1
Tyler felt the swamp water seep into his boots. He tightened his grip on his service weapon, his sidearm slick from the thick humid air and his own sweat. The night vision element of the tactical lenses clipped to his glasses had turned the wooded Missouri swamp land into a ghost world of twisted and gnarled hickory trees, wearing Spanish moss like a funerary veil. The bare bones of the rewilded military base were still just about visible, lumps of concrete encrusted with lichen and cracked by tree roots. The old motor pool was a largely intact concrete bunker rising out of the swamp water, a low hill covered in the fecund plant life but with oddly angular sides and leaking man made light and sound.
Ahead of him Tyler could make out the back of one of the Bureau’s elite Hostage Rescue Team members. She wore servo-assisted armor, the words FBI stenciled across her back, pulse carbine at the ready. Despite her bulk she was somehow moving quietly. Tyler didn’t feel stealthy. His own breath was deafening in his ears and he seemed to slip or stumble every other step. He didn’t need to look behind him to know that Serena was following him, nearly silently.
The music was grating on him. It sounded like a looped nursery rhyme over a discordant industrial beat, with an incongruously light and fast bassline woven into the track. He could feel his heart trying to match the drumbeat. His excitement came with a thrill of guilt. He knew that there would be no hostages for HRT to rescue. Credence Greco had worked too hard to remain off grid, leaving such a small footprint that even AI-augmented analytics and surveillance had been little help in tracking him. Tyler knew that the families of those that had been taken were living in false hope.
Tyler had been searching for Greco for months. The break had finally come when speaking to the survivor of an earlier attempted abduction. She had been able to describe the old base. Finding the survivor had taken the time but Greco had messed up. It must have been early in his career as a monster. He had struck too close to his lair.
A flickering strobe light then a staccato thunder, and Tyler felt things passing him at velocity. Serena pulled him down from behind. It took him a moment for his brain to unpack what was happening. They were taking fire. The HRT agent ahead of them staggered, but then her pulse carbine was at her shoulder. A different frequency of strobic light: flickering lightning accompanied by the screaming of pulse-accelerated bullets. Tyler couldn’t see what she was firing at, but whatever was firing at them stopped. He wondered if Greco was already dead.
“Sentry weapons…” someone said over comms. It meant Greco could still be alive.
“Red Actual to Blue and Red teams, breach, breach, breach.” This over the comms from the HRT’s Special Agent in Charge
abandoned, Tyler staggered after her as fast as he could, trying not to faceplant in one of the many pools of stagnant water.
He caught a glimpse of the sentry weapon as he ran past it. It was a scratchbuilt job, a civilian rifle designed for hunters modified for full auto with an extended magazine, mounted on a mechanized tripod and augmented with a motion detector. It was just so much scrap now. Not for the first time Tyler wondered at the Venn diagram overlap between serial killers and DIY enthusiasts.
Tyler scrambled and slipped up the moss-covered concrete slope to the bunker’s side door, following the HRT agent. Serena was little more than a fleeting shape in the darkness, always just behind him, ready to assist.
Tyler held back as three more members of HRT’s Blue team materialized out of the dark undergrowth. Tyler felt entirely ineffectual standing there with only his sidearm: but then, HRT had only allowed him and Serena along as a courtesy. Serena, unarmed, was at his side now.
More fire and thunder. An underslung breaching shotgun hit one of the hinges with a solid lockbuster slug, then the other hinge and finally the door’s lock. Metal screamed as a power-assisted boot kicked the door in and Blue team filed in. As Tyler moved after them, he heard multiple breaching charges go off at the main doors as Red team effected an explosive entry. Like Tyler, nobody here had any illusions as to whether Greco’s victims were still alive.
He clambered over the metal door, near bent in two, into the bunker and put his back against the wall. He was trying to catch his breath, breathing harder than even his current level of exertion warranted. Serena stood by him, scanning the area around them.
Tyler heard more gunfire: strobic light animated the shadows. He was standing at the end of rows of shelves filled with years of accumulated junk, all of it coated in moss and mold.
Movement to his left. He swung round, bringing his sidearm up. The flashlight mounted under the weapon illuminated the figure in his night vision. He almost squeezed the trigger. Then Serena was next to him, pushing the weapon down. For a moment he thought that he had almost made a terrible mistake. One of Greco’s victims was alive. Then he saw the wires sprouting from the man’s head, the crudely implanted servos on his joints, the only partially successful embalming. Tyler slumped against the wall and forced himself to look away, but he could still see the crudely animated body.
Somebody was shouting to cease fire over the comms, panic in their voice. It was his voice. Then the HRT agents realized what was happening, the source of the movement all around them.
* * *
An agent was curled up in his armor, hugging his knees, sobbing, another one comforting him. A third spitting vomit from her mouth.
Serena led Tyler through the old, overgrown motor pool. The HRT agents glared at him as if it were his fault, as though he had brought them here, and he had. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t really feel anything.
Greco was small, dirty and unkempt. Two of the armored agents pushed him onto his knees between them. Tyler stood over him. Greco’s tear-filled, wide eyes looked somehow innocent.
Tyler thought of the expanding web of grief growing exponentially out from this inadequate man’s fantasies.
Serena, always Serena, pulled the sidearm from Tyler’s fingers and stopped him from doing something really stupid.
* * *
Tyler woke up in the hypersleep chamber screaming and clawing at the glass. The hatch slid open and Serena was standing over him.
* * *
The city’s starscrapers were a field of glass spikes reaching up to a washed-out night sky. The passenger shuttle’s torch was just about bright enough that it could be picked out against the indeterminate glow of the light pollution. The southern polar city grasped the shuttle’s bulk as it sank between the spires towards the aerospace port. A patina of executive comfort grew like a fungus over the port’s vast, labyrinthian industrial superstructure. Engines on a heavy burn made their last few directional adjustments as the passenger shuttle was engulfed in a bath of its own exhaust. Flames licked out from the raised shuttle port’s exhaust venting. The landing pad sank on vast shock-absorbing coils as the shuttle touched down.
Thick umbilicals snaked through the smoke, plugging into the ship to provide fuel, oxygen and other essentials while sucking out waste. Moments later the passenger bridge concertinaed out to mate with the shuttle and the hierarchical disembarkation process began.
* * *
Tyler had been awake, in theory, for the better part of twelve hours. He was, however, nursing his lag, his hypersleep hangover. He half welcomed the numbness that came with it. It left him with a definite sense of dislocation, awake but asleep, as though he were haunting himself. He was aware that he had dreamed the entire month he had been in hypersleep and that those dreams had been unpleasant. He had a strong suspicion as to the content of the dreams. With an entire month to sleep since they had left Gateway Station, it was inevitable that sooner or later his subconscious was going to cycle back to that swamp in Missouri. He was thankful that he couldn’t remember the actual dreams. That he remembered the sensation but not the content only heightened his feeling of dislocation, however.
“Special Agent Matterton?”
Tyler looked around the luggage reclamation area, a huge concrete hall with a vaulted ceiling, as though seeing it for the first time. He located the source of the voice: Serena. His partner. She was white, dark-haired, and her medium build belied her speed and power. Serena had been designed, apparently, to look professional but unassuming, unthreatening but not unpleasant to look at. In terms of
unassuming the designers had outright failed. In terms of being not unpleasant to look at, they had underestimated the aesthetics of professional competence. That she was a packaged product, made Tyler all the more uncomfortable. He did his best to forget it. Maybe that was the problem.
“Serena, we’re off duty. Can you please call me Tyler?” he asked again.
“Protocol,” she said by way of explanation. “I believe our luggage has found us and our liaison is waiting beyond customs.”
Somewhere else he would have perhaps asked if the local authorities could fast-track them, but here on Alexandria Colony everything had a cost. Even professional courtesy.
Their autonomous luggage caught up with them. Tyler watched Serena walk away from him. He was in too much of a twilight state to sort through his thoughts, so he just followed her. It was easier. She was never not going to know the correct thing to do, after all.
* * *
The pickup area was mostly full of liveried drivers. The Buchanan-Memorial aerospace port was close to the city’s financial district. It was a place for commercial rather than tourist travelers. Tyler tried looking for Jean in the crowd but things weren’t entirely making sense yet.
“There,” Serena said, pointing to a figure in a rumpled temperature-regulated business suit, leaning against a pillar in such a way as to cause ripples in the holographic advertising.
had looked when they had attended the academy back on Earth together. It was in and around her eyes that he did see a change, however. Even through his fugue he could make out all the new lines. They had both been pushed hard as cadets at Quantico but even at their most sleep-deprived, he had never seen her look so weary. Jean had quit the Bureau for the lure of significant money with Hume City Serious Crimes back when the Core Systems, particularly Alexandria Colony, had been aggressively headhunting from some of Earth’s more prestigious law enforcement agencies.
“You look like shit,” Jean told him.
Tyler managed a smile.
“Hey Jean, this is my partner, Serena.”
Jean turned to look at Serena.
“Hey,” she finally said.
“Detective Hoyle.” Serena nodded.
Jean turned from Serena as though dismissing her.
“Tired?” she asked.
“I’ve just slept for a month,” Tyler said.
“That’s what I thought. Want to get a beer? I’ll take you to your hotel later.”
Tyler didn’t want a beer. He didn’t particularly like drinking. He was, however, aware of its importance in forming and furthering productive relationships with fellow law enforcement professionals. Besides, he wanted to catch up with an old friend.
“Sure,” he said.
* * *
Tyler was impressed with the gyrocar despite himself. They lifted off from the top level of the AS port’s parking structure. Lines projected on the screen offered flight paths that would keep them well away from the port’s airspace and the exhaust venting from shuttles landing and taking off. Around them all was steel and mirrored glass. Tyler felt the same way about Hume City’s financial district as he felt about almost every financial district he’d ever visited: the glass and steel towers were clearly supposed to inspire awe, but it was always a sterile awe.
“Yours?” he asked, nodding at the gyrocar. It looked more than a little worn around the edges. On the other hand, it was an gyrocar.
“Came with the job,” she told him, concentrating on pressing buttons, adjusting controls with one hand, the other working the steering wheel-like yoke. She flew the gyrocar over the edge of the parking structure. Tyler could make out the aerospace port’s ground traffic on the raised roadways that grew from the huge structure. He saw bridges for the high-speed passenger maglev lines and the heavier, slower cargo-carrying ground trains. Between the port and the surrounding glass and steel was a chasm where the light from the surrounding buildings and roads faded into darkness. There wasn’t much in the way of air traffic moving in the chasm, though as Tyler’s eyes adjusted, he was pretty sure that he could make out light further down in the murk.
“The port’s one of the old atmosphere processors, isn’t it?” he said, then frowned. He was surprised that the
gyrocar was sinking down into the chasm.
“Yeah, WY realized in the sixties that if they were going to spend so much on the processors it made sense that they should be repurposed. I’ve seen super malls, entertainment complexes, and giant apartment blocks, but they’re good as aerospace ports because they’re solid enough to take the load and most of them already had a few heavy lift platforms.”
Having drifted past the main passenger concourse level, the light grew dimmer and dimmer. The lower levels of the aerospace port’s surrounding towers were caked in a thick layer of grime. Past the raised roadways and rail bridges that fed the cargo port, the only thing to see was blinking collision lighting on the superstructure.
“Where are we going for a beer?” Tyler asked. “Hades?”
Jean laughed without humor. She hadn’t switched on the gyrocar’s running lights but now, through the grimy steel supports of the superstructure, Tyler could see other lights far below. Garish neon, flashing in greens, pinks, blues, and a lot of red. The gyrocar was slowly spiraling down between the supports as Jean relied heavily on the collision sensors to pilot the vehicle. Tyler could make out the neighborhood now. It looked like a mixture of stage one colony pre-fabs, some stacked eight or more stories high, and more permanent, poured concrete, stage two type buildings. It could have been some kind of living history exhibition except everything was caked in soot from the aerospace
port’s exhaust discharge: on every building was a grimy, garish, blinking neon sign collectively offering everything from gambling to cheap booze to pit fighting—some even openly advertising narcotics.
Tyler glanced back at Serena, her face illuminated by the neon as she looked around.
Jean switched the gyrocar’s running lights back on and took the vehicle over the crawling ground traffic of the main drag. Tyler could see drug dealers, barkers for the clubs, what he suspected were gang members, sex workers of every gender, and their pimps, all working their grift on the crowded sidewalks. The rest of the people on the street had to be the clientele, the marks, the victims and johns. Even from the vantage point of the gyrocar the visitors to this place, this neon Hades, had the look of people from better neighborhoods, slumming for illicit pleasures. All of them, natives and vice tourists alike, stepping over the omnipresent homeless.
Tyler wasn’t sure what most people thought when they saw a place like this. Some sympathy, others disgust, some were perhaps intrigued or even fascinated, some angry; any combination of those feelings was possible. What Tyler thought, however, was that this place was a prime hunting ground for a predator. He was starting to develop an inkling of why Jean had brought him here.
As they flew over the street a Hume City PD cruiser crawled by underneath, going in the other direction. Nobody on the street paid the police any notice. A few faces looked up at the gyrocar but nobody showed them untoward attention. The steel blue light of the gyrocar’s headlights picked out the hydrocarbon rain from another shuttle landing.
“Put this on,” Jean told him, handing him a filter mask. He affixed it over his mouth and nose. Jean was doing the same thing even as she steered the gyrocar over a four-story poured concrete
tenement building. She took the gyrocar down between a stacked container motel and the tenement. Green and blinking red neon leaked into the alley, illuminating the filth.
The gyrocar’s gullwing door slid up as the vehicle slipped down between the two buildings. Tyler saw more than he wanted through the ‘motel’s’ windows. Then he felt the atmosphere seep into the gyrocar. The air had a physical presence: gritty, thick and membranous. It had an unpleasantly warm and humid quality, formed of something more toxic than mere moisture.
Tyler felt the gyrocar touch down.
“Welcome to the Exhaust Town Strip,” Jean told him as her own door slid up and she climbed out.
Jean had parked the gyrocar with its rear facing the main street, which Tyler guessed was the Strip. She opened the trunk. There were a number of beers in a cooler. Then she extruded a straw from the top of a bottle and fed it into an aperture in her mask.
Tyler reached into the smoking moisture of the cooler and retrieved a beer for himself to show good form. He went to extrude the beer’s straw and then stopped.
“We’re standing in a crime scene, aren’t we?” he said.
“The whole of the Strip is one big crime scene,” she told him. He couldn’t quite make out her demeanor here. She seemed bitter. Tyler wasn’t sure if it was aimed at him or not.
“A murder scene?”
“It’s certainly statistically likely. Your synth
going to stay in the car?”
“She’s not ‘my’ anything. Her name’s Serena and I’d rather you used the term artificial person.”
Jean didn’t say anything. She just looked at him. Was it obvious? Had he made too much of defending Serena?
“I live there,” Jean said pointing at the tenement and then sucked some beer through the lid-straw. “On the top floor, but it’s still Exhaust Town. I have to pay one of the local gangs to protect the car.” She patted the gyrocar.
Tyler frowned. It didn’t really make any sense.
“I thought you came here for the money.”
“The key phrase is on-target-earnings.”
“And you’ve not been meeting the targets?” he asked.
Jean just took another sip of the beer. Tyler did the same and tried not to grimace. He still didn’t like the taste, and the atmosphere of Exhaust Town just made it worse.
“To earn you need to make high-profile cases but all the cherry cases go to those with the rank. They’ll throw you scraps if you do their legwork for them but that’s about it. Rank, and the profile of the case, dictate access to forensics, analytics, manpower and every other resource. You can pay for it out of your own pocket but who has the money?” She didn’t look at him as she said it. Perhaps she was fearing an ‘I-told-you-so’ from him. It wasn’t really how he worked: besides, Tyler wasn’t sure that HCPD had done anything other than formalise what were practically unwritten laws back in the United Americas. He’d heard colleagues say that people got the law enforcement that they paid for more than once.
“So, what am I doing here?” he said instead. criminals. They’re just working stiffs, mainly for the AS port, but they’re poor and have no safety net. On the Strip, however, people go missing all the time. The gangs kill each other, others get trafficked up-town, junkies OD or kill each other over drugs, or they lose their place in the food chain, and sometimes people just get in the wrong car. Nobody gives a fuck.” Jean paused. Tyler just waited. Jean’s mask covered much of her face: with her head down, her hair covered the rest. Once again, he reminded himself that he didn’t like beer by taking a sip. “I’ve been hearing things for the last few months. People are going missing in greater than usual numbers and the street bosses don’t know who’s doing it.” She pointed down the alley. “A woman used to sleep in this alley. Her name was Maggie. ...
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