It was bright here. Sin Eater raised, Kane took a long two steps through the cupboardlike connecting space between the two buildings, pulling up short as he reached the door. The corridor here, what little of it there was, was covered in molded transparent plastic, its dirty roof letting daylight in. It was a shock after the darkness of the mutie pen, and Kane took the extra few seconds to let his eyes adjust before he tried the far door.
It was dark again in the next room and the place had a definite aroma of sweat—not mutie sweat, but human sweat, the smell of a lot of people in a confined and poorly ventilated space. There was mist, too, obscuring Kane’s vision, and what light sources he could see were blurred by the smoke. There were a few light sources arrayed before him, a whole bank of them at waist height, a circlet of them higher up as though attached to the room’s low ceiling.
Someone shouted from up ahead of Kane and to his left; a man’s voice. “He’s coming. Deren—Alana—take him.”
There was the familiar
click-clack
of automatic weapons, of safeties being unlocked. Kane ducked back before the blasters fired, and a volley of bullets slapped against the door as he pulled it toward him for cover. Kane knew the pattern—they would fire, then they would wait to see if he shot back, and if he did they would fire again until somebody died.
“Time to change the tune,” Kane murmured to himself.
Then he wrenched the door toward him and dived through the opening. Behind him, another burst of fire echoed through the mist-enshrouded room, the bullets smacking against the open door and the narrow corridor beyond. But Kane was moving swiftly now, his mind in the zone, his body acting almost on instinct. He scrambled across the room in a running crouch, his head tucked low to his body, the Sin Eater’s barrel stretched out before him like a warning.
The room was large and ill lit, and Kane would estimate it took up almost all of the ground floor of the building that he had spied from the outside. He had entered by the back, but immediately his professional gaze took in the other exits—two in all, one at the front of the building, directly opposing his entryway, where what looked to be a curtained-off lobby area had been constructed. A second exit was over to the far right of the room, the door ajar and bright light nudging out from within.
The bulk of the room, however, was taken up by the two dream engines that served as the heart of the operation. They looked like giant water lilies, residing close to the hard stone floor with six sloping petals emerging from the central hub. Each petal was as large as a single bed and it contained a person lying supine—a dreamer. The dream engines featured a strip of pale blue lights along their bottom edge, which ran around the base of the flowerlike creation, coloring the room a kind of midnight-blue, like an old day-for-night shot from a cheap horror flick. Above them, a second strip of circular lights could be seen, emerald-green and forming a much tighter circle where the dream unit fed the sleepers their neoreality visions. Great pipe work connected the two sections, with plantlike growths depending from the ceiling unit, hanging in the air the way that jungle vines will curl down from the trees.
The engine was really what Kane was here for. Sure, closing down an operation like this one, which preyed on the unwary and battery-farmed mutie subhumans, sat well with Kane’s conscience. But it was Cerberus that he was here for—with their recent upset at the hands of the Annunaki prince Ullikummis, replacing their destroyed technology was becoming a very necessary and urgent requirement. Cerberus could function sufficiently, but the need for replacement equipment had become pressing. This operation, built around prenukecaust military-grade computer simulations, had a load of gear that could be better employed upgrading Cerberus and bringing Kane’s people back up to full functionality. That was, of course, assuming he could survive this little spat.
Another bullet came whizzing across the room, cutting the air in front of Kane’s face as it raced past. They had lost track of him as he ducked behind the closest of the dream engines, and the low light here gave Kane a minor degree of camouflage in his dark clothes. He checked around the room from his hiding spot, counting off his opponents as he located their positions.
There was a woman ducked behind a counter, wielding some kind of handblaster. The counter was well lit by a low desk lamp, and while Kane couldn’t see the shade, the illumination cast stark shadows behind the wall, drawing in the woman’s curves and her pistol with remarkable clarity.
Then there were at least two more people over the other side of the room and one of them was using the other dream engine for cover. Kane pegged that for Deren, the slick-haired man who had bumped into him in the sweatbox. He was reaching to retrieve something from a containment unit close to the dream engine, and Kane saw his bare arms unlatch its door. He could maybe shoot the guy in the arm, but there was too much cover between them, not to mention the risk of hitting the dreamers with a stray shot or a ricochet. Kane watched the man pull a bulky black metal tube from the cupboard, the familiar length of a shotgun, before he continued sweeping the room with his gaze. While he scanned with furtive eyes, Kane’s ears kept track of the man’s actions, identifying the sound of the breech of the shotgun being opened, shaky hands trying to load it.
Kane’s eyes swept the room, spotting the third figure moving close to the lobby, along with two other figures who were just waiting there, oblivious to the firefight that was building just a few feet from them. Dream addicts, Kane figured, their minds so blown out by their abuse of the dream engines that they could no longer delineate clearly between reality and hallucination. The other figure, however, was moving with purpose. Dressed in a long dress or skirt—it was hard to tell in the low light—the thin figure took heavy steps as it moved about the room.
Three then, plus the guard outside that he’d already taken care of. Fair odds for an ex-mag.
As well as his training, Kane had an added advantage. Back when he had been a magistrate, he had been renowned for something his associates called his “point-man sense,” an almost preternatural ability to sniff out danger before it happened. While the talent had often amazed his colleagues, in actuality there was nothing particularly superhuman about it—the danger sense stemmed simply from Kane’s ability to use his other senses in conjunction with a near Zen-like awareness. The fact that Kane was adept at using this ability in even the most tense of combat situations had saved his life more than once.
Crouching beside the sleepers in the dream engine, Kane targeted the counter girl with his Sin Eater, snapping off a quick burst. The bullets struck the counter, drumming across its facade in a warning. Behind the counter, the girl’s silhouette ducked lower and Kane saw the blaster shaking in her grip.
“Nice try, big man,” she taunted. “There’s no way out of here, you know. Not alive.” She was trying to sound tough, but could not disguise the tremor in her voice.
Kane figured that fear would keep her where she was for now, reducing the risk of her shooting him in the back.
Kane moved, gracefully pulling himself up from his crouch and drawing a bead on the shotgun wielder. Kane didn’t like shotguns; they were messy and dangerous, and even in an amateur’s hands they had the potential of creating a lot of damage. The figure behind the second dream engine was still resting on his backside, frantically loading his weapon. He came up, bringing the blaster around to fire just as Kane rounded the edge of the dream engine.
Kane shot first, a single shot striking the long barrel of the shotgun with the ringing clang of metal against metal. Deren—if that was his name—dropped the blaster with a startled curse, but he reacted swiftly for all that. As Kane leaped at him, the man revealed a second blaster from his left hand, a little hold-out pistol just a couple of inches in length, the kind of weapon a professional gunman would have as backup strapped to his ankle.
Kane’s leg kicked out, striking the gunman in the wrist even as he raised the weapon. The gunman held on to the blaster but he was surprised by the blow, and it took him a moment to recover. Kane delivered the follow-through by then, striking down with the leg he’d used to kick the man and using the momentum to spring up into the air in a running leap before bringing his other leg around in a brutal kick to the man’s breastbone. Kane’s opponent let out his breath in a
whoof
that sounded like gas catching light, falling backward against the dream engine that loomed behind him.
From across the room, a man’s voice was calling shrilly, “Careful! Don’t damage the dreameries!”
Kane landed and turned, all as one slick, athletic movement, bringing the Sin Eater’s muzzle around as he targeted the voice by sound alone. His finger stroked the trigger, sending a triple burst across the gloomy room, kicking up flash-sparks as they struck the walls and floor. But his target was gone, hurrying across the room with the swoop of a long dress.
It was getting messy, Kane knew. There was too much risk now, and damaging the tech wasn’t an option. He had to finish this—fast.
Kane ran, leaping over the outcropping of the nearest dreamer’s crib, his blaster stretched out before him, searching for a target in the darkness.
Crack!
Something struck Kane from the left, slamming against his side with the force of a charging bull. Despite himself, he felt his legs give and suddenly he was crashing to the floor. Kane struck the floor with a crunch, his jaws clacking shut as his lower jaw smacked against stone.
He had written off the woman too easily. She was scared, but she’d managed to stop shaking long enough to wing him.
For a moment he saw the room spin, the dull, bluish light making it seem like the ocean, as if he had been dumped at sea. Kane’s mind reeled, trying to cling to consciousness. His eyelids wouldn’t stay open.
“Look, do you see?” The woman’s voice was close, tremulous with adrenaline. “His blaster. He’s a magistrate.”
Something struck Kane hard in the side of his ribs; it felt like the toe of a shoe and it was directed with savage expertise.
“That’s not a mag.” This time it was a man’s voice. “They don’t come to this part of Hope.”
The woman spoke again. “But he’s using a Sin Eater. I recognize it.” She sounded young.
“Well,” the man replied, “we’ll find out soon enough. Go see to Deren, Alana, while I figure out what we’re going to do with our visitor here.”
Kane felt the foot again as it kicked him in the side, in the exact same spot as before. Then something heavy crashed against his skull and after that he didn’t know what.
Chapter 5
Accelerator pressed to the Turbo’s floor, Brigid Baptiste held the wheel locked as far as it could turn even as the first of the Deathbird’s laser beams sliced through the street in a bloodred streak. Light and nippy though the car was, the Turbo had a heavy engine. Brigid was counting on that—once it began to roll, it would keep going.
Another crimson beam of energy cut the air before her, blasting just six inches in front of the windshield and casting the whole interior of the car in a bloody red glow. She clung on for dear life as the vehicle slammed against the crash barrier and flipped, leaving the road entirely as it twirled through the air. Amid the shrieks of lasers and the rat-a-tat of the conventional guns, the barrier strike seemed soundless.
Then she was upside down with the car still flipping, its heavy engine drawing it slowly along its x-axis even as it flipped again 420 degrees along its lengthwise y-axis.
She couldn’t picture the map to the city because there was no map, Brigid recalled now. There was no map, no history. An hour ago she had entered a dingy little shack in the back street squats of Hope and paid a man to pump her with glist and send her on a journey into the
traum wirklichkeit
. If she worked at it, thought about it, she could still taste the glist on her breath, smell the room with its months-of-sweat stink, like a locker room.
Her false reality played on all around her, feeling no different to any other experience she had ever had. The Turbo 190 flipped again as it left the road entirely. Another blast from the chopper sawed clean through the hood with a scream. The view through the windshield spun with such speed that Brigid could hardly make sense of it, tossed as she was against the restraint of the seat belt. The shipyard building was ahead of her, rushing toward her as she sailed through the air, a great glass knife thrusting up from the street below.
Hovering over the roadway, the Deathbird turned on the spot, bringing its guns around to keep firing at Brigid’s cherry-red car. The vehicle was clear of the skyway road now, fifteen feet past the raised crash barriers and beginning to drop as acceleration gave way to gravity. Even as the vehicle spiraled through the air, pulled toward the ground, the front end fell away and plummeted over the edge of the docks toward the ocean, the glow of superheated metal shining like lightning where the laser had cut through it.
The Deathbird fired again, sending bullets in a steady stream at the careening vehicle. Inside, Brigid pulled herself in a ball as best as she could, wincing as the bullets struck the side of the car with the loud report of hail on a tin roof. A moment later the car—or what was left of it—struck the side of the shipyard building in a crash of plate glass, breaking through on the second story and sending a dozen workers running. It skidded across the tiled floor on its right wing for twenty feet before striking a wall and coming to a halt.
Noise was replaced by silence, like an emptiness had come in the wake of the crashing car. Outside, the Deathbird spun in place above the elevated roadway, searching for its target, unable to get low enough or close enough to see where Brigid had landed. The car had left a streak of scuffed paint across the pale floor tiles where it had come through the windows. It looked like a trail of blood, leading to a wounded animal. Office workers were poised around the red wreck, stunned and helpless as they wondered what had just happened.
Inside, Brigid felt one hundred new aches in places she didn’t know could hurt. Even if this was a dream, it still hurt like hell. And there was no way of waking up, not with the glist buzzing around her system and the whole VR dream engine feeding information to her brain. She had to play it out or shut it down. There weren’t any other options. But then, that’s why she was here, wasn’t it?
She shifted against the seat restraint, reaching up to the driver’s side door where it now sat to her left but also above her. She tried the handle, pushed at the door. The door was heavy, and its springs seemed determined to get it closed again as soon as she had it open more than an inch. She cursed, an incomprehensible shriek of annoyance, then leaned across until she could shove at the door with both hands. After a moment, the door swung open and teetered there, scraping against the ceiling of the room.
It was a lobby, Brigid saw when she climbed free of the wreck. In a moment she was on the floor, eyeing the office workers who watched her with incomprehension. She stood before them, dressed in formfitting black leather that accentuated her sinuous limbs, her long legs ending in heeled boots that came midway up her thighs. Her hair was in disarray from the crash and she shook it back—regretted it instantly when the impact of the crash left her dizzy.
“You need help, miss?” one of the office people asked, tentatively offering Brigid his hand.
Help? No. She just needed to remember everything so she could run the op the way they’d planned it. Where she was just now, the so-called
traum wirklichkeit,
was a faked reality designed to confuse the senses. Users would enter the dream structures after they’d been primed with glist, the psychedelic drug distilled from mutie sweat, creating a seamless transition from real to dream, where a preset environment was waiting to greet them. The environments varied from dream factory to dream factory, but the principles were always the same—once the user was in the dream he or she should never have cause to question it, even though it was at its core a highly advanced computer simulation. The glist smoothed off the hard edges, making it seem more real, turning the
traum wirklichkeit
into the user’s only reality.
In theory, there was no way to awaken from a
traum wirklichkeit
experience until the operators—generally black-market criminal gangs—stepped in to bring a user around. That gave the operators total control of how long a dreamer dreamed, allowing them to charge as much per session as the market could sustain. There wasn’t a lot of money in Hope, but addicts always found a way.
However, the system had never been designed to handle an attack from within. No one could foresee a way for an insurrectionist to get into the
traum wirklichkeit
and still be aware that they were dreaming. For a while, Brigid had been lost in the
traum wirklichkeit.
But she had something that most users didn’t have—a trick she’d learned back in her childhood and had employed ever since—her eidetic memory. With that, it was hard to fool Brigid for long; take away her memory of recent events and she cast back and recalled them, piecing things together with untold swiftness. She had been lost here for a time, caught up in the dream story she was being sold, the one she had paid credits to participate in, a new world painted on the canvas of computerized simulations developed for the military over two hundred years before. But she had come here with a mission, and recalling who she was and where she was was the first step in fulfilling that mission.
As the shadow of the Deathbird played across the ruined window by the skyway, Brigid stepped away from the car and addressed the gray-suited worker who had offered to help. “Roof access,” she demanded breathlessly. “I need to get up to the roof.”
Startled, the worker stuttered something, but Brigid grabbed him by both shoulders. “Now,” she insisted.
* * *
P
AIN
.
That was the first thing Kane felt. A pain in his side, almost like a bite. It seemed to kick in before he had even woken up, like an alarm chron. He was sitting on a hard chair with his arms wrenched behind his back, hands tied at the wrists, the coolness of a breeze playing against the warm skin of his chest and arms and legs.
“We are the dreamers of the dream,” a man was explaining, his voice close by.
With his eyes still closed, Kane surveyed his surroundings to the best of his abilities. It was a room, small room, the echoes of shoe heels against the hard stone floor told him that much. And there were two people here, one of them real close, looming over him and breathing into his face. The breath smelled sweet and strong, like four-day-old tangerine.
Kane opened his eyes, saw the man looking right at him, a desk lamp turned on its swivel arm to blaze at him with sun-bright intensity. The man had dark red skin, or maybe it was just a bad reaction to the sun.
“You have a magistrate’s gun,” the man began, his face close to Kane’s. “Are you a magistrate?”
“Wh-what?” Kane muttered. His mouth felt raw, as if he’d been asleep with it wide-open. He realized why he could feel the breeze now, too—he’d been stripped naked before being tied to the chair, his jacket, pants, shadow suit and boots slung in one corner of the little room. There was a bruise on his left side where the bullet had struck a glancing blow, in line with his bottommost rib. The shadow suit had dulled the impact, deflecting the bullet before it penetrated, but it had still hit like a locomotive. Without the shadow suit, he’d be leaking blood right now.
The room looked like an office, and it was almost big enough to hold the half-length desk that had been crammed against its longest wall, although it was probably a bastard of a thing to get a chair in here to sit at it. The desk was smothered in paperwork, credits tossed casually amid it all like eclectic bookmarks, bags of powder that looked like sea salt. There were pictures over the desk, too. Pictures of ants and locusts with women’s bodies—poor renderings done by hand, tacked to the wall.
“A mag’s gun,” the man repeated, lifting the weapon so that Kane could see it. “Tell me where you got it.”
Kane fixed the man with his steely gray stare. “Get bent.”
The man’s black brows rose in surprise, and then he drew back and slapped Kane across the face. It was a poor slap, no power in it, like the man was scared of hurting him.
The red-skinned man wore a red dress, buttoned high to his throat, with great puffy sleeves and a three-quarter-length skirt. He had an afro haircut, bulging around his face like a great black halo, and a pencil-thin mustache over his top lip. He had a diamond embedded in one of his incisors and it caught the light every time he opened his mouth and breathed four-day-old tangerine in Kane’s face.
“You’re in no position to fuck with us here, little Chihuahua,” the man with the diamond tooth said. “You know who I am?”
Kane looked the man up and down for a long moment, making a show out of it. “Some poor bastard’s very disappointing blind date?” he suggested with a smirk.
The man struck Kane across the face again, the slap harder this time. Kane felt the warmth spread across his cheek.
“What? You think you’re funny?” the man in the dress challenged. “You think this is all some great big giggle-fest?”
There was another figure at the door behind the man, forced to stand almost outside the office because of the lack of space. It was a dark-skinned woman, young and with big breasts that made her T-shirt bulge as though she was smuggling two melons. Her hair was in ringlets, pulled back in a tail that hung from high on her crown. Kane tagged her for the woman behind the counter, figured her for maybe twenty years old.
Which meant there were two people missing: Deren, the guy with the shotgun, and the mook that Kane had coldcocked in the alleyway at the back of the premises. They’d had enough time to strip him, but maybe they hadn’t found the mook in the alley yet—maybe Deren was looking for him even now.
* * *
A
S
THEY
EMBRACED
amid the ruins of the smoldering arms factory, Grant felt something hard press against his leg. He pulled away from Shizuka, opening his eyes and peering down. It was the hilt of her sword, tucked as ever in its ornate sheath at her hip. The sword was a
katana,
the weapon of choice for samurai warriors for hundreds of years, dating all the way back to feudal Japan. The twenty-five inches of razor-keen steel were honed to an edge so fine that it sang as it cut the air.
“You ever go anywhere without that?” Grant asked.
“Take me somewhere truly romantic and maybe you’ll find out,” Shizuka teased, wrinkling her nose.
“
Maybe
I’ll find out?” Grant challenged, but Shizuka ignored his implied complaint, pulling him closer to kiss once more.
* * *
J
UST
TWELVE
FEET
AWAY
, a single eye was peering through the gap that had been created in a ruined wall that proudly displayed the mottled spitball evidence of a bomb blast across its surface like some unfathomable work of art. The eye was the blue of polished sapphire, stark and clear as crystal. The eye widened as it watched Grant and Shizuka kiss, before blinking twice, very rapidly, and turning away from the hole in the wall.
“Algie,” a woman’s voice whispered a moment later, “there are people here. Come quick, see. There are people. I told you there must be.”
Behind the blackened wall, Algernon pushed the tails of his leaf-green frock coat aside and stepped up to the hole where his colleague Cecily had been just a moment before. His blond hair had streaks of soot in it and he had tied it back now with a thick black bow that rested low down on the nape of his neck, leaving much of his blond hair artistically loose. He had been working a few minutes before, but Cecily’s demands had interrupted that.
“Do you see them, Algie?” Cecily trilled excitedly. “Tell me you see them. I do so fear I might be imagining such things, being stuck in this dreadful place for days like this!”
“Oh, must you make such a performance of everything, Cecily?” the woman called Antonia hissed from behind the two of them as Algernon peeped through the hole. She strode into the ruined room through a doorway that had seen better days. Stepping from the shadows, Antonia brushed at her luxurious mane of dark brown hair, which flowed down past her shoulders to the base of her spine. Those shoulders had been left bare by the daring cut of her cream-colored dress, which had long hems that showed black streaks now where they had dipped in the ash that littered the factory. “Do you not realize how tiresome it becomes?”