Jade Dragon

5. Heroes Shed No Tears

Old Yee showed him a mouth of yellow tombstone teeth and gave Ko double the normal portion of curry noodles, taking the fold of yuan with his clawed fingers. Yee was from the mainland and refused to speak in anything but a thick dialect of Mandarin. Ko understood maybe one word in three, but he mosdy got by on the fact that the old geezer liked him. He wasn’t exactly sure why, but Yee made good noodles and his mobile stand always seemed to be open whenever Ko was hungry. He took a plastic bottle of Tsingtao and saluted Yee with it, then skirted the snake-buses as he crossed Hennessy Road. He made for the plaza, past the tourists being funnelled into large armoured people-carriers, great blocky things painted in gaudy tropical colour patterns that hid the snouts of stun nozzles.

The big holoscreen on the side of the CloudReach Shopplex was showing highlights from the day’s endorsed track duels at Happy Valley, and Ko winced around a mouthful of noodles as it slo-moed the horrific impact kill of a G-Mek V12 Interceptor striking the barrier at three hundred kilometres per hour. The car gently disintegrated into metal shavings, and an overlaid graphic pointed out the instant when the steering column speared the driver. The betting results faded away and up came the BloodPool sweepstake. Ko fished in his pocket for his ticket and realised with a frown that he’d forgotten to get one that morning. He chugged a gulp of beer to wash down the annoyance. Around him, foot traffic slowed as other people stopped to see the lottery numbers. Ko was always fascinated by the way that people from the States or the EU went crazy with their hooting and cheering when they gambled. That kind of behaviour was alien to the Chinese mindset. Games of chance required the most serious mind, not the loutishness that the gwailos displayed, scaring off the spirits of good fortune with all their noise. The tickertape ran the numbers. Low fatalities during the race day were balanced by an industrial accident at Quarry Bay and a restaurant boat hijacking that went bad out at Aberdeen. Hong Kong’s daily death toll was green for good, but without a ticket the score was meaningless to Ko. The holo-screen showed a streetcam view of the winner-a little woman in a viddysilk cheongsam-and the hesitant crowd around him broke up and melted away. Ko watched a little longer as the display went on to post scores for the state-sponsored manhunt going on over in Macao. That’s how to make money here, he thought. Win it, steal it or kill for it.

He finished the cooling noodles on the way toward the Causeway Bay metro station, crossing the road through a plastic tunnel. The tube glowed as he entered it, the walls fading into a grainy CGI model of a sun-kissed beach. It was meant to seem like Ko and the other pedestrians were ambling along the edge of a tropical island but the swearwords and flyposters dotting the walls spoilt the image. Ko watched a poorly rendered copy of Juno Qwan smile at him from the tree line. She had her hands cupped and glittering indigo liquid ran over her fingers. He blinked as the sublims kicked in, making him feel twitchy, and stared at the fake sand beneath his feet until he reached the other end of the tunnel.

Ko had never seen a blue ocean. A memory popped in his head, bright and hard. The day Dad had taken them on a trip up to the Peak so they could look out beyond Hong Kong Island and out into the haze. Ko had expected blue, the azure glitter they showed on the vid; but instead it was all the same dirty bottle green that lapped at the piers on the Kowloon side.

Blue. Ko wanted a blue sea, a blue sky, an endless road. He wanted freedom, if there was such a thing, but the idea of it was so ephemeral and directionless he couldn’t hold it in his mind for long. He was only sure of one thing. It would cost him money to get to the blue. He needed a big score to take him there, not the pissant pocket change he got from runs and road challenges. Ko sighed, crumpling the beer bottle in his hand. It wouldn’t be enough to get there alone, though. Ko thought of Nikita and the drug packet. He had to get her away too, before the city saw her weakness and killed her with it.

He went over the road with the metallic woodpecker of the crossing indicator rattling in his ears, and just for a moment he felt his black mood lift a little. There, on the shallow concrete bank where they always gathered, he saw Gau, the Cheungs and Poon clustered around one of the public benches. As ever, a string of hyped-up subcompact cars filled the roadside parking spaces. Second’s green Kaze with its black-tinted windows was there at the front of the rank, but Ko couldn’t see him or hear his braying laugh.

Gau had a magazine foldout in his hands, and the rest of the gang were engrossed in it. Ko saw a wide expanse of pale female flesh.

“Not real,” Little Cheung was saying. “You can see it’s just a render.” He pointed at one visible breast. “The tits are too good.”

“Too good is never too bad,” broke in Ise, tugging at his orange quiff. “I’d nail that, oh yeah.”

“Can you find your dick with both hands?” Gau asked. “Naw, Little Brother is right. You can see this is a fake. They mocked it up using pictures of her from that photo shoot she did in Free Malaysia.”

The image was of Juno Qwan, naked on a hardwood floor, cupping her breasts and wearing an incongruous little-girl smile. The image seemed off to Ko, too. It wasn’t uncommon for the tabloid screamsheets to make digitals of the idols-of-the-moment and then put them in compromising positions, just to sell a few more issues. Big Cheung patted his belly and leered at Ise. “You wanna see them boobies for real, I gotta sense-disc of her. Load it inna skin suit and you could have her all night long…”

Ise snorted. “That’s jagged, man. You keep your sick fantasies to yourself.”

“Hey,” said Ko as he approached them.

It was as if a switch had been flipped. The mood changed instantly, the air becoming chilly by degrees. People looked away, composing themselves.

Gau met his gaze. “Hey Ko. You drive in?” It was the standard conversation-starter in go-ganger circles, but it seemed stilted and forced.

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “In the shop. ”That was a lie; Ko’s Ranger was parked in a multi-story a few blocks away, hidden behind a ferrocrete stanchion. He hadn’t wanted to turn up on the street with it sporting the busted headlights that were Nikita’s payback for destroying her Z3N stash.

“Huh,” said Gau. “Right. Didn’t think we’d see you tonight.”

“Not after what happened…” added Ise, without looking him in the eye.

The air of easy banter had evaporated the moment Ko opened his mouth; now the vibe was frosty and strained. Everyone there wanted him gone.

“I’m missing something.” Ko said in a low voice, the first flickers of annoyance catching inside him.

“Got that right,” Poon said it so quietly he almost didn’t hear her.

Ko fixed Gau with a hard look. “You want to help a guy out?”

Gau looked away. “Don’t think I can, man.”

Ko opened his mouth to speak, but Little Chung bounced to his feet and broke in. “Look, Ko. Out at the airport, that was off-book.”

“What?” he retorted. “Like to see you jack a corp ride like that!”

“Yeah, but it was zero, chummer! You never did something so airhead!”

“Ko, man,” said Gau, “Rikio was by earlier tonight. He said about what Hung did. You’re giving us a bad rep. You shouldn’t have popped a corp’s car, that makes shit for the rest of us.”

“You gutless fuckers,” whispered Ko. “You’re always on about a big score, but you never do anything except…” He swallowed hard as the conversation he’d had in the Vector came back to him. Making yuan off races and taking pinks where you can. “All I’m saying is,” Gau continued, ignoring the outburst, “you might want to go dark for a little while, man. Just… Stay off the scope.”

“Stay away from us,” added Poon, just in case the point hadn’t been made strongly enough.

“Shit like racing we can get away with,” said Ise, “boosting the wheels off some ubersuit gets us all ass-screwed.” He finally looked at him. “You make it risky, Ko. You oughta cool.”

He backed off a step and looked at the group. Poon, her face hard with dislike; Gau, morose and obdurate; the Cheung brothers indifferent to all; Ise angry with him. In that moment, Ko had never felt so disconnected from them, these people he called his friends. They were turning away from him to protect the stupid little bubble of their road-tribe.

The doors to Second Lei’s Kaze gull-winged open and released a pulsing musical beat. Ko recognised the chorus to “Doppler Highway”. Lei emerged from the car buttoning up his shirt, two girls in Mongkok Sabre colours following him out. Their lipstick was smeared and their eyes distant. Second spat into the gutter and rolled something small and glassy between his fingers. Even from a distance, Ko could see it was an injector syrette.

Lei threw him a snide look and grinned. “Lost your way, spooky? Want me to call you a cab?”

“You’re a cab!” chorused the Sabre girls, giggling in breathy unison.

“Or maybe you’d like something else?” Lei approached him, rolling the injector over his fingers. He sniffed. “Just in. Better than gel caps. Just pop it to your neck and-”

“Ooooh.” the two girls mimed the action. “I’m the pretty voice… ”

“Pure,” he grinned. “First one’s free.”

“Get lost,” Ko snarled.

Lei’s grin widened. “You should take a page from Niki-Niki’s book, Chen. Be polite like your sister.” He licked his lips. “Do me a favour? Tell her I got a new shipment, I’ll give her a discount for her regular custom-”

Ko’s punch landed squarely on Second’s jaw and he staggered backward, bouncing off a parking meter. Ko’s vision hazed red. “You give that poison to my family, you piece of shit?”

Second recovered and sneered. “Don’t give it to her, spooky. She pays for it.”

Ko threw himself at the bigger youth and swung out, his anger making the attack clumsy and poorly aimed. Second deflected the blow and landed a heavy fist in Ko’s stomach. Ko recoiled, coughing.

“Is this guy not the dumbest fucker in the world?” Second asked the assembled gangers. “Brains of a wooden duck!”

Ko spat and hauled himself up. Second beckoned him to keep going. In the back of Ko’s mind there was a voice that begged him to do what he always did whenever he ended up facing off with Second. Let it go. Walk away. If he took his licks and went home, if he stayed off the streets for a couple of weeks, they would take him back in and nothing would change. It had happened before, it could happen now. If he just walked away. If he just let Second keep his top dog place, if he just took the easy way out. He glanced at the others. They made no move to intervene, content to let the conflict play out and follow the dominant alpha.

“Be smart, spooky,” said Lei, licking his lips. “Just walk away.”

“I am sick of the easy way,” said Ko, earning him a confused look from his opponent. With a jerk of his legs, Ko spun about and struck Second with a spin-kick that hit like a tornado, knocking Lei off-balance. Ko heard Gau swear under his breath.

The other ganger hit out blindly and Ko caught it, air blasting out of his lungs in a whoosh of sound. Lei’s girls released a short twin scream, like the bark of a vixen. Second came up and retaliated with a showy foot-sweep that missed by inches; Lei’s fighting was all style and no substance, based on the repeated viewings of a million fight films. Ko, on the other hand, had been sent to a Jeet Kune Do school by his father when Second Lei was still in shorts watching Seizure Monster anime. Ko’s style was all about application of force, hard, direct and instant. He threw punches inside the “gate”-the zone of body mass where the nerve points congregated-and felt a satisfying crunch as a dozen expensive plastic ampoules shattered inside Second’s pocket. He shouted at Ko and hit him across the cheek with a glancing, sideways blow.

Ko rocked back, stars of pain glittering in his vision. He chewed them down and sent a sharp kick at Second’s shin. The bigger youth shrieked as Ko’s shoe tore open the skin and fractured bone. Ko followed up with a strike that impacted Lei on the cheekbone and slammed his face into the driver’s side window of his emerald Kaze. Glass shattered and the car alarm began to wail.

The sound was the cue for the gang to disperse, and suddenly Gau and Poon and the others were running for their vehicles, but Ko was ignorant of all that. He was on Second as the drug dealer tried to stagger away, hands clutched to the cuts on his sour moon face.

“No-” Second said, but Ko ignored him. Ko’s mind was somewhere else now, in a place where every insult and hurt he had ever weathered was now being paid back tenfold on his tormentor.

By the time the police pulled Ko off and tasered him, Second’s expensive Soloto mocksilk shirt was a blood-streaked ruin. The greenjackets threw him in the back of the drunk-tanker and the robot patrol wagon drove him into the holding cells.

Fixx got to the fence of Barksdale Field without tripping any of the Air Force surplus scent-sniffers that ringed the compound. Like almost everything within the chain link barrier, Barksdale was a junkyard of elderly and dysfunctional leftovers from the American military machine of the Nineties; barely fifty per cent of the hardware worked correctly, but the trick was knowing which half did and which didn’t.

The sanctioned operative left nothing to chance. His quick communion with Papa Legba on the approach road led him off into the shallow scrub, and presently brought him to the fence at the north-west end of the airfield. Fixx removed his flexsword from its holster inside the long coat and gave the weapon an experimental twirl. It looked like a fat dagger in its collapsed state. He pushed the rocker switch in the hilt to “active” and held it horizontally in front of him. The blade warmed up and began to unfold, clicking and twitching. The memory-metal remembered the shape it had been forged in and became a long, thin streak of dull titanium alloy. It reset itself in less than ten seconds, and when Fixx was happy with that, he made two fast cuts in the fence, the blade blinking in the lacklustre starlight. No alarm bells rang; no barking e-dogs came running. He smiled and slipped into the compound, crossing the end of the runway in low, loping steps. He made a zigzag course towards the hangars, where harsh sodium floodlights bled their glare into the sultry Louisiana night.

There had been a time when a man would have been stripped and on his knees for daring to penetrate the security at Barks-dale. Forty years ago, the USAF had flown fighter planes, bombers and tanker jets out of this concrete nest, going about the business of defending the United States of America. That had been before the Fuel Crash and the Food Crash and the Welfare Crash and… well, before it had all gone to shit. In a time when it was hard enough to keep Americans secure from other Americans, the military turned their power inward and left everything they couldn’t afford to maintain rotting in the sun. Overnight, military bases became scrapyards as the government burned what they wouldn’t recycle. It was only when the corporations stepped up to bail them out that places like Barksdale went from defending the nation to being a new piece of commercial real estate.

The energy cost meant that these days only the rich had wings; but there were still things that needed shipping transglobal, still cargo that had to get to the other side of the world and not with silk napkins, glasses of champagne and dinky little meal trays. SkyeCorp made that happen. They were the company that the companies went to when something had to make it around the globe, no questions asked, no damn passport control or t-wave cameras peering into the crates. SkyeCorp made a billion a day shipping “tractor parts” to greedy dictators or “baby milk” to covert gene labs. They owned a string of decommissioned air bases across the continental United States, and with them a fleet of ex-military transport aircraft in various states of disrepair. SkyeCorp lost one flight in every thousand; but there were plenty of mothballed planes out in the Nevada desert, their clients had insurance, and it was tough to complain when the manifest said that all that got mislaid were “machine tools”.

Fixx hesitated in the lee of a rusted barn and studied the aircraft. One of them was a giant, a huge C-5 Galaxy, heavy like a pregnant albatross and low to the ground on a cluster of fat wheels. There was no cockpit to speak of, not in the sense that Fixx thought of it. Where the Galaxy had been built with a cabin for pilot and crew there was now a blank banner of plastic and steel, pockmarked with sensor pits and twitchy antennae rods. SkyeCorp didn’t use human pilots for the most part. It was far more cost-effective to engineer out that whole part of the system and replace it with cheap logic circuits and bio-matter processors-that is, brain tissue harvested from high-order primates. The four-engine plane had its nose lifted so that container trucks could drive aboard and deposit their loads. He could see from his vantage point that the last items of cargo were already being secured; soon the nose cowl would drop and the Galaxy would amble out on to the runway. The jets were already spinning at idle-this flight was running late. Fixx dropped to his knee and rolled the bones on a patch of weed-cracked concrete. The pattern brought another smile to his face. Good choice. This bird would take him where he wanted to go.

There were a few men milling around the front of the hangar, some running cursory checks on the aircraft, others smoking and drumming bored fingers on the barrels of their rifles-aging Gulf-vintage Colt M-16s, as third-hand as the base and the transport jet. Fixx kept the sword close and moved in toward the hangar. He could have killed every man here with the SunKings switched to deep reticule mode, but that would have brought the house down. No. Tonight he wanted to move in silence, leave nothing but footprints and take nothing but advantage. If he had to make a kill, it would be quiet.

The op kept to the pools of shade, shifting in and out of them under the cowl of the black long coat, a piece of the night moving here and there. He reached the back of the hangar and got in through a broken window. A hooter sounded from the front of the Galaxy, and he smothered a dart of surprise; but the alarm was only a warning as the transporter’s nosecone began to droop, yellow hazard strobes flashing across the concrete. The cargo doors at the back of the plane were already shut, but a side hatch was still half-open. Fixx frowned. Shut or open, yes, but halfway? That seemed strange, but he had no time to consider the reason. The flight would go if he dallied, and there were things unfolding in distant places that needed him to be there. His free hand dipped into his pocket and worried the bones a little. Yes, he had to act, not think. Fixx sprinted from cover and launched himself at the hatch. He was in and had it shut just as the hooting siren fell silent. The jets were growling up to power and he felt a lurch as the Galaxy taxied from the hangar.

He glanced around. Cargo modules two stories tall crowded around him, and items that were loose inside made desultory clangs against the walls of pressed steel. There was an alley between them that he could make it down if he held his breath, and with the sword leading the way, Fixx got to the front of the jet. What light there was came from the dull yellow glow of biolumes on the cargo gantries and the handful of plexiglas portholes in the fuselage. The Galaxy rattled and howled as it took up a waiting position at the end of Barksdale Field’s Runway Left.

Fixx glanced around for some corner where he could seat himself and that was when he noticed the door. The cargo container on the starboard side, yellow with a red pennant that said “Tao Ge Shipping”, made a creaking noise. The metal doors that sealed the contents in were unlocked, and one of them hung open. Each fresh vibration of the engines made the door shift a little. Fixx considered the guns again, then ignored the thought. A stray round might punch through the fuselage. Bringing the sword to guard, he approached. He was maybe a metre away when he saw that there was blood on the handle, and more in a spatter pattern on the deck. Fixx lashed out and yanked the door hard. It came toward him with a squeal of poorly oiled hinges, revealing a sea of dirty, terrified faces.

At the front of the women-and they were all females-there were two girls in prison-surplus jumpsuits. They looked at Fixx like secret lovers caught in a tryst, and between them they held on to a man whose throat leaked red, whose struggles were getting more and more feeble by the second. The man had his trousers and underwear halfway down his legs. One of the girls held a bent piece of metal in her fist, the end of it wet with gore.

Fixx lowered the sword. The container was full to bursting with human cargo, thin and emaciated girls, all of them oriental. Joshua would have said Korean, if he was pushed, but he was no expert. They stood there, the jet screaming around them, the unlucky guy bleeding out, watching each other. Fixx knew the look in their eyes well enough. These women had gone beyond the point of no return.

The would-be rapist burbled something and went slack. His killer went to work stripping his body for anything useful. The other girl-the intended victim, he wondered?-had a nasty wound on her arm. Fixx finally sheathed his weapon and dug out a pocket medipack from his coat. “You speak English?”

The girl shook her head and took the packet, tearing it open with her teeth. The plane shuddered and began to move, picking up speed. Fixx sniffed and sat down, bracing himself against the hatch. The women, some of them fretting, copied him. In moments, there was the gut-wrenching motion of take-off. Cold crept into the cargo bay as they ascended into the night.

Fixx had a couple of packets of Insta-Kibble (Swells In Your Stomach! Easy On Your Wallet!) that he’d intended to eat on the way. He tore them open, and with great care, broke them into enough pieces for everyone. The erstwhile passengers sat there in the rattling chill, chewing on morsels and regarding each other with wary eyes.

Fixx settled back and drew in his coat around him.

I will tell you, if you care to listen, something of cruelty. It is a uniquely human conceit; you will not see animals indulge in it. What of the cat, I hear you ask? The cat that torments and toys with the mouse? Ah, but Brother Cat is only training himself, using his prey to stay quick and deadly. He is no crueler than the virus that strikes down the newborn, or blinds the artist. This is simply the manner of nature. As it is the manner of man to be cruel.

And so my story. Look around in the shops selling effects of the past to visitors from over the oceans, the places that overflow with bowls in black lacquer, careworn jade and the litter of a thousand years of history. Inside one day you may see terracotta warriors, the clothes sculpted upon them the same as those worn by the swordsmen of that era. Some date back to the Qin Dynasty, when China was a feudal land and ruled by the blade and the pen.

In that time, there was a man, an Emperor, who greatly feared the world beyond death. He had killed so many of his enemies that surely they would be waiting for him when he perished, a war band of ghosts with the curse of his name as their last earthly memory. This man, this Emperor ordered an army of the red stone men made to accompany him into the other world when death came to claim its price. More than three thousand of the pottery soldiers were forged-regiments of footmen, archers, soldiers with spears or crossbows, charioteers and horses-all of them to be buried with their dead lord in a great tomb that was planted with trees and grass so it would appear to be a natural hill.

And so the man, the Emperor, died, and the army of stone was created. As this work went on, an act of cruelty came to pass.

A man, a swordsman, a simple fool with nothing of the Emperor’s greatness in him, a soldier in the real army upon which the facsimile was based, earned himself the ire of a minor warlord in the late Emperor’s service. It is not written nor remembered, what this simple fool’s misdeed was, but it was so grave-or perhaps, the warlord was so cruel-that it earned him a living death. The soldier was beaten senseless and pushed into one of the moulds used to make the terracotta men. He suffocated in there, seared to his demise and baked into the stone, bones and flesh buried along with thousands of identical mannequins.

The warlord later perished in battle and sank to the Nine Hells, as he deserved. But his cruelty extends to this day. The simple man remains lost, his bones encased in one of thousands of stone statues. Where they are, his spirit will never know. His peace is denied to him, forever.

This, then, is man’s cruelty. Better to be the cat’s mouse, neh?

Chinese Legend