Roadbeater

[Kostemetsia]

OOC: First of many chapters. Need as much criticism as possible.

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His name is Roadbeater. Actually, it’s Tim, but he goes by Roadbeater.

He is a mercenary. He is a mercenary who lives in City Nowhere. He is a seventeen-year-old mercenary living in a cleaned-out dumpster slammed up against a wall, pirating power and grid feeds from the office hive next door, beer from the local liquor store and ammunition from the local armoury.

The dumpster is bright baby blue. It has a great big ‘no’ symbol stencilled in red on one of the lids - Roadbeater’s handiwork - and both are padlocked, also Roadbeater’s handiwork. No explanation is actually given as to how he gets out of the dumpster, but many theorise he is simply excellent enough to disappear through its lid.

He probably is that excellent, but he is the kind of man - or boy, really - who simply could not be bothered to do it. His expertise lies in routines, time-honoured methods (although he’s only been in the business for about a year now, so he can’t be said to have had all that much opportunity to use them), and he most certainly doesn’t believe in changing such methods simply for the sake of someone else’s curiosity. Roadbeater has invested heavily in trademarks, signature moves and traditions; it pays low dividends, but it pays dividends and he is confident they will increase with time.

Right now, his figurative money is in visual motifs. When he’s out on the prowl, his immediate picker-outerer is his weathered brown leather jacket, with the strap of a camera hanging across it from right to left - surprisingly enough, in the times we live in, there is actually a camera attached to it: very professional and timelessly stylish, all polished steel and patterned PVC and ergonomic rubber grips and a long barrel, so it’s obviously not Roadbeater’s. He probably picked it up the last time he went raiding.

The only things Roadbeater has that he really cares about, as such, are his weapons. They have their own special corner of his dumpster, they are large and silver and skinny, and contrary to the bulldust Roadbeater puts about only one of them has ever been fired, that one having fired two .22-short rounds in fruitless desperation. He barely got out of that op in one piece and it’s one of the ones he doesn’t put on his CV.

You see, as previously mentioned, Roadbeater is a mercenary. He is one of the best in the refined, delicate trade of private warfare, because he never kills his targets. Officially, it’s because he’s good enough to negotiate with or temporarily incapacitate them - unofficially, it’s because Roadbeater is a skinny little brown-haired reed who couldn’t fight a ten-year-old if his life depended on it and would be literally terrified with fear at the very prospect of actually putting a bullet into someone’s head and perhaps getting the mob on his tail; knees and other non-vital body parts are fine, though, because at least you’re not killing people, are you?

On the side, he runs surveillance for a couple of megacorps, doing more the conventional private security agent type work as any good mercenary should. He’s employed by New Berlin’s frontier operations corps, Shriquo Research and Development, and the Villas de la Villaneuva at a rough tally, and that’s just naming the major players - occasionally he deigns to do a minor non-contact op for places like water shippers and residential items storage. Out here on the dried-up frontier world of Watsuo, and even in its admittedly not exactly bustling capital, City Nowhere - out here on Watsuo, where crime over such things as glasses of water is rampant, guards at reasonable prices are worth their weight in gold.

Roadbeater is waiting for an invite for an op to show up. Inside his dumpster, which is obsessively clean of the desert sand that infects every other part of City Nowhere and the rest of this world, there is room to put a desk. In that room to put a desk, there is a desk. On that desk, there is a portable terminal, steel and PVC and rubber just like the camera that isn’t Roadbeater’s. This laptop probably isn’t Roadbeater’s either, especially since it has ‘Elaine’ engraved into the base where nobody ever looks.

It’s running very cool. The equally cool Roadbeater is a fairly good mekenj - sorry, mechanical engineer - by virtue of practice; Watsuo isn’t a fun operating environment and the more successful mercenaries don’t tend to go there. Roadbeater, despite being extremely good, isn’t too successful (nobody takes a seventeen-year-old seriously, no matter how many big shiny expensive weapons he has), and therefore has to put up with the heat and the dryness and the dust of Watsuo, meaning he has to adjust his equipment appropriately. As such, he’s jacked some pipes and some coils and some mektools and broke some holes in some walls and made him a water-cooling system with a design worthy of Maurits Escher.

Admittedly, the laptop is pretty much of no note whatsoever. It’s an old model, with the raised letters almost worn off the foam keys and the screen flecked with dead pixels - the only thing that looks even remotely notable about it is the attention that Roadbeater pays to the outside, always cleaning it up and polishing it and making it shine. This is because he doesn’t know how to grave keys or to fix up screens, and he really doesn’t trust the compenjis out here in Nowhere, with all their smug smiles and their bright eyes and their high rates and their precise tools and their neat little tidy nice houses. And their high rates. Really, that’s basically the decider.

The laptop’s ratty condition doesn’t matter, though, because despite how much Roadbeater tells himself he’s going to take it to a contract negotiation one day, look professional and impress some high-flying businessmen, he never does and he’s the only one who ever sees it anyways. He uses it to pick up invites in flashy green and black with company crests and lots of text, for low-risk low-contact jobs with big salaries, which the moneymen seem pretty happy to hold out to contractors like Roadbeater - they’re the only jobs he’s ever done.

This is about to change.

The laptop beeps. Through the caked layers of grime on its surface it’s a pretty annoying sound, raspy at the edges, crackly in the middle, like a quarter-second of buzz-saw being played back. The dust lifts for a moment, then settles back, wedging ever more firmly into its little nooks and crannies; it’s disturbed again a moment later as Roadbeater unfolds himself from his pallet with affected nonchalance, blinking, and strolls over, the dumpster being more than large enough for the fairly tall, weedy kid to stand up in.

Fairly standard stuff. Water storage op, lots of surveillance stuff attached, all sorts of orbit pix and 3D simulations and tactical vectors. Roadbeater almost reflexively hits ‘accept’, then notices something, scrolls down a bit. Not so standard: it’s an attack op, and despite his old bad experience that brings a predatory smile to his face. He’s been a def operator before: he knows what def ops involve and it should be rather easy sitting on the other end, especially if the bit about a complimentary APC for op duration isn’t bulldust.

Yep, this looks like prime stuff. The prey is a teensy little hydro-seller’s right in the middle of Albiton district, where all the small-time amount-to-nothing shops set up, as you might know if you’re a mercenary. Looks like it’s a D&Q chainstore: D&Q are Delacruz & Quong, a tacky little interstellar conglomerate Roadbeater does really small jobs for, really badly, every now and then - as far as this job goes, the ‘interstellar conglomerate’ bit salves Roadbeater’s sense of guilt at perhaps putting the hurt on the underdog, while the ‘tacky little’ bit just fuels the fire under his fanatical sense of taste, which a man living in a bin really shouldn’t be allowed to have on the grounds of fundamental universal order. Needless to say, they don’t fawn over him all that much either.

Yes, Roadbeater believes he can afford to lose the Delacruz & Quong contract in exchange for - what was the price again? He checks - two hundred thousand reds and a few greens tacked onto the end to make it look nice. This is the kind of figure that gives people like Roadbeater involuntary pelvic spasms (he’s learned to control them over the years, of course): after all, it’s not like nine months’ expenses with luxuries on isn’t a decent figure.

APC transport? Two hundred thousand reds for a hydro heist? Too good to be true. Gleefully he flashes ‘okay’, and a little timer starts counting down in the corner of his screen to when the op is due - nine o’clock in the morning, three days from now. This gives Roadbeater ample time to put some resources together and arrange a nice safe route to the op launch site.

Right now, though, in a complete change from tradition, it’s time for a drink.

* * *

The Meaningless Bar is a strange place. On the outside it is a two-story building of charcoal brick, always managing to look slicked with rain despite the fact that even the most detailed searches have found no evidence that rain ever fell here. Its windows, if they can be called such, are exclusively on the second floor, exclusively mullioned, and exclusively on the opaque end of translucent - every so often a light will flash, showing up a sinuously writhing shadow in high definition against the plastic panes. Once, there were parents on this colony to complain about the moral degradation - now there are simply teenagers, the normal type like Roadbeater and the overblown type like pretty much everyone else.

The door is made of plywood, a fairly common construction material on this world thanks to its durability. It is varnished and polished to a high sheen, which is less common, and its doorknob is real wood of unknown provenance cut into a finely detailed dharma wheel. The door and the dharma wheel have been here for thirty years: the door is consistently maintained against the weather, and the dharma wheel is replaced every so often but is unnaturally durable nonetheless.

Upon slinking wall-huggingly up to the door and sneakily letting himself in, Roadbeater is greeted by a storm of noise completely inaudible from outside. Part of the noise is the pervasive drum-and-bass track that the club of the Meaningless Bar always seems to play with minor variation; the other part is the roiling, rollicking crowd which Roadbeater, with some warranted trepidation, moshes his way through.

Finally, he comes out on the other side, onto a tiled floor which by custom is untouched by the changing tides of the club patrons. The floor is really just a strip inset into the thick wall that separates the club from the Bar proper, about the size of a walk-in wardrobe, and has another dharma-wheel door. Roadbeater pushes his way through this and into the mercifully quiet murmur of the much more cultured Meaningless Bar.

The Meaningless Bar is also an odd place. It has what is perhaps best described as a lack of light, in that there are large sections not lit by lime-green low-power floods, but only by the mostly cyan glow of personal datapads, interrupted occasionally by the shadowing of busy fingers darting across their surfaces. Roadbeater always sits in the light, because he doesn’t want to know what lurks in the dark - this is a bar solely for the elite or for the friends of the elite (Roadbeater is one of the latter), and the elite did not always become elite by being Good Samaritans, altruists, ethicists - nice people as it were.

The back wall is tiled in silvery, semi-reflective squares with a glassy sheen in which Roadbeater can almost but not quite see his own face; along the wall are lined transparent domes full of standing bottles, occasionally unlocked to remove one or another kind of expensive liquor. The bar itself is one long slab of thick metal with intricate designs carved into it, topped by polished black stone flecked with grey, and carries none of the beer stains or stickiness that less expensive places might.

He orders a shot of Andalerian wine and waits, occasionally sipping at it as might any detective in a noir B-list video (although City Nowhere is not the nicest place by any measure, so perhaps a noir-ish manner is justified). In a few minutes, the member of the elite who secured Roadbeater’s entry into the Meaningless Bar comes out of the darkness, quite soundlessly, and taps him on the shoulder. He almost wets himself.

The Meaningless Bar is a fairly classy place - even when seedy it’s class - and the people tend to live up to it. This girl is no exception, although she tends more towards the ‘run away from, very fast’ end of the scale. Her name is Tira, and she is his weapons dealer and strategist. She has honed her own particular style to its sharpest, and is probably the only person who can walk around Nowhere in a tank top, a miniskirt, net stockings and thigh-length boots (all black) without getting a second look from a casual criminal.

It is wise not to write her off as ugly, though - very wise. In fact, Tira is prettier than the standard, despite - or perhaps aided by - her powder-white skin and jet-black irises, both artificially induced. She also happens to have baccalaureates in law and psychology, an IQ of at least 140, and fleur-de-lys miniature swords strapped with leather to her forearms. Were she to take any active interest in the field of dumb-grunt mercenary work, she might likely pull off every op she was given better, tactically and strategically, than Roadbeater would ever be able, and certainly with more style, more dash. The only advantage the young man has, and it’s a debatable advantage, is that he’s slightly larger.

It’s a pity she doesn’t take such an interest, then. All she does is sell weapons big enough to destroy cities. Fairly mundane and unexciting, one might think.

“Timmy!� she shrills at him. Normally she actually has a nice voice, very melodious and soothing - in keeping with the rest of her annoyingly perfect personality - but she puts on a sort of shriek to annoy him. The word ‘Timmy’ is also something of a berserk button for Roadbeater, but from Tira it’s okay. From Tira, everything is okay. Except the shriek; he winces, but nobody else looks around. Tira makes herself at home on the bar stool next to him and quiets her tone: “Ave, Timmy McAllister. How goes it?�

Roadbeater twitches. “Not Timmy, please.� Tira is ten years his senior, so she can do anything she likes, but he can at least protest. Too much? No matter - the young black-haired gunrunner is very hard to offend or even to put off when she’s on a roll. It’s not going to matter either way. She rolls on.

“What brings you to the bar right now?� She taps the metal-lined granite of the bar top for emphasis. “Here into the headquarters of the league of extraordinary gentlemen?� Over in the corner, a dataview burbles away, floating just a little bit off the ceiling and playing a news feed: everything from big Royal Navy movements to Rosie Wenderson's latest romance novel. Neither Tira nor Roadbeater pay it any heed.

Roadbeater pulls a few sheets of paplastic out of his pocket, embossed with the company crest of the outfit that sent him the job offer, and hands them to Tira. She pores over them, flicking through the sheets with the deadly sharp fingernails that are her trademark, picking out words with a professional eye, and comes to the same assessment that Roadbeater did: practically too good to be true, but still theoretically possible. She has reservations, but there’s not a good reason she can tell him not to go. Silly hunches are hardly strategic or tactical evidence.

A further detailed assessment serves to store the details in her mind.

The target is Delacruz and Quong store 338, selling kilolitre water supply blocks to the eager citizens of City Nowhere’s northern district, which isn’t all that different from any of the other districts apart from being slightly north of the central district. 338 is run by a minor scion of the Delacruz trading family, and is about three kilometres outside Nowhere - the place is surrounded by sand dunes, so that’s out of direct sight line.

The people offering the job appear to be a small consortium - or at least they’re billing themselves as a consortium. A little bit of research using a mapping service brings a note that they appear to be working in the city’s meagre red light district, specifically on SoHoRo; City Nowhere may be the only place where the space budget is tight enough that the majority of murderers live less than a street away from the majority of their targets, and SoHoRo is the point where the two cultures meet. For obvious reasons, it’s a fairly good place to recruit murderers, but Tira is thinking that Timmy does not live in the murder zone and is not a murderer, and she must wonder why they are trying to recruit him.

The rate on the job is fairly good, though. The number of reds being offered - Commonwealth argentars, the sole legal tender on Watsuo (although Earth pounds are sometimes used as a bridge currency) - is two hundred thousand argentars, plus ninety-five greens - vertars, or hundredths of an argentar - so: a200,000.95. This is the kind of money Tira takes in every week from her hundreds of buyers, but to mercs like her on-and-off boyfriend, if she remembers correctly, it’s about nine months’ drudge work. She can see why it looks good to him.

It brings a question, though: Why are the consortium - Flunderlevin is their name, the pad says - offering two hundred thousand reds for a water heist? Certainly it’s not out of the price range, but it’s got to be in the top ten percent. This would not normally raise a red flag, but if it’s a top-ten-percent operation, why are they hiring Tim? Lots of people know he’s plusgood, but those lots of people aren’t the right lots of people because Timmy ‘Roadbeater’ McAllister is pretty horrible at marketing and never thinks to ask for references. His name is not exactly a household one in industrial warfare - someone would have had to have recommended him; it could have been one of his previous employers if it weren’t for the fact that companies tend to shy away hard from revealing that they’re running active warfare ops.

Likelihood is that one of Timmy’s fellow mercs, or contacts like Tira, recommended him for the job. Not too implausible, but in the seven months Tira has been helping Timmy McAllister out with his private defence and security stuff she’s never known him to go on a team op, with the sole exception of this one, and she doesn’t think he buys from or gets advice from anyone else - so who the hell recommended him?

Still, it’s not like she doesn’t see problems like this all the time. Although Roadbeater doesn’t take advice or weapons from anyone except Tira, the converse sure-as doesn’t apply - she sells bulk weapons, from dart guns to low-yield nukes, to hundreds of individuals and outfits per week, not strictly legally, and interacts personally with maybe ten customers, tops, including Roadbeater. She’s let people go into riskier operations than this many a time and they’ve come out okay, so there’s no reason to hold Roadbeater back.

Basically, there’s simply not enough bad stuff here to counterbalance the potential profit. If Roadbeater gets more money then Tira gets more money, and hell, thinking from the outside, Roadbeater deserves some more money for himself. Nope, she’s going to give this job the greenlight, and if it goes bad, well, it had to happen sometime; being a hydro-raid it can’t go bad past maybe getting a slug through the thigh from a security-bot, and that can be fixed in less than a day.

Really, considering the profit-loss balance, it’s an excellent op. The kind of excellent op that only comes along once in a lifetime. She says as much, and Roadbeater nods sagely; she doesn’t feel he’s comprehended the full scale of just how unique this chance is, and restates: “Tim, this is your way into the big leagues. It’s not a big op or an important op, but the fact that someone is going to pay you two hundred thou is sure as hell proof of your talent, and you have got talent, don’t you forget.�

He blushes deep red, the colour of his hair, because he knows Tira does not give compliments lightly - hundreds of customers, countless contacts in the industry, at least ten direct employers, altogether he assumes they must invariably make one somewhat jaded. Coming from Tira, she being, well, Tira, that’s very high praise; he will be remembering it. His self-esteem has just boosted eighty points.

“Do you want new equipment for this job?� she asks chirpily, bringing him out of his momentary haze of warm fuzzies. She is in her element as a self-taught shopper - ‘shopper’ is the term the Royal Administration applies to gunrunners who haven’t provably done anything illegal and thus force Her Majesty’s boys in black to look the other way.

Roadbeater considers for a moment. He has a fairly new laser rifle back at home, rubber and plastic and steel like every other trade tool he owns, and it’s stocked up with batteries; calculating for the impression of on-site security he got from the skimming he gave the document before coming here, the laser should do quite well. “I have good equipment, believe me …�

“You want new equipment for this job,� she says, accompanying the simple phrase with a soft laugh that seems to echo but not carry. “People who have ‘good equipment’ rarely actually have good equipment, and that’s what you need. Laser rifle, I’m guessing?� He nods mutely, not being surprised, and she carries on: “Laser rifle is not what you want. See those little numbers?� She points to a place on the paplast sheet, and he doesn’t even look, just nods. “They’re bot model numbers, and those there,� she points somewhere else, “are human force numbers. You want a couple of slug guns and a stun rifle.�

She enters an alphanumeric into a field with the pointed tip of the stylus, fingers and input rod dancing faster than Roadbeater can track, and a website in muted primary colours materialises on the small touchscreen. He vaguely recognises it - one of the many netbazaars selling exclusively to the private defence and security, or PDS, crowd, and one of Tira’s daily haunts. He also knows enough about it to recognise the scrolling numbers on the main page and connect them to the odd little frown of surprise on Tira’s face.

Someone has just flooded the market with cheap weaponry - by ‘just’, and Roadbeater checks again, ‘three minutes ago’ is meant, and by ‘cheap’ is meant something like fifty reds for a high-end submachine gun. It’s obviously a trap of sorts, probably by the boys and girls in black, but the deal is simply too good to pass up - and with the right smarts even the biggest, slowest mouse can walk off with the cheese from the trap.

Tira opens another page in another browser tab. It is a bland white affair with a single alphanumeric field on it and a silver button saying simply ‘Go’. Tira puts in a string of numbers and decimal points, then hits ‘Go’, and another page that looks exactly the same comes up. She repeats the process several times. “Going through seven proxies,� she mutters from the corner of her mouth. “Standard operating procedure.� It probably is, but Roadbeater doesn’t know much about that.

Finally, the netbazaar page comes up again, edged in yellow-and-black danger stripes and with many expandable tabs edging it. Tira flicks through them, checking graphs and numbers and summary blocks and obviously divining something from them that Roadbeater doesn’t, then banishes them all to the edge of the screen again. Something goes green and she starts inputting numbers. It’s all very complex and indecipherable but eventually they end up on a purchase screen with tables of prices and model numbers stretching every which way.

Tira places an order for two of this, one of that, eight of something else and three of the other thing, hunching over the little computer in a manner that suggests she’s trying to hide what she’s doing from Roadbeater. He assumes it’s some sort of habit, and rubbernecks anyway, but doesn’t see much and only knows it’s done when she says it is.

“Express delivery,� she says with a glint in her eye. “’Fleit-truck straight to here. You can pick it up tomorrow … Care to stay for a drink?� She waves a fifty-red note which appears to have come out of nowhere, and eventually Roadbeater finds himself cracking the seal on a bottle of beer. To his credit, he insists it be light beer, and he only has one - as so many others have failed to do throughout history.


* * *

Roadbeater has a tradition. It is a fairly sedate tradition - where others might see fit to attend a gym, or to do a last bracket of target practice, Roadbeater simply visits his mother. She is not old, nor is she disabled - she is a highly successful financienne working for New Berlin, and she is perhaps forty years old. From her, Roadbeater inherited his spiky red hair.

Realistically, there is no reason she needs him to visit, but she has said that she likes him to. After all, in mercenary work, there’s no knowing when you’re going to come back home in a body bag, and so, as she’s somewhat preachily (one of her few faults) said, it’s probably a good idea to check in every so often and make sure everything is okay for both parties. Roadbeater doesn’t really see the sense in such a ritual, but he obediently shows up every time he’s about to go out on a job anyway.

So this is where he is going, having just finished his allotted schooner - Cold Ones are what the Bar does best. He is going to take the long circuitous route there to kill some time, and he is going to take that long circuitous route safely ensconced in a syk.

Syks are odd little things: they are hard eggs, rolling around on tripod metal spheres stabilised, and occasionally e-braked, by rubber squeeze-rings. For propulsion, they adopt clamped-down gravitics, fields of virtual mass that pull the reinforced hull and contents of the syk every which way. Basically, they are groundcars rebuilt around the rule of cool.

Inside, there is typically a single seat with a steering column on a flexible neck to the right. The yoke has a basic throttle switch on it; as a whole the yoke controls the operation of the gravitics, and the gravitics affect the operation of the roll-spheres and brakes, and in the end everyone is happy.

Syks are the latest replacement for groundcars. Last in the line of neo-transit was the fairly short-lived kofleitku - a corruption of ‘combat/flight-capable unit’, or CoFlightCU, reflecting the personal aircar’s origin as the sole preserve of the Terran military; the fad died out when people decided they didn’t like entrusting their lives to what was basically a hurtling computer-controlled thin shell of metal liable to drop out of the sky, but it appears they failed to notice that they’re still entrusting their lives to a hurtling computer-controlled thin shell of metal.

Roadbeater noticed it way back. He likes it. Entrusting his life to a hurtling computer-controlled thin shell of metal gives him an adrenaline rush, especially if it hurtles really fast - which syks do, because the decent ones can go so fast they can theoretically fly if you hack out their safeguards. Roadbeater doesn’t go quite that far, but his syk is pretty decent, which is one of the reasons he still lives in a dumpster - forging a shell and sticking gravitics and an electronic web in it takes a lot of money, as simple as it may sound, and buying it after that’s done costs even more.

For some reason, he is reflecting on how much it cost him to buy his syk as he cracks the sunshield and, with some difficulty, wriggles into the one-seat womb of the vehicle. He is reflecting on it as he pulls the sunshield closed, ensconces himself in darkness broken only by the computer system’s standby pinlights, and goes to sit down. He is abruptly forced to stop reflecting on it as he nearly fires off his pistol by sitting on it, because it is lying on the seat, and he continues not reflecting on it as he shuffles the pistol awkwardly into the little gap between the seat and the wall.

A not-a-little-harrowed Roadbeater makes sure there are no further obstructions, squinting in the dim-end-of-dim light, and takes a hold of the yoke; his body heat registers, everything lights up and the hi-fi synth plays a major chord. A moment later, the sunshield lights up with a blue-tinted camera view of the outside world, looking in the same direction Roadbeater is, and maps and control-meters fly in and superimpose themselves over.

A little pad rises out of the floor on a stalk, glowing blue and inviting near his knee. It says: where do you want to go today? Roadbeater taps in an address inexpertly, having still not gotten the hang of the tiny keys on the touch screen, and suddenly there is a needle-thin red pulsating line on the bluish road outside. The pad goes away again and Roadbeater is left alone with the yoke, the Meaningless Bar boulevard, and more power under his backside than he can reasonably handle.

Considering that that power is now in the hands of a seventeen-year-old with an unhealthy fascionation for guns, it’s somewhat surprising what he does with that power: he places his thumb on the throttle switch, throttles forward a quarter-centimetre, and smoothly moves away from the Bar on low gain, coming to a sedate sixty kilometres per hour within a few seconds and staying there. The numbers on the sunshield-screen scroll and everything is as if stationary again, with not even a hint of movement except from the camera feed.

Three hundred metres down the monobond Meaningless road, he falls into a wide left and turns off the big multi-carriageway onto a cobbled avenue, slaloming around in his own deliberately imprecise driving style, banking up the skate-ramped bottom of a neo-Victorian building, all tan bricks and mullioned windows. Some way ahead, the road becomes a pair of gravity rails, thin unsupported metal arches over the gigantic ravine that separates Nowhere’s north from its south, but that is not where Roadbeater is going - instead he navigates himself further into this district of old-style five-star apartment blocks, rattling along on the smooth-rough road without feeling the rattle.

Finally he comes out onto a long stretch of open road, raised slightly from the pressed sand of this world, lined by white bricks and made of big cream and black pavers. It curves up the wall of the half-bowl that surrounds southern Nowhere, and so is obviously exclusively a syk route - there is a black monobond road for conventional groundcars and pedestrians following it on a flat shoulder a little below; night is falling, though, and so the monobond road is slightly hard to see while the syk one is lit up with little high-shine dots of blue.

Roadbeater grins, all shiny white teeth in the shadowed, occasionally bluish interior of his syk, and opens up the throttle to full. He goes to three hundred and fifty kilometres per hour in a matter of seconds and maintains it, flying up the rocky road like a man riding on a comet, vrooooming silently on the wall. To the casual outside observer it’s fairly obvious he’s something of an adrenaline junkie.

The road leads into a dome. The dome is offset from City Nowhere by about six kilometres but is still designated part of District Twelve - the neo-Victorian one - by virtue of its contents. Inside it is lit by cool goldenrod and white spots and is officially the only part of Watsuo that supports any sort of plant life, owing to the amount of money its residents have spent on strange seeds and decided they can spend on massive amounts of water. Of course, most of them are filthy bloody rich on the order that Roadbeater hopes to one day be, so that’s understandable.

He has a visa to get into this particular sub-district. It’s in a little card wallet under the yoke, and he leans over to pull it out when he comes up to the gates. The heavily armed thing asking for it looks like a flamingo - well, a flamingo with a rectangular head, red laser eyes, and a cannon sticking out of its torso. All very innocuous and unthreatening; it also has a polite British accent, if that helps, but he still doesn’t feel any better about opening up the sunshield and sticking his arm a couple of centimetres away from the cannon to feed the visa in.

The gigantic slab of metal that blocks off the dome sub-dist from everywhere else slides to one side, slowly, ponderously, on huge wheels, and Roadbeater watches the text ‘Crimson Permanent Assurance’ slide past his forward camera view. He throttles forward again, sliding into the outer edges of the dome’s residential area, and suddenly he’s in what could reasonably be called Watsuo’s little paradise.

He is driving - the autopilot is engaged, so rather he is being driven down an otherwise empty cobblestoned road. Given that he’s still technically in the Eden district, this is fairly reasonable, but the cobblestones are an order of magnitude more class than anything back in dreary City Nowhere. Palms nod over Roadbeater’s syk, which remains for most of its journey unaccompanied by anything but the occasional bird of paradise.

The dome is maybe ten kilometres across with a fairly low arch, so Roadbeater still has five kilometres to go into the main city are. He cracks the sunshield, sticks his foot out onto the sill of the forward-facing single doorway, and leans out to get a drink from the courtesy bot which is easily keeping pace with him on its caterpillar tracks, heedless of the two-hundred-kilometre-per-hour speed the syk is going at.

Gradually the system throttles back the syk’s breakneck hurtle as the road goes from artistic rocks to smart white slightly rubbery plastic; dual blue lines are writ large with machine precision down its centre. Edging it are prismic buildings, one or two storeys, some with recesses: these are the Dome’s version of semi-detached houses. As something of an independent city of its own, it also has a rudimentary central business district, all ziggurats and stepped cones with fine etchings of light. This is where the successful people live and work, and, like the Bar which is this culture’s only contact with the outside world, entry is by invitation only.

Roadbeater’s mother lives on 4D Avenue; to add a touch of impenetrable coolness the streets within the Dome are numbered in hexadecimal. 4D is a very classy street among very classy streets, all in white with intricate designs on the house walls, done in red and gold and black and blue and every other colour that might go well with white, all representing the trade of the occupant.

Mrs McAllister, or Miss Fura as she prefers to be known since her divorce, lives at 23 - or, in decimal, 35 - 4D Av. Her trade symbol is a gleaming blue diamond, wreathed with emeralds embedded in the wall. Anywhere else, the elaborate and expensive decoration would have been stolen by now, but here in the Dome people are already rich enough to not need to steal jewellery. This is probably the only place on Watsuo where this happens.

Roadbeater centres his throttle and locks off his yoke at 23 4D, gliding to a stop in front of the Fura residence. Syks that would cost him his life savings glide past to one side, with transparent canopies through which he can almost hear the disdainful sniffs of the drivers - well, bugger them, he’s a legitimate visitor and he can do what he will. Boldly he steps from his syk, slamming the sunshield closed with a decisive wham, walks up to the door of the Fura house and rings the bell.

His mother answers the door with a synthetic smile on her face, which warms up a little when she sees it’s Roadbeater. She’s never approved much of his dark work, but they still get along fairly well, agreeing to disagree as it were - not so with Grigor McAllister, Roadbeater’s father, a blood-of-Terra Englishman with an appreciation of alcohol and a penchant for brickwork; Miss Fura and Roadbeater both stopped talking to him a few years back.

“Come in,� she says quietly, somewhat furtively, in a voice tinged with an accent straight out of London. There’s nothing like having your mercenary son who lives in a cleaned-out dumpster turning up on your upper-class doorstep in your upper-class neighbourhood, and Roadbeater enjoys the hot lights far above for a moment more before stepping into the glacial air-conditioning of his mother’s home, watching her spiky red hair flutter in what seems a sort of coincidental indignation.

Miss Fura’s place, despite the flashy jewelled decoration, is fairly practical and functional inside. The walls are desert tan, the entry hallway floor is polished black tile, and the only concession to decoration is the pair of blue lace agate glyphs hanging off the wall at the first T-intersection - the Chinese for ‘freedom’. It wasn’t here last time. Roadbeater thinks that given the amount of money Miss Fura is paid for her work (read that as you will) she wouldn’t know all that much about freedom, but keeps that to himself.

At the t-intersection, the black tile floor becomes ratty cream-coloured carpeting, rather than the expensive thick pile one might expect to find in a district such as this. From long experience Roadbeater knows his mother has never had time for unnecessary luxuries, and it is fairly public knowledge that she once professed she could live on chicken ramen, prawn pizza and Coke. Of course, prawn pizza around here is a hundred and twenty reds a pop, but it’s terrific.

To the left, a synthwood door with ‘dining’ engraved into it in big serif letters leads, not surprisingly, to the big empty dining room and the 2300s kitchenette which is normally abused for the purpose of cooking curry. To the right, a somewhat more flashy door, stained red and varnished, with engraved calligraphy on it filled with chalcedony, says ‘stuff’ and leads to Miss Fura’s study, bedroom and facilities. It is to the right that the two turn and through the Red Door - capital letters mandatory - that the pair pass.

Miss Fura walks with a sense of purpose. She always seems to be able to read Roadbeater’s mind, because she asks casually along the way what he expects to do with the money from the new job. He simply fills the ensuing silence with an ‘umm,’ and doesn’t respond further, because to be quite honest he has no idea. Maybe he’ll go put a deposit on a house and move out of his dumpster - but no, he likes his dumpster. It’s very unique, very him, and it’s his trademark. He might buy a new syk. Who knows?

Miss Fura walks into the study. It is small and cramped and white and has the obligatory trade symbol on one wall - a flat-gem version of the wreathed diamond outside. Roadbeater looks at it a moment, then looks around again, because this room seems to change every time he shows up. Right now, Miss Fura seems to favour a blank techno-industrial sort of décor - for squarish filing cabinets, big white pods with green and red light rings are substituted; the standard professional desktop terminal is replaced by a hinged screen in the desk, which Roadbeater supposes could be another interpretation of ‘desktop terminal’.

Miss Fura plays her fingers across the terminal’s backing, kicking up blue holographic wakes of highly detailed water, and as the screen obediently rises up Roadbeater thinks, not for the first time, that it is things like detail level, rather than flashiness, that mark out the amateur from the professional. The fact that the Universal No on the lid of his dumpster back home a few kloms away is visibly pixelated does not encourage him.

The water dies down as the terminal sorts out its affairs and gets itself in order. It chimes out its particular boot-up sound, the first four lines of an old song, which means it’s probably a Terrell - top of the market, best processors and interfacing around. Roadbeater isn’t surprised his mother has one, although it seems new. The screen is covered with a spreadsheet which Miss Fura dismisses with a wave of the hand which is smooth from long practice.

A voice with a classy British accent sounds out, and Roadbeater reflexively looks around before realising it’s coming from the terminal. The words are as upper-class as the voice: Good morning, Alys. Where do you want to go today? Miss Fura doesn’t deign to reply, simply pressing keys delicately, seemingly handling them with great care.

She does this for a couple of minutes. Roadbeater prowls around the confines of the small room restlessly, butting up against the back wall of the study and walking back to the metal-and-polyester chair he was sitting on, and on the third such circuit he notices something odd.

There is a slimline metal tank-top hidden in the shadows, bearing the unmistakable design hallmarks of anti-ballistic armour. It has the dark green tint of malloy, which, among other things, can change shape as the user does, and also happens to be very expensive - Alys Fura doesn’t buy much, but when she does, she buys top end. Even her ramen might as well be gold-plated for what it costs.

“Worried?� he says quietly. Miss Fura turns, looks at him, sees what he’s looking at, grunts, turns back to her computer. This is as clear as she can be that she doesn’t want to talk about the malarmour vest, which is, of course, as clear an invitation as there can be for Roadbeater to press on: “Well? You’ve bought armour, Mum. That implies loud and clear you’re worried about something. What is it?�

“Shut up, Timothy,� she says. There is a sharpness and a shortness in her tone. “It’s none of your business what I calculate for. Keep asking and I might be disinclined to do whatever it is you’re going to ask me to do.� It’s an empty threat and both of them know it, so Roadbeater keeps talking.

“Come on, Mum. I’m a security contractor,� he says, ignoring her mutter of ‘security’s too good a word’. “If you think someone’s going to shoot you, I deserve to know why.� He keeps nagging, trying different lines of attack, for the better part of a minute, and finally she snaps, whirls around on her chair, stares up at him. She has the usual white skin, unmarked by blemishes or wrinkles or anything else of the passage of time but gone a sort of sick greenish from fright; her deep green eyes are wide with some unknown horror - or rather a known horror: the horror of explosive change and the anticipation of its consequences.

“Tim, look … There have been shootings in the Dome.� This is frankly rather startling news even to the unusually contained Roadbeater, who can’t help but let a little of his surprise slip onto his face. Seeing it, Miss Fura continues, on a roll, hissing her s’s as she sometimes does, involuntarily, at times like this: “Three shootings. In the last week. The Nowhere police are frantic, they really are, they can’t work out any motive or anything, you know? They have no idea, they’re writing it off to insanity,� her speech has lost its punctuation, all rolling into one as she keeps chattering at top speed, “and if there’s a gun-wielding psychopath in the Dome I sure as hell am not going out without protection.�

Roadbeater mulls over the information in his head, dissecting it, pulling it apart, sticking it back together like an inexpert wrench monkey who’s been forced to resort to superglue. It certainly explains the unusual fakeness of her first smile at the door - Alys Fura, as a rule, tends to be warm and welcoming to everyone, and a patently, obviously fake, strained smile is out of keeping with her manner.

It just doesn’t make sense, though. How would an omnicidal maniac get into the Dome? The psychological tests are so stringent that even the certifiably sane Roadbeater had to clean up his manner - his manner, the way he walks and talks - to get his visa. They’d pick up a maniac from a klom away, or a kil if you prefer to abbreviate it that way, and sane people just don’t go around gunning people down

Speaking of which; he turns around and Alys already has the case files on screen. His reason for presence has been completely superseded by the need for her to find someone to be reassured by: he feels slightly put out but slightly flattered at the same time. The files kind of put down his mood a bit, though; Nowhere Police have logged two homicides apparently by rapid-succession ballistic force and fragmentation - machine-gunning, basically - and one from four rounds to the chest with a forty-five-calibre pistol.

All of the victims are white females with green eyes and shoulder-length to chest-length red hair. It’s easy to see why Caucasian green-eyed red-haired Alys is … slightly more cautious than usual; Roadbeater doesn’t like the look of it either, but a little bit of his mind can’t help but query why an apparently aimless maniac is targeting a single specific genotype.

He goes to peer over his mother’s shoulder, but it’s too late - she’s pulled herself together and closed the files. She briskly waves him back to his seat in a manner that brooks no argument and suddenly her mind is closed to him again, just her mouth asking what he was wanting. This is the first time she has ever needed to ask him what he was here for instead of mysteriously divining it from his manner, which says a lot.

He lays it down in a few words, basically saying that he needs information on the Flunderlevin consortium. This could be the key to unraveling the fairly minor mystery of why a high-flying high-paying consortium hired a man who, as far as the market is concerned, doesn’t exist.

* * *

First stop is netsearch. After a couple of quaestors through the local banks, coming back with nothing attached, Miss Fura puts through an information request to the Royal Databanks in Yi Lin City, some light years away. She informs Roadbeater that the request will take about a second to get there, seven minutes to be processed, and a second to get back, which is about enough time to have a fairly decent coffee.

Just as they sit down again, the new-mail chime sounds. A royal archivist named McClowin has picked up a match and has attached the files - and as it comes back in the pair groan, because the article that royal archivist McClowin has attached is a copy of a file from the local companies database. They’ve wasted something like seventeen minutes when they could have just looked through the companies database; still …

“Flunderlevin PLC,� Roadbeater reads. “Trade: site privacy, security and defence,� reasonable enough, until he comes to the next line of the spiel, “subtle or obvious as the customer wishes.� ‘Subtle’ and ‘obvious’, if Roadbeater remembers correctly, are Royal Army codewords for small troop deployments and orbital bombardment, respectively. “Flunderlevin does not rely on a static employee base, instead hand-picking high-quality subcontractors from the market to tailor the ideal security solutions for our valued customers.�

At this, Roadbeater has to laugh. It would take a very long stretch for him to call himself a ‘high-quality subcontractor’, and he finds the phrase something of an item of honour - at the same time he can’t help but think that Flunderlevin’s spiel on the Royal Watsuo Registry is aimed just as much at the high-quality subcontractors as it is at the high-paying consumers.

A little further reading tells him - maybe not Miss Fura, but definitely him - that not all of Flunderlevin’s action is strictly instigated by its customers. Some orders are apparently from the executive - to expedite the smooth operation of the consumer-provider partnership that Flunderlevin holds so dear, the article says. Read between the lines, and that little paragraph means that Flunderlevin is not so much a private police business as a tiny little attack squad. It is a highly secretive, probably highly selective tiny little attack squad, and why it wants Roadbeater is beyond his comprehension.

The little infobox at the bottom of the article has a short note of regret in it: Flunderlevin is currently not able to take on new contracts and apologises for the inconvenience. Miss Fura is the one to comment on this, but Roadbeater has already grasped the implication: Flunderlevin does not take contracts at all. What this little private security consortium operating out of SoHoRo does is focused on its own interests.

The rest of the visit is purely filler, albeit with food attached. When Roadbeater leaves, hopping back onto his syk and expeditiously departing, and when he rolls out the gates into the cool dark new night, he is doing so with more questions than answers weighing heavy on his shoulders.

However, there is an easy, if potentially risky, way of finding out exactly what is going on, and that is to march up to Flunderlevin’s doors and demand to know why the hell they’ve taken it into their big warm teddy-bear hearts to give him a ridiculously, ludicrously big contract and tell him to run rampant. The risk, of course, is that of sudden death at the hands of whoever controls Flunderlevin’s assets in the area of sudden death, but Roadbeater is resolved to go and find out what is happening anyway.

---

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