Some of you may remember me torturing poor Massassians with grammar questions in the discussion forum. Here's the first draft of the full thing.
It's kinda lenghty at 6,000 words, but you don't have to read it all, of course. As always, I would greatly appreciate all comments on what can be improved / dropped, what made you stumble through the story, and, if you stopped reading, then at which point (to weed out the more boring parts).
Thanks!
-----
The Red Pills Motorcycle Club
-----
Zak stepped around the overturned tables, trying to avoid the pieces of broken bottles that littered the floor. Volanda sat on the bar stand, a cigarette dangling between her lips.
“Glad you made it,” she said.
“Was it the Vipers?”
The Vipers recently took to frequenting the Steelworks District, and taking out one of the Red Pills’ five members seemed like a logical thing for the little bastards to do.
“No. I spoke to a couple of locals. The Eyes got him.”
Zak looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening in. It never hurt to be paranoid when Exotec Interal Security – the Trader’s Guild’s teeth and claws – were involved.
“The Eyes? They found out about the basement?”
“Don’t think so. What I’ve been told is that the Eyes moved in and threw two men out the windows, packed them up, and left.”
“I don’t think any of our guys were going to Eli’s.”
“Well, maybe the other guy wasn’t one of ours. Fact remains the same, though – the Trader’s Guild has Eli, and I’m not sure I want to know what they’re doing to him.”
Volanda caught him staring at her trembling hands. Cigarette in mouth, she rolled up her leather jacket’s sleeve and fed a black market Omegon capsule through the receiver implant in her wrist. Her hands stopped shaking.
“Come on,” Zak said, and, using his hand for support, jumped over the bar stand. He kicked away an old orange rag, and opened the trap door underneath. The small room under the bar’s floorboards smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. The sub-quantum computer still stood on the small wooden table, right next to Eli’s beloved leather chair. Volanda was right – the Eyes never checked the place. Zak removed a loose brick from one of the walls.
“You’ve been here often?” Volanda asked. Him knowing about the cache shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. After all, it was his idea for those of them with legal jobs to store the government supplied Omegon in case things went sour. He threw the capsules into his backpack.
“A few times,” he said, “Eli was onto something here, something big. He managed to plug that computer of his into an actual inter-city communications line.”
“Inter-city? So it’s true? There are other cities out there?”
Zak recalled the night he and Eli first unscrambled part of a call from the tapped government line. After going through the static, they’ve concluded that there was another city within a thousand miles radius, contrary to what the Trader’s Guild would have everyone think. There were people nearby who lived without the Eyes or Omegon capsules to dictate them their hours.
“Yeah,” he said, “There are.”
Volanda exhaled a stream of smoke through her nose.
“You think that’s why they got him? He found out some way to let them know about what’s going on here?”
“They would’ve checked here if that would’ve been the case,” Zak put his hand on the computer’s flat screen monitor, “And you think they don’t know? Though most don’t admit it, everyone pretty much knows that Exotec was behind the virus. There’s nothing to expose. I mean, a highly infectious virus with no permanent cure, an isolated self-sustained city of the terminally ill who are dependant on the government’s drug give-outs to stay alive? It’s the perfect control system.”
“So, if the Eyes didn’t know about him discovering the line…”
Heavy footsteps came from the ceiling, the kind that metal capped boots tend to make. Zak pressed his finger against his lips, but Volanda didn’t need the hint. She stuck her cigarette into the wall, putting it out in a burst of sparks. Zak shifted closer to the open trap door. If the Eyes were to decide to look behind the bar stand, Zak and Volanda would’ve been royally screwed.
There was a sudden, dull sound as if the Eyes dropped something heavy on the bar’s floor. Judging by the voices, there were only two of them, and, from his hiding place, Zak could hear their every word.
“Hell, why’d you have to make me drag that oil all the way here? Look at all this booze!”
“Yeah, and what if there wasn’t any? Just spread it out a bit, will ya?” said the other Eye.
Zak met Volanda’s gaze. It looked like they would be royally screwed either way.
“You know, the guy who owned this place?” said the first Eye, “The one we picked up this morning? I heard he’s in some motorcycle gang or some such. He even had this leather jacket with a red pill patch stitched on the back. Took some persuading ‘till he let go of the jacket, that stubborn son of a *****.”
“That reminds me I saw three bikes by the entrance. Were they here when you did the pick up?”
“Dunno. Maybe.”
“Burn them too.”
Zak, his eyes still on Volanda, gave her a nod. She answered by connecting her thumb and index fingers into a circle. He got ready to move.
“But chief, they look mighty expensive. Why not call in the hauler before we trash the place? It’s Chen’s shift tonight, he won’t tell nobody nothing.”
“I said…”
Zak ran up the three-step ladder, using the last step to launch himself over the bar stand. He heard Volanda hurry behind him. The two Eyes froze in the centre of the room. The first one carefully put the metal oil canister on the floor, and then both of them went for their shock batons. If their blue-red riot gear was any indication, they were no strangers to violence.
The Eye came at Zak swinging. Zak side-stepped, grabbing an overturned bar stool in the process. The baton slammed against the bar stand in an electric explosion, scorching the wood into blackness. In his peripheral vision, he saw Volanda pushing against the other Eye’s hand.
Zak swung the stool behind him to gather momentum, and smashed it against the right side of the Eye’s helmet. The Eye fell. Zak grabbed his baton and rushed to help Volanda. He stuck the baton in the opening on the back of Jone’s neck, right between the helmet and the body armor. The baton fizzled, and, with a moan, the second Eye fell to his knees. Zak helped Volanda up.
“You okay?” he asked.
She raised her thumb and nodded towards the exit. They had to hurry – it wouldn’t take long for the Eyes to call in the cavalry.
Outside, Zak and Volanda climbed on their motorcycles.
“Shame about Eli’s bike,” said Zak, putting down his helmet’s visor. Volanda sighed in return. Her visor was already down, the afternoon sun reflecting in its polished surface.
“They’ll be looking for us, so be extra careful on your way home. Call Tony and Lil Joe. The Red Pills are going to have one hell of a meeting.”
She turned her head away. In the distance, he could make out a small dot of a space shuttle take off from Duares III’s sole space port and disappear beyond the dark purple skies.
“Don’t worry,” Zak added, “We’re gonna get him back.”
He pressed his thumb against the ignition key scanner and the motorbike’s nuclear power cell beamed into life. He sped away from the bar and took a long bend around the Atomic District. Volanda went the other way. Plastic bottles and carton boxes crunched under his wheels. This district had always been a slum. He passed the district border, took his cruiser around the old meatpacking plant – that was Viper territory – and took the long stretch home.
He didn’t slow down until he reached the empty factories and the deserted living blocks of his home district. He got off the cruiser by the Chop Shop, and unlocked the door.
The Chop Shop’s sensors picked up movement, flooding the room with electric light. Zak rolled in the motorcycle, closed the door, and fell on his red leather couch. The Chop Shop doubled as his workshop, library, garage, and the headquarters for the Red Pills Motorcycle Club, and as such, had always been in a state of perpetual chaotic mess. But after having spent six years in the Water Pump Cluster’s rat-infested barracks, his poor man’s home had always been a sight most welcome.
He considered forcing himself to sleep, but then thought better of it. Zak dropped the helmet by his feet, and went ransacking through the piles of books he had lying in-between chassis and engine parts.
He found A to C Carrier Class Interplanetary Vessels by an old photograph of his late mother. With the heavy book in hand, he climbed back onto the couch. Zak remembered the day when he and Volanda bartered it from a trader for an eight-wheeler tire. It hadn’t aged well. But then again, neither did they.
Volanda’s hasty Knock-Pause-Knock-Pause-Knock came from the door.
“Hey,” she shouted, voice cracking up, “Open up, it’s me! Open up!”
He rushed for the door. Volanda yanked the door open from her side and ran into his arms.
“Zak,” she said, “They got Lil Joe. I tried calling him and an Eye picked up. I went to Tony’s place then, didn’t want to use the phone. His place was full of them. They barricaded the bloody street!”
“You think they got him too?”
“Then we’re heading out. We’ll pick up Tony on our way if he’s still in one piece.”
“On our way to where?”
Zak leaned down and kissed her forehead on impulse. The touch of her skin on his lips brought memories he had long learned to suppress. He let go of her.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” he said.
“Wait,” Volanda said, “Do you hear that?”
Another vehicle’s motor hummed outside – by the sound of things, a motorbike. He took a peek outside. The dark purple of the skies had now changed to black, the planet’s twin moons being the only source of illumination besides the Chop Shop’s electric light.
“Hey, Zak,” said Tony, removing his helmet. Compared to Volanda’s Samurai, his home-made motorbike looked like something out of an Old Earth museum.
“Tony, get in here!”
Tony hurried inside. Tony’s usual necklace of pre-historic cell phones dangled from his neck. Sometimes Zak thought that maybe it wasn’t just Tony’s motorbike that belonged in a museum.
Zak closed the door behind him. He noticed that one of the phones on Tony’s necklace looked like someone had tried to burn a hole through it.
“Nice to see you two all right,” Tony said, “They almost got me with a shock baton. What the hell’s this all about?”
“They got Eli,” said Zak, and threw Tony one of the green Omegon capsules that he had taken from Eli’s stash, “Take a hit, we wouldn’t want you going all paralyzed on us.”
Tony pushed the capsule into his wrist injector.
“Thanks,” he said.
“They’ve got Lil Joe as well,” Volanda added.
“As for what this is all about, ladies and gentlemen,” said Zak, “Have you ever heard rumors of there being other cities?”
Tony scratched his forehead.
“Of course there are other cities,” he said, “Where’d you think your cruiser came from before the Trader’s Guild sold it to you?”
“No, I don’t mean where the shuttles come from, I mean here, on Duares III.”
“And even so, what difference does it make? No one’d be able to go there. We can’t live without Omegon. It’s the same reason why no-one ever boarded a shuttle – it’d be a one-way trip. I guess this is why no one except the Trader’s Guild highest ranking members are allowed to the space port. They don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea and taking chances playing stow away. I bet their pilot crews got better things to do than jettison dead bodies into space.”
“It makes all the difference in the world,” said Volanda, “Eli tapped into the government’s inter-city line. That means there’s not only definite proof that there’s another city somewhere nearby, that means that we didn’t always need Omegon. That means that, in theory, we can live without it – that means we’ve got somewhere to go, someone to fight off the Eyes and the Trader’s Guild together with.”
“Is it just me, or are you both actually as naïve as you sound?” said Tony, “But I guess I can understand why the Trader’s Guild wants to shut us down. It’d be easier and quicker to just take five people out than to allow us to start a fuss out of this. All right then, what do we do next?”
“We go get Eli,” said Zak.
“From The Slam? You actually think that the three of us can break into The Slam and then just walk on out?”
“Eli wouldn’t be in The Slam,” said Volanda quietly, “He was meeting some bloke when they took him, and my bets are that he was one of the Trader’s Guild own. No, Eli isn’t some vandal that they could’ve locked up next to the likes of the Vipers. Trust me on this one – they would’ve taken him straight to Exotec Tower. The Trader’s Guild and the Eyes would have liked to have a few words with him first.”
“Exotec Tower? This keeps getting better and better! And what about Lil Joe?”
“One thing at a time, my friend,” said Zak, “One thing at a time.”
He reached under the couch, and took out three plastic squirt guns. He kept one for himself and gave the other two to Tony and Volanda. Zak thought that the expression on Tony’s face as he accepted the squirt gun would have made a dead man cringe.
“Look,” he said, showing to the squirt gun in Volanda’s hands, “There’s a lighter attached to the tip. The tanks are filled with a cleaning fluid, very flammable stuff. All you’ve got to do is ignite the lighter and…”
A line of concentrated fire shot out from Volanda’s barrel and exploded into flames against the concrete ceiling.
“Woah, easy there!”
“Cool,” she said.
Zak leaned against the couch.
“Have you ever read about the first motorcycle clubs on Old Earth, before we discovered worm holes, back when everything still ran on oil?” he said, “These clubs, gangs even, lots of them were started by war vets. Young soldiers came back home to peace, but by now they couldn’t live as civilians anymore. The most famous motorcycle club on Old Earth had a skull with two wings for an insignia. They took that from the air force.”
Volanda lit up a cigarette.
“It wasn’t about riding a bike and looking cool,” he continued, “And it wasn’t about smashing crap up and breaking things, like our friends and colleagues the Vipers seem to think. It was a way of being outside the system, outside the laws that were made by someone else for someone else. It was about living the dream, and they didn’t give a damn about how they looked living it.”
Tony took out his beloved flask and took a hit.
“So,” he said, “What you’re basically saying is that you want us to break into the one most important building of the planet’s totalitarian regime with three squirt guns and two pairs of balls, and that it’s the way that bikers roll?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Then let’s do this thing.”
It did not take them long to get to the tower. After leaving the Chop Shop, they’ve spilt up to avoid catching any unwanted attention, and met up in the empty street that lead to the tower’s main entrance in quarter an hour’s time.
Exotec Tower stood in the centre of an invisible triangle formed by The Slam in the Steelworks District, the city’s atom reactor in the Atomic District, and the space port beyond the city’s walls. The tower itself had been allegedly constructed from the chassis of the first colonist ship that landed on the planet, and as such, looked at least as ominous as the rumors that surrounded it.
Powerful projectors illuminated a set of stairs that lead to the tower. The main entrance, carved into the base of the carrier space ship, was protected by a large metal plate as an overhead. Zak supposed that it would fall down and lock the building up at the smallest sign of danger. The Trader’s Guild was anything but careless.
“We’ve got to do this quick.”
Zak kicked his chopper into first gear, flew up the stairs, through the entrance, and stopped in the middle of Exotec Tower’s reception hall, scaring the traders inside. Volanda and Tony followed.
There had been five or six people in the room, counting the trader behind the granite reception desk, the only piece of furniture in the room. He also noticed that the word “Exotec” had been engraved into the polished floor tiles at regular intervals.
One of the traders, a lowly eighth class one if the patches on his robe were any indication, dashed for the exit. A stream of liquid fire from Volanda’s squirt gun stopped him in his tracks.
“Everybody down!” she shouted, “Drop now, or drop dead!”
One hand on the throttle, Zak rode his chopper to the receptionist. He grabbed the man by his collar – a sixth class trader according to his badges – and stuck his squirt gun into the receptionist’s face.
“Close the door, now!”
The man pushed a button under his desk, and the heavy metal plate fell down, barricading the tower from the outside world. Zak let go of the man’s collar.
“The elevator keycard please, my good sir,” he said.
Hand shaking, the receptionist offered Zak the keycard.
“Get down on the floor.”
Zak didn’t have to ask twice.
“Damn,” said Volanda, inspecting the prone traders, “They’re all class six and under.”
He exhaled in relief. Fate giving them a high-ranking Trader’s Guild official would’ve felt too much like a trap.
“Tony,” he said, “You stay here and look after our friends. Volanda, come with me.”
“Tony do that, Tony do this… Why does it always take Tony to get things done?”
They killed their engines. Volanda followed Zak to the transparent elevator shaft, leaving Tony behind to start shouting about spraying liquid fire at the ceiling if somebody do as much as dare to move a muscle. The doors slid close behind them, and Zak punched in the floor into the control panel and inserted the keycard into a nearby scanner.
Offices and reception halls glided before their eyes through the elevator doors, sirens silently flashing alert. Zak watched traders hurrying around the floors with a panicked sense of purpose. As they went deeper into the subterranean part of the tower, the polished tiles outside changed to bricks and dirty pipework.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been here before,” said Volanda after a minute’s descent.
“No, but I’ve seen the schematics for the carrier. It’s a ‘Bravado Class’ one, a design that’s over a hundred revolutions old. We’re going to what used to be the engine compartment. No better place to use for a prison.”
The elevator stopped and the glass doors slid open.
“You are now on level minus eighteen,” said a polite female voice, “Please ready your badges for inspection.”
Lamps in the corridor’s four corners flashed red, bathing the dirty plastic walls in waves of reflected light. Zak crossed it half-way when an Eye in full riot gear came charging out the door, a shock baton fizzling in his hand. Zak slammed his helmet against the Eye’s face. The Eye fell down.
“Where’s Eli?” Volanda asked him. She kicked the Eye in the leg.
“Where’s Eli?” she repeated.
“I don’t take their names down, lady,” he said from the floor, “We’ve got one in cell forty six D, suspect number twenty three dash eleven. Came in fresh from the streets.”
Zak removed the guard’s keycard from his belt, and then punched The Eye in the temple. It took two hits to knock him out.
They pressed on into a long corridor, dozens of massive doors on both walls. Zak suspected that all the cells were soundproof. He expected no less from the Guild.
Suspect number twenty three dash eleven’s cell door had been rather unsurprisingly not in any way different from the many white square doors that they’ve passed along the way. Zak stuck his newly acquired keycard into the scanner.
The door opened to the side, and revealed an Eye staring straight at them. Behind the Eye sat a man in a torn Exotec pilot suit, just like the one Zak had seen on holographs, hands bound to the handlebars.
The Eye went for Zak, but was cut off by a stream of liquid fire from Volanda’s squirt gun. Zak slammed his elbow against the Eye’s mouth – six years in the Water Pump Cluster taught him the dangers of hesitation all too well. Without leaving his chair, the prisoner kicked the Eye in the knee. The man fell down, holding his jaw with one hand and his injured knee with the other.
“Untie me,” said the prisoner, blood trickling down his chin, “I know where your friend is.”
While Volanda untied him from the chair, Zak had some time to take a better look at the man. First thing he noticed was that the man didn’t have a wrist injector, meaning that he was the real deal. For all he knew, he might have not even been Exotec. The remains of his pilot suit betrayed an athletic build. He was in his late thirties, spots of gray lining his short hair.
“Thanks,” said the man, “Eli’s cell is right next to mine.”
“Wait,” said Volanda, “The Eyes grabbed Eli because of you, haven’t they?”
“More on that later,” he said, leading them back into the corridor. Zak locked the whimpering Eye inside and opened the door to the adjacent cell.
Eli sprung up from his bunk bed, blood stains on his shirt. Volanda removed her helmet and wrapped her arms around him, kissing him on his cheeks and mouth, each kiss a sting of molten iron into Zak’s broken heart. Eli’s arms and legs shook as he tried to answer her attentions. The Eyes must have held him on Omegon depravation.
Zak stuck a capsule of the drug into Eli’s injector.
“You two are crazy, you know that?” he said after taking the hit, piecing the words together with what appeared to be a strenuous effort.
“Yes, we know,” Zak said, “We’ve locked up the building, and Tony’s got things under control upstairs. Why did the Eyes trash your bar?”
“Your friend’s right, it wasn’t Eli’s fault,” said suspect number twenty three dash eleven, “But we’ve really got to get topside.”
Zak, Volanda, and Eli followed him through the cell block’s exit and into the corridor where the three red lights still flashed alert in silent contempt. The Eye lay where Zak had left him. Eli picked up his shock baton.
“Thanks for getting me out of this,” said the man, “And you’re right, if not for me, they probably wouldn’t have touched any of you in the first place. As I’m sure you have all ready figured, I’m not just a pilot.”
“Well,” Volanda said, “Who the hell are you then, except for bad freaking luck?”
“Name’s Gabriel Kitch. I’m an investigative journalist, if that tells you anything. We’re an independent press, operating out of this sector alliance’s jurisdiction.”
“What’s a sector alliance?” asked Zak.
“The alliance of corporations that oversee all operations in any specified sector. Your star system happens to be part of one of those sectors, just like all other systems in the Free Space. Exotec, one of this sector alliance’s members, had colonized this planet centuries ago. They addicted the new generations to Omegon so that their detestable Trader’s Guild pets could run the show, and a hundred years down the road this planet’s a cheap re-supply stop pit for their ships. Well, at least they didn’t give them guns, so I guess it could be worse. Sounds like a solid headline, wouldn’t you say?”
Volanda’s hair brushed against Zak’s cheek as the four of them squeezed into the elevator.
“It wasn’t nearly as hard to get signed on the Exotec pilot crew as you’d imagine,” he continued when they started their ascent, “I am, after all, a professional.”
“Remember the day when we tuned in on an inter-city com line?” said Eli, “Well, after you left, Gabriel managed to sneak into the Steelworks District and seek me out.”
“A man’s as good as his word, but a word’s worthless unless one can account for it. I needed someone from the underground, someone who sees through the veil of crap the Trader’s Guild built over the years. Eli agreed to give me a testimonial.”
“A testi-what?” Volanda asked.
“You are now on level zero, please ready your badges for inspection,” said the ever-polite elevator.
Tony paced across the hall, maneuvering between the still traders. Sweat poured from under his helmet.
“Finally!” he shouted when he saw them, “You don’t know what’s out there. They brought in every single Eye in the city. Look!”
He pointed at a security monitor on the reception desk. The monitor showed the tower’s stairs leading into a street crowded with Eyes, armed with batons and flashlights. Their blue-red hover vehicles blocked all conceivable means of escape.
“And who the hell is this?” Tony added, pointing at Gabriel.
“Don’t mind me,” said the journalist.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” said Zak, “Saddle up. Gabriel, you ride with Volanda, and Eli, you ride with me.”
“Pray do tell me if you’ve got a plan,” said Tony.
Volanda put her helmet back on and climbed on her bike.
“Didn’t think I’d get to ride a Samurai today,” said Gabriel.
Zak turned his head and said, “Hey, receptionist! Get to those controls.”
The trader hurried to the granite desk. The thick plate rose with a rusty screech, revealing a crowd of Eyes, their shadows highlighted against the street by Exotec Tower’s projectors. Zak, Volanda, and Tony rolled their throttles.
He rode down the stairs like an angel on fire, bursting through the men in the blue-red riot gear. With a burst of molten metal, his bike slid against one of the Eye’s hover cars, leaving a long scar across the cruiser’s hull. Eli tightened his grip on Zak, desperately trying not to fall off. Shock batons flew in the air, other batons flinging at Zak’s exhaust pipe. He flew out onto the main street. Volanda and Tony followed him through the breach he’d made. In his rear-view mirror, he saw the Eyes getting in their hover cars and bikes and turning in their direction.
Zak headed straight for the border of the Steelworks and the Atomic Districts. Volanda and Tony caught up, and were now riding by their side. The Eyes followed close behind, accompanying the race with deafening siren wails.
Many high speed turns later, a yellow road sign on a bent post pronounced that they were entering the territory of the J.F. Snake’s Meatpacking Plant. Zak drove past the sign and into the closed gates, flipping them open on impact. An Eye on a hover bike gained up on him and tried to hit him with a shock baton. Zak ducked, and crashed his cruiser against the Eye’s bike. The moment the bikes touched, Eli stuck his own baton into the Eye’s chest. The man flew off the hover bike and hit the ground, raising a cloud of dust on the impact.
Even now, Zak could hear Viper motors roaring to life. And if in other places in the city the short bastards could have perhaps differentiated between the Trader’s Guild, Red Pills, and the Eyes, then on their own territory they lived by no one’s law but their own. As they and their hover craft tail neared the middle of the plant’s territory – an open asphalted area sparkled with warehouses and other buildings of purposes better left unknown – the Vipers rolled into view.
Midgets in torn leather sat behind the shining headlamps, armed to their very teeth. Most of them brandished spiked planks, hockey clubs, and motorcycle chains, Duares III’s twin moons reflecting in their scratched helmets.
They sped towards the Eyes with berserker screams and war cries that rose above the wailing sirens. Zak felt his grip on the throttle loosen, his body violently shaking to remind him that he put off taking a capsule for way too long. He stopped the bike. The Vipers rushed past them to meet the Eyes, and his friends continued to the plant’s exit in the other direction.
“Hey,” shouted Volanda as she drove off, “Try not to take forever.”
The Vipers crashed into the Eyes, and their fight erupted into absolute chaos. Chains and clubs were as fair play as anything against the shock baton wielding blue-reds.
“My backpack,” Zak said over the sounds of battle to Eli, “Open it up, I’ve got the stuff from your place in there.”
Eli put an Omegon capsule into Zak’s hand. Zak slid the capsule into his wrist injector and it shot out its contents into his bloodstream. He brought the motor to full thrust, screeching the cruiser’s tires against the asphalt. In Zak’s rearview mirror, he saw the Vipers fighting the Trader’s Guild pets like starved, rabid dogs. That night, the old meatpacking plant was not a place for an isolated squad of Eyes to be.
The road led them past the Steelworks District and merged into a serpentine highway across the city. Zak turned off the headlamp.
“Did she tell you where they’re gonna be?” asked Eli.
“Yeah,” he lied.
Zak concentrated on maintaining speed on the scarred, torn road. Volanda didn’t have to tell him – there was only one place on the entire Duares III where she could know that he would find her.
They drove to the old playground in silence. He remembered telling Volanda how many years ago, Zak used to drive out here alone to stare at the sky, away from the cheap electric lights of the city. It was too far away for comfort from Exotec Tower for anyone to have bothered him, or to tell him what he had to do or how he had to live his life. He’s had quite enough of that at the Water Pump Cluster. He remembered how one summer night, he and Volanda made love under the stars.
Volanda’s Samurai and Tony’s self-made motor vehicle were parked in the center of the park, next to a set of ancient swings. Gabriel sat in the swings, sipping from Tony’s whisky flask. Tony and Volanda stood at his sides.
“Ah, and I was starting to get worried,” the journalist said.
Eli got off Zak’s cruiser and went to embrace Volanda. Zak bit his lip.
“Why’d you be worried?” Tony asked, “You’re out of your cell, still in one piece, and you don’t have to inject yourself with some poisonous crap every few hours or so. Sounds like a good set-up to me.”
“Didn’t I all ready cover this before? I’m probably the only chance that your potential offspring have at not having to shoot Omegon into their veins ‘till kingdom come. You know why nobody bothered to make this public before?”
“Why?” asked Zak.
“Because nobody in the whole wide world ever gave a damn. But we’re the free press, and we do give a damn about what happens to our fellow man. Coincidentally, we also give a damn about what happens to sector alliances political intrigues and to their firm belief in an inherited right to do whatever the hell they want.”
Gabriel paused for a few thirsty gulps from the flask.
“I can take two people with me,” he said, “You’ve saved my skin, and it’s only fair that I repay in kind. We’ve got good enough equipment on board to keep you ticking without Omegon for a while. And that’s not even mentioning that a couple of first-hand witnesses would be of some considerable help to me in bringing Exotec down to it’s knees, and that, I’m sure, is in everybody’s best interests.”
“What about Lil Joe?” asked Tony.
“He’s in The Slam,” said Eli, “And I’m not leaving my planet. Not a chance. There’s work that needs to be done here, on Duares III. You said,” he looked at Gabriel, “That there are no other cities on the planet, that the inter-city communication I picked up was a ghost-comm. Well, that might well be right. But so bloody what? This is my people here, and I’m not giving up the fight.”
“Not too sound too repetitive or something,” said Tony, “But I’m not leaving without Joe. Give me that.” He took his flask from Gabriel’s hand and emptied what little remained of the whisky into his throat.
“I’m in,” Zak said in a quiet voice, “I’ll go with you.”
He knew how the Trader’s Guild game was played, and in that game the good guys usually lost. The way he saw it, the only way to win was to change the rules of the game. Volanda stared at Zak with unblinking eyes. She first turned back to Eli, then back to him again.
“Me too,” she said.
Eli opened his mouth to speak, but she put her finger across his lips.
“Shhh,” she said, “I have to do this. Please, don’t make this harder for either of us than it should be. I just have to.” She put on her helmet and climbed on her speed bike. Gabriel positioned himself behind her.
“I hope you get your friend out of the slammer,” said Gabriel.
Zak didn’t say anything.
They reached the space port by dawn. This was a forbidden kingdom for the likes of Zak, and a control post in front of the entrance to the port, packed with offworlder security, made sure that it stayed that way. The security apparently did not care much for Trader’s Guild laws, carrying weapons that Zak had only read about – compact pulse rifles across their backs and blasters sidearm by their hips. On a closer look, some of them were so disfigured by cybernetic prosthetics that they looked human only slightly more than Zak’s power cruiser.
Volanda slowed down, allowing Gabriel to get off the bike. He approached one of the security men and talked to him for a what seemed to be a very long few minutes. Zak counted each second to be the last before they opened fire. But instead, the man laughed at whatever Gabriel had told him, and his colleagues let them pass into the open air space port.
“I convinced him we went to the same bordel together when we were kids,” said the journalist when he was back on Volanda’s motorbike, driving across the landing pads, “You can’t be a good investigative journalist if you don’t know how to talk to people.”
Gabriel’s ship turned out to be a one-story house sized metal brick with pipes, gauges, and antennas sticking out from all conceivable surfaces. Gabriel punched in a code into the keypad by the ship’s hatch and instructed them to get in the ship. Zak spat on the ground, trying to find justification for the loss of his motorcycle. Eventually he gave up, and together with Volanda, who looked even more furious about having to leave her Samurai behind, they climbed into the hatch.
Dim lights illuminated a web of hoses and wires inside. Gabriel strapped them into metal chairs in a compartment with an impossibly low ceiling, and stuck tubes into their wrist injectors.
“Always come prepared,” he said, “Not a bad motto to live by. My pilot – I’m technically the co-pilot, in case you wondered, by the way – might be all ready on his way back, and I don’t want this getting more violent than it has to. He’s not too bad of a guy. Hold tight, it’s gonna be a shaky lift off.”
He climbed further into the ship, leaving the two friends alone in the cabin. Volanda intertwined her fingers with his. He heard the ship’s engines turn on one by one, like hungry giants awakening from their restless slumber. The walls began to shake, and Zak tightened his grip on her fingers.
It's kinda lenghty at 6,000 words, but you don't have to read it all, of course. As always, I would greatly appreciate all comments on what can be improved / dropped, what made you stumble through the story, and, if you stopped reading, then at which point (to weed out the more boring parts).
Thanks!
-----
The Red Pills Motorcycle Club
-----
Zak stepped around the overturned tables, trying to avoid the pieces of broken bottles that littered the floor. Volanda sat on the bar stand, a cigarette dangling between her lips.
“Glad you made it,” she said.
“Was it the Vipers?”
The Vipers recently took to frequenting the Steelworks District, and taking out one of the Red Pills’ five members seemed like a logical thing for the little bastards to do.
“No. I spoke to a couple of locals. The Eyes got him.”
Zak looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening in. It never hurt to be paranoid when Exotec Interal Security – the Trader’s Guild’s teeth and claws – were involved.
“The Eyes? They found out about the basement?”
“Don’t think so. What I’ve been told is that the Eyes moved in and threw two men out the windows, packed them up, and left.”
“I don’t think any of our guys were going to Eli’s.”
“Well, maybe the other guy wasn’t one of ours. Fact remains the same, though – the Trader’s Guild has Eli, and I’m not sure I want to know what they’re doing to him.”
Volanda caught him staring at her trembling hands. Cigarette in mouth, she rolled up her leather jacket’s sleeve and fed a black market Omegon capsule through the receiver implant in her wrist. Her hands stopped shaking.
“Come on,” Zak said, and, using his hand for support, jumped over the bar stand. He kicked away an old orange rag, and opened the trap door underneath. The small room under the bar’s floorboards smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. The sub-quantum computer still stood on the small wooden table, right next to Eli’s beloved leather chair. Volanda was right – the Eyes never checked the place. Zak removed a loose brick from one of the walls.
“You’ve been here often?” Volanda asked. Him knowing about the cache shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. After all, it was his idea for those of them with legal jobs to store the government supplied Omegon in case things went sour. He threw the capsules into his backpack.
“A few times,” he said, “Eli was onto something here, something big. He managed to plug that computer of his into an actual inter-city communications line.”
“Inter-city? So it’s true? There are other cities out there?”
Zak recalled the night he and Eli first unscrambled part of a call from the tapped government line. After going through the static, they’ve concluded that there was another city within a thousand miles radius, contrary to what the Trader’s Guild would have everyone think. There were people nearby who lived without the Eyes or Omegon capsules to dictate them their hours.
“Yeah,” he said, “There are.”
Volanda exhaled a stream of smoke through her nose.
“You think that’s why they got him? He found out some way to let them know about what’s going on here?”
“They would’ve checked here if that would’ve been the case,” Zak put his hand on the computer’s flat screen monitor, “And you think they don’t know? Though most don’t admit it, everyone pretty much knows that Exotec was behind the virus. There’s nothing to expose. I mean, a highly infectious virus with no permanent cure, an isolated self-sustained city of the terminally ill who are dependant on the government’s drug give-outs to stay alive? It’s the perfect control system.”
“So, if the Eyes didn’t know about him discovering the line…”
Heavy footsteps came from the ceiling, the kind that metal capped boots tend to make. Zak pressed his finger against his lips, but Volanda didn’t need the hint. She stuck her cigarette into the wall, putting it out in a burst of sparks. Zak shifted closer to the open trap door. If the Eyes were to decide to look behind the bar stand, Zak and Volanda would’ve been royally screwed.
There was a sudden, dull sound as if the Eyes dropped something heavy on the bar’s floor. Judging by the voices, there were only two of them, and, from his hiding place, Zak could hear their every word.
“Hell, why’d you have to make me drag that oil all the way here? Look at all this booze!”
“Yeah, and what if there wasn’t any? Just spread it out a bit, will ya?” said the other Eye.
Zak met Volanda’s gaze. It looked like they would be royally screwed either way.
“You know, the guy who owned this place?” said the first Eye, “The one we picked up this morning? I heard he’s in some motorcycle gang or some such. He even had this leather jacket with a red pill patch stitched on the back. Took some persuading ‘till he let go of the jacket, that stubborn son of a *****.”
“That reminds me I saw three bikes by the entrance. Were they here when you did the pick up?”
“Dunno. Maybe.”
“Burn them too.”
Zak, his eyes still on Volanda, gave her a nod. She answered by connecting her thumb and index fingers into a circle. He got ready to move.
“But chief, they look mighty expensive. Why not call in the hauler before we trash the place? It’s Chen’s shift tonight, he won’t tell nobody nothing.”
“I said…”
Zak ran up the three-step ladder, using the last step to launch himself over the bar stand. He heard Volanda hurry behind him. The two Eyes froze in the centre of the room. The first one carefully put the metal oil canister on the floor, and then both of them went for their shock batons. If their blue-red riot gear was any indication, they were no strangers to violence.
The Eye came at Zak swinging. Zak side-stepped, grabbing an overturned bar stool in the process. The baton slammed against the bar stand in an electric explosion, scorching the wood into blackness. In his peripheral vision, he saw Volanda pushing against the other Eye’s hand.
Zak swung the stool behind him to gather momentum, and smashed it against the right side of the Eye’s helmet. The Eye fell. Zak grabbed his baton and rushed to help Volanda. He stuck the baton in the opening on the back of Jone’s neck, right between the helmet and the body armor. The baton fizzled, and, with a moan, the second Eye fell to his knees. Zak helped Volanda up.
“You okay?” he asked.
She raised her thumb and nodded towards the exit. They had to hurry – it wouldn’t take long for the Eyes to call in the cavalry.
Outside, Zak and Volanda climbed on their motorcycles.
“Shame about Eli’s bike,” said Zak, putting down his helmet’s visor. Volanda sighed in return. Her visor was already down, the afternoon sun reflecting in its polished surface.
“They’ll be looking for us, so be extra careful on your way home. Call Tony and Lil Joe. The Red Pills are going to have one hell of a meeting.”
She turned her head away. In the distance, he could make out a small dot of a space shuttle take off from Duares III’s sole space port and disappear beyond the dark purple skies.
“Don’t worry,” Zak added, “We’re gonna get him back.”
He pressed his thumb against the ignition key scanner and the motorbike’s nuclear power cell beamed into life. He sped away from the bar and took a long bend around the Atomic District. Volanda went the other way. Plastic bottles and carton boxes crunched under his wheels. This district had always been a slum. He passed the district border, took his cruiser around the old meatpacking plant – that was Viper territory – and took the long stretch home.
He didn’t slow down until he reached the empty factories and the deserted living blocks of his home district. He got off the cruiser by the Chop Shop, and unlocked the door.
The Chop Shop’s sensors picked up movement, flooding the room with electric light. Zak rolled in the motorcycle, closed the door, and fell on his red leather couch. The Chop Shop doubled as his workshop, library, garage, and the headquarters for the Red Pills Motorcycle Club, and as such, had always been in a state of perpetual chaotic mess. But after having spent six years in the Water Pump Cluster’s rat-infested barracks, his poor man’s home had always been a sight most welcome.
He considered forcing himself to sleep, but then thought better of it. Zak dropped the helmet by his feet, and went ransacking through the piles of books he had lying in-between chassis and engine parts.
He found A to C Carrier Class Interplanetary Vessels by an old photograph of his late mother. With the heavy book in hand, he climbed back onto the couch. Zak remembered the day when he and Volanda bartered it from a trader for an eight-wheeler tire. It hadn’t aged well. But then again, neither did they.
Volanda’s hasty Knock-Pause-Knock-Pause-Knock came from the door.
“Hey,” she shouted, voice cracking up, “Open up, it’s me! Open up!”
He rushed for the door. Volanda yanked the door open from her side and ran into his arms.
“Zak,” she said, “They got Lil Joe. I tried calling him and an Eye picked up. I went to Tony’s place then, didn’t want to use the phone. His place was full of them. They barricaded the bloody street!”
“You think they got him too?”
“Then we’re heading out. We’ll pick up Tony on our way if he’s still in one piece.”
“On our way to where?”
Zak leaned down and kissed her forehead on impulse. The touch of her skin on his lips brought memories he had long learned to suppress. He let go of her.
“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” he said.
“Wait,” Volanda said, “Do you hear that?”
Another vehicle’s motor hummed outside – by the sound of things, a motorbike. He took a peek outside. The dark purple of the skies had now changed to black, the planet’s twin moons being the only source of illumination besides the Chop Shop’s electric light.
“Hey, Zak,” said Tony, removing his helmet. Compared to Volanda’s Samurai, his home-made motorbike looked like something out of an Old Earth museum.
“Tony, get in here!”
Tony hurried inside. Tony’s usual necklace of pre-historic cell phones dangled from his neck. Sometimes Zak thought that maybe it wasn’t just Tony’s motorbike that belonged in a museum.
Zak closed the door behind him. He noticed that one of the phones on Tony’s necklace looked like someone had tried to burn a hole through it.
“Nice to see you two all right,” Tony said, “They almost got me with a shock baton. What the hell’s this all about?”
“They got Eli,” said Zak, and threw Tony one of the green Omegon capsules that he had taken from Eli’s stash, “Take a hit, we wouldn’t want you going all paralyzed on us.”
Tony pushed the capsule into his wrist injector.
“Thanks,” he said.
“They’ve got Lil Joe as well,” Volanda added.
“As for what this is all about, ladies and gentlemen,” said Zak, “Have you ever heard rumors of there being other cities?”
Tony scratched his forehead.
“Of course there are other cities,” he said, “Where’d you think your cruiser came from before the Trader’s Guild sold it to you?”
“No, I don’t mean where the shuttles come from, I mean here, on Duares III.”
“And even so, what difference does it make? No one’d be able to go there. We can’t live without Omegon. It’s the same reason why no-one ever boarded a shuttle – it’d be a one-way trip. I guess this is why no one except the Trader’s Guild highest ranking members are allowed to the space port. They don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea and taking chances playing stow away. I bet their pilot crews got better things to do than jettison dead bodies into space.”
“It makes all the difference in the world,” said Volanda, “Eli tapped into the government’s inter-city line. That means there’s not only definite proof that there’s another city somewhere nearby, that means that we didn’t always need Omegon. That means that, in theory, we can live without it – that means we’ve got somewhere to go, someone to fight off the Eyes and the Trader’s Guild together with.”
“Is it just me, or are you both actually as naïve as you sound?” said Tony, “But I guess I can understand why the Trader’s Guild wants to shut us down. It’d be easier and quicker to just take five people out than to allow us to start a fuss out of this. All right then, what do we do next?”
“We go get Eli,” said Zak.
“From The Slam? You actually think that the three of us can break into The Slam and then just walk on out?”
“Eli wouldn’t be in The Slam,” said Volanda quietly, “He was meeting some bloke when they took him, and my bets are that he was one of the Trader’s Guild own. No, Eli isn’t some vandal that they could’ve locked up next to the likes of the Vipers. Trust me on this one – they would’ve taken him straight to Exotec Tower. The Trader’s Guild and the Eyes would have liked to have a few words with him first.”
“Exotec Tower? This keeps getting better and better! And what about Lil Joe?”
“One thing at a time, my friend,” said Zak, “One thing at a time.”
He reached under the couch, and took out three plastic squirt guns. He kept one for himself and gave the other two to Tony and Volanda. Zak thought that the expression on Tony’s face as he accepted the squirt gun would have made a dead man cringe.
“Look,” he said, showing to the squirt gun in Volanda’s hands, “There’s a lighter attached to the tip. The tanks are filled with a cleaning fluid, very flammable stuff. All you’ve got to do is ignite the lighter and…”
A line of concentrated fire shot out from Volanda’s barrel and exploded into flames against the concrete ceiling.
“Woah, easy there!”
“Cool,” she said.
Zak leaned against the couch.
“Have you ever read about the first motorcycle clubs on Old Earth, before we discovered worm holes, back when everything still ran on oil?” he said, “These clubs, gangs even, lots of them were started by war vets. Young soldiers came back home to peace, but by now they couldn’t live as civilians anymore. The most famous motorcycle club on Old Earth had a skull with two wings for an insignia. They took that from the air force.”
Volanda lit up a cigarette.
“It wasn’t about riding a bike and looking cool,” he continued, “And it wasn’t about smashing crap up and breaking things, like our friends and colleagues the Vipers seem to think. It was a way of being outside the system, outside the laws that were made by someone else for someone else. It was about living the dream, and they didn’t give a damn about how they looked living it.”
Tony took out his beloved flask and took a hit.
“So,” he said, “What you’re basically saying is that you want us to break into the one most important building of the planet’s totalitarian regime with three squirt guns and two pairs of balls, and that it’s the way that bikers roll?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Then let’s do this thing.”
It did not take them long to get to the tower. After leaving the Chop Shop, they’ve spilt up to avoid catching any unwanted attention, and met up in the empty street that lead to the tower’s main entrance in quarter an hour’s time.
Exotec Tower stood in the centre of an invisible triangle formed by The Slam in the Steelworks District, the city’s atom reactor in the Atomic District, and the space port beyond the city’s walls. The tower itself had been allegedly constructed from the chassis of the first colonist ship that landed on the planet, and as such, looked at least as ominous as the rumors that surrounded it.
Powerful projectors illuminated a set of stairs that lead to the tower. The main entrance, carved into the base of the carrier space ship, was protected by a large metal plate as an overhead. Zak supposed that it would fall down and lock the building up at the smallest sign of danger. The Trader’s Guild was anything but careless.
“We’ve got to do this quick.”
Zak kicked his chopper into first gear, flew up the stairs, through the entrance, and stopped in the middle of Exotec Tower’s reception hall, scaring the traders inside. Volanda and Tony followed.
There had been five or six people in the room, counting the trader behind the granite reception desk, the only piece of furniture in the room. He also noticed that the word “Exotec” had been engraved into the polished floor tiles at regular intervals.
One of the traders, a lowly eighth class one if the patches on his robe were any indication, dashed for the exit. A stream of liquid fire from Volanda’s squirt gun stopped him in his tracks.
“Everybody down!” she shouted, “Drop now, or drop dead!”
One hand on the throttle, Zak rode his chopper to the receptionist. He grabbed the man by his collar – a sixth class trader according to his badges – and stuck his squirt gun into the receptionist’s face.
“Close the door, now!”
The man pushed a button under his desk, and the heavy metal plate fell down, barricading the tower from the outside world. Zak let go of the man’s collar.
“The elevator keycard please, my good sir,” he said.
Hand shaking, the receptionist offered Zak the keycard.
“Get down on the floor.”
Zak didn’t have to ask twice.
“Damn,” said Volanda, inspecting the prone traders, “They’re all class six and under.”
He exhaled in relief. Fate giving them a high-ranking Trader’s Guild official would’ve felt too much like a trap.
“Tony,” he said, “You stay here and look after our friends. Volanda, come with me.”
“Tony do that, Tony do this… Why does it always take Tony to get things done?”
They killed their engines. Volanda followed Zak to the transparent elevator shaft, leaving Tony behind to start shouting about spraying liquid fire at the ceiling if somebody do as much as dare to move a muscle. The doors slid close behind them, and Zak punched in the floor into the control panel and inserted the keycard into a nearby scanner.
Offices and reception halls glided before their eyes through the elevator doors, sirens silently flashing alert. Zak watched traders hurrying around the floors with a panicked sense of purpose. As they went deeper into the subterranean part of the tower, the polished tiles outside changed to bricks and dirty pipework.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been here before,” said Volanda after a minute’s descent.
“No, but I’ve seen the schematics for the carrier. It’s a ‘Bravado Class’ one, a design that’s over a hundred revolutions old. We’re going to what used to be the engine compartment. No better place to use for a prison.”
The elevator stopped and the glass doors slid open.
“You are now on level minus eighteen,” said a polite female voice, “Please ready your badges for inspection.”
Lamps in the corridor’s four corners flashed red, bathing the dirty plastic walls in waves of reflected light. Zak crossed it half-way when an Eye in full riot gear came charging out the door, a shock baton fizzling in his hand. Zak slammed his helmet against the Eye’s face. The Eye fell down.
“Where’s Eli?” Volanda asked him. She kicked the Eye in the leg.
“Where’s Eli?” she repeated.
“I don’t take their names down, lady,” he said from the floor, “We’ve got one in cell forty six D, suspect number twenty three dash eleven. Came in fresh from the streets.”
Zak removed the guard’s keycard from his belt, and then punched The Eye in the temple. It took two hits to knock him out.
They pressed on into a long corridor, dozens of massive doors on both walls. Zak suspected that all the cells were soundproof. He expected no less from the Guild.
Suspect number twenty three dash eleven’s cell door had been rather unsurprisingly not in any way different from the many white square doors that they’ve passed along the way. Zak stuck his newly acquired keycard into the scanner.
The door opened to the side, and revealed an Eye staring straight at them. Behind the Eye sat a man in a torn Exotec pilot suit, just like the one Zak had seen on holographs, hands bound to the handlebars.
The Eye went for Zak, but was cut off by a stream of liquid fire from Volanda’s squirt gun. Zak slammed his elbow against the Eye’s mouth – six years in the Water Pump Cluster taught him the dangers of hesitation all too well. Without leaving his chair, the prisoner kicked the Eye in the knee. The man fell down, holding his jaw with one hand and his injured knee with the other.
“Untie me,” said the prisoner, blood trickling down his chin, “I know where your friend is.”
While Volanda untied him from the chair, Zak had some time to take a better look at the man. First thing he noticed was that the man didn’t have a wrist injector, meaning that he was the real deal. For all he knew, he might have not even been Exotec. The remains of his pilot suit betrayed an athletic build. He was in his late thirties, spots of gray lining his short hair.
“Thanks,” said the man, “Eli’s cell is right next to mine.”
“Wait,” said Volanda, “The Eyes grabbed Eli because of you, haven’t they?”
“More on that later,” he said, leading them back into the corridor. Zak locked the whimpering Eye inside and opened the door to the adjacent cell.
Eli sprung up from his bunk bed, blood stains on his shirt. Volanda removed her helmet and wrapped her arms around him, kissing him on his cheeks and mouth, each kiss a sting of molten iron into Zak’s broken heart. Eli’s arms and legs shook as he tried to answer her attentions. The Eyes must have held him on Omegon depravation.
Zak stuck a capsule of the drug into Eli’s injector.
“You two are crazy, you know that?” he said after taking the hit, piecing the words together with what appeared to be a strenuous effort.
“Yes, we know,” Zak said, “We’ve locked up the building, and Tony’s got things under control upstairs. Why did the Eyes trash your bar?”
“Your friend’s right, it wasn’t Eli’s fault,” said suspect number twenty three dash eleven, “But we’ve really got to get topside.”
Zak, Volanda, and Eli followed him through the cell block’s exit and into the corridor where the three red lights still flashed alert in silent contempt. The Eye lay where Zak had left him. Eli picked up his shock baton.
“Thanks for getting me out of this,” said the man, “And you’re right, if not for me, they probably wouldn’t have touched any of you in the first place. As I’m sure you have all ready figured, I’m not just a pilot.”
“Well,” Volanda said, “Who the hell are you then, except for bad freaking luck?”
“Name’s Gabriel Kitch. I’m an investigative journalist, if that tells you anything. We’re an independent press, operating out of this sector alliance’s jurisdiction.”
“What’s a sector alliance?” asked Zak.
“The alliance of corporations that oversee all operations in any specified sector. Your star system happens to be part of one of those sectors, just like all other systems in the Free Space. Exotec, one of this sector alliance’s members, had colonized this planet centuries ago. They addicted the new generations to Omegon so that their detestable Trader’s Guild pets could run the show, and a hundred years down the road this planet’s a cheap re-supply stop pit for their ships. Well, at least they didn’t give them guns, so I guess it could be worse. Sounds like a solid headline, wouldn’t you say?”
Volanda’s hair brushed against Zak’s cheek as the four of them squeezed into the elevator.
“It wasn’t nearly as hard to get signed on the Exotec pilot crew as you’d imagine,” he continued when they started their ascent, “I am, after all, a professional.”
“Remember the day when we tuned in on an inter-city com line?” said Eli, “Well, after you left, Gabriel managed to sneak into the Steelworks District and seek me out.”
“A man’s as good as his word, but a word’s worthless unless one can account for it. I needed someone from the underground, someone who sees through the veil of crap the Trader’s Guild built over the years. Eli agreed to give me a testimonial.”
“A testi-what?” Volanda asked.
“You are now on level zero, please ready your badges for inspection,” said the ever-polite elevator.
Tony paced across the hall, maneuvering between the still traders. Sweat poured from under his helmet.
“Finally!” he shouted when he saw them, “You don’t know what’s out there. They brought in every single Eye in the city. Look!”
He pointed at a security monitor on the reception desk. The monitor showed the tower’s stairs leading into a street crowded with Eyes, armed with batons and flashlights. Their blue-red hover vehicles blocked all conceivable means of escape.
“And who the hell is this?” Tony added, pointing at Gabriel.
“Don’t mind me,” said the journalist.
“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” said Zak, “Saddle up. Gabriel, you ride with Volanda, and Eli, you ride with me.”
“Pray do tell me if you’ve got a plan,” said Tony.
Volanda put her helmet back on and climbed on her bike.
“Didn’t think I’d get to ride a Samurai today,” said Gabriel.
Zak turned his head and said, “Hey, receptionist! Get to those controls.”
The trader hurried to the granite desk. The thick plate rose with a rusty screech, revealing a crowd of Eyes, their shadows highlighted against the street by Exotec Tower’s projectors. Zak, Volanda, and Tony rolled their throttles.
He rode down the stairs like an angel on fire, bursting through the men in the blue-red riot gear. With a burst of molten metal, his bike slid against one of the Eye’s hover cars, leaving a long scar across the cruiser’s hull. Eli tightened his grip on Zak, desperately trying not to fall off. Shock batons flew in the air, other batons flinging at Zak’s exhaust pipe. He flew out onto the main street. Volanda and Tony followed him through the breach he’d made. In his rear-view mirror, he saw the Eyes getting in their hover cars and bikes and turning in their direction.
Zak headed straight for the border of the Steelworks and the Atomic Districts. Volanda and Tony caught up, and were now riding by their side. The Eyes followed close behind, accompanying the race with deafening siren wails.
Many high speed turns later, a yellow road sign on a bent post pronounced that they were entering the territory of the J.F. Snake’s Meatpacking Plant. Zak drove past the sign and into the closed gates, flipping them open on impact. An Eye on a hover bike gained up on him and tried to hit him with a shock baton. Zak ducked, and crashed his cruiser against the Eye’s bike. The moment the bikes touched, Eli stuck his own baton into the Eye’s chest. The man flew off the hover bike and hit the ground, raising a cloud of dust on the impact.
Even now, Zak could hear Viper motors roaring to life. And if in other places in the city the short bastards could have perhaps differentiated between the Trader’s Guild, Red Pills, and the Eyes, then on their own territory they lived by no one’s law but their own. As they and their hover craft tail neared the middle of the plant’s territory – an open asphalted area sparkled with warehouses and other buildings of purposes better left unknown – the Vipers rolled into view.
Midgets in torn leather sat behind the shining headlamps, armed to their very teeth. Most of them brandished spiked planks, hockey clubs, and motorcycle chains, Duares III’s twin moons reflecting in their scratched helmets.
They sped towards the Eyes with berserker screams and war cries that rose above the wailing sirens. Zak felt his grip on the throttle loosen, his body violently shaking to remind him that he put off taking a capsule for way too long. He stopped the bike. The Vipers rushed past them to meet the Eyes, and his friends continued to the plant’s exit in the other direction.
“Hey,” shouted Volanda as she drove off, “Try not to take forever.”
The Vipers crashed into the Eyes, and their fight erupted into absolute chaos. Chains and clubs were as fair play as anything against the shock baton wielding blue-reds.
“My backpack,” Zak said over the sounds of battle to Eli, “Open it up, I’ve got the stuff from your place in there.”
Eli put an Omegon capsule into Zak’s hand. Zak slid the capsule into his wrist injector and it shot out its contents into his bloodstream. He brought the motor to full thrust, screeching the cruiser’s tires against the asphalt. In Zak’s rearview mirror, he saw the Vipers fighting the Trader’s Guild pets like starved, rabid dogs. That night, the old meatpacking plant was not a place for an isolated squad of Eyes to be.
The road led them past the Steelworks District and merged into a serpentine highway across the city. Zak turned off the headlamp.
“Did she tell you where they’re gonna be?” asked Eli.
“Yeah,” he lied.
Zak concentrated on maintaining speed on the scarred, torn road. Volanda didn’t have to tell him – there was only one place on the entire Duares III where she could know that he would find her.
They drove to the old playground in silence. He remembered telling Volanda how many years ago, Zak used to drive out here alone to stare at the sky, away from the cheap electric lights of the city. It was too far away for comfort from Exotec Tower for anyone to have bothered him, or to tell him what he had to do or how he had to live his life. He’s had quite enough of that at the Water Pump Cluster. He remembered how one summer night, he and Volanda made love under the stars.
Volanda’s Samurai and Tony’s self-made motor vehicle were parked in the center of the park, next to a set of ancient swings. Gabriel sat in the swings, sipping from Tony’s whisky flask. Tony and Volanda stood at his sides.
“Ah, and I was starting to get worried,” the journalist said.
Eli got off Zak’s cruiser and went to embrace Volanda. Zak bit his lip.
“Why’d you be worried?” Tony asked, “You’re out of your cell, still in one piece, and you don’t have to inject yourself with some poisonous crap every few hours or so. Sounds like a good set-up to me.”
“Didn’t I all ready cover this before? I’m probably the only chance that your potential offspring have at not having to shoot Omegon into their veins ‘till kingdom come. You know why nobody bothered to make this public before?”
“Why?” asked Zak.
“Because nobody in the whole wide world ever gave a damn. But we’re the free press, and we do give a damn about what happens to our fellow man. Coincidentally, we also give a damn about what happens to sector alliances political intrigues and to their firm belief in an inherited right to do whatever the hell they want.”
Gabriel paused for a few thirsty gulps from the flask.
“I can take two people with me,” he said, “You’ve saved my skin, and it’s only fair that I repay in kind. We’ve got good enough equipment on board to keep you ticking without Omegon for a while. And that’s not even mentioning that a couple of first-hand witnesses would be of some considerable help to me in bringing Exotec down to it’s knees, and that, I’m sure, is in everybody’s best interests.”
“What about Lil Joe?” asked Tony.
“He’s in The Slam,” said Eli, “And I’m not leaving my planet. Not a chance. There’s work that needs to be done here, on Duares III. You said,” he looked at Gabriel, “That there are no other cities on the planet, that the inter-city communication I picked up was a ghost-comm. Well, that might well be right. But so bloody what? This is my people here, and I’m not giving up the fight.”
“Not too sound too repetitive or something,” said Tony, “But I’m not leaving without Joe. Give me that.” He took his flask from Gabriel’s hand and emptied what little remained of the whisky into his throat.
“I’m in,” Zak said in a quiet voice, “I’ll go with you.”
He knew how the Trader’s Guild game was played, and in that game the good guys usually lost. The way he saw it, the only way to win was to change the rules of the game. Volanda stared at Zak with unblinking eyes. She first turned back to Eli, then back to him again.
“Me too,” she said.
Eli opened his mouth to speak, but she put her finger across his lips.
“Shhh,” she said, “I have to do this. Please, don’t make this harder for either of us than it should be. I just have to.” She put on her helmet and climbed on her speed bike. Gabriel positioned himself behind her.
“I hope you get your friend out of the slammer,” said Gabriel.
Zak didn’t say anything.
They reached the space port by dawn. This was a forbidden kingdom for the likes of Zak, and a control post in front of the entrance to the port, packed with offworlder security, made sure that it stayed that way. The security apparently did not care much for Trader’s Guild laws, carrying weapons that Zak had only read about – compact pulse rifles across their backs and blasters sidearm by their hips. On a closer look, some of them were so disfigured by cybernetic prosthetics that they looked human only slightly more than Zak’s power cruiser.
Volanda slowed down, allowing Gabriel to get off the bike. He approached one of the security men and talked to him for a what seemed to be a very long few minutes. Zak counted each second to be the last before they opened fire. But instead, the man laughed at whatever Gabriel had told him, and his colleagues let them pass into the open air space port.
“I convinced him we went to the same bordel together when we were kids,” said the journalist when he was back on Volanda’s motorbike, driving across the landing pads, “You can’t be a good investigative journalist if you don’t know how to talk to people.”
Gabriel’s ship turned out to be a one-story house sized metal brick with pipes, gauges, and antennas sticking out from all conceivable surfaces. Gabriel punched in a code into the keypad by the ship’s hatch and instructed them to get in the ship. Zak spat on the ground, trying to find justification for the loss of his motorcycle. Eventually he gave up, and together with Volanda, who looked even more furious about having to leave her Samurai behind, they climbed into the hatch.
Dim lights illuminated a web of hoses and wires inside. Gabriel strapped them into metal chairs in a compartment with an impossibly low ceiling, and stuck tubes into their wrist injectors.
“Always come prepared,” he said, “Not a bad motto to live by. My pilot – I’m technically the co-pilot, in case you wondered, by the way – might be all ready on his way back, and I don’t want this getting more violent than it has to. He’s not too bad of a guy. Hold tight, it’s gonna be a shaky lift off.”
He climbed further into the ship, leaving the two friends alone in the cabin. Volanda intertwined her fingers with his. He heard the ship’s engines turn on one by one, like hungry giants awakening from their restless slumber. The walls began to shake, and Zak tightened his grip on her fingers.
幻術
