Nylon Angel (6 page)

The Slag, Plastique and Torley’s had distinct perimeter demarcations, which, if you lived in The Tert, you learned to recognise easily. A network of monorails had once linked all areas of the villa-tropolis back to the Trainway that still ran down the eastern boundary. But the structures had been remoulded and used to string up fragile hammock homes, or disassembled altogether.

Cramped living and lack of roads made for a crazy jumble of humanity. There were plenty of walkways - alleys big enough for scooters or ’peds or Pets - but you could get lost among them quicker than losing your virginity.

Tert people used compass implants to get around. Some had maps overlayed on to their retina. I couldn’t see the point in maps; once you knew the territories, you knew enough. The rest changed endlessly.

Every now and then you’d come across a precious parcel of space; usually the gardens that had once served a hundred or so villas as a community meeting place. Occasionally you’d also find the concrete guts of an old swimming pool, legacy of the days when Australia was still a country of backyards and mortgages. Mostly, now, the pools were built over with who-knew-what living underneath.

When Sto and I stopped at a demarcated entry point to The Slag, the toll had already doubled.

Topaz Mueno might be a vain lump of soft flesh but he wasn’t stupid. I pictured him rubbing his soft white hands with pleasure at the extra revenue an embargo would create, forcing traffic along The Tert’s eastern-most strip.

The toll keepers in The Slag weren’t like the jacked-up jerks that policed the Pomme de Tuyeau in Plastique. They tended to favour Topaz Mueno’s look: long-haired, soft-bellied, thick lips. It wasn’t a look to mess with. They could do things with knives that I only REM-ed about.

Their homogeneous look was a type of vanity. I’d read somewhere that humans were attracted to others that resembled themselves physically.

Know thyself!

In The Tert you had to
know
people. You had to see and smell trouble. I’ve got better than twenty-twenty vision and the best olfaugs bodyguarding can buy, but my intuition’s kept me alive.

Wrong! With Sto toe-to-heel at my back, I paid the Muenos’ inflated toll, hoping they wouldn’t look too closely at him; wishing I’d taken the time to make some superficial alterations to his appearance.

The keepers eyeballed him as he bent over to pick schrapnel from his foot.

‘Who’s the bunny?’ one of them asked.

‘Boyfriend.’

‘Where are your boyfriend’s shoes?’

Mostly everyone wore shoes in The Tert. I lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Caught him in bed with my mother. Thought I’d teach him.’

They looked suspiciously from Sto to me, and back again. Sto’s puny size against mine? I wouldn’t buy it either - but I’ve said it before, it takes all sorts.

I turned my back to the toll keepers as they tapped queries into their comm.

‘Get on the ’ped,’ I hissed between my teeth at Sto.

‘But—’

‘You want to make it out of here?’

He jerked his head up and down quickly.

‘Jump on the ’ped. When I say . . .
Now
!’

We leapt for the machine at the same time. Five gold stars each for not ending up in a tangled heap.

I jammed the accelerator to full throttle and blasted through the toll with Sto’s legs flailing out the back like streamers.

At top speed the ’ped only did twenty-five klicks. Hell, we might as well have got off and run! But Sto didn’t look like he could
walk
more than two hundred metres before his skinny legs and tender feet caved in on him.

I turned every corner I could, and then some more, before we hit a cul-de-sac.

‘W-what’s wrong? What did you do that for?’ he stuttered when we stopped.

If Dark grated on my finer feelings, then this guy gave me a dead-set migraine.

‘Look Sto,’ I said with patience I surely didn’t mean, ‘there’s an embargo on The Tert. Do you know what that means?’

‘Cops?’ he asked shakily.

‘Worse. Cops
and
the media. We’ve been totally cut off from the Outer. Do you know what it’s about?’

He swallowed as if he had a fist-sized marble stuck in his throat. ‘Me?’

I nodded. ‘They think you killed Razz Retribution. But you didn’t, right?’

‘R-right.’

‘No one kills a
One-World
newshound and gets away. The media are frigging royalty in this hemisphere. You’ve been set up to wear a murder rap by someone. Probably the Cabal.’

‘Who’re they?’

I didn’t even bother to reply because a noise above us triggered my body hair into a stiff salute.

Prier at twelve o’clock and descending - a media ’copter with military fruit but only a third of the size. Priers could land on a bald pate. They usually only carried one person - a journalist/pilot and a camera-mechanoid who doubled as a combat-model Interrogator.

Sto looked set to faint when I glanced back at him. If his skin got any paler, I’d be able to sell him for albino skin grafts. Shame about the freckles.

With Io Lang’s deal burning a hole through my ability to think, all I wanted to do was steal the information he wanted and nail Mondo’s arse. Stolowski, Dark, the embargo were all suddenly getting in the way of that.

Like an attack of conscience, a thrum started in my ear. My cochlea implant ringing again.

Guess who?

‘Come on. We got trouble.’ I dumped the ’ped behind the remnant of a retaining wall and hauled Sto towards the nearest doorway. The Prier would already have a trace on the ’ped, sold and relayed by the Mueno toll keepers.

Well, if the media wanted us, they’d have to get down and dirty.

I dragged Sto to the last door at the end of the pavement, where the buildings loomed like decrepit bodyguards. The villas only ran to four storeys, but add on makeshift microwave dishes and the wasp-like sleeping cocoons glued on to the roofs, and it made for a neck ache looking up. From above I imagined it looked like mutated beehive. Maybe one day I’d get a chance to see it from that angle.

I tore through a makeshift barricade and booted the door off its hinges so whoever lived there knew we were coming.

Inside a stench of something other than human had me fast-twitching my olfaugs to low sensitivity. From the gagging noises behind me I knew Sto was at it again. Some guys have just got weak stomachs.

I sympathised . . . for about a heartbeat.

Inside was empty apart from a few planks of discarded wood. Sto sagged on to a large piece, burnt at one end and fashioned roughly into a bench.

‘Don’t you know treated wood when you see it?’ I asked, neglecting to mention the mangy, zirconiumfanged feline curled up
underneath
the plank, licking its hair clean.

‘Treated?’

‘Soaked with pesticides. Burn it and sniff it and you’re on a one-way trip.’

He leapt up like I’d stung him.

The feline ignored us and started on its belly.

It was hardly the time but curiosity got the better of me. This guy was such a lamb. It didn’t add up.

‘Where are you really from, Sto? Born, I mean?’

His pale green eyes misted. His lip trembled and the words spilled out. ‘M-mid-country. I got press-ganged to the Dead Heart. We . . . I escaped. P-please don’t tell anyone . . .’

Now I can take most things. But crying isn’t one of them. Why dilute a good dose of emotion with tears is my attitude. When I feel bad, I get angry, but when runts like Sto cry in front of me, I get confused. Do I dump them where they stand? Or do I take care of them? I didn’t like the fact that Sto was leaning me toward
thou shalt cosset
.

Was that succour or sucker, Parrish?

He was an annoying little creep, but from what I’d heard, Dead Heart Mining Co-op made The Tert seem like a tropical paradise. Out there they used human labour because they were cheaper than maintenance on the mechanoids. Human underground work was s’posed to be illegal now, because the mines were old and dangerous, but no one really knew what happened outside Supercity limits.

Or cared.

Australia had always tended to be a coastal country. But since they stopped piping clean drinking water in, the Interior had fallen to aridity and lack of interest. It was a place of feral creatures, snakes and some pretty brutal mining cliques.

Sto’d skipped out on the co-op and they’d have their own people after him. But he was also media and cop bait, just because he hitched a ride on the wrong bike. Some people are born unlucky . . .

My cochlea implant vibrated again. I had to offload this call before my head turned into a tuning fork.

‘Listen, Sto. There’s a Prier about to land outside. We need to lose it and find a comm. Your buddy is giving me a headache tapping out my private number.’ I pointed to my ear.

He gave me a limp smile. And worse. Watery pale-green eyes full of trust.

Damn it. I hate trust.

A muffled boom outside sent a wall caving in, and one of the feline’s paws bouncing bloodily off my chest.

That was the first shot.

On the second, the blackened bench ignited like a bonfire.

Sto and I hit the internal stairs at a lively gallop, coughing out fumes.

The Prier’s pilot/journo could’ve easily blown the whole building to bits, so I figured the attack was just scaremongering. Otherwise Sto and I would be like the feline - body parts at all points of the compass.

I took that as a good sign. They wanted Sto alive. Probably so they could wring ratings on his trial.

Did I say trial? Make that execution. There’d be no trial for this skinny white boy. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t dumped him. I’m a sucker for long odds. That’s all I’d ever had.

There were stories around of how the media used to work as ‘observers’ of global events: no interference, objective views - an indispensable news source. Apparently they helped all of the lowlifes in the world get a fair deal.

Well these days the gloves were off.

Prier pilots had more firepower at their camcording, acrylic nail tips than the cops and the only people they had to answer to was the network credit assessor. If the media wanted Stolowski dead, then he was fried.

Judge, jury, executioner, photographer! ‘
Say cheese!
’

‘Say what?’ whispered Sto.

He crouched next to me, shaking, in the gutted bathroom of the fourth storey. His breathing came in short, chopped-off gasps.

‘Nothing,’ I mumbled. ‘Listen.’

We could hear the Prier’s propulsion unit whine in the distance as the pilot probed the building.

‘ATTENTION ALL HUMAN LIFE FORMS WITHIN HEARING. YOU HAVE THREE MINUTES TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF TO THE PRIER BEFORE AN INTERROGATOR IS RELEASED. RESISTANCE IS AGAINST MEDIA PROGRAMMING LAW.’

The message blared out, replaying in several dialects.

I’d always wondered when that three minutes began exactly. From the end of all the messages or the end of the message you happened to understand? When you worked with no margin for error, like I did, these things counted.

‘Parrish? What’s an “Interrogator”?’

I pointed to the manhole in the ceiling and started hoisting him.

‘I’ll make a deal with you, country boy. When we lose this little piece of aggravation, you and I are going to have a nice long educative chat. That way you might live to see next week. Now,
up
!’

This time he did what I told him. Maybe he wasn’t a total dead loss.

I swung up after him through the hatch, my miner’s light skittering along the ceiling like a disco ball, and found Sto baled up by the yowling family of the zircfanged feline. I didn’t fancy telling them Daddy wouldn’t be coming home tonight, so I shot through the ceiling to back the mother off and hurried Sto away along the main beam. I reckoned we had about ten seconds before the Prier’s pilot let the ’Terro loose.

In five, we’d crawled through a roof cut fashioned into a tunnel. It lead to the next villa set. In ten, the
maison feline
imploded.

So much for wanting Sto alive!

I counted us through twenty roof cuts, changing direction at random, before I dared to let Sto rest. Then I kept the miner’s light on and my back against an upright to straighten the cricks. Being nearly two metres tall didn’t exactly lend itself to attic crawling. And my hands were grazed and black with grime.

‘Do you think they’re still following?’ he ventured. He hadn’t complained but his feet were bleeding from snags and splinters.

‘Yes.’ I could have lied but what was the point? Fear could get you to do things, things that ordinarily you’d baulk at, and Sto wasn’t exactly Mr Risk.

Give the guy a break, Parrish
, I told myself.
He’d escaped from the Dead Heart.

The dendrons in my brain fired and forged a connection. No wonder leather-and-chains Dark had blushed at the sight of Mei’s dimply butt. He was a country boy as well!

With uncanny timing the vibration started up in my ear.

‘Sto?’

He stared at me, eyes red-rimmed. If he cried again, I swear this time I’d toe-tag him for anyone who wanted to hawk his bodyparts.

‘We’re going to go down now and find a comm. It’ll be more confusing for the ’Terro that way. Other humans to sort through. You never know, we might lose it altogether.’

It was hardly a convincing speech. But I suddenly had the urge to talk to Sto’s hulking friend. Right then, nothing in the world seemed more important.

‘
W
here have you been?’