SF in The City Anthology (27 page)

“What’s
he
going to do?” Charlisle murmured to Elegance.

Pulling a handful of marble sized orbs from his pocket, Taisei clicked them together and then quickly rolled them out of the lavatory. He handed each of his companions a compact gas mask and assured them they would want them.

“Is it a problem with the crapper?” they heard a harsh voice approaching them.

A thin but intense CA officer with steely grey eyes threw open the door to the lavatory only to be met with punches and kicks from the four people inside. Sending him into complete unconsciousness with the butt of his weapon, Taisei, with Ángel’s help, cast the officer down the latrine they had just exited.

With a nod from Mr. Ehrlichmann, the gangsters threw open the door to the restroom and emerged with their weapons drawn. The only sight that surprised them more than just one scientist in such a large laboratory was the project he worked on. All about the lab were tubes that contained vile creatures almost as ugly as the chimerical machine from the tunnels. Anthropomorphic in nature, these seemingly amphibious beings were all fast asleep, or in comas, in the dark green liquid that filled up their storage vessels. A mask was fitted to each creature’s face, with pipes connecting to external tanks. Presumably, they provided these beings with oxygen.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later!” the nose pinching scientist, who had a name tag that said “Quietus” on it, pushed an alarm button before pulling a revolver from his lab coat’s pocket.

“Drop the weapon, and we won’t hurt you!” Taisei leveled his rifle at the doctor.

“What I do is for the glory of mankind!” Dr. Quietus put the revolver in his mouth and blew his gray matter all over the tanks behind him.

“Well, that’s disappointing,” Charlisle threw his hands up in the air. “Who else can tell us what is going on here?”

“I believe I can help with that,” a pleasing voice rang in the minds of everyone in the company. “My name is Og Husher, and I am the head of the CA’s intelligence division. As you are all completely aware, you have trespassed on a secret base of ours – beastialists.”

“Do not use that word with us,” Ángel growled. “We know who the true beastialists in this world are, and it’s not a group of freedom fighters!”

“You came at a good time,” Mr. Husher continued. “The Club, a
nearly
mythological fraternity of The City’s thirteen most powerful men and women, has dropped by to inspect our hangar. To think you would give anything in the world to capture and expose the heads of Central Authority, yet here you are, fittingly dying with such a goal just out of your grasp. Only a fool invades a military base with four people.”

“Only a fool would suspect that this is the full extent of the rebellion,” Ángel clenched his fists. “Kill us here, this day, and dozens of our brothers and sisters who have awakened to the truth will take our place.”

“You’re dying for sure, Ehrlichmann, but your companions don’t have to die as well. Of the four of you, three grew up in ghettos and one lived a comfortable life as a wealthy business man.”

“That has nothing to do with what is going on here,” Taisei said angrily.

“Well you’ve followed everything the rich man amongst you has said,” Og thought to the group. “Two of you have criminal records outside of political crime. Why not become wealthy leaders yourselves? Not a single member of The Club has abstained from
foul play
for the sake of further uniting the world and making it a better place. You two grew up in an environment where rules were broken out of necessity, did you not? We can’t give you a position in The Club, since your bloodlines exclude you, but you can become one of the thousands of wealthy business professionals provided for by the bountiful generosity of Central Authority.”

“If that’s the case,” Charlisle crossed his arms, “then why didn’t you promise us such a comfy life before, instead of sending bounty hunters after us?”

“Never mind that,” Elegance said. “Charlisle, we already know that we can’t trust this louse! Why did we grow up suffering in the Gorse if the CA really made the world a better place? Why would they spy on us for no reason? What I want to know is what the madness in this lab portends.”

“I’ve found that revealing our strategies to those seemingly caught in a mousetrap can backfire,” Og’s voice began to trail off. “Goodbye, for good this time.”

A large door at the other end of the lab swished open, and dozens of CA soldiers poured into the room, their SERs raised for battle. Ángel and Taisei opened fire with their weapons, but the latter was felled by a half dozen particle beams within a few seconds.

“We need to get to that observation room!” Charlisle took Elegance’s hand in his and ran up the nearby steps to a glass chamber overlooking the entirety of the lab.

“I could use some backup,” Ángel thought in pain to the secondary team he had secretly told to follow the four person squad once they had made it that far.

More than twenty rebels started pouring out of the lavatory, only a couple at a time. Looking over his shoulder as he ran, Charlisle knew that the advantage still lied in the CA’s favor. They not only outnumbered the agitators, they also had them bottlenecked. Pulling elegance into the glass booth with him, the hacker found the button to lower the blast shields around their small room. He did it just in time too. SERs’ particle beams passed through glass easily.

“They’re getting slaughtered out there,” Elegance looked at the monitors receiving footage from the lab’s cameras. “Ángel is wounded and heading up the stairs.”

Charlisle opened the door to the control booth just long enough to bring their burned leader and another squad member, Toshiro Vernal, inside. While Mr. Vernal, an ex-police officer with combat skill, had escaped unharmed, Ángel’s wounds would be fatal. Besides missing an arm, several beams had penetrated his abdomen.

“Toshiro, I want you to carry on with the mission,” Ángel exhaled heavily. “Take these two with you and get to the hangar. I’ll hold of these guys as long as possible.”

“A wise hacker knows that the best way to beat a system is to turn its strengths against itself,” Charlisle spoke up, as he fiddled with the control room’s host of buttons. “If Elegance could give me a hand with this, I think that we could apply that philosophy to this current predicament.”

***

“You assured us protection you fool!” The Club’s chairman, Mimrod Dybbuk thought to Og angrily. “Please explain to me how these untrained lunatics break into our headquarters on Invasion Day.”

“Hey, you’re the ones who spend all your money on lavish banquets and induction ceremonies. Og stalked towards the base’s hangar furiously. “I’m the one who does all your dirty work for you.
I’m
the one who truly makes this world go around. You want to really improve The City? Get out and do it with your own hands, and if you can’t do that, move aside for someone with enough stones to suck it up and get it done!”

Og knew those cowards would take the private jet that brought them there and be gone before he ever stepped foot in the hangar. He half wished the rebels would catch up with them and put an end to their uselessness. Of course, just as annoying members of their families would step up to fulfill the bloodline’s mission. Pulling up an image broadcasting from the recorder contacts in Captain Drescher’s eyes, the head of intelligence could see how his troops were doing in the lab. Much to his chagrin, they were being torn apart – by the late Dr. Quietus’s test subjects.

“Drescher how is this happening?” Og thought to his assistant, just as he walked into the hangar in time to see The Club’s jet doing a vertical take-off through the trapdoor beneath the stadium’s field.

“As you’ll recall,” Drescher fired at an advancing “frog man” in a panic, “the doctor’s subjects have brains even simpler than an A.I.’s. Their bodies may be organic, but they’re really just drones. Those computer hackers must have…”

Og got a mental picture he cared to forget about. Drescher’s contacts stopped broadcasting video footage to the man’s brain. It was supposed to be the start of a new age for The City, and Central Authority’s finest hour was thwarted because a couple of upstarts turned their weapons against them.

“What good are the ships without their pilots?” Og shouted as he looked on the disc shaped VTOL’s in the hangar.

Suddenly the few soldiers that had accompanied Mr. Husher to this storage area were blown away from behind. Turning to face the assailants, Og could only chuckle a little, as he saw two criminals, an out of luck bicycle repairman and a dying business man approaching him.

“You’re all so pathetic,” he shook his head. “Go ahead. Kill me in cold blood. It won’t matter anymore than destroying you would end rebellion. My Dark Unit isn’t even here tonight. The Club is gone. True citizens like me will always work to improve the world, and fools like you will always oppose a well ordered society.” Og suddenly remembered that one of The Club’s prospective servants had brought a safe full of digital currency to lie at his superiors’ feet that evening, proving his worth as a trusted member of the CA. “Secure Mr. Buyobuyo’s VTOL,” he thought privately to the remaining soldiers in the hangar. If they intended to kill him that evening, than Og wasn’t about to leave with an even worse screw up on his record.

“I don’t intend to murder anyone,” Ángel’s vision started to blur, “but I want you to tell me what the invasion was all about. It’s obvious by the shape of the craft in this hangar that you wanted to stage a fake extraterrestrial attack. What isn’t discernible is
why
you would do such a thing.”

“You know,” Og laughed and moved his hand closer to the Illum 2300 strapped to his hip, “I felt that informing victims of the plans I had for them was the greatest torture possible, and it still looks that way. However, I’m not going to tell you what this all meant because I don’t even know myself. Truthfully, I never knew what it all was for, and I don’t care. The Club has promoted the idea of an alien invasion for some time, but they never even told me the purpose for faking such an unsurprising visitation.”

Og drew his pistol and fired an armor piercing round right through Ángel’s chest, and the rebel leader unloaded a full clip in his machine pistol on the abdomen of his enemy. Both men slumped and fell to the ground dead, ending the greatest rivalry The City had seen at that point. The remaining rebels stared on ambivalently.

“
I’ll take Ángel’s body in that small transport VTOL over there and return to headquarters, after I’ve given the hangar a makeover,” Toshiro Vernal spoke to the gangsters. “If the two of you still want to help us fight the CA, you’re more than welcome to do so. I imagine they won’t focus much effort on you with all the confusion that will hit them after tonight.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” Charlisle nodded at a civilian VTOL in the hangar’s corner. “I think we’ve had enough of the revolutionary lifestyle.”

“If you’re going to leave, I suggest doing so now,” Toshiro motioned at the rucksack he held in his hands.

“Message received and understood,” Elegance took Charlisle’s hand and ran for the civilian transport. “By the way,” she thought to Toshiro, “here’s the address for someone who can take you in if need be. Just don’t tell her that you’ve killed people.” She sent him a mental message with the address, as he started walking under the saucers, planting the “presents” he had kept in the bag.

Running up to the civilian transport, the gangsters were surprised to see such heavy security around the vehicle. While most of the remaining troopers were dealing with the frog men, the transport the youth intended to steal must have had some importance to it to warrant this kind of protection. Attacking from behind, the two made quick work of the security. While they felt proud of themselves for taking down those trained men and women, they didn’t realize that they had fought with the saucers’ technician staff, or nerds with guns as Og had called them.

Entering the vehicle and closing up the back hatch, Elegance ran to the pilot’s seat and determined which code she needed to beam to the hangar bay’s doors, while Charlisle looked over a metallic briefcase curiously. Hacking into its protective barrier, the youth unlocked
the baggage and peaked inside.

“Hey, there’s an ECU green box in here,” Charlisle called up to Elegance as she started to take off. “I wonder how many currency units they’ve got stored in here.” He inserted his ECU card with a “digital bump key” attached to bypass security measures, and his face went pale.

“Are you going to get up here?” Elegance asked as they started to ascend through the opening in the soccer field. “You’ll never get a view of your precious stadium like this ever again.”

The hacker plumped down in the seat next to her, staring at his ECU card with a shocked look on his face. He was further surprised as they exited the stadium to see a jet embedded in the stands around the field.

“You’re right,” he muttered. “I’ll never see the field looking like this
ever
again.”

“Sorry I wasn’t fully paying attention to you back there,” Elegance said. “I had to concentrate on flying. That is, unless you had a burning desire to wind up like the people in the crashed aircraft.”

“I transferred 200,000 ECUs onto my card from the green box,” Charlisle stared ahead, “and that’s only because that’s the maximum storage capacity for my card. There were 500,000,000,000 ECUs in the box.”