Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition (34 page)

I retreat to the spot where TJ’s lying and lift him in a fireman’s hold, slinging him over my shoulders.  Bullets have shattered his spine and nearly severed one leg.  Even the nanobots may not be able to put him back together.  Still, there’s no head wound, so we can reinstantiate him if I can get him to a vat in time, dump the soup of his consciousness – memories, aptitudes, affections, fears – into a new shell.  Every minute counts because he’s not breathing.  Lack of oxygen will kill off his brain if I don’t hurry, and at that point reinstantiation won’t work.  Or he could die by bleeding out, and you can’t revive the dead no matter how hard you try.

“Come on TJ,” I say to his unconscious form, my breathing labored as I begin to climb the stairs.  “I got you now, man.  We’re getting out of this hole.  Carmen will never forgive me if I screw this up.”

I’m talking to a near-corpse who in all likelihood can’t hear a thing I’m saying, but I do it anyway, just in case.  You never know.  I mention Carmen’s name on purpose to give him an incentive to push through the pain and keep living.  My entire body is swimming with sweat and TJ’s blood, making me feel slippery.  I force myself to move upward, hoping that there are more options above us than there are below.  As I turn the corner of a landing, his left arm comes fleetingly into my view.  The upper arm is out of focus:  his skill insignia tattoos.  On his lower arm are his battle insignia and those I can see clearly in that brief moment – the Detroit recon, the Second Washington Incursion, a whole row of them.  Not one of them killed him, not even the last one, the one we share but never discuss: Tijuana.  Nothing killed him before, but now the tattoos are being slowly covered by blood from one of his many wounds and I have to wonder if he’s come to the end, right here inL.A.

Because I’m carrying TJ’s weight, the bandits below us are catching up.  I can hear it in their footfalls:  with each moment the sounds become clearer, more defined, and definitely closer than before.  The echoes in the cement stairwell play tricks on my hearing, making it seem that there are more of them than there really are, but I consciously filter that out.  Nonetheless, there are more of them than us.  Almost certainly four.  Three if we’re lucky.

At the next landing I find a locked door.  I pause only long enough to try the handle, then continue upward to the level beyond that – there really seems to be no other choice.  After three more locked doors my thighs are beginning to shake with the effort of climbing at top speed while carrying one of my own men on my back.  The bandits below are only a floor or two behind us now.  It’s time for a change of plan, but I don’t like the only option I’ve got.

I stop at the next landing and look out the window.  To my left I can see a sheer drop down to the street, six stories below.  Even I can’t survive that, and TJ certainly won’t.  A little to the right is the roof of another building, one story down.  The drop would be survivable, but I have to wonder if I can get up enough momentum to reach it.  On this landing I’ll only have a few steps running start.  Plus I’m tired, it’s far, and TJ’s extra weight will pull us downward fast.  Still, there’s only one way to find out.  I use my right flechette launcher to take out the window, then continue firing around the edges of the frame to make sure there are no fragments left.

Backing up as far as I can, I brace my right foot against the wall behind me and use it to launch myself into the fastest run I can muster.  After only four paces I vault into the air, legs still pumping beneath me, pushing against nothing.  I can see the edge of the roof approaching, approaching.  Unfortunately it’s also rising – or rather, we’re sinking.

At moments like this I wish the Forces hadn’t taught us so much math and physics, because I can just about see our trajectory, as though it was projected onto the air in front of me, and it’s going to fall short.  I’m full of futile, wasted prayers, but we’re not going to make it and I know it.  I’m still praying when a small red dot appears in the upper left-hand corner of my vision.

“Home,” I command, and the world in front of me disappears.  My stomach lurches as my perspective shifts from a multi-story fall to lying flat on my back in the sim unit in my bedroom.  I take a breath, stretch, then reach for my kaikki in the right thigh pocket of my Forces-issue cargo pants.

“Gat here.”

“Gat?  It’s Rollie.  I disturb you?”

My heart is still pounding, the sharp tang of adrenaline still in my blood.  I force myself to sit up.

“No man, just a training simulation.”

“How were you making out?”

“I was getting killed and taking one of you guys with me.”

“Gee, that’s reassuring,” he cackles.  “
Gambatte!
”

Rollie is a droll guy.  In real life I haven’t lost a man yet and he knows it.  The sims are purposely set at impossibly high levels of difficulty to keep me learning, thinking, coming up with new ideas.

“So what’s up?”

“I thought you’d want to know that Ms. Prieto has been located and recovered, safe and well.”

“That’s great,” I say.

Ines Prieto has been missing for almost three weeks.  Ransom notes have been delivered to the family by email, threatening her with a gruesome death if they dared to contact the police.  They didn’t tell the L.A.P.D. a thing, they came to us instead.

“Is she back with her family?” I ask.

“Negative.  She’s in the lock-up.”

That brings me up short, but I figure out pretty quickly what’s coming.

“The boyfriend?”

I can almost see him nodding.

“Had her stashed away in a borrowed condo.  Belonged to a friend of his who’s out of the out of the country for the next few months.  Guess they figured they’d have everything wrapped up by then.  Better than pulling aSnowdon, I guess.”

A year and a half ago Brian Snowdon hit the news, a snotty little coke-head with a big inheritance waiting for him when his parents died.  Trouble was, he wasn’t sure they would ever get around to it, so he decided to hurry the process along.  He and his girlfriend, a teenager with sub-normal intelligence whose most obvious attributes were her large breasts and her willingness to do whatever anyone told her, had murdered his parents.  They tried to make it seem like a gang-related street killing, but being amateurs they messed up: got their tagging wrong, used the wrong caliber of weapon, even killed the couple on the wrong gang’s turf.  In any event, it seems that Ines and her beau, a rancher’s son namedPhoenix, decided to try a similar, if less bloodthirsty ruse:  fake your own kidnapping and collect a large ransom.  Someone should have told them that kidnapping’s a sucker’s game.  EvenSnowdonhad a better chance, dumb as he was.

“Thanks Rollie.  Anything else?”

“The Prietos were a little reluctant to pay us full price, given that Ines’ life was never really in danger.”

“Hell, we didn’t tell her to kidnap herself.”

“
Es la verdad
.  They eventually came around to seeing it our way.  I suggested that a second scandal was the last thing a wealthy, respectable family needed.  First their daughter pulls this dumb game and they fall for it, then they act like common deadbeats?  I tell them:  bad idea.  They got the point.  They’re not happy about it, but they’ll pay.”

“Good.  We laid out a lot of hours.”

“I know.  If anyone other than TJ was the lead on this one I’m sure they’d be looking for a little R&R, but you know how he is.  He lives for this stuff.”

I have a sudden memory of TJ in the stairwell, dead weight on my shoulder, then stow it away.

“Okay Rollie.  Thanks for the update.”

“No problem.  Go back to saving your ass.”

“I think I’ll run a new scenario.  That last one didn’t look like it was going to turn out too well.”

Rollie laughs again and signs off, leaving my small apartment seeming strangely quiet.  I get off the sim pad and head for the stereo, choose something light, and put it on.  
Grammatica
, by Sensorio.  I can’t get behind the group’s strange theories about music as a means of communication – with animals, with the cosmos, with each other – but their ethereal electronica is just what I need at the moment, like Satie updated by a few centuries.

I look out the window and see the usual crowds on Jung Jing Road – Chinese grandmas carrying thousand-pound bags of vegetables, young Asian hipsters with the latest haircuts and cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, gaggles of schoolgirls – but all sound is blocked by the window of my apartment and the images play out in front of me with Sensorio as their soundtrack.  The music makes the hustle of the street seem like a dance, giving an almost stately quality to what would otherwise be a frenetic mass of movement.  The apartment is cool and the carpet is soft beneath my bare feet.

It’s Sunday, and I should probably be out doing something social.  I can feel it pull at me:  friends, food, sex.  Carmen even offered to set me up with one of her friends this weekend, but I balked.  I’ve had to do too much paperwork the last few months, ever since the Max Prince case, spent too much running the business end of things.  I feel like I’m losing my edge, so I spent most of yesterday and today in sim, getting sharp again.

My company, Burroughs Oversight, was touted in a recent edition of the L.A. Times as an up-and-comer.  We were made to seem plucky, or feisty, or some crap like that – a mid-sized firm looking to make it big in the lucrative world of personal security.  The truth is that the Times doesn’t know the half of it.  My team is growing into one of the best around, one carefully chosen member at a time.  We are a bat out of hell and I intend to make sure we stay that way.

The larger firms are run by an aging gerontocracy of war veterans whose battles were fought so long ago that by now they’re more comfortable in suits than in uniform.  And they’re successful.  They’ve hit the phase in life where you want to sit back and enjoy the money you’ve made.  That’s perfectly okay, and I might do the same myself one day, but right now what it means is that I have an opportunity to sneak up behind them and cut their corporate throats, a chance I don’t intend to miss.  Selfish?  I don’t care.  I’ve died once, and I damned well don’t intend to do it again.  The only thing that can keep the reaper at bay is cash, lots and lots of cash, so in the interests of living for the next few hundred years at least, I intend to make as much money as possible.

Two-hundred years ago I didn’t think about things like that.  I was a twenty-year-old kid who didn’t understand that he wasn’t immortal.  My parents died, and I came close to joining them.  We were in a car accident, a common way to die back then.  It was obvious that no doctor could save my life, so I was stuck in cryo, as per my parents’ insurance contract, and there I stayed until about a decade ago.

In the meantime wars raged, empires rose and fell, and civilization damned near collapsed.  It did collapse in some places, the infamousGreyZones, while it was precariously preserved in the Enclaves, an array of newly formed nations, city-states, and autonomous territories.  I knew nothing about any of it, sleeping the dreamless sleep of the dead.  Then, with the advent of cheap and effective nanotechnology, a clause in the insurance contract kicked into gear and I was resurrected, along with thousands of others like me.  We awoke into a world that was stunningly similar to the one we’d known and terrifyingly changed at the same time.  Most of the others were older than me and had trouble adapting.  A lot of them ended up in hospitals, if they had the money, or on the street if they didn’t.  I had no job skills, no money, and no resume, but I was young.  I adapted.  I joined the California National Forces and got brought up to speed in a hurry.

The Forces dropped me into a new shell – the vat-grown body that I now occupy – and dumped the imperfect one into which I’d been born.  They let you see it afterward, the better to drive home the lesson:  that’s who you 
were
, you’re someone else now, a soldier, 
our 
soldier.  I remember looking down at that face with a mixture of regret and relief.  It looked innocent, but stupid too.  Pleasant, but weak.  That face was something I’d cherished, but now it was the past:  fading, dim, forgotten.

The Forces taught me how to kill, how to avoid getting myself killed, how to do covert ops, surveillance, counter-intelligence, and all kinds of other interesting things.  I hated it, but it served its purpose.  I was promoted, gained rank and insignia tattoos.  Still, I got out as soon as my contract was up.  I had blood on my hands and a head stuffed with nightmares.  The best I could say was that now at least I could earn a living. Los Angeleshas never been a safe place, so there was more than enough work for someone with my training.

I worked for a few years at Edie Lorenz’s agency, but in the end I found her moods too unpredictable, too volatile to put up with.  Besides, I had other plans, had saved some money.  I emptied my bank account, cashed in my Forces pension, and set up my own shop with the goal of making myself as rich as possible.  If you can pay the price, nanotechnology can not only resurrect you from the dead, it can keep you from ever dying.  Every time you get old you can just reinstantiate yourself into a new, young shell and start over.  I have no desire to die all over again.

The thought of business pulls me back to the present.  Moving from the window to the kitchen, I get myself a drink of water to re-hydrate.  These sim exercises may not happen in the real world, but they are a hell of a workout nonetheless.  I turn and face the sim pad again, think about my goal, my prize, and decide to go back into that other world, run a few more scenarios.  To hell with parties, friends, and sex.  If everything goes the way I’m planning I’ll have eternity to socialize.

I re-enter the sim with a jolt, right in the middle of my six-story fall, TJ still slung across my shoulders.  I hold onto him with one arm while the other reaches out automatically, desperately, for the edge of the building I’ve launched myself toward, but I can see that I’m not going to make it and my heart feels like lead in my chest.  I miss.  The sim’s resolution is so good that I can see the coarse grain of the brick wall that’s now shooting upward past me.  The ground is coming up damned fast.