Only Forward

Ji waved in the direction of the bar and a pitcher of alcohol was on the table before his hand stopped moving. He nodded at the stage. ‘What do you think of the show?’

‘Obscene,’ I said, nodding in appreciation, ‘genuinely obscene.’

‘Yeah,’ he grunted, pleased. ‘Bred for it, you know.’ He wasn’t joking: they really are. Red tends not to be the Neighbourhood of choice for women. I noticed that as usual all the girls had thick black hair. Ji has a thing for that.

We chewed the rag for a while. I recapped the last few months, mentioned a couple of mutual acquaintances I’d run into. Ji told me his land had expanded another half mile to the north, which explained his bar’s continued existence, recounted a couple of especially horrific successes, and used the word ‘fuck’ just over four hundred times.

‘So,’ he said in the end, waving and receiving another pitcher, ‘what the fuck do you want? I mean, obviously the joy of seeing my face, but what else? Nice trousers, by the way.’

‘Thanks. Two things,’ I said, leaning over the table and dropping my voice, just in case. ‘I have to find this guy. His name’s Alkland. People who are looking for him think he might be in Red somewhere.’

‘Actioneer?’

‘Yeah, and not just any old can-do smartarse. This is a golden boy.’

‘What the fuck’s he doing in here then?’

‘That I don’t know. I’m not even sure he is here. All I know is that he isn’t in the Centre. ACIA think he’s been stolen and stashed in Red somewhere: I guess it’s the logical first choice.’

I sat back and took a drink of alcohol. Ji knew what I was asking: I didn’t have to spell it out for him. On the stage the sweating and toiling performers were joined by a new pair of girls, who immediately proceeded to go to the toilet over them. That’s entertainment in Red for you.

‘No.’

I nodded and lit another cigarette. I think I forgot to mention that I’d just had one. Well I had. I finished it, put it out, and then I lit another one. Use your imagination.

‘I guessed not.’

‘I’ll listen for him. You still in Colour?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ll pass word if I hear anything. Don’t think I will, though.’

‘No, me neither. I don’t think there’s a gang in Red with enough power to kidnap an Actioneer right out of the Centre. It has to be someone else, maybe a team out of Turn or somewhere. But they could be holding him here.’

‘What’s the other thing?’

‘I need a gun. I lost mine.’

Ji grunted and waved at one of his bodyguards. Ji has a good line in waves: the guard didn’t even need to come over to know what he was asking for. He just disappeared straight out the back.

‘Thanks.’

‘No problem. You going to leave me the cube?’

‘Can’t. Zenda would kill me.’

‘You still working for her?’

I pressed the cube, printed out a colour image of Alkland and gave it to Ji.

‘You know me. I’ll work for anyone.’

‘Especially her.’

‘Especially her.’

By the time I got back to my apartment it was late. You’re not allowed to enter the Centre more than once in one day, so I had to go the long way round, via two other Neighbourhoods. Luckily Ji, cunning old fox of a psychotic that he is, had got hold of some WeaponNegatorz™, so I got the gun back undetected.

Guns, actually. Ji gave me a Gun, which is my weapon of choice, and also a Furt as an added bonus. The Furt is quite a flash laser device, which doubles as a cutting instrument and is therefore kind of useful. The Gun just fires energy bullets. Crude, but effective, and as it generates the bullets itself you never have to reload, which has saved my life eleven times. It was the same make as my last gun, which I lost on the recent job I still haven’t told you about, and it felt very comfortable in my hand. Over a couple more pitchers Ji and I had tried to work out where this left us in the favour stakes. We were both pretty bollocksed by then, but the end result seems to be that he now owes me one more favour than he did before.

As I sat with a jug of Jahavan coffee, each molecule of which is programmed to pelt round the body kicking the shit out of any alcohol molecules it finds, I considered where to go from here. So far, I didn’t have very much to go on. I had established that Ji hadn’t been involved in Alkland’s abduction, but I’d known that anyway. Ji simply wanted to take over as much of Red as he could and stay alive as long as he could whilst killing as many other people as possible. He was a simple man, with simple needs.

Whoever had Alkland was into something much more complex. They couldn’t be after money, because the Centre didn’t have any, but it was unlikely they’d done it for the sheer fun of it. They had to want something that only the Centre could give them. Working out what that might be was going to be important, and I put a memo in my mental file to have a crack at it when I could be bothered. My mental memos are different to my mental notes: I always do something about them eventually, and they’re typed so I can read what they say. For example:

Internal Memo: Who’s got Alkland?

1) Someone with enough togetherness to get people into the Centre to snatch him.

2) Someone with enough togetherness to know about him in the first place.

(The togetherness factor of these guys had to be pretty high. The Centre doesn’t widely distribute lists of ‘People Doing Really Important Things Whom You Might Like To Consider Kidnapping’. I’d never even heard of Alkland before tonight, and I know the Centre pretty well for an outsider.)

3) Someone who wants something of a kind that only the Centre can give them.

(When I knew what that might be, I’d know what kind of people I was dealing with, which would make it easier to predict the way in which they’d operate.) And

4) Get some batteries for the Gravbenda™.

See? Very diligent. Zenda would be impressed. Well, not impressed, probably, because I’m sure her mental memos run to 120 pages with graphs, indexes and supporting audio visual material, but pleasantly surprised, maybe. Surprised, anyway.

I also made another note, which I’m not going to tell you about. It was kind of a surprising idea, and very unlikely: but I stored it away anyway. I’ll let you know if it turns out to be relevant.

By the time I finished the jug I was completely sober. More sober than I wanted to be, in fact: I’d drunk too much coffee and was now too far in the black, sobriety-wise. It made me notice things like that whenever I come back to my apartment, it’s empty. It’s a nice apartment, fully colour co-ordinated and with happening furniture, but I use it just as somewhere to store my stuff, and to crash when I’m in the Neighbourhood. When I come back to it, it’s always empty. No people. Or no person, to be more precise.

I have an apartment, I have more money than I need, I have a job, of sorts. But have I got a life?

See what I mean? Foolish, unhelpful thoughts. I took a look at the packet of Jahavan and saw I’d picked up Extra Strength by mistake. ‘Warning,’ it said in the blurb. ‘Anyone except alcoholics may find themselves experiencing foolish and unhelpful thoughts.’

I wasn’t feeling tired, but decided to try to get some sleep anyway. When I get immersed in a job I tend to have to go days without any, which is one of the reasons I end up so tired. There was nothing more I could do tonight, so making a deposit in the sleep bank was the clever thing to do.

Before I turned in I checked my message tray, on the off-chance that Ji might have transfaxed something through. It was empty apart from a note from the council. The Street Colour Coordinator Computer had sent me a message saying how much it had enjoyed working with my trousers.

Three

At 4.45 a.m. I woke up, instantly alive and alert. I turned over and tried to get back to sleep, but it wasn’t going to happen. I still had Jahavan running wild round my bloodstream, shouting, carrying on, waking up all the cells. I got up, had a shower, went into the kitchen and threw the coffee away. I don’t need that kind of shit from a beverage.

I made a cup of Debe, which is similar to coffee except it has no natural products in it and doesn’t taste much like it either, and sat by the wall in the living room, waiting for dawn to break. An amazingly, ridiculously large spider ran across the floor in front of me. I stared at it for a while, wondering how the hell it had got in. My apartment is on the fourth floor: I couldn’t believe the thing had scaled a hundred feet of wall just to hang out with me. It had to have a lair in the apartment somewhere, though I couldn’t imagine where. I found it hard to believe that there could be a crevice in there big enough to hold an animal that size. More likely it just sat around in the open all day, cunningly disguised as a piece of furniture, waiting for night to fall so it could go zipping round the floor in that way they enjoy so much. I might have sat on it without knowing, or rested a drink on it. Hell, I could have stretched out and gone to sleep on it.

Halfway across the floor the spider stopped, skittered round, and sat and looked at me. I looked back at the spider. It was a tense moment.

I take shit as and when necessary, but not from things as far down the evolutionary ladder as spiders. I think it sensed this. After a long moment it pointed itself in a different direction and slowly and many-leggedly ambled towards the door. Then, probably realising this was the last chance it was going to get tonight to do any zipping about, it suddenly accelerated to warp speed and zoomed out into the hall, taking the corner on two legs.

Unlike a lot of Neighbourhoods, Colour is open to the sky, and by 5.30 the black outside my window was tinged with a hint of pinky blue. It didn’t help much but it looked nice. They always have nice skies in Colour: I think they fiddle about with them in some way.

It was still too early to do anything useful, so I went shopping instead.

Early afternoon found me back in the apartment, sitting crosslegged on the ceiling of the living room, finishing a massive lunch.

For long stretches I can’t be bothered with shopping, especially for food. I try, but by the time I get to the stores either I’m bored with the whole idea or I get choice anxiety and it all gets too much for me. Today, though, I’d gone through with it. I’d really shopped. Food, batteries for the Gravbenda™, food, Normal Strength coffee, food and food. I’d made the fridge really happy. Finally it had something to get its teeth into again, lots of stuff it could keep nicely cold and fresh. Not all of the food was for me: one of the things I had on my list of things to do was to get in touch with my cat, Spangle, and see if he wanted to come and stay for a while.

First, though, I had some calls to make. I made them. I called all of the reliable contacts I have in Neighbourhoods around the Centre, and some of the unreliable ones too.

Nothing. Whoever had snatched Alkland had done a truly tremendous job, secrecy-wise. It was looking more and more as if it had to be a gang from Turn Neighbourhood, which was very bad news. I do this kind of thing, the normal things, largely for something to do. I have to fill my time somehow, now that it’s all I have: but I’d rather it didn’t get too serious. I’ve calmed a bit in the last few years. Taking on a bunch of well-organised psychopaths doesn’t appeal as much as it would have done once.

I ate some more food. Things were not going particularly well yet, but that’s the way it always works. The City is a hell of a big place, split into hundreds of places that have no idea what’s going on in all the other places. There’s no point just skipping blithely round, hoping you’ll run into what you’re looking for on a street corner. You don’t get handed a job complete with a little box full of clues and helpful pointers. I don’t, anyway. There’s a lot of waiting involved in the initial stages. I’d put out feelers, registered an interest, and that was all I could do.

Suddenly there was a loud pharping noise from the message tray. Unfortunately the tray is fixed to the wall near the floor, and I couldn’t reach it from where I was sitting, i.e. on the ceiling. I flicked the switch on the Gravbenda™ to return things to normal.

It’s not just the batteries on that thing, you know, I think the unit’s completely dysfunctional. Instead of gradually reorientating the room it just switched over instantaneously, dumping me and the remains of my lunch in a large and messy pile in the middle of the floor. I made a mental note to go stand outside my ex-client’s apartment sometime and shout, ‘Be wary if this gentleman asks to pay you in kind, lest the consumer goods he offers are faulty in significant ways,’ or something equally cutting, and then crawled painfully through the debris towards the message tray. I hadn’t actually cleared up the mess from the last Gravbenda™ disaster before turning it on again, and you haven’t seen untidiness until you’ve seen a room where the gravity has failed twice in different directions.

The message was from Ji. He was going to kick the shit out of an enclave in the Hu sub-section of Red, and would I like to come along? I knew Ji well enough to realise that this was not purely a social invitation. He was on to something.

I quickly changed into attire suitable for gang warfare likely to stop only just short of the deployment of nuclear weapons. Long black coat, black jacket, black trousers, black shirt. On impulse I ran the CloazValet™ over the shirt first: it stayed black, but gained a very intricate, almost fractal pattern in very dark blues, purples and greens. I found my gun and shoulder-holstered it.

It’s always difficult to predict how long these things will go on, so I put a call through to Zenda to warn her I might be a little late calling in. This is me in full action mode, you see: dynamic, vibrant but considerate too. Royn answered the vidiphone.

‘Hi, Stark. Like the shirt.’

‘Thanks. Is Zenda available?’

‘Sorry, Stark, she’s too busy to talk to you right now. Way, way too busy.’

‘She’s always busy.’

‘Yeah, but she’s busy to the max at this time. She’s too busy to talk to the people she’s doing business with, let alone anyone else. Can I give her a message?’

‘Just that I may be a little late checking in: I’m going to a gang war.’

‘Oh wow. Well, have a good time. I’ll let her know.’

I looked for the Furt, but couldn’t see any sign of it in all the mess. The food had all disappeared – it’s set to do that, an hour after cooking – but there was furniture, books, all kinds of crap all over the place, and the Furt is a small weapon. My apartment is equipped with a Search function: you have a little unit into which you type what you’re looking for, and it electronically searches the place and tells you where it is. Unfortunately I’ve lost the unit, so I’m pretty well fucked. Where I was going one little Furt wasn’t going to make much of a difference, so I forgot about it and ran for the mono instead.

I told you things would start happening.

Two of Ji’s bodyguards met me at Fuck Station Zero, dressed in formal evening wear with black tie. They were very polite and deferential. Being a personal friend of a ganglord is kind of cool.

We walked quickly to BarJi, a hulk on either side of me. The street life got out of the way very rapidly when they saw us coming. One of the things you learn quickly in Red is that if you see men dressed mainly in black heading down the street you get the hell out of the way, before extreme violence breaks out all around you.

Ji was also in black tie, and seemed calm and collected.

‘We’re going to have to be quick,’ he muttered, ‘word is that the fuckers have heard we’re coming.’

I found this worrying, and voiced my concern.

‘So they’re going to be waiting for us?’ I said, wondering if my afternoon might be better spent tidying up the apartment.

‘No, so they’re getting the hell out. There’s going to be no one left to kill if we don’t get a fucking move on.’

In tight formation we strode out of the bar. The armoured cars outside took the signal and wheelspun away, thundering down the street in front of us towards Hu. Ji and I walked down the street behind them, flanked by bodyguards, two more cars rolling along behind us. Like the strippers, the bodyguards in Red are bred specifically for what they do: they’re all over seven feet tall and built to withstand a direct hit by a meteor. In particular they’re selected for the size of their torsos. Ji, of course, had the very best, and the six guards around us all had upper bodies that were about two feet thick. A top bodyguard reckons on being able to shield his owner from about thirty bullets or two small shells. I’m only six feet tall and couldn’t see where the hell we were going, but I felt pretty safe.

Red is closed to the sky, and it’s always night-time there. The streets were dark but studded on all sides by the neon glare of lights in the Dopaz bars and Fuckshops. The pavements we passed were deserted, but lots of faces peered out at us through the windows. A couple of the bars had hand-made signs saying, ‘Go for it, sir,’ strung outside.

A derelict staggered into sight from round a corner and I winced in anticipation. Ji has no time for derelicts. It’s not just that they aren’t consumers and so they’re no good to him, it’s mainly that he can’t stand people with no drive. I’ve often thought that Ji would make a pretty fearsome Actioneer, though the Centre would have to massively expand its ideas of what were acceptable Things To Be Doing. Sure enough, without breaking his stride Ji squeezed off a shot and the derelict’s head found itself spread along ten feet of wall. There was a small cheer from one of the bars.

Hu is a small sub-section pretty much at the centre of Red, bordering on the West side of Ji’s territory. It’s one of the oldest parts of Red Neighbourhood, and bad as Red is in general, Hu is worse. Hu is where the really bad things happen. You never see anyone on the streets in Hu, and there are no bars. There’s no commercial interest in Hu, because in Hu everyone stays indoors. Hu is where you go if you’re a serial killer and you want somewhere to slice up your victims in peace. Hu is where you go to worship the devil properly without being bothered by sane people. Hu is the very end of the line. If you’re in Hu you’re either dead, about to be dead, or squatting in a dark abandoned building, chewing on the bodies.

‘What’s the interest here, Ji?’ I asked, slightly breathless after five minutes’ solid striding. ‘Hu is no use to you.’

Ji rolled his head on his shoulders, limbering up. ‘I put the word around last night. No one knew anything about your friend, but I heard a whisper of a new gang holed up in Hu. Maybe they’re your people, maybe not. Either way I don’t want the fuckers near me.’

Up ahead of us the armoured cars were slowing down. We were nearing the edge of Ji’s territory. The transition zones in Red are the worst. Everybody hates everybody there. Suddenly a shot rang out from a third-floor window on the right and one of the bodyguards twitched, a small red circle appearing on the spotless white of his dress shirt.

‘Good work, Fyd,’ said Ji, clapping him on the shoulder. ’You okay?’

‘Feeling good, Ji,’ the guard grunted, using a biro to dig the bullet out. He was pretty tough, I decided. One of the armoured cars swivelled and fired: the third floor of the building in question disappeared. We trotted forward to the other car, the guards maintaining a perfect shield around us. The door opened and Ji and I ducked in, followed by three of the guards.

‘Lone sniper, sir,’ said the driver, ‘but there’s more activity up ahead.’

‘Okay,’ said Ji, settling comfortably into the gunner’s seat. ‘Here’s the plan. We go in there and kill everybody.’

‘Works for me,’ the driver grinned, and floored the accelerator.

Basically it took ten minutes. The four cars screamed into Hu, machine guns sending out a 360° spray of energy bullets and gunners pumping shells into anything that moved, or looked like it might. Shots and shells poured back down at the cars from windows and shop fronts, but you can’t argue with a man like Ji. Shooting at him just makes him more angry.

As whole floors of buildings exploded around us the hostile fire began to thin out, and the cars concentrated on wasting the men who began appearing in the streets, running like hell away from us. One lunatic jumped onto our car from a second-floor window and tried to fire his rocket launcher through the window. Fyd, who’d finished calmly digging the bullet out of his chest, punched his fist through the one-inch glass and the man’s body flew gracefully into the wall of the building we were screeching past. Most, but not all, of it then fell to the ground.

‘Okay,’ said Ji calmly, ‘tell car four to turn around and head back out, in case anyone’s running that direction. Tell one and three to drop back in formation to flank us.’

The three cars pelted down the street into the heart of Hu, mowing down anything in their way. I would have hated to have been on the other side. To be running through hell on earth, half deafened by the sound of three pursuing armoured cars owned by the most dangerous man in Red, that can’t be much fun. That must be a dismal feeling. Luckily, the feeling would have been of short duration as they were all put out of their misery very quickly.

‘Stop,’ said Ji quietly, and the cars halted instantaneously. There was a moment of quiet as Ji cocked his head and listened to whatever jungle instinct it is that men like him have. Around us the streets were empty but for pieces of dead people and blazing rubble, the stonework red with blood and the flickering of burning debris. ‘Okay,’ he said finally, satisfied, ‘let’s go.’

Fyd dealt out the weapons. He offered me a Crunt Launcher but I patted my holster, and he shrugged. When everyone was armament positive another guard opened the door and we got out. The other three guards were already waiting for us, and Ji and I stepped into their shadow. Ji took a quick look around, then nodded at a building to our left.

‘There,’ he said.

We walked slowly towards the building, the guards behind us facing backwards, Crunt Launchers cocked. Just before we reached the door of the building there was a belt of noise from one of the launchers, and the sound of a scream mingled with an explosion on the other side of the street.

‘Nice one, Bij,’ said Ji, without even turning round.

‘Thank you, sir.’

There was a small fire in the ground floor of the building, but it didn’t look like it was going to get out of hand. There was nothing to burn. Just stone walls, anything movable stolen decades ago. It looked like it must have been an office block a hundred years ago, back when people lived around here. There was kind of a weird smell about the place, but otherwise it didn’t look that special. But Ji knows these things: I don’t know how, he just does.

We headed for the stairs and moved slowly up them, still in formation. The second floor was deserted. The smell was worse here and I raised my eyebrows at Ji.

‘Think we’ve found somebody’s store cupboard,’ he said.

He was right. On the third floor the steps stopped, and we had to cross the floor to get up any further. We walked quietly into the first office area, and suddenly the guards moved with one mind and we were crouched into a knot behind the door, Ji and I surrounded on all sides. Then slowly the guards straightened.

‘Sorry about that, sir,’ Fyd said. ‘False alarm.’

We looked around the office. It was dark, the only light coming from the fires still raging outside. The floor was covered with human shapes, and the smell was terrible.

‘That’s okay,’ said Ji. ‘Nice moving, anyway.’

Forced to proceed in single file, we threaded our way across the floor. Something combustible caught outside and the fire flared up, throwing red and orange light across the room.