panel.
“OVERDOSE,” the sub-audible warning conducted the message along her large bones, “OVERDOSE OVERDOSE.”
QC hadn’t been able to afford a full body workup for the black market control kit installed in her thigh, so she’d opted for catch-all integration with the official panel in her forearm instead. The official panel, annoyingly, only came with one default alert: The overdose alarm. It functioned as a universal notification for everything she did with her unsanctioned nanotech. In this case, it meant the drop of motion-sensor-containing blood that she’d left on the junkie’s forehead had moved.
He was waking up.
She ran around the kitchen bar and stood immediately across from him, well within spitting distance. He was groaning and shifting now, the blood smeared halfway down his cheek. He coughed, turned, and threw a hand up over one ear. And that’s when she heard what had caused the man to stir in the first place: It was so faint from her place in the kitchen that she’d chalked it up to an electronic squeal; a high-pitched, struggling whine. But now she recognized it for what it was…
A door-drill.
Somebody was boring through the walls, into the vacuum chamber, trying to spring the seal. Somebody was breaking in.
The junkie bolted upright, yelling a syllabic remnant of something he’d been saying while still inside the trip. It startled her into swallowing half of the weaponized saliva she was nurturing. She choked and gagged and gasped for air.
“Introduce yourself!” The man demanded, spinning around on the bench, trying to take in his surroundings, “Inform me of my whereabouts at once! If I broke in here then I am terribly sorry!”
“The fuck are you?” QC finally managed to ask, slurring her words around half a mouthful of spit, “and the fuck are you doing in Red’s house?”
“Ah, we both want to know the same thing,” Byron conceded, just as an atmospheric pop shuddered through the walls. The first vacuum chamber had ruptured.
Chapter Twelve
“No fairsies!” Zippy squeaked, “we really got to get up in a big hurry an’ back when we killt that mean girl that kissed that other boy for you, you said you’d owe us one!”
“Ah, Zippy, lass: I told you,” the unseen voice replied in a lilting, dancing brogue, “iss naught up’t me.”
They’d progressed quickly enough through the fiefdoms immediately bordering Zippy’s own: A word from James or an eager smile from Zippy, and doors were thrown open for them. And if there was the slightest hesitation, Zippy signed a quick, two-pronged gesture to James, and he gleefully began cranking up something that looked like the access cover to a watermain: An oblong, flat black disc with a dense weave covering one side. When James finished spinning the oddly quaint, brass handle, it emitted a faint whine that quickly, exponentially built to maddening levels. If the stubborn inhabitant didn’t catch the hint and offer a string of rushed apologies in time, the scream terminated in a hollow concussive thump -- all shockwave and no explosion. The effects didn’t extend more than a paltry few feet before dissipating, but when James held the disc right up against something, that something ceased to exist in a large hurry.
They progressed haltingly in this fashion for hours – cajoling, flattering, and only occasionally blasting down each gatekeeper– until they abruptly ground to a dead stop. Red could see no clear boundary demarcating one territory from another, but all of Zippy’s influence seemed to end at a surgically precise, invisible line that ran between a little shop selling custom-built faux-leather jackets, and a wall comprised of an impassable network of interlocking rebar.
Zippy was engaged in an absurdly complicated war of false personas with the unseen Irishman, while James and Red stood quietly to one side, competing to see who could ignore the other the hardest.
James lost.
“So what’s this all
“OVERDOSE,” the sub-audible warning conducted the message along her large bones, “OVERDOSE OVERDOSE.”
QC hadn’t been able to afford a full body workup for the black market control kit installed in her thigh, so she’d opted for catch-all integration with the official panel in her forearm instead. The official panel, annoyingly, only came with one default alert: The overdose alarm. It functioned as a universal notification for everything she did with her unsanctioned nanotech. In this case, it meant the drop of motion-sensor-containing blood that she’d left on the junkie’s forehead had moved.
He was waking up.
She ran around the kitchen bar and stood immediately across from him, well within spitting distance. He was groaning and shifting now, the blood smeared halfway down his cheek. He coughed, turned, and threw a hand up over one ear. And that’s when she heard what had caused the man to stir in the first place: It was so faint from her place in the kitchen that she’d chalked it up to an electronic squeal; a high-pitched, struggling whine. But now she recognized it for what it was…
A door-drill.
Somebody was boring through the walls, into the vacuum chamber, trying to spring the seal. Somebody was breaking in.
The junkie bolted upright, yelling a syllabic remnant of something he’d been saying while still inside the trip. It startled her into swallowing half of the weaponized saliva she was nurturing. She choked and gagged and gasped for air.
“Introduce yourself!” The man demanded, spinning around on the bench, trying to take in his surroundings, “Inform me of my whereabouts at once! If I broke in here then I am terribly sorry!”
“The fuck are you?” QC finally managed to ask, slurring her words around half a mouthful of spit, “and the fuck are you doing in Red’s house?”
“Ah, we both want to know the same thing,” Byron conceded, just as an atmospheric pop shuddered through the walls. The first vacuum chamber had ruptured.
Chapter Twelve
“No fairsies!” Zippy squeaked, “we really got to get up in a big hurry an’ back when we killt that mean girl that kissed that other boy for you, you said you’d owe us one!”
“Ah, Zippy, lass: I told you,” the unseen voice replied in a lilting, dancing brogue, “iss naught up’t me.”
They’d progressed quickly enough through the fiefdoms immediately bordering Zippy’s own: A word from James or an eager smile from Zippy, and doors were thrown open for them. And if there was the slightest hesitation, Zippy signed a quick, two-pronged gesture to James, and he gleefully began cranking up something that looked like the access cover to a watermain: An oblong, flat black disc with a dense weave covering one side. When James finished spinning the oddly quaint, brass handle, it emitted a faint whine that quickly, exponentially built to maddening levels. If the stubborn inhabitant didn’t catch the hint and offer a string of rushed apologies in time, the scream terminated in a hollow concussive thump -- all shockwave and no explosion. The effects didn’t extend more than a paltry few feet before dissipating, but when James held the disc right up against something, that something ceased to exist in a large hurry.
They progressed haltingly in this fashion for hours – cajoling, flattering, and only occasionally blasting down each gatekeeper– until they abruptly ground to a dead stop. Red could see no clear boundary demarcating one territory from another, but all of Zippy’s influence seemed to end at a surgically precise, invisible line that ran between a little shop selling custom-built faux-leather jackets, and a wall comprised of an impassable network of interlocking rebar.
Zippy was engaged in an absurdly complicated war of false personas with the unseen Irishman, while James and Red stood quietly to one side, competing to see who could ignore the other the hardest.
James lost.
“So what’s this all
Similar Books
