SF in The City Anthology (25 page)

             
Elegance rushed past the large brute and jumped off the side of an abandoned fruit stand, using this momentum to deliver a powerful spinning kick to the smaller of his companions. As the bald man turned to Charlisle, he jumped reflexively when he saw the youth holding a shiny dagger in his right hand. However, a quick double take reminded him that it was merely a prop, its flawless brass paint giving it the appearance of a much older weapon. It was probably made of plastic.

             
Raising his can of chloroform and spraying it at the youth’s face, the big man missed his target as the youth spun into the mist, catching the brunt of it with the cloak on his back. He turned to look to his second accomplice and caught sight of Elegance, her hand’s covered with metallic steampunk gloves, giving her four armed opponent a hard time. By the time he sprayed the can’s second charge of chloroform, Charlisle was already on him.

             
Elegance delivered one final punch to her enemy’s swollen face, knocking one of his teeth out. “If you can get a bod mod for extra arms,” she pointed at his four slack limbs, “then you can get those teeth replaced.”

She stood up and looked over at Charlisle to see how he had handled his assailant. He sat on top of the big man on the ground, continuously hitting him with the prop dagger that came with his clothes. The balding fellow kept trying to get him with an ae
rosol can, but he was failing.

             
“Quit screwing around doofus,” Elegance gave a swift kick to the side of the fallen man’s skull, ushering him into a world of dreams.

             
“I had him on the ropes,” Charlisle muttered dejectedly, “but thanks anyway.”

             
Elegance smiled inwardly, pleased to see that Charlisle knew his place in their relationship well. She had never gotten what she imagined to be the truth of her companion’s business with the gray box in her neighborhood. While Elegance couldn’t prove it, she had a sneaking suspicion that the youth had feelings for her and had tried to spy on her telepathic calls. Even if he held such a creepy secret from her, she felt that she could make a responsible man out of him before all was said and done…maybe.

             
“There has to be a reason the streets are so empty,” Charlisle looked around the disheveled neighborhood disapprovingly.

As if in response, the sound of a police siren echoed down a nearby alleyway. A Gāo Motors ‘48 Infernal Lotus emerged from the alley, it’s orange and g
reen rotating lights flashing.

             
“Bounty hunters!” Elegance took Charlisle’s hand and ran down the nearest alleyway.

             
An Infernal Lotus had VTOL capabilities, but the look of a good old fashioned automobile. Rather than trying to make the sharp turn down the alleyway, the vehicle’s occupants fired up the jets under the vehicle and flew over the alley, the passenger hanging out her window with a Chthonious 5000 net launcher in hand.   

             
“Wait!” Charlisle yelled as he looked skyward. The bounty hunters’ vehicle was low enough that a rapid turn would inconvenience them. With her hand in his, the young hacker made an about face and ran to the street they had just exited. A small toy shop rested at the end of this avenue. Both of the gangsters barely escaped their pursuers’ nets, as they lobbed themselves through the store’s glass window.

             
“You could have just used the door,” the establishment’s livid owner muttered as she huddled in the corner.

             
“Nobody is outside at the moment except some bounty hunters,” Elegance glared at the middle aged woman. “How did everybody know to stay indoors?”

             
“They sent out a message through the Buraiyā’s emergency channel. I wish a tornado or a typhoon had hit instead. It would have been less destructive than you kids!”

             
Elegance picked up a solid, metallic knight from the collectibles shelf and bludgeoned the shop’s owner with it. As the now unconscious shopkeeper slumped to the floor, Charlisle stifled a laugh but also looked at his partner in confusion.

             
“What was that for?” he asked.

             
“Those bounty hunters will be in here in a minute, help me turn off all the lights in here.”

             
With a crash, the door to the shop burst from its hinges, a short man in a powered suit responsible for its dislocation. The suited bounty hunter entered behind an unbelievably overweight older woman, his only accomplice.

             
“You check the back room, and I’ll look behind the counter,” the heavy set women growled telepathically.

             
“Sure thing Rosie,” the armored hunter thought back.

             
Engaging his suit’s “stealth mode,” the bounty hunter waited but a moment for the micro shock absorption pads to inflate all over the bottom of his suit’s three toed feet, and for the metamaterial on his armor to shift until light bent all around it, making him invisible to the naked eye. He advanced into the back room, the high intensity laser on his exoskeleton prepared for combat. There was a dead or alive bounty on the two youth, and dead was sounding better all the time.

             
Better safe than sorry
, Rosie thought to herself as she turned the setting on the electrical truncheon in her hand from stun to kill. She could eliminate an assailant in just a few seconds with a slight touch from this weapon. Rosie knew better than to get overconfident at a time like this, but she couldn’t help but dwell on the possibilities this bounty would provide for her. For too long had she tolerated this business. Rather than splitting the sizable reward 50/50, she would give her partner, Byron, a proper send off, and then she could retire in Prefecture 100. Glowering over the counter with crimson cybernetic eyes, her expectations were dashed.

A thin cord emerged from the darkness and wrapped around the back of the female bounty hunter’s neck. With surreal strength, Elegance whipped the heavy woman over the counter and caught the arm that held the truncheon in a vice like grip with her legs. She repositioned the cord around her enemy’s neck and used it as a garrote. When she was sure that she had defeated her atta
cker, Elegance let the kendama
[42]
in her hands fall to the ground. “Old toy, new tricks,” she muttered.

             
Charlisle had barely managed to bury himself in the pile of used, stuffed toys in the back room. He could see from behind a large plush scorpion’s claw the outlines of a powered suit in stealth mode, as it entered the room noiselessly. An untrained eye would never have spotted the exoskeleton, but Charlisle had dealt with a police model in the Gorse once. The secret was to observe the machine from the feet up, until one had a clear picture of its shape.

Looking about the room in fear, the young hacker noticed one of the shelves had cans of aerosol string on it. Without putting much further thought into the matter, Charlisle leapt from his protective area and dove for the cans. Having taken an armful, he ran towards the outline’s right flank, a burning pain shooting across the side of his face indicating that h
e had narrowly dodged a laser.

Jumping onto the hulking exoskeleton’s back, the hacker popped the lids off of the aerosol cans, their bright colorations cutting through the gloom as they fell to the floor, and he sprayed thick trails of the sticky string all over his opponent’s armor. Byron swung about wildly, even activating the wrist torch on his suit in a desperate attempt to burn the boy off of his back – a truly foolish move, considering he would need p
roof of his victim’s identity.

Charlisle didn’t feel like being cooked that day, so he lowered himself farther down the left side of the suit’s backing, avoiding the flailing arms as well. He had beaten the police suit in his ghetto by crossing the red and black wires inside the exoskeleton’s control panel. Unfortunately, this powered suit was in stealth mode, so he couldn’t tell one wire from the next. Despite the rapid guesswork in this situation, he eventually cut enough cords that the s
uit emerged from stealth mode.

When Elegance had run into the back room, she had half expected to find Charlisle killed. The other half of her assumed he would be taken prisoner. It caught her off guard finding the pencil necked hacker standing over the shorted out remains of a
n eight foot tall exoskeleton.

“What?” Charlisle said in annoyance as the surprised Elegance entered the room. “I’m a gangster too; not a wuss!” He pulled the nearly unconscious
Byron out from under the suit.

“Did the CA hire you to catch us?” Elegance asked the bounty hunter, even though she clearly knew the answer.

“My leg’s broken,” Byron protested needlessly. “Yes, they hired us to take you in, dead or alive.”

“And I’m sure you don’t know why you were told to do so,” Charlisle sighed. “You really aren’t
worth anything as a hostage.”

“So what are you going to do about it?” a voice from the fro
nt of the shop called to them.

The two gangsters wheeled around to face the man who now approached them. He had fiery red hair and steely blue eyes, though the authenticity of these features was questionable. Despite their misgivings about him, the youth
could see that he was unarmed.

“My name is Ángel Ehrlichmann,” the man said with more gentility than most residents of the Gorse had ever heard from a living person’s lips. “What do you plan to do with him,” he repeated calm
ly.

“If he’s a friend of your’s, we could work out a deal
,” Charlisle crossed his arms.

“We’ll kill him if that’s not the case,” Elegance eyed their visitor suspiciously as she slid her hand into her pocket and gripped a recently purchased switchblade.
 

“He’s not a friend of mine,” Ángel said quickly, “but that doesn’t mean that I approve of avoidable killing. From what I can se
e, he is unarmed and injured.”

“And from what I’ve
experienced
, he’s dangerous,” Charlisle asserted.

“Why did you decide to visit this store in the first p
lace?” Elegance asked sternly.

“I’m the head of a group devoted to restructuring the government,” Ángel replied. “I’ve seen firsthand how tyrannical Central Authority has become. If you would have asked me a decade ago if world peace was possible because of the CA’s efforts, my response would have been positive. Now I’ve seen the dark side of the powers that be. A reliable source informed me of the trouble you kids were in, and I will offer the two of you protection if you join up with our group and expose the CA’s illegal surveillance activities to the world.”

Charlisle and Elegance shared a skeptical glance. Gorse gangsters were the masters of deceit – they had to be to get around provisions laid down by the Treaty of Oscuro Martes. A man claiming to expose the conspiracies of the ruling elite could just as well be one of their pawns. Elegance drew her knife from her pocket.

“
If you take this and kill the bounty hunter, we’ll consider joining up with you,” she said.

“I already told you that I didn’t feel right about murdering an unarmed man,” Ángel said coldly, as he watched the blade of the knife emerge with a swish. “We could use your help in stopping Central Authority! If they go down, you won’t have people chasing you anymore. It’s a mut
ually beneficial arrangement.”

“How do we know you’re not from the CA, and that’s why you don’t want to kill our
friend
here?” Elegance asked stoically.

“Believe me, I’ve seen more of Central Authority’s methods than you have, and if I was a CA agent, I would kill this bounty hunter to remove evidence and simultaneously gain your trust. The truth is I really am an agitator. If you don’t want to help me, not even for the benefits you would reap for yourselves, t
han our conversation is over.”

“Wait!” Charlisle and Elegance called out simultaneously as Ángel turned to leave. “Yes?”

“We can work out an arrangement of sorts with you,” Elegance grinned.

***

“Who in The City thought that a sewer was a good place for a meeting?” Charlisle coughed angrily.

The gangsters eyed the dark passages that surrounded them. After they had dropped off a gagged and bound Byron in front of a known CA safe house, the agitators had as much a flair for theatricality as the government itself, they had proceeded below the streets of Prefecture 68 and roamed through the gloom to a spot where the sewer forked. At this diverging region, they had met the most repulsive y
et fascinating of individuals.

Ambrose Tang was a middle aged man who could have blended in amongst any group of individuals. Nothing about him stood out, which ironically made him the true nonconformist. As Charlisle thought of his own green hair, it occurred to him for the first time just how desperately people around The City desired to seem different from their neighbors. They would conform on important issues, like what type of government should be in place or what economic philosophy had the most benefits for all classes, but when it came to one’s physical appearance, the desire for
uniqueness couldn’t be hidden.