Through her control rig, Rachel guided us quickly through the city centre, hugging the speed limit as often as she could. Corporate skyscrapers loomed on either side of the road like a great canyon of glass and concrete, taking the dwindling sunlight for itself and letting the dregs of the evening drift down to the chasms below, where they were subsumed by the light of halogen bulbs and the scrolling neon of holographic advertisements.
Some of the buildings were great edifices that could have been hewn from stone; slab-sided monoliths with small windows and hostile architecture. Those were the most modern buildings, built to order by multinational megacorps and designed to ward off the outside world, insulating their employees in a wholly corporate, wholly inward world solely concerned with the pursuit of their own profits.
The smaller companies – smaller being a relative term – tended to rent floors in towering skyscrapers of glass-clad steel and minimal concrete. It was a somewhat older style of architecture, but no less hostile. The employees within could look out of the windows into the city that drove their profits – assuming the view wasn’t shut away beyond cubicle walls – but for the people outside, those same windows became a great mirror that reflected the sky, or the buildings opposite. You could look out, but you couldn’t look in.
One of the smaller glass towers had the blue and grey logo of the Dockworkers Association over its revolving doors, and I felt a pang of grief in my chest as I caught sight of it. I remembered their old offices in a grand red-brick building that backed onto the harbour itself, as close as possible to their workers and infrastructure. It had been as homely as a corporate office could be, and entirely local in its decoration. Their new office was no different from any of the other buildings in the city centre, an uncomfortable reminder of what had happened to the company.
It was Saturday, but enough companies kept a six day workweek that we still found ourselves caught up in a diminished commuter rush, with luxury cars jostling for space with corporate-chartered buses as they returned the employees whose transient presence temporarily populated this naturally lifeless part of the city. Overhead, shoals of drones mingled below helicopters and the luxury vector-thrust aircraft of the super-rich. The shoals parted automatically as a twin-rotor Ares Dragon sped between the skyscrapers, its black silhouette trimmed with yellow livery and its IFF blaring out the signals of a Firewatch squad; one of Knight Errant’s high-threat response teams.
The matrix here hummed with activity, all of it tightly condensed behind end-to-end encryptions and private hosts as each corp drew in information and converted it into outgoing orders. It was almost disorientating to look at; the sight had always been near-blinding even when viewed from a distance and wholly immersed in the matrix. Up close, the juxtaposition of digital and physical reality was almost overwhelming. A few months ago, it might have been enough to slow me down.
Brockton Bay was the only city I had ever known, but there had always been an unspoken understanding among its inhabitants that it was actually two cities who begrudgingly shared the same name. Captain’s Hill was a geographical wall that squeezed the city against the coast, creating a natural barrier between North and South.
My home was a port city, dominated by a constant outward flow of containers from truck and train to the ceaseless tide of Neopanamax and Ultra Large Container Vessels. Beyond the docks, its many industries were either small scale local operations for distribution within the UCAS or solely export-focused businesses whose factories had been located in the city to minimise the distance between them and the ocean.
But once you passed the bottleneck you entered another city. It was much less rooted in geography, spreading out from the same great grid of skyscrapers that could be found at the heart of almost all cities on the New England coastline; the oldest and richest cities in the nation, which meant little to most of their inhabitants.
What little industry it had was cleaner, more refined. Medhall’s high technology pharmaceutical plants occupied a swathe of land in the east of the city, surrounded by other semi-automated factories that employed chemistry and engineering graduates to troubleshoot the array of robotic waldos and precision-engineered machine tools that made up their production line. An underground freight line brought components from the docks to that district. It was the only real North-South trade in the city.
To the north of the Downtown grid was a luxurious district of towers, rooftop parks, self-powered arcologies and condominiums that gradually descended in tiers from the skyscrapers to the coast, with each building fighting for the elusive sea view that would quadruple the value of their penthouse apartments. Down on the street, the shops were all either upmarket franchises or upmarket franchises adopting the aesthetic of artisan independents.
It was quiet in a way that I hadn’t been expecting; everything seemed a little muted, in both meatspace and the matrix. There were fewer people out and about, as you’d expect from the lower population density that accompanied wealth, but it was also as if every part of their world was more subdued, perhaps more tasteful. Back home, every shop window was plastered with adverts for this or that product, usually with an accompanying discount that seemed to remain the same all year round.
Here, though, such peacock-like enticements might have the opposite effect. Nowhere wanted to be seen as trashy, which meant the signs were all in a neat typeface no taller than a foot and the advertising was minimal bordering on non-existent; limited to billboards jutting out of the street or bolted to the sides of the buildings, whose metal frames created a clear barrier between the advert and the world that simply didn’t exist in most parts of the city.
The streets were so clean they almost felt unreal, like the whole neighbourhood was just a concept demo mocked-up for investors. We passed more Knight Errant officers than I’d usually see in a whole month in the north, dressed in crisp uniforms rather than the all-concealing taksuits I was used to and wandering down the sidewalk as if they had all the time in the world.
Kayden lived somewhere in this neighbourhood, in a penthouse condo with a coastal view. Max owned the place and Medhall owned the building; I knew lot of the condo towers we drove past were under the same sort of arrangement. Even if there was no visible sign from the outside, I could tell from their matrix networks which buildings were wholly owned by megacorps who then leased the units within to their employees, providing them with subsidised housing in a fancy neighbourhood at the cost of making it even more inconvenient for them to ever leave the company.
The Raleigh building jutted out of the surrounding blocks like a knife, so distinctive among its neighbours that I was sure its construction had been taken as a declaration of war by the owners of every building behind it. Its sides were glass cut by diagonal ribs formed from great sheets of bronze metal, evoking the wooden boards of the ship it was named for. At least, according to the building’s own website. To my eyes, the bright windows cut by dark metal made it look like a glowing ribcage seventy-six stories tall.
Kayden herself had already left for the party with Aster in tow, and I’d been tracking the movements of Max and Theo as well. All the living members of the Anders family were currently concentrated in one fancy party, but Regent had judged that it would be best for us to arrive a little late, so that we could blend in with the less organised arrivals.
The Republica Palace had its own entrance on ground floor, separate from the boutique mall that occupied the first few floors and jutting out a little into the road like an art deco tail on the ribs. The décor was dominated by blue and gold, and looming over the two double doors was a fifteen foot tall art deco statue of a musclebound Adonis of a man with two great wings three times his height raised vertically in challenge to the sky.
Another vehicle was pulling away as we pulled in; a stretch limo that had disgorged its cargo of six tuxedo-clad teenagers in an already drunken mess of boisterous shouts and back-slaps, their progress to the lobby tracked by an MCT-Nissan Roto-drone that was hovering a hundred metres overhead, broadcasting a constantly-adjusted flight path to the city’s low altitude GridLink and the van full of guards that was lingering on the other side of the street.
The van disappeared around the side of the building, but not before I saw a brief burst of comm traffic pass between them and the building’s Host. They were headed to the underground parking lot, and they’d just handed jurisdiction of their clients over to the building’s security. It was a very smooth transfer, but that was just because both the guest’s guards and the building’s security worked for Petrovski Security, which meant there weren’t any concerns over the clients leaving the company’s protection.
We didn’t have that connection, and I didn’t want it. It would be too hard to spoof. Instead, as Bitch remotely parked us below the looming statue, I put the finishing touches on the RFID tags marking myself, Brian and the car as the property of Tyr Inc, a paramilitary security company owned by Maersk. The choice was a strategic one; Maersk had a substantial presence in Brockton Bay, but because it was one of the city’s more diverse employers I was fairly confident we wouldn’t run into anyone from the company here.
Grue and I left the car first, while our honoured guests and one invisible ninja waited for me to open the door for them. I took the chance to blatantly scan my eyes over the front of the building, taking in the CCTV cameras, grey-clad security guards and – hidden from view – the turret that would deploy from the base of the statue to turn the awning below into a kill field.
Regent stepped out of the car beside me, then turned to offer his hand to Tattletale in a gesture that was the picture of grace, in that it was like a still image devoid of any life. She accepted his proffered hand with the genuine smile of a truly skilled actress, wrapping a hand around Regent’s waist as soon as she was standing, before the pair of them strode towards the doors with Grue and I acting as their shadows.
The guards eyed me with professional suspicion, their cybereyes caressing my persona as they scanned my body for electronics, finding my submachine gun, cybernetic arm and entirely cosmetic comms gear. Nothing out of the ordinary for a high-end bodyguard.
They scanned Regent and Tattletale as well, but neither were carrying any weapons, and the guards didn’t bother trying to stop them. The invites to the party had been issued electronically, which meant I’d been able to tweak and clone Kayden’s to create a valid link. It had been pretty trivial; the software already had a generous plus one system, I just had to tweak it to show we’d been invited by somebody other than our mark.
We were let in without issue, passing through the doors and into a comparatively small lobby with a polished floor of black marble, golden metalwork creeping up the walls and a single elevator at the far end of the room. Regent led Tattletale by the arm towards the lift, while I followed Grue’s lead as he peeled off towards a desk manned by a wiry-looking Petrovski guard with a sergeant’s chevrons on his epaulettes.
“Two to hand over,” Grue reported in a bored but professional tone. “Alec Clermont and… Lara Wilkinson, isn’t it?”
I nodded at Grue’s bit of improv, then broadcast the two fake UCAS SINs to the desk sergeant’s terminal. I’d bought them from Labyrinth; I wasn’t confident I could fake them myself. Not without a deep dive into government systems, which I wasn’t going to risk without a better reason than saving a few of Calvert’s nuyen.
“They’re in our system,” the sergeant reported, sending me the digital equivalent of a signed custody form. “Petrovski Security accepts no liability for your client’s own misadventures, but will protect them in accordance with the terms of our contract with the Republica Hotel. Do you accept this transfer of custody?”
He’d started recording, looking for verbal consent.
“Overkonstabel Madison Chase, Tyr Incorporated serial number two-five-seven-four-four, transfer of custody acknowledged.”
“Good. Valet will take you and your car down to the parking lot with the other bodyguards. I think someone from the hotel has brought down spare food and a coffee machine.”
“Appreciate it,” I said, magnanimously, as Grue and I made our way back out into the cold.
The valet could have walked right out of an old movie, with her red uniform and funny little hat, but instead of actually getting in the car she reached out with a control rig and requested permission to take control. There was absolutely no point in keeping her out front, but I figured the hotel’s owners felt the place’s décor simply wouldn’t be complete without some girl in a stupid outfit shivering outside the door.
She piloted us around the block to the parking lot’s entrance, then down through three floors of luxury vehicles to the fourth sublevel, where a section of car park had been sectioned off from the rest by holographic No Entry signs. The vehicles within were clustered around a staff only doorway like some kind modern-day wagon fort, while every car, van, four by four and outrider escort looked like a catalogue photoshoot for the kind of magazines that were the prized possessions of teenage boys the world over.
While my organic eyes watched the valet carefully backing us into a space, half of my attention remained on the feed from the contact lenses that Alec and Lisa were both wearing, linked to their commlinks and therefore to my mind.
They’d just stepped out of the elevator into the real lobby of the hotel, a grand hall with fluted columns running down its length. There was a real reception desk at the far end, staffed by two women wearing professional smiles and crisp blue uniforms trimmed with bronze, while beyond the columns were staircases and wooden double doors leading off to the hotel’s ‘ground’ floor amenities, with signs guiding guests to at least three restaurants, five bars, two smoking rooms, a swimming pool, gym, library, ballroom – and those were just the ones I’d caught through the limited perspective of my AR-linked contact lenses.
Extra tables had been set up by the hotel staff, laden with glasses of various drinks and manned by smiling waiters in crisp white shirts, but it was clear this wasn’t the main event. There were guests in the hall – all of the men in tuxedos and all of the women in dresses – but they were pretty thin on the ground and most of them looked like they’d just arrived.
“They’re in,” I said to Grue as I brought my attention down about sixty floors to the parking lot, where it looked like the various security details were trying to hold a small guerilla party of their own.
Across the way from us, four guys were playing cards using the hood of an upmarket sedan as a table, while beside them a human in a tight-fitting tactical jumpsuit was showing off her armed escort motorbike to an elven woman in a bodyguard’s suit, in what even I could see was a shameless attempt at flirting.
“Any word from Aisha?” Grue asked.
“Nothing yet, but that’s expected. Imp’s running dark right now and it’ll take her time to get there.”
Grue shifted back in his seat with the sound of creaking syn-leather, his hand idly tapping out a rhythm on the door.
“You try and keep an eye on someone and she learns how to turn invisible…”
I chuckled, as Grue flashed me a smile. It wasn’t like before, when he’d clearly been dismayed at Imp’s chosen profession. Now he was comfortable enough with the idea that he could make jokes about it. It was a good sign.
“She’s doing okay,” I remarked. “Anyone with that attitude has to be, right? I feel like I’d collapse from exhaustion if I tried acting like her for a day.”
“She’s kept it up for eighteen years,” Grue remarked, with a fond smile on his face.
“Guess that explains why you’re so straight-edge,” I joke back. “Some kind of karmic balance.”
“You’re one to talk,” he replied, his closed fist tapping my shoulder. “You act like a shy bookworm, but when you’re on the job it’s like you’re a force of nature. It feels like every time we go out you end up crying blood because you’ve burned out your brain doing something insane in the matrix.”
You don’t know the half of it, I thought. I hadn’t told anyone about the entity yet. Lisa would understand, but I think Brian would just be worried.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Grue continued, obviously reading something into my silence that wasn’t there, “it’s impressive, even if I don’t really understand what you’re doing when you go under.”
“It’s mostly playing for ownership. Making software think you have permission to access and modify it. Then once you’re in, you can… Holy shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Grue asked, already reaching for his gun.
My attention had snapped back to the camera feed. Regent and Tattletale had made their way to the hotel’s ballroom, where the party was in full swing. Instead of answering Grue, I used the car’s one-way windshield to display the full spectacle. I doubted anything I could say would do justice to the sight.
Like the rest of the building, the ballroom was an art deco temple, with golden metal pillars rising up walls of black stone that had been polished to a mirror sheen. Angular chandeliers ran down its length, casting shifting fractal light across a scene of religious worship; a congregation of the mighty gathered in praise to that briefest age of American history, when the great and the good renounced inhibition and prohibition alike as they indulged in magnificent excess, blind to the looming depression developing beneath their feet.
The room was a riot of light and sound, of shimmering dresses and slick suits. It was the clink of glasses, the roar of laughter, the giddy screams all mingling with the clamouring noise of a full Powerjazz orchestra positioned in a half-hidden balcony, their instruments – physical and synthetic – carried throughout the room by a near-deafening speaker system.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Gymnasts swung between the chandeliers; tall, lithe women in glittering metallic skin-dye and leotards so close in hue that it was hard to tell where golden fabric met golden flesh. Waiters and waitresses circulated through the party holding trays of drinks and canapes, their crisp pants, skirts and shirts in the hotel’s blue and gold colour scheme. There were other staff too in formal white uniforms I didn’t recognise, standing at the edges of the ballroom next to open attaché cases that had been placed on chest high tables. Most of the staff were human, but there were a few elves among them.
“I was expecting…” Grue’s voice trailed off. “I don’t know, ballroom dancing? Long white dresses, sipping lemonade on the porch? Gone With the Wind shit.”
“You’re a decade out; this is a temple to Gatsby. Society’s built around consumerism and excess, and the people up there are the ones at the top of the pyramid. So when they celebrate, they’re celebrating being able to get whatever they want whenever they want it. We’re looking at the American dream.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be into politics,” Grue observed, leaning back into his seat as his eyes flicked between me and the spectacle.
“I’ve never voted if that’s what you mean, but mom was very active. Used to take me to a lot of rallies when I was a kid.”
The silence crept back, as we watched in a mix of amazement and something close to nausea while Regent and Tattletale began to circulate. Regent snatched a pair of champagne glasses from a passing server without so much as a word of acknowledgement, then handed the glass to his ‘escort’ with the bare minimum of courtesies. An old man in a tuxedo staggered passed them, already three sheets to the wind as he nakedly leered at Tattletale before giving Regent a knowing wink and a slap on the back.
Tattletale took it in her stride. She was following the plan; panning her gaze over the room with slow eye movements that allowed me to capture snapshots of faces, cross-referencing them with all the archived news footage I could get my hands on. These people hadn’t had privacy from the moment they were born, but I doubted it bothered them too much.
What do the watching proles matter when you’re used to servants hovering in the corner of every room?
Eventually, I found what I was looking for. A flash of brown hair over an attractive yet somehow mousey face. I tagged Kayden Anders on both of their contacts, a simple mental algorithm outlining her with a white halo each time the unique pattern of her face appeared on the screen. Idly I did the same for a few other targets of interest related to the Gilberts – in case the hosts were more on top of the guest list than appearances would suggest – and the other Anders.
“What would you do,” Grue began, apropos of nothing, “if you had their kind of cash. Say you rescue Hestaby’s egg and walk away with a tenth of her hoard.”
“I thought people said ‘never deal with a dragon?’”
“Sure people say it, but would you tell a dragon no if they asked?”
“Point.” I frowned, thinking it over. “I honestly don’t know. I don’t think this is about the money for me anymore.”
“Then what?” He sounded taken aback.
“It’s about taking control of my life. Give me the famous ‘one last job’ payout and I might try and set myself up like Faultline. Really own the whole ‘Spider’ thing and stretch my web as far as I can reach.”
“You really are relentless,” he remarked, with a warm smile.
“You’re really after a quiet retirement?” I asked. Grue didn’t answer for a moment; he seemed to be figuring out how to put it.
“I’m good at what I do, but it’s always been ‘what I do.’ Sure I wanted to become a Shadowrunner like half the kids my age, but I picked up a gun because I was looking at a short lifespan and a handful of dead end jobs for dead end pay, with twenty other guys fighting for each. Gang work was fast and dangerous and I learned that the hard way, but it got my foot in the door of merc work, which was about as dangerous but paid more.”
“So what’s your exit plan?”
“Property. I figure if I can keep at this for at least five more years – maybe ten – then I ought to be able to buy some failing business I can use to launder all my earnings back into legitimate currency. Then, so long as I don’t spend money like those assholes,” – he nodded to the screen – “I should have enough for me and Aisha to live comfortably.”
It was an inherently sensible plan; the sort of thing I’d expect from Brian, even if it sounded far too passive for my taste – and much too passive for Aisha’s. But then, he’d always been the voice of reason in our team. It wasn’t his fault we lived in an unreasonable world.
An incoming signal drew my attention away from this unexpectedly philosophical conversation. Imp had come back online.
“Imp,” I began, speaking the words aloud for Grue’s benefit. “What’s your status?”
“Chill, Spider, I’m here.”
I reached out through my faint connection to her suit, switching on her own helmet camera and taking stock of a cramped and empty security office with a desktop terminal beneath a bank of monitors, with a datajack adapter plugged into it for the more technologically inclined. Surprisingly, the terminal was unlocked and each of the monitors was cycling through different CCTV footage.
“They just left it open?”
“Nope. You’re not the only one who can hack,” Aisha said, smugly, as she held up a post-it note with a string of twelve letters and numbers written on it in pen.
“Amateurs,” I scoffed.
“Not to defend the rent-a-cops,” Aisha countered, “but I am on the fifty-eighth floor, and I had to crawl on the ceiling over like three different pressure sensors to get to this office. Anywhere, where do you want this thing?”
She’d taken a commlink out of one of her belt pouches to recover the same stripped-down commlink I’d given her for our last job.
“In the datajack next to the keyboard.”
A moment later I could feel the firewalls of the hotel’s host through my connection to the commlink. Bypassing the firewall took only a minute of careful work; it was basic, especially when compared to the Renraku programmer I’d hacked, but that was because the terminal didn’t actually have many permissions attached to it. It let me see the various monitoring systems around the hotel, from the CCTV to the pressure sensors Imp had climbed over, but the data was read-only.
I could push further in, spinning sprites to twist the terminal’s permissions until I was able to access the rest of the host, but I didn’t need to. The alert system I could access already had everything I needed for the time being, most importantly a list of the occupants of each room.
“Looks like Aster is in room twelve, floor sixty-eight. Occupancy info lists one juvenile client and five attached staff. One of them will be the nanny, the others guards.”
I modified the building plan I’d already loaded into Imp’s suit, marking out the room and a few possible routes to it.
“Back of the building,” she remarked – maybe to herself. “Good. Always liked the look of downtown more than the ocean. It’s more interesting.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree,” I countered, but Aisha had already dropped off the grid. She’d left the commlink behind, probably hidden behind a monitor or dangling by the cable behind the desk, which meant we were on the clock before someone stumbled across it.
I checked through the monitoring data, finding the RFID checks linked to each Staff Only door. The doors were labelled and locked, opening only when they detected the correct signal from a staff ID badge. To our benefit, the signal wasn’t individual to each staff member – a dangerous oversight, but no system is perfect. We could try and track down some staff, lock them in a closet and steal their badges, but that would be messy.
Instead, I captured one of the incoming signals and teased a strand of resonance from the ether, twisting it like a violin string until the tunes matched. It was deceptively fiddly work, and the sort of thing that would probably be impossible within the binary limit of conventional code, but the resonance was uniquely suited to mimicking the matrix. I doubted it’d work on any active monitoring systems in more secure facilities, but I hoped it would be good enough for a passive RFID check.
Grue had been watching me since Imp’s call came through, waiting for confirmation. When I gave him a nod, we opened the car doors and stepped out into the garage, noting that a few more security vehicles had arrived after us. It had become a true party in its own right, albeit one with much less alcohol.
Not no alcohol, however. There were a few grizzled old timers drinking from hip flasks because they just didn’t give a shit, plus one or two cocky young morons who I suspected were on their first and last week on the job. Most of the others had fallen into cliques along company lines, with the occasional mutual acquaintance dragging rival companies into games of AR cards or pirated sports trideo overlaid onto the sides of minivans. It looked like someone from Stoddard Security had ordered pizza, while the hotel had fulfilled their promise by laying out a few tables of surplus food next to the door into the building.
There was an intermittent flow of people passing through that door, most likely because there were a few bathrooms somewhere on the other side. It meant the small army of guards were unlikely to notice us leaving, provided we didn’t leave together.
As such, I held back for a moment, pretending to check something in AR while Grue navigated his way between the parked cars before I followed after him. It wasn’t until I heard raised voices that I realised we’d made a mistake.
The Stoddard Security team, parked almost in front of the door, had left their pizza behind and were squaring up to Grue. There were four of them; all of them human, all of them male, with shaven heads and black tactical fatigues. They were all armed, of course, with each of them wearing a pistol, a taser and what looked like a stun baton. None of them had drawn their weapons, but it was clear they were spoiling for a fight.
“Who the fuck hired pigface?” the lead guard demanded, sizing Grue up. I think he was the commander of the team as well; he had more chevrons on his shoulders than them, which meant they’d definitely follow his example. I picked up the pace without trying to seem like I was running.
I heard Grue say “easy, chummer,” in a cold and even tone. “Just doing a job, same as you.”
The response was a harsh bark of laughter.
“Same as me? You can’t send a trog to do a man’s job! The fuck are you doing skulking around, tusker?”
“I’m just going for a piss, man.”
I couldn’t start a shootout here, in the basement, before we’d even got our foot in the door. I couldn’t hack them; they were wired, of course, but I wasn’t confident I could tangle with two networks simultaneously without tipping one of them off. All I could do was close in in Grue, stepping out from behind a van and trying to make myself look even larger than I already did.
“Who the fuck is that?” the lead goon demanded, his hand moving to his belt. “You trynna pull something, boy? Get your supersize girlfriend to bail you out?” He turned to his friends, grinning wildly. “You grab that mountain by the horns or do you wear the skirt in the relationship?”
I almost shot him, then. In spite of every instinct cautioning against it, I almost drew my submachine gun and sprayed the lot of them with a hail of bullets. I’d already unconsciously swapped the selector from burst fire to full auto, and I fervently wished I’d loaded live ammo. Instead, it seemed for a moment like things were about to get worse; six new human guards were moving up, all in Petrovski Security grey.
“Cut this shit out,” one of them – a woman with an eastern European accent – snapped. “Fucking Stoddard Security isn’t going to start a shooting war in my parking lot. You assholes aren’t even licenced to shoot first.”
“We’re cleared for self-defence,” the skinhead shoots back, clearly wrongfooted.
“Yeah, that came free with your second amendment, citizen,” the Petrovski woman countered. “But Petrovski’s extraterritorial. I can use ‘all reasonable force’ to protect this parking lot, so go back to your pizza or call your client and explain why we’re booting you out on the street.”
The Stoddard guards looked between us and the Petrovski team before they seemed to come to some mutual agreement, with the leader sneering at us before heading back to their car, loudly swapping insults about everything you’d expect.
“Thanks,” I said to the woman, even as Grue gave me a warning look.
“Don’t act like I’m your friend,” she snapped back. “If you can’t go five seconds without provoking those bonebreakers, you stay in your damn car.”
“We have been,” Grue interjected, “and we will. Just hitting the bathroom first.”
“Fine,” she replied, before she and her colleagues went back to their game of cards.
“What a fucking bitch,” I muttered, before Grue put a hand on my arm.
“Leave it. Let’s just get going.”
We made our escape as quickly as we could, my duplicated RFID tags opening sliding doors as we made our way through the maintenance ways to a staff only elevator that ran up the spine of the building. I didn’t talk; I was still pissed off. Instead of venting to Grue, I refocused my attention on our two agents among the American nobility.
The party had, if anything, deteriorated from when I’d last seen it. If I thought it was epicurean before, it had become a scene of hedonistic decadence. The Powerjazz was louder than ever, strobing golden lights lit the room with kaleidoscopic intensity and the mass of privileged humanity had begun to descend into a mob of drunken lunatics.
A great mass of them thronged a dance floor in the centre of the room, flesh writing against flesh like a single creature. Inhibitions had fallen by the wayside; some of the women had stripped off their expensive dresses as if they were tissue paper, cavorting bare breasted like frantic Bacchantes. Many of the men had done the same, and the two met in frenzied encounters that I could swear crossed the line into actual sex in a few places.
Alec and Lisa hugged the edge of the room, and it was interesting to see who was there with them. Even in this Olympian class there was a hierarchy; there were those who surrendered themselves to decadence, buffeted to and fro by the momentum of the party, and there were those men and women – usually the older ones, but not exclusively – who rode the wave.
They were the veterans of frat parties and sorority initiations, of decades of novacoke-fuelled living and corporate-mandated binge drinking socials that spilled out of the venue and into whatever bars and clubs they could find, with the veteran alcoholics in management noting a mental black mark against each fallen employee abandoned by the wayside at train stations, taxi stands and dingy bathrooms.
They seemed to be drinking a similar amount to the rest, but they never allowed themselves to totally lose control. I could see them on the edges of the party, or holding the attention of a group of revellers. They were taking stock of who did what to whom, keeping tabs on how their peers acted when stripped of all self-control. They kept track of their equals, as well; sending occasional nods to each other as if in recognition of their primacy among nominal equals.
Max Anders was one of them, as was the host Nathan Gilbert. Interestingly his daughter was one of the revellers, although she’d managed to keep her dress on. She was at the centre of her own court of petitioners and socialites, surrounded by her friends and friends of friends and want-to-be friends. Her arm was wrapped around the waist of a very out-of-place Theo Anders, who seemed dumbstruck by the whole affair. I wondered if she was as manic as she seemed, or if she’d agreed with her father’s patriarchal calculus and was determined to grab the recalcitrant Medhall heir’s attention by whatever means she could.
Theo’s father, on the other hand, was watching the strange staff in white uniforms with a professional eye. Their function was clearer now; their tables and attaché cases were laden with a selection of narcotics, with the white-clad staff being medical personnel brought in to safely measure out dosages or supervise injections. It was an aristocratic absurdity; the pinnacle of society indulging in the addictions of their polar opposites, administered in perfect safety by what had to be Medhall doctors and nurses loaned out for the occasion.
Kayden Anders was seated on a chaise lounge in a relatively quiet corner of the room, nursing a glass of white whine as she engaged in small talk with a few other women of varying ages, though none of them seemed younger than their late twenties. She was wearing an ankle-length dress made of a metallic white fabric that glimmered like the surface of the moon, and her face was the picture of patient attention, even if it didn’t quite reach her eyes.
Regent and Tattletale were mingling on the periphery of a mixed-gender group of socialites around their age, where they could both see and be seen by Kayden. They were caught up in a performance piece of feigned affection, conversing eagerly about fashion trends in Montreal and New York as they pulled away from the group and closer to each other. When Tattletale glanced down for a moment, I saw that Regent’s hand was on her hip.
“We’re moving up,” I reported through their earpieces. “Got held up in the parking lot, but we’re clear now. Imp should be checking in soon. Meantime, I’m sending you Aster’s room number. Are you ready to move?”
“Of course, a Grecian cut can be very confidence boosting,” Tattletale answered, concealing an affirmative in her conversation. “What girl doesn’t want to feel like a goddess?”
“Good,” I said. “Beginning my attack now.”
My read-only access to the security sensors was vital for keeping a clear path through the hotel itself, but it wouldn’t be enough when it came to taking out Kayden’s security detail. For that, I brought up the cluster of sensors in Aster’s room. No cameras, of course, but there were trip alarms on the door, pressure sensors on the exterior windows and even a detection system in the climate control that estimated how many occupants the room held at any given time.
It only took a moment to slip a woodlouse into the node, leaving the sprite to chew a bypass between my terminal and the sensors’ inner workings. By the time the lift reached the sixty-eighth floor, I already had total control over the room’s sensors. A moment later, Imp’s suit appeared back in my peripheral vision.
“We’re live. Regent, Tattletale, go now.”
I sent a message to Kayden’s phone, spoofing the number used by her nanny. Through Tattletale’s contacts I saw Kayden’s eyes flick to the left as she selected the incoming message notification on her own AR lenses, before she stood and made warm apologies to her circle of friends. She looked around, taking stock of Regent and Tattletale as they in turn watched her.
For a moment she seemed taken aback, before she rolled her eyes at Tattletale and turned to leave the room, with the two mages following a discrete distance behind her as they passed beyond the epicentre of the party.
That didn’t mean leaving the party behind, however. It had long since spilled over its bounds, populating the corridors immediately around the ballroom with more discrete couples hunting for quiet niches, staff members hurrying to keep the drinks flowing to the main hall and one white-haired gentleman who’d snagged a whole bottle of port from the ballroom, which he used to repeatedly refill a tiny crystal glass in a show of impressively ingrained decorum in the face of uncontrolled alcoholism.
Grue and I weren’t met by the same sort of overspill. Our elevator opened up into a service corridor that was only meant to be accessed by the hotel’s staff, almost all of which were busy ferrying drinks. The only sign of the revelry occurring a few walls way from us were a pair of waitresses sitting against the wall, one of them holding the others shoulder while she wept. Her shirt was torn, like someone had tried to rip it off her, and the pair of them cringed as we walked past, probably confusing us for security.
“Imp, we’re in position and moving in,” I broadcast to her suit, even as I pulled up the feed from her mask.
Even from seventy six stories up, the city centre filled the sky for as far as I could see. I was used to seeing it from the North End, where the entire district could be seen rising up in tiered skyscrapers to the tallest buildings in the centre. It was contained, somehow, like a tumour growing out of the city. But seen from here, I could understand why some might see it as the only city.
“Imp, are you there?”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
“I’m surprised you can hear anything over the wind up there.”
“The suit’s good,” she replied, her voice strangely distant. “Top of the line.”
Imp drew her pistol from its holster and pulled back the slide, revealing the single round of armour-piercing ammunition at the top of her magazine before it was shunted forwards into the chamber. She was kneeling on top of industrial heat vents that capped the southern side of the tower, with the north given over to Nathan Gilbert’s own penthouse and rooftop garden.
As she stood, her feet on the very edge of the skyscraper, she looked down at the vertigo-inducing drop below her, all the way down to the small plaza out the front of the Raleigh Building, surrounded by other towers that only reached two thirds of its height at most. Without saying a word, Imp leant forward and let momentum carry her off the edge of the rooftop, twisting her feet at the last second so that she faced out towards the galaxy-like skyline of distant windows.
She craned her neck back, looking down at the distant ground for a few heart-wrenching seconds of freefall before the wires on the small of her back caught her and rapidly slowed her momentum, flipping her one hundred and eighty degrees before arresting her fall entirely. She reached forwards with an acrobat’s ease, locking her electrostatic gloves and boots onto one of the great bronze ribs of the building.
“Spider.”
“Yes, Imp?”
“This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done.”