“Good afternoon, my name is Emma and I’m calling from Ophelia Legal Services. I understand you’ve recently been in an accident that wasn’t your fault.”
“Fuck off, wageslave,” Alabaster’s gruff voice came back down the line. “And delete my fucking number.”
He hung up, but the damage was already done. I grinned, looking across the street at the old building that was once a community centre before it fell into private ownership.
“He’s in there,” I said, leaning back against Bitch’s van as I looked down at Tattletale.
“Good,” she nodded. “Be a shame to waste the trip. Now,” she flicked up her hood, “how do I look?”
The others were probably a little taken aback at Lisa’s change of appearance, but to me it felt surprisingly familiar. The trenchcoat was still there, of course, but beneath it she wore a threadbare tracksuit with mismatching pants and hooded top, and worn but practical boots that were maybe a size too big. It was a look I’d seen on her before, in CCTV footage revealed to me by the event horizon, but it was also one she’d long since thrown away once she’d managed to claw back some of the designer lifestyle I suspected she’d enjoyed in Tír Tairngire.
She couldn’t completely pass for human, even with the hood covering her ears; her features were just a little too sharp, her frame a little too thin and a little too tall. But that same skinny frame could be mistaken for malnourishment, and if the old community centre was as dingy as we were expecting then the hood would leave her features hidden in shadow.
She certainly stood out a lot less than I would.
“I can’t believe you made me wear this,” Alec said, worrying at a thread on the sleeve of his dark grey hoodie. “These jeans are itchy. Why are they itchy?”
“Hey, I bought those at a very nice thrift store,” I countered. “Probably only had three or four previous owners, tops.”
“Maudit…” he swore, probably, and flipped me off. “The things I do for money…”
“That’s odd…” Tattletale said, looking intensely at the building. “Hey, Regent, have a look at this place. It’s not just me, right?”
He turned around, looking up at the building, as I tried in vain to see what they saw in it. From the outside, it looked just like any other building. America As One’s posters and signs were surprisingly restrained, and the windows of the first three floors were boarded up.
On second glance, I realised that the tame exterior was probably meant to divert attention away from whatever was happening inside. From the steady line of destitute humans making their way through the doors, it seemed like there was an event on.
“Now that is odd,” Regent abruptly observed. “A little hypocritical too, given why we’re here.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“This place is practically bleeding magic,” he explained. “Looks like it’s being used as some kind of lodge.”
“And the Chosen are magophobes…” I chuckled, thinking of something mom used to say. “If they didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.”
“It’s weird, though, isn’t it?” Tattletale pushed. “I mean, think about that chromed-up monster in the pit. Did anything about him seem less than genuine to you?”
“No,” I frowned. “You’re right. Someone like that isn’t going to be buying his drugs from mages. An alliance of convenience, maybe? Solidarity among metaphobes?”
“Maybe he doesn’t know,” Grue pointed out as he stepped out of the door of the van, looking up at the community centre.
“If it’s a free clinic and food giveaway, you’d think they’d want to advertise more,” he observed. “Barely any signs, nothing in AR. It’s listed on the policlub’s website, but that’s it.”
“They’re probably mostly relying on word of mouth,” Tattletale mused. “Get a few volunteers to canvas the streets and spread the word, then let the local homeless spread it further among themselves. A lower profile probably makes it easier to filter out the undesirables as well.”
“Either way, you two should get going,” Grue said, nodding at the dwindling number of people entering the building. “Looks like it’ll be starting soon. Same drill as last time; gather what intel you can and we’ll be waiting with the firepower if you need it.”
“Right then,” Tattletale nodded. “Time to go see what the fuss is all about.”
As they made their way across the street I followed Grue into the back of the van, where Bitch was sitting on one of the utilitarian seats with a plastic case in her hand, about the same shape and size as a commlink but a little thicker. She opened it up with a surprising amount of care, before I saw a datastream form between her and the box as a tiny drone crawled up and onto the lid.
It was about the size of a large insect and it looked like one too; sleek and wasp-like with spindly legs, a small thorax, yellow wings and tiny antennae jutting out of its head.
“I haven’t seen that one before,” I observed.
“It’s new,” Bitch said as the drone spread its wings and took flight, the ornithopter-like motion of the wings supplemented by the absolutely tiny pulse jet at their base. “A Mitsuhama Automatronics FlySpy. I bought it with my share of the Garcia job.”
“How much did it set you back?” I asked, curious.
“Two thousand,” Bitch answered nonchalantly, following the flight of the wasp with her optics as it moved from one corner of the van to the other, its feet gripping onto the ceiling. Even from a few feet away I was having trouble making it out.
Two thousand nuyen… I thought. Over half a month’s rent for a few grams of metal.
Bitch stopped tracking the motion of the drone with her optics, instead taking direct control of the bug as she overlaid its vision onto hers. The drone’s flight wavered ever so slights as Bitch took over, and she leant back into her seat as she focused on familiarising herself with an entirely unfamiliar form of motion.
“All good?” I asked.
“Fully functional,” Bitch answered, her mouth moving even as her optics stared off into space. “No latency, cameras are online.”
I reached into the matrix myself, tapping into Bitch’s PAN once again as I pulled up the FlySpy’s feed in a window in front of me. I watched the footage as Bitch guided the drone out into the street, before I reached out and pulled shut the rear door of the van, finding my way to one of the seats with only a yellow streetlamp’s light-bleed through the front windows to guide me.
Grue was seated as well, checking over his new assault rifle. Honestly, he looked a little lost. It didn’t take me long to realise that this was the second mission in a row – technically – that he’d spent sitting on his hands.
“Want me to patch you into the feed?” I asked him.
He looked over at me, setting the rifle aside before answering.
“Please.”
I nodded, sending a connection request to his cyberware’s wireless node. He yielded in a second, and I overlaid the drone’s feed in a window he could manipulate in AR.
“Would have been nice to have this with the Chosen,” he observed. “You kind of left me in the dark back there.”
“Sorry,” I said, my tone a little sheepish. “It was pretty… mentally intense in there. Didn’t have much bandwidth to focus on anything outside Bitch’s head. If I’d realised it was an option, I’d have patched you in.”
“It’s okay, Bug,” he said, though from his tone it sounded like that wasn’t the whole truth. “Doubt I could have contributed much anyway.”
“Doesn’t mean you should be shut out like that,” I observed, giving voice to the part he’d politely left out. I was leaning a little on knowledge I shouldn’t have had; Brian had tried being just a hired gun and it had almost got him shot up by a High Threat Response team.
“I know I wouldn’t want to be,” I continued, “but then I’m never more than a few datastreams away from letting myself in anyway.”
“I never had much of a head for software,” Grue remarked. “Had a mandatory CompSci class back in middle school, but it never really grabbed me like it did some of the kids.”
“I always loved it,” I smiled. “It just made sense, even before it ‘grabbed me.’” I punctuated the euphemism with air quotes. “I haven’t done much coding since, though. Not in the traditional sense, anyway; it just feels too inflexible now. Like trying to write with a pen instead of a keyboard.”
“That must have been a hell of a thing to go through,” Grue observed, as the feed in front of us showed the FlySpy tucking itself beneath the turned-down collar of Tattletale’s coat.
“Yeah, it wasn’t the best experience in the world. It was kind of like the whole world was a spam zone, before I got used to it. Even the smallest matrix-capable device felt like it was screaming into my head. And as if that wasn’t enough, this was back in sixty-four.”
“Crash two-point-oh, the ‘New Revolution’…” Grue shook his head. “Not a good hand to be dealt.”
“Whole city was in flames, the wired Matrix had burned down with it and I had absolutely no idea what was wrong with my brain. I didn’t even come across the word ‘Technomancer’ until about two years later – even then, it was just a rumour. For a while, I wondered if I was the only one.”
“Heads up,” Grue said, nodding at the feed. “Looks like they’re in.”
Regent and Tattletale had made their way to the entrance of the building, mingling at the back of a group of half a dozen transients. They were greeted at the door by a smiling human woman who looked like she could be a college student, wearing a navy-blue polo shirt with the America As One logo on it and an ID badge on a lanyard around her neck. In deference to the weather, she wore a deep red puffer jacket open over the shirt, to keep herself warm in the cold evening air.
Behind her, standing well back from the friendly face at the entrance, were two hired security guards with bulletproof vests worn over black turtlenecks, looking more like corporate security than local hired muscle. They weren’t interfering with Tattletale’s group, but that didn’t stop the people in front of her from eyeing them warily. No doubt they’d been ‘moved on’ enough times to be suspicious of security by default.
Inside, a short corridor opened up into a cavernous hall with a laminate floor, easily large enough to hold the rows of benches and trestle tables that were, for the moment, absent of any food. However, the benches and the hundred-odd people sitting on them quickly faded into insignificance next to the room’s décor.
“Well, would you look at that,” Grue remarked. “It seems… OTT for this sort of event.”
“Maybe they use the hall for their meetings as well as charity,” I said, shrugging my shoulders half-heartedly, with my eyes fixed firmly on the feed.
From the FlySpy’s position under Tattletale’s collar, I could see right down the length of the table, past similar desperate figures in worn but warm clothes. At the end of the hall, the tables gave way to a raised stage, with a deceptively simple podium in front of a wall of spotlessly clean banners and flags.
Pride of place went to a rendition of George Washington in the centre, the white-haired statesman in colonial dress surrounded by a halo of blinding light. He was flanked by narrow, floor to ceiling banners topped by fifty stars on a blue background, with red and white stripes cascading down to the ground like streamers. Flanked between those banners and ones with the ancient circle of thirteen stars that Washington had carried was the almost understated logo of the policlub; their acronym ringed by white stars in a blue band.
There were a few people on the stage, dressed in the same pseudo-uniform of policlub polos as the girl outside, but none of them looked important to be enough to be the speaker. Any one of them could have been Alabaster, but personally I doubted it; they were all a little too young. Students, probably, fighting the ‘good fight’ in clubrooms and campus debate societies, rather than on the streets.
There was a quiet murmur of conversation, but despite being vastly outnumbered the policlubbers were contributing about as much of it as the recipients of their goodwill. Life on the streets didn’t foster a sense of community, at least not on a large scale; the few conversations at the tables were happening between those who shared a nice patch of sheltered ground, but everyone else was too wary to talk; too concerned with protecting what little they had.
Interestingly, nobody was complaining about the lack of food – not yet, at least. It seemed like Tattletale was right. They knew the drill; no charity until you’ve listened to the charity’s spiel.
Not that AAO was going to keep them waiting for long; a man had just walked onto the stage, and unlike the policlubbers he wasn’t wearing the mandatory polo shirt. In fact, he was dressed like a priest, with black pants and a neat black shirt. All he was missing was the strip of white at his collar.
He was the picture of the young politician; in his late twenties or early thirties, with a winning smile on his face and a sparkle in his eyes, his blonde hair slicked back and neatly shaved down at the sides. He stood on the stage for a moment, looking over the crowd with what appeared to be genuine warmth before he tapped the microphone at the podium and let the feedback bring the conversation to a halt.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “I’m sure that some of you have been here before, that you’ve heard me talk. I’m just as sure that for many of you, I am a complete stranger, but whether you’ve heard of me before, I would like to thank you all for coming here tonight. We host these kitchens at this time, on this day, every week, and we’re open to all humans in need of aid.”
“He’s Awakened,” Tattletale whispered into the microphone hidden at the base of her hood. “None of the others are. I doubt any of them are Alabaster.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Grue said. “Bitch, see if you can take the drone for a spin. Get a look at the staff.”
“For those of you who don’t know me,” he continued, “my name is Justin Hammond. America As One is my organisation. I am a preacher, a campaigner, an advocate and a crusader who fights for candidates and laws that advance American values, and protect American citizens. But at heart, I’m a simple man.”
He smiled, looking up rather than out across the tables, and as Bitch steered the drone out of Tattletale’s collar and began crawling it down the front of her coat, I saw why. There were cameras lining the walls, capturing his speech from multiple angles.
It doesn’t matter if your in-person audience is nothing but SINless, voteless vagrants when an infinite number of people can fit behind a screen, I realised.
“I like steak and potatoes. I like a good fight, a serious game of baseball or football. American football. I like a good woman’s company-”
That got a chuckle out of the crowd, but Hammond had clearly planned for that. He held up a hand for calm, with an affably sheepish expression on his face that disappeared immediately the moment the room was quiet again.
“-And I believe that they are fucking things up, out there. And the rest of the world’s letting them.”
“What are you doing under the table?” Grue asked, as the FlySpy took to the air off of Tattletale’s knee. “We can’t see anyone down there.”
“It’s small, but it’s not invisible,” Bitch explained, as she steered the drone between a pair of legs and skimmed the floor of the room. “Everyone behind Tattletale is looking at the stage; they’d see it if I took off straight away.”
“I’m sure you all understand exactly what I mean,” Hammond leant forward, resting an elbow on the podium. “When I go looking in the universities, or in Downtown or on the Boardwalk, it’s hard to find people who really get it. They’re insulated from the consequences… hell, a lot of them even benefit from the way things are. But you know better, because you’re the victims of this world we live in.”
Bitch hugged the wall with the drone, ducking behind an old flatscreen before coming to a hover in the rafters. From there, she could see the entire hall at a glance.
“You know who I’m talking about. What I’m talking about. You can’t escape their influence no matter where in the world you might be because they’ve made the world their own. It’s their playground, to do with as they see fit.”
Hammond was animated now; getting into the swing of his speech. With none of the visible employees being likely targets, I spared a moment to look over the crowd. Most were politely watching, some weren’t watching at all, but there were more than a few who seemed to be picking up what he was putting down; watching the speech with dangerously intense looks in their eyes.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“They decided who deserved to be a citizen not by the country they were born in, but by submission to their SIN. I look before me and I see old families, old names; the fabric on which this nation was built. Maybe not all of you, but many. But they don’t make a distinction because to them your name – your history – is without value.”
Bitch pulled the drone in a quick pass of the rear of the room, checking over the security guards who’d ambled in and positioned themselves out of sight of the crowd while keeping their client firmly in their view. At first I thought they might have been hired in-house, in which case they’d be a perfect candidate for Alabaster, but one of the guards was wearing a fleece with the logo of a small-scale security firm on it.
“Value is, of course, what it all comes down to,” Hammond continued. “What can you do for them? They set the prices, to control where you live. They stack the governments with men who agree with their control, who benefit from it. They stock the shelves with the food you eat, cutting every corner they can to squeeze as much value – as much profit – out of you as they can. And you pay for that food, if you can afford it, with the money they pay you.”
He leant forwards, his hands gripping the sides of the podium. At the back of the room, in a little alcove above the entrance, Bitch ducked around the vision of a trideo camera and its crew, capturing the speech for all to see.
“You know what I do, and it probably makes you laugh. Because I can campaign for better politicians, better laws, but we both know they’re not the ones who’re really in charge. The United States don’t matter anymore.”
“Make your way to the front,” Grue instructed Bitch. “Alabaster might not even be in the room, but this asshole clearly came from somewhere that’s staff only. No way he was slaving away in a kitchen back there.
Hammond stepped back from the podium, throwing his hands in the air.
“But there I go, stating the obvious. You don’t need me to tell you who rules this city; you just need to take a hike up to the roof and look for Ares’ walled castle. That’s the way the world is, and I’m too young to remember any different. But that doesn’t mean it was always this way.”
He took a half-turn back, gesturing with one arm at the image of George Washington. As he did, his other hand – tucked behind his back, but visible from the drone’s position – twisted itself in a complicated pattern, glowing with an ethereal, staticky light.
“And here’s the magic,” Tattletale whispered gleefully, as the symbols of old-world America began to glow with an inner light, their colours becoming more vivid to the point of being almost technicolouresque.
“It might be hard to imagine now, but this land was once whole. From California to Maine, Seattle to Miami. From sea to shining sea. The United States of America was the vanguard against unchecked corporate power; the knight standing between the American citizen and the greed of foreign businessmen who saw them only as resources to exploit.”
He turned his attention away from the flag, his eyes leaving the audience as they focused solely on the camera at the back of the room. Bitch hugged the ceiling, crossing its span in a single flight that put her right at the top of one of the waving flags.
“United as one nation, this continent was strong enough to say no! No, to unchecked corporate power! No, to the enemies at our borders! No, to terrorism! No, to war! No to additives in your food! No, to the rat-race to discover the absolute depths of moral degeneracy!”
“There,” I said, marking a section of the feed. “In the wings. There are people watching from the shadows.”
“Pulling in for a closer look,” Bitch answered, as Hammond ramped up the intensity.
“You might say those days are gone, but I say just look at Japan! They unleashed the megacorporate scourge on the world with the Shiawase decision, but they managed to ride the lightning! While Ares, Horizon and NeoNet abandoned America and its values in pursuit of global profits, the Japanacorps spread Japanese culture to the world and remain under the guiding hand of the Japanese throne!”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” I grumbled. Most would say it’s the other way around.
Bitch had pulled the drone into the shadowed space off the side of the stage, where there was a cluster of techs gathered around a bank of screens and audio equipment, gathering together the feeds of the room’s cameras even as a director in a garish teal shirt stitched it all together into a cohesive viewing experience for the livestream. More importantly for our purposes, there were a number of other figures watching from the shadows; each one of them no doubt serving some nebulous role in the running of the policlub.
“Now I’m not praising them because I believe Japan wants what’s best for America!” Hammond shouted. “Japan wants what’s best for Japan, and their megacorps are no less willing to exploit us! But Japan proves that America could have risen, rather than fallen! If it had seen the Ghost Dance War to the end rather than losing to a bunch of tribal relics we’d beaten a hundred and fifty years back! If it had the strength to force the Southern States to stay in the Union, or the resolve not to provide the Canadian provinces with the handouts that drove them away! If it had responded properly to goblinisation, VITAS and HMHVV rather than letting them tear society apart!”
I couldn’t help the sinking feeling in my stomach. Lumping goblinisation in with the deadliest diseases in human history was sickening on a deeply personal level, and admiring the Japanese ‘response’ – of mass segregation and deportation – was abhorrent. The obvious popularity of his ideas – seen in the staff, the building and the livestream – sickened me.
“But Japan’s star is falling!” Hammond slammed his fist down on the podium. “They’ve lost their hold on California! They’ve lost one of their largest companies, with Yamatetsu rebranding itself as Evo and embracing global corporate degeneracy even as Japan’s child-Emperor has rolled back proscriptions on metahumans entirely! Now is America’s chance to rise not as an eagle, but a phoenix!”
Hammond reached into the pocket of his pants, pulling out a trio of tokens that seemed to glimmer in the light. He twisted his fingers, snapping the tokens in half, and let the shards fall to the floor.
They never made it; dissolving into motes of light that spread and took shape as a trio of spectral figures, looming behind Hammond and glowing with an arcane white light. Their form, while slightly distorted by the camera’s inability to fully comprehend magic, practically radiated power, each spirit taking the form of a knight in angular, medieval plate armour, swords proudly gripped in both hands.
“Now is our chance to reunify North and South! To purge our society and government of the rot that has infested it for too long! Then we will march West once again, under the banner of a new Manifest Destiny, using the magic that undid the old America against our enemies! We will reclaim California, drive Aztlan back across the Rio Grande and sweep away the so-called Native American Nations, returning to the States we have lost! Men and women like yourselves will be at the vanguard of this movement! The huddled American masses, yearning to breathe free!”
Grue leant forwards, his eyes fixed on the cluster of figures lurking in the shadows.
“It can’t be that simple, can it?” he asked, a finger outreached towards one figure in particular. The moment I saw it, I chuckled and asked Bitch to zoom in.
Lurking near the back of the group, far out of sight of the cameras and transients, was a man in a simple black suit under a long grey overcoat. More pertinently, his skin was unnaturally pale, his irises appeared pinkish in the half-light and his close-cropped hair was as white as his crisp shirt.
“But all this is just smoke in the air,” Hammond waved a hand as he brought back the tone from the boiling point. “The dreams of men and women who care about this country, but are so far powerless to do anything about it. But here, now, we can make a difference. Until America is once again the land of the free and the home of the brave, the least we can do is put food on her citizens’ tables. So until we can give you back America, I hope you enjoy this hot meal and warm company. I thank you for your time.”
As the crowd erupted into polite applause – the policlub’s volunteers contributing about half of the noise – food was brought out of the wings on trays, and the transients waited to receive their fare. Hammond, his spirits and several staffers did the heavy lifting of actually handing out the meals to each transient, Hammond himself making a slower circuit of the tables than the rest as he stopped to chat to every four people.
“We think we have him,” I told Tattletale and Regent. “An albino waiting in the wings with a few other suits. I’m going to see if I can hack his comm.”
“Good,” Tattletale whispered. “It’s too early for us to sneak out of here.”
I shed meatspace like a chrysalis, unfurling my digital wings as I left my body to slump bonelessly back into Bitch’s jump seat. We were in the heart of the city; the matrix practically hummed with activity, datastreams passing over my head in a constant constellation of glowing trails. The air – or what passed for it – seemed to hum with the resonance of tens of thousands of devices as I passed the street, while the hosts of great corporations drifted like islands through the air.
I followed the tether between Bitch and the FlySpy like a roadway, using it to carry me to Alabaster’s approximate location before using its camera feed to match the man in meatspace to the commlink in his pocket. Idly gathering together datastreams in the clawed hands of my persona, I weaved them together into a woodlouse and drew on the resonance to breathe life into the sprite – potentially even calling it forth into the vessel from beyond the event horizon, like Hammond using the talismans to bring his spirits into the material plane.
My woodlouse was a great deal subtler, however, going completely unnoticed as it chewed its way into Alabaster’s comm. When it gave way, I eagerly tore into the files within, pulling them out of the device’s icon and spreading them out in front of me as I sifted through the data faster than the speed of metahuman thought.
“It’s all here,” I said, grinning. “Alabaster – Zachary Hunter – is the coordinator for the whole network, and he arranges it all through this comm. I have contact information here for a manager in Medhall’s community outreach division. He supplies America As One with medical supplies for a free clinic they run out of this building, and Alabaster arranges the transfer of a quarter of those drugs to the Chosen, as well as more numerous shipments of dopadrine and other recreational drugs that they then resell on the black market. And he’s been doing it for years, at least.”
“Excellent work, everyone,” Grue said. “We’ve got everything the client asked for without even firing a shot. I guess all that’s left is for Tattletale and Regent to enjoy a free dinner on the policlub’s dime, then we’ll send all this off.”
“I’ll package up the data for him,” I said, as I created a new datastream between the commlink and Bitch’s PAN, using it as a temporary storage drive in which to format a comprehensive package outlining the entire structure of the network, from the recipients in the psychogang to the Medhall warehouses that put the ‘outreach shipments’ together.
“And here comes dinner…” Tattletale whispered. I spared a glance at the FlySpy’s feed and saw that Bitch had repositioned it to provide good coverage of our two infiltrators as Hammond himself finally reached them with a plate of what looked like a slice of soymeat roast, potatoes and green vegetables, all coated in a generous amount of instant gravy.
“Here you are, young man,” Hammond said good-naturedly as he set a plate down in front of Regent, before doing the same for Tattletale. “It’s a shame to see people your age on the streets.”
He looked closer, pausing, and his eyes narrowed as he stared at Tattletale’s face beneath her hood.
“I’m not sure you’re in the right place, miss,” he said, slowly. “There’s a metahuman shelter on the corner of Grayson and Dutch Street. We focus more on filling the gaps left by the more… liberal minded charitable organisations.”
“I know,” Tattletale said, her tone quiet and apologetic. “And I’m sorry. It’s just… I don’t feel safe there. There are a lot of orks and trolls three times my size, and they… Well, they scare me.”
If the atmosphere wasn’t so tense I might have cracked a joke at that. As it was, I could only watch through the screen as Hammond seemed to come to a decision.
“I see. I’m assuming you don’t have a place to stay tonight, either?” Tattletale looked away. “Well, you wouldn’t be the first nonhuman to try your luck with our charity. It’s as you say; the other shelters are dangerous, and even an elf can… fall on hard times. My associate, Mr Hunter, will set you up with somewhere to stay for the night.”
“That’s not necessary,” Tattletale shook her head. “I can leave once I’ve had my meal. Or before, if you want.”
“I insist,” Hammond said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “I couldn’t live with myself if I let a friend go hungry.”
Whether signalled by one of the staffers or spirits, Alabaster was moving across the room towards Tattletale. Through the FlySpy I saw her eyes widen momentarily as she caught sight of him before she schooled her expression into something more neutral, but I couldn’t tell what had her so spooked. And with Hammond so close, she couldn’t whisper it into her mic.
“Evening, Justin,” Alabaster greeted the policlub’s head. There was something to his voice – some deep sound I couldn’t quite place. “Another stray in need of care? ”
“The very same,” Hammond nodded. “I know you’ll see her right.”
Tattletale was poking at one of her potatoes, pushing it around on the plate without actually touching the food. After a moment, though, she began eating under the watchful eye of Alabaster as Hammond moved to continue serving the rest of the table.
“Bug, need you in the real world,” Grue said to me. “I don’t know what this is, but I don’t like it. We may need to run a hot extraction.”
“Sure,” I said, drifting back to my body. “I’m done here anyway.”
In meatspace, Bitch was cocooned in the front seat with her mind still in the FlySpy and the rack of Dobermans in the back spooled up and ready to deploy. Grue was by the still-open door, his rifle in his hand and a worried expression on his face as he focused on an AR window of the feed. I reached into my jacket and pulled out my submachine gun, pulling back the Executioner’s slide after only a moment’s pause.
Back in the policlub, Tattletale had only eaten about half of the soymeat before she abruptly set her plastic cutlery down on the paper plate. She looked up at Hammond, with resolve in her eyes and a feigned expression of worry on her face – but beneath both I could see real fear.
“I don’t think I’m that hungry.”
Alabaster nodded like it was ultimately of no consequence.
“Then come with me,” he told her, waiting for her to nod. He barely even reacted as Regent stood up as well, simply leading the pair of them away from the packed conference room and into the wings – all the while making sure to keep them both in view.
He led them through the corridors that ran the length of the policlub, past meeting rooms, offices and through the free clinic that was the source of the Chosen’s own medical supplies. Bitch followed them in the FlySpy, setting it to run on its own pilot programme so she had enough brainpower left to drive the van.
In comparison to the din of the main hall – the conversations and sounds of chewing – the halls were as quiet as the grave, the only light coming from automated sensors that flickered on and off as the trio passed beneath them.
“So,” Tattletale broke the silence, her tone almost contemplative. “How long do I have?”
Alabaster didn’t answer.
“You know,” Tattletale continued, like someone trying to talk down a rabid dog. “Left to live. I assume we aren’t going to survive this; you wouldn’t want to leave another vampire out there.”
“Holy fucking shit!” Grue swore, as my grip tightened on my gun. “Bug, where the fuck are they?”
“How the fuck am I-” I stopped, looking through the matrix at Alabaster’s comm – it still had my mark on it. “Near the rear. Gridlink says there’s an alleyway there.”
Without so much as a word, Bitch immediately sped off, sending me flying from my seat even as Grue was barely able to hold onto the open doorway. Only my blind panic at the vampire was able to overcome my blind panic at being thrown back in a moving vehicle, and I desperately tried to think of some way we were going to survive this.
Where the fuck do you even find a stake in this day and age?
Back inside the policlub, Alabaster’s reaction to Tattletale’s words was a put-upon sigh.
“Albinism is a genetic condition,” he explained. “It has nothing to do with vampirism.”
“You’re not a vampire because you’re an albino,” Tattletale said, still allowing Alabaster to lead them towards a fire exit at the back of the building. “You’re a vampire and an albino. I can see it.”
Alabaster chuckled. “Awakened? Hell, I almost feel bad for you. Able to see what’s coming, but too weak to stop it even with your friend. But fuck, your blood’s gonna taste great.”
Tattletale looked down at the tiled floor, playing the part of the tragic victim. It was the right move; Regent would help, but they still wouldn’t survive a fight indoors, with policlub security guards just a scream away.
Suddenly an idea struck me – one born of desperation, but that felt much more likely to succeed than just trying to shoot my way through a vampire.
“I’m calling the client,” I said. “One of his guards was a mage, maybe he knows something. Plus, he asked for secrets he could exploit – this qualifies.”
“There’s no way it’ll matter in time,” Grue said as he fished a set of grenades out of a holdall. “I have phosphorous grenades back here, and Regent can use magical fire. No idea if it’ll be enough to kill him.”
“Even if you did, we’d be back at square one,” I said. “The snake can’t get a mole in the network if they’re rebuilding it from the ground up. But we can stall him with the threat of the grenades, maybe even blackmail him with exposure.”
“It’s as good a plan as any,” Grue said, clinging to the doorway for dear life as Bitch turned the corner into the alleyway. “Fuck it, make the call.”
Bitch sped down the alley, driving the up-armoured Bulldog through garbage cans and spilled-over stacks of refuse, sending a family of rats skittering away from the headlights. She barely made it in time, pulling up and leaping out of the van alongside Grue and I just as the double doors at the back of the policlub swung open and Alabaster, Tattletale and Regent stepped out into the glare of the headlights.
“Don’t move.” Grue’s tone was low and cold, as a quartet of Doberman drones rolled out the back of the van and swung around to flank us. My mind was only half there, my Executioner levelled squarely at Alabaster’s forehead even as I sent out a call to Mr Johnson’s number.
“You guys have no idea who you’re fucking with,” Alabaster drawled, as Tattletale and Regent moved away from him.
“You think we’d ambush you like this if we didn’t know exactly who we were fucking with?” Grue lied through his teeth, using his thumb to pull the pin out of the grenade in his left hand. “We’re packing enough incendiaries to light you up like a shantytown fire.”
As if to accentuate the point, Regent pulled out a talisman of his own from his pocket and snapped it, causing a shower of sparks that coalesced into a hovering spirit of our own – more vivid in person than anything I’d seen through any camera. Like the spirit I’d seen in the warehouse, way back on my first job, it resembled the Greek ideal of the human form. This effigy was female, however, with her body wrapped in fire like diaphanous robes.
The call came through, and I immediately sent over the paydata.
“Mr Johnson,” I began, in the privacy of my head. “We’ve put together an information package for you and cornered the administrator of the whole drug network – Zachary Hunter, or Alabaster, a staffer with the pro-human policlub America As One. He’s infected with HMHVV – a vampire. If you want someone to blackmail, now’s the best chance you’re going to get.”
There was the slightest of pauses – though it felt like eternity in my head – before Mr Johnson’s voice came back to me.
“I see. Ideally, I would have decided when and where to make my mole, but I will not let this opportunity pass me by. Put this ‘Alabaster’ on the other end of a commlink.”
“Our employer wishes to speak with you,” I said, my aim unwavering as I patched the Naga into Tattletale’s commlink. She felt the vibrations through her jacket and nodded.
“And Bug?” Mr Johnson continued, as Tattletale held out her comm to the vampire without so much as flinching. “My conversation with Alabaster is private. You are not to listen in. Should you feel tempted, know that my own matrix specialists are more than capable of telling the difference between a call from a cyberdeck and a call from a technomancer.”
I paled, my skin turning even greyer as I untethered myself from the call’s datastream, leaving only the link between Mr Johnson and Tattletale’s comm.
“So,” Alabaster began. “What could possibly be worth all this trouble? No, wait,” he smiled. “Let me guess.”
He didn’t continue; it seemed Mr Johnson didn’t give him the chance to elaborate. It felt unnatural to cut myself off from digital information that was right there in front of my face, but this situation was precarious enough that I wasn’t going to risk it. Instead, all I had to go on was the expressions on Alabaster’s face – and he did not look like he was hearing good news.
“And why should I believe you over them?” he snarled, before Mr Johnson continued.
At the far end of the valley, the darkness was suddenly broken by another pair of headlights, as a black sedan pulled leisurely into the alleyway. Alabaster looked over at it, but didn’t show any reaction that would have suggested it was policlub reinforcements. As it got closer, though, his expression only seemed to get angrier and angrier.
“Fine,” he spat out. “I’ll hear you out. If you’re right, it’s not like I have anything to lose.”
He tossed the comm at Tattletale, who caught it without any sign of the fear she’d shown inside the policlub, and simply walked out of our ring of guns without so much as a word.
A woman got out of the car – one I recognised as the chromed-up elven girl who’d accompanied Mr Johnson when we met him. She walked around the car and opened up the rear passenger door for Alabaster, who sneered at her as he got in the back seat.
Once the door was shut, the razorgirl paused before opening up the driver’s door.
“Mr Johnson has found your work satisfactory,” she said, her accent foreign – Russian, perhaps. “Your payment has already been wired to your fixer, and Mr Johnson will consider your team again for further work in this city.”
With that, she got back in the car and pulled out of the alleyway. With the vampire gone, it was like a literal ton of pressure had been lifted off our heads. We should have been celebrating, but it was like we all understood just how close things had been to going terribly wrong. Instead, we piled into the van in silence, and nobody said a word until we’d put five blocks between us and the policlub.
“I never did get to finish my meal,” Tattletale sighed, like all the danger she’d been in was nothing. “Anyone feel like finding a Stuffer Shack and grabbing a soyburger?”
It was a blatant ploy to lighten the mood, but we all latched onto it like it was a lifeboat in a tempest.