The inside of Hub 22 was just the
old-fashioned way Drake liked it: metal stools, strobing lights on the walls,
and plenty of the heart-pumping, chest-thumping music so obnoxiously bassy you
could taste the beat. He paused to soak in the atmosphere. The bars in the
upper levels had definitely lost their touch. In the concentrated effort to
find the perfect balance of sensory resonance for optimal libation, all clubs
and lounges of any kind were nothing more than padded restaurants that served
more alcohol than food. Here in the Streets, they still knew how to club.
"Lemme go! I got rights! I can
be 'ere same as everybody else!"
Drake heard the high voice pierce
the comfortable sound barrier of the music. He craned his neck to see what was
going on. Two bouncers made their way to the door, bearing a compact, struggling
body between them. Drake curled his lip in a sneer and resumed jostling his way
to the bar. Stupid kids; the Streetlings were convinced that the laws Up There
didn't apply Down Here, that one could drink and smoke and do whatever the heck
they wanted when they felt ready to deal with it. The bouncers returned from
the doorway and resumed their posts along the wall of the pub.
"Fire in the Hole!"
Drake's eyes lit up as he saw the
flaming stein on the corner. He let the flames die and then took a sip, the scalding
beverage desensitizing his tongue before searing a path down his throat to
smolder in his stomach. All that remained was the blessed taste of the gin on
his breath.
"The Dragon walks," she
murmured, winking at him as she pulled three drafts and set them on a tray. Her
bouncy brown curls reflected the colored lights and made her ponytail sparkle
like some child had dumped glitter all over her head. "I was beginning to
wonder if I would ever get the chance to serve the Fire again before I left."
"Oh, come on, Marta,"
Drake chided, "It hasn't been that long, has it?"
Marta winked her icy-blue eye at
him. "At my age, three months might as well be eternity!"
Drake snorted as he sipped his
drink. Marta didn't look a day over thirty, but then again, life expectancy in
the Streets plummeted every year past 25—the age he'd been when They
deactivated him. Drake shrugged it off and changed the subject.
"What's that you were saying
about leaving?" He prompted. "What, Streets of Wales not good enough
for you?"
Marta shrugged easily as she loaded
bins of flutes and steins into an automatic washer. "I'm just saying I
want to be in charge of the day I leave—get out before I get thrown out,
y'ken?"
"Thrown out?" Drake
echoed, mystified. "What do you mean?"
Marta shot him an incredulous
sneer. "You didn't smell that?"
Drake buried his face in the
charred foam. "Sorry honey; filter's on."
Marta rolled her eyes.
"Here." She pulled her wallet out of her apron pocket and activated
it. Drake used eye contact to activate a wireless connection with his
receptacle. What he learned caused a deep frown to form on his face.
Assembly-sanctioned evacuations
were underway. The WRAITHS razed homes around the outskirts and chased the
families away, forcing them to relocate—but where? A high wall separated the
Streets from the rest of the world. Once, countries had no such borders and
citizens could visit other countries at their leisure—but now that was a
privilege only possible for the City Levels.
"Where are they going?"
Drake asked as his receptacle compiled the data. "The relocation program
provides permissions for at least being able to go over the wall, right?"
"Yeah," Marta snorted.
"For a price! I don't know where the ones who can't afford it go. Some
have Witnessed a few of the Displaced returning to sites that have already been
raided."
"So why evacuate?" Drake
pressed, nodding to signal that they were going to engage in covert matters
now. "What news from Up Top?"
Marta smiled; with her bouncy curls
straightened and her artificial scar over her right eye, and the one
Upper-Level dress she had ever owned and worked hard to keep in the latest
style, no one would ever know that the enchanting beauty at all the galas was
just a Street-level barmaid spying on them all.
"Sure, Big Daddy's got big
dreams," said Marta.
Whitaker is definitely planning
something—something expensive.
"For the farm or for the
family?"
Are we talking something nationwide
or just focused on a specific level of citizens?
"It starts with family, but I
hear Daddy's fixing to buy the farm next."
Whatever he's got planned, the
evacuations are the first stage, but he's going to practically have control of
the country when they finish.
"And how does Big Mama feel
about this?"
Would the Assembly—or even
Parliament —let him get away with this?
Marta smirked. "Mama was always
scared of rats, you know; so Daddy told her it was just a new mouser."
Whitaker had been playing up the
evils of the streets and the crime for so long, that the Assembly will very
likely let him do what he wants under the guise of "crime control."
Drake recalled the raid he'd
Witnessed on the way over. "Mousers," he muttered, echoing the code
word for the WRAITHS. "You heard about the sting that almost
happened?"
Marta smiled as the Whitaker topic
took a backseat for a while. "Word is, Somebody's channeling bloody St.
George. By the time I heard anything, it sounded like they'd pigeon-holed
you."
Drake chuckled, "So I'm a
pigeon, am I?"
"The way Corey told it, you're
a bloody sparrow. He says it took him hours to finally eye the bugger, and you
scoop him out in half a second."
She crossed her arms and leaned
conspiratorially over the counter. Her white neck gleamed in the strobing
light. "How do you do it, anyway? The spooks figure out how to look, act, and
sound like us, but you suss them as soon as blink."
Drake drained the last of the Fire
and gestured to his forearm. "It's the hair," he answered. Normally,
he wouldn't care to tell even an old trusted friend like Marta, but the drink
had made him amiable, and he'd had a very productive day already. He continued
under Marta's interested gaze.
"Part of a WRAITH's duty is to
accept applications from Assembly members who need something done."
Marta shuddered. "That's black
market stuff!"
"I know," Drake answered.
"Whitaker would handle the whole thing; you know, those fat cats want
nothing more than to live in their perfect little floating bubbles of
happiness—they don't care how it's managed."
"Okay, but what do
applications have to do with hair?"
"You know how an application
works, right?"
"Not really," Marta
admitted.
Drake showed her an image from his
wallet. "An application is a clear silicon sheet that has been printed
with a chemical ink that only reacts with human skin. The only way it gets read
is by activating the ink—"
Marta nodded. "I get it:
applying it to the skin. But how does that explain how you knew the spook was
WRAITH?"
Drake pulled back the cuff on his
sleeve so Marta could see the scars on his arm. "The chemical burns the
skin to be visible. Softer skin is less painful, but the message doesn't last
very long. Most Mercs use the inside of the arm as a nice, taut surface, but
too many applications, and it sears over. The only choice then is to apply on
the back of the arm. The hair burns off fast, and the skin takes longer to
sear."
Marta's eyes flicked up to his
face. "His arm," she whispered.
Drake nodded. "Saw it when he
drained his glass. No hair means Mercenary Witness—and Mercenary Witness out
and about when the WRAITHS are haunting means spook."
Marta chuckled appreciatively at
his cleverness.
[...]
Drake chuckled to himself as he
sauntered down the alleys of the Streets toward the bunker. In a way he was
almost glad that he no longer had his old job that required him to live in The
Stacks, as Walkers referred to them. There were no secret corners or hideaways
there. Each living space had to be registered in order for a Descender to carry
the resident to it—the only way people ever got around anymore. Drake paused at
the door and glanced up.
This was one of the few vantage
points from which at least one outer face of the "vertical nation"
was visible: he could see into the low-twentieth level, watch the Descenders
like so many beetles crawling up and down the sides of the city, along the
tracks. Drake gave the lot of them a one-finger salute and stomped down the
stairs to his bunker.
Archie and Blaine had not returned.
This was no surprise; it was supper time, after all, and Hannery's wife brooked
no absence from this auspicious meal. Drake removed the filter and activated
his receptacle. The comp activated in response and commenced offloading the
info he'd picked up from his "faces." Such a confusing mass of data.
The streams dribbled before his eyes like rain down a window pane; as the
leather chair absorbed his body heat and confirmed to his shape in its cradle,
his eyes drooped...
Drake Ross hit the floor with a
bang that sent a jolt through his entire body. The comp unit blinked
"OFFLOAD COMPLETE"—but wasn't that usually a silent affair?
Someone stepped out of the shadows
behind him. Her dirty blond hair looked like she'd cut it herself with dull
scissors. His practiced eyes noticed the minute scar on her brow line that
bespoke a fine-grade receptacle—but it was the grungy pip from the Hub!
"Heard you was in," she
grunted, sounding for all the world like the Walker she looked. "Th'said
you could do it."
Drake's brain felt like a rusted
comp unit trying to track a six-tera data stream. "Hell..." was all
he could manage.
She stepped toward him, still
fixing those weird blue eyes, which he knew he'd seen before, on him. She wore
scuff-rags on her hands, and the delicate fingers were so clean compared to the
rest of her clothing that they fairly glowed. "Can you?" She asked.
Drake shook off the shock and
smirked derisively. "Do what?"
"Delete somebody for me."
It sounded so morbid, the way she
said it so flatly, Drake choked back a laugh. "Aren't you a little young
to want somebody dead?" He asked.
"Not that sort, you numpty!"
She spat, rolling her eyes. "Cybercide."
Drake balked, sizing up the
street-pixie who seemed to know a heck of a lot more about him than he knew
about her—such as where to find his bunker, and how to get in!
She misread his hesitation.
"You are the one they call the Dragon, right? The bloke who blew the
servers at the Assembly with the Rot and got the I.A. Minister booted last
month when all the rainmakers were trying to tell us he was a shoo-in?"
Drake smiled smugly in spite of
himself at the memory. That was some clever bit of wriggling, finding just the
right penetration point in the Minister's data stream to divert specific
messages to the WRAITH team just when they were on the cusp of searching for
him—but how had she known that? She certainly looked more like a pickpocket
than a hacker. Those scuff-rags didn't just keep your hands from getting cut by
rough cement, and the adept fingers needed to be free for more of a reason than
just their aesthetic value. Drake sent a signal from his receptacle to power
down his wallet so she couldn't swipe it.
"Okay, kid," he sighed
and smirked at her. "You got me; I'll bite. What's the job?"
She crossed her arms and shook her
head. "First promise you'll do it!" She demanded.
"Listen you little chit,"
Drake loomed over her, "I don't have to promise a damn thing! I am the
Dragon, and this is my Lair, and I can throw you out so fast you won't know
which way is down!"
The two glared at each other for a
very long time. The girl broke first.
"Fine then!" She retorted.
She reached into her left scuff-rag and dug out a small microchip, which she
handed to him. Drake grabbed a digital "bump-drive" and began
decrypting the information it contained.
"What's this?" He asked,
even as his Receptacle recognized the data as reference files, copies of the
data he could use to "scent" every last vestige in the Cloud. The
more reference data, the stronger the "scent"; a stronger scent, in
turn, meant a more complete deletion.
"Who's the target?" He
asked, as the general files commenced decryption.
The girl watched the white data
streaming on the blue field as if she knew exactly what she saw.
"Me."
Drake was so preoccupied with
sorting the data that he almost missed her answer.
"Come again?" He blinked.
The girl huffed. "That memory
chip is my info. I want you to erase me."
>>>>>>>>
Also from the "Red Dragon of Wales":
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