B-spine Read online

  She opens the case file on Slate as the janitor’s correspondence arrives. She reads one and nods – he can’t spell but his complaints put him in the clear. The Boiler’s diagnostics listlessly pulse up and down in another window as she starts to drag and click the strands of evidence in the work log into a case against the landlord.

  There’s a drone overhead and she looks up to see the red and green navigation lights of an airship pass by only a couple of hundred feet up. Unusual. She lifts her head and breathes in the freezing air deeply. She hopes to catch a trace of the heady fragrance of the aircraft’s twin gasoline engines but the exotic smell doesn’t carry.

  As the engine noise is lost in the background hum of the Hub, she goes back to Slate. She figures the wetware is malnourished and filthy but basically recoverable. She could authorize a factory recall and they could steam clean the casing, treat the respiratory tract infection with steroids and antibiotics and bring the meat back up to a serviceable weight. But would it be worth it? She shakes her head and looks away and there, a couple miles to the east, is another airship slowly descending. Unprecedented.

  She’s closing the diagnostic windows and opening FedNet as the janitor steps out, an army-surplus parka in one hand, his shotgun in the other.

  “Two airships,” she says, pointing to the sky. “You ever seen this much air traffic at night?”

  “Three,” he corrects, pointing to another set of nav lights to the south. “Never seen three in the air at any time, day or night. Lucky if you see more than one a day overfly this District. What do you think the emergency is?”

  “Wait one and I’ll tell you,” she says. There’s nothing on FedNet so she checks the local emergency service channels. Local PD, local FD, nothing. She tells Slate to sweep the hospital bands but they’re quiet too. She goes wide and looks for Urban Pacification Force and Mercwar activity across the whole Toronto Hub but there isn’t any.

  “Nothing’s doing,” she says. “Apart from us, feels like the whole Hub’s fast asleep.”

  “That’s one hell of an air force to be launched for no reason,” says the janitor and Kirsty thinks so too. They stand in silence for a couple of minutes as the three airships slowly converge a few miles away. They start to corkscrew down, one after another.

  “So what do you reckon?” asks the janitor.

  She squints into the distance. “I think they’re landing at Arclights. You know it?”

  “The club? Sure I know it. Some nights, when the wind is right, you can hear the music.” He cocks his head. “But not tonight.”

  “That’s where they’re landing, I’m sure. I think I can see the lights on the tower.”

  “But what do you reckon about the Boiler,” says the janitor. “I’m not in the shit over this, am I?”

  “You’re clear,” she says. “Your landlord owes you a new Boiler, delivered within twenty four hours and at his own cost. Add the fine on top of that and his penny-pinching has cost him big time. You like that?”

  He nods. “I’d like that fine. But I’d prefer it if the residents stopped giving me grief every hour.”

  “I think can help with that too,” she says. “You do realize that this Boiler’s dead meat without a major factory refit?”

  “I’d worked that out already.”

  “But that in itself is a problem. Meat4 Power are backlogged for days. It’s a security alert – no personnel on the street without an armed guard.”

  “I seen that on the nearest wetware transit station,” he says. “They’ve had protesters banging up against Urban Pacification Forces at the factory gates for weeks now. Some kid caught a stray round in the leg and bled out in the street two or three days ago. It’s this hostile takeover thing that’s all over the news feeds, isn’t it?”

  “So I’m told,” she says. “Since your Boiler will be dead before Meat4 Power arrange a pick up, I’m going to snuff it now.” She unzips her ruck, opens out rows of padded pockets and pulls a euthanizing dose pre-packed in a syringe. The janitor goes back to looking worried.

  “You’re leaving the dead Boiler here?”

  “I thought maybe you could get back into your residents’ good books. You do get on with them, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” he says. “They’re regular people. Well, apart from the scagbanders, of course. Most are just pissed ’cos they’re cold and poor and hungry, same as everyone else.”

  “So invite them up to the roof garden,” she says. “Make the most of the afternoon sun because after the winter we’ve just had, we could all do with some rays.”

  “I’m not following you,” he frowns.

  “Hub conservancy measures direct me to find the most simple, straightforward and streamlined solution to any problem. Well, I need to dispose of five hundred pounds of bioengineered elk meat and you need to keep your people happy. Why don’t you sign for the carcass yourself and have a cook-out?”

  He finally gets it. “A barbecue?” he beams. “You’re saying I could have a barbecue?”

  She smiles back. “No, as a representative of President Vandernecker, I’m ordering you to have a barbecue. Just give me your thumb print and it’s a done deal.”

  He thumbs Slate’s screen and Slate beings up his photo ID. Philip Tackett, DOB 21-07–69. Another case closed. “So firstly,” she says, “I spike your Boiler with this dose. Secondly, I’m off to Arclights for a look-see at those airships.”

  “You sure about that?” he says. “I’ve always though that if it ain’t my business then it ain’t my business. Know what I mean?”

  She smiles. “Phil, Phil, Phil… what did I say about my bike? Crossing a Fed carries a mandatory sentence – it’s the simple, straightforward solution that keeps us on the streets unarmed and unmolested. You really think there’s some goon over at Arclights willing to risk federal investigation by getting in my way? I tell you, I’d love to meet someone that stupid…”

  Three month earlier…

  Thursday 09 January

  01:57 am

  JUDE HEMBLEN LEARNED plenty as a Marine on the Southern Wall but one thing that stuck with him was that any fool could be uncomfortable all the time. Back then as now, the infantry manned trenches on the wall itself – seven meter high earthworks bulldozed all across southern Texas – but he’d run his night-time recon missions out of a bunker dug into the rear-facing slope of a delisted interstate overpass. He’d lined it with wall insulation from the ruins of a high school and slept soundly on salvaged gym mats while Honduran rocket salvos shook Texan grit through the perforated steel plate ceiling.

  Hemblen had applied the same principles to his comms bunker, two hundred grand of weatherized electronics jammed into a fresh-cut hole in the ground. Fifteen days into their yearly corporate hunting camp, his clients were already starting to bitch about sleeping in their own log-topped bunker, even though Hemblen’s crew had dug it for them and decked it out with goose-down sleeping bags and folding cot beds.

  Lying in his own sleeping bag on top of pine branches, waiting in the glow of the comms screen for the satellite to pass overhead, Hemblen couldn’t see their problem. If the choice was down to in the Hub or out of it, Hemblen knew which one he’d choose every time. Then the fat face of his boss blinked onto the screen and Hemblen felt his heart sink. Monty Cox wasn’t the sort of person to stay awake for a 2am comms check unless he had a reason.

  “I need you back here yesterday, Jude,” said Monty. “I know you love your wilderness breaks but we caught a big one so that’s that.”

  “This is an encrypted channel, boss,” said Hemblen. “You want to say how big?”

  “The biggest,” said Monty, “Meat4 Power.”

  “You sure? Cry Havoc are Meat4 Power’s triggermen. Always have been, always will be.”

  “Used to be, not any more,” said Monty. “You remember that oil tanker hijack at the Canadian end of Ontario a few summers back?”

  It was hard to forget it. A tanker full of Venezuelan crude had been
captured, fought over and sunk, turning Lake Ontario’s shores black. For a few days in August, another war had seemed very likely. “Sure I remember,” said Hemblen. “It’s not every day that you see Canadian jet fighters over Toronto.”

  “My contact tells me it was a Cry Havoc botch job funded, at several stages removed of course, by Meat4 Power. Cry Havoc won’t be on the Meat4 Power payroll any time soon.”

  Hemblen ran his fingers though stiff, unwashed hair. “What’s the gig?”

  “Mercwar, plain and simple,” said Monty, “although admittedly on a scale that scares the crap out of me. We’re talking millions of dollars for anyone involved. That’s enough for you to quit, if you’re still talking such foolishness.”

  “I’ve said it before, Monty, I’m the only one over forty with boots still on the ground.”

  “So retire if you must but earn a decent pension first. Pack up, roll responsibility down the chain of command, stop babysitting those moose-shooting company jerks and come on home…”

  It was two hours to the nearest road, a steady gradient lit only by his bobbing head torch that dropped him through the snow line and let him trek through the woods without his snow shoes. The first stream that wasn’t iced over, he stripped out of his filthy combat gear in the total darkness of the forest canopy and washed until his teeth chattered. Stuffing stinking clothes and muddy body armor into his rucksack, he zipped his rifle into a carry case, changed into jeans and a sweat top and double-timed to the roadside to get his blood flowing.

  He ran a half dozen glo-sticks down the road side, pulled a fluorescent Mercwar rain cover out of a side pocket, pulled it tight over his rucksack so the creases wouldn’t show. Then he waited. A couple of times an hour, a logging truck rumbled past, some big, last-century eighteen wheeler diesel converted to run on filtered, cooked-out vegetable oil. Seven left him in their donut-smelling wake until, not long after a late, indistinct dawn, the eighth fired its air brakes and pulled over. Hemblen looked up at a guy born to drive a rig. Beard turning to gray, checked shirt hanging over a belly, faded denim, fallball cap.

  “Hell of a strange place to try and catch a ride,” the driver shouted over the idling engine.

  “Ten thousand square miles of nothing. And that’s just what I can see from here,” nodded Hemblen. “Appreciate you stopping, sir.”

  The gray beard laughed. “Sir? You can stow that shit right there, soldier. you’re one of those private military types. You looking to get somewhere fast?”

  “I am on both counts. The Mercwar Union has decided that the most simple, streamlined and efficient way to transport me and my kind is to offer anyone who helps me a standard rate. Get me to an Amtrak station and the union will pay a hundred bucks for picking me up plus twenty five cents every kilometer after that. That’s monty straight to you too, not your employer.”

  “Kilometers? Shit, last time I looked, my dials read miles. How far’s a kilometer?”

  “Far enough to make it worth your while, sir.” said Hemblen.

  The gray beard pulled a mock salute and grinned. “Truth be told, I’m so bored I’d-a picked you up anyway. Grab your bag and get on up here.”

  “Sure thing, boss. My name’s Hemblen, Jude Hemblen.”

  “Call me Rooster, son.”

  They were twenty seven hours on the road and never stopped once, both of them pissing into a cup Rooster kept handy then throwing it out a window. Hemblen offered some of his bagged rations but Rooster shook his head and stuck with nutriceutical milkshakes that kept him focused on the crumbling pre-Hub blacktop. An hour after he’d drank one, the added stimulants made him talk constantly. An hour before he was due the next, he’d hunch over the wheel and stare silently ahead.

  Small towns with names like Dalton, Bolkow and Nicholson blew past the windows. One time, they might have been nice places to live, Hemblen thought. Now they were company pit stops and maintenance facilities, places that had been spared the repopulation to the Hubs by serving the endless convoys that fed into the Hubs.

  “I guess you’ve served your time in the military then” said Rooster.

  “You guessed right,” said Hemblen.

  “See much action? Want to talk about it?”

  “Yeah and no,” said Hemblen. “If that’s okay with you.”

  “I’m not looking to pry, son,” smiled Rooster, “just wanting to pass the time. Did you ever work out what we’re fighting over?”

  “The presidential line is that Central America’s juntas are making the most of the NAU’s sanction-induced weaknesses but no one on the Southern Wall ever bought that,” said Hemblen. “I always figured that Honduras and Guatemala and Mexico are overpopulated to the point of bursting while we’ve got five States abandoned. Never looked for a reason more complicated than that.”

  “You know what I think?” smiled Rooster. “I think they want to invade Nashville, Graceland and Detroit. Those Central Americans are after the spiritual birthplaces of our rock and roll music, ha!”

  “I seen you mercwar guys on the cable access,” said Rooster, suddenly lighting from a couple of hours of intense road staring and waking Hemblen from a slumber. “Busting in doors on America’s Most Wanted when local PD are too shit-scared to do it themselves. You ever been on those shows, Jude?”

  “You’ve got us confused with Urban Pacification Forces,” yawned Hemblen, rubbing his eyes. “They’re the crews who handle shortfalls in law enforcement. Mercwar’s more militarized than those guys. We’re the ones corporations hire when they need to operate close to the Canadian border or want to head west into the drought States. Anywhere that local law enforcement is weak or they’re on a rival corp’s turf, we step in.”

  “You’re like a private army, then?”

  He shook his head. “That’s exactly what we’re not. Federal government holds the strategic oil reserve so they’ve got all the tanks and helicopter gunships. Off-Hub, mercwar licensing restricts us to line-of-sight, man-portable weapons only. Nothing laser-guided, no air support or artillery, no individual mercwar outfit over a hundred and twenty strong. This way, we may be dangerous but we’re never going to rise up and overthrow President Vandernecker, you know?”

  “So the UPFs take the Hubs and you work everywhere else?” asked Rooster.

  “Again, not exactly,” said Hemblen. “Eighty seven percent of this country live in Hubs so it follows that most work is in the Hubs. The UPFs police the streets and we specialize. Some handle riots, others carve out new territories for registered gangs. My crew – Crash The Pad – are assault specialists. We assist in hostile company takeovers.”

  Rooster frowned. “In a manner of speaking…”

  “No, in an entirely literal sense,” said Hemblen. “The most direct way to take over a rival’s facility isn’t months of negotiating small print or buying stock options. It’s a dozen guys running in and taking it. If we’ve got the firepower to announce that a building’s ours, then you better believe we own the floor space, the data store, even the paperclips.”

  “And the federal government lets you do that?”

  He nodded. “They encourage it, so long as we stick to the rules and no one gets hurt. We’re efficiency in action, the greatest gain for the minimum outlay. Might is right as applied to business is what keeps corporations lean and tight and low key. And as long as they’re hitting each other then they’re not looking towards Washington, which is just how the Feds want it.”

  “And how come I never see this on the cable access?”

  “That’s ’cos we’re shy, Rooster. Fearful camera-shy.”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” he said.

  They drove on through Chapleau and Metagama. Small places with big names that used to fly the maple leaf flag until the old USA seized them in the war with Canada. These days they were part of the NAU – the North American Union – whether they wanted to be or not.

  Rooster asked if Hemblen had ever got shot and he said sure it happened but he wouldn’t believ
e how good body armor is these days. He told him that mercwar armor was so tough, you needed a special license just to own it. He said that with the new laminates – fibers spun by DuPont-Zimmerman spiders and lightweight panels built by Praxis-Koi silicon bees – they could take small arms fire better than most vehicles. Rooster asked about civilians caught in the crossfire and Hemblen spent an hour explaining mercwar’s on-Hub legal restraints of battlefield judges and specialist weaponry. When he’d heard it all, Rooster shook his head in disbelief.

  “Seems like a crazy way to settle scores.”

  “I hear you there, Rooster,” said Hemblen, “and I’m sure the President would happily cancel our mandate tomorrow if he could. But mercwar started back when the Hubs were filling up. Sixty years ago, I think anything that would streamline the country was considered. Spending millions to outfit mercwar by wiping out billions of dollars of lawyers and legal fees must have sounded like a fine idea at the time.”

  “My daddy used to tell all sorts of tales about those early Hub days,” said Rooster. “A fella he knew got a grant to increase the manufacturing efficiency of those disposable ball-point pens. He’d pulled one apart and counted all the pieces – the ink tube and the outer sleeve and the little ball bearing – and worked out that there were something like a dozen pieces, all in different materials, none of them recyclable. He designed one with three components and made millions.” The old man shook his head. “Shit, you know what I’d have done with all that federal cash?”

  “You tell me, Rooster.”

  “I’d’ve bought everyone in the whole country three pencils each and told them to take care not to snap any. Ha!”

  Pogamasing, Larchwood, Azilda – sorry little pockets of society servicing the endless lumber and ore runs that trucked in what couldn’t be reprocessed or grown in the Hubs. Hemblen slept for a few hours and woke when they pulled into Sudbury railhead in a flurry of wet, wind-blown snow. Twenty seven hours after he’d last pulled the handbrake, Rooster stretched, yawned and turned to Hemblen.