Elizabeth Bear - Hammered

“Razor, it’s going bad.”

“See that. Hang on!” Razorface thumbed the ignition on. The engine purred into life and Razor twisted the wheel, streetlights reflecting from his slick-shiny scalp. Mitch grabbed the dashboard; the Caddy laid rubber against the curb.

He slid his gun out of its holster as two dark vehicles peeled away from the roadside behind them. “Those still your boys, Razor?”

“Who the fuck knows? We on our own now, piggy.” Razorface jerked his chin down and to the side. “Shotgun under your chair. I want it.”

“Gotcha.” Mitch waited until Razor’s foot came off the accelerator so the seat belt quit driving the edges of his trauma plates into his skin and relaxed enough for him to snake a hand under his seat. Razorface reached across his body with his left hand.

He stowed the sawed-off weapon between his seat and the door. “Got feed?”

“Yeah. She’s not dead yet. She got Emery, Razor. Looks like, anyway.”

“Tell her loading dock. Stand back.”

“On it.”

Razorface spun the armored Cadillac until Mitch smelled rubber smoking and pointed it toward the scrolling metal bay doors. Two were elevated, but the third opened out at ground level. The other two cars hopped the curb, not quite following Razor’s bootlegger reverse but hot on the tail nonetheless.

The big man leaned forward, eyes narrowing. “Brace.”

Mitch put his feet up on the dashboard after all.

The Cadillac skittered sideways, bullets spattering off its armored hide as Razorface wrenched the wheel left and then right. The rear wheels skipped, skidded, slung around, and bounced, but the front tires grabbed and hauled the vehicle forward.

Razorface leveled it nose down at that third, lowest door. Mitch closed his eyes.

The chromed cowcatcher on the front of the Caddy met the steel bay door, and the Cadillac won.

Mitch blinked as metal stopped tearing. The garage bay was floodlit, and he saw Bobbi at an erratic dead run, bullets glittering off the cement a half-step behind her. He reached back and slammed the rear door open, had Bobbi by the shoulders, and was dragging her inside the car when Razor smashed it into reverse and back out through the shattered door.

“Shot, Michael,” Bobbi snarled when they were clear.

“How bad?”

“Calf. I won’t bleed out.”

“Fuck,” Razor said a moment later, reaching for the dashboard phone. He punched a code, and listened to it ring. “Fuck,” he said a second time, coding again.

Mitch tasted blood when the answering machine picked up in Razorface’s woman’s voice. He held his breath as Razor snapped two short sentences—“Leesie, take the dog, get out of the house. Now, go.”—and closed the connect.

“Do we want to go there?”

Razorface just shook his head. “Call that doc of Maker’s,” he said, and Mitch did as he was told. He couldn’t stand to see the expression in the big man’s eyes.

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

Friday 15 September, 2062

First light

Elspeth laid a cream cheese bagel (fresh made by a computerized sidewalk vending machine) on her desk beside the cardboard cup of coffee. She opened her contact case and was still blinking the contents into place when a red telltale unscrolled across her vision. Encoded message waiting. Please unzip to holographic media.

Consciously smoothing her expression, she fumbled in the gold-accented stainless rack for a clean data slice and pressed it into the reader. What sort of message is big enough that it needs to be unzipped into a data slice? She had a breath-held idea of what — of who — it might be. Each individual beat of her heart constricted her throat as she waited for the copying process to finish. It was an effort not to glance around the room nervously. Instead, she unwrapped her bagel and lifted half of it to her mouth.

And bit down, with an effort, as her eyes fell on words printed on the inside of the wrapper where the nutritional label would normally be.

Elspeth: If I may be so bold as to call you that — once you have copied the data I have provided, please deliver them to J. C. with all due haste and discretion. You are watched, or I would have been in touch sooner.

Yours truly,

Dick

Elspeth chewed slowly, reaching out one-handed as she idly folded the wrapper shut over the remaining half of the bagel. She set the part she had taken a bite from down on the edge of her interface plate and took a sip of coffee, fumbling under her desk with the other hand until the copied data slice slipped into her hand. She set it on top of a small heap of similar slices, and bent down to slip the uneaten half of her bagel into her canvas tote bag, stroking the green-and-beige Unitek spiral on the side with amusement. She pulled a handkerchief out of the bag and used it to polish the smear of cream cheese off her interface, setting it down on top of the little pile of data slices.

She’d stow it in her bag later, along with the copied data.

In the meantime, she peeled the top and bottom of her bagel apart with shaking hands and regarded the thick smear of cream cheese without appetite.

So eager to get back to jail, Elspeth? They’ll hardly know you’ve been away.

With a sigh, she tossed the bagel at the trash can and picked up her coffee instead.

0930 hours, Friday 15 September, 2062

Allen-Shipman Research Facility

St. George Street

Toronto, Ontario

A message light blinks on my desk when I report for work on Friday. I flip it open and delete it halfway through the time stamp. Simon. Ah, qu’est que le fuck tici maintenant?

I don’t want to talk to Simon. I sent a request to transfer my medical records two days ago. I don’t know if they’ve arrived. Valens hasn’t mentioned it, so I assume they have.

I never want to talk to Simon again. I dig the little vial of pills that Valens gave me out of my pocket and turn it in the light. I haven’t seen about ordering new uniforms. I wonder if anybody — read Frederick —is going to kick up a fuss about my civvies; it hasn’t happened yet.

They could always court-martial me.

The bottle doesn’t even have a childproof cap. I thumb the lid off and tilt it, communing with the shiny yellow pills. Yesterday’s drug-assisted virtual flight of the Indefatigable, without observers this time, went much more smoothly. I managed to hold it together until I pasted the fucking thing into a convenient star.

I set the pill bottle down but don’t cap it. I’m still sitting at my shiny new desk and staring into thin air when Gabe knocks on the door and opens it, leaning in. “Busy?” He catches sight of the bottle. “I guess you are…”

“Gabe.” The top snaps back onto the pills; I sweep the vial into a desk drawer and lock it. “Stay.”

“VR again today?”

“No,” I answer, standing as he comes into the office. “Just thinking.” Not thinking about the limpid clarity of yesterday afternoon. Not thinking about the texture of his kiss like a hand sliding up my spine either. No, sir. “Come to lecture me about the pills?”

“No,” he said. “I want to talk to you about Leah.”

“What about her?”

“She’s won some kind of a scholarship in an online game. But there are problems.” His eyes are dark and weary. “She says — she showed me the paperwork — it provides for, among other things, the nanosurgery required for neural VR.”