Los Angeles 2170, page 15
She doubted he had written it with her in mind, but she also wouldn’t discount it. Corlin had known something, probably far more than he would even admit under torture.
Silence eventually fell, like night engulfing them. Three choruses out and that was that.
Daria remembered to breathe, finally, almost slumping in relief.
Dewey turned to her with an enigmatic look.
“That is not the way I wrote that song,” he sounded almost angry.
Daria shrugged, unwilling to say anything at this point, as the sharp, fragile edges were finally, maybe deciding to melt a little and fuse back into a whole.
“And you’ve never heard the song before now, have you?” he accused her.
“Nope,” Daria shrugged again. “Figured it was easier to come in here cold and just play.”
“Well, you’ve ruined my touring plans,” he harrumphed. “Unless you’re really that good.”
“Me?” she asked. “How?”
“We’re going to have to re-record the album before I can release it,” he finally smiled. “And not just the opening number. I suspect you’ll make all of them better. I wouldn’t say you brought a woman’s touch to it, because that’s not what I just heard. But it’s something I’ve never experienced. Something new I’ll need to find.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily suggest it,” Daria tried to make the words sound not like a challenge to a man who looked for such things.
“Why not?” Dewey’s voice was all challenge anyway.
“Two things I’ve done recently that you probably haven’t,” she let her voice go cold. “At least not yet.”
“Which are?” he matched her.
“You’ve probably never killed a man,” she offered. “And certainly never died.”
She liked the way his eyes got big. Hopefully, she hadn’t just added two items to his checklist, because she couldn’t recommend either.
But they did do something for the music.
And yeah, she was suddenly looking forward to playing with this band.
Rescue
Chance didn’t waste a lot of time on philosophical shit. Time was flying and there was too much to do before she died.
More toys to build.
More adventures to have.
Y’know, all the crazy stuff.
She flipped up the welding mask and studied the latest join she had just finished
Should hold. Never expected that much torque, or I’d have started with it twice as thick.
Good enough. She pushed the button inside that released the piston back down and locked it into place. Couple of bolts, lock washers, sealed washers and it would hold. And not bend next time.
Would have been damned embarrassing if she’d broken a leg doing that jump, even it was mechanical.
Time to test it.
Chance was more or less dressed for it today. Thin, long-sleeved, white T-shirt that would breathe but keep the hot sun off her skin. Skirt that came down to mid-thigh and covered enough for most people. She wouldn’t have to change into anything else, just for a quick run around the hills.
The workshop was an organized mess, just the way she liked it. Workbenches on two sides with parts and limbs in various states of repair and upgrade. More parts stored in lockers. Couple of catwalks for looking down on things. Cranes on rails overhead to move heavier stuff around. Skylights on the south-facing roof to let in the morning sun and keep out the heat.
Chance stood up and stretched the kinks out of her organic parts. Weren’t many of those left, but she didn’t mind. The important stuff was still there: brain, heart, vagina. Boobs had only been slightly improved. And it really didn’t matter if the hips ended in chrome and titanium sockets, like the arms, and the ribs and tendons had all been reinforced. Or that the ears were twice as long as came to sexy points like an elf.
It let her mix and match parts on the fly for the mission or the party. As it should be.
Let’s see, best way to do this?
Chance carefully put the welder and mask on a nearby workbench and studied the latest work of art.
Horse body. Minus the fur and all that, but still kinda awesome in black carbon-fibre with red highlights and warning-cone-orange socks on all four metal hooves.
She could take the time to do it all the right way, but she really wanted to test it all out now, so Chance put her heels together and locked her cybernetic legs, mentally triggering the bolts that held them in place and retracting the wiring socket inside.
Her workshop had a jungle gym of bars and poles exactly for times like this, so Chance reached out and pulled herself out of her cyberlegs hand over hand. Up to the catwalk she had built to actually get into the horse body the right way. Walked across on her hands like some gymnast dude on the pommel horse. Dismounted the catwalk and landed her butt where a saddle would have been, if she was interested in someone riding her in the traditional sense.
Still hadn’t met a man kinky enough to do her as a horse. She’d have to work on that.
Mermaid seemed a major fantasy for most dudes. And that whole Kali-ma thing with four arms got everyone hot and bothered.
Chance hand-walked forward and slid her hips into the socket, wriggling a little until it locked shut with a hard thump and her legs came alive with a whole bunch of extra parts.
Centaur.
Sagittarius Babe.
Carefully, she backed herself out of the stall where she stored this body and studied everything from nine feet in the air. Chance laughed and swished her tail. No flies in here, but who cared.
Just for fun, she reared up on her back legs and touched the I-beam overhead where her crane ran.
Living in the future was so awesome.
She dropped back down onto all fours hard enough that she might have bent the old weld out of shape. Best to check it now, where she was a meter from the shop tools to fix it, but it held this time.
More laughter.
She turned and slowly walked her awesome, centaur self to the rear door of her garage/workshop. The sensor in the floor read her weight and rolled the door to the side, letting the late morning sun and dust infiltrate, at least as much could against the positive pressure she maintained inside.
Her phone rang, but she was in too good of a mood to answer. They’d leave a message if it was important enough.
She’d call back eventually, if she cared.
Down the driveway, turn right and cross the gravel street at a quick canter, letting all the bugs and silliness work themselves out.
Sun was out and it was gonna be hot, so she reached back and opened the hatch in the horse’s side. Yup. Canteen inside. Pistol with it, loaded and secured. Easy to get to if she ran into a mutant cougar or something.
Or another asshole intent on setting wildfires in the dry hills of SoCal’s Inland Empire. It was already too hot and dry. Every year, fools with matches seemed to want to bring about the End of the World.
Chance never had the heart to tell them that Jesus had already come back and taken the worthy ones up to Heaven with him. Left all the assholes and sinners behind. Things like that were what had gotten her kicked out of her house at sixteen.
Maybe the best thing that ever happened to her, too. Chance could only imagine where she’d be today. Probably four kids and frumpy. Stephanie had been well on the way, last time Chance ran across a message from her on one of the social boards.
Not for me, folks.
The hills above her shop were wild and free. There had been homes there two centuries ago, before The Crash cut the world’s population by a third. Before a few decades of wildfires and earthquakes and winter monsoons had done a damned nice job of wiping out all trace of humanity from large stretches of dirt.
The heat and other things had driven most of the rest of the people into bigger and bigger cities.
Yuck.
Chance could envision Hell. It looked like a desk job in an arcology somewhere, pushing electronic papers around as a shipping clerk or something. Like Stephanie.
But for the weird, mutant shit living in the mountains and the need for a Post Office box for replacement parts, Chance would never come down from the old fences.
It was mid-morning, so she put her head down and worked herself up to a dead-hard gallop, pushing those pistons and wires as hard as she could, with a good diagnostics program running verbose in the background. Centaur was still her favorite form. At least this year.
Who knew what craziness she would come up with over the winter?
Her phone rang again. A different tone this time.
Corlin, the fixer. Intergalactic Man of Mystery and Obscure Music Trivia.
She had stuffed it into the pocket of her shirt. Almost dropped it getting it out, but galloping was too much fun to stop.
“Hiya,” Chance chirped brightly. “Was that you earlier? Haven’t listened yet.”
“No, Chance,” his deep voice came back to her. “But the message would have been the same. Angeles Search and Rescue would like to hire you for three days. I take it from the sound that you’ve repaired the Sagittaria?”
“Affirmative,” she laughed. “Taking it out for a spin. Who got lost?”
“How soon can you be back down to your shop?” Corlin seemed to ignore the question.
“Eight minutes, tops,” she felt the seriousness of adulting creep into her life. So much for a good run in the mountains. Real horses would never do the crazy stuff she took for granted.
“Good,” Corlin said. “I’ll see you then. And you’re out of orange juice.”
He hung up before she could reply. Then it hit her that he was standing in her office, looking in the refrigerator.
Of course she was out of OJ. Did you know how much the real stuff cost these days? Oregon charged a lot for their fruit. And the fake stuff tasted too metallic.
Still, it was Corlin. Most of her parts came from his friends. And he was a ringer on trivia night. She slowed enough to turn and aimed herself back down the hillside.
Eleven minutes passed, only because she detoured by the store to pick up some juice for Corlin. Shahnaz was good about keeping some weird things in stock, mostly because she was always having strange visitors with money, and his was the closest place for them to pick things up on the way to her place.
And he didn’t mind bringing out a bag to her, when she didn’t want to try to fit herself into the interior of his little grocery, and had left her human legs back at the shop.
She chirped the garage door sideways with her phone and rumbled into the shop.
Corlin wouldn’t be all that impressed by the centaur, so she lined up to set in the cradle and change back to her normal legs when he appeared and waved for her to stop.
“Best to stay quadruped,” he said as he approached.
The man always dressed nice, even in dive bars, so the suit didn’t surprise her. Nor did the briefcase in one hand.
That was Corlin in her mind.
Behind her, the door slid shut on oiled rollers and she handed him down a bag with a fresh liter of juice, still cold.
“Why for?” Chance grinned down at him. “Momma always told me it was rude to lurk over people.”
“I’m hoping you won’t be here long,” Corlin’s normally passive face actually showed traces of pain. “Are you free to hire?”
It was an old industry term.
Just because you ran into someone you knew was in the business didn’t mean you could hand them money on the spot. They might be on a mission and you risked blowing their cover. Or they might not like you. Something
Corlin was the neat, older brother she’d never had. The one who helped her sweep Trivia Nights regularly.
“Sure.” She replied. “Who got lost?”
“A car ran off the road, up in the hills,” he replied, still kind of evading the question. “Off and down into a dry ravine. Rescue flight got there this morning and rappelled from the helicopter. No passengers were found, but there was no blood. The fire department doesn’t have any trackers as good as you, and they couldn’t find any trail. You didn’t answer your phone, so the chief called me.”
“The Chief?” Chance said. “Like immediately? ‘cause you called within five minutes.”
“Correct,” Corlin’s face was way too serious now.
“So I’m going to be mean now,” Chance finally matched the man for serious. “Who was in the car?”
He took a deep breath and studied her, looking up nearly a meter over his impressive height.
“My god-daughter,” he finally admitted, opening up a whole new can of worms Chance had never even imagined existed.
Corlin was all about business, except when he wanted to chill at a dive bar in the boonies, where nobody knew him. Hang out with a local chick who had strange body parts that seemed to change every week.
Never had he suggested something like this.
“Okay, I’ll assume complicated and maybe you’ll explain later, but who is she?” Chance asked. “What do I need to prepare for, going in there?”
It was a given that she’d be available. This was Corlin.
What gear? What weapon? Did she need to call in some other favors and get some friends to drop everything on a Thursday afternoon and help her?
“Nineteen years old,” Corlin related slowly. “Mixed background with an Anglo father and a Nigerian mother. Tall and beautiful. Uni student on summer break. The first indication of trouble was the car’s impact alarm going off and radioing for help, about twelve hours ago.”
“With you so far,” Chance said, sidling over where she kept her various legs stored.
The shop legs were still in the middle of the floor, but she would need the mountain legs, most likely, so she grabbed them from the gunrack-looking-thing and put them into a travel bag she slung over her haunches. She already had a pistol, so she did a mental inventory as Corlin talked, moving to the actual gunsafe next to the limb vault.
“She’s on her grandfather’s Medical Contract, a Class Platinum, so they immediately dispatched a gunship and a medical team,” Corlin moved with her.
“She got a name?” Chance asked.
“Daraja,” he replied.
It was a pretty name.
They had done this enough times that the choreography was down. Even if she was a centaur today.
The rifle came out of the gunsafe when she put a thumbprint on it. Wasn’t actually her thumb, being a cyberarm, but it had the right chip and near-field-security in it. She skipped the assault arm and the grenade launcher for now, settling for the ability to take down a moose or a hungry cat. It went into a dedicated slot on her right side.
“Only tracks initially found were the paramedics going down the slope, and they messed up any other trails in their urgency,” Corlin’s emotions began to waver between rage and despair, so Chance turned to face him.
“I’ll get her back,” Chance said firmly.
“I know you’ll try,” Corlin reacted with a pained smile. “Search and Rescue’s on it, but I’m assuming something bad until proven otherwise. They’re a civilian outfit, and I didn’t want to bring in something heavy until you decided you needed backup.”
“Got anyone in mind?” Chance perked up.
She normally worked alone, but this would be heavy terrain, hot summer day, middle of bloody yucksville. Rattlesnakes, cougars, and whatever other weird shit you could imagine as Mother Nature put her foot down and said: “Get out.”
“I have a rolodex,” Corlin’s smile finally softened. “And I have made a few inquiries, but nothing yet. Depends on what you need.”
“Medevac on call and a couple of good cowpokes,” Chance decided. “We’ll see from there.”
“Noted,” Corlin said.
She watched him pull a pocket secretary from an inside pocket of his jacket. He pushed the button, murmured something too quiet for her to hear, and put it away.
Almost immediately, Chance heard the big whoop-whoop of helicopter blades in the distance. Must have been on stealth mode, waiting the call.
And close.
“Who’s that?” Chance asked anyway, just in case they weren’t here with Corlin.
“Our ride,” he smiled up at her.
“Uhm, you sure?” she asked. “One: I’m kinda heavy in this configuration and Two: you don’t usually go out into the field.”
“Correct,” Corlin replied with a hard smile.
Chance felt a chill shiver even her silicon and steel parts.
Big-ass, ex-military, transport helicopter built for armored cars lowered the back ramp and Chance cantered down it. She didn’t even need to duck to clear the sill, which was kinda kewl. She couldn’t afford one of her own, though.
Corlin was right behind her, as they emerged into a roadside, scenic overlook, parking lot not far from the place he had marked on her maps as the crash. The spot was something from an earlier century, but the view was still gorgeous.
If you liked brown.
Almost immediately, the chopper lifted and scooted away. Somebody who owed Corlin favors. Like everyone else.
There was a flatbed truck close by, in red, rust, and bondo coloring, with a long, gooseneck trailer on a fifth wheel attached. A man in blue denim was leading a second horse out of the back, to go with a big gray one already saddled.
Horses didn’t necessarily like centaurs, until they got used to them, so Chance stayed over here and let the man work. Later, she’d play sniff with the beasts to calm them down.
Corlin surprised her by walking over immediately and greeting both the man and the horses.
Huh.
“Good to see you, Cowboy,” Corlin said as the sound of the helicopter receded quickly. He patted the gray horse on the neck. “You, too. We set?”
“Just need to saddle Big John,” the man replied.
“Good,” Corlin announced. “You do that and I’ll change.”
