Qentiga
1.
Monkey Crocodile Temple was one
of many nightclubs that had re-invented itself to cater exclusively to the
Aztec Band craze. A two-story rectangle of concrete covered in garish paint and
rippling with capering animations of stylised animals and the sort of old gods
who demanded blood.
Nicholas Mitcham entered the club
with the wary curiosity of someone who hadn't set foot into a nightclub for
twenty years. A lot of the territory was familiar to his memories; the bass
pulse in his innards long before he reached the main wall of noise, the smell
of cheap booze and air-freshener failing to mask the heady undercurrent of hot,
hormone-ravaged bodies and the inevitable glowering bouncers prowling the
perimeter of the dance floor. Amongst this was the unfamiliar. The music was
nothing but a rhythmic, pounding noise to him. The synthetic feathers, bones
and body paint the kids were done up in looked ridiculous, but still not quite
as stupid as the dance moves.
He made his way through the edge
of the heaving press towards the booths near the back bar. The music changed
gears and most of the lights went out. He had to slow down to avoid barging
into people - or a supporting pillar - and he felt the tension level in the
club start to climb, the movements of everyone around him getting stiffer with
anticipation. When the music resolved in a barrage of bass, light came blazing
back in the form of a shower of artificial rain, made of glowing multi-coloured
drops of Slick, a gel-like self-illuminating sweet designed to
bio-degrade in minutes once it was out of its container. The crowd exploded
with fresh energy, hands raised up to catch the Slick, cramming it into their
mouths as they danced.
At forty seven, Nick was old
enough to look at the crowd of be-feathered, jerking bodies under the flashing
lights and wonder what the fuck was wrong with the youth of today - but he was
not so old that when the beat dropped he didn't feel it. Some primal call in
the music distantly answered in the back of his mind, where his lizard-brain
capered in the same tribal way as the skinny, spotty little arseholes all
around him.
He slipped into a small, sticky
booth, kicking some empty bottles out of the way from under the tiny table
while his gut scraped a few more off the tiny table. He got his digipad out and
thumbed his way through settings for his EyeSpy camera to compensate for the
shitty lighting before he started to record. It was 01:45 and what was going to
happen was supposed to happen soon.
As soon as the EyeSpy was turned
on, the muscles in his eyes respond to the twitch-dampeners and he did a few
slow pans of the dance floor to get back into the feel of it while he waited
for the main show to begin. He hadn't personally set up any of it - he never
did, if he could help it - but things had been passed along by second and third
parties and if all had gone to plan, once that particular batch of Slick kicked
in, he'd have himself a story. Not a great story, but things had been a
little slow lately.
It was barely noticeable at first,
just a few dancers halting mid-thrash and gazing up at the ceiling with their
arms dropping limp by their sides. It spread, accelerating through the crowd
until the few that hadn't been crunching down mouthfuls of Slick stopped
dancing themselves, looking around at the sudden field of open-mouthed, glassy
eyed ceiling-gazers.
A bouncer crossed Nick's frame of
view shouting into his collar mic, "We've been fucking zombied!"
Nick twitched half a smile as he
filmed the un-zombied dancers shifting from unease, to a more annoyed alarm.
They knew as well as he did that the rozzers would be on their way soon and
they ducked and scampered their way through the zombies to make themselves
scarce before the law showed up. What they didn't know was that this particular
nightclub was smack-bang on the border between 4L London Constabulary territory
and their bitter rivals, Surrey CapSec Security. Both forces had been called
out by two separate barmen who had been slipped a few credits for their trouble
and while the zombie-footage was something Nick could sell as stock 'zombie
menace' for the news feeds, a story showing two private police forces having a
dust up at the scene was a rent-payer.
CapSec were usually a bit slower
off the mark, but given the contested territory, they still managed to be the
first to arrive, decked out in navy blue hardshell armour with battenberg bands
and the corporate abortion of 'PROLICE' stencilled across their backs. For some
reason they were already flashing their laser-sighted guns around the club,
sending a spray of red dots over the completely harmless zombies on the
dancefloor. A CapSec officer with pips was waving her arms around, shouting and
Nick's EyeSpy translator took a stab at lipreading, flashing up subtitles on a
separate layer. It was never a sure-thing, but the gist seemed to be that the
officer wanted the music killed and the house lights put on.
While the officer was shouting at
a bouncer, 4L Constabulary rocked up, materialising out of the gloomy
entranceway in black silksteel softshell that proudly displayed the word
POLICE, since 4L was the only company with the licence for it. Their officer
was a man with sergeants stripes who was so solidly muscled, he looked like he
could snap the CapSec officer with one hand.
The argument started almost
instantly and the flashing lights and pounding rythm made a great backdrop for
the scene, subtitles stuttering across the bottom of his vision. He would edit
them later, either to a best guess, or to whatever would make the best story.
If Nick had any sympathy at all, it was for the CapSec officer. CapSec were a
bit gun-happy, but on the whole he trusted them more the 4L lot, who depended
less on hardware and more on wetware and augmentations. Nick had never met a
single 4L constable who didn't have some heavy alteration and he was of
the opinion that there wasn't a man or woman amongst them who hadn't joined up
out of a deep seated desire to be 'fixed' somehow.
His distrust of their
augmentations bore fruit less than five minutes into his footage of the
increasingly juicy inter-security row. The big 4L sergeant, for reasons Nick
couldn't fathom, suddenly flared his nostrils and looked directly at him. For a
couple of beats, neither of them moved, then the sergeant pointed a finger at
him and the subtitles translated his mouth movements into a probably very
accurate 'Stay right there, Sunshine.'
While he hadn't personally done
anything beyond making some requests of some fixers, who did all the real
arranging - a night in 4L custody trying to explain why he was filming at the
club didn't really appeal. Nick weighed his options up. The Sergeant looked too
heavy to be a fast runner and there was a packed dancefloor full of zombies
between him and Nick. The emergency exit, on the other hand, was right next to
Nick's booth and he hadn't been chipscanned on the way in, so short of a
facematch, they'd have a job finding him and he was wearing some 'moisturising'
cream that by sheer co-incidence showed up as solid black on most face-scanning
cameras.
The 4L sergeant made a 'hang on'
gesture to the CapSec officer and began to walk Nick's way. Nick thumbed off
his EyeSpy, squeezed himself back out of the booth and made for the emergency
exit as fast as he could.
When he was filming, Nick forgot
he was fat. When he crashed through the emergency exit, the alarm joining in
with the thudding beat from the dance floor, he remembered he'd put on a little
weight. By the time he'd run the length of the side-alley and cut hard left
into a back alley, his memory caught up with reality and he felt an unpleasant
stab of panic when the noise from the club flared up behind him as the
emergency door crashing open again.
He put on the best spurt of speed
he could, hoping like hell it was still the big sergeant after him and not one
of the more whippet-like subordinates. If he could just out-run the ox, he
could lose himself in the rubbish-strewn riverside alleyways and get out of
even borderline 4L jurisdiction. All the sounds of the club were behind him
now, fading, fading and replaced by his own thudding footfalls and laboured
breathing. He could already feel needles of pain shooting through his
over-burdened ankles and knees and he silently cursed all the sitting and
eating he'd been doing the last few years.
Two more alleyways on he was
forced to burst out onto the main road, cross over a street sparsely populated
with clubbers and drunks wending their way either to the next venue or the
nearest fast food joint. Wheezing, Nick paddled a drunk out of his way with the
flat of one hand and jogged across to another alleyway.
Behind him, he heard the Sergeant
roar, "Stop right now, or I'll shoot!"
There was a scream from a
colt-legged girl and a chain-draped ginger boy shouted, "Fly, fatboy, I'll
hold off the filth!'
Nick risked a glance back,
automatically trying to jink to avoid being shot. He saw the big cop did
have his gun out, but the trim was ebolt blue instead of a deadly red and the
ginger idiot was dancing in front of the cop spoiling a shot anyway. At least until
the cop just ran through him, sending the boy flying with only a slight dip of
his shoulder to meet the impact.
Deciding he'd seen more than
enough, Nick scampered into the next alleyway. He was lucky that the cop was a
slow one - almost as slow as he was. He had no doubt about which one of them
would run out of stamina first though and he started looking for somewhere to
hide, pulling plastic rubbish bins down behind him as he went along the back of
a row of shops.
His possible salvation lay two
turns further on, in the form of a miraculously unlocked dumpster. Under normal
circumstances, Nick wouldn't have been able to boost himself into it, but the
particular panic of being hunted leant him some of his old athleticism for a
few seconds and in a flailing of legs, heavy grunting and a final teetering of
balance, he fell in a crackling, crunching heap into the dumpsters contents. He
flailed one chubby hand at the lid, pulling it closed and trying to muffle his
laboured wheezing into the crook of one elbow.
He heard the Sergeant thud his
way down the alley, but any hope he had that the man would run straight past
died as the policeman's boots scraped to a stop. Nick strained to listen,
fighting his lungs desire to tear breath.
The sergeant, by contrast, was
breathing easy, as if he'd done nothing more strenuous than take a stroll. Nick
hated him for this and grew no fonder as he heard the bootfalls coming closer
to his dumpster - the prospect of a night in constabulary custody seeming near
certain and making all this exercise an unpleasant waste of time.
He was saved by the sergeant's
comms, which tootled an alarm before Nick heard the sergeant answer it with an
inpatient-sounding;
"What? I'm still in
persuit."
There was a pregnant pause,
during which Nick discovered his elbow was in something squishy and
unpleasantly fragrant and his lungs tugged at his diaphragm insistantly. Then
the Sergeant's tone changed to exasperation.
"I'll be there in five -
don't let it escalate."
There was a few seconds of
silence, then the sergeant - right outside the dumpster now - said, "You
are one lucky fat man. I smell you anywhere near my patch again and I'll have
you," the man exhaled heavily, muttered, " Skurwysyn,"
under his breath and then Nick heard him moving away, picking up speed as he
ran back the way he had come.
Free to gasp for air again, the
smell of the dumpster suddenly became a more pressing concern and Nick gagged
as much as wheezed as he flung the lid open to let a little fresh air in,
almost not caring if the copper had been playing a trick on him. He didn't
think he had - he thought the cop had known exactly where he was hiding, but
just hadn't the time or leisure to drag him out. Nick hoped the CapSec lot were
busy beating the tar out of the 4L freaks back at the club.
It took him twenty or so attempts
before he realised that he couldn't get himself out of the dumpster alone. He
was too low into it and the footing was a mess of shifting food sludge and
slippery wrappers. As he slid back into the mess for the umpteenth time, he
almost felt like crying out of sheer frustration.
He was still trying to decide his
next best course of action when his digipad bleeped at him. He pulled it out
and accepted the call, seeing that it was Jackson - a digifeed editor that on
occasion, commissioned stories from him. Good ones, usually.
Jackson looked hatefully safe and
comfortable in a well-lit office, a glass of whiskey and water at one elbow,
"Nick! Where the hell are you, on a job?"
Nick worked his face into a sort
of professional self-assuredness he didn't much feel at present. What he felt
was a nasty wetness seeping through his trousers from the rubbish he was wedged
hip-deep in, "Evening, Jackson. Always on a job, you know that. What have
you got for me?"
"Something fairly big, if
you're up for it? Corporate expose, offworld."
Nick pursed his lips, "Who's
paying for it and what corporation?"
Jackson took a sip of his
whiskey, "Confidential and I can't tell you what corp until I know you're
on board. You'll need to use a device - I know how you are with personal
involvement, but..."
"I like to stay out of
jail," Nick glanced at the bottom of the screen, noting a completely
unfamiliar encryption protocol flagged on the signal, which piqued his
curiosity despite his instant misgivings, "Just how big is this?"
Jackson smiled, "Remember
the Polymol massacre on Mars? At least that big. Probably bigger."
Nick straightened up, crap
rustling all around him, "Seriously?"
"Seriously. I can't tell you
any more over a feed. If you're interested, come to my office and have your
thumb ready for the NDA you'll need to sign before I can fill you in - whether
you take the job or not."
Nick thought about it for less
than two seconds. He could always turn it down, after all. He had to at least
hear the deal out. He nodded sharply and said, "Sure thing, but I need a
favour from you first."
"What sort of favour?
Offering you the job is a favour, you know."
Nick grinned, "I know and
thanks, but if you want me at your office tonight, I need you to send a couple
of your lads my way. Ones good at heavy lifting."
Jackson frowned, "Is this
trouble?"
"No, just heavy lifting and
my back's not what it used to be. I'll send you my location. Alright?"
"Hnn. Alright - you'll be
here tonight for sure?"
"For sure, you have me
intrigued."
After the link was cut, Nick
tried to make himself comfortable in the rubbish while he waited for help to
arrive. He hoped they'd come quickly, before that ox of a copper decided he did
have time to fish a journalist out of a dumpster after all.
