Chapter 1
Tarent laughed as he looked at Mishy’s face on the screen in front of him. “You threatening me, now that’s rich.” Tarent’s eyes narrowed to slits as he glared back at Mishy’s image. “What can you do to me, Mishy? You’ve had it, man! It’s over! You’re washed out. Why don’t you just give up now while you still have at least one shred of dignity left? One little tiny insignificant piece of turf.”
Mishy snarled back at him. He was a man walking the razor’s edge. Tarent wanted him to be afraid, maybe he should have been, but Tarent had pushed him way beyond that. There was a point at which all reason just shut down. Mishy had reached that point. There was only a black, burning pit of rage in his stomach, and the need for revenge in his heart. He had no other purpose; nothing else had any meaning. “Laugh your stupid black ass off, Tarent. Some things are worth more than money, or turf, or even power. My father told me, long ago, when I first took over his business, he said, ‘Never take all that a man holds dear, because there is nothing in this world as dangerous as a man who has nothing to lose’.’”
“And nothing as impotent.” Tarent laughed hatefully. “What is this shit? Your last great hurrah? You can’t do anything to me, and we both know it.” He took in a deep breath. “Save your threats for the few people you still control, the scum that I left for you—your ever-dwindling empire. Don’t waste your breath on me. I was never afraid of you, Mishy. I’m certainly not afraid of you now. Computer, close transmission.”
Mishy glared at the blank screen and smiled. “The cocky bastard. It’s all just a matter of time. Soon he’s about to learn that the road to hell goes both ways.” Mishy laughed as his chair swiveled to face the men waiting for his orders. “We’ll see if I’m as impotent as he thinks I am or if I can still get it up... Way up, when I have to!”
Mishy’s face left the screen to be replaced by swirling colored lights and the mechanical music the dyarhythms machine produced for Tarent’s entertainment.
The door slid open and his daughter walked in, short and thin, fine featured, regal and graceful. She was a brown-eyed beauty, immaculate and cultivated—a credit to him and to her dead mother. The bitch had at least been good for genetic material, he thought as he leaned back in his chair, which moved to accommodate him.
He looked up at his daughter. For the moment at least, she had his undivided attention. “So, Elantra, what can I do for you?”
“I wanted to talk to you about school, my residency.” She sat, and the chair, anticipating her intention to sit, rose to meet her.
“What’s the problem?”
“The program runs too fast for me. I’m two or three days behind...”
“No problem, just slow the program down....”
“I’d like to go to college, Dad,” she said nervously, not sure whether her new approach to this old argument was going to get her any further than earlier attempts. “I think that if I could study with other people, interact with them on an academic level... Work on real patients instead of holograms...”
“How many times do we have to go through this, Laney? The answer is still no. Having all those people around is just going to distract you from your studies. As for patients, you’d never get the variety of cases in a hospital that you’re getting from the program. Laney, you’re only twenty-one years old, and you’re seven months away from having your MD. Why change things now when you’re so close to finishing? If you go into a residency program it will be two years before you get your degree. Rejoice in technology, dear. Don’t fight it. It takes three times as long to do things the old way. I should know. When I was a kid the programs were different—they called it a public tutor board. It’s very hard when fifty kids are all asking the terminal questions at once. The public program made learning slow and tedious. I can only imagine what it would be like if the kids had been sitting all around me as well, screaming out their answers, all asking questions...”
“Maybe I could learn something from their questions or from the answers they give and receive. Maybe they would ask questions I wouldn’t think to ask, come up with answers not even the program had thought of. Treating a real patient with the flu has got to be better training than treating a holographic patient with malaria—which by the way there hasn’t been a real case of in over two hundred years...”
“Elantra... You are being ungrateful. You have always had the best of everything. Maybe I should send you off to college so that you’d appreciate just how easy you have it...”
“Just let me go for a while. If it’s as awful as you say...”
“The answer is no. Now I let you do this doctor thing because you had your heart set on it, but I have never really embraced the idea. The idea of anyone purposely exposing themselves to so many germs—it boggles the mind! You aren’t going off to college, and that’s final. Now... find something pleasant to talk about, or go to bed.” Tarent turned away from her to look at the swirling colors on his screen. She was being dismissed.
Elantra had enough of her father in her that she wasn’t going to be put off that easily. “I... I don’t even know what people look like. I feel like I have spent my whole life in this building. Like some pet or house plant. Just once, I would love to step outside these walls and see just how awful it is out there. Do you plan to keep me here the rest of my life? I’m going to leave eventually, whether you like it or not... I just don’t see why it’s such a big deal...”
Her father laughed, but didn’t turn to look at her. “You’re exaggerating, Elantra. Right now is not a good time. It’s not safe outside the building. The street urchins are fighting over a piece of turf, and...”
“What does that have to do with us, with me?” she demanded.
“If you’d let me finish. I’m in the middle of a corporate takeover, dear. Sometimes the competition doesn’t want to play by the rules. They stir the thugs up and then none of us are safe until things cool down and the police agencies can get things back under control.”
“There is always some excuse, some reason why I can’t have a life...”
“I’m a villain because I want to keep you from going through the hell that I went through on the streets...”
“I’m a prisoner here!” Elantra stood quickly, and the chair helped her. “You can’t keep me at home forever, Father.” She turned on her heel. The door opened before her, anticipating that she wanted to leave, waited a sufficient amount of time and closed behind her. She stepped onto the moving walkway and it carried her to her room, where her door opened before her and closed behind her.
“Music on,” she ordered. The dyarhythms machine kicked in. “Chair up.” The chair rolled up behind her and rose to meet her flopping butt. She was mad. Dealing with her father always left her feeling like a six year old. He was always going on and on about how he was sparing her from the horrors of his own youth, but she was sure the truth was he hadn’t been outside a building much more than she had.
He certainly didn’t leave the comforts of the building now. Tarent Powers never left Powers’ Tower. If he had his way neither would she, and if Tarent Powers was good at anything it was getting his own way.
She was furious, and she was bored—if it was possible to be both. “H.V. on,” she commanded, and all around her colored lights began to dance. “Holo-vision, so named because of the hollow way it makes you feel,” she mumbled. “Give me something to fit my mood.” The computer read her body heat and heart rate, and then picked a suitable program—two people beating each other up with big sticks. She sat back and watched as the images played out her frustration and her rage. The pictures didn’t really look like people, but they were close enough for most. For most that was, but not for Elantra. She longed for physical contact with real people. People besides her father and his well-paid lackeys.
She decided to do something drastic. She decided to go out. She dressed appropriately, grabbed her cat for company, and using all the tricks she had learned over the years made her way out of the building undetected. Feeling very smug, she called for a car. Her victory, however, was short lived. Before the car had time to arrive, three people wearing masks appeared seemingly out of nowhere. There was a smell, an awful smell, and then nothing.
Tarent rubbed at his temples. “How the hell did she get past my security system!” he bellowed.
“Don’t know, boss.” The man rubbed at his own head, perhaps to show sympathy for Tarent’s headache. “Maybe she smuggled something through on one of her tutorials.”
Tarent nodded. That made sense. He inwardly cringed; he should have had the tutorials screened. After all, he screened all other data that entered his system. “Do we have a clear picture of who grabbed her?” he asked.
“Look for yourself, boss.” He pointed at one of the screens that lined the wall in Tarent’s office. Men in masks—they could have been anyone, but Tarent was fairly sure he knew exactly who was behind the abduction of his only child.
A third man ran into the room, completely out of breath although he probably hadn’t run any further than the length of the hallway, and even then on top of the moving walkway.
“Any sign of Elantra?” Tarent asked him.
The man—too winded to talk—shook his head no, and took three deep breaths before he spoke in gasps. “We’ve looked… all around the… building… and the surrounding… area. Nothing.”
Tarent wasn’t too surprised. After all, the computer hadn’t found her anywhere.
“Did we at least get a make, a model, a license number on the car, anything useful?”
“They must have used some stealth thing. None of the cars the cameras picked up had Elantra in them.”
Tarent’s computer buzzed, and then Mishy’s face filled the screen. Mishy smiled broadly at Tarent. “I told you, dickhead. Don’t fuck with a man who has nothing to lose.” He laughed sadistically, and the transmission ended.
Tarent let out one long, loud scream.
He jumped to his feet and said more to himself than anyone else, “The bastard just wants to fuck with me.” Tarent paced across the room twice then stopped. “Computer, run the agencies. I want the best one.”
“You want to hire cops, boss?” one of the men said in disbelief.
“Like I don’t own cops all over this city. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what Mishy did or why. Mishy’s got Elantra, and he’s going to use her to get to me. As much as I know about Mishy and the way he operates, the cops know more. Any of you know your way around Slum Town?” The other men were silent. “I didn’t think so.”
James Rank took a double take. Powers was the last person you expected to see on a police agency terminal. Unless of course you were accessing his file to see if he was most probably involved in the crime you were investigating. Tarent Powers was the biggest crime lord in Freight City. Everyone knew it, but try as they might they could never get anything on him. The bastard owned way too many politicians for that. Tarent was a smart crook. He stayed holed up in his building, running everything and never actually getting his own hands dirty. It was hard to prove someone was guilty of a crime when all you had to prove it were a few vague computer files.
“I got to tell ya, too happy to see your ugly mug I ain’t. What the hell do ya want?”
“I realize that you people at the police agencies all suffer under the delusion that I am some sort of criminal master mind, but you’ve yet to turn up any evidence to prove your pathetic theories. I’m clean, Rank. I’m clean, I have the money, and by law you have to take my case...”
“You were never fuckin’ clean, Powers, not even on the day you were born. Just good at coverin’ yer ass. I know the fuckin’ law, Powers, and I don’ have to take your fuckin’ case unless you’ve already been turned down by every other agency in town—and that ain’t what my terminal is tellin’ me...”
“You’ll do what I tell you to do, punk...”
“Ya threatenin’ me, Powers? Cause if ya are I can haul your ass in and we can charge the city a small fortune for gettin’ yer sorry ass out ah yer buildin’....”
“I’m not threatening you, Rank,” Tarent said through gritted teeth. He wasn’t used to kissing anyone’s butt, much less the police. Unfortunately he was between a rock and a hard place. “Mishy took my daughter.”
Rank choked on his laugh, but cut it short. “Now don’ tell me yer surprised ’bout that considerin’ what ya did ta Mishy. Hell, I’m surprised it took him this long ta do somethin’.”
“I didn’t do anything to Mishy.”
“Nothin’ that we can prove. Nothin’ at least that will hold water in court. Apparently Mishy has all the proof he needs. One of these days, maybe today, yer gonna step your ass over the line one too many times, and one of the agencies is gonna grab ya. I only hope it’s us. I could use that kind of money right now. But who knows? Maybe Mishy will take care of ya for us. Either way we win.”
“I’ll give you twenty million dollars to find my daughter, return her to me safely and bring Mishy in.”
“Ya pay us twenty million dollars; we find your daughter and return her to ya, same price alive or dead. Ten million up front, ten million on delivery. As for Mishy... We leave Mishy where he’s at...”
“Mishy kidnapped my daughter...”
“I doubt Mishy left any more evidence of what he did than you do. Jus’ cause no one can prove what ya did don’ mean ya didn’ do it, and both of us know what ya did to Mishy. I’m not about to get in the middle of your fuckin’ turf war. I’d lock ya both up and pocket a bunch of money if I could. But as long as you’re runnin’ around free an able, I’m sure not goin’ to be the fool to lock up anyone who’s a thorn in yer side. We’re not stupid, Tarent, we know that if we take out all the little guppies there’s jus’ more shit fer the big fish in the cesspool.”
“Quit talking shit, Rank. That’s no deal! It’s a bunch of threats and innuendoes. You’re wasting minutes and my daughter may have only seconds. I’m not an idiot. You really expect me to pay you a small fortune to maybe rescue my daughter and you let her kidnapper go scot-free?”
“That’s my deal, Powers, take it or leave it. I doubt any other agency is going to offer you anything any better. Thanks ta people like you we have plenty of business, and we’re not hurtin’ for work.”
Tarent seemed to think about it for a minute, then he nodded. “All right, Rank, but it’s ironic that you’re the one who’s calling me a crook. I want this kept as quiet as possible. I have many enemies, lots of people besides the police agencies who would like to take me down. I want my daughter back in one piece, Rank. But I can’t afford to lose face. If everyone knew that my daughter was taken right in front of my own home...”
“Don’ tell me how to be a cop, and I won’ tell ya how to be a crook. I’ll work for ya ’cause ya have a legitimate case. But if ya think I’m gonna take orders from ya like one of yer goons, then yer outah yer fuckin’ tiny little mind.”
James Rank listened to the computer drone its data for the tenth time. No matter how many angles he came up with, no matter how much information he fed the computer, it always spit the same name back in his face, and he was running short on time. According to the computer not one of his other detectives had more than a twenty percent chance of retrieving the girl alive. Only one of his agents had a ninety percent chance of success. He sighed as the computer droned the name again, Conner McVee.
“Well?” Jason Hunter asked, sliding into Rank’s office on a moving walkway. He had been hovering around the office for ten minutes like a vulture waiting for something to die. He very much wanted the computer to say that he was the one to lead the assignment, no doubt because whoever did it was going to get a huge cash bonus. “Well?” he asked again.
“Everyone’s on the case, Jason.” James sighed; he wished the computer had chosen Jason—or anyone else for that matter.
“But am I assigned to the case. Is it my case?”
“Sorry, but no,” James said.
“Who?” Jason asked, all the wind taken out of his sails.
“McVee,” James answered.
Jason laughed. “Conner ‘The Hammer’ McVee! She’s never going to take this assignment, and thinking she would is just ludicrous. Would you do it if you were her?” Jason didn’t give him a chance to answer. “Come on, boss, give the job to me. You know I can do it, and you know Hammer isn’t going to.”
“The computer gives you a less than twenty percent chance of success, and it gives Hammer McVee a clear ninety. No one has the kind of connections in Slum Town that McVee does, or anythin’ close to her arrest record. As for McVee not takin’ the case... Unlike yerself, Hammer is not a cop for the money. She’s in it ’cause she has a very well-defined sense of what’s right, an’ what’s wrong, an’ she wants to help make things right. Tarent may be the scum of the earth, and McVee may have very good, personal reasons to hate him, but this girl has committed no crime. I doubt even Hammer wants to see Tarent punished bad enough to see an innocent woman killed.”
“Yeah, right.” Jason laughed.
“Tell you what, Jason. Get out on the street. If you get the girl before Hammer does, I’ll give you the bonus.”
“Thanks, boss!” Jason smiled and left. As he stepped onto the moving walkway it anticipated which way he wanted to go and started moving.
James watched him move away. The smug little bastard was sure he could do the job, but then he didn’t know Hammer or the streets the way James did. It might take some talking, but in the end she would do it—if it could be done.
“Chair up.” The chair pushed up so that it took him as little effort to stand as was possible. He got onto the walkway. “Garage,” he ordered. In a few minutes he was in the garage under the building, and he’d maybe had to walk a grand total of ten feet. “Computer, send car.” In seconds his car stood before him. “Door, open.” It did, and he got in. “Door, close.” It did, and his restraint slipped on automatically. “Take me to one-forty-eight West Street in Hammer Town.” The car took off. “Play music.” The dyarhythms started to play. He sat back and relaxed. Ten minutes later he entered Hammer Town.
The whole place gave him the creeps. It was like walking back in time. He saw a bunch of Constructionists working with anachronistic tools to build a home—of wood no less! Their air hammers made a loud, piercing sound as they shot things called nails into the wood. Not many steel or plastic homes here. Not many computers, either. In fact, very few machines of any kind.
The Constructionists were a religious cult that believed that man was never meant to live in a push-button, computerized world. They believed hard work and personal contact were all-important if one wanted to live a righteous life.
McVee lived in Hammer Town. That’s how she had gotten the nickname Hammer. Well, that and the fact that she used an air hammer as a weapon.
James liked McVee, but he didn’t understand her religion, and he didn’t understand her.
The car stopped in McVee’s driveway, an open thing with no roof or walls. In fact everything in Hammer Town was just kind of open and airy. If he thought about it too much it would give him nightmares.
He walked up to her door. “It’s James Rank,” he told the door. It didn’t open. “James Rank,” he said again. The door remained closed, and it took a second for him to realize why. Then he remembered where he was. He looked for and found the little button that was by the door. He pushed it and it made a noise inside the house.
“Come in!” He heard Hammer scream from inside.
He looked at the round thing on the door at waist level and tried to remember how it worked. Finally he grabbed hold of it and turned. After a moment he remembered to push and the door opened. He walked through and kept going, then remembering that the door wouldn’t close itself he went back and shut it. He could never get used to this shit.
“I’m in the kitchen!” she hollered.
James walked through the house—under his own power—to the kitchen.
The kitchen was a real trip. The Constructionists got in their cars and drove to these places and bought their food, or they grew it themselves in these things they called “yards.” Their appliances were all separate, and they prepared and cooked their food themselves. There was this thing called a “sink” that always fascinated James. Water ran into it from a tube, and it held water—for what purpose he had no idea.
As weird as James thought the Constructionists were he couldn’t help but admire them. They lived a very hard life.
McVee stood at the sink holding a container under the metal tube to fill it with water. When it was full she shut the water off by hand and then walked over and poured it into a little machine. “Rank, good to see you.” She smiled. “So were you talking to my door again?”
“Yes. Fer the life of me I don’ know why you live like this.”
She laughed and pushed a button on the machine. It started making tea. James could smell it. It smelled good. That was the one thing he liked about Hammer Town—all the smells—food cooking, wood, grass. Computers just couldn’t replicate it.
“You want some tea?” she asked.
“Ah…” He’d never eaten there before, and he wasn’t sure that it was safe, but it smelled so damn good. “Yeah.”
“Well, sit down take a load off.”
She waved towards a chair at a table, and he sat down. The chair didn’t rise to meet him, and he hit it so hard he almost fell over. McVee laughed.
“Primitive,” he mumbled.
She poured two cups of tea, set one in front of him, and sat down with the other across the table from him.
“You know if you would keep your computer on I wouldn’t be forced to travel out here every time I have an assignment for you.”
“And what does it take? Ten, maybe fifteen minutes of your precious time?” she asked.
“In some cases that fifteen minutes can be the difference between life and death,” James said.
She shrugged and took a sip of her tea. He tried his carefully, then smiled and sighed.
“Good?” she asked.
“Out of this world,” he said.
“So everything about us is not so bad?”
“I don’ have any trouble with Constructionists. I don’ understand why ya would choose to make so much work fer yourselves, but I don’ have any problem with it.”
“If God had meant for us to live in a push-button, computerized world, It wouldn’t have given us opposable thumbs. You think we’re lunatics, but where is the sanity in having the computers and the machines do everything for you so that you have to go to the gym three times a week just to keep your body from atrophying?”
And that was basically the foundation of their faith.
“So... What’s the problem with this job that you know that I don’t want to do it?” she asked, suddenly changing the subject.
“Oh, God! I wish you wouldn’ do that,” James said, a bit unnerved.
“Hey, don’t blame me. The agency was the one that pushed me to get the empathy implant,” Conner said with a smile.
Conner McVee was a shop job, a cyborg, a relic from a time before they made shop jobs all but illegal in the trade. Even after eight years of working with her he still wasn’t sure just what she was capable of. How much was flesh and how much was machine. He wasn’t even sure how much of her ability was her and what had been mechanically enhanced.
Back in the old days when Conner McVee had first started out, the business had been very competitive. Brakston Agency, which James ran for the corporation as his father had before him, had used everything at their command to make them number one. Conner McVee had made them a lot of money, and the company had put a lot of money into her.
“James?” she prompted.
“You ain’t gonna like it, but the computer says yer the only one with an acceptable success ratio.”
“And we all know that computers are never wrong,” she scoffed, making a face.
He ignored her. “It’s a good payin’ job. Your part will be two million up front, five on completion.”
“God in a car, man! What the fuck’s the job?” she asked suspiciously.
A more eloquent man would have found some gentle way of leading up to it. He had never been a man of many words. “Tarent Powers’ daughter was kidnapped from right outside Powers’ Towers by some of Mishy’s hired thugs. Now I know that...”
“I’ll do it,” she said too quickly. Her hand was shaking, but that was the only sign that she was feeling anything.
“I expected a fight...”
“Why? The girl didn’t do anything to me.”
“It needs to be discreet.”
“Yeah right.” She laughed. “By now everyone and his dog knows that she’s been kidnapped. Hell, she may already be dead.”
“All the more reason to get right on it,” James said. “If the girl’s still alive she isn’t likely to be much longer.”
“I’ll load my gear, jam up my computer, and I’m on the road.”
“I’ve got everybody on it, and you’ll all be linked in,” he said. “We’ll keep a trace on ya.” She glared at him then with her one eye, and he felt like his dick was crawling back into his body. He had hit an extremely exposed nerve. One of her implants allowed them to monitor her every movement for a fifty-mile radius. It was an extremely sore spot because it was the one piece of hardware in her body that she hadn’t authorized.
“Don’t get too close. If I need help I’ll yell. Otherwise stay the hell out of my way.”
“I never put the trace on ya unless you’re workin’,” James said.
“That’s not really the point is it, Rank?” she said through clinched teeth. “The point is that you can do it any time you like.”
He nodded his understanding. “Are you going to be all right with this? Because I could put...”
“If you could have thought of anyone else who could do it, you would have assigned them already. I’m fine with it.” She got up from the table. “I’ll get my gear up and you can put me on line.”
She left to get ready, and he drank his tea. He looked around quickly, saw that she wasn’t coming and drank hers, too. It was good. He went and got another cup and drank it, too. He was about to get another one when Conner walked out in full pack.
“I’m out of here. Get back to the office and line me up.”
He nodded and followed her out to the driveway. “Door open,” he said. His car door opened. As he got in he saw McVee open the door of her primitive car manually.
So much wasted energy.
“Car, drive back to the agency.” Suddenly he had to go to the bathroom very badly, and he shuddered to think what that might be like in Hammer Town. “Car, go faster.”