VOLGA, CYRA, AND I unload from the taxi onto the buzzing Hyperion street. The sliver of morning sky seen through a gap in the overhead bridges and buildings of the city above is as bright and blue as the dresses girls wear to the summer races at the Circada Maxima. This dilapidated deep level of Hyperion is naked under the high sun. Ancient buildings, moldering signs, forgotten by the progress above. Grafitti of upside-down pyramids embedded with screaming mouths score storefronts and alley walls. The Vox Populi seems to have an endless supply of paint.
On a building-side HC a newscast blares. A fatally serious Copper reporter drones on about the hunt for the Reaper after his murder of the ArchWarden. Hacked the man down in cold blood, they say. Sounds about right for the bastard. I might like booze, but power’s his cup of poison. The Colors are shocked, appalled that such an affront to the Republic could occur by their great hero. But after seeing the fall of one empire, I know enough to see the cracks in the foundation of this one.
I suck back a burner. With our preparations for the heist under way, we’ve been running eighteen hours a day. The first several days were strategic, scouting the viability of the three posited locations for the heist that the Syndicate provided. Once we picked one, I told Gorgo, our Syndicate liaison, the only way the task could be done proper was with a military-grade gravWell. I half told it to the Obsidian as a bluff to test the limits of his reach, but the Syndicate beast looked unfazed and kept smoking a burner over his espresso at the highrise café where we met. Said he’d run it by the Duke. He did. Said it would take two weeks. Guess dancing with the devil means you get hell’s resources.
I pull my wool overcoat tight against the early autumn chill and notice Volga staring up at a residential skyscraper with a sliver of green foliage on its roof.
“What would it be like to live up there?” she asks. “A garden atop the clouds.”
“After this you’ll find out,” I say.
Cyra snorts. “Don’t tease the crow. Even after this dreadnought of a payday, all of us together couldn’t buy that penthouse.”
“How much do you think it costs?” Volga asks.
Cyra shrugs. “Hundred million, maybe more.”
Volga shakes her head at the number, stunned on a primal level.
“There’s your Rising for you,” I say.
We cross the street after an automated grocery truck trundles past, and make our way across the fissured concrete to a small shop underneath a gaudy, glittering holosign proclaiming, KOBACHI’S TECH EMPORIUM. WON’T TAKE A BYTE OUT OF YOUR WALLET. Another sign underneath flashes: NO RUSTERS. NO CROWS. NO EXCEPTIONS.
Volga pauses outside the door. Cyra goes right on in. I pause and consider Volga for a moment. She kept my secret from the others. But the last few days she’s been sullen. “Want to see inside?” I ask.
She looks at the sign and shakes her head. “No, thank you.”
I sigh. “What’s wrong? You been slumping along like a wounded puppy since we took this job.”
She relents and looks at me hesitantly. “Are you not worried? Worried that this will hurt the Rising?”
“Life’s a mountain, Volga. Nasty, steep, covered in ice. Try to move it, you’ll go nowhere. Try to help someone else, you’ll fall right down with them. Focus on your own feet, and you just might make it up and over.” I reach up to clasp her muscled shoulder. “Now come on.”
“It will be trouble.”
In response, I flash the black rose in my interior coat pocket and grin. “Pale lady, today we’re the trouble.”
The interior of the shop is a dim jungle of gadgets and secondhand gizmos so thick they seem to grow into the humid air. Amidst floating indigo signs, obscure relics hang on hooks beside knockoff datapads and ocular implants. A good half of the store has been given over to biomodifications. Two teenage Greens with heavy tattooing and liberty spike hair sift through plastic packages containing discounted neurolinks. Idiots. After the darkness of the Society, this new generation is so desperate to plug in, to know everything instantaneously, that they put the whole holoNet in their heads without giving two shits about the consequences. The teenagers eye Volga nervously as she comes in.
Cyra’s already snagged a cart and is getting to work on her datapad’s shopping list. Volga stands behind me, eyes darting around like a puppy given leave over a butcher’s shop. They settle on a holoExperiental station that several kids have gathered around. “Go on, feast your eyes,” I say. She gives me a careful smile, then, taking huge care not to let her broad shoulders knock over a rack of metabolic implants, lumbers over to watch. A Blue kid is sitting in a chair, nodes attached to his head. A projection of what he’s seeing with his closed eyes dances in the air above him. His friends watch excitedly, waiting their turn. They peer back as Volga’s shadow eclipses them. One of Kobachi’s employees, a gangly young Green, monitors the experiential over a tray of nasal caffeine inhalers. The Red’s flying a Colloway xe Char mission—the fantastical first where the dashing ex-pirate personally relieved House Saud of ten tons of gold bullion they were moving from their Luna banks to Venus in a caravan. They put a hell of a bounty on him after that, and made him famous.
The employee blanches when he sees Volga. “No crows,” he says, gesturing to the sign. She looks down at him, embarrassed. “Can’t you read, girl?”
“Yes, I can read,” Volga says in a small voice.
“She’s with me,” I say.
He doesn’t turn. “Look, if she was a ruster, she’d steal shit. If she was a Brown she’d clean shit. But she’s an Obsidian: they break shit. I don’t make the rules, brotherman.”
“Kid,” I say. I nudge the employee. He turns his bloodshot eyes to me. His pupils are huge on some designer drug, his armpits dark with sweat. “Watch your fucking manners.” He swallows, seeing the Omnivore pistol hanging on the holster inside my jacket. “Where’s Kobachi?”
“In the back.”
“Get him for me. Tell him it’s Ephraim.”
The Green just blinks at me.
“Before I grow a beard.”
“Keep up, pops. Already called him.” He taps the scar on his right temple where his neurolink went in. His eyes narrow rebelliously. “Told him a tinman was waitin’.”
A few minutes later, I spy Kobachi peeking out the crack of the door leading to the back of his shop, where he does his repairs. He catches me spotting him, then ducks away before reappearing grandly, extending his arms in welcome. He’s a little mechanized gecko of a man. In his deep sixties, his sleepy green eyes embedded with sensors and magnification lenses. Bald headed. In patched-up overalls with multiscrews and other tools sticking out of the belt on his tiny hips. Dull metal implants rise up out of the pale flesh covering his skull.
“Ephraim, my dearest friend,” he says in a thin voice as he comes up to me in the cluttered aisle. He hasn’t yet seen Volga past the stacks of music equipment. “What joy to see you again. Such a fright you gave Kobachi.” He leans closer. “I thought you were the Watchmen come back with cruelty on their minds. Such nasty, nasty customers, your kinsmen. All extortion and bullying and demanding the severest discounts. Sometimes they even demand…” His voice falters.“…refunds.”
“Refunds,” I say. “The horror.”
“I know. I know. But such times we live in. No protection for the small-business owner. Only taxes and extortion. Such is to be expected from leaders who have never run a business!” He waves to a floating sign that says NO REFUNDS. “But is it too much to ask for a literate militarized police?”
“At least they weren’t too upset about the shit knockoff lenses you repackaged in Sun Industries wrapping….”
He gasps. “Repackage! Insidious accusation! And this, from a dear friend.”
“More like insidious business practices. Those lenses you fleeced me for scratched my cornea. You’re as bad as Roduko.”
“Roduko! How dare you.” He sets his reedy hands on his hips and can’t find them because of the bulk of his tool belt, so he settles for crossing his arms. “Kal ag Roduko is a two-bit Terran hustler without a kilobyte of consideration for his customer. Profit. Profit. Profit. They’re all the same.”
“Immigrants or Silvers?”
“Either! Both! No care for being an institution in the Bazaar. It’s all about what they can extract from their customers.”
I smile, genuinely amused at the small man. He’s the most useless hustler I’ve ever met. But somehow, someway, he’s remained on this corner for forty years, like a benevolent fungus resistant to any and all change. Hell, I keep coming back even though a quarter of the commercial goods I buy here are guaranteed to break after a week’s use. But maybe that’s just because the turnover rate on everything else in Hyperion is manic. Gotta respect a fungus like Kobachi. Especially one that files off serial numbers and wipes digital signatures. Best ghost tech for fifty kilometers. Even if the toys occasionally break.
He smiles at me now, a toothy, obscenely disingenuous one that seems to grow every time he smells credits in my pocket. “What can Kobachi do for you today? Virility implants? Infrared ocular sensors? Zero-gravity acid applicators? Or will you be wanting something more…” His smile grows till it reaches his ears. “…expensive.”
“Actually, custom is the game of the day.”
“Crow! Mind your hands!” he shouts past me. I turn to see Volga frozen mid-reach toward an iridescent glass globe with floating electrical wires inside. She sheepishly steps away from the item. Kobachi wheels on me, eyelids pinched in anger. “Kobachi thinks it is not just Wardens who cannot read.” He waves to another sign that has an X drawn over an apelike monster that is supposed to be an Obsidian. “No crows. No exceptions.”
“Volga likes toys,” I say. “Volga is going to look at toys. And you’re going to mind your manners, Kobachi. For once.”
“This is my shop—”
“And you’re happy to have us here,” I say, producing the iron rose from my pocket so that only he can see it. He blanches, as if I were holding death in my coat pocket. “Aren’t you?”
“Very happy,” he says quietly, but the look on his face says otherwise.
“Glad we understand each other.” I pocket the rose and clap him on the shoulder. “Now, that custom order.”
He grunts and leads me to the back of the shop, which is filled with a large workbench stacked with half-completed projects. “So this is what it looks like back here,” I say. He looks at me with an altogether different set of eyes now that he’s seen the rose. He keeps glancing at my pocket.
“I was not aware…”
“It’s a new arrangement. And not permanent.”
“Silly Gray. It’s always permanent,” he says quietly. “They never let you go. You don’t want this, my friend.” I dismiss his words with a shrug. I don’t need him to know what I’m feeling. But I know he’s right. After so many years of watching the Syndicate’s tentacles stretch from the Lost City up to high Hyperion and out to Endymion and the other spheres, I know they never let go of something valuable. After the Fall, they decided they wanted the whole ecosystem. That’s what caused the Territory Wars between them and the old gangs. There’s few of them left anymore. Even old Golgatha fell hard.
“Is this all you have?” I ask Kobachi. “Gorgo will be disappointed.” The name affects Kobachi. His knees begin to shake so badly they almost knock together. He touches a button underneath the workstation. The back wall retracts into the ceiling, revealing a secondary room stocked with a treasure trove of gleaming titanium, slick plastic and steel—weapons, drones, data slicers and all manner of illegal military tech. He smiles with pride, despite the fear that the Syndicate has put in him. So this is what pays his rent. I laugh. “Kobachi, you old dog. I didn’t know you had so many secrets.”
“A better compliment, there is none.” He begins rattling off his catalogue of weapons. “For close work, the R-34 Widowmaker with ion pellets. Of if you’re feeing like something discreet, a wrist-mounted Eradicator. Or…”
“I’ve got a gun,” I say.
“A plasma pistol?” he scoffs. “Clumsy weapon. Loud. Indiscriminate. Hardly an improvement over—”
I pull out my gun.
“An Omnivore-540,” he whispers. “Semiautomatic railgun. Titan Arms. Powered by a rechargeable ion cell to drive the round along patented parallel reactive conductors. Adjustable internal diameter, multicaliber friendly, with”—his voice goes hushed—“an autonomous forge in the magazine.” He smiles dreamily. “Metal goes in. Death comes out.”
“No need to get dramatic.”
“Only twenty thousand were ever made. Where did you find one this side of the Belt?”
“A man’s gotta have his secrets.”
“I will buy. How much?”
“Not for sale. What I need is one of these.” I walk to a rack of glistening titanium hunterkiller drones, with silent engines and a neurotoxin deliverer concealed in their front faceplates. It is an assassin’s machine. “How small can you make it?”