The Song Conductor Series:
Precision without compromise.
Multi-feed for any—and every—audience.
Every engagement a symphonic performance.
I was filled with nervous energy, and I was doing my very best not to let it show.
Fidgeting with my hands. Shifting back and forth. Pacing.
For about the eighth time in the past quarter hour, I crossed my arms and rested my right palm on the grip of my banger, where it rested in its shoulder holster, under my jacket.
Like all bangers, it was a cheaply made chunk of extruded polymer, a non-serviceable, non-reloadable piece of shit. Mine was nine shots of small-caliber, high-velocity rounds "tuned for defeating intermediate armors." The marketing was dubious, but I let myself get upsold into buying this design by the shop VI. I'd had it for over two years now after getting robbed and having my entire shit pummeled on a remote gig. So now this was my work piece, a small piece of security, even if mainly served the purpose of dissuading potential violence and placating my nerves.
I'd had to point it at people a few times since then, but I'd never been forced to fire it.
And that was more than fine by me, honestly.
I loved violence and the catharsis of seeing your enemies slain and inert at your feet.
Virtually.
Actual violence in meat space left me queasy, drenched in sweat, and feeling like my heart was about to explode in my chest. It wasn't an exaggeration to say I was… pretty much fucking useless in a fight.
It was how Big Cee and I met in the first place. I'd taken a tiny schoolyard fist directly to the face after telling a classmate to shut up. He'd called me something I didn't fully understand, but I knew contextually it was to put me down and make me feel small for playing with the girls. The word he'd used stuck with me longer than the bruise did, but what stuck out more was the vision of the biggest boy in the class standing there, red-faced and pointing down at the other boy he'd just put on the ground for punching me.
We'd been like water and CA glue ever since, and while it was the first time that happened, it certainly wasn't the last during the school years.
Kids are tiny, Id-driven, asswipes.
"Chill, chica. You're putting the rest of us on edge. You sure you don't want a puff of this kusa?"
One of the younger members waggled a smoldering blunt in my direction, the same one they'd been nursing off and on for the past fifteen minutes. The smell of weed was strong in the poorly lit warehouse we were in, but it only partially masked the stench of hydraulic fluid, heavy industry lubricant, and mildewy polycrete.
I wet my lips and shook my head. The offer was tempting, but I didn't want anything altering my mental state for the work ahead. Mistakes could happen, and I didn't want it blamed on a lack of responsibility on my part.
A sudden electrical hum broke the relative quiet of the warehouse, and there was a mild, screeching protest from one of the bay doors as it rolled upwards to expose harsh headlamps and a faux chrome grille of a bog-standard cargo van.
One of the old hats shifted the bulky rattler he had strapped on, hands resting on the grips. His left eye flickered, and several more overhead floodlights clanked on, raising the lighting from dingy murk to mostly lit in the middle of the building where we were situated.
The van came to a stop, the bay door closed behind it, and the locks on both clunked.
I couldn't help but notice the spatter of arterial blood on the passenger-side door and the gouges and dents in the polymer window set into the door. There were a few bits of unidentifiable meat plastered to the bottom half of the passenger door. I suspected it might be gray matter, but I looked away before my stomach had the chance to react.
The lights went off, and two old hats stepped out of the front of the van. The back doors opened a moment later, and Cee and a person I didn't recognize stepped out of the back. He looked around until he located me and flashed me with a sweaty and flushed-looking grin.
"Took you long enough," one of the people who'd been waiting in my small group said. There were between a dozen and twenty other members in the warehouse in addition to the small group I'd been loitering with, but they were clustered into their own groups or keeping their eyes open for unsolicited activity in and around the building.
"Things got a little more rowdy than we would have liked, but no major problems," Cee reported.
"Agents?" One of the old hats asked.
Cee and one other member of his group shook their heads. "Nah," he said, "a few contractors who were feeling like cowboys, made the mistake of thinking that the added hazard pay would be worth it. This block disagrees," he grinned and tapped two fingers to his color block. The gesture was repeated around the group to knowing smirks.
"Yo, K! This is all you from here out. Let's get this done, yeah?" he called over to me.
I nodded hastily and walked over, keeping my virtual eyes downcast and away from the bullet holes and bodily fluids. The two groups merged, with the exception of us two, who climbed into the back of the van. Their chatter provided some welcome background noise. I took a look around the brightly lit interior space of the van.
Haas security lockers lined the walls and below the limited seating space that was one part bench seat, one part footlocker on each side of the floor. Haas was on the high end of the spectrum, but it shouldn't be a problem for me to pop them open. I walked to the front end of the cramped space and got to work.
I slid up the left sleeve of my jacket and exposed the purpose-built slate I had strapped to my forearm. It looked and acted like a normal handy, but was anything but. Ninety percent of the boards were yanked, along with most of the battery, all to make room for the cracking hardware I'd installed into it. I pulled cables from my jacket pocket and flipped through a ring of socket adapters looking for my Haas key.
There. Long datalink jumper into the key, and the other end into the slate. Another datalink into my DNI port, and down into the slate. A thought started up my soft suite. The screen filled with a black background and the white logo of the grinning skull with bunny ears and X's for eyes. Skunny-kun softs were some of the best out there and didn't come cheap. It was the subject of constant debate whether or not Skunny was a VI, an extremely talented and well-connected decker, or a pseudonym for a collective.
The way the soft popped open corporate-grade encryption, it was almost certainly involved in the corporate world in some way. Might even be a corporate product itself, it wouldn't be the first or last time a corp got caught double-dealing, selling the keys to their clients' kingdoms to put extra pressure on selling the latest and greatest subscription service packages.
Real bastard shit.
I connected the slate to the first locker and did a preliminary scan.
I could feel the anticipation radiating off Cee.
"What's the word?" he whispered over to me.
"A little unusual, but easily doable. A couple of the boxes have a much higher grade lock than the rest."
"How long do you think?"
I hummed a note while my eyes flicked around in my skull to look at things that were visible to me alone.
"Mmh. Ten minutes for all the lower stuff, another ten to fifteen for the harder ones. Just keep in mind that cracking is highly variable, might take thirty seconds on one, eight minutes on the next. Are we on a time crunch? You all got positive confirmation on the scramblers, right?"
He nodded smoothly and wiped his brow with one palm. Probably stims and not nerves. At least, I hoped. Reaching over, he squeezed my shoulder, then leaned back against the inner armoring of the van's side.
Work progressed quickly, and my initial estimate was pretty close, which was good, since it was more of a spitball estimate than it was napkin math.
One by one, the seals on the drawers popped open, and their contents unloaded and inventoried. Their intel had been good. Lots of high-grade medical drugs suitable for use in a corporate clinic are put into the discard bin for whatever reason. Packaging defects. Expiration dates. Bad seals on sub-packaging, so the entire production run was tossed.
There was a fair amount of narcotics and stims as well, some recreational, all high-end. This was going to be a tidy sum of a haul when everything was finally moved.
The first two of the more secure compartments popped open, and the contents were on cryo. Nitrogen vapor rolled out of the wide tray under the bench opposite where I was sitting. You couldn't see shit underneath it.
Cee leaned over and waved a hand to clear it enough to get eyes on the contents.
Vacuum sealed, wrapped, and tagged in clear polymer bags. Spotlessly clean, shiny chrome with their connections neatly arranged around each device and marked by nerve cluster. I didn't recognize most of it, but a few stood out from marketing images I'd seen. Class 2 cyberware: restricted and credentialed-use only. The spicy shit that agents used and had to get yanked out of them if they lost their credentials. Hard to move without serious connections to the big dogs in the black market. Likely that this would be going through the gang's connect to one of the organized crime outfits of their choice.
It wasn't the most restricted grade, that was Class 3, but having this stuff in you without some forged credentials or institutional-level know-how on scanner spoofing would get you arrested and/or shot on sight going through any transit checkpoint. Having it in you meant you'd never leave X-3 unless you were in a body bag for extraction purposes or for incarceration or forced conscription.
Plenty of people still had it in them. The black market was huge, and one of the main revenue streams for the aptly-named black clinics throughout the city.
Cee was all smiles. To the right buyer, this was worth more than the rest of the haul combined. He snapped the inner seal closed and pulled the insulated container from the secure storage drawer. The cryogenic lines disconnected with a pop, snap, and hiss. The container would hold temp off its own supply for a number of hours before it needed to be reconnected to a loop. He lifted it up and out with a grunt; it was deceptively heavy with all the transportation hardware for the cybernetics. I was left alone in the van while the excitement and chatter outside spiked. Laughing and flesh slapping.
Lower-grade cybernetics weren't so sensitive; most of them didn't even need special packaging or transport so long as the packing seals were kept in good condition. Chilling and freezing were standard practice for anything that needed to be ripped, as active decay of the body could irreversibly damage the cybernetics. As a general rule of thumb, the better the wares, the more sensitive they were to conditions.
I closed the drawer with the tip of my boot and swapped benches to hit the other one. The sooner I wrapped up here, the faster I could get back to grinding away on my deck.
It was a bit of a warning sign and red flag for most addicts, but I didn't really care about credits that much. Credits were a means to an end; they allowed me to do what I wanted to do, kept me clothed, and in the privacy of my own cube. It was typically around the point when a sim addict stopped caring about money that their addiction started to lose altitude, and the downward spiral began.
The thing was, I'd never been one of the people who were obsessed with credits or the width of the readout on the digiwallet. For some, it's all they lived for, or seemed like it. My motivations hadn't really changed with my addiction when it came to money.
Minutes passed while I monitored the progress of my cracking soft, I sat in the van alone, listening to some tunes on my lattice in the background while I worked. The last drawer unlocked when my soft finished executing. I'd thought it was two initially, but it was a single double-height unit.
Some mist seeped up and over the lip of the drawer where it'd popped out slightly. My curiosity got the better of me. I wasn't one of those stupid fucks who were going to dip my fingers into the loot, but I did enjoy the appeal of seeing a box open and the portal artifact revealed. I looped my fingers around the handle and slid it open.
I waved away the mist shrouding the contents.
Large, transparent cylindrical containers, probably polymer. Strange organic shapes in liquid suspension, partially obscured by the mist, condensation, and light refraction.
Cloned organs? Would be quite valuable if they were markerless, medical-grade. That sort of stuff doesn't come down here unless you're lucky enough to have your IIMM lottery ticket get pulled.
Imrael's X-3 charity and medical outreach programs were the best and last hope for most X-3 citizens with systemic iss--
Something moved in one of the containers. I leaned closer to get a look, a cat's cradle of curiosity-driven strings tugging me in eight different directions at the same time.
An eggshell white snake-worm-centipede-leech thing slapped into the polymer between me and it with enough force to shake the contents of the entire drawer.
I screamed at a pitch that would vibrate glass and threw myself backwards, smacking my head firmly enough into the wall of the van behind me to daze me, and I nearly ripped my datalink out.
I slumped onto the bench seat with my vision momentarily blurred and my head ringing like a bell. That was going to leave a hell of a lump on my head, and I had the impending doom sensation of knowing that within an hour, I'd have a monster headache. Kind of like when you got hit in the balls, and it didn't immediately hurt, but your gut started turning upside down in preparation for the world of pain that was coming.
Cee darted around the back of the van and into view, and the vehicle rocked as he hopped inside to check everything out.
I was furiously rubbing at the back of my head to try to deal with the blooming sting.
"What happened!?" He demanded.
"I fucking-- ow! Got startled by some freak shit in the box and hit my head. Fuck!"
He laughed loudly and lightly thumped me on the shoulder.
I scowled, unplugged my key from the port, slid to the end of the seat, and stepped out of the back of the van. I needed space, and I didn't want to be around… whatever the fuck that thing in there was. I had a creeping suspicion, but I didn't want to voice it.
I walked over to where a table had been set up, and people had been munching on snacks while waiting for me to finish working, and slipped into a vacant seat, still rubbing at my noggin through my holomask. Probably looked weird seeing a cute animated-style lady with part of a jacketed forearm clipping into her head.
Someone passed me a can of Blast! and I cracked it open and chugged it. The caffeine would help with the headache, and the cold drink was soothing to my wounded pride.
"You should try out for Sector's Talent with those pipes of yours," one of the hoods teased.
I flipped him off, and he snickered.
Several of the old hats stood up and moved over to the back of the van, where a discussion was taking place. I hoped they'd hurry up so I could get the fuck out of here and go home. Might drop in a U-Med on the way back and try to get a couple pain tabs dispensed.
"What was in there that got you screeching like that?" The lady from earlier asked.
"I don't know, cloned organs, or some nasty shit. One of the things was moving around," I grumbled.
"Yeah, they do that. Gotta keep them in shape while they're in storage. Can't stick a heart in someone that's all flabby and flaccid."
I cringed internally at her phrasing, but nodded anyway. "Makes sense," I admitted. "Didn't look like any heart I've ever seen before, but who knows what kind of weird shit they're cooking up in labs topside."
Voices got elevated as the discussion turned into what sounded like a heated argument. I heard Cee's voice involved on one side.
"Enough!" shouted one of the old hats, and he chopped his hand through the air like he was issuing orders to troops on the battlefield. "Leave it! Pack the other shit up, and we're moving the van where it can be found and turning the scramblers off!"
Brows furrowed, and jaws flexed, but two finger salutes tapped on color blocks. The group split and immediately got to work executing their tasks. The rest of us stood up and loosely gathered, and Cee walked over to address us. He took a spot a few feet in front of me, with the rest of the group to my sides and behind me. Weird positioning, I was a nobody here, just a tech. He was looking at me as he addressed the group.
"Pack it up and get it moving. Everything counted can get pushed, anything that still needs to be logged, keep together, and we'll go through it back at HQ. No funny drok, and stick to the main routes."
"What's going on? Why the hats arguing? Why we leaving shit behind?" A voice behind me and to my left.
"Something in the van that doesn't belong there, and it's not worth the heat, let alone the smoke. We're seeing that it gets back to where it belongs and cutting out with what we got. It's a good take, nobody here's going to complain about that, right?"
Shaking heads in the corner of my vision.
The girl who'd been chatting with me asked in a lower voice, for just the immediate area, "What is it, Cee?"
He pulled a face. "Biotech, probably for a big-shot User down here. Nopch."
Not our problem, chum. Three-speak for blind deafmute mode, find something else to occupy your interest. If he's right, he's right. Biotech was at the absolute bleeding edge of personal enhancement technology, and nobody sane wanted it outside the most hardcore Users and Divers who were okay with sticking living alien shit inside themselves for the gains. BT flicks are their own genre of horrorshows.
I'd count myself on the side of what I assumed was the cooler-headed old hats. Crime, and to a lesser extent, life itself in X-3 was an equation. Tokh had a phrase that roughly translated to "chase the meat worth eating." The concept of selective predation. It was the best summary of this concept. You did your best to stay below the notice of things that would squish you like a bug, and they largely ignored things not worth the time or effort. Making yourself notable was flirting with the reaper.
This was well out of our weight class, even the larger institution of the street gang, which was represented by the old hats, knew better. We'd keep the scraps and politely return the big-ticket items.
Big Cee motioned for people to get moving. Addressing me directly now, he said, "You're all good to go, Kay. I'll swing by when I'm able to settle up with you, if that works."
I went to nod, and a throb at the back of my head reminded me that maybe that wasn't the best idea right now. I smiled with my digital face and gave him a thumbs-up instead.
He smiled back.
There was a strange thud sound originating from the opposite side of the van. Cee turned toward where the sound had come from and glanced around, his head tilted back slightly as if he was looking at the shadowed ceiling of the warehouse.
A series of rapid, individual, deafening bangs reverberated through the largely open space of the warehouse, and each one felt like someone was rapping me in the back of the head where I'd hit it.
Shouting and screaming, alarm and chaotic motion.
Someone pointed a blindingly bright tactical lamp attached to the end of their rattler at one end of the warehouse and up, where the structural members supported the roof.
A dark, blurry shape was poised on one of the steel beams.
The person with the rattler opened up with sustained automatic fire; the shots were surprisingly accurate. Probably one of the vets with a good collection of wares.
Ear-splitting shrieks in time with rattler shots, punctuated by blooming showers of sparks, like holographic fireworks.
Big Cee pulled an equally big piece from the back of his pants, held it securely in both hands, and squeezed the trigger. V-shaped jets of fire belched out of the top of the frame near the muzzle, and each shot was like someone thumping me on my chest.
I screamed, but I don't think I made a dent in the bedlam.
The shape dropped from the ceiling to the polycrete floor and resolved itself into a solid shape.
A full Borg!
It looked humanoid in that it had two arms, two legs, a head, and a torso. But the proportions were entirely wrong, the arms and legs too long and narrow. The entire thing was all black, angular panels, extremely sleek and aerodynamic looking. It had something strapped or attached to its back, but you couldn't make it out with everything going on.
"Kieran! Get the fuck out of here!" Cee's voice bellowing, broke me out of my paralysis.
I was somehow still on my feet, despite shaking in place like I was having a seizure.
Go. I need to go.
My eyes darted around for the best way out of this. The Borg was standing by one of the side entrances now, it had been hopping around acrobatically like it wasn't bothered in the slightest by the constant stream of bullets dusting the walls directly behind it.
I've never been here before today, I don't know my way around here! The bay doors are closed, and I don't know how to open them. The emergency exit sign is behind the Borg!
I was trying to watch the predator in the room while trying to find a way to get myself out of here. It reached over one shoulder and pulled the object off its back. It was the most stereotypical street gang heavy piece I'd seen. A rattler you'd find at nearly any shop or stall.
It cocked it, rotated it sideways like it was a block banger vid, and started spraying back.
Suddenly, it was like someone got a rebar glowing red-hot and pressed it directly into my left thigh, and someone lightly punched me in the side of my abdomen.
My face was wet and sticky, and I tasted metal.
Cee was in front of me. Most of his head was missing. I could see the inside of his scalp. He toppled over to the side and sprawled on the floor, where he lay twitching in place.
I turned and ran. I could hardly see out of one eye; it burned like crazy, and I couldn't stop blinking it. Every step was a reminder that I had burning metal stuck in my leg.
Someone I recognized from my hab-block went toppling over a railing, smacking into the floor in front of me as I ran past. It was the cute girl with the fingernails I liked. The hollow sound her skull made when it bounced off the polycrete cut through the rest of the noise and made me gag mid-shuffle.
I sort of blanked out. I didn't know what I was doing, I wasn't paying attention, I kept thinking about that image--
Skunny beeped at me, and an industrial hatch in the floor swung upwards. A bar ladder and yellow light seemed awfully welcoming right about now. I got halfway down the ladder before my left leg went out on me. My hands were slick with blood. I fell straight on my ass. I couldn't stay here; I had to keep moving.
A utility access tunnel. The city was packed with them. Tall, narrow, filled with pipes, conduit, and potentially dangerous things.
I couldn't remember if I closed the hatch. It didn't matter; they had an automatic timer to reseal after a few minutes, and I didn't have it keyed out.
I crawled up to my hands and knees and got myself back upright. I had to move.
These access tunnels ran for millions of kilometers within the city and were notoriously maze-like. They are legitimately dangerous to navigate; it was drilled into us in school.
Traversing fifteen intersections, you could be almost anywhere. Twenty million routes deep, with no maps.
I shuffled down the tunnel; the racket in the warehouse wasn't anything more than a dull, distant echo down here.
I took a couple of turns, but didn't go too far out of my way to cover my tracks. I was nearly certain that the Borg couldn't fit through the tiny shaft under the hatch. There was no sound here other than my own wheezing and occasional pained whimper.
And a soft pitter-patter. My side ached. I had my left hand pressed over the front of my flank.
It was funny. My thigh hurt so bad that it made my head feel fuzzy, but it wasn't bleeding too badly. My side was the opposite.
I had to get to a U-Med. But I was out of breath, and my legs were wobbly. I could sit down for a minute to get my wind back.
I worked in a retail office. I was more out of shape than the average resident, overweight in a way that constantly grated at me, and I just didn't do cowboy shit like this.
I carefully rested my head back against the wall of the tunnel. My head was killing me on top of everything else.
Probably gave myself a concussion. I wheezed a half-laugh. That hurt. Let's not do that again.
I closed my eyes to try to shut out the ugliness in my head.
Another intersection or two, and I'll pop back up to street level and find the nearest U-Med. I hope more people were able to get away.
A rustling sound teased at my ear.
Probably clickers. The tunnels alternated between being empty and being filled with mechanical insects. They looked like silver and polymer cockroaches, with tiny red glowing eyes. You'd see the mark of either One or Eleven on their back, depending on function. An entire robotic ecosystem tucked out of sight, quietly maintaining the city.
The sound again, more of a rasping, and closer. I cracked an eye and looked over in the direction it was coming from. I didn't see anything.
A weight dropped down on top of my head, shoulders, and chest. My eyes shot open, and my hands shot up to grip at whatever it was.
Eggshell white. Soft in some places, hard in others. Slick, too slick. I couldn't get a grip on it anywhere. I tipped over, thrashing and wrestling with it as it squeezed my neck until I felt like my eyes were going to pop out of my skull.
I couldn't breathe.
My ears were ringing. My vision was darkening at the edges. The slickness was at my jaw now, my cheek, and I had a split-second where I was able to gulp air. Something forced itself past my lips, over my tongue, down my throat. Stringy wet gelatin, slightly bitter. I couldn't stop it, couldn't bite down, I just felt it pressing deeper.
Sound and pain fell away.
There was only the squirming pressure in my chest. I couldn't tell if I was dying or--