Under Dark Sky Law (7 page)

Xero coughed and knew that she’d been
intubated at some point. Her throat was raw even over the drugs. “I
feel like I was stabbed, left to die, and then pumped full of
drugs,” she said.

The nurse nodded. “That summarizes the
situation,” she said. “You were treated for a fully penetrated stab
wound with associated blood loss and shock trauma. Surgery was
performed to explore damage to the abdominal cavity and to clean
and close the wound. Your gallbladder and several inches of
intestine were removed due to injury, but fortunately no other
major organs were catastrophically damaged. You received two
transfusions to replace lost blood volume. There was some trauma to
your liver and lung that will continue to cause you some
discomfort. IV pain medications will be administered to manage
pain. You suffered other minor bruises and contusions, but no
significant head trauma was detected.”

Xero whistled. “Well, that about sums it up.
Thanks for the update,” she said. “But the really important
question is when can I get out of here.”

The nurse finally looked at her with small
round brown eyes. “Now that your mental status has been assessed
you will likely be sedated for rapid healing protocols,” she
said.

Of course. They didn’t want any dirty pits
people stinking up their pretty hospital any longer than necessary.
She reached a hand up and felt the prickly sides of her shaved
head. They had taken the liberty of removing her wig, so anyone
walking by would immediately know she wasn’t supposed to be there.
Non-regulation haircuts were highly discouraged, especially in the
big metropolitan domes. Can’t go around encouraging people to
incite anarchy or anything like that, and everyone knows that
colored hair means an instant government takedown.

Shaking aside her animosity towards the
system, she took a moment to be grateful that she was still alive
and not feeling any pain for the moment.

“Your cancer status remains low,” she added,
her eyes returning to the tablet. “Signs point towards being a good
rapid healing candidate. Your recovery should be swift and with
minimal repercussions.”

At least she had that going for her. All
signs from her repeated dome inspections indicated that she would
stay clear of the big C for a good long while—it was worth their
while to keep investing in her as a runner that would be viable for
a long time.

She adjusted herself in the hospital bed and
winced when her abdomen moved too much. “Can you tell me what
became of Commander Raul Sanchez?” Xero asked.

“I’m sorry, I can’t divulge that
information,” the nurse said without lifting her gaze.

She had learned to be a decent politician,
and she usually did an okay job of holding her tongue, but in this
circumstance she was having a hard time keeping her natural
personality in check. Sanchez was a decent man to work with,
something that was especially hard to find in the world of the dome
squares. She would be pissed if retarded policies had led to his
death. And there would be consequences.

With great effort she kept a feisty jab to
herself. “Can you tell me where my appointed business partner is?”
she asked, knowing it was futile.

The nurse gave one curt head shake and raised
her eyes to meet Xero’s gaze. “I don’t have that information,” she
said, and Xero believed her.

“I see,” Xero replied, proud of herself for
showing restraint. She was getting better at this. The last time
she’d been drugged up and injured in front of dome assholes it had
not gone well. Sometimes there were not enough sedatives in the
world to deal with people.

“Get some rest,” she said. “You’ll be sedated
later this afternoon.”

Xero refrained from asking why she needed to
get some rest if they were just going to sedate her anyway, but
didn’t think the sarcasm would penetrate the robotic nurse’s
strictly maintained façade. An actual cyborg would have had more
warmth, but those had been outlawed long ago.

“Hey, bring a military commander in here—I
have important intelligence information I need to discuss,” she
said as the nurse attempted to leave, but her request was totally
ignored.

She sighed and threw up her hands. Figured.
Too married to policy to give a shit about a potentially lethal
threat. The dome citizens were so cushioned and sheltered from the
world outside their shiny plastic lives, most of them couldn’t even
conceive of what life was like on the outside. At some point they
deemed it too stressful to broadcast that kind of information, so
images of the flats or the pits were not illegal to be shown on
mainstream media. That’s not to say that people didn’t find ways to
get that kind of information. They trafficked all kinds of goods
across the black market, and recently she was seeing a spike in the
illegal information trade. Those types of runs always made her
happy—she got to make an easy buck and while fucking the dome
agenda at the same time. She almost would have been willing to
traffic that kind of goods without any sort of fee, but she had a
policy about giving away any services. There’s no such thing as a
free lunch, even if that lunch consisted of freedom and
vengeance.

The nurse closed the door, and a locking
mechanism whirred a moment later. At least they didn’t have her
physically restrained against the bed. Either she had finally
bought some karma with her business partners, or Sanchez’s buddies
had pulled some strings. She pulled back the thin white and blue
hatched hospital covers to check out the damage. She must have
crashed or rolled the vehicle again when she passed out because
there were extra cuts and bruises painting her arms and legs that
she didn’t remember getting in the first wave of the skirmish. Not
that she gave a fuck—her body was covered in a life’s worth of
scars from too many fights to count. The worrisome part was the
network of bandages tightly wrapping her from her collarbone down
to her waist. At least they were going to bump her up to a rapid
healing protocol. From the looks of it, she would have been out for
months trying to heal that shit naturally, and with Trina down for
the count they just couldn’t afford to let the territory go for
that long. Not with things as unstable as they had been.

That was the bigger question. What had become
of Argon? Did he know what had happened to her? Had he been
attacked too? As much of a hard time as she gave him, he really was
a competent fighter when his brain wasn’t stuck between his legs,
and she had confidence that he could hold his own in an attack. But
then again, Sanchez was one of the better fighters she’d ever
worked with, and they had been overtaken by skeleton’s despite
being paired with her. That was embarrassing to be sure—whether
they were working with imbeciles or not, one of them should have
kept a better handle on that situation, and they’d paid the price
for sure. She must have been a sight for the dome patrols to pick
up—half naked and covered in blood. At least her wig glue had held
fast prior to the hospital staff taking it off.

She would have killed for a communicator and
some privacy. She needed to figure out whether or not Argon was
still alive, and she needed to have a serious sit down with
Calavera. She wasn’t sure what was worse—Calavera losing control of
her goons, or just outright turning against her. From the sounds of
it, whoever was behind everything was stirring up trouble on a
bigger scale than the typical drug wars. Shit was going down, and
she wasn’t one to just sit on the sidelines and let things burn
around her. Either she was going to take a fire extinguisher and
put out the blaze, or she was throwing gas on the flames.

She wasn’t going to get the chance to get all
the answers she wanted right now, but there was a bright side. At
some point they’d changed their policies. For far too long they had
disseminated the patient information on a digital basis
only—meaning there was no chart left behind in the room for anyone
to look at if they didn’t have their own tablet to access it. This
had caused her great inconvenience on certain missions, and she
imagined it had also likely caused a good deal of medical
malpractice, as it relied on medical personnel actually taking the
time to ID their patients before looking up their chart
information. Looked like they had solved it by just leaving a
tablet behind in every patient’s room, which was just fine and
dandy for her.

Only thing that would have made it better
would have been to put it closer to her bedside. The tablet was
docked at the foot of the bed. Thinking of her skewered organs and
the wide swath of bandages across her abdomen, this wasn’t going to
be comfortable by any stretch of the imagination. Fuck it. She sat
up in bed and bit her tongue to stifle any excess screams from the
pain that cut through the drugs. If anyone was looking at the
security cameras they’d see her getting up to no good, but making
undue noise would just draw their attention sooner.

With one swift exhale, she jerked forward and
snagged the tablet from the end of the hospital bed. Perhaps she
was imagining it, but she could have sworn she felt and heard
something go
crunch
in her abdomen. Her head thumped against
the hard pillows, and she spent a minute breathing heavily through
the painful throb in her gut. There were some red spots leaking
through the pristine white of her bandages. Probably ripped some
stitches. Crap, she would get into trouble in for that later for
sure, but it’s not like it was anything that they couldn’t patch
up. They would have to deal with it. If they were more transparent
with their policies and information she wouldn’t have to go to such
extreme measures anyway.

Once she had the pain under control she set
to work on the tablet. She wasn’t a computers expert, but she’d
spent enough time out on the black market to have picked up a thing
or two from the less than scrupulous hackers out there. It took a
few minutes of noodling, but she broke out in a huge grin when the
mainframe opened to the tap of her fingertips. She was in. A quick
glance at her own chart confirmed that the nurse had been straight
with her about her diagnosis and what had happened in surgery. She
read a note about her wig being removed to check for head injuries,
which made sense. Truth be told, she was surprised they even
noticed it was a wig—the Grease Weasels took disguise seriously,
and they usually found some pretty quality costuming materials on
the black market. Perhaps it had actually been partially torn off
in the second crash. She made a mental note to look into doing some
more adhesives testing when she got back to the pits.

She pursed her lips and continued tapping
away at the screen until she came to the file that she was looking
for. Another smile spread across her face and she chuckled a
little. That bastard Sanchez had made it after all. They were a
hard pair to kill. The laser had tagged him in the chest,
collapsing his lung and blowing out his shoulder joint on the way
out. Thankfully, the shot had missed his heart, and the strike
itself was clean. One benefit to the laser guns was that they
didn’t leave behind the shrapnel of a conventional weapon. She’d
been hit with a real bullet or two in her time, and it wasn’t an
experience she wanted to relive.

With that question settled, she moved on to
her next agenda item. The other great thing about the tablet was
that it was connected to the internet. One of the most annoying
things about the pits was the lack of internet. Some of it was
being restored, but much of it was still patchy, slow and
unreliable. In some ways it had restored privacy that was
nonexistent in dome life, but it made many other things
inconvenient. Some of the pits that were in close proximity to
areas of former technology glory, like the areas north of San
Francisco and the Silicon Valley were actually bringing an
underground network of sorts back again. Xero was ambivalent about
the whole affair, and hadn’t done much with her home area yet.
There was a certain appeal to living off the grid.

With Sanchez accounted for, that just left
the matter of figuring out what became of Argon. There was no way
to try and contact him directly through the tablet that wouldn’t
lead to suspicion and traces on their communication that were
unacceptable even in dire circumstances. The sanctity of the Grease
Weasels was bigger than the safety of any one member, and it wasn’t
worth the risk. Even if Argon were in dire straights, with her
communication abilities severely hampered there wasn’t much she
could do. Hopefully if the shit had started to fly he would have
tried to make contact with home base back in the pits where they
might be able to activate some of their covert ops teams to come to
the rescue. She trusted Milo to make the best tactical decisions
for the circumstances.

She spent a few precious minutes combing
through the hospital records on the off-chance that someone fitting
Argon’s description or going by his real name or any of his various
aliases had been admitted to the facility. When she came up empty
handed, she moved on to the last productive thing she could do
while in possession of the tablet. Digging through a few layers of
search engine filters, she tapped into a few of the more well-known
taboo websites in search of any news regarding the riots in the
flats or any associated instability dome-side.

She had just located an article that
contained a photo of some of the carnage in the flats when the same
nurse marched back into the room.

Xero sighed and dropped the tablet on her
lap, lifting her hands in the air to show surrender in an attempt
to avoid full restraints or premature sedation. “Busted,” she said
with a mild attempt at sheepishness.

The nurse wasn’t buying it. She stomped her
way to the bed, the smooth porcelain veneer of her dome drone face
cracking into a sneer. Her eyes beady eyes were squinted into even
smaller bland brown pin points. “How dare you,” she said. “You just
violated not less than seventeen hospital policies.”