Slab City Blues: The Collected Stories Read online

  Table of Contents

  Slab City Blues

  A Song for Madame Choi

  A Hymn to Gods Long Dead

  The Ballad of Bad Jack

  An Aria for Ragnarok

  Slab City Blues

  I was in the forest with Consuela when Father Bob patched the call through. We were having The Discussion and she was at the “just throw the switch you selfish sonuvabitch!” stage.

  “Inspector McLeod?” Father Bob, terrific timing. He’s a great guy. I’d die for him.

  “Yes Father?”

  Consuela crossed her arms impatiently. “Alex.”

  “Superintendent Mordecai for you.”

  “Alex!”

  “Patch her through.”

  Consuela turned away and stomped off through the undergrowth, losing herself in the trees.

  “Alex?” Sherry Mordecai, nervous, guilty. She hated calling me here.

  “Sherry. What’s kicking?”

  “Got a flatline for you. Yang Thirteen, Quad Delta.”

  Yang Thirteen - Spliceville. “What species?”

  “Human.”

  “Unusual.”

  “Very. Get here.” Sound-off click leaving staring after my wife, my hawk-faced Spanish wife who hated me for making her live in paradise.

  “Jack me out please, Father.”

  *

  Father Bob pulled the leads from my temples and I straightened up with backache adding to post-immersion nausea and the added disorientation of the old face/new face swap-over. When I jacked in for the first time the war was six months over and I’d actually forgotten I had a new face. I’d left the old one behind when a spent-uranium tipped shell tore through our shuttle during the Langley Raid dust-off. Several centuries of surgery later and a stranger stared back at me from the mirror with a French woman’s idea of what Englishmen are supposed to look like. If they’d known I was the son of a Russian mother and Scottish father I’m sure I’d have come out as a cross between Rudolph Nureyev and Sean Connery. My new face was beautiful, no lines or scars. I hated it. Apparently, so did Consuela.

  “Who the hell are you?” she said that first time. I jacked out and Father Bob left the room so I could cry in peace. Next time I brought a disk with an old 2D so he could render a convincing mask.

  Consuela lay on the next couch and the sight of her still chilled me - implanted leads, waxy skin, a lump of machinery grafted onto her chest, making her breath, making the blood pump through her veins, making her live. But it couldn’t heal her, couldn’t bring her back to me.

  The private immersion suite of Yang Twelve’s Neo-Catholic Chapel was supposedly reserved for visiting Cardinals who wanted to commune with the Saviour Himself in moments of spiritual crisis. When Father Bob arrived he reported the neural enhancers defective, knowing no repair crew would venture into this neighbourhood, and converted it into much needed office space. When he heard Medicalis (“Because We Care”) were going to cancel Consuela’s insurance, he called and offered free, indefinite usage. Did I tell you he was a great guy?

  “She asked again, Father,” I told him.

  He didn’t look up, busy thumbing through Revelations for a spark to inspire the morning sermon. “Yes, Inspector. But did you hear her?”

  “You think I should do it.”

  “I think it’s between the two of you.”

  “Sometimes I think she hates me.”

  “She loves you, you silly fuck.” He picked up my gun from the desk with a thumb and forefinger, holding it out at arm’s length. “Go to work.”

  *

  Blood seeped out from under the edges of the sheet covering the body. Some days are worse than others on the Slab. I had a feeling today would be a gem.

  Fabio Ricci grimaced as he lifted the sheet to cast his pathologist’s eye over the corpse. “Sheesh! Someone really wanted to see this Jed’s backbone.”

  The morning rain was washing the blood away. Slab rain, streaming in ugly miniature waterfalls from the girders and ceilings. I suppose they didn’t care about the condensation factor when they designed this place, given that the current population exceeds the original estimate by six hundred percent. All the thousands of unfortunates crammed in here, sweating, breathing, fighting, screwing. Steam rises and having risen must fall. Slab rain falls hard, pooling to reflect dim streetlights like a thousand unpolished mirrors. I hate the rain.

  “Dead,” said Sherry Mordecai.

  “Flatlined,” I agreed.

  “Chilled,” Ricci, not wanting to be left out. He lowered the sheet. Sherry and I exchanged expectant glances.

  “Nasty,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Nasty but quick. Couldn’t’ve taken more than a couple of seconds. Doesn’t fit any known MO either. Slashers like to take their time and keep it private. And they usually slice off a chunk or two as a souvenir. Unusual weapon too, look more like claw marks.”

  Sherry turned to Ricci. “ID?”

  He was already running the scans through his smart. “No match. Either he’s got no priors or he’s had some expensive remodelling work. Might get a hit when I scan his neural cortex. The one thing you can’t change.”

  I crouched down and lifted the sheet. Oriental male, late twenties. I checked the arms and what was left of the chest. “He’s a Shuriken, Black Lotus.”

  “You’re kidding.” Sherry bent down to take a look. I pointed out the two dragon tattoos on the inside of each forearm, one black one white. With a bit of imagination the design on what was left of his chest became a lotus. He’d served a hard apprenticeship - over twenty kills to get his dragons and a high profile hit for the lotus.

  “Hey.” Ricci held something up for inspection, a thimble sized plastic vial with a needle protruding from one end. “Had this under a false skin patch on his sole.” He handed it to Sherry.

  “Ampoule,” she said. “Bliss maybe.”

  “Nah.” I took it from her, turning it over, no markings. “Shuriken like to stay pure, use that zen mind-control crap to shut out the pain if they get hit. Could be poison but that’s not their style.” I handed it to Ricci. “Let me know when you get a make on the contents.”

  This was the first murder of the day. The daily average for the 28th Precinct was six. One hundred and eighty a month, two thousand one hundred and ninety a year. Ninety five percent are cleared up in the first five hours. The last five percent are my job. I suppose it’s flattering.

  I scanned the crowd. We were in the market district. A satyr in a raincoat haggled with the dire wolf who ran the fruit stall. An orang-utan with a reverse baseball cap made bets on the Tyger Joe vs Ortega the Puma title fight, speaking into a smart whilst peeling a banana with his feet. A pack of wolf cubs roller-bladed past in a high-speed babble of Slab-slang and juvenile howls. Spliceville. At least it’s never boring.

  I wandered over to a jewellery stall where a young vampire couple sold under-priced platinum trinkets.

  “How’s business, Jed?” I asked the guy vampire.

  “It’s Antonius.” Pale and sullen. He didn’t look at me. No-one liked being seen talking to the Demons.

  “What about you, Jedette?” I asked the girl.

  “Calpurnia.”

  Latin names. A high-status vampire thing. These were two genuine lace wearing, turn to cigarette ash if you expose them to ultraviolet, blood drinkers. Oh the wonders of science.

  “See him?” I jerked my head at the Black Lotus under the sheet. ““How long’s he been there?”

  “Couldn’t tell you,” Antonius said.

  “He here when you set up this morning?”

  “Didn’t notice.”

  “Say Jed, where’d you get
the metal for these things?” I fingered a dolphin shaped brooch hanging from the stall. Consuela had always preferred platinum to gold. Our wedding rings were platinum.

  “We buy it wholesale,” Calpurnia said. “Jed from the lower Yin resyk bins comes round with a sackful every few weeks.”

  “That’s good. Nice and legal. Not like if you bought it from those kids who crawl around the hull scraping precious metals from the cables.”

  “No. We don’t do that.”

  “It’s easy enough to check. My fat Italian friend over there, he’s a genius with this stuff. It’s all in the purity levels apparently. The recycled stuff is like, total crap.”

  “He was here when we set up,” Antonius said.

  “When was that?”

  “Eight or eight thirty.”

  “That’s three hours ago. Didn’t you feel even a small urge to call us?”

  “Switch on, Demon man. Flatlines are a banquet round here. We call it in we’ll be lying next to him two seconds later.”

  “You two didn’t take the opportunity to have a little snack did you?”

  They bared their fangs in a unison smile. “Dead meat’s no good to us.”

  “So I heard. How much for this?” I held up the dolphin brooch.

  Calpurnia sighed. “It’s on the house.”

  I took out some European green and handed over a couple of hundred. “Buy yourselves some o-neg on me.”

  “Anything?” Sherry asked as I wandered back. Spliceville heating systems never work properly and the chill made her scars angry red stripes across the paleness of her face. I never asked why she hadn’t had them fixed.

  “Been here three hours at least,” I told her. “The local Jeds picked him clean so forget about finding any of those little knives they carry.”

  Ricci had bought a taco from a nearby stall and spat corn and pepper as he spoke. “No defensive wounds on the arms. This was over before it began. Must be someone special whoever it was, taking down a Black Lotus like that. Could make a killing this side of the Axis, literally.”

  “Veteran?” I wondered.

  Sherry dug her hands into her raincoat. She didn’t like to talk about the war. “Could be. Certainly narrow the list of suspects if it is. Not so many of us left.”

  “I’ll speak to Colonel Riviere, do the tour of the Vic affiliates, see if anyone’s heard about a big contract on offer recently.”

  She nodded. “Let me know what you get. Ricci, we’re done here. Get this thing shifted.”

  *

  I took the Pipe to the Axis. Some overweight Australian tourists, still jaded by the obligatory Yang-side sleaze tour, started fumbling for assorted souvenirs as the gravity lightened up. A Blissful sleeping it off on the floor floated up to the ceiling and banged his head on the fluorescents. He didn’t wake up.

  A Yin-side girl watched the sports on a portable hol. The Multimedia Entertainment Corporation had announced the postponement of Tyger Joe’s latest fight. The smiling MEC PR lady explained how the big guy had sustained an unfortunate injury during training but they expected he’d be back on his feet soon and anyone with tickets for the fight would receive a full refund. Somehow, I doubted the orang with the baseball cap would get his stake money back. Ortega the Puma was explaining how Joe was a gringo faggot running scared from a real fighter when the Yin-side girl noticed I was watching, got scared and moved seats. I have that effect on people, pretty face or not.

  As the Pipe crosses into Axis territory it passes the sky-view window on the roof of Yang One and there’s a ten second panoramic glimpse of the Slab’s interior. Imagine Hawksmoor had designed a shopping mall and got MC Escher to touch up the sketches and you’ll have an idea of what it looks like. In orbit it’s almost majestic. A tall, spinning, gothic rectangle above the blue green jewel of mother Earth. Once it had the inglorious title of Orbiting Housing Enterprises Luxury Apartment Complex No. 5. After the war it became Lorenzo City in honour of our glorious leader, the second city of the Confederation of Autonomous Orbital States. Now, everyone called it the Slab. A hard, cold prison for the poor where rats grow big and sweat falls in rain. Hard to believe we fought a war for places like this. Harder still that my wife died for it.

  *

  I got off at Axis Central, propelling down the tube and flashing my badge at the border checkpoint. They let me in without the mandatory customs search and I floated through into the Axis.

  Inside it’s beautiful, a vast cavern of spherical hab-pods tethered together with miles of cable and crawlway. Micro-grav hydroponics give rise to spider-web extrusions of cherry blossom and maple lit by countless floating glow orbs. The antithesis of the hard-edged simplicity of most Slab architecture, even the higher Yin levels couldn’t hold a candle to it.

  I drifted for a while, enjoying the view. No rain here. The Axis Provincial Council had set aside sufficient funds for moisture extraction gear. I started to move, old trooper’s hands reaching instinctively for the ladders, propelling myself towards the VA pod.

  I drew a few glances from some of the Axis folk, even a couple of salutes. Here I wasn’t a Demon or some Yang-sider you didn’t sit next to on the Pipe. Here I was a Vet, a Langley Vet at that. Here I was a hero.

  Most Axis folk are amputees or paraplegics from the war who got tired of waiting for the COAS Feds to cough for decent prosthetics or nerve reconstruction and decided to annex the Axis. They’d stormed the place, throwing out the leisure loving Yin-siders who gathered there for micro-grav sports, and declared themselves an autonomous province. The City Council, peeved at the loss of prime real estate, ordered the Lorenzo City Police to clear the area at once. Two months later, when the mayor (a rich but stupid Chechen who got flatlined last year when his bribe-fees became excessive) asked Police Chief Arnaud why the squatters were still in residence he received a “Nah, fuck that,” by way of reply. No-one had mentioned it since.

  Colonel Riviere is a living, breathing monument to the nature of war. His arms are two Daewoo Mark II prostheses, his vision a Nikon sonic-sight implant, no good in a vacuum but you can’t have everything, and his legs end below the knee where Medicalis (”We give you peace of mind”) decided they’d squeezed enough publicity out of war heroes and moved on to orphans with a conveniently short prognosis.

  “Whoever it is,” he said, “they’re not here and I don’t know where they are.” He lit a cigarette, which is a disgusting habit at the best of times and truly appalling in micro-grav. I’m sure he only does it to annoy me. We’d never got on. He thought Consuela was too good for me (hey, he was right). I suppose it was understandable. She was his daughter after all.

  “Consuela sends her love,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. If he had said anything it would have been “My daughter is dead”, but the last time he said that I broke one of his arms. It was a heat of the moment thing and I’d forgotten it wasn’t real. The pain receptors worked OK though.

  “Black Lotus got chilled in Spliceville this morning,” I continued. “Killer displayed signs of pronounced combat expertise. Thought you could give us some pointers.”

  He shrugged. “Fewer Shurikens taking up good air the better.”

  I held out my smart. The moment stretched. He sighed smoke and took it, called up Ricci’s shots of the body.

  “No other wounds?”

  “No.”

  “Make on the weapon?”

  “Not yet.”

  He grunted and handed it back. “Saw something similar during the war, but only once. It was in the early days, we had this Splice in our cell. This was when we were trying to target the Downside security chiefs. The Splice, he could rip them apart with his hands… well, claws. Handy because we didn’t have enough weapons to go around. Looked like this Black Lotus of yours when he was done. Not as neat, but similar.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Got scragged in the first UNOIF counter-offensive. Saw it happen. Pity, I liked him.”

  “Wha
t was he?” The smoke made me cough. “What species?”

  My father-in-law smiled as I choked. “El tigrĕ.”

  *

  I did the stool-pigeon tour around midday. Two hours of cajolery, bribery and intimidation later and I wasn’t any nearer to whoever killed the Black Lotus. No-one knew anything, or if they did they weren’t willing to sell, which is so unlikely as to be impossible.

  I was on my way to the office when Madam Choi called me.

  “I have trouble Inspector.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “Can you come?”

  Madam Choi ran a joint on Yang Ten, one of the more Oriental levels. She saved my life during the war and never tired of calling in the favour.

  “You know I’m always there for you, Matsuke.” I sounded off before she could say anything else. Her real name was Matsuke Hiroka but, the denizens of Nippon being about as popular as small pox on the Slab, she had changed it to Choi Soo Ying. Madam Choi was the living definition of pragmatism.

  *

  It was called The Heavenly Garden, at least that’s what the cheap hol above the door said, but everyone called it Madam Choi’s. The name was kind of misleading anyway because it had no garden and no sentient being could call it heavenly.

  Near the door two elderly Chinese were shouting at each other over a Mah Jong board. A Blissful was negotiating desperately with a pusher at a corner table and Marco, the elderly lobotomy case who did the shit work, was mopping blood from the floor. Madam Choi was waiting behind the bar with a double Glenlivet. She kept it just for me.

  “Thanks.” I drank it down and slammed the glass on the bar. “So?”

  Madam Choi wrapped her talons around the bottle and poured me another. “It is a delicate matter, Inspector. A matter requiring tact.”

  “So why call me?”

  She smiled her Dragon Lady smile. I suppose she was beautiful, pale skin, long silken hair, lips red like cherries, all that good stuff. Personally, I’d always found her about as attractive as a scorpion.

  “You are my friend,” she said.

  I picked up the whisky. “I’m listening.”

  “There was an incident last night. A regrettable incident.”