Gunwitch: Rebirth Page 11

  The lack of structure to her new life was not helping. She was getting sick of being lied to, and it was starting to seem that Doctor White and his administration did not know how to do anything else. Having spent a little over three days getting to the other side of the continent, Annette had been met by a UDF intelligence operative who had presented her with some briefing documents, a bed for the night, and instructions to the effect that she should get on with her job and out of his hair as soon as possible.

  So, that was what she had done. She had prevailed upon his ‘kindness’ for another couple of days while she checked out the area, and then she had moved to what was going to be her new home for a while.

  Slipping out of her sleeping bag – she had yet to arrange a better bed – she walked over to the window and looked down at her new view. It had been a park. In fact, more or less directly below her were the remains of buildings which had been a zoo. Now the park was a farm, or a group of farms, worked by slave labour. She really had left civilisation behind her to come here, and if here had been where she was supposed to be fighting the enemies of Utopia City, that would have been fine. Instead, the island she had been told was known as Manhattan was where the ‘local resistance’ was based.

  There were four main gangs controlling the streets of Manhattan. The building she had selected for her own base of operations was almost at the northern extent of Cyber-Kings territory. To the north, the largest of the groups held a significant proportion of the park and much of the northern island. They were the Spyders, and Annette assumed the misspelling was intentional, but could not be sure. Reading and writing were not high on the priorities of any of the gangs. The southern part of the island belonged largely to the Juicers, who were the major drug producers in the area, but they were also their own biggest clients which made them unstable and prone to infighting. And lastly there were the Frankies, who were not actually one gang, but they were all based around the same method of gaining resources: Frankies ran slaves and harvested organs throughout Manhattan and further afield.

  Of the four, the Spyders were the least important to the UDF. The Spyders were quite happy with their local dominance and so were annoyingly difficult to influence.

  The Cyber-Kings were an entirely different matter. According to Annette’s briefing, they predated the wars and plagues which had brought down the old world. They had been founded by a transhumanist group who believed that mankind should transcend the weaknesses of the human body through cybernetics. They still held the belief that progression to full cyborg was the way to go, but their high aims had been heavily curtailed by the collapse of civilisation. For years, they had been stuck with whatever random parts they could find and backroom surgeons who knew little about installing cybernetics. The UDF had bought influence with the gang by supplying modern parts and surgeons able to fit them. The Cyber-Kings were almost loyal subjects of Doctor White and they had benefitted in the local power stakes because of it. They had controlled none of the parkland a few years ago.

  However, the local situation was not, precisely, Annette’s concern because the target of the UDF’s activities was not in Manhattan: it was on the Long Island. That was apparently what they had called it before and now the entire walled-off place was the Long Island Enclave. Those people who had turned up in Utopia City all those years ago had been from the Long Island. Doctor White, it seemed, held a grudge.

  Annette’s job was to find ways of disrupting or destroying the Long Island Enclave. The UDF had been busy with trying to do just that for years, but there was no information available on what any other agents had found and no direction regarding where to look. The entire situation was disordered, unstructured, and essentially slipshod. The UDF was efficient, disciplined and… had failed to stop the Insurgency in over twenty years.

  Whatever, Annette was fairly sure that someone would eventually come after her for the murder of her father and she needed to be out of Manhattan before then. The Long Island seemed her best chance at that for now and it needed to be investigated. Which was what she was supposed to be doing anyway, so it was time to get started.

  Brooklyn District, the Long Island Enclave.

  The founders of the Long Island Enclave had been cautious people, if not paranoid. Of course, with Manhattan the way it was, a little paranoia was sort of justified. One of their first acts was to cut the island off from Manhattan by demolishing the bridges and collapsing the tunnels. There was one way in over land, via Staten Island, and that was now fortified and very well guarded.

  Or that was the theory. With UDF help, the Cyber-Kings had partially reopened the tunnels. They had even got some electric cars running to provide transport to the collapses, then it was a case of going on foot through the newly cut and shored-up section. Since it was supposed to be a secret, the exit point was not at the road tunnels where they had originally emerged. In the case of the one Annette was using, you surfaced through an old subway entrance and into the territory of the Tarantulas.

  Street gangs seemed to be the norm through the entire region. The Tarantulas seemed like the kind of people Annette would have avoided under any normal circumstances, but the UDF was paying them to be the gatekeepers of the tunnels. The ones in the subway were heavily armed: Annette saw a lot of knives and pistols, several assault rifles, and a couple of coilguns. She was watched all the way out onto the street, but she was not sure whether it was an attempt to intimidate or simply men watching an attractive woman.

  In an attempt to blend in, Annette had selected a pair of tight ripped jeans, a T-shirt, and a short jacket. Her pistols and a couple of spare magazines were hidden away in her sports bag. She figured if she needed them, she would have more to worry about than low ammunition. The fact that the Tarantulas were carrying firearms in one of their safest locations did not speak well for enclave policing, but also did not come as a shock. When she made it to the surface, she realised that the enclave was a little different from what she had expected.

  The population seemed a little thin and a little threadbare. In the Tarantula-controlled area, the people also seemed depressed and fearful. Clothing was generally not that clean, and was torn or patched. Money, it seemed, was tight. Annette was used to throwing away anything she wore which became damaged, but here they obviously kept things going long past the point of collapse. However, it looked like anyone who could afford to had a weapon strapped to their body, in plain sight. She was going to have to look into how that worked, but it might make life easier.

  Having started late, Annette decided that this would be an afternoon of getting a general feel for the place, so she just walked. The streets were laid out in a block pattern with a mixture of houses and short apartment buildings, all of them looking as though they had been built a long time ago and had seen only minimal maintenance in quite a while. There were some shops, mostly selling basics: bread, eggs, milk, some meat, all the kinds of things which had been provided to everyone in Utopia City. And there were gang tags on the walls on every street. The same tag, a stylised, thick-bodied spider in red paint, until Annette crossed an imaginary line and the predominant symbol changed to a large letter J in purple. She had entered someone else’s territory.

  A few streets in, she found a fence upon which someone had scrawled ‘Jacksons Rule!’ and she figured the local gang was known as the Jacksons. Not exactly a name to conjure with, but at least she had an idea of what she was dealing with. The housing had been getting lower and a little better kept up for a while. This was obviously one of the better parts of the Brooklyn District, but the number of handguns being carried did not seem to diminish.

  Soon enough, she came across both the reason for the increased wealth in the Jacksons’ area and her first sight of one of the barrier walls the enclave had erected around their land. The wall itself was some thirty metres high and built of solid concrete. And this thing surrounded more or less the entire island. Of course, the wall around Utopia City looked a lot better and contained an area al
most as big, but this was impressive.

  And set against the wall, within an enclosure formed of lower walls, was a building which Annette might have guessed the function of, even without the sign outside the gates. The Brooklyn District Fusion Plant looked small to be the area’s only power source. If that held up in the other districts, the enclave was operating on a relatively barebones electricity supply, easy enough to disrupt. Annette watched the gate for thirty minutes and then turned away, frowning.

  A couple of hours in the nearest district suggested that taking the enclave down would not take a vast amount of effort. The land was flat, so water and sewerage systems almost certainly relied on electric pumps. Take out the power, take out three essential services, maybe more. The security was there, but nothing which could not be breached by a few Infiltrators. It was a lot like no one really wanted to find a way to bring the Long Island Enclave down. And the enclave was fairly lucky that Annette had no desire to either.

  Manhattan.

  Nights were not easy in Manhattan. The Cyber-Kings had a habit of partying late for one thing. Annette had selected the highest place to base herself from that she could find, but the sound of drunken cyborgs and would-be cyborgs still filtered up from below. She was still not sure what they might decide to get up to either, which made sleep hard to come by.

  Waking with a screaming headache not long after she did get to sleep did not help in the least. She lay in her sleeping bag, waiting for the pain to subside and considering her drug supply. It was limited. She had packed as much of her various painkillers as possible, but there was a limit and she had no way of knowing whether she could get anything analogous in Manhattan or the Long Island. That was going to become a problem.

  As the numbness set in, she activated her file management app and pulled up the specifications for something she called Project Omega. It was an ultimate solution to the rejection problem and the more she looked at it, the more she assured herself that it would work, but the dangers…

  Closing the file, Annette turned on her side and listened to the Manhattan night as it descended into silence. Even here, there came a time when all little cyborgs needed their rest. Annette closed her eyes and tried to join them.

  Brooklyn District, 16/12/83.

  The southern part of Brooklyn was the domain of a faction of Cyber-Kings. They were not directly aligned with the ones in Manhattan; in fact, they were generally runaways from there. Annette had been warned to be careful down there, but she had also been told that it was perfectly legal to openly carry weapons in the enclave. Concealed carry was a different matter, but so long as everyone could see her guns, no one would question them.

  There was, it turned out, one major advantage to the area. While she was walking the streets, Annette’s computer popped up a rather unexpected display: the local wireless network window. Somewhere nearby, there was an active wireless network and the protocols were the same as the ones used in Utopia City. Better yet, when she tracked it down, it was in a coffee shop and the UDF had supplied her with some local currency.

  Cyber-Kings, at least these ones, appeared to take their caffeine seriously. The shop sold a couple of different varieties, with or without milk, and even with a few flavour additives. Annette had no idea where they were sourcing any of it from and the prices were a little steep, and she was going to forego the pleasure because, even if there was coffee and networking, she had no idea where to look on the local internet. Then she spotted a sign inside the shop on the wall which proclaimed that the networking service was provided, free of charge, by the Enclave Public Networking Service, and then gave a bunch of useful web addresses.

  ‘Done,’ she said to no one in particular and walked into the shop.

  She was watched for a second or two. She was a stranger and, she suspected, the shop was generally frequented primarily by regulars. Interest was lost as she went to the counter and requested a black coffee, and her computer was accessing the shop’s network before she had the words out. A second later, she was looking at a browser window showing the website for the enclave’s government.

  The woman behind the counter handed over a mug of black liquid and Annette examined her supply of bills to find one larger than the quoted price, but not too much. It was, she thought, fascinating. They still used paper money. Printed designs on sheets of paper. The coins, it seemed, were moulded plastic, but the larger denominations were paper. They called them dollars, just like in Utopia City, but there it was all done by electronic transfer and here… Didn’t they realise how much they could save by cutting out all that printing and moulding? Didn’t they realise that physical money could be stolen?

  Still smiling at the absurdity of it, Annette took a seat where she could watch the street outside and settled down to see what could be found on the enclave’s official website.

  Jackpot! There was a potted history of the enclave, maps of the enclave and the four districts at various levels of detail, the legal code, the immigration policy, minutes of the last ten years’ meetings of the House of Representatives… It seemed like someone had decided to take every document they could find and make it available via the site. Annette rapidly discovered that her idea about taking down the power system would work, and it would require six teams. There were six fusion plants in the enclave, and they had been put in place to take over from an old fission plant, just as was the case in Utopia City.

  There were some interesting links to other government agencies, and Annette made a point of following the one to the Long Island Police Department. There she found yet another rendition of the legal code and confirmed the statutes on carrying weapons, adding some clarity. Fully automatic weapons were controlled and full-on assault weapons were tightly controlled. Beam weapons were listed among the regulations, so they obviously had them. Annette figured her pistols and her weapons system as a whole probably fell into the controlled category, but no one was going to know if she stuck to semi-automatic fire.

  Another interesting feature of local law enforcement was the Citizen Deputy Programme. Citizens could be deputised to supplement the police. There were lots of words dedicated to the task of claiming that this was an exercise in empowerment and bringing policing into the remit of the people, but Annette read ‘we don’t have enough resources to operate an effective police department.’ The weird thing was that the enclave budgets were available on the government site and they had a defence budget of over three hundred million dollars to play with, and no standing army. They had to spend a lot on maintaining the walls.

  The coffee was adequate. Not exactly great, but drinkable. Annette had two mugs of it before leaving the shop with a better idea of the layout of the enclave. One map had shown the light rail and subway lines which had been put back into operation and she wanted to check those out. Walking let her see more, but it was not going to be viable when she started looking at the Queens District in the morning.

  She had walked a couple of hundred metres when a cyborg stepped out in front of her. It was pretty obvious that he was a cyborg: his left arm was metal with a basic, three-fingered ‘grabber’ hand and a few exposed wires showing. He smiled at her in the way a shark probably smiles at a tuna. To go with the exposed metalwork, he had cropped electric-blue hair and a lot of leather clothing, but no sleeves.

  ‘Hey there, lady,’ the man said. ‘That’s a lot of cash you got on you.’

  Annette glanced back over her shoulder and the two men trying their best to catch her unawares stopped in their tracks. She turned her attention forward again. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Sure is. A lot of cash.’

  ‘Thank you. Lesson learned.’ She needed to be more careful about counting money out in public. ‘Now, if you’ll allow me to pass, I’ll be on my way.’

  The would-be mugger put his hand on the pistol he was wearing on his right hip. ‘Not until you’ve–’

  Annette moved, her hands moving back so that her pod could hand her her own weapons. She turned, her arms risi
ng as she did so. The men were moving to draw their guns, but they had apparently not expected such an immediate response. Annette fired both weapons, shifted her aim slightly on the right-hand one, and fired again. There was a lot of very unmanly screaming as the three muggers lost the use of their right arms.

  ‘Are we done,’ she asked, still covering them, ‘or do I have to shoot you anywhere else?’

  The man with the metal arm stumbled to one side to allow her past him and the other two seemed to have decided that this was one woman who was not going to be a victim. Annette looked up and down the street, shrugged, and set off again. In Utopia City, if you shot someone, there would be UDF officers coming out of the woodwork in seconds. Here there was nothing. People were avoiding the scene and keeping their heads down, but it all seemed like it was a business as usual in Brooklyn.

  Annette handed her pistols back to her pod. ‘If this place is any kind of threat to White’s little utopia, I’ll eat one of my bullets,’ she muttered. But then, that was just one more lie to add to the litany.

  Queens District, 17/12/83.

  They liked their walls on the Long Island. Aside from the thirty-metre boundary wall, the districts were separated by ten-metre walls, and the Queens District was cut into two uneven parts by ‘the Factory Wall’ which was three metres high and topped off with some form of wire defence system.

  According to the history Annette had found, buildings had been demolished to make way for the outer wall, the Sea Wall, but the new residents had not built new homes. Existing buildings in Brooklyn and Queens which had not suffered too much damage were fixed up as well as possible, and the land further east had been turned over to cultivation. As the need and capability for industrial sites arrived, the southern part of Queens had been demolished to make way for factories, and Queens had become the main location for factory workers to live in. To the east, the cultivated area was pushed out and new houses were built, mostly for those managing the factories. A social order had begun to develop where before there had been general equality.