House of the Sun

16

I sat in the back of The Bus, morosely watching the assortment of (meta)humanity sharing the vehicle with me. Mostly working-class Hawai'ians, I figured, but mere was a significant minority of younger people I tentatively labeled as the kids of corp vacationers. (Did mummy and daddy suit know their little darlings were riding a fragging bus instead of cruising in a limo? Not that it mattered…) The "recently dead" look seemed to be back in fashion, with bleached skin, black-dyed hair, and makeup to give the eyes a sunken look. Anything that could be pierced was pierced. The only thing that set these pre-suits apart from sprawl guttertrash was the quality-and obvious expense-of their clothes. Oh, sure, they wore the de rigueur biker jackets and weathered jeans. But their jackets were real leather, not synth, and they'd obviously bought their jeans prefaded and preslashed.

And then there were the T-shirts and sweatshirts they wore under their jackets-emblazoned with logos from fashionable corps. I don't know jack about fashion, really, but I do know how much a trendy label adds to the price of something. I sighed. In the grand scheme of things the only difference between cows and some people is that cows don't pay mega-cred to get branded. Maybe it's time to cack us all and give the cockroaches their shot…

It was continuing to be one of those days, all in all. Through no fault of my own, I'd gotten myself mixed up in the affairs of kings, corps, and dracoforms. I'd witnessed an assassination, I'd been shot at repeatedly, and I'd almost asphyxiated under a paralysis spell. And the day wasn't even over.

It was Miller time with a vengeance. Of all the things I could think of, what I most wanted right at that moment was to head back to my doss, flop down on the bed, and watch eyelid movies for twenty-four hours. Maybe by the time I woke up again, things would have started looking a little better.

Problem: I didn't have a doss at the moment. Or, more correctly-I had two dosses, but they were about as compromised as it's possible to get. Maybe I should just head on back to the Iolani Palace, ask for political asylum, and throw myself on the mercy of the Ali'i. Maybe King Kamehameha V needed a haole courtier or a eunuch or some damn thing.

Sitting there in the back of The Bus, I scanned through the memory of my pocket 'puter. I still had a couple of aliases stashed away in the little box's optical chips. They were all on a par with the one I hadn't needed to check into the Ilima Joy: good enough for low-level, routine drek, but certain suicide if I tried to travel on them.

I tried to think back to when I'd snagged the Ilima Joy room. Had I used one of those aliases? I knew that the desk clerk hadn't asked me for ID, but…

But didn't the credstick with which I'd paid have an ident stored on it, just in case? I thought so. Okay, so assume that ident-"Emory Archambault"-was compromised. Quickly, I set myself up another "blind" credstick, this time under the name "Mike Bloemhard." When that was done-a matter of minutes-I started watching The Bus stops and figuring out exactly where I was.

Two transfers and twenty minutes later, I was in a Bus rolling northwest on Highway 99. When I hit Pearl City- older than Ewa, apparently, but better maintained-I swung down off The Bus and started trolling the backstreets for a place to flop. In the west another perfect sunset was burning its way down behind the skyline. Tropical twilight is always short, and maybe ten minutes later the streetlights were coming on to hold back the night.

Maybe Pearl City hadn't been such a good bet, I started thinking after another half hour or so. All the hotels I'd found, even the ones well off the beaten track, were surprisingly high-tone. Sure, they were old, but they'd been seriously gentrified, like the New Ritz Hotel in Seattle, using their age as a selling point instead of a drawback. Typically, places that invested that much cred into the physical facilities wouldn't have scrimped on the electronic side, either. It wouldn't take much in the way of data back-checking to figure out that "Mike Bloemhard" was as much a fiction as "Neil the Ork Barbarian." For a moment I debated hopping The Bus back to Ewa-at least I knew I could find some sleazy flops there-but quickly discarded the idea. If Kat and her little friends had bugged my bike, it just wasn't a reasonable risk to go anywhere near where I'd dumped the Suzuki. So I walked on.

I must have been tired-that's the only excuse I can come up with-tired and emotionally battered. Otherwise, I like to think I'd have noticed the Renault-Fiat Eurovan creeping up on me a little sooner.

The puke green van was no more than ten meters away when my cerebral cortex finally got with the program and tagged it as something to be concerned about. Just in time, too. In my peripheral vision I saw the passenger-side window roll down and spotted the movement inside the cab. Reflexes kicked in, and I flung myself to the sidewalk.

The weapon the van's passenger was aiming went off- a dull pum noise instead of the usual sharp crash-and I felt something split the air above my falling body. A myopolymer net appeared-magically, it seemed- immobilizing and incapacitating a datafax kiosk a meter or two behind me.

I hit the sidewalk hard, rolling to try and absorb the impact My sartorial splendor downgraded itself yet again, but at least the light armor underneath saved me from losing much skin. I did another tuck-and-roll into the shelter of a parked car. My Manhunter was in my hand, safety off and finger on the trigger, but I kept it down, out of sight. The slag in the Eurovan had taken his first shot with a netgun, meaning he wanted me alive-for the moment at least. It didn't make sense for me to return fire and escalate matters to a more lethal level. Cautiously, I raised my head above the hood of the car behind which I was crouching.

And all nonlethal bets were immediately off. The side door of the Eurovan slid back, and three laser sights winked on in the darkness beyond. I dropped flat to the ground, as autofire stitched the car and blew out the windows, showering me with transpex. Over the rattle of gunfire I heard another door open on the Eurovan. The passenger's side door? Probably-the guy with the netgun was taking advantage of the "suppression fire" to come and finish me off.

Mentally, I reviewed my tactical options. It didn't take more than a fraction of a second-there were only two, and only one of them involved staying alive. Before I could think about it too much and immobilize myself with fear, I forced myself to my feet, put my head down, and ran. Directly away from the car, jinking and weaving, but concentrating more on pouring on the speed and opening the distance. Ideally, I wanted to keep as low as possible, to minimize my exposure, but speed was more important than anything else. Without looking, I squeezed off four shots from the Manhunter back over my left shoulder.

Bullets whipcracked by my head. Ricochets whined off into the darkness. I felt something pluck at the collar of my shirt-now that was too fragging close.

On this part of the street the buildings, largely light-industrial facilities, were separated by narrow walkways… or, more accurately, breezeways. I faked right, then cut hard left, and hurled myself headlong down one of these darkened passages. I yelled with pain as something slammed into my left shoulder blade-a love-tap with a baseball bat. The impact was enough to throw me off balance for a second, and I caught my right elbow a nasty crack on the corner of a building. I howled, my right hand and forearm feeling like they'd been dipped into molten lead, but I kept on running.

The firing continued behind me-no more punts, all the cracking of real-and-for-true guns-but nothing came close. I tore down the walkway/breezeway like a boosted sprinter and hung a skidding right when I reached the end.

An alley-a fragging, noisome, garbage-strewn alley. Even though I knew I couldn't really spare the breath, I cursed out loud. Was it just me, or did everyone's life seem to gravitate to drek-choked alleys and dumpsters? I pounded on. The gunfire had stopped behind me, but I could hear the echoes of pursuing footfalls. I risked a glance over my shoulder and was rewarded with a momentary glimpse of two figures bursting from the breezeway. One was big and hulking, with klick-wide shoulders; the other was small and wiry. Moko and Kat, two of the runners connected with "the big worm?" A pretty safe bet, I figured. Both of them popped some caps in my direction, but the visibility was drek, and the range was extending. I sprinted on, until the air was like knives in my lungs when I breathed in.

Questions churned through my mind as I ran. First off… how the fragging hell did they track me? They might have put a tracer on my bike, but I'd dumped the bike…

Hold the phone. A tracer on the bike was an obvious play, but I'd also given Kat and the others plenty of chances to put a tracer on me, hadn't I? Frag, it doesn't take much these days, not with the microminiaturized drek on the market. A casual pat on the shoulder and you've transferred a self-adhesive tracker the size of a pinhead.

If that was me case, the "why" could only have to do with Ryumyo-assuming it was Ryumyo who'd done the morphing trip on my telecom screen-and his warning to stay out of matters. So what had I done almost immediately thereafter? I'd run to the fragging Ali'i, hadn't I? Not a particularly good way of keeping my nose out of trouble. When the big worm realized I hadn't taken his friendly advice, he'd decided to send Kat and her little friends out to settle things once and for all. (What was with the netgun if they were simply going to open up with lethal ordnance the moment the nonlethal takedown failed? Obviously, the ALOHA runners were planning to cack me anyway, but their primary plan was to bag me and then put a pill in my ear in private. When I inconsiderately refused to be bagged, they went to Plan B: Hose the place down.)

Kat and Moko were still on my hoop, maybe fifty meters back but closing the gap. (Fear and adrenaline can do wonderful things, but they can't make up for too many months as a couch-tuber.) They weren't firing indiscriminately anymore. Hell, they didn't have to; they knew they'd catch me eventually. Panicking seemed to be the only logical plan at the moment, so that's what I did. Wildly, I started looking around for somewhere to make my last stand.

And that's when guns opened up behind me again. Not Moko's and Kat's-someone else's. The two ALOHA runners were packing SMGs of some kind; the reports and cyclical rates were unmistakable. The guns that suddenly cut loose were something very different, with a much higher cyclical rate of fire. Not miniguns-the reports were from small-arms rounds-but with a similar rate of fire, sounding like giant zippers. Standard SMGs stuttered in response, but the zippers spoke again, and the SMGs fell silent.

Part of me wanted to know what the frag was going down behind me, back down the alley. Who the hell was hashing it out with Kat and Moko? The more logical part of my mind wrote the question off as meaningless. Anything that eliminated pursuit was all to the good, wasn't it? "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," and all that jazz…

The alley ended, and I was out onto a backstreet. Another skidding turn-left, this time-and I started to slow down. There was silence behind me-no gunfire, no running footsteps. Were Kat and Moko down, or had they just broken off pursuit? If the latter, they-or their friends, come to think of it-could still be tracking in on me, using the hypothetical locator that had led them to me in the first place. Frag, I had to ditch that thing fast… but doing a striptease in the middle of the street probably wasn't tactically sound, for various obvious reasons.

My heart was pounding in my ears, and my calves felt like somebody had worked them over with a nightstick. Had I eaten dinner, I'd probably have been busy losing it. I jogged on, trying to decide what to do next…

… And slammed on the brakes just in time to avoid plowing into the figure that emerged from the shadows ahead of me. Instinctively, I brought up the Manhunter.

No, I tried to bring up the Manhunter, but my right arm was damn near paralyzed from the crack on the elbow. My left hand snatched the big pistol from my numb right. I triggered me sighting laser and set the red dot center-head.

Dark, liquid eyes widened in panic. A tastefully made-up mouth dropped open.

She was beautiful, was the elf facing me. Just shy of two meters, I guessed, willow-slender, with the kind of face that might best be described as "why men fight."

Hooker, joygirl, sex-worker-that's how I labeled her initially, but then I saw her clothing. Top-tier corp garb, that's what she was wearing. A skirtsuit that probably cost as much as a small car. Polished titanium jewelry: earrings, necklace, matching bracers on her wrists. Those bracers flashed in the streetlights as she showed me empty hands. "Don't shoot. Please!"

Instinctively, I lowered the Manhunter. The more rational part of my brain knew it was a bad idea, but the knight-in-shining-armor lobe seemed to have suddenly taken over. The instant my gun was off-line, she extended one of her slender palms toward my chest.

And then fragging shot me. Flame flashed from the bracer, and pain drove deep into my chest, a long, lancing needle of agony that went through the light body armor as if it wasn't there. I tried to bring the Manhunter back up, to return the favor on my way out, but the thing suddenly weighed a couple of hundred kilos.

I was still trying to think of a witty exit line when blackness crested over me like an ocean wave and carried me down, deep deep down.