Cyber Dreams 3.22 - Nuts and Bolts

Welcome to New Atlas. Let me know what you think :)

-Plum

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By the time Juliet had finished with the Port Authority officer’s questions, Aya had left and returned with Bennet. The two of them were halfway done conducting an assessment and inventory of the Bumble’s systems when Juliet watched Reggie walk away down the corridor, still checking off items on his little clipboard. He hadn’t given her any trouble about her account of events on Dione, but he’d certainly been thorough, asking follow-up questions about nearly every detail of the encounter with the pirates.

Juliet found them in the engineering corridor, pulling out components, examining them, and then, in most cases, stuffing them back into their housings. “What’s the story?” she asked from the ladder leading up to the mess.

“Shiro wants us to know what we’re dealing with before we see about trying to sell this thing,” Bennet grunted as he spoke, wriggling a hefty, stainless cylinder around, trying to get it to slide back into the cramped space under the floor paneling.

“So, they’re definitely selling it?”

“Yeah, I think so, but they told me to send you to meet with them after the guy got done grilling you. He’s done, right?” Bennet peered past her to the opening leading upward.

“He’s gone.”

“Everything okay?” Aya asked, looking up from an instrument making a ticking, popping sound, its red needle bouncing around crazily.

“Yeah. Everything’s fine. Where am I supposed to meet them, Bennet?” Juliet was feeling a strange anxiety having these two combing through the ship, getting ready to sell it.

“Well, they’ve been dealing with the Port Authority, too. They had more bodies and the gunship salvage to get inspected. If they’re done, they were planning to find a bar near the port. Just hit Alice up on comms; she’ll give you her location.”

“Right. What about Engineer?”

“I’ll take him back to the Kowashi,” Aya offered. “I’ve got some diagnostics I can run, and if I don’t have the right specs for his chip, I can find it pretty easy on the sat net.”

“Promise me you won’t delete him or take him apart or something without talking to me first.”

Aya looked up sharply and met Juliet’s eyes. “I won’t, Lucky. I’m not a monster.” Bennet chuckled at her words but didn’t offer any comments on the subject.

Juliet nodded and said, “Thanks. Right, well, I’ll see you guys later, I guess.” She turned to climb out of the hot, cramped space.

“See ya. We need to set up a lifting schedule while we’re in port, huh? Hey, hold up!” He sat up, set his socket driver down, and waited for her to look at him.

“Yeah?”

“I wanna help with your friend. You know, the one in trouble. I owe you, and I mean it—anything I can do, don’t forget to ask.” His eyes were earnest, and for once, he didn’t have a hint of a joke in his voice.

Juliet nodded and smiled, “Thanks, Bennet.”

“I’ll help too. I don’t know what you two are talking about, but I want to help,” Aya chimed in, still fiddling with her scanner, pointing the nozzle at some tubes protruding from a diamond-shaped, shiny, crystal-looking thing.

“Okay. Thanks to you both, then. I’ll let you know.” With that, Juliet climbed out of the corridor and into the mess. “Angel, what’s the deal with guns here?”

“New Atlas has a far more liberal take on self-defense than Luna City; anyone without a criminal record can purchase a license that takes effect immediately. SOA operators are no exception. This freedom only extends to weapons incapable of damaging the dome—most small-arms, personal weapons fit that category.”

“Okay,” Juliet nodded, then, hoisting her pack onto the table, she began changing her clothes. She put on a pair of stretchy, comfortable black cargo pants, her boots, her only clean tank top, blue with a yellow frowny face on the chest, and her motorcycle jacket, but not before slipping into the shoulder holster for her needler. When she shrugged into the garment, its silky red lining tickling her bare shoulders, she couldn’t help but notice that it was a bit tighter than the last time she’d worn it. “Did I put on that much muscle lifting with Bennet?” she muttered.

“Your musculoskeletal rating has improved significantly. Would you like to see your updated numbers?” Angel’s voice was high with excitement.

“Just the top part! My rankings.” Juliet sighed and clicked the blinking tab on her AUI:

“So, seven percent? Are you comparing me to everyone? Men, too?”

“Everyone in my database. I wish I could increase it somehow, but the measurements are not easy to come by. My data set only consists of the nearly ten million assessed individuals that WBD input before my liberation. I was a pre-alpha product, let’s remember.”

“Right. Maybe we can raid WBD someday and get you some software updates.” She checked the magazines on her needler and strapped her vibroblade to her wrist. That done, Juliet zipped up her backpack and called down through the hatch, “Hey, can you guys bring my pack to my room on the Kowashi?”

“No problem,” Bennet grunted, his voice echoing up amidst clanging and Aya saying something harsh in Japanese.

“What are you cussing about, Aya?” Juliet asked, grinning.

“I smashed my thumb!”

Shaking her head, Juliet walked off the ship and started following the long, winding corridors toward the spaceport. On the way, she contacted Alice on her comms, “Hey. Where are we meeting?”

“We just finished with the Port Authority. The guy grilling us told us about a bar called Nuts and Bolts. Sending you the location.”

“Everything go okay?”

“Yep! Salvage is free and clear, and five of the bodies had bounties.”

“Wow, nice. So, we can just claim the bounties even though we didn’t down that ship?”

“Finders keepers,” Alice laughed.

“Heh. But, seriously?”

“It really is a lot like finders keepers. The bounty is open until claimed or closed, and these guys hadn’t had either done yet, so we got lucky.” She paused and then added, “There’s probably a joke in there about your name, but I’ll skip it.” Her tone was light, giddy almost, and Juliet figured there must have been some decent bounties on those pirates.

“You heard about the bounties on the three I killed, right?”

“Oh yes. Hey, but I want to change my shirt. Meet you at the bar, and we can talk, okay?”

“Yeah, I’m on my way. I’ll get us a table.”

“Perfect. See you soon, Lucky.” Alice cut the connection, and Juliet switched her full attention to her surroundings. The corridors leading from the docks and airlocks were square and fabricated from some sort of plasteel. The metal was darker than that on Luna, though, and dingier. Accumulated grit and debris lined the corners where the floor met the walls, and a lingering odor of scorched metal and solvents hung in the air, somehow bleeding into the passageways from the shipyard.

“Probably comes in with every airlock cycle,” she muttered, shifting to her left o avoid a pair of men in greasy overalls cutting through the wall, a new section of pipe on a cart next to them. “Got a leak?” she asked as she passed.

“Think so. Hope this is the right spot, but we get paid by the hour, love.” He gave Juliet a long, slow look, up and down, as she passed by. “You docking nearby? I’m always happy to show a stranger around the port district . . .”

“Just passing through, sorry.” Juliet kept moving, glancing once over her shoulder when she was a good ten paces past the men; they’d returned to their work. As she cleared the corner and saw the open airlock leading into the central dome of New Atlas a hundred meters or so down a long, straight, empty corridor, she subvocalized, “You don’t think Alice and Shiro are going to try to rip me off, do you?”

“I don’t think so. I think they want to approach the split delicately, though, because it’s in their best interest to get the best deal possible, yet they don’t want to offend you.”

“Yeah, makes sense. How many corridors like this feed out of the shipyards into the dome? It’s weird that no one’s around, isn’t it?”

“Not particularly. It’s near midnight local time, and there are no less than two hundred similar docking corridors.”

“Right. Midnight, huh?” Juliet glanced over her shoulder again, saw the empty corridor behind her, then hurried toward the bright lights beyond the opening ahead. A few minutes later, she was stepping through the doorway, a heavy, circular metal door perched above the corridor, ready to fall into place should a breach occur. Thinking of the door falling into place, she asked, “I noticed we’ve had full Earth gravity since we landed. The gravity generator here extends beyond the dome?”

“Yes. The generator here is larger and newer than the one on Luna.”

“Newer? But still old, right? Made by the AIs before the war?”

“No, it was created by Atlas Corporation, the primary shareholder in the original conglomerate that founded New Atlas. While speculation abounds about the lack of understanding of the tech involved, Atlas Corp was able to copy the specifications of Luna’s generator.” While Angel spoke, Juliet looked around the area, a small corner of the port district of New Atlas. The sky above was dark, so that she couldn’t get a good feel for the air or the size of the dome, but looking around, she’d never have guessed she was even inside one.

Trees lined the little boulevard that passed by the sidewalk she stood upon, their blossoms illuminated by the yellow glow of regularly spaced streetlamps. The air felt fresh, despite what she’d seen from space, and standing there as the light traffic passed by, Juliet’s nose was tickled by the scent of orange blossoms. “Are those orange trees?” she asked.

“They don’t match my images of orange trees from Earth, though they could be a genned variant.”

Juliet glanced left and right and saw that the sidewalk she was on passed in front of dozens of other airlocks connected to other tunnels that led away to the shipyards, and then she approached the roadway lined with trees. She could see, on the other side of the street, buildings that reminded her of vids she’d seen of New York and its many boroughs. They were crafted from cement and brown-colored bricks. Many were dark, but plenty of others had brightly illuminated window displays, casting a flickering, multi-hued neon glow on the far sidewalk.

Vehicles passed by in front of her; all sounded electric to her, but she was surprised to see full-sized sedans and trucks—quite different from Luna City and its fully public transit system. Juliet looked at the map Angel projected onto her AUI and saw that she had a bit more than a kilometer to walk to get to Nuts and Bolts, so she turned left on the sidewalk and began looking for a way to cross. “Is it illegal to cross without a crosswalk here?”

“There are city ordinances, yes, but the public net seems to indicate that such laws are rarely enforced.”

“Good,” Juliet said, timing a quick jog across the street to take her between a couple of slow-moving vehicles—a panel van and scooter with an enormous houseplant strapped to its little grocery rack. Her destination was further into the city, so she turned up the narrow road leading away between two rows of large buildings, and then she realized what she’d taken for granted; she was going up a fairly steep hill. “They didn’t level the place like Luna City?”

“It appears not.”

“Do you practice that deadpan, or is it natural?”

“Natural.”

“You’re killing me, Angel.” Her destination wasn’t far ahead, but she saw a crowd standing around the corner where she had to turn. The buildings nearby were dark, but the group was huddled near a bright streetlamp, the only one of four still working at the intersection. Its yellow-orange glow illuminated the crowd, casting their clothing and hair into weird shades. A vape cloud rose above one of the men who laughed raucously at something a woman said; Juliet could pick out her high-pitched voice rising above the general din, something about limp sausages. Two other men, both wearing heavy leather-like jackets, were busily shoving each other on the perimeter, and another leaned over the curb to vomit.

“Partygoers,” she guessed, looking to cross the street to avoid them; her destination was to the left anyway.

“What’s up, babe?” One of the women called to her as she started into the street. “We scare you?” The same man laughed again, the sound trailing away with a prolonged, wet cough.

Juliet frowned but ignored the woman, but then she heard footsteps thumping on concrete, and she whirled in time to see three figures coming over the street toward her. “Come on! Wait up,” a man called, big and shadowy in the dim glow of the only working streetlight; Juliet couldn’t make out his features.

“Up the gain on my eyes,” she subvocalized, then squared off, facing the three people as they crossed toward her. One thing she knew about drunk troublemakers—looking like she was scared or running away would only encourage them. As Angel adjusted her implants, making better use of the dim light from the streetlamp across the street, Juliet saw that these three had a similar logo on their jackets, a hyena with red eyes and chromed teeth.

Juliet was relieved to see the larger group was moving away, further down the street, but that didn’t seem to bother those who were fast approaching her. Her needler was loaded with shredders, or she might have considered trying to tranq all of them and run for it. Shredders were surely an option, but she didn’t want to resort to lethal violence, not yet. “Can I help you with something?” she asked, trying to keep her voice firm, trying to channel her inner Ghoul.

“Yeah,” the big man said, and Juliet took in his weird cybernetics, a metallic lower jaw, square LED eyes bleeding soft violet light, and a metal fist that looked like it weighed a hundred pounds. “You can party with us. Too good for the jackals?”

“Jackals? Is that your, um, club?” Juliet gestured to the man’s jacket and the weird logo. She took a step back as his two friends started to move around her; she knew better than to allow that. “Back up a step, gear-brain,” she said to the skinny woman who’d sidled up on her left, the closest of the three. The insult was mild back in Tucson, but it apparently offended the woman a great deal. Perhaps it had something to do with the cheap cybernetics adorning her skull and her arms—a speaker where her mouth should be, sick-looking, infected flesh around her forehead where a four-inch vid screen displayed a scantily-clad woman dancing on a stage, and long, wiry prosthetic arms that ended in jagged claw-tipped fingers.

“What did you call me, spacer bitch?” She made to lunge at Juliet, and Juliet reached into her coat for her needler. She was fast, probably faster than any of the thugs around her, but there were three of them, and she couldn’t keep her eye on them all. By the time she’d jerked her needler free, the other man bulldozed into her, driving a shoulder that felt made of concrete into her ribs and sending her sliding over the hard, dirty sidewalk. He might have been aiming to stun her, but all he really did was give Juliet the room she needed to bring her needler to bear.

She pointed it at the group, intending to warn them, to try to scare them off, but then the liberal gun laws of New Atlas showed her their other side; she wasn’t the only armed person on the street. The metal-armed woman flicked her fingers, revealing four-inch razors that made her earlier claws look downright playful, and the big man, the one who’d first spoken to her, reached into his coat to grab the handle of a very large pistol grip.

Juliet didn’t bother to see what the other man was doing, the one who’d knocked her down; this had gotten serious enough. She kicked the ground with her heels, trying to move, to drive herself back in case someone was about to shoot at her, and then she began to rapidly pull the trigger on her needler.

Her motorcycle jacket, designed, apparently well, to protect the wearer from rough slides on concrete, offered little friction, and she moved a good three feet from where she’d started. It was a good thing because a tremendous *boom* followed by a cloud of concrete chips and dust billowing into the air heralded the destruction of the sidewalk where her hips had been a moment before. While she’d been sliding, Juliet clicked the trigger on her needler half a dozen times, and when her brain registered the explosion on the sidewalk, she grunted and rolled over her shoulder to the left, springing to her feet.

She needed to reassess, to see who’d shot at her, to see whom she’d hit, if anyone, but at that moment, her gut was telling her to move, and she wanted to listen. Juliet sprinted over the dark street toward a broken-down sedan parked in front of a shadow-clad building. The car was missing tires, but she didn’t care; she needed cover. She was halfway to it when she felt an unbearable need to do something erratic, and she tucked her shoulder and rolled to the left, toward the front of the car. Another tremendous *boom* shook the night, and a three-inch hole appeared in the car’s rear quarter panel, rocking it on its shocks.

“Angel,” Juliet subvocalized, somersaulting onto her feet and diving over the car’s hood, “infra-red spectrum.”