We walked through the front door
of the brownstone and into the living room. Pawn looked up from where he was
smoking his nip pipe and watching TV. He looked at Patch and then me. His eyes
cleared, if only slightly.
“What happened?” he asked,
slurring his words.
Patch waved his hands in the air
in frustration and walked down the stairs to his basement room.
I chuckled. “Oh, it’s the same
old story,” I said, sitting on the black leather couch. “Boy meets girl. Boy
accidentally runs over girl with his car. Boy cuts off girl’s head for ritual
sacrifice. Boy eludes cops in a daring escape. It was basically Joseph
Campbell’s hero’s journey in twenty minutes flat.”
Pawn nodded, then the
implications of what I just said fully set into his drug-addled brain and he
started laughing. “So, typical first date?”
I laughed and settled in for what
I’d hoped would be a quiet evening.
I guess here would be a good
place to introduce the reprobates that I lived and worked with.
Pawn had been working with me the
longest. He was a Tsume Focused, although that term was often laughably
inaccurate. When he was on point, though, he could Wreck Shit Up. He stood
about a foot shorter than me, but he was really fast, and really, really
strong. The only discipline he ever exhibited was to his martial arts, though I
often suspected an inner reserve of dedication that he chose to hide behind
heavy drug use. He had orange tabby-ish coloring and bright green eyes. In one
of our many scrapes, he had lost his tail. He had it replaced with a cybernetic
model that he could detach and turn into a thirteen piece rod or whip or
whatever the hell he called it.
In addition to working for UPC,
he was also in a Japanese biker gang, he called it a bosozoku. Pawn was
actually just a title. His gang was organized in a hierarchy based on chess.
His full title was Black Pawn Four, but he was aiming higher. I’d met Queen
once. A bit older. Hard as nails. Her gaze could cow even me. She did all the
real work, as you might have guessed. A badass through and through. She was
definitely not a bad connection to have.
Patch was our machinist and one
of our resident hackers. He had the full run of the basement, more room even
than I had in my own house. When some of the other roommates complained about
this, he very convincingly told everyone to shove it up their collective ass
because he needed the space to make all of the great shit we kept breaking. No
one brought it up again.
He was a Human. He was burly and
pale, with dark eyes, hair, and beard. He always had that intense look of
someone that was mentally tearing apart and rebuilding whatever it was he was
looking at, even when he was looking at you. He was loud and emotional and,
despite all of his bluster and insults, he was loyal as a dog.
Our other hacker was also our
other Devout. Naz was an incredibly stoic bastard. He was Devoted to Ananzi,
but without the sense of whimsy. He was really just in it for the spiders. A
Human of West African descent, he was an imperious man, and actually pulled off
the super-mysterious thing infuriatingly well. He kept his head clean-shaven,
to better show off the six additional black eyes tattooed to his face. His
cosmetically and cybernetically enhanced black-within-black eyes showed
nothing.
He was the orderly, methodical
side of the spider. A builder of patterns and comfortable with endless toil, he
operated on the Wire with a precision and elegance that put most coders to
shame. His Devout focus was on summoning spider spirits, or taking on the
occasional fearsome aspects of the arachnids for himself. I once saw him sprout
hideous, ethereal mandibles and bite someone’s arm clean off. I hired him on
the spot.
Tanith was a big, sleek, grey
Visral. She had a shitload of cybernetics implanted into her, all with the
specific goal of beating people’s asses. She was a hell of a brawler. While
Pawn was a well-trained - dare I say elegant - fighter, Tanith was pure brute
force. Her serpentine body was as amazing at soaking up damage as it was
dealing it out. I’d seen her sprout all sorts of nasty metal surprises out of
her body – and then put them immediately into someone else’s.
Despite her brutally unsubtle
fighting style, she was actually kind of a sweetheart and pretty diplomatic.
She acted as the group’s de facto conscience, purely because no one else wanted
that Sisyphean job. When I say conscience, she was still a killer, but a bit
less blood-thirsty or sociopathic than the rest of us. She was probably the
person I trusted most. Lucky her.
Omar was a young Al-Radan. Barely
the age of maturity, she’d been trained in some pretty nasty forms of
infiltration and assassination. She made up for her diminutive size by being
very loud and very crass. She was also a bit of a porn addict, and would sit
and watch it while she ate breakfast in the living room. Who does that?
She was the newest addition to
the team, and a hell of a sniper. I got the feeling she was trying very hard to
lie very low from people who were very dangerous. I always kept an eye on her
to see if she was getting extra jittery, if she thought they were closing in. I
really didn’t want my lovely home (or me) getting blown up because of politics.
Not when there were so many better reasons to incinerate me.
I guess last is Santos, another
Human. He was a scruffy-looking ginger in his late twenties, but he still
managed boyish good-looks. He was, according to him at least, a “gonzo
journalist,” but he didn’t ever send any of his work out to be published. He
was a technophobe who used possibly one of the last analog typewriters in the
world. As often as he was using it to type, he was using it to bludgeon the “enormous
fucking rats” that he believed plagued him.
Santos did a lot of
hallucinogens.
He wasn’t cybered up. He hadn’t
sold his soul. No great physical skills to speak of. But he was a pretty solid
strategist. He certainly thought outside of the box enough, I suppose. And he
offered a dissenting opinion from mine. His contrarian ways had probably helped
us avoid a lot of danger that I might otherwise have led us into. But I would
never tell him that.
That was us. That was United
Plumbing Company. We got rid of the shit clogging up your life. The bigger the
shit, the bigger the price tag. We mostly worked black ops for the corporations.
They paid the best and had the delightfully vicious work that we specialized
in. We weren’t picky. One day we could be kidnapping a highly prized asset to
be reprogrammed by a psychic for one corporation, the next day we could be
murdering the psychic for another. No masters but money. But then again, I
guess that made us just like everyone else.
It’s all just business, after
all.
No comments:
Post a Comment