The rooftop of an unusually tall low-income apartment building somewhere between the warehouse district and downtown Beijing was inexplicably closed. Several lovebirds had been very distraught to discover their usual meeting place locked so tight, but the cinch bars latched onto the door's outer side kept them out.
On the wide plane of the rooftop a jungle gym of antenna and satellite dishes sprouted from one central mount, blossoming upwards like the flowers of some huge plant. Nestled among them was a giant beach umbrella spray-painted the same gray color as the satellite dishes, and under it sat a comfortable-looking lawn chair and a folding card table. Sandwiched between the two was a slightly overweight Hispanic-looking gentleman, a large, colorful headset obscuring most of his face. He was sipping from a big plastic container with a transparent domed lid, the thick straw showing a steady stream of tiny pea-sized lumps ascending through the milky liquid. It was bubble tea, and Baby had discovered that he loved it within fifteen minutes of touching down in China.
"Okayyy… " he mumbled, both hands slowly fluttering over the two joysticks on the table in front of him. His field of view had maps over maps, tiny matching readouts next to each showing temperature, fuel, speed, latitude and the like. In the middle of them all was a window replaying the bug's view of Fede as he pulled the throttle and roared off towards the field, the flanges of his mechanical legs finding the tiny foot posts on the bike like he'd been born riding it.
"Boy's a fucking natural" chuckled Baby, canceling the video feed. He studied the maps again more carefully, noted the tiny red dot moving swiftly down the highway. Far to its right three green dots were navigating a series of local roads, moving to intercept him. As Baby watched a similar set of dots suddenly appeared on the highway close behind Fed. Baby clucked his tongue and pattered his fingers against the two joysticks, slowly wiping his hands before bending over the side of the table. He sat up holding an oversized, no-nonsense, matte-gray joystick. It was an expensive item, stolen by certain key people under Big Circle's employ, and Baby was very pleased to be able to use it. He jacked in and watched a grid unfold, aligning itself with the maps he already had open. Baby chuckled again and took another pull on his bubble tea before slowly wrapping his fingers around the joystick in front of him. He breathed deeply, slowly, and began to caress it.
A visual appeared in a window in front of him, a top-down image of the highway, the city at its edge. He touched the joystick and it zoomed in, slowly resolving on a tiny motorcycle and three humvees racing down an aisle of motionless cars. At the center of the image was a transparent red circle almost the width of the middle two lanes. The herk-jerk of the image slowly settled, steadily tracking the three cars. The red circle hovered over them, wavering slightly left and right to encompass the passenger cars to either side, cars full of innocent Chinese wondering why they were locked in and who was driving by.
Baby exhaled slowly and his thumb flickered against the base of the joystick. The red circle got a little darker, then lightened again, and the three green dots suddenly slowed.
Somewhere behind Fede an obscenely powerful burst of microwave radiation lanced out of the sky and charred the three humvees behind him into melted slag, hot pools of metal spilling forward into otherworldly sculptures all over the road.
Feed didn't notice.
He was not having a good time. His back was cramping up being hunched over the bike and he hadn't seen any sign of Chow's military since he'd gotten on the road. It was too long on one track, and the white line just kept scrolling forward.
Eventually he got cold enough to try to zip up his jacket again, riding one handed as he glanced behind him. He didn't manage to get the stuck zipper moving, but he did discover that the gloves had chords built in. As he tugged at the zipper a tiny set of Chinese characters appeared, scrolling down the right-hand side of the helmet's HUD alongside the accelerometer. It ended in a question, followed by a "yes/no." He keyed in "yes" and chorded the usual "hello world." Sure enough, the words appeared along the bottom of the screen.
It was tricky, chording and driving at the same time, but before long Fede had discovered a whole host of feeds streaming into his helmet, all encrypted. Each was formatted differently, and it took him a while to figure out that he was looking at a toolset Cessus must have built on top of a series of Xing's boy's hacks. The bike's gyroscopic force kept it level as Fede raced onward toward the city. Fed's eyes grew hard under the helmet as he correlated the data, backtracked through apps, dissected command sets. He was looking at Plan B.
Fifteen minutes later he pulled off the main road, roughly thirty blocks away from the train station, and slowed to a stop behind a corn syrup tanker refilling its tanks. The bike shimmied and grumbled as it idled, a low grind that almost matched the sound of helicopters coming in from the south, back the way he had come. but Fede was temporarily away.
Baby had fed the bright red cord through the unusually thick antenna main some hours before, and lowering it to a near horizontal was easy. He connected the mains to it and carefully disconnected everything else except for his joystick and comm. They ran on battery power and were tied into the same geosynchronous satellites he'd used to fry Fed's pursuers. A squat square block with four accordioned legs was slowly waddling away from him, pincers mounted on its top holding the twelve-meter metal-ceramic amalgam tube. Baby hustled back under the gray canopy and settled himself into the lawn chair, pulling on his headset and fiddling with the joystick as the horizon bobbed back and forth with the motion of the robot. He chuckled to himself and rubbed his hands together gleefully before finishing the last of the bubble tea and tossing the container on the rooftop next to him. This was the part he'd been hoping for the whole trip.
Suddenly the horizon spun, the distant cityscape spinning by. His hands clenched and hammered on the joystick with no result, and he scrambled up in his seat, tearing at the headset.
Down past his feet, at the end of the long tube, the robot was double-timing to the left, away from Baby.
"What the hell are you doing" he screamed, his hands still flying over the joystick. He pulled the headset down again and saw the view suddenly resolve, then zoom in faster than his eyes could follow. The visual snapped to and Baby was suddenly looking at a set of tanks rolling down the road towards him in the distance.
"Urk" said Baby. There weren't supposed to be tanks there. He was going to use the gun on the helicopters that were coming in from the south.
Overlaid against his view of the tanks came a series of red and green lines, and as he watched code spun out in a column on the right-hand side. A google page flew up, jumped to a page about high-speed magnetic physics, and a formula flew from the page and dropping into the code. The visual turned to wire frame, the lead tank suddenly plucked out and pasted against a visual recognition window, statistical data spilling from the google window and also snapped up into the code. The red and green lines shuffled themselves, once, then twice, then aligned themselves in a gentle arc along the event horizon of the tank treads. The visual zoomed in until all Baby could see were the treads, and the red and green lines began to blink. Behind the visual warning notices suddenly began to pop up, bright red warning notices in several languages, most of the English ones including terms like "extremely dangerous," and "Fatal." One very prominent window read "Overload."
Baby yelped and slapped the headset to transparent, leaping up and entangling the top of the headset in the canopy. He struggled free and danced around the giant capacitor mounted against the bottom of the tube, his hands grasping at nothing, his mouth making a little "O" over and over again. He turned and ran alongside the tube towards the robot, his hands in the air, not noticing when the cable to the joystick on the table behind him reached its limit and pulled out of his headset with a little "ping." He hopped over the tube as the robot made a minute, last-minute adjustment, then straddled it and waddled forward as fast as he could as he came close and prepared to grab it.
There was a loud "zot" and a dopplered "zing" as the air around the tube vibrated out of the magnetic spectrum. A second later a thundercrack sounded as the metal rod that had previously been housed inside the tube split the air at several times the speed of sound. It left a tracer in the air, tiny waves of split hydrogen atoms flickering back together, creating a track from the tip of the rail gun forward and down the long road away from Baby. He slapped the headset again, little bits of glitter descending from the Mary painted on its front, and slowly let his jaw descend. The row of tanks now had only one set of treads apiece, smoking bits of metal littering the road where the wheels on their right-hand side had been. A blank space in Baby's field of visual suddenly sprouted data, shouted commands and screams in Chinese coming through a previously dead channel. They'd been on radio silence, operating outside of the visual spectrum. A moment later Baby's headset faded to black, the sounds fading to a dull distant whine.
"Fatalities: 0" scrolled across his headset. Then, "Distractions: 1."
Baby heard the sound of helicopters approaching.
His headset scrolled another message, and this time Baby listened. It read, simply, "Run."
Feed shoved off the side of the syrup tanker and pulled out of the lot, turning to head back the way he had come. Chow was approaching, but more slowly now, and the attack on the tanks weren't going to encourage him any. Feed didn't have to go far; only a few blocks down the road he could see sirens atop the military humvees. He waited until they were almost directly in sight before waddling forward onto the road atop the bike, making a show of trying to get the thing started. There was a loud crunch as one of the humvees swiped a car getting past it and Fede leapt forward, tearing ahead and towards the train station, trying hard not to think about the weapons pointed at his back.
He made it moments ahead of them and came to a stop right outside the station. It was deserted, the parking lot almost empty, florescent lights flickering in and out across the vast empty plane in front of the giant complex. Feed didn't know how to shut the bike off so he let it slow to neutral and then jumped off. The bike wobbled and flicked out its kickstand, the engine clicking off behind him.
Feed pulled off the helmet and snapped his goggles up and into place. He'd re-routed the data feeds to his own comm, and now he slapped the helmet into shutdown as he strode purposefully into the station, following a map only he could see.
He took two turns down a short and a long corridor, then stopped in front of an unmarked service door. He knocked, twice, and stared up with hard eyes as it was opened.
Marcus caught the helmet and stared in surprise at the man standing in front of him.
"You got a gun I could use?" asked Feed.
Marcus nodded, surrendering a tiny brown pistol.
"You know how to use it?" he asked.
Feed's fingers fluttered against the inside of the motorcycle gloves as he sucked down data about the pistol.
"I do now" he said, slapping out the cartridge and checking the bullet count before slamming it shut again and sticking it in the hem of his pants, against the small of his back. He nodded briefly at Marcus before spinning on his heel and leaving the way he had come.
Marcus closed the door behind him and carefully misted the inside of the helmet with bleach, wiping down the headset and changing the air filter. He took out a small plastic bag of gray powder and dusted the helmet with it. He checked the tiny headset he'd brought with him to make sure the corridor was empty and pulled himself up onto his crutches before slowly hobbling out of the room.
Marcus made his way to the end of the same corridor Fede had left by before unlocking and squeezing into a tiny broom closet. He leaned back on his crutches and watched the data through the headset. He waited a while, watching information stream by, trying to figure out what had happened to Cessus and Cass and Xing and Feed. There was no sign of them; the lines were silenced, which meant that either they'd been cracked by Chow's men or that everyone was dead. He eventually gave up worrying; there was nothing he could do about it except to fulfill his part of the plan. He'd seen the look in Feed's eyes - he would have to take care of the rest. He was the only one who could.
The cameras throughout the train station fed into a semi-public feed, terminals mounted at each hallway junction flipping through different views. The most prominent, frequently seen image was of the main entrance, of the doors through which Feed had marched only a few minutes before. Now that view was filled with an increasing expanse of angry-looking Chinese youth. Three or four dozen punks of varying flavors hopped around and punched at each other to the tune of antique Brit-Punk. "Anarchy in the UK" was chorused with no "r"s or "l"s, blaring from a cheap local broadcast through the trashy scooters parked haphazardly in clusters around the lot. They were loitering, biding time, building up their courage. Hands sought pockets with lengths of chain hidden within them, fingered kitchen knives wrapped in antiseptic towelettes carefully placed to remove any DNA in case they were used.
Chow watched from the end of the street leading to the station and silently ground his teeth. He needed the programmer, needed him to rework the virus so Chow could re-use it on his own, so his rogue French geneticist could fulfill his remaining promises. Instead he waited, watching the punks in the parking lot, the empty stalls without cars, the silent street they were parked on.
"Why are we waiting?" hissed Poulpe. He had little bits of white fluff sticking to the back of his arms and legs, tiny cotton strands from where his exoskeleton had torn up the car seat as he wormed around like an anxious child. "We just saw him go in there!"
"Why are these young people here?" asked Chow, more to himself than Poulpe. The two soldiers in the back of the car kept quiet, eyes watching the slowly waning charge on their suits' battery indicators.
"Does it matter?" asked Poulpe. "We can take care of them, yes?" Poulpe was becoming increasingly difficult to handle. He was drunk on the power of the suit and knew neither how to handle it nor its limitations.
Somebody came out of the train station and the crowd leapt up. A familiar-looking motorcycle helmet was waved in the air and the punks streamed in through the front doors, disappearing within.
Chow cursed and pressed one of his cufflinks, subvocalizing a command in Chinese. The other humvee pulled out and plowed up the stairs and to the front doors of the station, four soldiers leaping out as they powered on their suits. They disappeared inside.
The rest of them waited. The cameras aimed at the parking lot showed the scooters, tiny LEDs and day-glo stickers vibrating slightly to the tune of the music blaring from their tinny speakers. The empty humvee idled, tracer lining sparking blue lances of electricity around the handles and windows. An old newspaper appeared at the far end of the lot and slowly traversed it, carried by an untraceable wind.
One of the soldier's voices crackled across the radio. Chow asked a question, got the same answer: "Fatchan."
Chow cursed again, louder this time, and threw the humvee into drive. He leaned across Poulpe as he pulled the car out into the street and towards the station, took a pistol from the glove compartment.
"Fatchan?" asked Poulpe.
"Triads" hissed Chow. "The Triads are after him."
"Move! Move! Move!" screamed Feed, waving his pistol in the air. He had found the right train and gotten on the first car, his pistol and goggles and oversized gloves driving the pair of occupants there through the doors like rabbits. He ran through to the next car, found no one, then onward. There were thirty cars in all, and he only found a handful of occupants. In the seventh car he had to kick a drunk awake, screaming death-threats the man would never understand. He finally got to the end, pulled open the door and crossed to the final car.
This car terminated in a solid silver wall at the far end, no handle visible. Its seats were the same as all the rest of the train, plain hard green plastic tilted in 90-degree angles, booth seating only. Feed was startled to see a slightly balding head in the last seat, and jogged up to it, gun extended, one hand chording up access to the station camera system through a hack the Otaku and Cessus had put in place earlier that week.
"Get out" he said, breathing hard now. "Get the fuck out of here."
The man in front of him did nothing. He was in his fifties, yet another worn and wearied salary man, deep wrinkles around his mouth and bags around his eyes. He seemed tired, his dark suit seemed tired, his plain, carefully cut fingernails at the end of his old hands, resting on his knees, seemed tired.
When Feed pointed the gun at his forehead the man no longer seemed tired anymore. He straightened, slightly, and gently cocked his head to one side. One corner of his mouth twitched up and he shook his head no.
"Get out!" screamed Feed. He was starting to shake a little, now, the adrenaline eating away at his nerves. "Get out of the fucking train!"
The man slowly bent over and covered his head with his hands.
"Get out! Get out get out get out!" screamed Feed. He reached over and shoved the man.
Something didn't feel right, when he did that, and he backed up. Cursors in the corner of his vision showed alarms tripping, showed the helmet leaving the building, coming back in again. Feed moved to the far seat opposite the man and sat down.
"Just don't fucking move" he said, carefully switching on the gun's safety and tabbing up the visuals on his goggles. "Just don't move."
The first four soldiers had caught up to a large group of punks and slaughtered the lot of them, their cries of "Barbarian" as they peeked through doorways turning to screams of fear, then the silence of death. They were deep in the warren of tunnels and pathways now, their headsets painting an ordered path for them to follow. They had thought they had a lead on where the punks were going, or at least where a lot of them were going, but now they weren't sure. They were chording inputs to each other, trying to come to a decision when the lead soldier flashed a hand up for silence. The mics on their exoskeletons picked up a shuffling tap-tap-slide, tap-tap-slide. Their rifles snapped to and they fell into standard position, two against the wall, one bent in front, one standing behind. Marcus turned the corner ahead of them, hobbling forward on his crutches.
"Ting" announced one of the soldiers, his rifle aimed at Marcus's forehead. Marcus stopped and slowly spread his feet, letting his crutches fall to the ground on either side of him. He balled his huge fists and raised them in front of him, his bloodshot eyes deep-set and glittering.
"You know what's so great about being big?" he asked. The two soldiers on either side of the corridor exchanged smiles, their guns dipping as they watched the lead man walk forward and raise the butt of his rifle to knock Marcus aside. Their exoskeletons gave them strength and speed, power this crippled foreigner couldn't match no matter how big he was.
"It's because everyone thinks you're stupid" Marcus said. The lead soldier slowed as he approached, a look of fear spreading over his face as the regulated oxygen supply to his helmet suddenly sputtered out. At the same time his suit stopped moving, its weight no longer a support. The soldiers were in peak physical condition, but as Marcus watched they slowly let their arms drop and their backs bend, their knees giving way one by one as the weight of their battery packs drove them to the ground like old men. Their curses turned to huffing for breath and then, slowly, to tired whimpers. Marcus bent over, wheezing, and picked up his crutches.
"I know how you feel" he said, blowing out his cheeks as he held his breath, easing himself back to standing. He leaned over and slapped a panel on the wall. Tiny spigots in the ceiling stopped spitting out the bacterial mist that had been showering the soldiers, bacteria designed to eat through the rubber housing sealing the conduits from the battery packs to the exoskeletons they wore, to dissolve the junction cables there that powered the suits.
"Clever shit" said Marcus, looking down at the soldiers. "My friend Tonx designed it."
The soldier said something in Chinese, heaving for breath, his face turning red through the thick glass of his helmet. Marcus didn't understand, didn't care to understand. He nodded solemnly at the soldier.
He held up the headset and peered through it again. "You better hope he's okay" he said quietly.
Chow made Poulpe stay behind the two soldiers in the lead, had to keep telling him to keep back, to cover their rear.
"I am not here for covering rear" said Poulpe. He had found the bayonet that attached to the end of his suit's arm and was waving it around like a mechanical grim reaper. The first thing he had done upon entering the station was to punch a hole in one wall and puncture a water line, tripping an alarm and flooding the main room with water. Now they sloshed out and to higher ground, stopping at a set of terminals showing groups of punks running down hallways, civilians cowering in doorways and being left behind, the first group of four soldiers running down a long corridor in standard point formation.
"There" said Poulpe. "Next to that statue of a boy." He pointed and they caught a glimpse of a slight, mechanical-legged figure slipping behind it and out of view. One of the soldiers consulted a map on his HUD and said something to Chow.
"Follow me" said Chow to Poulpe. Chow's pants legs were soaking wet, but he still commanded the soldiers with authority, an authority Poulpe found both distracting and annoying. He had been enjoying himself a great deal since he had met Chow, had made use of the resources Chow allowed him to explore several pharmaceuticals he had not allowed himself in a long time.
They strode down the hallway, their hydraulic legs sending them gliding past and around Chow, his shiny Italian leather shoes double-timing to their every step. Poulpe found himself in the rear, and took the opportunity to relax himself a bit with a tiny aerosol spray can. It hissed lightly, coating the inside of his palate with a minty flavored combination of several carefully selected drugs. Time slowed, the hallway stretched out in front of him, and Poulpe became delightfully aware of the interplay of light on the shiny portions of his fellow soldier's exoskeletons.
Chow heard the hiss and grimaced, but did not turn around.
They entered the main hall and saw eight of the punks disappear around the same statue they had seen Feed by.
"Hurry!" said Chow, breaking into a trot. The two soldiers overtook him, looking down at him in pained anxiety.
"Go!" said Chow, then breaking into Chinese he gave them open license to do what was necessary to take Feed alive and to prevent his capture by the Triads. They broke into fluid trots, then a flat-out run as they rounded the corner and out of sight.
"Carry me" said Chow to Poulpe. "And don't drop me this time."
Poulpe was tired of this. He was the mastermind behind this coup, had arranged everything since he'd first met Feed and sensed the potential there. He was not destined to answer to little, arrogant, public officials.
"To hell with you" said Poulpe, wetting his lips slightly with the tip of his tongue as he savored the taste of the words.
"Do it or I send you back to Disney" said Chow. He was through with being nice; it was time the Frenchman knew who was in charge and what the consequences for failure were. Poulpe didn't smile. His dreamy eyes narrowed. Chow had been doing his homework, he was disappointed to discover. He had learned somehow about the training Poulpe had received, about the conditioning he himself had designed for Disney to use with its top engineers. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny tin.
"What are you doing? Pick me up! We are falling behind!" said Chow.
"I need focus, Monsieur" said Poulpe. He was having a difficult time making himself do this. He could feel from the distant clench in his chest that as soon as he did he wouldn't be having any fun anymore. He was having a lot of fun right now, was really, really enjoying the slightly orgasmic chills running across the hairs of his arms, the tender pull of his calves under the support straps of the suit. He pulled out a plain white pill from the tin and gently set it on his tongue. Chow watched as he closed his mouth, chewed once, and swallowed. His pupils abruptly tightened to pinheads, as sharply as if he'd walked out of a cave and looked at the sun.
"As you ordered, sir" he said, scooping Chow up off his feet. He broke into an awkward run, the suit picking up the pace and turning it into a rapid glide as they went. Chow hung on, startled, his arms around Poulpe's neck. The stale antiseptic smell of the Frenchman's sweat swirled around them and they hurried down the corridor, the other two soldiers turning and running out of view at the other end. There were screams and an explosion. The comm on Poulpe's shoulder hissed to life, a gurgle of Chinese followed by several words that were sharply cut off. The sound of machine-gun fire rattled against the walls and down the hall towards them.
The room beyond was another antechamber, a huge sculpture of a man in traditional bamboo armor standing on a dais at its center. Bodies littered the room, punks splayed out in bloody repose. The body of one of the soldiers was prone on the floor, a long filet knife somehow woven between the protective plates of his suit and buried in his neck. The remaining soldier was firing at an archway extending off to their left, and he nodded quickly at Chow as they stepped into the room. He pointed once at the comm mounted to his chest, drawing attention to the single bullet hole there.
"Nice shooting" gasped Poulpe, the drugs making him heave for breath despite the suit. The soldier waved at them and held up one finger before pointing at the archway. He jogged up to the wall next to it and waited, watching Chow for orders. Next to and over his head a row of terminals showed a set of three trains pulled up next to their platforms in the room beyond, the empty lot in front of the train station, the water-filled front room. The sound of shouting came from the room beyond, then a tearing metal sound. The shouting dimmed.
"Go!" barked Chow, pointing at the doorway. The soldier stepped out and around the corner, pressing his back up against the other side of the wall. Poulpe stepped forward before they saw the center of the man's torso explode, the wall blowing back towards them, splattering the floor with gore.