city blues 02 - angel city blues (29 page)

I shook my head. “That’s crazy! I can’t outrun a maglev tram. The next car will be along in about forty-five seconds, and it’s going to swat me like a bug.”

“Just run,” Dancer said. “
Trust
me…”

So I ran: rushing deeper into the semi-darkness of the tube, my feet pounding on the meter-wide poly-laminate insulator strip separating the twin rows of superconductors that formed the tram’s electromagnetic rails. Sprinting at first, and then dropping into a more sustainable pace as my muscles burned off that initial surge of blood sugar.

My words were punctuated by breaths as my body adjusted to the unexpected exercise. “I can’t… outrun… a fucking… maglev… tram.”

“I know,” Dancer said. “We’re not trying to outrun the tram. We’re looking for a maintenance hatch.”

“What… if… we… don’t… find… one?”

“We will,” she said. “Stop worrying.”

That was easy for her to say. She was already dead. Or pretty damned close to it, anyway.

I passed glow strips at regular intervals, but they weren’t shooting by the way they did on the tram. I started to imagine the sound of the next car rushing up behind me. There wasn’t enough room for me to tuck myself out of the way and let it pass. When the tram came, I was going to become a splatter of unpleasant fluids on the walls of the tube.

“This… is… not… a… good… idea…”

“Shut up,” Dancer said. “Save your breath, and keep running.”

I did.

Another glow strip passed. Still no sign of a maintenance hatch, or any cranny large enough to crawl into.

“There!” Dancer said. “Left wall, about ten meters ahead.”

I looked and saw a rectangular metal door plate—a little less than a meter wide and nearly twice that tall—covering a shallow box set into the wall of the tube.

I sprinted to it, popped the release catches, and pulled the door plate aside, expecting to see a crawl space or a maintenance alcove. Instead, I was staring into an electrical junction box, only about thirty centimeters deep and packed with circuitry. Maybe an anorexic mouse could fit in there, but I sure as hell couldn’t.

“Keep it!” Dancer said. “Keep the door plate.”

“For what?”

Her voice was nearly a growl. “Jesus, Stalin, will you stop second-guessing me? I know what I’m doing.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Lay the doorplate lengthwise between the magnet rails.”

I did as she ordered.

“Now, lay down on it.”

“
Huh
?”

“Lay down on it. Get your fingers under the lip of the leading edge. You can let your feet dangle off the end.”

Again, I followed her instructions. Was I supposed to lie flat, and let the tram pass over my head? If that was her plan, I was about to be squashed flat. The track clearance was only about ten centimeters.

“What the hell are we doing?”

Dancer laughed. “Lev surfing.”

“What?”

“You’ve seen it,” she said. “Kids using steel plates to ride the electromagnetic bow waves that run in front of Lev trains.”

Oh shit!
That
was her plan?

“I’ve seen it alright. It looks insanely dangerous.”

I could feel the vibration of the approaching tram now. Not good… This was very
very
not good…

“It’s not so bad,” Dancer said. “Scary, but fun. Did it all the time when I was a kid.”

The vibration was getting stronger now, and I began to feel the stirring of artificial wind currents as the oncoming car shoved a column of air through the tube.

“Ever get hurt?”

“A few broken bones,” she said. “Some staples. But I lived to tell about it. Just make sure you hang on to your surfboard.”

I had an even more terrifying thought. “What if this thing isn’t steel? What if it’s one of the nonmagnetic alloys?”

“Ouch,” Dancer said. “If it’s not steel, I guess you’re fucked.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but my words were overwhelmed by the roar of the onrushing tram.

Then the metal plate was up off of the insulator strip, caught up in the leading edge of the moving magnetic field, and I was shooting forward at what seemed like the speed of a rifle bullet.

It was a hurtling maelstrom of noise and wind. The rushing air stung my eyes and whipped my clothing painfully against my skin. The acceleration nearly ripped the metal plate out of my hands, but I hung on—quite literally—for dear life.

The world was a blur of strobing light and darkness as the half-seen glow strips shot past me at impossibly short intervals.

“I’m going to kill you for this!” I shouted into the tumult.

There was no answer. Maybe Dancer couldn’t hear me over the rush of the air.

My fingers were starting to cramp. I could feel my grip weakening, my body starting to slide off of the thin metal plate that shielded me from disaster.

How the hell did kids
do
this? Probably with straps, and built-in handholds, and other features that my improvised surfboard didn’t have.

I was mere seconds from an extremely messy death when the tram began to decelerate. The wind tunnel effect subsided as the car lost momentum. The maelstrom faded to a gentle breeze, and inertia lost its determination to shove me off the door plate.

The tram slid out of the tube and braked to a stop at the terminal platform. I coasted a few meters into the next section of tube, until my steel plate slid down the leading edge of the car’s electromagnetic field and came to rest on the insulator strip.

I staggered to my feet, still gripping the plate, stumbling toward the platform. If I was going to mix it up with Arm-twister and his genteel buddy, I would at least have something to club them with.

My heart was still pounding, and my knees were shaky, but I intended to put up a fight. Anything would be better than another round on the surfboard of doom.

When I stepped up onto the platform, it was deserted. No sign of the two thugs.

I looked toward the exit. “Where did they go?”

No response from Dancer.

I glanced around. “They couldn’t have made it all the way up the ramp that quickly, could they?”

No response.

I tapped the ear bug with a fingertip. “Dancer? You awake?”

No answer.

The doors of the tram whooshed closed, and I looked reflexively toward the sound.

Through the side windows of the car, I caught sight of Arm-twister and his unidentified escort; still seated on the tram. Apparently, this had not been their stop, and somehow they had missed my unceremonious venture into Lev surfing.

Arm-twister spotted me as the car started to pull away. We locked eyes for a brief instant, and then he was on his feet, trying to get to the door.

Too late. The cigar-shaped tram car disappeared into the tube, accelerating rapidly as it went.

I leaned the steel plate against the wall of the terminal and started up the exit ramp.

“I thought they had us,” I said.

Still no response from Dancer.

I dug into the pocket of my windbreaker and pulled out my phone, still bundled to Dancer’s Turing Scion by nano-pore tape and a few centimeters of fiber optic cable. I thumbed the phone’s menu button, but the screen remained black. The phone had somehow shut itself off.

I held down the power key, and waited for the green restart icon. Nothing. The screen remained dark and inert.

I unwrapped the tape far enough to get at the phone’s battery compartment. I ejected the coin-sized power cell, counted to thirty, and then reseated it. This—or so I had been told—was called a ‘hard reset.’ It was supposed to dump the phone’s volatile memory, and allow its internal processors to come back on line with a fresh start of the operating kernel.

It didn’t work.

The phone showed no signs of life.

I searched the casing of the Turing Scion for any sign of a battery compartment. Maybe a hard reset of the Scion would get things moving again. But the black carbon-polymer surface of the casing was featureless. If there was a seam or a slot, I couldn’t find it.

I jiggled the connectors for the fiber optic cable.

Nothing.

And that exhausted my entire repertoire of troubleshooting ideas. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I had no hope of fixing it myself.

There were bound to be plenty of repair techs in the Osaka district. I’d have to go find one when I had the time. At the moment, though, my first priority was getting my hands on a gun. I didn’t want to be unarmed the next time I came up against any of my Asian bad boys.

I slid the dead phone and Scion back into my pocket and started up the ramp. I was going to miss having Dancer’s voice in my ear, offering insults and useful advice in roughly equal proportions, but I could deal with it.

I had been alone before.

CHAPTER 23

My first thought as I emerged from the tram terminal was that the Roppongi district looked an awful lot like the Zone, back in LA. Narrow streets lined with garish holo-facades and laser neon, interspersed with the dark forms of multistory buildings and even darker alleyways.

Other than the disproportionate number of Asian faces, the people didn’t look much different either. The usual sidewalk circus of muscle punks, wire-heads, party boys, hookers, and street freaks—with a liberal seasoning of tourists in scruff-drag, trying to blend in with the local toughs.

Like the Edo district, this was a homogenized approximation of the real thing. An idealized marketing-friendly simulation of deliciously dangerous street life. I wondered how much of it was based on the Roppongi section of Tokyo, and how much had been cribbed from vids and the fertile imaginations of corporate designers.

I had no doubt that you could get yourself laid here. Or high. Or injured. Or even killed.

But there probably wouldn’t be organ poachers waiting to carve up the tourists for spare parts as soon as their bodies hit the pavement. Instead, I had visions of emergency medical teams lurking not too far out of sight, ready to rush in with defibrillators, resuscitators, units of blood surrogate, and surgical robots programmed for trauma work.

I didn’t know that for certain, but it seemed like a logical necessity. A resort that gains a reputation for killing off its customers tends to lose allure as a tourism hot-spot. On the other hand, it probably didn’t hurt for an occasional visitor to go home with heroic surgical scars and a story about being dead on the operating table for three minutes, after a vicious knife fight with a gang of bōsōzoku.

Analyzed from the risk management mindset of corporate investors, that probably added up to a significant measure of permissible danger, constrained by the statistical limits of the colony’s business model. Bottom line: you could get hurt here, but the staff would try not to let you die.

Of course, I wasn’t sure whether or not the business model applied to me. I didn’t know where Nine-fingers, Messenger-boy, and Arm-twister fit into the scheme of things. If they were not plugged into the station hierarchy, I would theoretically enjoy whatever protections were accorded to other customers of Chiisai Teien. On the other hand, if they were working for someone high up in the colony’s power structure, I might have no protections at all. The Nine-fingers gang might have official clearance to shove my corpse out an airlock with no questions asked.

In other words, I couldn’t assume that the colony police or staff would intervene if I got in trouble. Fair enough…

I took a leisurely stroll up the street, fending off several offers of recreational chemicals, and a few more overtly personal propositions as I walked.

About three blocks later, I found what I was looking for. A public access kiosk, set into the front wall of a cosmetic surgery boutique.

I angled over to it, and tapped the display screen to bring the unit to life. I located the icon to toggle the language to English, and then ran a quick search for the Glass Planet Club, or Club Glass Planet, or whatever the nightclub was called.

The name turned out to be just Glass Planet. It was about five blocks away. I called up a map, memorized the directions, and then ended my kiosk session.

I looked around to get my bearings. The holo-sign above the door of the surgical boutique spelled out the words ‘Face Replace,’ the text morphing cyclically from English, to kanji, and back.

According to the map, Glass Planet was back the way I had come, so I found myself walking past the same lineup of hustlers and street crawlers.

No, I still didn’t want a good deal on any Jag, Crystal-Z, or specially-enhanced companionship. Nor did I need tickets to the zero-g ninja cage fights, special death match of the century.

I passed the tram terminal, then two more blocks of the same sorts of offerings, differing only in details and price points.

Glass Planet turned out to be a squalid little psycho-rock bar on the second floor of a building with a surrealistically green rainforest holo-facade.

The street-level entrance was through an archway of conveniently-curved fern fronds, of a size that probably hasn’t been seen since the demise of the dinosaurs. About a quarter of the way up the narrow staircase, I had to edge past a trio of surly-looking gaijin boys—maybe late teens (cosmetically at least), bristle-cut hair, heavy eye makeup, and theatrical tough-guy scowls.