Necrotech (7 page)

I should have... done something. Anything.

Not that I could. The only thing that kept me from corrupting on the heels of nanoshock was the recharge the cops had shoved in me.

She'd gotten bullets.

Greg felt laughably surreal, a weird cherry on a diarrhea day. I didn't know what he'd hoped to accomplish here. A shaky offer of contract work seemed like an unstable plan, even for the lure of that file – which he'd basically just taken the teeth out of by keeping it off the system. If he was personally hanging onto it, that meant a good linker could relieve him of it for less than the cost of a police system incursion.

But I was saving his ass. From me, as well as anything else being on my roster would set him up for. “When you need a favor – one,” I added firmly, lifting one finger, “you leave a message with Shiva at the Mecca. I'll get it done. You give me the file and erase all copies and we're square. That's how this works.”

“You are stone cold.”

“Don't ever forget that,” I shot back. The look I leveled at him wasn't sympathetic this time. “Don't fuck around anymore.”

I headed for my exit without waiting for a reply. It was easy to spot, the only patch of white in a wall that looked like a collective of graffiti artists threw up on it. Pasha's Den of the Exotic – exactly the cheap contract sex service it sounded like – fought for territory with the Rat Café and every possible rendition of corporate propaganda you could ever want.

They used to put ads on the disconnection doors, but too many complaints of confused users getting stuck in projection earned them a lawsuit they couldn't buy off. Although most of us don't need to use the door to activate our protocols, a lot of older gen users prefer the comfort.

As for me, I just liked leaving on a, well, bang.

My hand was on the panel when Greg's voice cut the silence. “I have a kid, Riko.”

I hesitated. I shouldn't have.

“She's three years old.”

Fuck.

I turned. A three year-old kid confessed to a recent fling? Smooth. “Married?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

Surprise, surprise. Guess he'd had that sweet little wife all along. Only instead of waiting at home while her cop husband nabbed the bad guys, she waited while he fucked them. Heh.

“So?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

Greg ran both hands through his hair, finally meeting my eyes from across the neon-spattered floor. “She wants a divorce.”

How was this my problem?

I really couldn't handle complicated people. “That sucks.”

He frowned at me. Obviously, that wasn't the response he'd wanted.

I snorted a laugh that caused him to draw back as if he'd been slapped. “What do you want me to say? Is it supposed to make me feel guilty that I was complicit in your extramarital affairs? It doesn't.” Not even a little bit. Greg was an adult, he could handle his own decisions, and I'd handle mine. “You'll be fine,” I assured him. “You're a cop. You probably know a good lawyer.”

Something hard and desperate banked in his green eyes, something that could have been anger, but looked more like envy to my tired brain. It twisted his upgraded mask into something ugly, undoing all that cred he put into the work. “I need better income.”

“So?” I asked again.

“So I can't get a second job, Riko. A cop doesn't get to put his badge away for another shift.”

Ah.
Now
it made sense. It wasn't about me; it was about the income contracting out to a merc could give him. I was probably the only runner he was on good terms with. Damn it. “No,” I said again. “Hell, no.”

“I love her, you know.”

Maybe. Maybe his grasp on that subject sucked, too. “I'm glad,” I said evenly. “What's her name?”

“Sandra.”

I didn't notice anything different on his face. Hearts didn't sprout up around his head, hosannas didn't play behind his voice. No sparkles. Nothing that could tell me if he loved this woman or was spinning me some kind of song.

Honestly, I didn't care. “Then patch it up with Sandra,” I told him. “Work out your financial issues together and leave me out of it.”

“You're the only one I've ever cheated on her with, Riko. Doesn't that mean something?”

My fingers cracked against the panel.

“Yes,” I answered, very slowly. As if I was talking to a child. “It means that you're a purist
and
an asshole.” Not always mutually inclusive. “And that I liked you better before. Actually, scratch that.” I gave up on the door entirely. “I liked you better when we weren't talking. Chunk off, Detective Keith.”

“Riko, wait–”

Triple
hell no
, with a dash of
eat a dick
for flavor. I gave up the drama of the door and dropped the projection.

I slept for almost thirteen hours, and I was still nursing a grudge when I woke up.

Groggy as hell, I forced my eyes open around a seam of scum and grit. As soon as light touched my optics, the numbers in my arm's informational display faded into view. Green, simple, brutalized into the minimalist programming I preferred. Back to normal.

Groaning, I rolled over and shrugged my left shoulder, testing gingerly for hurt. Fortunately for me, today my meatsack brain didn't feel like being a dick. Awesome. I wasn't in the mood.

Normally, I'd check the shit that mattered. Palm up my readout – which was tied in with my disconnected netware, so fuck
them
, very much – and check messages. I couldn't engage that display until I had Lucky recalibrate my chipset and turn my netware back on. All I had going for me was the structural data coming from my arm's feed and basic chipset functions.

Not helpful, unless I was desperate to know exactly what my rescued mattress was made of.

I'd catch up on whatever I'd missed the past few days later. Right now, I had a mission. One that didn't involve worrying about the time or the weather. I could guess both: time for a drink, and hot as hell.

I rolled off the cot, feeling a thousand times better and still about thirty percent into
fucked.
Dragging myself to the small shower, I shed my filthy clothes and dropped them a pile. I'd shred them later.

I wasn't disorganized by nature, but I wasn't a neat freak, either. I just didn't own all that much stuff. Especially now that my everyday arsenal had gone the way of the memories prior to waking up in that hellhole.

I missed my guns.

I took a shower in the crappy standup, which took longer than I liked my showers to be. Given the chance of water poisoning at any given part of the city on any given day, the safest disinfectant comes in the form of highly regulated and intense bursts of ionized radiation. People who make a decent living tend to have a nice radiation unit with speed settings. People who make enough to floss their asscracks with credsticks usually boast several units and a supply line into a private water purification process.

In this rundown shack, the radiation wasn't so much a
burst
as a queef.

I stood there for ten minutes, naked and sweating, as the radiation took care of anything I'd picked up in the lab or on my adventurous trek through the city. I could have simply sprayed myself down with a can of sanitizer, but I liked radiation better. It's always thorough, dry, and doesn't leave you smelling like you'd rolled in alcohol and deodorant.

Shocking what a civilization with cancer-ending nanos and a complete lack of moral ethics could come up with.

My shower was slow, true, but at least the place had one. The city took radiation sanitation seriously. It kept some of the nastier infections from spreading among the cramped populace.

The downside to standing here was all the time it gave me to fume over Greg's miserable failure of a reach-out. Married, cheated on her, and trying to hit me up for payday over it.

I mean, even if we got on like slankers and whores, he was police, not corporate. The boys in blue rank lower, pull shit duty, and have about as much security clearance as I did. Less, really. I knew people who could skate along clearance lines for the right price. Police get a gob full of red tape for the trouble.

Besides, helping me would probably cost him his job. I'd deny it if anyone called me soft, but now that I knew he had that little kid of his to feed, I was even less inclined to bring him on. He smelled like bait, and my line of work wasn't easy credit.

Even if we spent it like it was.

I pulled my clothes on – the second of three sets I stashed, and none worth more than the time it took to dial them up from a cheap printer. Replacing the nanosteel jewelry I'd lost was just as easy. I'd get better shit later.

The light rod hanging from the ceiling painted the room in soft gold, providing me enough illumination to get dressed by. It turned on automatically at night, then spent the day recharging from the ambient daylight. Good tool. I always made it a habit to have one in any place I squatted in.

I opted for universal black pants, built a lot like the BDUs I'd stolen but better fitting. They bagged around my legs, loose enough to let me run without cinching, riddled with cargo pockets, and hung low enough on my hipbones that the light tattoo on my lower back was easy to see. Given my intended location, I would have gone for a sexier vibe, but I didn't want to waste my red vinyl. Just in case tonight's plan went cock-side-up and blood flew.

An electric yellow wraparound halter bared my arms, which meant nothing to get in my way. Dancing. Fighting. Breaking limbs. I was multipurpose like that. It folded around my nape, wrapped around my ribs. The front tapered to a point over my waistband, covering my navel and baring my back. If it got shredded, I'd call it street chic and wear it anyway.

The design showed off my ink. Since my genes had never been pure enough for my uptight mother anyway, I'd taken my authority issues a step further and burned the genetically formulated white right out of myself using as many colors as I could get away with. My right arm and shoulder sported an esoteric map that started with a retro Dia de los Muertos skull and graduated to toxic flowers and abstract designs. I'd had all the bare spots between shaded, outlined, textured by whatever the street artists had wanted to draw.

More vivid color stained my left ribs, my hip, all the way down my left thigh. My left shoulder had once been home to a lotus that matched Nanji's and Indigo's – most of us on the regular team sported at least one – but that had gone up in smoke with the rest of my arm.

A thought turned the vid-ink up to a thin gleam. Luminescent lights dotted the designs in complex patterns.

The pants could conceal more than a handful of weapons, but tonight, I only slid a single knife into my thick-soled, matte silver boots. The sheath fit right into the cuff, ideal for just this occasion. If I was lucky, I wouldn't need it.

I didn't put a whole lot of stock in luck, which explained the serrated interceptor blade. I was going in as close to naked as I could get while clothed. I didn't like the feeling. My instincts screamed that I needed more – more weapons, more heat, more fury.

I didn't know what was going on, but somebody was going to die for it. Brutally. Since I couldn't achieve that without Indigo and the team, I had no choice but to check my shit and focus on the next step.

Nanji deserved better. Across the board, she deserved better. I'd make sure the jackhole behind it all knew her name when he died. Preferably with my fist in his chest.

I ran my hands through my hair, wrinkled my nose at the state of my borrowed crash pad. A layer of grime had settled over everything, like a dust storm had wandered by and I'd left the windows cracked. Totally not healthy. Was it this bad last I checked?

When was the last time I even cleaned?

At least now I could tell myself that dead girls didn't have to clean.

Ah,
shit
. That reminded me, far too late. I should have brought that damned tablet out with me. Aside from the obvious problem – you know, that part where I wasn't actually dead – it could have served as proof when I hit people up for answers.

Then again, if I'd done that, Fagan would have gotten his fat fingers on it. I doubt he would have recognized the value of the information.

Chunking cops.

By reflex, I grabbed for my harness out of habit and remembered that it wasn't hanging on the edge of the window sill anymore. Fuck. It killed me that I'd lost my gear to that shithole I'd woken up in. I loved that harness. It was designed to carry almost any weapon I needed through its ingeniously constructed straps, and I'd broken it in perfectly over the past four years. It, along with all the weapons I'd been carrying when I vanished into that lab, would be mourned.

Assholes. That would cost them, too. Just as soon as I got the help I needed.

Some SINless runners work alone, banding into teams only when a job requires it, staying together long enough to get the job done and get paid. The problem with that life is the longevity. A good take split four ways suddenly becomes better split three, even better two, and best for one.

If you want a long – well,
longer
– life in this business, you find a group of people you trust and you make them trust you. You run together, take on jobs everybody understands, and split the take fairly. I'd found that in Nanjali and Indigo Koupra.

One old man may have taken my cocky swagger and turned it into a lethal machine – no pun intended, since the same old man had outfitted my arm – but Nanji and Digo had made sure I survived the effort. We watched each others' backs. Got in, got out, got paid. We'd gotten good at it, built up a hell of a team. Cred came fast and easy. Well, easier than going alone, anyway.

Indigo had always been the brains of the operation. He was a dervish with a computer and knew more people than I'd met in my whole life – a qualified linker no matter what side of the divide. You know that person who always seemed to have a guy? A clothes guy, a getaway guy, a tickets guy.