CD & EA - 1.34 - Nocturnal Activities

Today's installment! A little more conversing and world-building, leading up to some possible action. Feedback welcome!

-Plum

Juliet followed Tony and Honey up a stairway on the far side of the store to the second level, where more displays, surrounded by opened and unopened cardboard boxes, filled a space just as ample as the area below. Tony spoke to Honey as they walked about a mutual friend of theirs named James and how he’d won his latest three matches. As he stopped near a pile of unopened boxes, he said, “You should’ve seen it, Hon! Even with his arm tuned to regulation, he knocked the guy out with a gut shot!”

“Sheesh! Seriously? He’s really getting tough—gonna have to go up to a higher circuit soon.”

“Yeah, for sure. Anyway,” Tony said, ripping open the top box, “I think this is it . . . yep, here they are! B&C! Pretty damn good chill suits, and we’ve got all the sizes.” He glanced at Honey, eyes roving up and down, then his gaze drifted to Juliet, and he said, “A small and a medium?”

“Woah, let us decide that, buster,” Honey laughed. “We’ll want to try ‘em on and make sure they work. How long they been in these boxes?”

“A while. They work, though,” he nodded and pointed to the far wall behind Honey and Juliet, “You know where the dressing rooms are.” He held out two suits, and Juliet had a feeling they were small and medium, and she also figured he was right—she had a few inches on Honey. Honey took the suits, and Tony said, “If you’re doing a stealthy job, I have a few specials I can show you. I’ll get things together while you check out these suits.”

“Thanks, T,” Honey said, sauntering past Juliet with a wink. Juliet followed her to the dressing rooms, and Honey added, over her shoulder, “You got infrared on your ocular implants?”

“Yeah, do you?”

“Nope—pretty plain Jane retinal implant I got when I turned sixteen. Decent AUI, and that’s about it.” She opened one of the dressing rooms and continued, “We don’t really need separate rooms—they go on over your clothes. Let’s go in here, and you can check if they work with your implants.”

“Oh, sure,” Juliet said, following Honey into the little room. They unpackaged their chill suits, and Juliet held the weird material in her hands, letting the long garment, complete with oversized foot pouches and a hood, out in front of her. It was heavy, and she could tell the material was metallic in nature or at least some kind of weave of plastic and metal, and a black, plastic battery pack was built into the chest. Hers displayed a dim LED that read 76%.

The two women struggled to squeeze into the suits; Juliet had the hardest time with her boots, but once those were in, she pulled the rest of the suit on easily enough. Several built-in drawstrings allowed her to take up slack in the material. Once it was on and she’d touched the power button, she felt a slight hum at the center of her chest where the battery lay. “Yours all set?” she asked Honey.

“Yeah. Think so,” Honey said, pulling the cords that tightened the hood around her face.

“‘Kay, let’s see here,” Juliet said, then subvocalized, “Angel, can you turn on that heat sensing mode in my . . .” She stopped when Angel went ahead and switched over her visible spectrum. The world went sort of monochrome gray again, but this time there wasn’t smoke hanging in the air, so she could see the details of the dressing room clearly enough.

Honey stood before her against the wall, and she was giving off a heat signature very similar to the drywall behind her. A tiny bit of blue-green was visible where her face was, and two little dots of orange were in the hollows under her brow. Juliet looked down at her body and saw that her suit seemed to be working as well—she was the same cool gray with a few blue highlights here and there. “Seems to work,” she said. “The only heat I’m seeing from you is a little on your face and from your eyes.”

“I’ll buy some goggles while I’m here. I doubt your eyes will show up—you’ve got full ocular implants, right?”

“Yeah, but they have vessels. They’re synth-flesh.”

“Still, your PAI can adjust their temp, I’m pretty sure.”

“That’s correct,” Angel added into Juliet’s ear.

“Cool.” Juliet started to shrug out of her suit and saw Honey doing the same, but the other woman was clearly stifling a laugh. “What?”

“Not cool, Juliet. Chill!”

“Oh, God! Dad jokes? Is our friendship to that level?” She laughed along, though, and as she worked to pull her boots out of the suit, she said, “Good to have these—if we get in a fight, we can both put them on to chill out.”

“Okay, that was worse,” Honey snorted.

When they returned to the sales floor, they found Tony waiting with a few items atop a stack of boxes. “Hey,” he called as they approached. “Now, ladies, I don’t pretend to know your business, but if you want chill suits, I’m assuming you’re going to try sneaking past some infrared optics somewhere. No, no,” he said, holding up his hand, though neither Honey nor Juliet had started to say anything. “Don’t tell me! I don’t need to know the details. I might have some more gear that might be of interest, though.”

“Well?” Honey asked, looking at the unpackaged objects, one of which looked very much like a grenade to Juliet.

“Right,” Tony said, grinning. “You’re always so eager, Honey! Relax, I’m coming to it.” He reached out and picked up a black, triangular plastic piece of gear with a thick strap—it looked like a gas mask to Juliet. “Here, we have a military-grade disposable air filter and rebreather. It’s cheap because you can only use it for about an hour in a harsh environment. Still, it does the job, so you can use these bad boys.” Tony set the rebreather down and picked up the grenade. “We’ve been sitting on these a while, and pops will let ‘em go cheap. Trust me,” he said, winking at Honey.

“Well? What are they?” Juliet asked, starting to feel the strain of knowing Ghoul was riding toward an uncertain fate while they dithered with Tony’s flirtations.

“Easy, legs!” Tony said, but before Juliet could even start to scowl, Honey reached out and gave him a pinch on his pectoral. He yelped and pulled back, but Honey held on.

“Don’t call her that! Her name’s Juliet! I already told you.”

“Easy, easy. All right, I’m sorry. Juliet, these are, basically, knock-out grenades. Each one will fill a standard room, like a bedroom-sized space, with enough gas to knock out a gorilla.” He rubbed at his chest, clowning up for Honey’s benefit, obviously trying to get a smile out of her. It sort of worked—she at least stopped scowling.

“How cheap?” Honey asked.

“Fifty bits each.”

“How much are the suits and the rebreathers?” Juliet asked.

“The suits are a thousand, the rebreathers two hundred.” Tony shrugged and added, “I don’t set the prices.”

“Well, can’t you help us out, T?” Honey asked, leaning forward. “We’re already out a lot of bits ‘cause of this job—had to drop a contract.”

Tony vacillated for a minute, making a show of looking over his shoulder, even though everyone knew his father was downstairs swamped at the point of sale. “Oh, man, Honey, you owe me for this! I’ll throw in a case of the ‘nades if you buy the suits and the rebreathers.”

“I knew you’d help us out!” Honey squealed, leaning forward and actually kissing him on the cheek. Juliet’s mouth dropped—she’d had friends that flirted with salespeople before, heck, she’d flirted before, but never to this brazen degree. She couldn’t help the smile that stretched out her cheeks.

“Thanks, Tony. We need some goggles for Honey, too.”

“Night vision? Flash correcting? Zoom?” Tony asked, smelling an upsell opportunity.

“Yeah, I guess so, but we don’t have a ton of cash, T. Can you get me something for less than a k?”

“Oh, shit yeah. You ladies head down to the payment line, and I’ll put things together for you. Don’t worry; I’ll take over for pops before you get to the counter.” He smiled at Honey, and this time Juliet sort of saw why Honey liked him; he looked almost sheepish, blushing and grinning. He really was smitten with her, and that peck on the cheek had clinched the deal.

Juliet and Honey had to stand in line for nearly fifteen minutes before they got to the counter, and, true to his word, Tony took over for his dad, running the point of sale. He rang up the suits, the masks, and a pair of goggles for Honey. Then, with an enormous, ridiculous wink, he put a green box of grenades into the canvas bag. Juliet read the label as he nestled it among the other items: Thompson ‘Nite-nites - 8 count.

Juliet insisted on paying because it was a job for her friend, after all, so she walked out of the store 3,200 bits poorer—Honey’s goggles had been eight hundred bits. “What’s my balance, Angel?” she subvocalized as she climbed into Honey’s car.

“25,133 Sol-bits.”

“Thanks,” she said aloud, then smiled at Honey as the car hummed to life, “Talking to my PAI. Thanks to you, too, though—glad to meet your boyfriend.”

“Oh, don’t you start!” Honey laughed, pulling out of the parking lot. “He’s a good guy, and yeah, we have some history, but he’s not . . . well, he’s not serious.”

“Yeah,” Juliet mused, reflecting on Tony’s over-the-top demeanor. “I can see that.”

They’d just gotten on the interstate when Angel informed Juliet that she’d lost contact with her snooper daemon. “They’ll probably have a jammer on her from this point forward,” Juliet subvocalized, not really ready to tell Honey that she’d bugged her friend.

“So, this place we’re going? You’ve seen it before?” Honey asked, turning down the synth-pop she’d been playing on her car’s speakers.

“Yeah. It’s kind of a horror story—how this all started. I guess this is a good enough time to tell you about it.”

“Sure, if it’s something you don’t mind talking about. I’d like to get an idea what we’re getting into.”

“Well, it was my first job. It was a heist—stealing some new li-air batts from a corp in Tucson. It was trickier than it was supposed to be, which I’m starting to learn is kind of par for the course, but we finished okay. Ghoul was hurt; she lost an arm, but we’d stabilized her, and she was sleeping in the van, Vikker’s ride. Anyway, Vikker was like, ‘Hey, we need to swing by my place, but Don—that’s the other asshole that double-crossed me—will drive you back to your wheels.’”

“Sounds a little sketchy. You didn’t know those guys, right?”

“Right. Well, I was even more naive then than I am now, if you can imagine. I was nervous, of course, but I figured it was cool—they seemed really friendly. Oh, the worst part was they said I was too new for them to show me Vikker’s location, and they made me wear a hood. God, I was an idiot,” Juliet sighed, shaking her head.

“Hey. You’re not an idiot for trusting people. I mean, you gotta get a little more street-smart but don’t beat yourself up for not seeing the worst in people. So they had a hood on you, then what?”

“Then Don was like, ‘I’ll lead you to my ride, it’s right over here,’ and the next thing I knew, he was putting an autoinjector into my neck, paralyzing me.”

“Holy fuck!” Honey said. “How’d you get out of it? Ghoul?”

“No, Ghoul was out. I was lucky, that’s all. The drug they used on me was bad or the wrong dose or something. They thought I’d kicked it, actually joked about it, but before they started ripping my gear out of my supposedly dead body, they went to get some beers. I got up, found an electro shotgun in Vikker’s garage, and gave them a hell of a surprise as they came back.” Juliet didn’t notice how she automatically edited her story to avoid talking about Angel until she was done. Was she becoming a liar? She frowned, not liking the idea.

“Woah. Some luck, but some badass moves, too, I bet. So, if they’re dead, who are we dealing with? An angry wife? An operator buddy of theirs? Why’d they want Ghoul?”

“That’s the thing—I’m pretty sure Ghoul’s taking the fall for me. Don’t ask me why; maybe she feels guilty that they double-crossed me, and she didn’t know anything about it. She worked with those guys for a long time and did a lot of jobs with them. Anyway, they’ve got some leverage on her, and I’m fairly sure the guy pulling the strings was related to Vikker. They’re planning to make Ghoul do some things she’ll regret, and I’d be shocked if they didn’t kill her afterward.”

“So this guy, this relative of Vikker’s, he’s at Vikker’s place? You know, I don’t know Ghoul, but from what you’ve told me about her, I’m surprised she ran to Phoenix—why not take this asshole out?”

“Yeah, that’s the million-bit question. I think he’s gotta be connected. Maybe he works for a corp or has access to a lot of operators. Like, maybe he’s a fixer? I really don’t know, but that’s what we’re doing. We’ll get some intel, scope out the scene, and then we can decide if you all want to help me further. I promise I’ll understand if you think it’s too dangerous.”

“It’s not just a question of what the site looks like, though,” Honey said, frowning at Juliet. “If Ghoul didn’t think it would help to try to punch this guy’s ticket, what good will it do for us to go in guns blazing and rescue her? She turned herself in, right? How do we help with the leverage they have?”

“I’m working on a plan. If things go the way I’m hoping they will, we won’t have to kill anyone, and these assholes are going to be way too busy to worry about Ghoul or getting revenge for Vikker’s death.”

Honey stared at her for a long second before she said, “Not ready to explain more?”

“Not yet. Sorry, but I’m still working out the details, and I need to see what we’re dealing with to know if it’s even possible.”

“Fair enough,” Honey reached out and turned her music back up, and Juliet sat back and watched the miles drift by as they drove south at ninety miles per hour. It was dark by the time they got to the ABZ north of Tucson. Juliet had Angel send the location for Vikker’s compound to Honey, and they chose a route that would lead them through the foothills of old open-pit mines.

The route had them taking a long circuitous route that avoided even the ABZ for the most part, driving down old dirt roads, paved roads long overgrown, and at one point, they had a view into a massive mine pit that looked big enough to swallow half of Tucson’s downtown district. “Holy shit!” Honey said, “That was a mine?”

“Yeah, there are pits like that all around Tucson and south of it. They mostly mined copper, but they found some rare earth metals in the forties and really expanded the operation.”

“They don’t operate anymore?”

“Oh, there are a few still running, but, you know, with the mines in the belt and on the moons, things just aren’t as profitable as they used to be. Lithium used to be rare—you know that?”

“Oh, sure! I might look like I never went to a school, but I did.” Honey laughed, her warm, rich voice bubbling with self-deprecation, and Juliet smiled.

“Nah, I wouldn’t ever say that, Honey. You seem smart as hell.”

“Careful, Jules! You’ll end up stuck with me as a friend if you keep saying things like that! Hey, we’re only about ten clicks out. I should kill the lights, hmm? I have pretty good night vision.”

“Great idea, and let’s hike the last little bit. Park well out of their view.”

Honey nodded at Juliet’s words and reached forward to click the lights off. The desert was dark out there, miles from the Tucson downtown, but Juliet’s implants immediately compensated, and though the colors were washed out and artificial looking, the landscape before them became as bright as daylight.

She looked around, a stupid grin on her face, admiring how far she could see and felt almost like a peeper—she saw things out in the darkness that no person was meant to gaze upon. An owl sat on the frame of a half-built, abandoned house, a mouse hanging from its beak. A big mama javelina led a troop of babies around a cholla cactus and all sorts of other night creatures, confident in the anonymity of darkness, prowled the old, abandoned roads, buildings, and desert landscape.

Stranger than the animals were the occasional people that looked up with startled faces as Honey’s hydrogen-powered hatchback purred down the dirt roads. They looked equal parts bewildered or guilty, and Juliet wondered what brought them out to those weird little campsites in the desert. “You ever wonder about people like that?”

“Hmm? Those campers?” Honey looked at her and winked.

“Campers?”

“That’s what Temo calls ‘em—people who don’t quite fit into this lovely corporate utopia we live in.”

“That’s a pretty broad brush. I don’t fit into the ‘corporate utopia,’ and please tell me you’re using that word tongue-in-cheek.”

“‘Course I am, sweet Juliet,” Honey laughed. “Those people really don’t fit in. Some are criminals on the run, but lots of ‘em are just people who want to go back—back to what it was like before we were all connected, like how it was before we were all over the damn solar system. I think it’s a lost cause, but maybe not. There’s surely a lot more space to get lost in than there was a hundred years ago. I guess we can thank the corpos for that—they might own all this land, but they don’t really use it. Their arcologies sucked the population out of the landscape.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I didn’t grow up under a rock. I’ve seen those weirdos out in the sticks—I used to drive past some of ‘em almost every day on my way to work. I guess what I’m saying is, well, maybe they aren’t weirdos. I think I’ve had my mind opened quite a bit over the last couple of weeks.”

While Honey was talking, Angel caused Juliet’s navigation window in her AUI to blink a few times, and she realized they were getting fairly close to Vikker’s compound. “Hey, this thing has all-wheel-drive, right?”

“Yeah,” Honey nodded, “and damn good tires for off-roading.”

“There’s a wash up around the corner. Pull into it a ways, and we’ll hike the rest of the way. Time to see what the hell is going on around Vikker’s compound,” Juliet said, reaching into the backseat to grab the sack with their chill suits. She was nervous, but she was also excited—she wanted desperately to help Ghoul, to see her friend free of this mess, but just as much, she wanted to put this whole affair behind her.

In a way, Juliet wished she could go back in time and refuse to work with Vikker, but then she thought of all she’d gained—new friends and a cold lesson about trusting too much. “More than that,” she said, too softly for anyone to think she was speaking to them, “but I’m not sure if I’d repeat that night, given a choice. Not sure at all.”