Bitstream

13.3

The Rattlehive hasn't changed much since the last time we clawed our way through its guts, but the details always hit different when you've been gone awhile. The container towers still lean like crooked teeth, lashed together with catwalks and scaffolds, humming every time the trains scream overhead. Same smoke, same rain, same oily stink of frying meat in the walkways. But there are new things too: lanterns strung higher than before, fresh neon charms sparking weakly in the dark, faces I don't recognise peering out from patched windows. Places like this don't rebuild. They accrete, layer on layer, until the old bones are buried under whatever scraps the day can afford.

Arden still lets us use her apartment as a meeting point when we need to, though it's obvious she doesn't think of us as a crew. Not really. She thinks of Fingers, and by extension the rest of us are tolerated. Family's family. Simple as.

We catch the rattling lift to her floor, the cage groaning under our weight, and, after walking through a thin stretch of corridor, shoulder through her broken sliding door. Inside, she's already laid out seats at the dining table in the middle of the kitchen. Looks like she's been busy since the last time we were here: new drapes of patched cloth across the cracked windows, a row of scavenged bottles lined neatly along the counter, a little shrine in the corner with candles guttering in pools of melted wax. Arden always finds a way to carve order out of chaos. I guess there's something to admire about that. It takes a lot of thinking power to wrestle messy ideas into form, and I guess you could say the same thing about this plan: Harrow & Carrow, and, as Fingers put, the 'trojan truck method'.

I've gone over it quite a lot on the ride up here, and it's definitely one of the more complex walls we've been shoved up against. Which is why Fingers and I thought it would be a good idea to lay all the deats down here. This place is an Old Mill of sorts, though certainly emptier without Cormac's poetic wit to keep things churning.

But that's the past. I can't focus on that too much. Not now.

I take a seat at the dining table, as do the others, and Arden comes in from one of the bedrooms down the hall, still dashing with her black mohawk, red-implant eyes, and a high-collared jacket stitched with steel and flex-bands, shoulders bulked just like her sister's: less muscle, more strata of military padding. And like before, she offers everyone a cigarette. Also like before, Vander is the only one to take her up on it.

No surprise there. If it isn't obvious enough by his half-toothed grin, that man loves his smoke, perhaps not as much as Raze, but enough to keep the gums red and the teeth tartaring to the high heavens.

"Righty-o," says Dance, thumbing through the brickie, eyes locked and loaded. "I agree with one thing: it's definitely a doooooozie. On one hand, you have Sloan Harrow, who controls the Lumina trucks and all those bloody pathways into the Capital, where Calyx is sittin' pretty on her monopolised throne. Harrow also has some sort of AI shard that allows her to reroute the trucks. Nifty. But on the other hand, you have Mezhane Carrow, who's a little like me: likes his chemistry, creates Lumina, improves it, yadda-yadda-yadda, and has a little ol' chipper that grants him access to the Lumina trucks when they come around for loading. I understand that right, princess?"

"Dead-on," says Fingers, leaning back in her chair, boots kicked up on the rung. "Except Carrow's not like you, Dance. He's not just chemistry. He's Frankenstein. Cutting open 'lab rats', wiring them to machines, seeing how far he can stretch a nervous system before it snaps. Experimentation is his game."

"You'd be surprised what I'd do with a higher budget, mate," he quips, though nobody laughs.

Vander exhales smoke and shakes his head. "Yer pointin' around too much. Easy answer: we need both. Carrow gives us a key, Slern gives us a map. Without one or the other, we're dog food."

"Exactly," I say, watching the smoke curl between us. "Carrow's override chip stops the trucks from detonating if we crack one open. Sloan's shard lets us reroute the convoy and slip a truck right into the Capital. Together? That's our Trojan horse."

Arden flicks ash into a tin tray, eyes narrowing. "And you're planning to take them out in what order?"

"Carrow first," I say without hesitation. "Crowjack was clear on that. Without his chip, Sloan's routes don't matter. All we'd have is a locked truck that cooks us alive if we try to open it."

Dance twirls the brickie in his hand, voice going sing-song. "So: first we nick the key from lab-rat man, then we steal the AI chip from robo-queen. After that, we ride our shiny little trojan right through Ward's front gates, undetected, change all of our names, ages, backgrounds using Gossamer sig, and slice her bloody neck once we get close enough." He smirks. "Simple enough even a five-year-old could get it."

"Don't patronise," Fingers says.

"I'm not." Dance grins wider. "I'm dumbin' it down for Vander, mate."

"Alright," I interject, trying to get us back on track. "So we're caught up. Now we need to talk Carrow. Did Crowjack send you the deats on his exact whereabouts? He was pretty vague before."

Fingers nods, pulling out her phone and taking her boots off the rung. "Yeah, he did. File came through an encrypted drop. Carrow's nested in a sub-facility under Sector Twelve, a public facility where people come to look at some upcoming scientific 'advancements', though I'm willing to bet none of that mind-control shit's hitting the public eye anytime soon. Looks clean on paper: medical research, cortical therapy, all the PR-friendly crap. But Crowjack says the real work happens two floors down. That's where he fiddles with his toys."

"Did he ever actually mention what it was he was experimenting on?" Arden says. "'Lab rats' is all kinds of vague for a fixer."

Fingers scans through the details. "According to the message, he's got a stable of test subjects. Some are volunteers: desperate folk who sign contracts for a few thousand eddies and never come out the same. Others are… not volunteers." She swipes again, lips pressing tight. "Animals. Modified. Chimps, mostly. Some hooked to rigs, some running free, all wired with Lumina's early-stage prototypes. Neural overrides. Basically walking proof-of-concept that mind-control works in the flesh."

Did she say… chimps?

"Cute," says Dance, wrinkling his nose. "Nothing says fun day out like a trip to the monkey madhouse. Do we bring bananas, or just body bags?"

"Chimps aren't monkeys," says Vander.

"What? 'Course they are."

"Nerp," says Vander, taking another drag on his cigarette. "Completely different. Monkeys aren't apes either."

"Fuck off with your shit, mate," says Dance quickly. "Chimps are monkeys. End of discussion."

Vander just smirks, smoke drifting out of his nostrils like a dragon that doesn't give a damn. "Yer a monkey."

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Christ almighty," Fingers mutters, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Can we not waste brain cells debating taxonomy when we're planning to walk into a nightmare?"

Arden leans forward, elbows on the table, hands steepled. Her red-implant eyes gleam faintly in the low light, dissecting us one by one. "Dance isn't wrong, though. You're not raiding some office. You're walking into a lab where everything is designed to keep outsiders from walking back out again. Carrow's got guards, cameras, sure, but it's the things he's building that you need to worry about. He doesn't just study them. He sics them on people. Animals wired to fight, or worse: people stripped of what made them human and reprogrammed into something obedient."

"Sounds familiar," I say, throat tight. My mind flashes to Lumina's promise: Ward's dream of an army, and to Priest hooked up to that chair. "The lab's just rehearsal. We stop him, we're cutting off her proof-of-concept."

"Yeah, well, proof-of-concept usually means it works," says Dance. He twirls the brickie in his hand. "So we're gonna have to try a mix of things here." He flicks the brickie upright again, its blue light casting a soft square across his jaw. "We'll need to cut smart too. Can't just charge in blind, unless we're lookin' to be monkey chow. First step: knowing the layout. Thankfully, the subsector's old and it's all been mapped before, so it comes on my brickie. There are lifts designed to bring the big cargo down." He flips a latch under the casing, pulls out a wafer-sized holo-projector, and sets it on the table. "Arden, kill the light, would ya?"

Arden sighs but gets up, yanking the blinds shut until the Rattlehive's smog is just a dull smear through patched cloth. The holo-projector hums louder, spitting blue dust into the air until it resolves into a wireframe of Sector Twelve: blocky towers, walkways, and the thick concrete guts below.

"Right." Dance's voice has a rare edge of seriousness. "This is the sector's underbelly. Street level looks like hospitals, therapy centres, all neat and tidy for the civvies. Two floors down, it's Carrow's playground. Access tunnels snake into this big chamber here—" He expands the projection, and the lab area swells up. "—where Lumina gets refined, bottled, and tested before loading. This I say is where they bring in the experiments, the unlucky bastards, plug 'em into rigs, and see how long it takes before the mind snaps or bends. Place is wired with cameras, drones, motion sensors. You sneeze too loud, they'll know."

Fingers folds her arms, glaring at the image. "That's where Carrow keeps his chip too. Has to be. He won't risk leaving it anywhere else."

"Exactly," says Dance. He points at a lift shaft jutting up in some harsh approximation of a throat. "Every month or so, shipments are walked up through here. Carrow himself plugs in his override, disables the kill-switch, then personally oversees the load-in. That's our only outside window. We catch him by surprise, knock him out, take the chip, skedaddle. But if he's holed up inside…"

"Then we cut in," I say. "We've done this before. Back on the cargo ship, when we got that Ourovane case for Rico: we had suits. Chroma-Skin. There was some other technical name you had for it that I can't really remember, Fingers."

"V-technica anti-fibre suits," she says.

"Do you still have them?" I ask.

"You kiddin'? You think I'd throw out military-grade invisibility suits worth more than my entire life? Of course I kept them. Brought 'em along for the trip, though they might need some repairs, know? Lotta water damage, and those gravitational claws.... Wow, that was a night, huh?"

It sure was.

"That's no issue," says Arden. "I know tonnes of places that can get that done in a beat – for cheap too. Don't sweat it."

"Hear this sheila," says Dance. "Though I admit: quiet's good." He flicks the brickie to highlight the wiring routes. "Because if any alarm goes off, this whole sector goes on lockdown. I mean everything. Shutters, drones, guards. You won't crawl two feet before getting diced. Which means, lucky us, somebody's gotta cut the juice."

Vander exhales smoke once again, nodding. "I'll do it."

"Not alone, big man," Dance shoots back. "You'll need me. Power junction's tucked out in the service lattice: tight crawlspaces, rats, old pipes, half a dozen lines braided together like a hydra. You pull the wrong one, the lights don't just go out; they explode, and suddenly we're all glowing cinders. I'll guide, you'll muscle."

"You do realise I'm an engineer and have a bachelor's degree?" Vander says, eerily clearly. "I think I kner how to cut the perrr." Oh, there it is.

I almost expect Dance to say, 'Fuckin perrr', but instead, he says, "The day you get a bachelor's degree is the day you learn how to say 'know' correctly. I'll help you out. We can work on not blowing ourselves up together." He snaps the holo shut. "Piece by piece, we snap her spine. Well, it might take a while. She's a big ol' dragon waiting to breathe fire on this entire state."

Arden chuckles at that, and she heads back to the table but doesn't sit down. "Mono," she says.

I look up at her. "Yeah?"

"Have a spare quick-hack for you that might help," she says. "One of those older ones my ex-boyfriend left behind."

"You're into men?" Dance says.

Arden scowls at him, and there's silence for an awkward second.

"I mean, sure. If that's okay with you?" I say, sounding disgustingly timid.

"Wouldn't be offerin' it if it wasn't, clapper." She heads down the hallway into her bedroom and comes back a minute later with a small shard. She comes over to me, reaches out her hand, and I zip out my neural wire. She takes it and hooks it into the shard. An 'Uploading Quick-hack' appears on my neural display, and a blue bar quickly fills up to 100%.

When she finishes, the title 'Black Iris' pops up in my quick-hack list.

"Black Iris?" I say.

Dance whistles low. "Lucky you."

"It temporarily blinds cyber-optics," Arden explains, folding her arms. "Shuts down aug-eyes, HUDs, targeting reticles. Basically anything running through an optic feed. Lasts thirty seconds if you're lucky, maybe a full minute if you overload the shard. Doesn't do squat against meat eyes, though, so don't expect miracles."

I scroll the quick-hack window in my neural HUD, watching the blue icon flicker like an iris dilating. "Why'd your ex have something like this lying around?"

Arden snorts. "Because he was a paranoid bastard. Claimed half the city was staring at him through drones and optics. He liked keeping the watchers blind when he made his moves. Personally, I think he was just scared of getting caught cheating."

Dance lets out a sharp laugh. "Christ, mate, imagine losin' your girl and your eyeballs in the same night. Brutal."

"Keep talkin', and I'll show you how it feels," Arden fires back, though there's the shadow of a grin tugging at her lips.

We all laugh at that, though only briefly. When the laughter subsides, Fingers makes a point:

"I just thought of something: You know you're gonna have to get over your fear of chimps for this one, Mono."

"I'm not afraid of chimps," I lie, going slightly red.

Dance smirks as though he's just smelled blood in the water. "Sure you're not, mate. We'll get you a banana costume, see how long you last."

That cracks a laugh out of Vander – a low, rumbling thing – and even Fingers has to smother a grin behind her hand. For a few seconds, the whole room feels lighter. Easier. Almost human again. But it doesn't last. It never does.

Because under it all, there's the plan, sitting heavy on the table: Carrow, his chimps, his chip, his little dungeon two floors down where science goes to rot. If we're lucky, we'll catch him in transit. If not… well, I've never believed in luck anyway.

Arden kills the last candle at her shrine, leaving only the smog-dim light pushing through patched cloth. She doesn't say much, just: "If you're serious, you move before the end of the month. Next shipment's the 28th. Miss that window, you're waiting another thirty days, and who knows what Carrow dreams up between now and then."