Black Glass Page 16

  Candle used to admire them. Now, not so much.

  The flying drills were like the guns but with drills instead of muzzles—and as Candle turned to stare at a drill nosing through the wall, Shortstack pushed the women’s workstations out of the way ...

  And then Candle saw the hole in the floor; hidden, till now, under the workstations. A crudely cut-away trap door. A wooden ladder nailed in place going down into shadow. Brinny was already descending when the drill expanded, the bit separating into four parts that opened and whirled, cutting a wider hole in the wall, whining and whirring.

  “If you flatten on the floor and don’t move,” said an amplified voice from beyond the drilled wall, “the guns will not kill you. I repeat, you must immobilize completely. Do not force us to open fire ...”

  The drill flew through and was followed, before the dust cleared, by a flying gun. A remote operator somewhere turned the gun toward Pell, already descending the ladder as Monroe, whimpering and biting through a bright red fingernail, waited her turn—

  Candle was registering that no one had told him about the escape hole in the floor—

  Another flying gun was nosing in through the hole in the wall—

  And Shortstack was leaping up, grabbing the flying gun aimed at the girls—it fired a burst into the floor near them with a chut-tering, hissing sound as he wrestled the weapon down—

  Candle yelling, “Don’t do that! Don’t touch the–”

  And, sensing that someone had turned it from its target, the gun automatically did what it was programmed to do: it forced extremely concentrated compressed air, with punishing suddenness, out through its support-and-navigation air-holes; hundreds of air-jets so intensely concentrated and minutely focused that they cut like needles into Shortstack’s hands, so that all at once his fists were hidden in explosions of blood. Blood spattered Shortstack’s face, the walls, and Candle’s cheek and shoulder.

  Shortstack screamed and let go, falling back, his face contorted with pain, hands a welter of red shredded muscle tissue, outlined in exposed bone.

  Freed, the gun rose toward the ceiling, tilted down for another firing angle.

  “I repeat, you must immobilize completely ...”

  Monroe was almost down the ladder, just her head and shoulders showing above the hole in the floor—the flying gun hammered a burst of bullets at her, the weapon bucking only slightly in the air from recoil, and the top of her head was instantly chiseled away, exposing gray matter in broken-edged skull-cup before blood gushed to cover it, streaming over her blond hair—a wig, flipped aside—and she fell down the ladder, stone dead before she hit the floor below. The gun started toward the hole, its operator seeming intent on descending to pursue Pell and Brinny, like a barracuda entering a cave in a reef, but Candle was already pushing the market computer stations over onto the flying gun, the hardware tipping down, slamming down onto it, pinning the remote-controlled weapon in place. It spat bullets like an angry trapped animal.

  The other flying gun was circling the room, coming up on Shortstack—firing. Missing. Deliberately, it seemed to Candle. It was firing warning shots at Shortstack as if it were driving him back with them, forcing him toward a corner. The bullets strafed up the floor, making Shortstack scramble backwards.

  Candle snatched up a plastic bag that had contained someone’s tofu tots, rushed the flying gun from the side, slung the greasy bag over the muzzle. Momentarily blinded, the gun hissed bullets, punching holes in the bag, as Candle ran to Shortstack. The bag still partly obstructed the gun’s camera—a whisker of fiberoptics over the barrel—and the remote operator, swearing in some distant Slakon security room, had to dip the muzzle to shake the bag off. Giving Candle just enough time.

  Shortstack was up on his knees and Candle bent, scooped him up—he was surprisingly heavy—and carried him out the upper entrance, the ragged doorway cut behind the camouflage desk, expecting with every staccato heartbeat to be drilled or shot in the back as he went.

  “If we have to open fire again–” boomed the amplified voice.

  They made it through, Candle stepping to one side of the entrance, and bullets dug a line into the floor where they’d just been.

  “Put me the fuck down!” Shortstack snarled.

  Candle put him down and—holding his ravaged hands out from his sides—Shortstack ran to the hallway. Candle followed, barely able to keep from running Shortstack down, slipping on the blood streaming from his torn hands. “’Stack, the arrest team’s gonna be here any second!”

  “We gotta get to Rina—!”

  “No, they’ll be watching the bar!”

  “I’m not gonna let ’em get her!” Shortstack sounded crazy, panicked, furious, despairing, all at once.

  He ran to the stairs, led Candle on the circuitous route back through the buildings to Nodder’s bar—and the flying gun followed. Thirty feet behind, then twenty-five, then twenty, catching up as they ran around a corner with a burst of bullets chewing up the doorframe behind them ...

  “Lie flat on the floor, immobilized, or we will open fire!” The command was being transmitted through a small amplifier on the gun now. As if the gun itself was shouting at them. “We have a warrant! You are under arrest!”

  Then Rina was there in the hallway below Nodder’s bar—rushing toward them, something clenched in her bared teeth. In each one of her hands she had an open bottle of vodka.

  What was the vodka for? And then Candle realized, seeing the Molotov rag stuck in it. “Throw it, Rina, light it and throw it!”

  Someone controlling the flying gun anticipated her, firing toward the bottles, as she skidded to a stop in the bare tiled hallway—and the bottle in her right hand shattered. She dropped the broken neck of the shattered bottle, took the lighter from her teeth, lit what Candle now realized was a vodka-soaked tampon—and threw the bottle at the oncoming flying gun as it swung toward her, centering its muzzle on her body mass. All her martial arts skills and a lot of practice throwing bottles came into play: she hit the flying gun square, blue flame engulfed it, and it kept coming, a meteor now, but flying past Rina, smashing into the wall, spinning around, firing wildly.

  Rina and Shortstack dodged to the side, into a stairwell. Bullets chipped the door panel, bits of door stinging Candle’s cheek as he rushed in after them, slammed the door shut behind.

  “Oh God what happen to his hands!” Rina wailed.

  “Just keep going down the fucking stairs!” Candle shouted.

  He could hear men in the hallway up above. The arrest team was there. They must have missed them outside the market room by seconds.

  Shortstack’s blood made the stairs slippery. But they made it to the bottom floor—to the parking garage that had become a squat. Men, women, children, old people, stared at them from their cardboard shanties and tents, gaping at Shortstack’s clawlike red hands, then at the door they’d just come through.

  “Rina!” Shortstack said, stopping, his head drooping. “In my right pants pocket there—a sticky-cam. Get it out, slap it up on that metal beam, facing the stairs we just came outta ... oh fuck, my hands ... hurry!”

  She dug in his pocket, found a little camera/recorder about the size of a bottle cap, slapped its magnet onto the rusty metal column.

  “You see that!” Shortstack shouted at the squatters, “I’ll check the record, see that the first ten people blocking that door get two-hundred WD each, and you know I’m good for it!”

  Shortstack staggered on between the encampments, Rina helping him, squatters getting out of his way—he was near collapsing now—and Candle hurrying along behind. “Where we going?” he asked.

  “Utility tunnel,” Shortstack rasped. “They probably don’t know about it.”

  Candle glanced back once to see at least thirty squatters holding the metal door to the stairwell shut, while others brought metal debris to pile in front of it. Shouts and warnings and poundings came from the door.

  “You did this!” Rina said, weeping o
ver Shortstack’s bandaged hands. “You, Candle! You can go to fucking hell!”

  “No ...” Shortstack said faintly. He was heavily medicated, barely conscious.

  He was lying on a portable aluminum-frame hospital bed in a neat, white-painted room of Allwall materials, in Rooftown. This low-ceilinged room, and one other not much bigger, were what passed for Rooftown’s hospital—a kind of impromptu clinic set up by a man who called himself Dr. Benway, rumored to be a physician who’d lost his license after writing himself too many narcotics prescriptions. There were some older but still useful pieces of bio-monitoring equipment and there was a pretty fair emergency pharmacy; “Benway” kept the hypoderm jets and sheets clean, and kept the patients fed. If they could pay. He claimed it was safer than a regular hospital. Fewer “wildcat infections.”

  Candle shifted in the folding chair next to the bed, feeling claustrophobic in here, and he was normally never claustrophobic. “I didn’t bring them, Rina—Christ, they almost killed me ... I stopped one of the guns ...”

  “Maybe you didn’t know guns coming, but you told them ... you brought them ...”

  “No. I didn’t. I tried to warn you, when I figured it out, but I couldn’t get through. How’d you find out about the raid?”

  “Pell got through, she call me—you say you can’t call but she call. Clifforrrrrrd!”

  Who was Clifford? Then Candle remembered that was Shortstack’s first name, the little guy opening his eyes a crack to look at her. “I don’t think he knew, Rina ... he ...” Barely audible. Candle couldn’t make out the rest.

  “How come nobody told me about that escape hatch in the floor?” Candle asked.

  Shortstack just closed his eyes.

  “No one trust you, that why!” Rina sobbed.

  “Here, here, it’s not going to help Clifford to carry on like that,” said Benway, bustling in, the floor creaking under his tread. He was wearing a white lab coat and old fashioned stethoscope, to create the illusion of professional authority. He was a man who’d had too much facial reconstruction, his face tight as a drum, his nose whittled down to a caret. He stood only a foot taller than Shortstack, which accounted for the low ceilings. That and the unofficial Rooftown building code. Which was: You build it too big, we shove it off the platform.

  The wind whined outside the shack; the walls trembled.

  “Oh—Listen to that! It’s going to fall down!” Rina said, lips quivering.

  Candle shook his head. “Rina—most of the time you’re the ballsiest woman I know. You take out armed drunks and flying guns. But you get in a big tree-house and you’re scared it’s going to fall. And you think everyone around you is a traitor.”

  “Oh shut up. Not everyone! Just you! It your fault!”

  Benway was flipping a business card through his fingers the way a magician flips a poker chip. He smiled tautly and handed it over to Rina. “Clifford’ll be okay. Take him here, they can reconstruct his hands. Do it soon. Tonight if you can. Clifford, how’s the pain?”

  “Not much,” Shortstack mumbled.

  “I’ll see you get another shot and pills to go. But best you don’t stay here. You’re a touch too hot.”

  “We on the news?” Candle asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Benway replied, taking Shortstack’s pulse. “It’s just the word on the street.”

  Not on the news? Why? Candle wondered. Probably Grist wanted the underground to know—and he’d see to it they knew—but it’d be bad publicity for Slakon, laws or no laws, if it got out he’d used his own people to squelch black stock markets. Most people regarded it as just free enterprise, the last hold-out of the little man against corporate power. Probably he’d pull strings to keep it off the Mesh as long as he could. The Fortune 33 owned most of the commercial meshworks now ...

  “Doc–” Candle shifted in his chair. Uncomfortable here. “Doesn’t he need more blood? He left a lot of it on the stairs ...”

  Benway shook his head, heading for the door to the next room. “No, his blood pressure is pretty good. We gave him what he needed. I’ll be in here.”

  “Where ... where’s Nodder?” Shortstack rasped, when Benway was gone.

  “Hiding out,” Rina said, with a toxic glance of mistrust at Candle. “He okay. But Monroe not okay. Monroe dead. Brains all over fucking floor.”

  Candle kept his face impassive. His grimace of pain was inward. Remembering her head flying apart; her brains exposed. Was she still thinking and feeling, for a moment, with the top of her head shot open, her brains half scooped away?

  “She was my friend,” Shortstack said, almost loudly. “Monroe was my friend. I fucking let her down. I was stupid. Brinny tried to warn me ...”

  “Not your fault!” Rina said. Another glare for Candle. “Even if he didn’t bring them in—he was supposed to protect you from them! That was what you pay him to do!”

  Candle’s grimace, now, was outward. She had him there. He thought of pointing out that they’d gotten away with the backup memsticks; that most of them had escaped alive; that he had gotten there in time to help. But he wasn’t convinced, and she wouldn’t be. He sighed. “Nothing I can say to that,” he said. “Except, you’re right. And—I’ve got the blueglove. You know how to contact me ... Clifford.”

  Shortstack winced. “Don’t call me ... that ...”

  “Surprised you prefer ‘Shortstack’.”

  “Don’t like that either. You work ... for me.” He licked his lips. “Call me ...”

  “Boss?” Candle smiled. “Okay, Boss.” He patted Shortstack’s arm. “I’m going to see if I can find out how the girls are doing. And what the next move from the assholes is gonna be.”

  “Sure you can find out what police next move is—policeman?” Rina asked, wiping her eyes, getting her glitter of hardness back.

  “It’s only superficially the police,” Candle said. “It’s Grist for sure, behind it. He hates the idea of the—what he calls the Black Stock Market. The whole style of that raid, that was privatized cops. He’s got the courts involved, yeah, but for sure, it was him. I heard on the news, when I got up this morning, he had a meeting with the President of these fucking United States about ‘rogue investment’ a week ago. A private meeting.” Candle stood up. “Maybe it was my fault they found the market—in a way. Because Grist was after me—and maybe they followed me to you.”

  “Or ...” It was just a murmur from Shortstack, his eyes closed. “Or the fucking trolls followed us ... to you.”

  “What you need to follow is doctor’s orders, Boss,” Candle said, ducking to go through the door to the ramps. Pausing in the doorway long enough to add: “And Rina’s orders too.”

  Candle stepped out into the evening wind, working his way across a swaying catwalk made of old car tires; there was a peculiar smell on the wind that gushed against his face: sweet and industrial both. What was it? Finally he decided it was the smell of the PetroPro refinery, a few miles away; it converted shale-oil petroleum into food-supplement protein.

  Hearing Rina’s voice in his head: “Even if he didn’t bring them in—he was supposed to protect you from them!”

  Pup Benson doubted he could get into the lab at all. It was high security. He had a pass for some Slakon buildings, but not for this one. And when it was dark out, and the buildings were mostly empty of personnel, the guards always got more suspicious.

  An actual in-person, physical security guard was looking doubtfully at Pup from the window of the booth beside the facility gate. The booth stood in the cone of a streetlight glow that marked out the sketchy lines of a thin rain. The guard was a black man in a Slakon Security uniform, his wide face etched with a scowl that looked permanent. Just now he was scowling over Pup’s pass. It said “Rod Hooper” on the pass, a name the Claire woman had given him. She’d sent him the pass online, he’d printed it out real high-rez. It had the right barcode, had his photo on it, but the guard didn’t seem to want to open the gate.

  “I got to see some
ID to go with this,” the guard growled.

  Pup didn’t have any ID that said Rod Hooper on it, of course. Now what?

  On an interior wall to the guard’s right was a thin comm screen, which suddenly lit up with an image of Terrence Grist. Pup could see it, beyond the guard. He had never met Grist but he’d seen him plenty on iNews. “You there—Spaulding!” the image barked. Grist’s image was looking furiously at the guard’s back.

  The guard jumped a bit in his booth, turning to face the screen. “Mr. Grist?”

  “Yeah that’s right—me you managed to correctly identify. Now stop holding up my associate! Let Mr. Hooper through now! No more delays! He’s on a mission for me! And see to it no one bothers him while he is on the property! He’s cleared for all doors and corridors! Follow him on monitor and unlock anything that needs unlocking! He’s fetching equipment for me and I need it fast!”

  “Yes, sir,” the black guard said, licking his lips and thumbing a release panel. “I’m on it right now, sir.”

  Pup realized his mouth was hanging open. He shut it, wondering how there could be a connection between Grist and the Claire woman. Was it Grist who’d transferred the money to him? But it didn’t make sense. Why would Grist want him to steal something that belonged to Slakon—to Grist himself?

  But the gate rolled back, out of his way. Pup took back his pass, clipped it to his coat pocket, and walked through the entrance, hurrying through the misty evening toward the building Claire had designated ...

  Ten minutes later, he was walking through a door—a door that had simply opened for him as he’d approached—and right past a security robot, that seemed utterly indifferent to him.

  Pup shook his head, as he scanned doors for the right lab number. Had he misunderstood the Claire woman? He’d had the definite impression he was here on an illegal job; that he was to slip something past Slakon. But suddenly Slakon was eager to cooperate with him.

  He thought about the money. Ours is not to reason why ...