She winced. That was her father talking. He’d never liked metahumans. Any of them. The elves were "pointy-eared pricks." dwarfs were "foot stools." and trolls were "horn heads" with the intelligence of a brick. Orks . . .
Orks were what Pita was now. But she didn’t have to like it.
She hurried through a second hall where most of the patrons were male. She tried not to look at the halfclothed woman who leered at the customers from behind a tall brass pole. The stripper had huge breasts, but it was hard to tell where they stopped and her bulging chest muscles began. Her face was painted in a horrible parody of a human woman; the dark eyeshadow gave her face even more of a greenish tinge, and the jutting canines ruined the effect of her lipstick. Even so, the men hooted and whistled, bellying up to the stage to wave in the hope of catching the stripper’s eye.
Someone pinched Pita as she went by. Still hyped up from the encounter with the off-duty cops, she yelped and spun around, one fist raised. The pinching fingers belonged to a troll, so huge that his eyes were level with Pita’s even though he was sitting down.
"You got a nice ass, girl." he said. "How about you sit it down here, on my lap."
"Frag off." Pita snapped back. She was trying to sound tough, but her voice was close to cracking.
"Ooh." said a man next to the troll. "I don’t think she likes you, Ralph. But don’t worry if this one gets away. She’s not much to look at anyhow."
Pita hurried away, her cheeks burning. She found the door at the back of the restaurant that led into an underground passage. It was about half as wide as a city street, and was fronted by shops and offices on either side. The walls were cobbled together from a mix of brick, concrete, and plastiform, while rusted metal pillars held up the ceiling. A grid of overhead lights, pocked with burned-out tubes, cast a pattern of shadows. The floor underfoot was heavy-duty linoleum, scuffed by the passage of many feet and littered with drifts of plastic cups and paper wrappers that smelled of day-old food. Orks of every description walked back and forth along it, pausing to look into barred windows or bustling in and out of doorways. A handful wore double-breasted business suits or dresses and pumps, but most were wearing cheap, ill-fitting clothes that had been intended for human proportions. Mothers dragged complaining children along by the hand, while teens in baggy stretch pants and MetalMesh shirts lounged against pillars or rattled past on gyro boards. Some of the orks rode scooters or electric bicycles, weaving their way between those on foot. The effect was a strange cross between an enclosed shopping mall and a rundown city street.
Pita walked slowly along the corridor, wondering which way to go. Unlike a megamall or an arcology, the Underground had no directory, no color-coded strip lights in the floor to follow. The narrow streets didn’t even run in straight lines. They zigzagged this way and that around the support pillars, disappearing around corners and then reappearing again. The shops seemed to be wedged in wherever they would fit.
Two orks wearing gray jumpsuits and leather holsters with oversize pistols walked boldly down the center of the corridor, scanning the people who streamed past. Occasionally one grabbed someone by
the shoulder, dragging the pedestrian over to him.
Crumpled dollar bills would change hands, and then the pedestrian would be given a rough shove and sent on his way.
Pita ducked behind one of the supporting pillars and kept it between herself and the two uniformed men until they had passed. These were the "security guards" who served as the semi-official police force for the Underground. They were little more than goons who shook down the inhabitants of the Underground for protection fees. They were also the reason why Pita and her street chummers never ventured into the Underground much. If you couldn’t pay the fee for the "protection" offered by the uniformed guards, you could always work off your fee as a press-ganged member of one of the maintenance crews who did all of the hard, dirty, and dangerous work of expanding and repairing the Underground’s ever-growing maze of tunnels. It didn’t sound like much fun.
An electronics shop seemed the most likely place to start her search for Yao. The first three Pita tried didn’t produce any results. None of them had heard of Yao—or was willing to admit that they’d sold equipment to
Orks
First!
Exhausted and hungry, Pita was about to give up. She had decided to find a fast food outlet and do some scrap snacking—eating the soggy fries and burger crusts that patrons had left behind—when she spotted an electronics shop. It was tucked into the bend of a street, its merchandise displayed behind barred windows. A flickering holo of a trideo camera floated above the door, slowly rotating. A closed-circuit trideo set in the window broadcast the passing shoppers. The view panned back and forth, as if the holo-camera was doing the recording. It would have been a neat trick if the trideo set’s tracking hadn’t been so bad. The picture was smeared with static.
Pita rapped on the door of the shop, then waited for the clerk to buzz her in. It was a tiny store, just a
couple of meters wide and deep. The shelves on either
side were lined with home entertainment equipment, most of it second-hand. Large yellow price tags hung from each item. The center of the store was taken up with bins of off-the-rack electronics: fiber-optic cables, datachips, mini-amps, and interface plugs. Glass counters held cheap knock-offs of designer watches and electronic toys, made in some Third World sweat-shop.
The shopkeeper was a female dwarf who sat on a tall stool behind one of the counters. She was hunched over a cyberdeck, her short legs dangling. Half of her head was shaved, revealing multiple datajacks. A cable stretched from one of the jacks to the deck. On the other side of her head, her hair hung down in a thick braid. Her fingernails were covered in a thin layer of polished metal, making light clicking noises as she drummed them against the counter. Her eyes were unfocused at first, but then she blinked and looked up at Pita.
"Can I help you?" she asked, gently tugging the jack from the slot above her ear.
Pita started to shake her head. What would a dwarf clerk from a crummy little shop like this know about ork trideo pirates? But she’d come this far. Might as well ask.
"I’m looking for someone." Pita said. "Yao Wah. Yao is the first name. He’s a pirate who shoots trideo for
Orks
First!
I thought you might know him. He’s my friend’s brother and I need to tell him someth—"
The dwarf’s eyes narrowed. "What makes you think I know this Yao?"
Pita shrugged. "I don’t know. I thought maybe he came in here to buy equipment."
The dwarf stared at her impassively.
"Guess I was wrong." Pita said, reaching for the door. "I know him."
"You do?" Pita turned around quickly.
"Yeah. He’s a class-A slot." the dwarf said, wrinkling her nose. "Stiffed me for a signal booster. Owes me five thousand nuyen. But is the fragger going to pay me? I doubt it. He’d rather deal with his own kind."
Pita waited, sizing up the dwarf. "Do you know where I can find Yao?"
"You could try posting a message on the Matrix.
Orks
First!
runs a bulletin board on the
Seattle
network."
"I don’t even have enough nuyen to use the public telecom." Pita said. "Besides, I need to see him in person."
"You need to meet the meat." the dwarf said. "Why?"
"Something’s happened to his brother. I need to tell Yao about it, face to face."
"This brother’s important to him? You think Yao would answer if I posted something about the kid?" Pita nodded. "Tell him it’s a message about Little Pork Dumpling. Then he’ll know it’s for real. He used to call his brother that because he was so fat when he was little."
"Right. Wait one." The dwarf slotted the jack back into her head and closed her eyes. After a second or two she opened them again. "It’s done. A friend of his is passing the message along."
"That’s great!" Pita said. "When can I meet him? And where?"
"Right here." the dwarf answered. "But not until he pays his bill, plus interest for the three months it’s overdue. And don’t get any ideas about going off to find him yourself. The door’s locked and armed. If Yao wants the meet, he’ll come. We’ll see if his ‘little pork dumpling’ is worth five thousand nuyen to him."
Yao
was shorter than he looked on trideo. He was about Pita’s height, but had broader shoulders and a thicker neck. He looked like an older version of Chen, with the same straight black hair and Asian eyecast. He wore his hair "high and tight"—shaved over the ears and spiky on top. It was starting to gray a little, although he was still probably only in his mid-twenties. Life on the streets had given his eyes a hard, wary look. But he was good-looking, for an ork. His jaw was narrow and his nose straight. He wore jeans torn off at the knee and a black leather vest over a loose-fitting sweatshirt—probably to deliberately contrast with the carefully groomed reporters of the legitimate news stations.
Yao
sat on the other side of a small plastic table, watching Pita scarf down her second plate of noodles. There was no way to tell whether he had anything so fancy as an cybereye cam, but there a datajack showed in his temple and a mini-radio was clipped to one earlobe. When Pita asked what it was, he told her it was a Lone Star scanner and decryption unit. "Keeps me one step ahead of the cops." he explained, one arm draped across the back of the bench. She noticed he always kept one eye on the doorway, where his friend Anwar lounged.
The second pirate wore jeans, a muscle shirt, and
cowboy boots. He leaned against a wall next to the door, one arm cradling a bulky trideo camera whose size gave it away as being more than two decades out of date—nearly an antique. He grinned at Yao and gave him a thumbs-up sign indicating that none of the Underground’s security goons were in sight.
Pita finished her noodles and drained the last of her soda. She toyed nervously with one of her chopsticks until Yao gently touched her wrist. The back of his hand was covered with a mass of spiky black hairs; he didn’t shave his hands to look more human the way some orks did. "Well?" he asked. "Are you going to tell me something about Chen? Or do you want to soak me for another plate of noodles first?"
The chopstick in Pita’s hands snapped in two. "He’s dead." she blurted.
"Yes."
Pita looked up. "You knew?"
Yao
shook his head. On his trideo broadcasts, he was animated and expressive, but now his face was strangely still. Only a faint wince of his eyes betrayed what he must be feeling. "I didn’t know. But I could guess. I can read people. I can see that Chen meant a lot to you."
Pita stared at the tabletop. Its edge was scarred with cigarette burns. The brown stains reminded her of the dried blood she’d found on her jacket the morning after Chen had . . . After the cops had . . .
Tears dripped onto the bright yellow plastic. Yao reached across the table and lifted Pita’s chin with one massive hand. "What happened? How did he die? Was it a fight? An overdose? How?"
"The Star." Pita answered. She had to swallow before she could go on. "They shot him. And two of his friends, Shaz and Mohan. We were hanging out, trying to boost a trideo feed to catch one of your broadcasts. Lone Star stopped us and—"
"And Chen pulled a weapon. Stupid fragger. You’d
think he’d know better."
"No!" Pita protested. "It wasn’t like that at all. At first all the Stars did was smash the ’trode rig you gave him. But later, they came back in their patrol car. Shaz threw a rock at them, and they opened fire on us. But none of us had a weapon. Not in our hands. Mohan had a knife, but it was still in his pocket. The cops never even got out of their car or gave us a warning. They shot before we even had time to run."
"But you escaped."
Guilt washed over Pita like ice water. "Yes." she muttered, looking down at the tabletop once more. "But I came back, later, to see if the others were all right. That’s when I saw the cops cutting them up. And writing the Humanis slogans on the wall."
"Humanis Policlub?" Chen leaned forward, a hard glitter in his eyes. "You mean fragging
cops
belong to that drek-eating hate club?" A muscle worked in his jaw. "Well, it figures. Orks represent sixteen percent of Seattle’s population, but nearly fifty per cent of the prison population is ork. Not only are we arrested and thrown in jail more often, we’re also under-represented as cops. Only one fragging per cent of the Lone Star cops patrolling Seattle are ork. Nearly eighty per cent are human. Those figures have been documented by the Ork Rights Committee. And their numbers don’t lie. Prejudice against metahumans runs long and deep in the Star. Chief Loudon’s going to have a lot to answer for the day the coalition takes over the city. And that day is coming—soon."
Pita was impressed by all the facts Yao had at his fingertips. He was informed. He was determined.
He stopped talking as the waitress came to clear the table. She was a pretty girl—human—a little older than Pita. But Yao looked at her with open contempt. "Wait until we’re finished eating, drekhead." he snapped at her.
Pita pushed her bowl away. "I’m done." she said quickly. But the waitress had already scrambled away.