SETH W. JAMES

Betrayed – fiction (To Walk pt3, fini)

November 30, 2015

By Seth W. James

Ferrol was about to kick Marcel out of the club—off of Barge Bridge, if he could have managed it—but he never got the chance.  Marcel was off like a shot.  Outside, shoving his way into the mass of people moving between shops and shanties, Marcel drove a hand into his jacket and brought up a comm window in his mod eye’s visual overlay.  He had to call home, tell Yukie and Jeff to run before KJI Security Soldiers airdropped onto their apartment stack.  As his finger stabbed at the connect icon, Marcel ripped his hand out of his jacket with a cry.

“Hank and Murray will have given the SS my appcon details,” Marcel shouted to himself, not even drawing a look from the people he pushed past.  “They’ll trace the call back to Yukie.  Back to Jeff.  Madre de Mierda, they’re probably tracking my location.”

Marcel tore the small computer out of his jacket, out of the subdermal jacks that connected it to his eye and ear mods, sending a jolt across his cerebral cortex.  Scrambling to the edge of Barge Bridge, at times swimming through the crowd more than walking, Marcel came to a row of eth shops and food stalls.  He couldn’t see the water behind them but he knew it was over there somewhere.  With a heave, he sent his appcon arcing over the improvised boulevard and into the river.  He then pulled himself up onto the roof of an eth shop and raced east, toward the Jersey City side of the bridge.

His panic soared to new levels when he passed the fortified checkpoint: he had unconsciously depended upon his appcon’s navigational aids for so long that he wasn’t sure which alleyway would lead home fastest. Recognizing it in the next instant, Marcel set off at a sprint. Encumbered by the eth can over his back, slapping him with every stride, Marcel almost threw it away until he remembered what he had concealed within it.  One of the last two RG-88s he’d salvaged from the KJI SS platoon he’d wiped out at the exploded lube shop.  Though he had disabled its tracker, it still had a fresh power pack and flechette magazine.

Marcel stopped for a second, dropping to one knee to pry open the eth can, when he noticed that someone was behind him; someone who had tried to slip unnoticed into a pre-fab apartment stack’s exterior stairwell. Marcel stilled his breathing and reached a hand into his jacket, to jack up the gain on his ear mods so he could hear if the person had run up the stairs or if he stood just inside, breathing as hard as Marcel did from their run.  But Marcel couldn’t jack up the gain on his ear mods because they were normally controlled by his appcon.

“Motherfucker,” he spat and dashed off, slipping down the first cross-alley he came to.

A mugger, probably.  Maybe someone who had overheard Ferrol talking in Wei Tao, following him now to try to earn a few credits from KJI by giving up his location.  And maybe it was a field agent from KJI, who had picked up on him by triangulating his appcon’s location from the mesh net nodes he connected to the last time he’d accessed network data.  Marcel ran harder.

Doubling back, Marcel knelt again and nearly swooned with the effort to control his breathing.  Whoever was following him would almost certainly jack up the gain on his ear mods and Marcel didn’t want to give away his position.  The eth can stubbornly opened and Marcel lifted the RG-88 railgun out of the wadded printer fabric.  Bringing the individual weapon to life, he trotted down the muddy alley as quickly as he could while maintaining some level of stealth.  At its mouth, he edged one eye around the corner and saw someone at the next alley down slipping out of sight.

“I ain’t playing ring around the fucking rosy with you, cabrón,” Marcel growled, sprinting with total disregard for the sound he made until he came to the alley’s mouth.

Whoever was following him must have heard his footfalls but it was too late. With a featureless pre-fab stack to either side, there was nowhere to run.  The six-story plastic trench entombed him as Marcel swiveled in on a knee, weapon to shoulder, and let off a long burst of railgun fire that filled his innards with steel needles.  The tail convulsed only briefly before massive blood loss and nerve trauma ended him.

Marcel ran down the alley to the corpse and frisked it, only now cursing himself for not being more careful: the guy would carry an appcon or IDac that maybe wasn’t under KJI surveillance.  Rolling the corpse onto its back, Marcel nearly fell over: it was one of Hank and Murray’s modded-up bodyguards.

“So it’s true,” Marcel whispered.  “Sold me out.”

He had no time for the betrayal he felt.  If Hank and Murray were tailing him, then what Ferrol had told him must be true.  Marcel ripped the bodyguard’s appcon out of his jacket, and was about to connect to the mesh Yukie and he always used, when a voice suddenly sounded behind him.

“Ah, so that’s what this puta was after, eh?” the voice said.  Marcel swung around to see a Jin Dao heavy with the customary red Mohawk, standing at the alley’s mouth. He was naked to the waist, covered in the tattoos and ritual scarring that denoted rank and accomplishment in the highly tribal Jin Dao, and carried two Shinya Scythe conductive submachine guns. His filter mask—an old but reliable twin barrel model—must have had a mic/speaker unit because his voice boomed down the plastic-walled trench at inhuman levels.  “Nice piece, gilipollas. Drop it; I don’t want to get your blood all over it.”

Marcel had the RG-88 almost across his body, pointing more or less up the alley at the Jin Dao heavy.  A little speed, a little luck, and he might shred the unarmored man before he could bring up his sub-guns. Marcel took a deep breath.

“Naw, beau, naw,” the heavy said and pointed with his chin toward the other end of the alleyway.  Marcel turned his head just far enough for his peripheral vision to take in the entrance of another Jin Dao heavy.  “You ain’t fighting back.  The only question is, how much do we hurt you before we take everything you have and chop the mods out of your ass.”

“Chingar tu culo,” Marcel spat.  “I don’t have time for this!”

Marcel couldn’t hope to shoot in one direction and then whip the RG-88 around before the other Jin Dao heavy shredded him with a Scythe. But Marcel still had his Pythonoid heavy mass-driver pistol stuck in his belt.  Dropping the appcon from his left hand and shaking his head as if resigned to his fate, Marcel then threw himself backward—a bare foot of space—and snatched the mass driver from his belt as he sprayed a short burst at the first Jin Dao.  The other Jin Dao, perhaps realizing at the last second that any flechettes he sent up the alley that didn’t hit Marcel would likely hit his partner, waited a crucial second.  Marcel used that second to fire a dozen flechettes at him.

The Jin Dao heavies were not new to this game, though.  Veterans at twenty, they had survived the perpetual street war of the fab by knowing when to run.  Both ducked out of the alley as Marcel shredded empty space.  Marcel had to keep up a near continuous stream of fire to suppress both ends of the alleyway; if he paused for more than a second, one or the other heavy would have a clear shot and kill him. Or worse.  But it was a waiting game for them.  Marcel only had so much ammo and was caught with both ends of the alley held against him.  He would eventually run out of sabot-plus rounds for the Pythonoid and he had no hope of suppressing two opposite directions at once.  In between bursts, he could hear them laughing.

“I don’t have time for this,” Marcel shouted again.

Dropping his mass-driver pistol, he shoved the bodyguard’s appcon into his jacket and then snatched up the pistol just in time to let off a few shots at the heavy making a tentative probe of his ammo capacity. Marcel then pressed his back against the wall of the stack behind him and kicked his feet up onto the pre-fab in front of him.  When Terminal Drought had sent waves of refugees streaming into the north east, sparking the Refugee Crisis, pre-fab stacks were airdropped anywhere space could be found; sometimes so close that it was impossible to walk between them.  Tight alleyways like the one in which Marcel found himself were not uncommon.  With his feet walking up one wall and his shoulders shimmying up the other, Marcel rose into the air.  He had to keep up his suppressive fire as he crawled into the night sky and hope that his Pythonoid didn’t run dry before he reached the roof.

“Look at that motherfucker,” the first Jin Dao said, ducking his head into the alley for a moment before dodging another burst from the RG-88.  “Tell you what, beau, you just drop the assault rifle and we’ll let you go.  You earned that much.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Marcel shouted at him.  It took what felt like ages, and Marcel’s legs shook as he neared the roof of the six-story stack, but he made it.  He had to toss both weapons onto the roof and then haul himself over before the two Jin Dao blew off his legs.  It was close.

Laying on his back, dragging air through his mask, Marcel knew he had to get up, to run, to leap to the next building over or the Jin Dao would come up the stairs.  He first pulled out the bodyguard’s appcon and connected to the Newark mesh.

“Yukie,” he gasped.  “Yukie, you’ve got to get out of there and take Jeff with you.”

“Marcel, is that you?” Yukie whispered, clearly talking between gasps of her own.  “Marcel, there are SS everywhere.  They landed on the roof and are going door to door.”

“Madre de Mierda,” Marcel breathed.  “Get out, run for it.”

“I went over the skyway into the burned-out building next door,” Yukie said.  “I’m going to try to hide.”

“No, you have to get rid of your appcon,” Marcel said.  “They can trace it.  Where’s Jeff?”

“I don’t,” Yukie said and dissolved briefly into tears.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know!  He said he needed more space for the new program he’d written for his legs.  He was just supposed to be out in the alleyway.”

“Son of a bitch,” Marcel growled hopelessly.  “Dump your appcon and run, Yukie.  I’ll try to find Jeff.  I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said and then the connection died.

Marcel could suddenly hear someone running up the stairs.  He rolled to his feet, snatched up both weapons, and then leaped to the next rooftop over.  A burst of fire tracked him across the sky but never connected.

“Better run, motherfucker, better run fast,” a voice in the alleyway shouted.

Marcel ran.  He again felt the hopelessness of it all.  Not all pre-fab were the same height.  He would eventually reach a place where he couldn’t jump to the next roof.  And if he tried to run down the stairs of a farther stack, the Jin Dao in the alley would catch up too quickly, pin him down inside as the other attacked from above.  Two more roofs passed before he reached such a point.  With no other choice, he jumped.

It was an old street kid trick, as old as the pre-fab ghetto.  The plastic walls of the stacks were scummed over with algae.  By dropping between the walls and pushing a foot out to either side, a street kid could slip down between stacks just slow enough to survive it; like a fireman coming down a poll back in the days when there were firehouses.  Marcel hit the ground and took off.  He had no illusions of outrunning the Jin Dao heavies; he expected to take a round through the back at any moment; he felt certain the KJI SS would find Jeff before he ever reached home.  And he ran on anyway.

The scene around his apartment stack was of open warfare.  A platoon of KJI SS swarmed over the place, two VTOLs circled the area, and a miserable huddle of Marcel’s neighbors knelt in a hastily erected holding pen.  Waiting on their interrogator.  Marcel watched from as close as he dared to come, trying to see if Jeff was among the prisoners.  He was torn now: believing that his son was captured or dead, he didn’t know whether he should charge the SS and die with him or try to find Yukie and escape.  He loved them both and could not decide.  Then gunfire erupted from the other side of the stack.

Marcel pushed to the edge of the alley and watched as SS scrambled for cover.  From a flanking rooftop, a figure leaped an impossible distance and kicked a sniper team—both of them—landing with their throats gripped in talon-like feet.  The figure then threw one of their bodies over his shoulder and hefted its weapon.

“Jeff, no!” Marcel shouted.

Jeff either couldn’t hear him or didn’t care.  He dropped over the side of the roof, his h-aug legs gripping the plastic wall with their talons, wall-walking.  He held the sniper’s armored body in front of his chest and when the surrounding platoon of SS fired, their flechettes may have pierced the front of the armor but lost too much energy to push through the body and the rear of the armor, too.  After ten years of moving himself around with only his arms, Jeff was unusually strong and easily kept the sniper’s body in place.  He became a roving turret clinging to the pre-fab wall.  His h-aug legs raced along the side of the apartment stack, leaped from one stack to the next, and all the while Jeff fired down on the SS platoon.  They could never find the firing angle they needed and soon realized that they would be cut to pieces.  Not expecting to find an h-aug on the other side of the equation, the SS platoon hadn’t brought one of their own.  They were soon in retreat, calling for an air strike.

Jeff dropped to the ground and bound over to the prisoners.  He crushed the holding pen’s bars with his new legs and ushered everyone out. The newly released fled in every direction as one of the circling VTOLs sped off to gain the necessary altitude for a rocket attack.

“Jeff, hurry!” Marcel shouted, adding his own railgun fire to the backs of the fleeing SS.

“Dad?” Jeff shouted and then sprang a dozen feet to his side, threw Marcel over his shoulder, and then launched them a hundred feet down the alleyway as the rocket strike shattered their home.

“How, how did you do all that?” Marcel asked once they were a few blocks away, circling the reforming SS platoon and looking for Yukie.  “You could barely walk when I left.”

“I finally figured out the problem,” Jeff said.  “The legs were trying to work independently, only relying on my neural input, when their chips are actually supposed to work as co-processors for a central core.  I wired up my appcon to do it.”

“You’re appcon?” Marcel said in horror.  “Oh no.  You have to get rid of it!  KJI can trace it.”

“It’s alright,” Jeff said, taking a hold of his father’s arms.  “I had to disable its antenna.  Actually I had to pull just about everything out of it to make space for the locomotive subroutine.  It’s not transmitting anymore and never will again, until I can figure out something.”

“Wait, wait,” Marcel said.  “How did you shoot like that?  I’ve never taught you to shoot.”

“Well, you see,” Jeff laughed, scratching his head.  “I couldn’t build the program from scratch so I altered Katiana Caprice’s, adapting it to real-world physics.  That’s why my appcon is basically empty of anything else now: no more space.  She could really shoot, too, so all I had to do was put the weapon reticle where it told me to.”

“That’s crazy,” Marcel whispered.

“Worked, though,” Jeff said.  “Come on.  We’ve got to find mom.”

“Yes, come on,” Marcel said, stumbling forward.  “I know where she’ll be.”