Iteration 0011 - The Party Life
Bill Halstead never could get used to the city.
Anywhere below uptown, he couldn't see the sky but for a peep-sight slit through the towers. From loward down, the rain burned, the lights blazed, and the racket-rumble never stopped. Midward up, every corner dared a glass-slicked plunge. Man wasn't meant for the chthonian depths of dronetown nor the noxious heights above.
Halstead had grown up in an outer zone, one of the orange-band strips the Authority all but forbade. It had been filled with hostile fauna, hidden dangers, scavs, and old war leftovers. If you broke your leg in a ditch or stepped on a Collapse landmine, no medbot was going to pull you out. You'd feed the vultures or a scrapper, and it would be days before anyone knew you'd died.
But out there, he could see the sky, and for Halstead, that beat every convenience of the hive.
And yet, he found himself sitting on a capital bench, upper midward, watching the neons shine from the wet blacktop's obsidian mirrors. A groundcar rolled past and splash-shattered the skyline's reflection. Halstead looked up and surveyed his target.
The second-swankiest club in midward stood at the edge of a promenade tier, a neon-purple cutout against the black ravine and the iridescent twinkle of the distant tower-wall. The club front was accessible by the groundcar rim-road, while its back was reserved for lift docks and the open dark.
Even as high as midward, he couldn't see the stars. Too much light poured from the depths. From the orbitals, the cities looked like tectonic plates bursting, riven with laser cracks like splitting seams. Even at this height, the starlight lay concealed behind the glare. For not the first time tonight, Colonel William Halstead, retired, wished for the star-specked skies over his ranch.
The ragged lump shifted beside him, revealed the edges of greyed flesh amid soiled clothes. Halstead followed the movement from the corner of his eye, checked for threat, and dismissed. The vagrant curled on the edge of the bench, unable to settle. That was by design, of course. Public transit benches always had gaps in their beams and curves on their seat. They were comfortable enough to sit on, but hell to sleep. Just another way to remind the unwanted: 'go be miserable somewhere lower'.
Sensing no threat, Halstead returned to his stakeout. In many ways, his job was the most comforting part of his evening. He'd never felt at ease in the city, but he'd always been comfortable on the hunt, and it would take more than a few weeks of retirement to dull a lifetime of soldiering.
Another set of groundcars rolled between Halstead's target and his maglev-station bench. Most were new, passerby vehicles on their automated routes. One was an unmarked security car. Halstead reset his mental timer when it passed. He'd made that cruiser, two passes ago. The idiots didn't even try to hide their route. That kind of arrogance got men killed.
Halstead's target profile was nearly complete. He'd counted the cars, marked the cameras, and memorized the guards. The line of would-be revelers trailed down the block, a neon-bathed rainbow parade of gleaming shimmersilk and kilocred skinjobs. Halstead marked them, too, until he knew who got in, who stayed out, who paid, and who didn't.
The club groomed a specific clientele. Every member of the iridescent queue was the kind who thought that dropping to midward was 'slumming', but even among that frocked and feathered crowd, there was careful alchemy. The bouncers let in two young-and-pretty pieces of paparazzi royalty for every stiff-suited powerbroker. Gaudy accessories and trendy skinwork might help, but names bought admission. Attendees traded access for time, flesh for favor, and everyone got what they wanted.
Despite well-trained neutrality, Halstead couldn't stop his lips from turning. The unasked question hounded him, 'Is this what I fought for?'
He pushed the doubts away. He had a job to do, and the first step was getting into that club. He lacked the clout, credits, or couture to buy through those gilded doors, and the bouncers were too keyed-up to be slipped or rushed. Those weren't thugs, in those too-tight slicksuits. Halstead noted their staggered patrols, their disciplined radio checks, the staggered posts - these were surplus soldiers, Section Thirty-Fives, winners of the 'peace dividend' that dumped a couple million veterans into civilian life. With one stroke of a pen, entire armies vanished from the payroll and flooded the streets with angry, idle, well-trained kids, and not enough work to employ them. Most of them had nothing to their name but range time, PT, and elan. It was no surprise that the businesses most hiring were often private, discreet, and not entirely clean.
It was a goddamn mess.
Halstead forced down his scowl and turned back towards his objective. The front door wasn't an option, not with this clientele or security. He'd never been the tech guy, and a breaching charge was a bit more bang than appropriate, however satisfying it might be. Fortunately, the club had a back door, and social hacking was a hell of a lot smoother than its technological twin. As a bonus, it was one of the few things that got easier once his hair turned gray.
His target had arrived twenty minutes ago, dropped by a black liftcar that may as well have had the word "AGENCY" stenciled down the side. Everything since had been a waiting game.
Halstead glanced at his watch, then surveyed the guards at their posts. He found every one of them where he expected: two by the door, one with the valet, another two on the balcony stairs. The rotation was about to start, which meant it was time for him to move.
Halstead wound down the sidewalk, circled around to the block-end crossing. Every meter he drew away from the target stretched him like elastic, screamed at him to get his eyes back on the objective, but this was a necessary risk. He couldn't dash across the traffic divide, that would pull too many eyes. No, the hatch-walk, one block down, was the better call. He passed under the street, clambered up the stairs, and looped back towards the club.
On the midward plateau, the towers stood like obsidian knives, their windows shining. Stone, steel, and glass varied only by refraction. Streetlights and headlights echoed through a carnival maze, and the midnight hung as the unending blur between neon dusk and shining dawn.
Halstead closed towards the club, threaded the stacked queues of patrons-in-waiting. He slipped through the files of asymmetric-cuts and vat-leather handbags like a shadow; his dull jacket vanished in the sprays of luminescent paint and electric fibers. To the glitterati, Halstead was nothing but another nameless civil servant, a gray man, not one worth remembering. When he cut down his chosen alley, none marked his passing.
Off the main strip, the steam clung to the stone, and the blacktop shone like a funhouse mirror. The neons turned garish, and even this high in midward, the mix of mildew, bleach, and ion scrubbers stabbed at Halstead's nose. The machinery churned below, the pulsing gasp of the city's mechanical lungs resounding through the vents. A fog cloud billowed, hot air flash-cooling as it plumed through the steel lattice. The distant scent of oil and heated metal joined the milieu. Halstead seized his moment and pushed through the haze, cloaked from the electric eyes.
He took the back steps at a jog, pressed himself nearly flush to the kitchen door. He placed one hand in his jacket, wrapped his fingers around the folds of faux-leather, and waited. When the door bolt clicked, he raised his free hand, as if he'd been angrily stabbing at the buzzer.
A place like this generated a lot of trash, and no one respectable wanted a chute inside the building. That meant someone low on the totem pole would have to haul the bags out by hand, drag them across the alley, and pitch them down the compactor hatch. The dinner rush would be winding down, and shifts had to be kept, so, like clockwork, the door swung wide. Silhouetted against the yellow-white kitchen glow, a young busboy dragged out a mass of black bags, earbuds in and augsim visor up.
Halstead blocked his path, and the youth crashed into him. The busboy stumbled back, his visor flashing clear to reveal wide, panicked eyes.
Halstead snarled, "Well, thank God!" He dropped his hand from the buzzer and produced his badge-in-wallet. Before the kid could adjust his eyes to the neon-wash twilight, Halstead shoved the badge-shield into his face and barked, "City health! How long were you going to leave me out here?!"
The busboy opened his mouth, formed only the first stutter of a syllable.
Halstead cut him off and snapped, "The inspection?! Don't tell me you forgot!"
The busboy staggered back, nearly toppled over his bags. Halstead sneered as he passed, flipped his badge closed, and slipped it back into his jacket. He strode through the storeroom as if he owned the place, ignored every stammered apology behind. Sometimes, it still amazed him, just how many places a man could get with an old base identicard, a cheap suit, and chutzpah.
Halstead paraded through the backrooms as the very picture of an overweening bureaucrat, equal parts flunky and tyrant. With every step, he inspected. He scowled at the pots and burners. He harrumphed at the rehydrator. He met the turn-aside stares of the cooks and waiters, made them blink, and stitched cryptic notes on his datapad. He made one half-loop, careful to avoid the chef, and with one final flash of a badge, slipped cleanly into the dance-hall.
The door-seal broke, and a wall of sound washed over him.
The lights pulsed with the bass-thump, lasers swayed with the horns. A crowd undulated with every surge of the music, drawn across time and space. One moment was hot-yellow and wailing treble, high-desert flash, and searing haze. The next surged with a purple-strobe bassline, plunged the dancers under the roaring tide.
All around him, the spotlights twirled, carved a tornado through sound and sweat. Blue to green, orange to purple, blazing white to glowing black. The patterns command attention, pulled his eyes back and forth, from the twirling shimmersilks on the dance floor to the gleaming brass horns flashing on the stage.
Halstead set his eyes on a fixed point - the white-blue spotlights over the gleaming brass-and-glass bar. Fire burst across that gleaming counter, the flourish of a pyrotechnic cocktail. The bartender, clad in white and gold, spun the flaming drink down the slick-top, and his crowd roared in response.
Halstead steadied on that point, fixed it in his mental map. Everything here was designed to daze and distract. He pushed the noise away and scanned the room.
The pounding drums faded, the crowds settled, and the lights cooled. The horns lowered, and the wildfire faded.
Halstead spotted the director's booth high above, a nestled gleam of monitors perched behind a muted-black guardrail. That was the point of control, the nerve center. There, the directors would study their banks of monitors, their metadata feed, the metrics of body-heat, rhythm, and alcohol sales. Synchron clubs ran on data. A limited AI ran a sample beat, set a rhythm. The band improv-riffed on the groove. The lasers drove the dancers, spotlights sought the highlights, but the crowd controlled the data and fed back to the beat. The band chased the algo, and the algo chased the band. The dance was both product and source.
Some might have found poetry in this, but Halstead saw only the mechanism. The current lull was an opportunity, but it would not last. This was the data spooling, the clinically-designed refractory period before the next eruption.
He swept the room, sought his man. His target wouldn't be on the club floor, pulsing with the tide. Nor would he sit at the bar, drinking stunt-mixers from glowing flutes. Halstead's eyes were pulled to the yawning black above the stage, towards the hole in the sound, where people observed instead of danced. Those balconies were his quarry's domain, the shadow-cloaked heights, watching yet unwatchable. Adjacent to the action, but impartial. Halstead felt his scowl return, his whiskers brushing along his lip. This was too predictable.
He plotted his course along the inside wall, below the sight-angles of the balconies. He stepped from the walkway, slipped along the outside the crowd. Two steps into his path, he heard the tell-tale song of the synchron beat, the creaking, accelerating 'drip-rip-ririri'. He spared one glance towards the stage, where a singer had taken the mic. The drumline fired, and she belted out a wordless melody, swaying with the algo.
The shimmersilk diva crooned, and smoke poured over the dancefloor, laser-lit red and gold. Halstead fixed his weathered hand on the cold brass of the guardrail, pulled himself along the edge of the sea. Electric thunderheads rolled across him, sound and fury pulsing in time to adaptive harmonies.
He stayed to the edges, took the long way about, as the music pounded. Better to go long than risk the crowd, where the spotlights might mistake his purposeful stride for dance-variation, and give him unwanted attention.
Through the sweat-soaked haze, he advanced. He skirted the dancers and wormed through the peripheral coves, past neon-highlighted waitstaff in form-cling slicks, around the bouncers and lurkers waiting to ply their twilight trades.
Finally, he reached his exit, the cut-out-black form of an arch and the barest hint of a rising ramp. Halstead felt his way up the guardrail. As he turned from the dancefloor, it backlit his ascent in neon flashes and whisps of blacklight fog. He climbed, passed the arch, then another, and the tumult faded in layers, the roar wicked away by acoustic-foam partitions.
The world faded from chaos to fuzzy blue-black nocturne, lit only by the distant storm and the deep-purple glowstrip walls. Halstead slowed, allowed his senses to recover. Subtle lines emerged from the nether-light: Black leather couches. Deep crimson carpets. Brass handrails.
A waiter floated past, carting a tray of neon drinks. A pusher turned his trade, and a hooker worked her mark. With flashes of synthflesh and bleached powder, the underworld flirted about him. Halstead pushed past them all.
His target would be further above, nestled into the tiers of oyster-shell booths. He ascended.
He slipped up the stairs, cut through the fragrant air. In the club heights, the oil and ion stench of the dancefloor receded and revealed the perfumes of vape, liquor, and sex. He didn't bother to check his disgust.
He ascended over the balcony lip, the dancefloor once-more dawning past the black-cut of the railing as he climbed. The bass-pulse returned, muted but no less powerful. He glanced over the cut-away walls, tried to catch a glimpse into the booths, but they were blocked to him. No surprise. These luxury theaters were designed for voyeurism, to see and not be seen. Power, even in hedonism.
But even without sight, blocked by the partitions, and without sound, drowned by the band, the smell told him enough. Lust leveraged proximity to power, all carried by the harmonic heartbeat. In the ephemeral economy of twilight, nothing existed beyond these walls and this moment.
Halstead spared a thought for the dronetowns boiling below. Someday, a cake-eating mob was going to storm this place, and he wouldn't blame them for the pitchforks they carried.
Halstead cut through the balcony terraces, threaded the canyons between the oyster booths. He passed old money, repeat-skinjobs stuck in an uncanny age between eighteen and eighty. He skirted undersecretaries and executives, inquisitorial stares and nimble fingers, handshake deals and 'mutual understanding'. None of these were his target.
Halstead knew his destination. There, on an elevated terrace, half-hidden from view, half-prominent before the crowds, sat a crescent booth atop a pearlescent stair. From that height, the occupant could make himself obvious or invisible, depending on the angle. From the front steps, he could hold court, while from the back, no one would see who came or went. This was the type of 'perfect position' that a couple of decades of combat had long taught him wasn't worth holding. If you saw it, the enemy saw it, and trying to take it just got you killed. It was often far better to deny such a position to the enemy, or lay in ambush and skewer your opponent when they took the bait. Only a fool stuck their flag on such clearly contestable ground.
Or perhaps, not just fools, but the kind of men who would place more value in the symbolism of a position than its utility. A throne was such a locus, and a king was just the man who could hold it.
Halstead took the back stairs.
The first bouncer was meant to be seen, cut from the mold of suit-and-tie enforcer favored by city princelings. The man resembled nothing so much as an overfed bull, stuffed into a tiny suit, corded neck bulging at the collar, and meat-hook hands half-strangled by cufflinks. Unfortunately, the human bludgeon blocked the stairwell and waited, glaring at the world. Stealth would carry him no further, so Halstead changed modes. He waited for the bouncer to look after a particularly pretty waitress, then bolted past. The suit saw him move, but Halstead was already across the gap.
Halstead clambered up the shadowed stairwell, raced towards the portal of light above. From behind, he heard the shout-grunted, "Stop!"
A man that size couldn't enjoy running up a ladder in a too-small suit. Halstead had a chance.
A second guard appeared at the mouth of the stairwell, dressed similarly to the first, but wiry in build, his suit baggy and ill-fitted, all the better to conceal a gun. A third, mirror to the second, emerged from the opposite flank. This stairwell was closed.
Halstead ignored the obvious and crashed through the twin guards. He broke into the neon dawn and smashed through grabbing hands. For just a moment, he burst from the darkness, lunged out over a dinner-table, and shouted, "Mike!"
The bouncers catapulted him back into the shadows. Rough hands snatched his arms, spun him about. He heard the snick of a baton slipping from its holster, and he knew what was coming.
"Hold!" The command rang through the oyster booth.
The baton never struck. Hard hands pressed Halstead into the wall, but they did not twist or pummel.
From behind, Halstead heard fabric rustle, the sound of dinnerware settling onto porcelain. A rough voice commanded, with more than a note of amusement, "Let him go."
The hands fell away, and Halstead managed not to topple as he settled back onto his heels. He took a moment to gather himself, smoothed the pleats of his shirt, spared a withering glare at his would-be accosters, and then turned to face his target.
In the shadows of the booth, Section Chief Michael Raschel reclined at his table, just below the razor's edge of neon stage-light. The laser horizon bisected the air just above the semi-circle seating: light above, darkness below. Halstead stood in the radiance, half-blinded. Raschel waited in shadow, the folds of his suit blended into the crushed leather cushions, his eyes gleaming from his umbral cave.
Raschel's snakeskin fingers tapped out a drumbeat on the table, half-concealed by empty scotch tumblers and barely-sampled lobster. In the darkness, Halstead could see the hard lines of the section chief's face, needle-sharp eyes nestled under armored flaps of a brow. Raschel shook his head, as if he'd just been disappointed by a joke, then glanced at his companion.
Beside the Agency man, wrapped in translucent topaz gauze, an uptown princess giggled in response. She pressed one hand on the flat of his coat, the other slipping behind his back. On her face, she wore the fawning, vacant expression of the supplicant admirer, besotted with the transubstantiated power seated beside her. Raschel flashed her another wry smile, let her bask in the Party's reflected glory. His eyes, though, never left Halstead, and they conveyed a secret punchline that only the two understood.
Halstead could almost feel the filth coursing over him. It was like he'd been dunked a putrid river. He picked his words precisely, careful not to snap or snarl, and he advised the young woman, "Excuse me. Ma'am. He and I have business."
She pulled her adoring gaze from the chief, swung her head with drunken swagger. Towards Halstead, her smile carried neither respect nor affection, but the disdain reserved for misbehaving pets. She gave him no reply but the slow flutter of over-weighted lashes before she returned to her paramour.
Raschel, though, paid her no mind. He pulled his arm from her grasp, ignored her sniff of protest, and welcomed, "Please, sit down. You should have called - I'd have gotten you in the front door."
Halstead bit back his reply. He reached into his coat, ignored the sudden tension from the guards, produced a datacard, and tossed it across the table. The spinning black tablet knocked aside a soup-bowl, clattered through Raschel's silverware, and came to rest, glowing.
Raschel ignored it. Instead, he introduced, "Eyra, this is Bill. He's an old friend. Bill, this is Eyra. She's just leaving."
The courtesan nodded absently. A moment later, the thoughts connected, her heavy eyes flashed wide, and she whirled to face her patron. Raschel waved her away without a glance, a credit chit shining between his fingers. His guards were at full attention.
She snapped the card from his hand and stormed away, not waiting for an escort. She cursed at Halstead as she passed, a blur of newspeak pouring through her neon lips. Halstead didn't bother to decode the slander.
Raschel sent his guards out after, one to watch the stairs, the other to 'mind the girl'. When he turned back towards Halstead, his professional smile was firmly in place.
Halstead stated, "You're an ass."
Raschel shrugged and admitted, "The Party life is a party life." He motioned towards the opposite corner of the booth, below the division of light, and offered, "Have a seat, Bill."
Halstead chose to stand.
Raschel asked, "How's retirement?"
Halstead accused, "Thirty days. You couldn't last thirty days?"
Raschel shrugged.
"You looked me in the eyes. You said you were sorry. Stupid me, I thought you were talking about the past."
"I don't know what you're going on about." Raschel replied, his voice flat. He used his fork to point towards his butter-drenched lobster and offered, "You want some sea-roach?"
Halstead refused the diversion. He pointed to the datacard, "Look at it. That's my name on orders I didn't sign. It's postdated. Someone shuffled a lot of our best and brightest to a shell-town in the middle of the Hub. I forwarded it to Harper, but it kept popping back at me, said it needed my personal approval. The date stamp was junk, too, kept saying it was two months ago."
Raschel gave a small grunt, paired it with a shrug, and hypothesized, "Computer glitch. Did you call tech support?" He made a show out of dipping his biscuit into the butter pool.
"Don't bullshit me. That's a draw-up for a black op. This has Agency prints all over it. I checked with Newman, but he stonewalled me. He's slimy, but we both know he's not clever enough for this. The whole operation is black. Every soldier involved is on leave, on-call, or away for training. All the equipment is unmarked - fell off between shipments. The whole thing may as well not exist, my name is on it, but I'm retired and shouldn't see it. Putting this together must have taken months of scheming, not to mention and a complete disregard for all chains of command, structure, or integrity." Halstead paused, then leveled the accusation, "Naturally, I thought of you."
"I see my reputation is unsullied."
"Why did you need my name?"
Raschel's smile faded, his voice dropped to a whisper-growl, and he replied, "Relax, Bill. You're retired. This won't touch you."
"You put my name on it." Halstead gave no ground.
"It's a glitch. It won't be there on the backend."
"What. Is. It?"
Raschel sighed, wrath blurring into resignation. He admitted, "It's a mission, Bill. The kind you don't do anymore."
Halstead glowered. He let the silence carry his charge.
"Hekate."
The codeword landed hard, sucked the air from the booth. Halstead knew what it meant: it was a classification for the blackest of black, reserved for state secrets so damaging they could only be alluded to but never spoken. He felt the familiar tingle at the base of his neck, the hair standing straight on his arms.
Before he could reply, Raschel changed the conversation, "Now, let's talk about something else. Have you tried the crab? It's fantastic."
"I don't want the goddamn crab."
"No, really. It's good." Raschel glanced over his ledge and watched the singer amid the twisting pillars of light. He added, "Let's not do this. Just walk away."
For a long moment, Halstead stood in silence. He'd come here to accuse. To fight. He'd expected Raschel to posture or bluster. Instead, the Agency man had deferred. Demurred. It didn't fit. Halstead said, "There's more to this."
Raschel shook his head.
"Tell me." Halstead insisted.
"No lube, Bill? Fine, have it your way. Sit down. Have a drink. We'll talk." Raschel adjusted his collar, pulled the starched ring from the rough-red flesh of his jowls. "How'd you get in, anyway? Health inspector bullshit?"
Halstead took his seat but replied with a shrug.
"Goddamnit. Fucking clowns at these places. You'd think they never heard of implicit deny." Raschel snatched up another biscuit. "You really should have called. You could've gotten something from the kitchen. Now it's just drinks. Best cocktails in midward, though."
"Talk."
Raschel snatched up his tumbler. He let the scotch rest on his tongue, closed his eyes, then swallowed. After a deep breath, he admitted, "Sakharov's back on the board."
Halstead sucked in a breath, felt his fingers curl into a fist. He said, "I thought he was gone."
Raschel shook his head, poured two glasses. This time, Halstead accepted.
Raschel admitted, "Everyone did. A couple months back, we started getting hits on a name: Koschei Tugarin, the new head of the Perimeter Group."
"Any particular meaning to the pseudonym?"
Raschel gave another sigh. "Nothing beyond the expected. It's the kind of sinister-juvenile horseshit a teenager would cook up."
"Who's his client?"
Raschel shook his head. "I'm going over the line for you, Bill. For old time's. But there's a limit."
Halstead nodded. Instead, he asked, "How about the target?"
"Airship. Twelve hundred civies."
"His price?"
"Complete dissolution of the Authority."
Halstead scowled.
"Exactly." Raschel replied.
The pieces clicked, and Halstead felt the icy certainty settle into his stomach. He stated, "It's a suicide mission."
"Bill, please..."
"You used my name to send all those people to their deaths."
Raschel took a drink. He didn't need to speak the words, 'it's my job'. Halstead could read those chilling syllables on every twitch of the old spy's leathery face.
"You son of a bitch." Halstead whispered.
Raschel drank again.
"You were trying to save me." Halstead felt the snort-laugh burst through his fury. "You were!"
"I meant what I said. We were friends once."
Halstead downed his entire glass. He even managed not to gasp as the warmth wormed through his gut.
Raschel watched, cold eyes measuring up and down.
Halstead demanded, "Reactivate me."
"No."
"You want that order signed? Reactivate me."
"Don't do this."
Halstead shook his head. He wiped the trace of bourbon from his lips, flung the drops to the ground. He pulled up a napkin, tried to scrub the trace liquor from his fingers. This place disgusted him. The greasy feast-table, the sensuous roll of the drum, the neons, the narcotic haze - all of it made him sick. He glanced over to Raschel, perched in shadow amid a fortress of stained silver and empty glass, and he wanted nothing more than to burn this wretched club down to the base-deck.
He answered, "I have to."
Raschel slumped in his booth. He flicked one hand across his widows-peak, pushed a strand of thinning hair towards the white wings on his temples. He followed the motion with his head and turned out towards the dancefloor once more, lost his thoughts in the chaos. "You're playing into his hand, Bill. That high horse is gonna get you killed."
"Whose hand?" Halstead asked. "Sakharov's?"
Raschel shook his head.
"I told you I'm in. That gets me need-to-know."
In the neon flash, the weathered old chief might have almost shown remorse. He admitted, "If I tell you, I'll never talk you out of this."
Halstead waited.
"He's playing on your arrogance. He wants you to take the bait. That's why I'm keeping you out!"
"Who, Mike?! Pyotr's bad enough! Who's holding his leash?!"
When Raschel glanced back, Halstead felt his blood turn cold. There was no mistaking the dread writ across that face. This was no childhood fear, no irrational phobia. This was the dismay of the aged miner when he felt the earth shift under his feet, the terror of the life-long cynic when a midnight wind rattled through the Collapse boneyard.
"Striker's alive." Raschel confessed.
Halstead sank into his seat, all fights forgotten, all arguments abandoned.
Raschel slumped back, hands wide in an 'I told you' shrug. His suitcoat fell open to reveal the silver party shirt beneath, its gray-scale symmetry broken only by the gold-thread chain hung around his neck like a lazy noose. For a long moment, there was nothing but the pulse of synchron and neon thunder.
Halstead broke the spell. He pulled his chair forward, leaned over the table like it was a tac board, and asked, "What's he want?"
"Revenge? Vindication? To prove a point?" Raschel offered. "There's no council holding his leash this time. No one to check him."
"And Sakharov?"
"His hand on the field. Perimeter is his primary asset. Not enough genejobs to go around."
"The hostages?"
"Don't do this, Bill." Raschel pled.
Halstead shook his head. "You already read me in. Can't kick me out now."
"No one's here but us. Walk away. You've got something worth keeping." Raschel reached up as if he was about to pound his breast for emphasis.
"I won't send my teams where I won't go."
"They're not yours anymore!"
Halstead responded with a raised eyebrow.
"Bill, he's playing you! He wants you in the field! That stick in your ass makes you predictable!"
"Standards do constrain a man." Halstead replied. He didn't bother to withhold the verbal backhand.
"Exactly." Raschel agreed. "So fuck off and let us handle this."
"No." Halstead said. "Not Striker. Never him." Before Raschel could protest, Halstead clarified, "I'm running the op. You needed my signature to get it rolling, I'll give it on one condition. You cut me out? I'll use every drop of influence I have to carve back in. You know I have friends."
"Look at you!" Raschel mocked. "Little Billy isn't so above politics, after all! And here I thought you were going to die from that terminal sneer."
Halstead countered, "I won't bore you with arguments from principle. Let's talk pragmatism. You need a good commander, and you need deniability. Who better than the man who skunked Striker the first time? Who more deniable than a publicly retired old warhound, desperately clinging to old glory. I'm good for the task, and I'm easy to blackball if we fail."
Halstead watched as the Raschel mulled. In the strobe-shadow, he could almost see the little black gears whirring behind those stony eyes.
Raschel tapped his thick-sausage fingers, Agency ring rapping on leathery knuckles. He said, "You make a good case."
Halstead nodded. He leaned forward once more and asked, "The hostages? Where does Sakharov have them?"
"An airship. Hardened with Perimeter mercs and a Phalanx AI."
"The strike plan?"
"Rough. We've got a hook out for a specialist to beat the Phalanx, but the infiltration plan is sketchy at best."
Halstead nodded. Bits of half-plans began to swirl in the back of his mind, undefined and vague, but ready to be bolted onto any one of a dozen scenarios. "And you're confident in the intel?"
Raschel growled, "There's another twist."
"What's that?"
"One of them turned himself in. He's cooperating against his brother."
The world spun around him, and Halstead had to steady himself against the table.
Raschel agreed, "That's what I said. Worse, he requested you by name. That's why I cut you out."
Halstead tried to form a cogent argument. He drew only blanks.
Raschel leaned in and whispered, "I've got a counter-proposal, Bill. You sign it, and we bring it to the director. With both of us making the case, he'll change plans. We can skip this shitshow, blast Sakharov's petting zoo out of the sky, and go after Striker the old fashioned way."
Halstead demanded, "'Blast the petting zoo?' That's twelve hundred people."
"They're already dead."
"Not by us." Halstead countered. "That's not what we do. Not what I do."
"This isn't the time-"
"I won't do it. Not when there's another-"
Raschel rolled his eyes. He scoffed, "See, this is what-"
Halstead snatched the Agency man by the collar, grabbed the gold-thread chain, and pulled Raschel across the table. He snapped, "We are not murderers! We are soldiers! We will kill and die as required, but we will not be butchers! Not again!"
Raschel didn't blink. As icy as ever, the chief replied, "And what do you plan? If that strike fails, Sakharov will use the ship to kill a hundred times as many. And we'll be down an asset."
Halstead tightened his grip. He wanted to throw a punch. His knuckles grew white on the silver collar, and the gold bit into his pale-stained flesh. He drew a hissed breath, forced himself calm, and let Raschel go. He admitted, "It might end the same, but we have to try. Otherwise, how are we any better than Striker? Or Sakharov?"
"Or me?" Raschel asked. He said it with a laugh, but there was only bitterness in his breath. He straightened his shirt, carefully threaded his chain back beneath. "This may surprise you, but none of your posturing will matter if you lose."
"And winning a fight is pointless when the prize is a pile of ashes." Halstead replied.
Raschel snorted.
Halstead stated, "How about this: we make a play, and if it fails?"
"Hekate." Raschel agreed.
William Halstead, formerly retired, drew a deep breath and rose from his seat. He said, "Send me the papers. Enjoy your dinner."
Halstead descended the ramp. At the bottom, Raschel's guards stood vigil with another uptown princess. She couldn't have been a day past twenty-two, bound in skintight translucent silver. She clutched at her vapor-pen and wound her tongue through vapor trails that licked from her half-open mouth. Her glossy eyes shone in the blacklights, contrasting her glowing paints.
Halstead kept walking, ignored the girl's breathy insults and the smirks of the guards. He left the chief to his twilight court and shadow throne. Raschel and this city deserved each other.
For now, Halstead buried the old wound, forced down the fury and broken oaths. There wasn't time for that. Not now. He had a job to do.
If he was honest, he hadn't enjoyed retirement, anyway.
Anywhere below uptown, he couldn't see the sky but for a peep-sight slit through the towers. From loward down, the rain burned, the lights blazed, and the racket-rumble never stopped. Midward up, every corner dared a glass-slicked plunge. Man wasn't meant for the chthonian depths of dronetown nor the noxious heights above.
Halstead had grown up in an outer zone, one of the orange-band strips the Authority all but forbade. It had been filled with hostile fauna, hidden dangers, scavs, and old war leftovers. If you broke your leg in a ditch or stepped on a Collapse landmine, no medbot was going to pull you out. You'd feed the vultures or a scrapper, and it would be days before anyone knew you'd died.
But out there, he could see the sky, and for Halstead, that beat every convenience of the hive.
And yet, he found himself sitting on a capital bench, upper midward, watching the neons shine from the wet blacktop's obsidian mirrors. A groundcar rolled past and splash-shattered the skyline's reflection. Halstead looked up and surveyed his target.
The second-swankiest club in midward stood at the edge of a promenade tier, a neon-purple cutout against the black ravine and the iridescent twinkle of the distant tower-wall. The club front was accessible by the groundcar rim-road, while its back was reserved for lift docks and the open dark.
Even as high as midward, he couldn't see the stars. Too much light poured from the depths. From the orbitals, the cities looked like tectonic plates bursting, riven with laser cracks like splitting seams. Even at this height, the starlight lay concealed behind the glare. For not the first time tonight, Colonel William Halstead, retired, wished for the star-specked skies over his ranch.
The ragged lump shifted beside him, revealed the edges of greyed flesh amid soiled clothes. Halstead followed the movement from the corner of his eye, checked for threat, and dismissed. The vagrant curled on the edge of the bench, unable to settle. That was by design, of course. Public transit benches always had gaps in their beams and curves on their seat. They were comfortable enough to sit on, but hell to sleep. Just another way to remind the unwanted: 'go be miserable somewhere lower'.
Sensing no threat, Halstead returned to his stakeout. In many ways, his job was the most comforting part of his evening. He'd never felt at ease in the city, but he'd always been comfortable on the hunt, and it would take more than a few weeks of retirement to dull a lifetime of soldiering.
Another set of groundcars rolled between Halstead's target and his maglev-station bench. Most were new, passerby vehicles on their automated routes. One was an unmarked security car. Halstead reset his mental timer when it passed. He'd made that cruiser, two passes ago. The idiots didn't even try to hide their route. That kind of arrogance got men killed.
Halstead's target profile was nearly complete. He'd counted the cars, marked the cameras, and memorized the guards. The line of would-be revelers trailed down the block, a neon-bathed rainbow parade of gleaming shimmersilk and kilocred skinjobs. Halstead marked them, too, until he knew who got in, who stayed out, who paid, and who didn't.
The club groomed a specific clientele. Every member of the iridescent queue was the kind who thought that dropping to midward was 'slumming', but even among that frocked and feathered crowd, there was careful alchemy. The bouncers let in two young-and-pretty pieces of paparazzi royalty for every stiff-suited powerbroker. Gaudy accessories and trendy skinwork might help, but names bought admission. Attendees traded access for time, flesh for favor, and everyone got what they wanted.
Despite well-trained neutrality, Halstead couldn't stop his lips from turning. The unasked question hounded him, 'Is this what I fought for?'
He pushed the doubts away. He had a job to do, and the first step was getting into that club. He lacked the clout, credits, or couture to buy through those gilded doors, and the bouncers were too keyed-up to be slipped or rushed. Those weren't thugs, in those too-tight slicksuits. Halstead noted their staggered patrols, their disciplined radio checks, the staggered posts - these were surplus soldiers, Section Thirty-Fives, winners of the 'peace dividend' that dumped a couple million veterans into civilian life. With one stroke of a pen, entire armies vanished from the payroll and flooded the streets with angry, idle, well-trained kids, and not enough work to employ them. Most of them had nothing to their name but range time, PT, and elan. It was no surprise that the businesses most hiring were often private, discreet, and not entirely clean.
It was a goddamn mess.
Halstead forced down his scowl and turned back towards his objective. The front door wasn't an option, not with this clientele or security. He'd never been the tech guy, and a breaching charge was a bit more bang than appropriate, however satisfying it might be. Fortunately, the club had a back door, and social hacking was a hell of a lot smoother than its technological twin. As a bonus, it was one of the few things that got easier once his hair turned gray.
His target had arrived twenty minutes ago, dropped by a black liftcar that may as well have had the word "AGENCY" stenciled down the side. Everything since had been a waiting game.
Halstead glanced at his watch, then surveyed the guards at their posts. He found every one of them where he expected: two by the door, one with the valet, another two on the balcony stairs. The rotation was about to start, which meant it was time for him to move.
Halstead wound down the sidewalk, circled around to the block-end crossing. Every meter he drew away from the target stretched him like elastic, screamed at him to get his eyes back on the objective, but this was a necessary risk. He couldn't dash across the traffic divide, that would pull too many eyes. No, the hatch-walk, one block down, was the better call. He passed under the street, clambered up the stairs, and looped back towards the club.
On the midward plateau, the towers stood like obsidian knives, their windows shining. Stone, steel, and glass varied only by refraction. Streetlights and headlights echoed through a carnival maze, and the midnight hung as the unending blur between neon dusk and shining dawn.
Halstead closed towards the club, threaded the stacked queues of patrons-in-waiting. He slipped through the files of asymmetric-cuts and vat-leather handbags like a shadow; his dull jacket vanished in the sprays of luminescent paint and electric fibers. To the glitterati, Halstead was nothing but another nameless civil servant, a gray man, not one worth remembering. When he cut down his chosen alley, none marked his passing.
Off the main strip, the steam clung to the stone, and the blacktop shone like a funhouse mirror. The neons turned garish, and even this high in midward, the mix of mildew, bleach, and ion scrubbers stabbed at Halstead's nose. The machinery churned below, the pulsing gasp of the city's mechanical lungs resounding through the vents. A fog cloud billowed, hot air flash-cooling as it plumed through the steel lattice. The distant scent of oil and heated metal joined the milieu. Halstead seized his moment and pushed through the haze, cloaked from the electric eyes.
He took the back steps at a jog, pressed himself nearly flush to the kitchen door. He placed one hand in his jacket, wrapped his fingers around the folds of faux-leather, and waited. When the door bolt clicked, he raised his free hand, as if he'd been angrily stabbing at the buzzer.
A place like this generated a lot of trash, and no one respectable wanted a chute inside the building. That meant someone low on the totem pole would have to haul the bags out by hand, drag them across the alley, and pitch them down the compactor hatch. The dinner rush would be winding down, and shifts had to be kept, so, like clockwork, the door swung wide. Silhouetted against the yellow-white kitchen glow, a young busboy dragged out a mass of black bags, earbuds in and augsim visor up.
Halstead blocked his path, and the youth crashed into him. The busboy stumbled back, his visor flashing clear to reveal wide, panicked eyes.
Halstead snarled, "Well, thank God!" He dropped his hand from the buzzer and produced his badge-in-wallet. Before the kid could adjust his eyes to the neon-wash twilight, Halstead shoved the badge-shield into his face and barked, "City health! How long were you going to leave me out here?!"
The busboy opened his mouth, formed only the first stutter of a syllable.
Halstead cut him off and snapped, "The inspection?! Don't tell me you forgot!"
The busboy staggered back, nearly toppled over his bags. Halstead sneered as he passed, flipped his badge closed, and slipped it back into his jacket. He strode through the storeroom as if he owned the place, ignored every stammered apology behind. Sometimes, it still amazed him, just how many places a man could get with an old base identicard, a cheap suit, and chutzpah.
Halstead paraded through the backrooms as the very picture of an overweening bureaucrat, equal parts flunky and tyrant. With every step, he inspected. He scowled at the pots and burners. He harrumphed at the rehydrator. He met the turn-aside stares of the cooks and waiters, made them blink, and stitched cryptic notes on his datapad. He made one half-loop, careful to avoid the chef, and with one final flash of a badge, slipped cleanly into the dance-hall.
The door-seal broke, and a wall of sound washed over him.
The lights pulsed with the bass-thump, lasers swayed with the horns. A crowd undulated with every surge of the music, drawn across time and space. One moment was hot-yellow and wailing treble, high-desert flash, and searing haze. The next surged with a purple-strobe bassline, plunged the dancers under the roaring tide.
All around him, the spotlights twirled, carved a tornado through sound and sweat. Blue to green, orange to purple, blazing white to glowing black. The patterns command attention, pulled his eyes back and forth, from the twirling shimmersilks on the dance floor to the gleaming brass horns flashing on the stage.
Halstead set his eyes on a fixed point - the white-blue spotlights over the gleaming brass-and-glass bar. Fire burst across that gleaming counter, the flourish of a pyrotechnic cocktail. The bartender, clad in white and gold, spun the flaming drink down the slick-top, and his crowd roared in response.
Halstead steadied on that point, fixed it in his mental map. Everything here was designed to daze and distract. He pushed the noise away and scanned the room.
The pounding drums faded, the crowds settled, and the lights cooled. The horns lowered, and the wildfire faded.
Halstead spotted the director's booth high above, a nestled gleam of monitors perched behind a muted-black guardrail. That was the point of control, the nerve center. There, the directors would study their banks of monitors, their metadata feed, the metrics of body-heat, rhythm, and alcohol sales. Synchron clubs ran on data. A limited AI ran a sample beat, set a rhythm. The band improv-riffed on the groove. The lasers drove the dancers, spotlights sought the highlights, but the crowd controlled the data and fed back to the beat. The band chased the algo, and the algo chased the band. The dance was both product and source.
Some might have found poetry in this, but Halstead saw only the mechanism. The current lull was an opportunity, but it would not last. This was the data spooling, the clinically-designed refractory period before the next eruption.
He swept the room, sought his man. His target wouldn't be on the club floor, pulsing with the tide. Nor would he sit at the bar, drinking stunt-mixers from glowing flutes. Halstead's eyes were pulled to the yawning black above the stage, towards the hole in the sound, where people observed instead of danced. Those balconies were his quarry's domain, the shadow-cloaked heights, watching yet unwatchable. Adjacent to the action, but impartial. Halstead felt his scowl return, his whiskers brushing along his lip. This was too predictable.
He plotted his course along the inside wall, below the sight-angles of the balconies. He stepped from the walkway, slipped along the outside the crowd. Two steps into his path, he heard the tell-tale song of the synchron beat, the creaking, accelerating 'drip-rip-ririri'. He spared one glance towards the stage, where a singer had taken the mic. The drumline fired, and she belted out a wordless melody, swaying with the algo.
The shimmersilk diva crooned, and smoke poured over the dancefloor, laser-lit red and gold. Halstead fixed his weathered hand on the cold brass of the guardrail, pulled himself along the edge of the sea. Electric thunderheads rolled across him, sound and fury pulsing in time to adaptive harmonies.
He stayed to the edges, took the long way about, as the music pounded. Better to go long than risk the crowd, where the spotlights might mistake his purposeful stride for dance-variation, and give him unwanted attention.
Through the sweat-soaked haze, he advanced. He skirted the dancers and wormed through the peripheral coves, past neon-highlighted waitstaff in form-cling slicks, around the bouncers and lurkers waiting to ply their twilight trades.
Finally, he reached his exit, the cut-out-black form of an arch and the barest hint of a rising ramp. Halstead felt his way up the guardrail. As he turned from the dancefloor, it backlit his ascent in neon flashes and whisps of blacklight fog. He climbed, passed the arch, then another, and the tumult faded in layers, the roar wicked away by acoustic-foam partitions.
The world faded from chaos to fuzzy blue-black nocturne, lit only by the distant storm and the deep-purple glowstrip walls. Halstead slowed, allowed his senses to recover. Subtle lines emerged from the nether-light: Black leather couches. Deep crimson carpets. Brass handrails.
A waiter floated past, carting a tray of neon drinks. A pusher turned his trade, and a hooker worked her mark. With flashes of synthflesh and bleached powder, the underworld flirted about him. Halstead pushed past them all.
His target would be further above, nestled into the tiers of oyster-shell booths. He ascended.
He slipped up the stairs, cut through the fragrant air. In the club heights, the oil and ion stench of the dancefloor receded and revealed the perfumes of vape, liquor, and sex. He didn't bother to check his disgust.
He ascended over the balcony lip, the dancefloor once-more dawning past the black-cut of the railing as he climbed. The bass-pulse returned, muted but no less powerful. He glanced over the cut-away walls, tried to catch a glimpse into the booths, but they were blocked to him. No surprise. These luxury theaters were designed for voyeurism, to see and not be seen. Power, even in hedonism.
But even without sight, blocked by the partitions, and without sound, drowned by the band, the smell told him enough. Lust leveraged proximity to power, all carried by the harmonic heartbeat. In the ephemeral economy of twilight, nothing existed beyond these walls and this moment.
Halstead spared a thought for the dronetowns boiling below. Someday, a cake-eating mob was going to storm this place, and he wouldn't blame them for the pitchforks they carried.
Halstead cut through the balcony terraces, threaded the canyons between the oyster booths. He passed old money, repeat-skinjobs stuck in an uncanny age between eighteen and eighty. He skirted undersecretaries and executives, inquisitorial stares and nimble fingers, handshake deals and 'mutual understanding'. None of these were his target.
Halstead knew his destination. There, on an elevated terrace, half-hidden from view, half-prominent before the crowds, sat a crescent booth atop a pearlescent stair. From that height, the occupant could make himself obvious or invisible, depending on the angle. From the front steps, he could hold court, while from the back, no one would see who came or went. This was the type of 'perfect position' that a couple of decades of combat had long taught him wasn't worth holding. If you saw it, the enemy saw it, and trying to take it just got you killed. It was often far better to deny such a position to the enemy, or lay in ambush and skewer your opponent when they took the bait. Only a fool stuck their flag on such clearly contestable ground.
Or perhaps, not just fools, but the kind of men who would place more value in the symbolism of a position than its utility. A throne was such a locus, and a king was just the man who could hold it.
Halstead took the back stairs.
The first bouncer was meant to be seen, cut from the mold of suit-and-tie enforcer favored by city princelings. The man resembled nothing so much as an overfed bull, stuffed into a tiny suit, corded neck bulging at the collar, and meat-hook hands half-strangled by cufflinks. Unfortunately, the human bludgeon blocked the stairwell and waited, glaring at the world. Stealth would carry him no further, so Halstead changed modes. He waited for the bouncer to look after a particularly pretty waitress, then bolted past. The suit saw him move, but Halstead was already across the gap.
Halstead clambered up the shadowed stairwell, raced towards the portal of light above. From behind, he heard the shout-grunted, "Stop!"
A man that size couldn't enjoy running up a ladder in a too-small suit. Halstead had a chance.
A second guard appeared at the mouth of the stairwell, dressed similarly to the first, but wiry in build, his suit baggy and ill-fitted, all the better to conceal a gun. A third, mirror to the second, emerged from the opposite flank. This stairwell was closed.
Halstead ignored the obvious and crashed through the twin guards. He broke into the neon dawn and smashed through grabbing hands. For just a moment, he burst from the darkness, lunged out over a dinner-table, and shouted, "Mike!"
The bouncers catapulted him back into the shadows. Rough hands snatched his arms, spun him about. He heard the snick of a baton slipping from its holster, and he knew what was coming.
"Hold!" The command rang through the oyster booth.
The baton never struck. Hard hands pressed Halstead into the wall, but they did not twist or pummel.
From behind, Halstead heard fabric rustle, the sound of dinnerware settling onto porcelain. A rough voice commanded, with more than a note of amusement, "Let him go."
The hands fell away, and Halstead managed not to topple as he settled back onto his heels. He took a moment to gather himself, smoothed the pleats of his shirt, spared a withering glare at his would-be accosters, and then turned to face his target.
In the shadows of the booth, Section Chief Michael Raschel reclined at his table, just below the razor's edge of neon stage-light. The laser horizon bisected the air just above the semi-circle seating: light above, darkness below. Halstead stood in the radiance, half-blinded. Raschel waited in shadow, the folds of his suit blended into the crushed leather cushions, his eyes gleaming from his umbral cave.
Raschel's snakeskin fingers tapped out a drumbeat on the table, half-concealed by empty scotch tumblers and barely-sampled lobster. In the darkness, Halstead could see the hard lines of the section chief's face, needle-sharp eyes nestled under armored flaps of a brow. Raschel shook his head, as if he'd just been disappointed by a joke, then glanced at his companion.
Beside the Agency man, wrapped in translucent topaz gauze, an uptown princess giggled in response. She pressed one hand on the flat of his coat, the other slipping behind his back. On her face, she wore the fawning, vacant expression of the supplicant admirer, besotted with the transubstantiated power seated beside her. Raschel flashed her another wry smile, let her bask in the Party's reflected glory. His eyes, though, never left Halstead, and they conveyed a secret punchline that only the two understood.
Halstead could almost feel the filth coursing over him. It was like he'd been dunked a putrid river. He picked his words precisely, careful not to snap or snarl, and he advised the young woman, "Excuse me. Ma'am. He and I have business."
She pulled her adoring gaze from the chief, swung her head with drunken swagger. Towards Halstead, her smile carried neither respect nor affection, but the disdain reserved for misbehaving pets. She gave him no reply but the slow flutter of over-weighted lashes before she returned to her paramour.
Raschel, though, paid her no mind. He pulled his arm from her grasp, ignored her sniff of protest, and welcomed, "Please, sit down. You should have called - I'd have gotten you in the front door."
Halstead bit back his reply. He reached into his coat, ignored the sudden tension from the guards, produced a datacard, and tossed it across the table. The spinning black tablet knocked aside a soup-bowl, clattered through Raschel's silverware, and came to rest, glowing.
Raschel ignored it. Instead, he introduced, "Eyra, this is Bill. He's an old friend. Bill, this is Eyra. She's just leaving."
The courtesan nodded absently. A moment later, the thoughts connected, her heavy eyes flashed wide, and she whirled to face her patron. Raschel waved her away without a glance, a credit chit shining between his fingers. His guards were at full attention.
She snapped the card from his hand and stormed away, not waiting for an escort. She cursed at Halstead as she passed, a blur of newspeak pouring through her neon lips. Halstead didn't bother to decode the slander.
Raschel sent his guards out after, one to watch the stairs, the other to 'mind the girl'. When he turned back towards Halstead, his professional smile was firmly in place.
Halstead stated, "You're an ass."
Raschel shrugged and admitted, "The Party life is a party life." He motioned towards the opposite corner of the booth, below the division of light, and offered, "Have a seat, Bill."
Halstead chose to stand.
Raschel asked, "How's retirement?"
Halstead accused, "Thirty days. You couldn't last thirty days?"
Raschel shrugged.
"You looked me in the eyes. You said you were sorry. Stupid me, I thought you were talking about the past."
"I don't know what you're going on about." Raschel replied, his voice flat. He used his fork to point towards his butter-drenched lobster and offered, "You want some sea-roach?"
Halstead refused the diversion. He pointed to the datacard, "Look at it. That's my name on orders I didn't sign. It's postdated. Someone shuffled a lot of our best and brightest to a shell-town in the middle of the Hub. I forwarded it to Harper, but it kept popping back at me, said it needed my personal approval. The date stamp was junk, too, kept saying it was two months ago."
Raschel gave a small grunt, paired it with a shrug, and hypothesized, "Computer glitch. Did you call tech support?" He made a show out of dipping his biscuit into the butter pool.
"Don't bullshit me. That's a draw-up for a black op. This has Agency prints all over it. I checked with Newman, but he stonewalled me. He's slimy, but we both know he's not clever enough for this. The whole operation is black. Every soldier involved is on leave, on-call, or away for training. All the equipment is unmarked - fell off between shipments. The whole thing may as well not exist, my name is on it, but I'm retired and shouldn't see it. Putting this together must have taken months of scheming, not to mention and a complete disregard for all chains of command, structure, or integrity." Halstead paused, then leveled the accusation, "Naturally, I thought of you."
"I see my reputation is unsullied."
"Why did you need my name?"
Raschel's smile faded, his voice dropped to a whisper-growl, and he replied, "Relax, Bill. You're retired. This won't touch you."
"You put my name on it." Halstead gave no ground.
"It's a glitch. It won't be there on the backend."
"What. Is. It?"
Raschel sighed, wrath blurring into resignation. He admitted, "It's a mission, Bill. The kind you don't do anymore."
Halstead glowered. He let the silence carry his charge.
"Hekate."
The codeword landed hard, sucked the air from the booth. Halstead knew what it meant: it was a classification for the blackest of black, reserved for state secrets so damaging they could only be alluded to but never spoken. He felt the familiar tingle at the base of his neck, the hair standing straight on his arms.
Before he could reply, Raschel changed the conversation, "Now, let's talk about something else. Have you tried the crab? It's fantastic."
"I don't want the goddamn crab."
"No, really. It's good." Raschel glanced over his ledge and watched the singer amid the twisting pillars of light. He added, "Let's not do this. Just walk away."
For a long moment, Halstead stood in silence. He'd come here to accuse. To fight. He'd expected Raschel to posture or bluster. Instead, the Agency man had deferred. Demurred. It didn't fit. Halstead said, "There's more to this."
Raschel shook his head.
"Tell me." Halstead insisted.
"No lube, Bill? Fine, have it your way. Sit down. Have a drink. We'll talk." Raschel adjusted his collar, pulled the starched ring from the rough-red flesh of his jowls. "How'd you get in, anyway? Health inspector bullshit?"
Halstead took his seat but replied with a shrug.
"Goddamnit. Fucking clowns at these places. You'd think they never heard of implicit deny." Raschel snatched up another biscuit. "You really should have called. You could've gotten something from the kitchen. Now it's just drinks. Best cocktails in midward, though."
"Talk."
Raschel snatched up his tumbler. He let the scotch rest on his tongue, closed his eyes, then swallowed. After a deep breath, he admitted, "Sakharov's back on the board."
Halstead sucked in a breath, felt his fingers curl into a fist. He said, "I thought he was gone."
Raschel shook his head, poured two glasses. This time, Halstead accepted.
Raschel admitted, "Everyone did. A couple months back, we started getting hits on a name: Koschei Tugarin, the new head of the Perimeter Group."
"Any particular meaning to the pseudonym?"
Raschel gave another sigh. "Nothing beyond the expected. It's the kind of sinister-juvenile horseshit a teenager would cook up."
"Who's his client?"
Raschel shook his head. "I'm going over the line for you, Bill. For old time's. But there's a limit."
Halstead nodded. Instead, he asked, "How about the target?"
"Airship. Twelve hundred civies."
"His price?"
"Complete dissolution of the Authority."
Halstead scowled.
"Exactly." Raschel replied.
The pieces clicked, and Halstead felt the icy certainty settle into his stomach. He stated, "It's a suicide mission."
"Bill, please..."
"You used my name to send all those people to their deaths."
Raschel took a drink. He didn't need to speak the words, 'it's my job'. Halstead could read those chilling syllables on every twitch of the old spy's leathery face.
"You son of a bitch." Halstead whispered.
Raschel drank again.
"You were trying to save me." Halstead felt the snort-laugh burst through his fury. "You were!"
"I meant what I said. We were friends once."
Halstead downed his entire glass. He even managed not to gasp as the warmth wormed through his gut.
Raschel watched, cold eyes measuring up and down.
Halstead demanded, "Reactivate me."
"No."
"You want that order signed? Reactivate me."
"Don't do this."
Halstead shook his head. He wiped the trace of bourbon from his lips, flung the drops to the ground. He pulled up a napkin, tried to scrub the trace liquor from his fingers. This place disgusted him. The greasy feast-table, the sensuous roll of the drum, the neons, the narcotic haze - all of it made him sick. He glanced over to Raschel, perched in shadow amid a fortress of stained silver and empty glass, and he wanted nothing more than to burn this wretched club down to the base-deck.
He answered, "I have to."
Raschel slumped in his booth. He flicked one hand across his widows-peak, pushed a strand of thinning hair towards the white wings on his temples. He followed the motion with his head and turned out towards the dancefloor once more, lost his thoughts in the chaos. "You're playing into his hand, Bill. That high horse is gonna get you killed."
"Whose hand?" Halstead asked. "Sakharov's?"
Raschel shook his head.
"I told you I'm in. That gets me need-to-know."
In the neon flash, the weathered old chief might have almost shown remorse. He admitted, "If I tell you, I'll never talk you out of this."
Halstead waited.
"He's playing on your arrogance. He wants you to take the bait. That's why I'm keeping you out!"
"Who, Mike?! Pyotr's bad enough! Who's holding his leash?!"
When Raschel glanced back, Halstead felt his blood turn cold. There was no mistaking the dread writ across that face. This was no childhood fear, no irrational phobia. This was the dismay of the aged miner when he felt the earth shift under his feet, the terror of the life-long cynic when a midnight wind rattled through the Collapse boneyard.
"Striker's alive." Raschel confessed.
Halstead sank into his seat, all fights forgotten, all arguments abandoned.
Raschel slumped back, hands wide in an 'I told you' shrug. His suitcoat fell open to reveal the silver party shirt beneath, its gray-scale symmetry broken only by the gold-thread chain hung around his neck like a lazy noose. For a long moment, there was nothing but the pulse of synchron and neon thunder.
Halstead broke the spell. He pulled his chair forward, leaned over the table like it was a tac board, and asked, "What's he want?"
"Revenge? Vindication? To prove a point?" Raschel offered. "There's no council holding his leash this time. No one to check him."
"And Sakharov?"
"His hand on the field. Perimeter is his primary asset. Not enough genejobs to go around."
"The hostages?"
"Don't do this, Bill." Raschel pled.
Halstead shook his head. "You already read me in. Can't kick me out now."
"No one's here but us. Walk away. You've got something worth keeping." Raschel reached up as if he was about to pound his breast for emphasis.
"I won't send my teams where I won't go."
"They're not yours anymore!"
Halstead responded with a raised eyebrow.
"Bill, he's playing you! He wants you in the field! That stick in your ass makes you predictable!"
"Standards do constrain a man." Halstead replied. He didn't bother to withhold the verbal backhand.
"Exactly." Raschel agreed. "So fuck off and let us handle this."
"No." Halstead said. "Not Striker. Never him." Before Raschel could protest, Halstead clarified, "I'm running the op. You needed my signature to get it rolling, I'll give it on one condition. You cut me out? I'll use every drop of influence I have to carve back in. You know I have friends."
"Look at you!" Raschel mocked. "Little Billy isn't so above politics, after all! And here I thought you were going to die from that terminal sneer."
Halstead countered, "I won't bore you with arguments from principle. Let's talk pragmatism. You need a good commander, and you need deniability. Who better than the man who skunked Striker the first time? Who more deniable than a publicly retired old warhound, desperately clinging to old glory. I'm good for the task, and I'm easy to blackball if we fail."
Halstead watched as the Raschel mulled. In the strobe-shadow, he could almost see the little black gears whirring behind those stony eyes.
Raschel tapped his thick-sausage fingers, Agency ring rapping on leathery knuckles. He said, "You make a good case."
Halstead nodded. He leaned forward once more and asked, "The hostages? Where does Sakharov have them?"
"An airship. Hardened with Perimeter mercs and a Phalanx AI."
"The strike plan?"
"Rough. We've got a hook out for a specialist to beat the Phalanx, but the infiltration plan is sketchy at best."
Halstead nodded. Bits of half-plans began to swirl in the back of his mind, undefined and vague, but ready to be bolted onto any one of a dozen scenarios. "And you're confident in the intel?"
Raschel growled, "There's another twist."
"What's that?"
"One of them turned himself in. He's cooperating against his brother."
The world spun around him, and Halstead had to steady himself against the table.
Raschel agreed, "That's what I said. Worse, he requested you by name. That's why I cut you out."
Halstead tried to form a cogent argument. He drew only blanks.
Raschel leaned in and whispered, "I've got a counter-proposal, Bill. You sign it, and we bring it to the director. With both of us making the case, he'll change plans. We can skip this shitshow, blast Sakharov's petting zoo out of the sky, and go after Striker the old fashioned way."
Halstead demanded, "'Blast the petting zoo?' That's twelve hundred people."
"They're already dead."
"Not by us." Halstead countered. "That's not what we do. Not what I do."
"This isn't the time-"
"I won't do it. Not when there's another-"
Raschel rolled his eyes. He scoffed, "See, this is what-"
Halstead snatched the Agency man by the collar, grabbed the gold-thread chain, and pulled Raschel across the table. He snapped, "We are not murderers! We are soldiers! We will kill and die as required, but we will not be butchers! Not again!"
Raschel didn't blink. As icy as ever, the chief replied, "And what do you plan? If that strike fails, Sakharov will use the ship to kill a hundred times as many. And we'll be down an asset."
Halstead tightened his grip. He wanted to throw a punch. His knuckles grew white on the silver collar, and the gold bit into his pale-stained flesh. He drew a hissed breath, forced himself calm, and let Raschel go. He admitted, "It might end the same, but we have to try. Otherwise, how are we any better than Striker? Or Sakharov?"
"Or me?" Raschel asked. He said it with a laugh, but there was only bitterness in his breath. He straightened his shirt, carefully threaded his chain back beneath. "This may surprise you, but none of your posturing will matter if you lose."
"And winning a fight is pointless when the prize is a pile of ashes." Halstead replied.
Raschel snorted.
Halstead stated, "How about this: we make a play, and if it fails?"
"Hekate." Raschel agreed.
William Halstead, formerly retired, drew a deep breath and rose from his seat. He said, "Send me the papers. Enjoy your dinner."
Halstead descended the ramp. At the bottom, Raschel's guards stood vigil with another uptown princess. She couldn't have been a day past twenty-two, bound in skintight translucent silver. She clutched at her vapor-pen and wound her tongue through vapor trails that licked from her half-open mouth. Her glossy eyes shone in the blacklights, contrasting her glowing paints.
Halstead kept walking, ignored the girl's breathy insults and the smirks of the guards. He left the chief to his twilight court and shadow throne. Raschel and this city deserved each other.
For now, Halstead buried the old wound, forced down the fury and broken oaths. There wasn't time for that. Not now. He had a job to do.
If he was honest, he hadn't enjoyed retirement, anyway.