Nanoshock Read online

  Another reason I needed a functional streetdoc.

  The Shepherd smeared with rot and practically foaming at the mouth jumped at me. I grabbed his arm, fingers slipping in the grime, and twisted harder than I should’ve had to. The move pulled at my new bullet hole and tore it that much wider. Pain ripped right up into my brain.

  On the plus side, I rocked the guy into an armbar that ruined his day. Bone and gristle popped. He screamed, thrashed and punched and kicked whatever he could, like a kid throwing a tantrum.

  When I didn’t let up, the guy who’d tagged me rolled in hard and drove a fist against the back of my head. My skull snapped forward, head ringing. Sweat rolled down my back, cold and clammy. I was used to getting shot. Didn’t make it physically easier.

  I wrenched the howling, frothing deacon around, slammed him into his buddy. The Sauger Quad went flying.

  I, uh, didn’t expect one of them to have hold of my harness. Not sure which one, but at least nobody but those two were left to see me roll ass over snatch when they jerked me right off my feet.

  I’d had enough.

  Using the momentum, ignoring the sharp scrapes and bruises the broken asphalt ground into me, I rolled back up to a crouch. They struggled to detangle themselves. I stepped on the butt of the Quad by my feet, flipped it up, and caught it by the fore-end. Using its own weight, I pumped it once and had the barrel pointed business end first at the unfortunate deacons.

  Both froze. One wobbled on unsteady knees, then fell back on his ass. “W- Wait…” His dark skin gleamed with sweat, eyes so wide the bloodshot whites practically glowed. “Our Lord said–”

  “Oh, for…” I bent to bare my teeth at both. “Wake up, fuckos. He ain’t helping!”

  The other very, very slowly lifted hands twisted by scars. That was the one who’d dinged me with the Crappo. Point blank in the back.

  Both knew what I knew – Sauger Quad 54s had a spray that hit everyone like bukkake made of rusted nails. I’d tag them both, and the floor, and the surrounding walls, in one shot.

  I waved the shotgun. “You didn’t even prime this thing,” I said, disgusted.

  They stared at me in silence. One’s jaw set, fear a trembling line in it. His buddy was too stupid to look down the barrel of a shotgun and see anything but the inside of his own ass.

  Ugh. Boring.

  I tipped the barrel one way, then the next. “So, dickruns. Which of you d’you think your God wants to save?”

  The stupid one glared mutinously at me. “Go ahead,” he spat. “Martyr us.”

  I snorted so hard, laughter and saliva knotted into my sinuses and burned all the way down. Choking on the effort hurt like a bitch, but I’d be fucked right here if I let that one slide. “Martyr you,” I repeated, croaking. I buried my nose into the crook of my elbow, eyes stinging.

  Maybe he blushed. His jaw got harder and harder, his mouth thinner and thinner.

  A figure moved in my peripheral. Keeping the Sauger trained on them, I lifted the Kago in my other hand and directed the trigger to the unlucky deacon. He hit the dirt, gurgling from the hole in his throat. Last bullet, too. I dropped the piece of shit. It bounced, skidded.

  They stared at me.

  “Martyr.” I hocked up mucous in my throat and spat. The gob splatted by his feet. “Bitch, somebody’s got to care about you first.”

  “Burn in hell!” the scared one managed.

  Adorable.

  Holding the weapon steady, I lifted my brain- and blood-spattered tech hand. Strings of meat seamed the middle finger I gave them. “You first.”

  I guess I hit the breaking point. Both turned and booked it; a Shepherd specialty.

  Killing assholes was mine.

  The Quad’s blast scored the ground, the corner the quiet one tried to dive behind, and most of his exposed meat. Blood and flesh splattered. He hit the ground, twitching. The skinny one screamed as he planted face-first into the slimy street.

  Nobody shoots me and lives.

  I ignored the smeghead dying across the way, approached the little one and put a boot on his chest. The Shepherd whimpered, eyes rolling back in his head.

  I wasn’t even in the mood to savor it. This time, I shoved the barrel right into his gaping mouth. Teeth shattered on metal. He screamed around the barrel, and the acrid stench of ammonia drifted up to my nose.

  “Yikes,” I said, glancing at the stain spreading at his crotch.

  So much for the martyr act. Tears ran from his eyes. His whole body shook, frozen to the ground. Whatever he said, I couldn’t understand it around the shotgun. Blood and saliva dribbled down his cheeks.

  Sister Charmine’s ruined, they’d said. Bitch slipped us.

  Such equality. Much love for the flock.

  My lip curled. “Yeah, don’t care. Tell me who your contact is. Who’s the cunt you mentioned?”

  His dark eyes widened, raw panic stretching every line of his face. He tried to speak, garbled nonsense.

  I bent over. It tilted the barrel, which grated up into the broken shards of his upper teeth. “What?” I asked, cupping my filthy hand behind my ear. “I can’t understand you.”

  He screamed, jagged gums grinding as he tried for words his shattered mouth couldn’t frame. He openly cried. Wailing, gasping panic that hitched into hysteria. “I- I…” A shaking whine. “Ah ‘o ‘oh!”

  My nose wrinkled. “What? Oh.” I pulled the barrel from between his torn lips. “Oops, sorry.”

  “I don’t know, please,” he begged. “Please, believe me, I–”

  My boot ground in. Something underneath it popped. He screamed. I let him, waiting him out. When he ran out of breath, I tapped his cheek with the Sauger. “Why are you after me?”

  His hands twitched against my ankles, feebly grasping for something. Anything, I bet. Something to use.

  All he had was me and the spread of his own piss. I smiled down at him.

  His whole body flinched, tried desperately to go fetal. Wasn’t all me. The spray he’d taken did a lot of the anti-mobility work. “Not me! Didn’t want to do it!”

  “Nope.” Another pat, metal to cheekbone. Harder. “They wanted me alive. You wanted me dead. Why?”

  I watched the realization bloom into full-on terror in his face. The babylicker was genuinely crying. Like he didn’t spend his days ass-deep in it every day.

  The worst.

  He thrashed, hurt himself doing it, cringed, cried harder. His face cracked into fragments of snot and filth, blood and shards of teeth, and he sobbed, “Somebody hired Carmichael. Creds for you, that’s it. That’s all I know! I swear to God, I don’t know anything else!”

  Pretty sad for a would-be martyr.

  “Why dead?”

  “Cred,” he managed.

  The Word, I realized. Shepherd lingo for cred. Easy enough to understand there. Killing me would be a massive boost for the dregs of the city. Killing any merc would do it for these shitsuckers. Had Carmichael’s efforts at revenge made me an easy and coincidental target?

  That felt like a stretch.

  “Who knows details?” I demanded.

  His eyes rolled to Crossface’s sprawled corpse.

  Just fucking awesome. Two dead sources of information. This wasn’t my day.

  “Well,” I said briskly, removing my foot from his chest. “Give my love to the devil.” I looked down at him over the barrel of the shotgun, and smiled. “I hear,” I added, licking my lips, “he’s got a huge cock.”

  Full-fledged panic turned his sobbing back into screams, and that was all I’d get from him, so fuck it. He was too close for spray. Instead, when I pulled the trigger, thunder and meat exploded outward. Hit the street and everything else around it in a radius of disgusting.

  Martyr, huh? These crunchnuggets and Carmichael both, hiding behind that useless cross.

  At least I’d walked away with slightly more information than I’d started with. There was some source who’d tipped the Shepherds off enough to hit a Man
tis contact with my name, and wanted me delivered to them alive. That same source knew about my hard-on for MetaCorp, and their hard-on for me. They knew I associated with Mantis.

  The way I figured, they’d know more about things than I did. Things I would get answers for.

  Hunting that asshole down had to be my next job.

  I threw the Quad into the mess and walked away, seething. Goddamn. Shooting wasn’t enough. I should’ve dropped napalm on the whole crew when I had the chance. All the blood and sweat had washed that dried spunk off my pants and now I just didn’t have any reason – or patience – to deal with Malik and his stupid desk.

  His sources sucked. More, I figured I wouldn’t find the source in his turf anyway. If a leak had dribbled out of his department, he’d never tell me. He’d just execute the culprit and walk out unspattered by the shit.

  I hated his face.

  When I didn’t want to fuck it.

  Let the operator make the report without me. Let him debrief his boss. I was done. My leads pointed streetwards, not to the corporate sector. If His Gaping Asshole had a problem with that, Reed could deal with it himself.

  5

  I couldn’t get out of Shepherd turf fast enough. Given the necessary circumnavigation, it took me longer than I wanted, and every kilometer of ragged asphalt under my piece of shit Vega V3’s wheels ticked my annoyance higher and higher.

  I don’t like questions. Hate digging to find the answers. My usual methods involve shooting elbows and kneecaps until somebody chokes out the info I want. I prefer to leave the digging to Indigo and show up for the bloody rest. Without my linker – without his team at my back, the way it used to be – I didn’t know how to get answers. Digo had always been eyes in the air for me. He excelled at processing info fast enough to re-evaluate the plan on a moment’s notice. Finding another one was out of the question. Most linkers make solid contacts when they did good, which I needed, but the best linkers are hard to cozy up to.

  What the hell was I supposed to tell him, anyway?

  I couldn’t rely on memory, and Indigo knew it. Couldn’t give him any more details right now than somebody knows my shit. Thin stuff. It may not even help prove that I’d been set up in his sister’s death. While I wanted to claim a frame job, how could I know? I couldn’t say it wasn’t me.

  I really, really needed to say it wasn’t me.

  Doing things my way required hands-on access, but so far there wasn’t anything to get my hands on. I needed help tracing this new problem. Malik Reed wasn’t it.

  Leaving him stewing in his polished offices made me feel a little better about it.

  Once I made it out of the dregs, the sun had already vanished. The shade cooled the muggy press of summer from fuck I’m dying to damn it’s hot. So, not great. Better than heatstroke by the side of the street, though.

  Not everybody is smart enough to keep hydrated on boosts, boxes or booze.

  Sanitation is slow to come by places like this. Most times, it’s a privatized effort to get rid of the bodies, human or vermin. When the sun hits peak, corpses abandoned long enough explode out – which smells, by the way. It smells so fucking bad.

  The rest of the seasons aren’t that much cooler. We’d ruined that way back, when the government – and the corporate interests that funded it – gave up all pretense of giving a damn. The regulations came off and the money rolled in. The midwest cracked up in a methane apocalypse and the ozone, already straining, took a massive hit as more and more factories spewed out the kinds of poison forward-thinking countries had once banned.

  Didn’t help that a mini ice age rolled in for a few decades, letting everybody preach about how global warming had been beaten. Emissions skyrocketed. Good old us, we’d led the way for everyone else to deregulate until the ice age boiled over, and by then it was too late. Global warming had become the least of our worries – the rat race had been too focused on the money on the ground to think about what was going on overhead.

  But we’re stubborn. Humanity cowered together like the vermin we are, merged the larger cities along coastlines into even larger megacities. The widespread development of shielding combined with the mass production of nanos did the rest.

  Any children born within the city are squeezed out with the standard nano package. It’s programmed in, parent to kid. First thing they do is carve a Security Identification Number into the fetal brain, upload that data to the system. Those born outside the city only carry if one of the parents does, but the programming is patchy. The radiation shearing through the fucked-up atmosphere takes care of those poor bastards real quick. Even if they’d had fully capable nanos, no amount of repair can keep up without shielding.

  Those of us inside the shields trade freedom for security, kept nice and tame with chipsets loaded up on all kinds of entertainment. The bandwidth gets us free access to thousands of vid feeds on our devices and, if we want it, stringently approved tech integration. More are available for a price.

  No fucking thanks.

  I rode my Vega to a place near the rack, stopped in a one-stop-shop for a radiation burst and new clothes. The low-pulse shower seared the filth off my skin, while the printers worked on new clothes. Nothing fancy. This place replicated clothing that nobody would mistake for brand, not with the shitty printers available by the item. I paid for a new deep-vee tank and electric blue drop crotch harems. Tight around the hips, loose to the knees, lined on both sides with crackling white vinyl.

  For shits and giggles, I printed out a slim black tie. Mostly because I knew looking at it would eventually piss Malik off.

  I paid for it all with some of the creds I’d jacked from the failed mission. As I checked myself in the mirror, I pulled the tie into a loose knot – no idea how to loop a tie, I just one-knotted it at my neck. On my way out, I traded in my filthy boots for new bright green copies.

  Now this was Mecca material. I’d chucked the Gritster when I’d emptied it, so no need to pack it. I threw my empty rig over the outfit. Kept my knives, though. One in each boot.

  Next stop, Indigo, and then a little recreation. By way of getting as crunked as my meatbag could handle.

  I was half out the door when the chipset installed at the base of my skull thrummed; a haptic tap, like a finger poking at the top of my spine. A projected call, right to my personal frequency.

  Just what I didn’t need.

  Grimacing, I connected the call as I made my way out and around the corner.

  Nice thing about projection space is its ease of use. One part of your brain takes the call while the rest of it sleeps, rests, or idles by in absent observation of the area around you. I wouldn’t drive with it – that’s what comms are for, and also I couldn’t afford another bike if I wrecked it – but it meant I could loiter at the side of the shop and still be aware of both meatspace and virtual. Though one, by sheer brain capability, always claimed dominance.

  The usual bare room with its standard bare table and metal chairs loaded up. No additions, no tailored locale. The vibe felt scattered; a sign of spotty connectivity. Low res virtual space.

  Wasn’t Malik calling to chew my shit, then? Another saint? I could have installed projection identifiers, but it didn’t seem helpful. Most of us changed our freqs too often. Especially when we fuck around with projection calls as much as we do. Comms are shit for long distance.

  Sainted signals on the bandwidth are pirated and locked down, but if we try to use anything fancier than the baseline hack, it sucks up more data packets than a non-signal can keep invisible. Relying on the dark parts of the band keeps us more or less under the radar.

  If we want more, we gotta pay up bigtime for the properly forged keys, code and official seals that let the leaks look legit. Not to mention pay through the ass for a lockdown on a steadier signal.

  When tens of billions of connections jam the bandwidth at any point in time, and with limited resources available, it’s pay up or deal. I dealt. My linkup still hadn’t shown up by the
time I’d settled into my virtual skin, so we were both slow loading.

  As I folded my arms and waited, my caller finally took shape in the black space set as the connection point. Formality. You can just pop in and drop the link anytime you want, but walking in is a legacy touch that’s supposed to give the projection more realism or something.

  Not that I needed more of that.

  Sometimes, I wish I’d had the foresight to really amp up my projected image. I’d’ve gone naked into the space and watched Detective Gregory Keith’s face melt in shock. Instead, he got my usual – clean skin, updated ink, shiny red tank, black pants. Full diamond steel arm.

  As usual, his pretty green eyes landed on that first.

  Purists. Mad enough about big tech to stand on picket lines, just hypocritical enough to enjoy the bennies nanos shell out. I hadn’t known that when I’d banged him about a year ago. Then again, hadn’t lost my arm yet, either.

  “You seem–”

  “Wait,” I interrupted, eying the austere room. I hated starting conversations in the box before the ads loaded up. It pissed me off.

  Between one second and the next, a whirlwind of color and words – flashing advertising and vid clips, the same as everywhere – erupted on every wall. Eateries, spas, educational facilities, weapons manufacturers, beauty tools. Capitalistic greed at its finest.

  You can learn a lot about a person by their advertising blast. Mine slapped up hues of weapon adverts, technical enhancement; the kind of stuff the good detective wasn’t supposed to see. Only reason he could was that he’d gone and paid a low-end streetdoc to tweak his filters.

  Greg was trying his cute little best to fit into the street role he didn’t have.

  His ads, on the other hand, rolled out a whole different kind of struggle. The number of eateries and spas didn’t surprise me. The detective was dealing with marriage issues, and his answer seemed to include a hell of a lot of marital bribery. To find it, he was looking for a cure way, way over his paygrade.