to stop the murder.
He pressed hard, felt the blade cut through skin, muscle, tendon, windpipe. It cut deep and savage in a bright fountain of crimson, the tip slicing right down to the spinal column. And as McEvoy’s head lolled back with a gaping crimson mouth Keenan kicked the body from the chopper. It toppled, tumbling end over end, and was consumed by the sea.
Franco peered after it, and shivered.
“You’ll have the Seven Syndicates after us, now,” he said.
“Fuck ’em.”
“You’d fight every last one?”
Keenan’s eyes gleamed. “The baby abusers? I’ll fucking kill them all. Burn them. No problem.”
Pippa moved forward. She placed her hand gently on Keenan’s shoulder. The man was lost to anger, to hatred, was deep in a bad place filled with a dark violent energy. Gently, Pippa reached up and rubbed speckles of McEvoy’s blood from Keenan’s cheeks. “Killing this scumbag won’t change anything.”
“I know that!” Keenan pulled away, moving into the Apache’s interior. Rebekka shrank in the shadows, horrified by this apparent... insanity
.
This was something she had never seen: a base primal animal logic; a primitive need to kill, and to kill, and to keep on killing until all the bad men were dead unto dust. “I can put a spanner in the machine. I can slow it down, and by slowing it down I hit them where it hurts most: financially.” He gave a bitter laugh and rubbed at weary eyes. “Come on. Let’s get out of this depraved shit-hole. The City.” He snorted a derisory laugh. “What a fucking toilet.”
Pippa retook the controls and the Apache banked, dropping towards the rolling sea, and hugging the waves for protection so the moving water could mask their digital signature. It sped towards Freeport 557 and the waiting Hornet.
The Hornet gleamed slick in the cold night air. Despite the late hour, people moved in thick streams down walkways and roads, huge snakes of living moving flesh, human mixing with slab and alien, proxer and kjell. The Apache helicopter came in discreet, low from the Tekkajemnon River, skimming the bulky concrete buildings of hydra-turbines and touching down with minimum fuss on the deserted outskirts of Freeport 557. Slowly rotors died, thumping rhythmically to a halt. In the gloom of the cockpit, Franco glanced nervously at Keenan, his face albino in the glow of the consoles.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, almost reverently. Since McEvoy’s murder, Keenan seemed to have adopted an invisible mantle, an aura of quiet but dreadful respect.
“I’m not sure,” said Keenan. His voice was a low growl. He lit a home-rolled, and the ceiling air-filters clicked on. The glow of the cigarette turned his eyes amber.
“It’s clear, as far as I can see,” said Pippa. “All the scanners ID. The Hornet hasn’t been tampered with. Anti-intrusion detectors are fine.”
“Let’s just wait it out for a while.”
They sat in the gloom, in silence. The rain started again, sheeting across the landscape. Lightning crackled distantly, illuminating a nightmare skyline: a skyline from the spastic brush of a mad artist. Towers bristled like spikes. Lights glimmered neon against a surreal staccato landscape.
Franco stared hard at the back of Keenan’s head.
Shall I tell him?
he thought. Then:
Naaah. It’s irrelevant. Anyway, he’ll find out soon enough.
Franco chewed his lip, worried a little.
“I’ll recon. Watch for my signal; then bring in the Apache so we can transfer the kit.”
“Yes,” said Pippa.
Keenan stepped out into the rain, and was instantly gone. Pippa watched on the scanners, and glanced up, realising Rebekka was staring hard at her: a focused, intense stare.
“What you looking at?”
“You said you’d kill me.” Rebekka was shivering a little. Pippa felt herself deflate.
“I... apologise. Those words were said in anger. Don’t take it too personally; I’ve had a kind of hard life.” She smiled. “Maybe we could be friends?”
“That would be... better,” smiled Rebekka uncertainly.
“It’s a long time since I’ve had a friend,” said Pippa with a deep sigh. She saw Keenan’s signal. “Come on, the boss says we’re good to go.”
“Thank God for that!” blurted Franco.
Pippa spun up the rotors, and gave him a sideways glance. “You sound very relieved, Franco. Something you’re not telling us?”
“No, no. No. No! Well, yes,yes, maybe, possibly, but that’s the whole damn point. I’m not telling you.” He grinned with the smugness of the deranged.
Keenan peered into the darkened interior. “Cam?”
“Yeah, Keenan, I’m here.”
“You OK?”
“Hmm, sort of, except for a pounding at the fists of that ginger lunatic.”
“Ahh, so that’s how he got out.”
“Yes.” Cam spun slowly, a grey light blinking. “Bastard gave me a right hook, sent me bouncing down the corridor like a ping pong ball. Let’s just say he caught me unawares.”
“Never underestimate the insane.”
“Believe me, Keenan, I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
“Everything else OK?”
“As far as I can ascertain. The rain has been driving me mad with its incessant pounding. I didn’t realise we were putting down in the tropical season.”
Keenan nodded, watching the Apache skim low over the landing port and touch down nearby. Donning Gore-tex jackets, which soon glistened, Keenan and the others began transferring weapons, WarSuits, ammo, flak-armour, bombs and other kit from the belly of the Apache into the Hornet’s bomb-proof hold. They attracted little attention in the bustling surroundings; FukTruks roared and flyers hummed overhead. All around the noise was a magnification of chaos. Combat K worked, with the help of Rebekka, loading and checking equipment.
“Where will you go now?” asked Keenan, during a lull where he lit a cigarette. Under the canopy of the Hornet’s low wing, he watched heavy raindrops rolling and dropping with a fast
tick tick tick
.
“I’ll build a new life here,” said Rebekka. She smiled; it lit up her face. “I’ll just have to keep a low profile, away from the Syndicates.”
“Will you be safe?”
“As safe as any other gun-running Syndicate-hunted proxer on a human-run cash-only lawless non-policed world.” She grinned. “So, things haven’t got any worse, then. Looks like the Syndicates were on to me; shit. I thought I was too clever for them.”