Chapter Twenty-Four - Ingenious

“Trash Island is probably the most famous location filled with human waste, but there are other, larger deposits. Notable examples are the Cambodian trash castle, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

There are also super-landfills closer to home.

Such as Florida.”

--“Where’s the Trash?” Death Magazine article, 2046

***

“Ouch,” I said to the dirty ceiling of the decontamination room.

Something banged against my shin, and I folded my knee so that whatever it was could get past.

The door closed, and the room thumped as it locked. “Cat! Are you okay?”

I swallowed, then raised my head. Gomorrah was standing next to the heavy door, a hand on the handle. She’d closed it, which, all things considered, was pretty clever. I looked lower, towards my chest. There was something flat and shiny squished under one breast.

Reaching over, I tugged at it, then inspected the almost flower-shaped disk that must have been a bullet a moment ago. “Oh,” I said. “That’s what hit me.”

My armour had a small smear, the paint over that area scuffed. No dents though, which was nice. “Are you injured?” Gomorrah asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. I climbed onto my elbows. “What the fuck was that?”

“A gun. I think it’s a turret—I didn’t exactly stop to stare,” Gomorrah said.

“Not the nicest welcome,” I said.

“I can’t detect any electronic switches, or any program designed to fire a weapon in the vicinity. It’s possible that the trap is entirely mechanical,” Myalis said for our benefit.

Grunting, I half-turned, then stumbled to my feet as the shower started to spit and gush water back down onto us. “Great,” I said. “Should we try again?”

“You want to get shot again?” Gomorrah asked.

I chuckled. “No. I’m standing to the side this time.”

Gomorrah did the same, stepping back so she was pressed up against the wall. I reached over and tugged the door open, the massive thing creaking even as the water from the decontamination shower finally stopped.

Nothing happened.

“Alright,” I said. “Myalis, do my shoulder guns have cameras?”

They do.

I deployed one of my railguns, then leaned over so that it could poke out around the corner. Myalis helpfully filled the vision of my cybernetic eye with the fish-eyed sight from my gun’s camera-sight. There was a plain corridor, relatively wide, with pipes here and there and a lot of fifty-five gallon drums to the side. In the middle of it was a rickety table, one with fold-out legs, and atop that a gun in some homemade rack.

“That thing looks like it was put together by a kid,” I said as I flicked my railgun back off and moved into the corridor.

A glance to the side revealed the trigger. A bit of rebar, held in place by a few nails welded into the wall next to the door. A piece of cardboard was taped on the end. Opening the door shoved the cardboard aside and made the rebar drop, which tugged at what looked like a piece of fishing line that ran through some rings all the way over to the gun.

Gomorrah inspected the booby-trap, then hummed. “Primitive,” she said.

“It worked though,” Rac said.

I rubbed at my chest. “Yeah, it did. Very creative. I’d give the asshole that put this together a gold star if I could find him.”

“I don’t know if this alerted anyone,” Gomorrah said. “It looks like the kind of trap that you just need to know about to avoid.” She reached into the decontamination airlock and pulled out a long bar with a crude hook on the end. Something to disarm the trap from within, I guessed.

“There are marks on the walls,” Franny said.

“Where?” I asked as I looked around.

“In the airlock,” she said. “I thought they were graffiti.”

The nun was right; there were some marks painted against the inner edge of the door. “Warnings, then,” I said. “They’ve got their own little codes and shit.”

“It’s a thieves’ cant,” Rac said. “Us trash people have something like it. Marks that tell you where good trash is, where the trash cans are watched, which ones are bad, and where to go to get away from the cops.”

“Do the Sewer Dragons get attacked often enough to need traps like this?” I asked.

Franny hummed. “They probably do. Most of the gangs in New Montreal are pretty small. One, two buildings. Maybe a district at most. If they get too big, they become a problem, and then someone fixes that problem because it hits their bottom line. Or they start making enough money that a corp steps in and replaces them. The Sewer Dragons are basically the exception to a lot of rules. Their territory is huge, the entire city.”

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“And that means they bump into every gang, not to mention every corporation, being dicks and wanting to use the sewers for shady shit,” I said. “At the same time, they’re a necessary evil.”

“So it’s complicated,” Rac said succinctly.

I nodded, then gestured deeper down the corridor. “Shall we?”

“You first,” Gomorrah said.

I did have a whole heap more armour on. Still, I took my time as I moved ahead, eyes roving across the walls and ceiling and floor. I was expecting pressure plates and hidden lasers and maybe one of those giant boulders ready to roll down a slight incline.

I wasn’t exactly well-versed when it came to traps.

The next section of the corridor was somewhat unique. The wall to our right was made of stone. Not cement, but rock that had been cut into and chopped apart, the marks left by some no-doubt massive machine still left over after however much time had passed since they dug this part out.

“How deep are we?” I asked.

“You should be about sub four,” Rac said. “Myalis let me play with the map. So you’re pretty deep. There are these big mountain and hill bits that reach up from the dirt-ground and all the way up to the underside of the city in some places.”

“Alright,” I said.

I glanced at my own map, just to have an idea of where we were. There were a lot of corridors ahead, a whole maze of passages, with some ending in elevators that ran up into the sub-basements of the buildings above. We were, if I zoomed out, pretty close to the dead centre of New Montreal, the place with the tallest towers and where the richest folk lived.

Our destination was only a couple of hundred metres away, a section filled with small rooms and a few larger areas that might have been factories once. Not necessarily part of the sewers, I didn’t think, but connected all the same.

At the next door, both Gomorrah and I paused, then looked around for marks and obvious traps. “There,” Gomorrah said, she spotted the little painted symbols first.

“Rac, you know what these mean?” I asked as I stared at them closer. They looked like... a house, some squiggles, and what might have been a mask? They were blue, blue, and green, respectively.

“I’ve no fucking clue,” Rac said. “I don’t do sewer cant, I do trash cant.”

“So you can’t understand these?” I asked while restraining a giggle... poorly.

Gomorrah sighed. “Why do I even put up with you?” she muttered while Rac giggled over the line. She reached out and opened the door a notch, then looked around it for triggers. “Nothing I can see,” she said.

I nodded, then took her place behind the door and opened it carefully. Nothing exploded, so that was nice. At least until Myalis piped up. “There are lingering traces of... quite a few toxic chemicals in the air. I suspect this airlock is meant to kill anyone using it without the proper precautions.”

“Anything we should worry about?” I asked.

“Atyacus has disabled the air exchange already,” Myalis replied. “The area past the airlock seems like another short passage, followed by an area with more activity.”

“How much more?” I asked.

“I count twenty-two active augmentations.”

“Any guards?” I asked as I stepped in.

Myalis took just a second to respond. “One augmentation in the next room. The user is currently distracted observing some adult material.”

I shook my head. “Well, let’s not interrupt our new pal’s alone time,” I said as I turned on my invisibility. “Gomorrah, do you mind if I check out the next area solo? I need to do something with all of this stealth gear. You can back-seat samurai and not-flirt with Franny.”

Gomorrah sniffed. “Fine. Do try not to get yourself shot any more than you need to.”

“You know I don’t live a life where people try to not shoot me. That’s how you know you’re doing things right. Or very wrong.”

“You’re so terribly wise,” she deadpanned.

I was grinning as I pushed the door open a crack, then snuck into the next room over. Time to see what was up at last.

***