“What the hell are you waiting for? Get dressed,” she told the girl, who was hesitating. The kid jumped to comply, startled.
Chapter Eight
They got off the train at a station in the south of Chicago, trudging down the path of crumbled gray asphalt and sand that wobbled between jumbled stretches of gray and white snow, leading into Bronzeville. Once, their O’Neal-fair skin would have been cause for comment in the historically black community. Not now. Time and migrations to and from the Nat King Cole Sub-Urb, along with the shuffling effect of the semi-random sweeps for shippers — as the involuntary off-world colonists were called — had shuffled the population into a spectrum from Sub-Urban spectral white Caucasians to dark brown, old-time Metropolitans, with a vast middle of cafe au l’asian.
The landscape was a mixture of buildings. Bricks with early twentieth-century arched windows. Buildings with squared off prewar windows. Crumbling brick, crumbling cinder block. Tattered strips of old stores. Row houses like shark teeth and blocky old four-story tenements. In front of one of the old strips of had-been neon and steel, a cart of fresh vegetables from a black-market hydroponics setup sat upwind of a burnt-out sedan, whose trunk served as a shelf for piles of bagged tortillas, dimebags of cornmeal, the same of textured soy, and a large pile of slump cakes. The latter was a heavy, flat bread that had begun life as wet wheat sourdough, then got loaded with as much corn and soy meal as it could take without turning into a rock. It was a staple, as the name implied, of people whose financial resources were in a slump. Judging from the size of the piles, compared to those of the other fare on offer, this included most of the scattered denizens of Chicago’s once-teeming South Side. Over a fire in a barrel, an old woman shook and tossed a pan of popping corn, which a little boy beside her poured into paper cones and hawked to passers-by. In the late afternoon sun, a smattering of young teen whores, pushers, and grays milled around, grabbing something to eat and running errands before their nighttime working hours. Dressed in the typical third-hand drabs of the grays, Cally and Denise blended into invisibility among the cleaners and other low-grade menials that served to keep the city’s innards running for Chicago’s trade and professional classes. She dropped a couple of dollars on the popcorn boy, handing one of the two cones of the plain, hot kernels to the girl beside her.
As they moved away, Cally hissed under her breath, “If you don’t quit sneaking and just walk, I’m going to cold-cock your ass.”
The girl flushed in embarrassment and began walking more normally, keeping her mouth shut. Next, the older woman bought a cake of slump for another dollar, breaking it in half and sharing it with her. The tall blonde glared at the kid when she bit into the bread and almost choked. Denise erased the offending expression and tried hard to look hungry as she dry-swallowed the nasty stuff. It was scratchy, as if ground or chopped corn husk had been added to make a few kilos of grain stretch.
As they moved past the makeshift market and its shoppers, Denise only pretended to eat and hoped nobody noticed, not the least her interviewer. A block down, they turned into an alley. Shortly thereafter, Aunt Cally tossed her half of the awful stuff over to a couple of rats who were scrabbling around in a mess best left unidentified. She followed suit, trailing behind to a particle-board door in one of the buildings. Her aunt pulled out a pistol, seemingly from nowhere, and screwed a cylinder onto the end.
“Kick in the door. There should be a man sleeping inside. Kill him,” she said, thrusting the gun into the girl’s limp hand.
“Huh? Just like that? What’d he do?” She blurted. Her hands were sweating, and she felt a sudden cramping in her guts as if her bowels were about to cut loose. She swallowed.
“Do you really need to know?” Cally shrugged. “Please do make sure he’s dead.” After a second she sighed and snatched the gun back. “You cock it like this. This is the safety. See? Now it’s off. See the little patch of red beside the lever?” She shoved the gun back at Reardon. “There. Do it, now, or I will. Then we go home.”
Taking a deep breath, the thirteen-year-old girl hit the door with a solid side kick right at the knob. Then she had to hit it again, since it only collapsed into a ragged almost-hole at the point of impact. Her second kick knocked it open, and she stumbled into the dark, musty room, blinking. Over on a pallet in the corner, barely visible by the light streaming in through the doorway, a man lay, face to the wall. He was snoring loudly, though it was pretty damned amazing he had slept through the noise. She walked up to maybe two and a half meters from him and fired two shots at his head, closing her eyes despite herself. Her hand must have been shaking, because two dark, wet splotches that she could barely identify as red splashed across his back, splattering onto the pallet and the floor. She ran back for the door, stopping halfway to heave up the contents of her stomach.
Outside, she wiped off her mouth with her sleeve, shakily. “Okay,” she said. “I did it.” The arm with the pistol hung limp at her side.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Her aunt asked her, searching her eyes. “Gimme,” she said coldly. She held out her hand for the gun. The professional disappeared into the building, emerging after what seemed forever, but from the pounding of her heart could only have been a few seconds.
“You got him. Let’s go.” The taller blonde strode back up the alley, turning the corner as her niece had to jog to catch up. Neither of them said a word all the way back to the car, and then, via a circuitous route that probably wasn’t the way they got out there, to base.
“Can I… know what he did, now?” she asked as her aunt dropped her off at the room she’d been assigned.
“No.”
Three floors down and two corridors across, Cally sought out Harrison, who had beaten them home and, of course, changed immediately.
“So she passed,” he said.
“Maybe,” Cally answered. “If we didn’t need her, I could come up with half a dozen reasons to flunk her. But yeah,” she sighed, “she passed.” She lit a cigarette in a convulsive, angry motion, arms hunched in close. “That is, she passed if she still wants to sign on after thinking about it for a couple of days. You overdid the snoring just a bit. I could hear you all the way out in the alley.”
The Darhel Beren had recessive metallic gold fur, threaded with black. His slit-pupilled eyes were a vivid deep green. The deeper purple tinge to the portion of his eyes around the pupils spoke of too many late nights playing strategy games against his AID. With a roundedness to his frame, he was the closest thing to a fat Darhel one would ever see. He sat staring at the image over the altar to the Lords of Communication and crunched on a bright turquoise vegetable. It actually wasn’t bad. He’d made something of a study of the available vegetables and their varieties — an extensive study. The trick was to find the high-protein ones, just close enough in taste and saltiness to… He didn’t even think about meat, just shied away from the idea when he felt that tell-tale twinge of euphoria as his body threatened release of the deadly-addictive Tal hormone.
Right now, he was replaying the transmission that had just come in, light speed, from the jump point. The message was so hard to believe that he couldn’t tell whether he was looking at a fantastic opportunity or a piece of disinformation, leaked as part of some elaborate plot against the Gistar Group. Six level nine code keys, or the better part of them, missing. An Epetar freighter on one of their highest margin trade routes stranded in the backwaters of the Sol System waiting for cash to pick up its cargo. This was an especially intriguing opportunity, if true, simply because pick-ups and deliveries to the Sol System were so onerous, anyway. Most systems had the resources to build their outer-system trade base two weeks or less out from the major jump point or points servicing the system. Titan Base in the Sol system was far, far inwards from normal.