“How can anyone live here?” Cooke asked, after a while.
“The alternative is to freeze to death,” said Delagarza.
“They should freeze,” Krieger said. Delagarza withheld the look of disgust—it would’ve been wasted on her—and focused on Cooke:
“Most of them are addicts. They lost their jobs and their homes, and this is all they have. No money to buy a ticket off the planet. Thanks to Alwinter’s life-support machinery, the tunnels are warmer than the streets, if only by a fraction. When the machinery fails, you can find the sewers strewn with frozen bodies—”
“God, I’m going to be sick,” Cooke said.
Delagarza found what he’d been looking for. A service monorail line, still connected to the power network (thanks to God-knew-how-many-bribes). Guarding a tiny car, barely big enough for the three of them, was a kid dressed in a ragged reg-suit. He regarded them with a frown on his face, which was caked with dirt.
“She’ a cop?” the kid asked.
“None of your—” Krieger started.
“Yeah,” Delagarza said, flashing his best friendly smile. He ignored Cooke’s alarmed gaze and gestured at Krieger to calm down.
“She an enforcer?” the kid asked.
“Nah,” Delagarza said, “just security. She’s on the level.”
The kid spat a yellowish blob on the floor. “What you want here?”
“Access,” said Delagarza. “My name’s Delagarza, I vouch for the cop and my friend.”
“Don’t know any Delagarza, old timer,” the kid said, using Inner Edge’s affectation. There was a dangerous glint in his eye. He barely reached Delagarza’s knee, but the man had little doubt the young kid had some hidden danger close nearby.
“I’m a friend of Nanny Kayoko,” Delagarza said. “She has vouched for me before.”
It was like the kid had been replaced by a different person. He smiled like an angel at Delagarza and the others and gestured at them to take a seat in the trolley. “Should have said so sooner, uncle! To think I almost shot you. Go ahead, sit! Say hello to Nanny for me. Tell her Sunny boy says hi.”
“Will do,” said Delagarza. He tried to see where Sunny boy kept his weapon, but the kid was unarmed.
So there’s a hidden shooter somewhere.
Delagarza shrugged and sat in the trolley. After an instant, Krieger followed, with Cooke behind her. The trolley clanked when electricity flowed through it, and old wheels moved along the rail, gaining speed at every passing second.
“Who is Nanny Kayoko?” asked Krieger, who either was a stone cold badass or hadn’t realized how close they had been to being on the wrong end of a shootout.
“We’ll meet her,” Delagarza said. “She runs a good chunk of Taiga.”
“You said she was a friend of yours,” Cooke said, eyes wide, like seeing Delagarza for the first time.
Delagarza blushed, sensing the implications of Cooke’s expression. “Nothing like that,” he told him. “I’m not a mafioso, Cooke, she’s really just a friend. We met at the line for the bus. I let her go first, and we talked. She invited me for some tea, and we’ve done small business occasionally. She’s a nice old lady, really.”
Cooke shook his head, like he and Delagarza lived in very different worlds and spoke different languages.
The trolley brought them deep into Alwinter’s bowels. Air became colder as they went down, cold enough that their wristbands alerted them not to turn off their reg-suits for any reason, or they’d freeze to death in minutes. The hood’s light on their faces grew so intense that Delagarza’s sunglasses tinted further dark to protect him from blindness.
His battery pack lifetime ticked faster with each passing minute as it adjusted to the extra power expenditure.
“We’re here,” he said, an instant before the trolley began to decelerate. It stopped in a node surrounded by other rails and trolleys from different tunnels which lead to an ample archway formed by Alwinter’s titanium foundations. The very structures that gave the city its structural support formed the dome of Taiga Town.
“Don’t get too excited,” he warned Krieger and Cooke, “atmosphere’s thin here. Oxygen is…um…loaned from the pipelines.”
His head already felt lighter. He forced himself to take long, unsatisfying breaths.
They reached the archway. Three guards covered the entrance. They were older than Sunny boy had been, and clearly armed, with rifles and flak armor. Their helmets’ visors were dull.
Sunny boy must’ve already told the guards Delagarza was coming, because they didn’t react to their presence. They only stood at attention, visors hiding the faces underneath.
“They aren’t going to search us?” said Krieger.
“No need to,” Delagarza said, and pointed at the archway. “There’s scanners there. If we carried a bomb or something like that, we’d be dead already. They don’t care about guns though. Everyone in Taiga is packing heat.”
“My kind of place, then,” said Krieger, letting sarcasm flow from her voice.
BESIDES COLD, Taiga Town was humid and shaken by drafts of wind coming from the ventilators hundreds of meters toward the surface. It was illuminated by industrial lamplights atop long shafts embedded to the floor, connected to each other by cables and to generators at hidden spots. The smell of half-cooked stim juices and other drugs overwhelmed Delagarza’s nose, but he also recognized the aroma of greasy food, bleach, and burning incense.
The entire span of Taiga was about the same size as a football stadium. Most of it was empty space, although many people took permanent residence near the back, a number that grew with every passing day.
Delagarza guided Cooke and Krieger through ample sections, separated from each other by thin walls made out of rusty iron sheets. Every section had, without rhyme or reason, a selection of stands, stores, and pressure tents of all sizes and colors. People of all walks of life moved among these, avoiding eye contact, but wading through the small crowd with practiced ease.
Delagarza assumed the role of touristic guide for his companions:
“Taiga’s home to a thousand permanent residents,” he said as they passed near a weapons stand that would’ve put a colony barracks to shame, “and ten times that many customers at any given time. The place gets quite packed during holidays, and after a big shipment comes through Outlander.”
“How come I’ve never heard of it?” asked Cooke.
“Because people can tell at a glance you’re not from around here,” Delagarza said.
“Neither are you.”
“Well, don’t go around telling them that.”
As they moved toward the center of the startown, the stands and tents disappeared and were replaced by honest-to-god poly-plastic buildings, indistinguishable from the ones at the surface, except for the damp, copper-and-moss background that insinuated behind them. Unlike its surface counterpart, these storefronts cared little for regulation or legality.
“The city council knows about all this?” asked Cooke when a scantily clad lady gestured obscenely at him from behind a glass window in a neon-covered whorehouse.
“Taiga pays a lot of bribes,” said Delagarza, “and it's an integral part of Alwinter’s economy. Without it, the city would be at the mercy of Outlander.”
Delagarza shot Krieger a meaningful glance. The enforcer had either caught a case of selective blindness or knew the way the cookie crumbled.
“We’re here,” Delagarza said. They had arrived as far as ordinary civilians could go. Deeper inside was the exclusive hold of the mob. The store he stopped in front of was a graffiti-covered mess, decorated by tacky neon lights and overworked LEDs. A sign next to the automated door showed a woman making love to an old computer.
The place’s interior had more in common with a warehouse than a store. Rows upon rows of machinery (most of it broken and useless), circuit boards, ancient connectors, and long-ago discontinued storage systems.