1% Free

By G. A. Matiasz

An astute, socially relevant tale, set in a world that readers will happily get lost in.
Kirkus Reviews

Detective Jimmy Hidalgo tracks a serial killer whose first victim was Jimmy’s best friend, in a San Francisco on the brink of social insurrection. The killer has a terrifying new way of murdering her victims. Salvor Becky W

• Language: English
• Publisher: 62 Mile Press
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9780997264296

G. A. Matiasz

Born in 1952, G.A. Matiasz was a late hippie and an early punk. He began self-publishing at 17 with a high school underground newpaper, and burned his draft card at age 18. Essays from his publication Point-Blank/San Diego's Daily Impulse have been reprinted in Semiotext[e] USA, the Utne Reader, and War Resisters' League's short-lived youth publication SPEW! He has also published essays in Against The Wall, the New Indicator, Draft NOtices, and the San Diego Newsline. His first science fiction novel End Time: Notes on the Apocalypse was published by AK Press and was reprinted in Portuguese by a Brazilian publisher, Conrad Livros. He lives in San Francisco, where he write a monthly column of news analysis and political commentary for Maximum Rocknroll under the name "Lefty" Hooligan. 1% Free is published through his business 62 Mile Press.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The OverUnity’s imperial flag starship hit a corsair mine somewhere along the upper limb of that peculiar ripple of stars known as Gould’s belt, above the fiery Orion galactic spur. The fatal collision occurred in ultraspace, while the starship was going roughly fifty thousand times the speed of light.

The pirates responsible for planting the intelligent quantum explosive device called themselves the Irugi Covin. They had purchased knowledge of this OverUnity transportation corridor from the clever, shapeshifting Xymry. But the schedules and nature of the cargos were unknown to them. When the mine blew up, it sent a coded tachyon pulse back to the pirates’ cluster base in the jagged, radiation-baked debris fields orbiting the Capella binary. The Irugi swarmed out like ultradrive insects hungry to salvage the wreckage.

All organic sentiency was seared from the starship the moment the smart mine detonated. The Hatala crew, a clannish, nomadic species of fibrous beings pledged to the task of transporting the OverUnity’s state and military cargos, died almost instantly. The shielded organic mental nuclei of the ship’s bio-computer network experienced a much slower and more painful death. They dutifully reported the disastrous loss of their irreplaceable cargo to the OverUnity before expiring in agony.

The mine’s targeted blast ripped open the craft’s starboard side decks and holds, shearing away the ultradrive pod. The impact of the explosion dropped the ship’s two main remnants, as well as several dozen fragments, into normal space, on collision course with the star system’s third planet.

Even with their nimble ultraspeed flyers, the pirates arrived on the scene too late. Most of the starship’s debris was too close to the world to be reached in time, much less diverted. The shattered starship and its precious cargo had scattered through that blue and white world’s atmosphere as fiery meteor showers almost a day before the Irugi took up position behind the planet’s large moon.

As the pirates studied Earth, they realized that this was a sentient-evolved world, one with a primitive spacefaring civilization. They quick-mapped the planet’s rude habitation, the cloud of orbiting satellites and space debris, the two active space stations, and the two operational lunar outposts. Irugi Command and Control was painfully aware of the draconian Galactic Convention penalties against interference with prestellar species, not to mention the zeal with which maximum punishments were meted out to pirates.

Parts of the imperial vessel, including the crucial ultradrive pod and the starship’s strategic memory archives, had come down in either sparsely populated areas or the world’s wide waters. They proved easy to discreetly recover. The largest piece of interstellar scrap, the main body of the starship, broke up in the atmosphere. Its central hexacell cargo hold crashed in an area which was active with the local sentiency. The planet’s natives quickly appropriated it. Irugi Command and Control accepted the loss, judging that such were the spoils of piracy.

The Irugi sped away and added the location of Earth, with its emerging organic intelligence, to the knowledge they had for sale. The parsecs of space around this dim little star would be infested with OverUnity imperial battleships soon enough. They would come to scour the region for any sign of their wrecked starship. The Irugi Covin intended to be comfortably lodged in their safebase near the cold black heart of the Aquila Rift by then, planning their next attack.

In the Kunlun Mountains of Central Asia, a war-weary Uyghur shepherd watched the fireball descend in midday on supersonic thunder and was gripped with an overwhelming terror.

THE LOST COAST

ONE

The city had been beautiful at the turn of the century. Whitewashed houses carpeted the hills like a languid Aegean island town. People called it the Paris of the West Coast. Now San Francisco brought to mind more and more the profound decay and virulent tech of L.A.

Jimmy Hidalgo had a clear view of San Francisco, old and new, through his fifth-floor office window in the Mission. He was solidly built, his shoulders, face, and hands wide and strong. His posture and frame still bore the mark of his service in the Marines nearly two decades before, even in black jeans, a dark blue Pendleton and black leather Wolverine work boots. His gold-brown eyes were capable of turning black in anger, though now they looked tired and bored. He added two fingers of whiskey to his cup of coffee, then ran a hand through his wavy black hair. The fallen comrades memorial i-bracelet on his wrist clinked against the cup.

It was a few minutes past five, dark and muggy. A weathered cityscape of three-, four-, and five-story wooden and brick buildings struggled to hold its own above profuse subtropical vegetation, which grew faster than it could be cut back. The buildings’ rooftops were themselves forested with antennae, satellite dishes, shigawire, and the occasional jumper pad, glistening now from cool January showers. Jimmy glimpsed a piebald slice of the Forbidden City squats a couple of blocks away, strung beneath the decaying remnants of an ancient freeway. A public urban drone occasionally bobbed up above the skyline.

What was left of old San Francisco ambled up to the nucity’s gray and brown hive architecture, which jutted almost a half kilometer into the dense evening. HD LCD advertisements fifty meters tall ringed the nucity, marketing Planet Financials, EBC news programs, the McGuffin Analog-Digital Deluxe, and expensive European vacations. Twinkling vehicles traversed the air to and from the arcology’s upper platforms, guided by strict geometries of yellow, blue, and green lasers. The polarized metaglass windows on the nucity’s unfinished southeastern side formed a smoky black wall above the pillared nanoconcrete entrance porticos running along Market Street.

Corporate buildings played hide-and-seek in the gray drizzle to the north and west, beyond the nucity. The ruined skeleton of the Bay Bridge curved gracefully from the Rincon Towers’ desolate remains to an overgrown Yerba Buena Island in the distance. The silver spires of the elite Treasure Island tower shimmered through the drizzle at an even greater distance. Jimmy surveyed the view as he sipped more coffee. The whiskey bit.

Jimmy managed to make a living practicing the somewhat archaic art of private investigation. These days, nearly everyone had a universal identity card assigned at birth. These i-cards were linked to centralized data libraries, where an individual’s personal information and every monetary transaction was routinely updated and stored along with fingerprints, retinal patterns, voice prints, and DNA code, allowing for integrated identity i-scans.

Superficially, the reason his profession continued to exist was because money hadn’t been entirely digitized, nor had society outside the battlefront been completely wired. The unrecorded use of paper money, for instance, allowed the adulterer the mistaken notion that his infidelities were undetectable. A more fundamental reason he could still make money as a detective had to do with human behavior—in particular, the often tragic clash between the desire to get away with sin and the desire to know the truth. Coveting your neighbor’s wife while making certain yours stayed faithful.

Jimmy only investigated sins that, if considered criminal at all, were low on law enforcement’s priority list. In addition, he had the digital skills to know that when records, transactions, and identity were simply a matter of bits and bytes, clever hacking could hide a multitude of transgressions. That’s when old-fashioned, tedious legwork came into play. He had been a detective for too long, however, to believe that the truth ever set any of his clients free. Pissed them off and broke their hearts? Yes, often. Freed them from betrayal, rage, or despair? Never.

And then there were the naga. However elaborate and comprehensive the existing security regimes were, millions of people lived without documentation—untraceable through normal means, under the radar, off the grid. Many of them committed crimes. The naga realm overlapped the world of organized crime and was hence peripheral to Jimmy’s practice.

Jimmy did business at the corner of 16th and Mission. His pastel-tiled professional building had weathered fire, flood, earthquake, and riot in this traditional San Francisco neighborhood, now known as the Mission Commune. The building was more than a century old, yet it had a few modern amenities, among them a top-level i-scan at the front door and omni-flash EM surveillance throughout.

His office was Spartan: a scuffed wooden desk and chair, a nicer chair for visitors, a four-hook coat rack, and three old-fashioned, scratched, and dented metal filing cabinets. A standard KIT protocol unit and his JINN workstation occupied the top of the desk along with a lamp, file organizer, desk calendar, and a lighter and ashtray he now kept strictly for clients. Jimmy went back to work. A recent ex-smoker, he tapped a pen nervously on the desk when he wasn’t scribbling notes on a pad. He was doing the final rewrite on the report for a jealous wife whose husband frequented strip clubs and prostitutes in the dense warrens of the Tenderloin.

Jimmy leaned back in the chair and rubbed his eyes with knuckled fists. His cup was almost empty.

I’ll read it one more time. But basically it’s done. Let’s call it a day, Jen.

As you wish, the JINN office computer said in its sexy female-receptionist voice. Switching to night mode.

The phone rang and he raised a hand to halt JINN.

Jimmy, it’s Alex. The KIT piped SFPD Sergeant Weston’s voice—sans video—into the office. I got some bad news.

Jimmy leaned back in his chair.

Dammit Alex, you work homicide. It’s bad news every time you call.

I’m serious. A note of concern sounded in the cop’s voice. We got a friend of yours down here. In the morgue. You sitting down?

Yeah, I’m sitting. Who is it?

Danny. Daniel Delgado.

Jimmy was stunned into silence.

Alex was a friend by professional association. A helpful cop he’d met on a missing persons case eight years ago. They’d fished together a couple of times, and they regularly exchanged large bottles of whiskey at Christmas. But mostly they did each other favors. Sometimes the sergeant needed what Jimmy could dig up on the streets; sometimes the PI needed information from police files. A comfortable symbiosis. No doubt Weston thought that, as a cop, he pulled rank and commanded deference. Jimmy, however, kept things strictly quid pro quo.

In contrast, Danny and Jimmy had been comrades. Blood brothers. Danny did some detective work, but security was his forte: individual, one-on-one bodyguard gigs and team security for high-powered events and clients. Jimmy had taken one of Danny’s classes six years ago and they’d become fast friends, drinking buddies, off-road enthusiasts, and occasional partners on a job. Like Jimmy, Danny was a lapsed Catholic, an opinionated student of America’s second civil war, and a fan of both Charlie Parker and 2030s acid bop. Both were one-quarter Mexican Mtl’nka Indian, a tribe so small the two were probably related.

You still there? Alex asked.

Yeah. Jimmy squeezed the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes. How’d it happen?

Maybe you should come down to the morgue. There was something the police sergeant wasn’t saying.

You need me to identify the body?

Uh, no. But there’s something about the way he died I think you should see.

After Weston hung up, Jimmy put away the legal pad with his notes, shut down the workstation, and reached for a coat, hat, and umbrella. He was in a daze, his actions automatic. The knock on his door startled him.

He quickly checked the KIT. Nobody had buzzed from downstairs or run an i-scan. The building alarm hadn’t gone off, so there’d been no forced entry. Most disturbing, there was no omni-flash data associated with the phantom visitor. He turned his workstation back on and ran a manual scan on the hall. Nothing. He started to ask JINN to run an anomaly scan when the knock came again.

It’s open, Jimmy said.

A man entered. He was average in height and frame, dressed in a tan trench coat and hat against the weather. Inconspicuous.

Mr. Hidalgo?

The man smiled when he asked the question. He sat uninvited in the chair in front of the detective’s desk. Jimmy was nervous. A glance showed that nothing registered on KIT’s full-spectrum EM office scan either. According to his computer surveillance systems, no one had recently entered the building, and he was alone in his office. He fiddled with the ball chain at his throat, which displayed three dog tags, his own and two with nine debossed names.

I was just walking out the door, Jimmy said. State your business.

I want to hire you for a job.

Didn’t catch your name.

It roughly transcribes into AjNzarSharmAlqotra. Which crudely translates into Sacred Eye of the Storm.

From what language?

A language of tactile light, the nuances of which I couldn’t begin to convey. Not under such barbaric circumstances. The man spread his hands, a gesture encompassing Jimmy, the office, the city, the world. Suffice it to say it is the language employed by the inhabitants of some thirty star systems under the benevolent governance of My species, the Majjar. I am allied with the OverUnity, a starfaring civilization approximately five-thousand light years closer to the galactic center than your sun, governing what you call the Sagittarius galactic arm.

I don’t have time for jokes.

No joke, Mr. Hidalgo. The man waved a hand. A cigarette suddenly appeared between his fingers.

I don’t have time for sleight of hand either.

Is this a sleight of hand? the man asked. He pointed. The lighter jumped up from the desk and floated serenely through the air until it hung before the man. It struck by itself, and the visitor lit his smoke from the flame. Then the lighter sailed smoothly back to Jimmy, who snatched it out of the air, startled by its solidity. It’s impolite not to offer your guest a light.

Who the fuck are you?

The smell of the tobacco was real enough.

Sacred Eye of...

The Storm. Yeah, I heard you the first time.

But please, call me Ajnzar.

Jimmy shook his head and reset the office scan with a keystroke. Still nothing.

Okay, I’ll play along. What’s the job?

I want you to find someone.

Who?

One of My operatives.

You want me to find an alien?

Not exactly. Ajnzar puffed languidly. This operative is human. More or less.

Jimmy spread his broad hands, planted them on the desk, and leaned toward the man.

Okay. You’d better start from somewhere I can remotely call reality because you’re not making much sense.

The man took another drag.

Fair enough. What you humans call the Milky Way, the Ancients called tu Ossain, and the Majjar call the Shining Path. The more universal name for the Shining Path and its eighty-eight satellite galaxies is Galaxia. Galaxia teems with life. All organic life is built on a base of carbon, silicon, or nitrogen; breathes oxygen, chlorine, or hydrogen; and uses water or ammonia. Galaxia’s advanced water-based species constitute a single pan-civilization, ruled by the Five Dominions, who collectively call themselves the Full Dominion. Ammonia-using life forms originate on gas giant worlds and are much less common in the galaxy. They are hostile to water-using life forms. Neither water- nor ammonia-based species have been interstellar for even a thousand years…

Jimmy shook his head to interrupt the man’s languid exposition.

I don’t want a science-fiction fable. Get to the point.

Ajnzar’s gaze suggested he would overlook Jimmy’s rudeness just this once.

The OverUnity has been monitoring humanity from a distance for approximately one of your centuries now to determine your suitability for galactic membership. For the last twenty-five of your years, you have been exploring your own local stellar neighborhood.

The Alpha Centauri mission returned last year.

Exactly. At about the same time you launched that primitive vessel, the Majjar was commissioned to get some inside information on your world. The Majjar constructed an archetypal human being from primary genetic material, programmed it, and deployed it to gather firsthand data on humanity. It failed to report back about three weeks ago.

Failed to report, or went AWOL? It was a hunch.

I’m not sure, the man said, appearing uncomfortable. In either case, I will have a difficult time explaining the disappearance to the OverUnity.

You suspect your operative is alive?

Better than that. I know. I can detect its biological signature. Unfortunately, I cannot pin down the location more precisely than a radius of roughly eight-hundred kilometers.

Centered in San Francisco?

Yes.

Jimmy wanted another shot of whiskey, and a cigarette.

One more question. Why’d you pick me?

Ajnzar smiled, extracted a small object from his coat pocket, and placed it on Jimmy’s desk.

You were recommended. Highly. I know all of this is a little too much to absorb in one sitting. Take your time, think over My offer, and I’ll be in touch. This credit card contains a little advance on the job.

The man quickly, soundlessly crumbled into cool blue light. The light evaporated. The thin, transparent flexi-card, with its fine black carbon filigree traced with invisible nanocircuitry, remained on the desk.

Jen, Jimmy croaked. Did you catch that?

Catch what? the office computer answered.

What just happened!

I am sorry to say that after the call from Sergeant Weston, you dozed off. You have been asleep at your desk for the last fifteen minutes. I try not to disturb you when you are napping.

Then what the hell is this? Jimmy pointed to the credit card.

Oh my. The computer sounded concerned. Where did that come from?

Exactly. Jimmy picked up the faintly blue card and turned it over several times before tucking it gingerly into his shirt pocket. Jen, I’m going home. Think about why you can’t account for the appearance of this ceecard.

But... JINN said, digital anxiety creeping into the computer’s voice.

It’s been a long day. Jimmy stood, scooping up his leather briefcase, navy blue pea coat, dark gray fedora hat, and black umbrella. Switch to night mode. I’ll talk to you in the morning.

A fine sprinkle greeted him when he exited his building’s not-so-secure front door. His naCloud activated the audio skein embedded in his left ear once he was outside the building. Instead of opening his umbrella, Jimmy pulled down his hat, flipped up his collar, and crossed the street, stepping over pools of rain reflecting neon and laser. A flock of radiation-detecting, high-performance plastic warblers shrieked overhead; biochem-sniffing birds flew lower and had a deeper whistle. The chiseled features of citizen soldier Johnny Yank beamed from a bus stop poster slick with rain, the poster’s message to watch and report obscured by graffiti and red syrmons. The nearby Basis five-pointed star poster was not vandalized. A small convoy of three Unified Military humvees rolled the red, white, and blue on Mission. An annoying robotic shrine decorated with flowers, candles, and prayer ribbons trundled along the cracked sidewalk, its squeaky treads punctuating a tinny version of Love Me Tender as a holographic Elvis flickered in the empty air above it. Jimmy stopped himself from throwing a kick at the seedy pop icon.

He maneuvered through the hucksters and hustlers, beggars and addicts, going with the lively flow of passengers down into the BART station. Before stepping on the escalator, he slipped on a pair of anti-EM mirrored sunglasses. Those, and the EM-thwarting technology woven into his clothing, comprised Jimmy’s efforts to obstruct the omnipresent public surveillance. Rain drifted in after him as he descended. Colorful adflix and American flags along the walls wafted on subtle airflows. Phrases rolled by on a scrollbox overhead. Be vigilant! Be prepared! Be resourceful! Be patriotic! Followed by: You are The Basis. We are The Basis.

Conspicuous cameras and i-scans swept the underground station’s public areas. A halfway decent percussion trio tried for cred with an upbeat Caribbean sukulu tune while Pueblo pilgrims begged and BART cops patrolled the tumult. An attendant chased a monkey with a shock stick, trying to force it out into the drizzle. Not until Jimmy had used his i-card to pass through the scratched metal gates and descend another level, not until he was staring long and hard into the musty, dark tunnel from which his train would emerge, did he allow himself to think again. And even then only about the incident in his office.

His JINN office computer, with its mutually aware bicameral neural networks, Argos OS omnisense, and up-to-date security system, had been hacked. The credit card in his shirt pocket was proof of that. The coat pressed the ceecard’s flat, hard, very real existence into his awareness. JINN, not Jimmy, had been down for the count for those fifteen odd minutes. Tricked and evaded by an expert. So what had Jimmy really seen? An elaborate hologram? If so, who had projected it, and how?

Dammit, he’d smelled that cigarette.

He shook his head. Veeclips danced on the walls across the tracks, parading fast food and up-and-coming ATWA televisionprograms. A breeze started up from the left. Jimmy noticed he was sweating. The sleek, third-generation, fifteen-car BART train whisked into the station. The platform’s overhead holos flashed: SACRAMENTO. The train stopped on the mark, only two-thirds full. He took a window seat. An orange dayglow sticker on the seat back in front of him read: Abolish work before work abolishes you!

He didn’t trust JINN to read the ceecard after that failure. But he didn’t feel comfortable using his homenet to crack it either. Not after the way it had come into his possession. Perhaps he should consider an ABC security upgrade for all of his systems.

He disembarked at Powell Station, his actions mechanical. He resisted thinking about his immediate destination. Instead, he considered technical aspects of the ceecard problem as he flashed his i-card, fingerprints, voice-recognition, and retinal patterns to breeze through the nucity security gates. The main downtown police station was upstairs, above the BART station, all maraging steel and metaglass, in the nucity’s ground floor. Jimmy ran into Alex in the entrance hall.

About time you got here. I’m going for Chinese, but we can stop by the morgue first.

The cop led the detective to an elevator bank.

So, what’s the mystery? Jimmy asked.

Weston sighed, his bald spot visible in the LED light despite a comb over. They took an elevator down.

We found him this morning, in a Tenderloin hotel. You know the kind of place I’m talking about, Jimmy. The clerk said he’d checked in yesterday evening with a young girl. She came back down alone about thirty, forty minutes after they went up.

Murder?

The sergeant ushered Jimmy into the sub-basement.

No, no one’s charging murder at this point. Forensics says he just stopped sometime last night.

What do you mean? A heart attack?

Cardiac arrest, cerebral arrest, everything arrest. The lab ran every possible test. Nothing. Far as they can figure it, every process in the man just stopped for no reason a short time after he checked into that hotel room.

Alex placed his hand on the lock to open another dull metal door, stenciled with the words MORGUE TWO.

How’s that possible? Jimmy asked. Some kind of shock?

Your guess is as good as ours. Needless to say, we put an APB out on the young lady. There’s one more clue besides the girl.

The room was chilly, white-tiled, clinical. The cop glanced along a row of lockers, then pressed a button. When the cold steel drawer rolled out, Danny’s slack, gray corpse made it look small. Alive, he’d stood six foot four—a meter ninety-six—and weighed a hundred twenty-seven kilos, all of it muscle. Jimmy immediately noticed the mark. Pulped purple skin covered his friend’s dead face like a livid, fleshy flower in bloom. Or a stop-shot explosion.

Blood vessels? Jimmy closely examined the blemish, large as his hand, following out the damaged threads. How old had Danny been? Only thirty-five.

Capillaries. All of them ruptured. And most of the surrounding cells too.

It spreads evenly, out from the lips, Jimmy observed. Danny boy, he asked himself, what’s happened to you?

In every direction, Alex added. Forensics don’t know what caused it. Obviously they think it’s trauma based. Something to do with the way he died. But they can’t prove it.

What have his girlfriend Jackie and the secretary said? Jimmy straightened up, suddenly, painfully aware of Danny’s dead weight in the room. He pressed the button to close the drawer. The police sergeant seemed to relax when the body rolled back into the white-tiled wall.

His office, they say he was working a job. He was secretive about it according to the girlfriend. But he came into a lot of money just before he died. We’re checking on that too.

The girl?

Not much on her yet. The registration was fake and the clerk couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify a mug shot. Not good for business. All we got is a basic description. Dark hair, light eyes, real pretty. About five-six. Meter seventy-two. Hard body type.

They retraced their way to the cold, fortified entrance to the police department. Weston slipped him the particulars on the hotel and the clerk.

I’ll see what I can dig up on Danny, Jimmy said.

Thanks. Weston gave him a nervous smile. My boss, he don’t like it when people start dying in ways we don’t know about yet.

The trains rumbled beneath Jimmy’s feet.

He took the escalator down into the station. The strange visitor from his office forgotten for the moment, he reminisced about Danny as he paced next to the tracks. He recalled dirt-bike expeditions into the Sierras, late-night political quarrels after a couple of beers, listening to fervent jazz in smoky bars at the edge of musical satori. Jimmy thought about Danny’s bird collection. How he’d helped build the heated aviary in his friend’s backyard to house the live parakeets, finches, parrots, cockatiels, macaws, and dozens of other exotic birds.

A Richmond-bound BART train hissed to a stop next to the platform and he found a seat. The train achieved ear-popping speeds beneath the bay. Jimmy squeezed the bridge of his nose to hold back tears. The image of his friend’s cold body on the police morgue’s slab, with that strange, disfiguring mark on his face, etched itself into the darkness behind his closed eyes. Too damned young. Jimmy shook his head, suddenly aware that he was four-plus years older than Danny.

I’ll find who did this, Danny, Jimmy reassured himself. I’ll get ‘em.

TWO

The Red Havana burned out sometime after Becky Wiley recognized the outline of an armored truck on the gestalt sensor sweep. She chewed on the dead cigar stump as she carefully studied the computer-enhanced image. The truck appeared to be a Ford P-750, 2018 model, half buried in the gutted ‘burbs past the gray zone, well into No Man’s Land. Nicknamed the gray tortoise, the P-750 was encased in layered plasteel armor, which would be worth plenty even if empty.

It looked too damned easy.

She locked her skyring, Kalinda, into the casual flight arc that would eventually take her back to the location of the potential salvage. Becky returned her attention to early evening landscapes beneath the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains, watching them through Kalinda’s smart cockpit cyglass. The mountain peaks were steeped in sunset hues.

She sat lanky in her steel-blue flight suit and black tactical boots, with a strong jaw, sharp nose, and short-waved, red-black hair. Her green-gray eyes were half shut as she checked the sensor array once again. No IRs in the area, but that could be camouflage.

It was probably a trap.

What’s your take on it, Kali?

Five to one, baby, the ring’s AI said, her words a verbal sneer.

One in five, Becky mused. Fire a shuriken on approach.

She heard her mother’s chastising pack-a-day voice as she relit the Red Havana with a safety match and puffed it into life. The cigar’s fierce red glow limned the smoke as the cloud layered with the cool blues, greens, and yellows of Kalinda’s instrumentation. The spooky light of sensory screens on scan mode ghosted the cockpit’s dark interior.

Outside and at a distance, the threatening darkness of No Man’s Land frayed into the gray zone’s spotty light. Illuminated suburban clumps and strings quickly congealed into the patchwork remnants of southern California’s leading metropolis. Nucity L.A.’s glinting, gaudy arcology rose over this sprawl almost a kilometer into the brooding evening, far behind Becky’s right shoulder like a defiant, completed tower of Babel surrounded by animated mega-advertisements. The lights from Lemuria West smudged green and gold across the hazy ocean horizon beneath trails of muddy sunset.

It took thirteen minutes, twenty-three seconds by Kalinda’s clock for them to swing back over the target.

You and I both know it’s probably an ambush, Kali, Becky said. But if the shuriken bounces, we take it.

If it’s a trap, they’re IR-screened, Kalinda pointed out. I’ll have to respond on sound and motion.

Let’s just hope they don’t outgun us. Becky took another long puff on her dwindling cigar, confident despite the admonition.

Quarter VR? Kalinda asked, suggesting the percentage of surveillance the AI should provide for Becky while she worked.

Sure, she said. And Kali, we’re far enough downrange…

Got it. Kali was now keyed to respond with maximum lethal force.

The supersonic shuriken bounced off of certified plasteel armor, or something equally as hard, so Becky took Kalinda down on a spiral. The bandits in the suburban ruins, one crew at least, jumped the gun. They fired an Arrow missile, which was easily dodged by the skyring. Kalinda zeroed in on them and laid down a withering initial barrage. Three empty houses nearby immediately ignited amid bright billows of startled parrots.

The ambushers were pinned down by the time the skyring settled over the armored truck. Becky dressed in full cylink body armor before exiting the ring through the safety hatch. She noted the Brink’s logos on the vehicle’s exposed surfaces as she used an industrial laser to carve up the plasteel like butter. Kalinda covered her with demanding, deadly fire.

Becky watched the battle, projected in virtual reality on the left side of her combat goggles, as she worked. Two berserkers, one a tall black woman with an orange mohawk, fell beneath the skyring’s automatic lasers before they could throw their grenades. A green-haired white hoodlum, wearing nothing except neon war paint, collapsed while still swinging a plastique boomerang when one of Kali’s razor bolas took out his legs. The boomerang’s blue-white explosion took out three additional outlaws. Two leather-clad street gangsters bounded in on green exoskeletal RooFrames and were transformed into screaming, colliding pincushions under Kali’s hail of venomous nanodarts. Silent in order to avoid disturbing Becky’s concentration while she worked, Kalinda snarled Bitch! as the AI chased a racing Nukizer mounted with a Northrop Grumman cannon firing short bursts at the skyring. Kali finally hit the vehicle with a laser bolt to the fuel tank, causing it to burst into a satisfying ball of flame.

Kalinda was programmed with the experience of thousands of chess and Go masters, as well as hundreds of military strategists and tacticians, so Becky knew the AI could handle these bozos. Easily. Her job was the salvage.

Becky noticed a few small, old-style security cases tumbled together in the truck’s large, exposed cargo compartment. She managed to scoop them into the ring’s lift before she finished slicing up the plasteel. By the time she raised her booty into the bay, the surrounding blocks of abandoned tract homes were ablaze and the surviving ambushers were on the run.

Looks like they got three or four salvors before we came along, Becky said, examining Kalinda’s record of the battle on the flight home. There was stripped wreckage stashed everywhere around the Brink’s. They were using it for bait, just like I figured.

They won’t be bringing down any more, Kali said. Their overconfidence was a help. Fiery the angels fell.

You implying they almost took us down? she asked. She reached for another Red Havana from the case next to her flight sling and felt the ache of sore shoulder muscles.

If it weren’t for some of your modifications, we’d be their salvage now. Kali’s tone was neutral.

Becky thought about it as she stared out of Kalinda’s smart canopy into the night. Kali flew a low, evasive course back home to Mother Colony. No running lights. Brilliant white and blue maglev railways veined the northwestern horizon. She struck another safety match to light the second cigar. Several LAPD battle units shot away from the nucity’s serrated gold and silver crown, only now responding to their firefight with the ambushers.

They had decent firepower, Becky acknowledged, puffing meditatively. Sonics. Plastique. Percussives…

Kali came to the bottom line.

They also had an x-ray pulse cannon mounted on a Jeep. And they knew enough about my design to do some damage. I hit them hard after their premature attack, but they fired the cannon four times before I knocked it out. Three times dead on my engine casings, the fourth dead on my AI core. Luckily, they didn’t realize you had monoplated those crucial components. Otherwise, those punk-ass bandits might have tried taking potshots to bring us down—dangerous considering how compact I am.

Becky had fallen in love with Kalinda’s tight Hummingbird line of skyrings, depending upon them for her life in the Amazon water wars. She’d decided on salvage and repossession after military service and bought a govsurp bird six years ago. High performance plastics, graphene and carbon cubed, silicon carbide, maraging steel, a spectrum of metaglass—she had acquired materials that had strength, toughness, and flexibility, but were simultaneously lightweight, heat resistant, and potentially cyber smart. Kalinda emerged as she rebuilt the skyring from top to bottom, inside and out, on a couple of interest-free GI loans.

Although Kalinda had originally been designed to accommodate four crew members with room for two passengers, Becky had sharply reduced operations space to two plus one. She’d installed the latest compact super-alloy Euro propulsion units, upgrading to Mach III just last year. And she’d spared no expense in obtaining the most advanced miniaturized weapons hardware available, whether military, corporate, or black market. Consequently there had been ample cargo storage for the plasteel, the security cases, and more.

Becky had put in a standalone AI to bring the craft entirely under her command. And she hadn’t used just any AI for Kali’s brain. Her ring was equipped with the same type of AI employed frontline by the Pentagon, a Morrigan configurationintegrated with a basic Badb/Macha security architecture employing a Nemain data structure. A Unix-derived Khattiya operating system handled the hardware, and in turn, was informed by a comprehensive software library of tactics and strategy. To this she’d added that hard-as-nails voice stolen from Sigourney Weaver’s portrayal of Lt. Ellen Ripley in a series of 20th-century sci-fi alien monster films.

Kali was now the lean, high-tech fighting machine that the Hummingbird skyrings should have been, back when they were prowling what was left of Brazil’s smoking green jungles a decade ago. Becky’s salvage work was just as dangerous, even discounting urban legends like the killer ahuizotl houses.

She launched a string of blue smoke rings into the cabin’s murky atmosphere, suddenly aware she’d been up since dawn.

All right, we buy upgrades with this haul.

You should make a nice personal profit from the plasmetal, Kalinda chimed. Even after my improvements.

Becky smiled, her mind quickly calculating markets and sales.

That’ll go toward vacation time. Costa Rica, here I come.