“Stay away from us,” added Poon, just in case the point hadn’t been made strongly enough.
“Shit like racing we can get away with,” said Ise, “boosting the wheels off some ubersuit gets us all ass-screwed.” He finally looked at him. “You make it risky, Ko. You oughta cool.”
He backed off a step and looked at the group. Poon, her face hard with dislike; Gau, morose and obdurate; the Cheung brothers indifferent to all; Ise angry with him. In that moment, Ko had never felt so disconnected from them, these people he called his friends. They were turning away from him to protect the stupid little bubble of their road-tribe.
The doors to Second Lei’s Kaze gull-winged open and released a pulsing musical beat. Ko recognised the chorus to “Doppler Highway”. Lei emerged from the car buttoning up his shirt, two girls in Mongkok Sabre colours following him out. Their lipstick was smeared and their eyes distant. Second spat into the gutter and rolled something small and glassy between his fingers. Even from a distance, Ko could see it was an injector syrette.
Lei threw him a snide look and grinned. “Lost your way, spooky? Want me to call you a cab?”
“You’re a cab!” chorused the Sabre girls, giggling in breathy unison.
“Or maybe you’d like something else?” Lei approached him, rolling the injector over his fingers. He sniffed. “Just in. Better than gel caps. Just pop it to your neck and-”
“Ooooh.” the two girls mimed the action. “I’m the pretty voice… ”
“Pure,” he grinned. “First one’s free.”
“Get lost,” Ko snarled.
Lei’s grin widened. “You should take a page from Niki-Niki’s book, Chen. Be polite like your sister.” He licked his lips. “Do me a favour? Tell her I got a new shipment, I’ll give her a discount for her regular custom-”
Ko’s punch landed squarely on Second’s jaw and he staggered backward, bouncing off a parking meter. Ko’s vision hazed red. “You give that poison to my family, you piece of shit?”
Second recovered and sneered. “Don’t give it to her, spooky. She pays for it.”
Ko threw himself at the bigger youth and swung out, his anger making the attack clumsy and poorly aimed. Second deflected the blow and landed a heavy fist in Ko’s stomach. Ko recoiled, coughing.
“Is this guy not the dumbest fucker in the world?” Second asked the assembled gangers. “Brains of a wooden duck!”
Ko spat and hauled himself up. Second beckoned him to keep going. In the back of Ko’s mind there was a voice that begged him to do what he always did whenever he ended up facing off with Second. Let it go. Walk away. If he took his licks and went home, if he stayed off the streets for a couple of weeks, they would take him back in and nothing would change. It had happened before, it could happen now. If he just walked away. If he just let Second keep his top dog place, if he just took the easy way out. He glanced at the others. They made no move to intervene, content to let the conflict play out and follow the dominant alpha.
“Be smart, spooky,” said Lei, licking his lips. “Just walk away.”
“I am sick of the easy way,” said Ko, earning him a confused look from his opponent. With a jerk of his legs, Ko spun about and struck Second with a spin-kick that hit like a tornado, knocking Lei off-balance. Ko heard Gau swear under his breath.
The other ganger hit out blindly and Ko caught it, air blasting out of his lungs in a whoosh of sound. Lei’s girls released a short twin scream, like the bark of a vixen. Second came up and retaliated with a showy foot-sweep that missed by inches; Lei’s fighting was all style and no substance, based on the repeated viewings of a million fight films. Ko, on the other hand, had been sent to a Jeet Kune Do school by his father when Second Lei was still in shorts watching Seizure Monster anime. Ko’s style was all about application of force, hard, direct and instant. He threw punches inside the “gate”-the zone of body mass where the nerve points congregated-and felt a satisfying crunch as a dozen expensive plastic ampoules shattered inside Second’s pocket. He shouted at Ko and hit him across the cheek with a glancing, sideways blow.
Ko rocked back, stars of pain glittering in his vision. He chewed them down and sent a sharp kick at Second’s shin. The bigger youth shrieked as Ko’s shoe tore open the skin and fractured bone. Ko followed up with a strike that impacted Lei on the cheekbone and slammed his face into the driver’s side window of his emerald Kaze. Glass shattered and the car alarm began to wail.
The sound was the cue for the gang to disperse, and suddenly Gau and Poon and the others were running for their vehicles, but Ko was ignorant of all that. He was on Second as the drug dealer tried to stagger away, hands clutched to the cuts on his sour moon face.
“No-” Second said, but Ko ignored him. Ko’s mind was somewhere else now, in a place where every insult and hurt he had ever weathered was now being paid back tenfold on his tormentor.
By the time the police pulled Ko off and tasered him, Second’s expensive Soloto mocksilk shirt was a blood-streaked ruin. The greenjackets threw him in the back of the drunk-tanker and the robot patrol wagon drove him into the holding cells.
Fixx got to the fence of Barksdale Field without tripping any of the Air Force surplus scent-sniffers that ringed the compound. Like almost everything within the chain link barrier, Barksdale was a junkyard of elderly and dysfunctional leftovers from the American military machine of the Nineties; barely fifty per cent of the hardware worked correctly, but the trick was knowing which half did and which didn’t.
The sanctioned operative left nothing to chance. His quick communion with Papa Legba on the approach road led him off into the shallow scrub, and presently brought him to the fence at the north-west end of the airfield. Fixx removed his flexsword from its holster inside the long coat and gave the weapon an experimental twirl. It looked like a fat dagger in its collapsed state. He pushed the rocker switch in the hilt to “active” and held it horizontally in front of him. The blade warmed up and began to unfold, clicking and twitching. The memory-metal remembered the shape it had been forged in and became a long, thin streak of dull titanium alloy. It reset itself in less than ten seconds, and when Fixx was happy with that, he made two fast cuts in the fence, the blade blinking in the lacklustre starlight. No alarm bells rang; no barking e-dogs came running. He smiled and slipped into the compound, crossing the end of the runway in low, loping steps. He made a zigzag course towards the hangars, where harsh sodium floodlights bled their glare into the sultry Louisiana night.
There had been a time when a man would have been stripped and on his knees for daring to penetrate the security at Barks-dale. Forty years ago, the USAF had flown fighter planes, bombers and tanker jets out of this concrete nest, going about the business of defending the United States of America. That had been before the Fuel Crash and the Food Crash and the Welfare Crash and… well, before it had all gone to shit. In a time when it was hard enough to keep Americans secure from other Americans, the military turned their power inward and left everything they couldn’t afford to maintain rotting in the sun. Overnight, military bases became scrapyards as the government burned what they wouldn’t recycle. It was only when the corporations stepped up to bail them out that places like Barksdale went from defending the nation to being a new piece of commercial real estate.
The energy cost meant that these days only the rich had wings; but there were still things that needed shipping transglobal, still cargo that had to get to the other side of the world and not with silk napkins, glasses of champagne and dinky little meal trays. SkyeCorp made that happen. They were the company that the companies went to when something had to make it around the globe, no questions asked, no damn passport control or t-wave cameras peering into the crates. SkyeCorp made a billion a day shipping “tractor parts” to greedy dictators or “baby milk” to covert gene labs. They owned a string of decommissioned air bases across the continental United States, and with them a fleet of ex-military transport aircraft in various states of disrepair. SkyeCorp lost one flight in every thousand; but there were plenty of mothballed planes out in the Nevada desert, their clients had insurance, and it was tough to complain when the manifest said that all that got mislaid were “machine tools”.