Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2) (2 page)

Nathan reached up to his temple and pressed gently, and the bright sunlight and fresh scents and his wife and child and their home vanished instantly. Nathan blinked and sucked in another breath of air as he leaned back on the couch and stared vacantly across the lounge to where broad windows overlooked New Washington’s west quarter.

The perfect blue vault of the heavens was laced with speckles of distant cloud, and he could see through the windows their shadows beneath them on the surface of the ocean far below. The panoramic view above spanned only a fraction of Earth’s surface, in this case the Pacific Ocean as it passed by three hundred kilometres below. Nathan could see tiny island chains scattered amid the vast blue oceans, and across the view stretched immense girders that supported New Washington’s vast ray–shielding that kept warmth in and the radiation and vacuum of space out. As the surface of the Earth drifted by below it also rotated in a dizzying effect as New Washington spun in space, the motion producing the natural gravity felt by the population occupying the inside of the station’s disc–like ring.

Nathan sighed, rubbed angrily at a stray tear on his right cheek as he stood up and removed from his head a thin silver object that looked much like a hair band but for the slim blue light traversing its length. The
Lucidity Lens
was a device that allowed dreams to become reality, giving the wearer the ability to produce what were known as lucid dreams at will – a virtual reality indistinguishable from true reality because it was generated by the brain itself. But the device created a four hundred year old reality that only haunted Nathan, teased him and kept him trapped between two worlds, neither of which always felt entirely real.

Nathan tossed the device onto the couch and ran his hands through his hair as he glanced at the Optical Data stream in his right eye.
10.42am, Geo–stationary Orbital Time.
Despite his initial resistance, it had been required of him by the New Washington Police Department to install an ID chip, which came with the Optical Stream as standard.

The Implanted Designator, or ID for short, was fused into the bone of his skull while the optical data display was a biomechanical electrode resting against the inside of the lens of his eye. Updated every time he moved through one of the city’s myriad checkpoints, every human being was implanted at birth with one of the personalized chips. A liquid–cell quantum storage device, everything about Nathan and every other person was recorded and stored if needed for future use. The law stated that no ID chip was ever to be tampered with, but a vibrant market existed for those able to afford tinkering with their ID and evading the law.

Nathan closed his eyes briefly until his grief had passed and then he tightened his belt, buttoned his shirt and grabbed his badge and his weapon from a table alongside the couch. He was due for duty at 11am, the precinct just around the block from the small apartment he had been gifted by the city’s governor as a reward for his
“heroic efforts”
of just a few months before. The invasion of the Ayleean warrior ships and their colluding with the Director General, Franklyn Ceyron, had created a tremendous conflict into which Nathan had been hurled, despite being awoken so recently from a cryogenic slumber that had lasted four centuries. The world he had known had long ago succumbed to an alien virus and was long gone, as were five billion souls who perished before a cure was found using his own body’s preserved immune system.

Nathan walked across his apartment, grabbed a sip of stale coffee and then walked for the door. As was his unbreakable habit, he paused as the apartment door dematerialized before him before walking through and heading for the elevator. Hard–light, one of the strangest and most bizarre technologies that Nathan had encountered since he had awoken in the twenty fourth century, allowed for light to possess mass and thus had changed the very nature of many cities. Doors were opaque or transparent and elevated walkways were walled with invisible barriers meaning that nobody could fall from them. An unforeseen consequence of this freedom of visibility was that Nathan was frequently confronted with vertigo–inducing chasms between buildings to which he had not yet become accustomed. Most all folks in the city thought nothing of a six hundred foot drop just inches away from where they walked.

Nathan travelled down in the elevator that clung to the outside of his apartment block and then joined The Belt.

The New Washington Beltway, or simply The Belt, was a conveyor system that ringed New Washington with multiple routes and carried commuters and pedestrians along at a spritely pace without the need for the flying vehicles humming through the skies above. As The Belt carried Nathan away from the apartment block so he got a panoramic view of the sky above the city.

Built before the scientists who designed such cities had been able to grasp the fundamentals of the Higgs Boson’s control of mass and gravity, New Washington relied instead on good old–fashioned centrifugal motion: the orbiting platform spun at a rate sufficient to generate one–G of acceleration on the inside of its outer ring, The Belt, thus providing natural gravity for those living there. In the center of the station the docking and loading bays allowed visiting spacecraft to land without worrying about gravity – docking clamps ensured that they could unload passengers and goods safely before departing again, while pedestrians at The Hub, as the station’s center was known, wore boots designed to grip the surface which allowed them to walk fairly normally. Not dissimilar in appearance to the ancient sketches of science fiction writers from centuries before, New Washington’s ring–like form was now some ten kilometres across having been repeatedly expanded to accommodate a population that could no longer afford to live on the planetary surface. The spread of the housing projects at the four points of the station’s wheel, named the Four Corners, had become a stain of poverty on what had once been mankind’s flagship orbital living–space, back then ironically only available to those super–wealthy enough to afford it.

Nathan exited The Belt alongside the Fourth Precinct building, and heard a sharp whistle as a black and white police cruiser hummed across the street to his side, its gull–wing doors open for him to climb aboard.

‘You’re kidding me?’ Nathan sighed as he looked inside. ‘You’re driving again?’

‘You snooze you lose, buster!’

Nathan climbed in alongside traffic officer Betty “
Buzz
” Luther as the cruiser’s doors closed either side of them and Betty guided the vehicle up smoothly into the flow of aerial traffic cruising through the station’s skies.

‘You’re doing this to annoy me,’ Nathan complained.

‘I’m doing it to help you,’ Betty replied with a bright smile. ‘You can’t just become a detective overnight and not know your city. Lieutenant Foxx put you here for a reason, so suck it up and get to work.’

Betty was a gray–haired woman of perhaps fifty or so years, although it was tough for Nathan to tell for sure because people all looked
so young
. Betty may well have been seventy years old or more, and her sedate lack of ostentation at the cruiser’s controls suggested that she had been on the force for many decades, as did her reputation for somewhat reckless flying. Keen eyes scanned the traffic around them, and despite her experience Betty proudly wore the blues of the traffic police.

‘You could have made captain by now,’ Nathan pointed out as they levelled out amid the traffic streams headed for Phoenix Heights.

‘I could’ve made Director General by now,’ Betty replied calmly. ‘But I don’t much like offices.’

‘Nor me,’ Nathan replied, tugging at the uncomfortable collar of his uniform. ‘Don’t much like uniforms either.’

‘But you sure do like complaining,’ Betty observed. ‘What’s the name of that block over there?’

Betty nodded to an ugly high–rise jutting up out of the shadowy confines of Phoenix Heights a thousand feet below them.

‘Byron Tower,’ he replied.

‘And that one?’

‘Falls Incorporated,’ he replied, ‘headquarters of the Falls Mining Company.’

‘Very good,’ Betty chortled with a motherly pat on his forearm. ‘What’s our speed, altitude and time to the North Quarter?’

Nathan glanced at the instrument display that suddenly appeared before him, an optical projection that created a three dimensional map of the city around them now tagged with names for all buildings and even, if they required it, all citizens below.

‘Seventy knots, three hundred fifteen meters, four minutes and twelve seconds.’

‘Point the location out to me.’

Nathan looked up out of the cruiser’s clear canopy and pointed up toward the distant side of the station’s sweeping surface, where the tops of high–rises were visible catching the light of the sun through the station’s ray–shielding girders.

‘Excellent.’

Betty said nothing more as they cruised through a wispy bank of cloud, the sunlight streaming through the vapor in fingers of gold light tinged with rainbow hues as the moisture separated the sun’s spectrum. The city’s dehumidifiers had long since become overwhelmed by the volume of population now living inside New Washington, creating novel weather systems above the city that included rainfall literally created by moisture from citizen’s sweat and respiration. All of the orbital stations suffered from the same consequential ecosystem issues, despite the efforts of their respective governors in raising the capital needed to repair and improve the systems.

‘How long do you think Lieutenant Foxx is gonna keep me on traffic duty?’ Nathan asked.

‘As long as it takes.’

‘And how long is that?’

Betty sighed. ‘As long as I decide it takes.’

Nathan leaned back in his seat. He was about to ask another question when the cruiser’s communicators crackled.

‘Robbery in progress, Constitution and Fourth, ten–thirteen – repeat, ten–thirteen. All available units deploy immediately!’

Nathan instinctively hit the sirens and lights as Betty accelerated and pulled up above the traffic streams.

‘What’s a ten–thirteen, Nathan?’ she asked him, her tones clipped now.

Nathan needed no reminding, the code the same as when he had been a Denver police detective some four hundred years previously.

‘Shots fired,’ he replied as he checked his sidearm.

***

III

Betty guided the cruiser down through the streams of aerial traffic, their flashing hazard lights glowing as they descended through a thin layer of mist. Nathan glimpsed the lights flickering in the passing windows of high–rise buildings built long before the invention of hard–light, the glass old and stained with the accumulated grime of decades.

‘C’mon, get outta my damned way!’

Betty gestured for a slow vehicle to shift aside as she jerked the cruiser to the right and banked steeply over. Nathan grabbed the side rest for support as the cruiser shot through a narrow gap between the slow vehicle and the solid walls of a tower block as he recalled why Betty had gained the nickname “
Buzz
”. Windows flashed by, shocked faces leaping back as the cruiser rocketed past.

‘Officer down and in distress!’
barked a voice on the communicator.

‘Officers Luther and Ironside, ETA twenty seconds!’ Nathan replied as he drew his service pistol in preparation.

Alongside the city’s northern beltway was a series of high–rise projects that had long since been the blight of New Washington, a haven for the criminal low life packed inside North Four. The drug trade, which prospered despite the complexities of living in such a city, had produced a new underbelly that the police department had long fought to eradicate, but those down in the planet–side capital of New York City seemed to care little for their brethren in New Washington. With crime often concentrated around the Four Corners, and with illegal bandwidth jammers creating entire blocks where police communicators became ineffective, the projects were a dangerous location for any police officer to find themselves whether under fire or not.

‘Any idea on the number of shooters?’ Betty asked the despatcher.

‘Negative!’
came the tense reply.
‘Multiple witnesses though, a citizen called it in.’

‘No radio coverage,’ Nathan said as Betty descended to street level. ‘We’re on our own.’

‘Stay close,’ Betty advised as the cruiser settled down onto a street already filled with citizens scattering away from a disturbance ahead. ‘Keep line of sight, understood?’

‘You got it,’ Nathan said as the cruiser’s gull wings opened and he vaulted from the seat.

For the first time Betty showed her true age as Nathan sprinted away from the cruiser, dodging like a gazelle through the fleeing crowds as Betty struggled to keep pace behind him. Nathan heard a crackle of gunfire somewhere up ahead, coming from a tower block on the corner of Constitution. Screams echoed across the streets and he saw an individual sprint across the street at a speed no normal human could achieve.

‘They’re enhanced!’ he yelled over his shoulder to Betty as they ran.

A vibrant black–market trade in biomechanical surgery thrived within the Four Corners, providing performance enhancing prosthetics. Most were modified from those used by hospitals to replace limbs lost in accidents, where the patient’s own tissues were used to regrow the limbs: instead of replacing the natural limb, the black–market version would be enhanced by molecular titanium reinforcements, a nanofiber mesh woven into the fabric of human skin that gave increased durability and rendered the wearer virtually impervious to pain. Outlawed almost a century before except for those protected by the veil of “human rights” laws that enshrined the citizen’s right to self–enhancement if born deformed or deficient in any way, criminals made full use of the enhancements along with a multitude of other modifications.

A moment later Nathan spotted the cop lying in the street, one hand still grasping a pistol and the other clasped over a wound in his chest, wispy tendrils of blue smoke spiralling up from his smoldering uniform where the plasma round hit him.