The Playground at Cougar Tooth
By Raven Green
From the "Afterworlds" Collection
Sometime
after the Sixth Great Migration…
Jayda
Barut liked that the truth about Uli Koche’s scar
was hers, and only hers.
She
watched longingly as Uli scrambled up the dusty steps of the Ruins of the
Ancestors with his crystalline-bladed militia knife clutched in his teeth, and
a broken magrail lacking in ammunition slung across his back by a frayed strap.
The boy wore scavenged and ripped-up militia fatigues two sizes too big for
him, and a pair of goggles that must have belonged to a gun-gyro pilot when
they were new. The goggles were pushed up on his forehead, revealing
characteristically bright Peltierite eyes. Under his left eye ran a scar from
his last argument with a warden. In the two years since that argument ended
badly, it had reduced to a pale pink but still visible line against his brown
skin that curved when he smiled.
On the
ground below the stepped, hypermetallic structure, Jayda, one year younger than
Uli, aimed her unloaded, broken-triggered handgun and shouted “Pow!
Pow! Pow!” slowly, deliberately, knowing that Uli had the
weapon that would have fired faster if it was loaded. The two of them followed
the rules of the game. No cheating.
Jayda
lacked her playmate’s scar, but recently she’d come
to think of the boy’s old injury as edgy and
mysterious. Scars were important. They told stories. The stories meant
something. All she had were scraped knees. Uli never told the underwhelming
truth about that scar, and he never told the same lie twice. Only Jayda knew
where it really came from.
Uli
assumed a mock firing position on the steps of the shortest of the ancient
power ziggurats in the Ruins and shouted back in much more rapid sequence,
simulating the imagined firing rate of his defunct magrail, “Vorpvorpvorpvorpvorpvorp!”
A
wasp-like gun-gyro buzzed across the deep blue sky of a late summer evening.
Its black rotor blades spun violently against the strong wind, and the craft
arced upward above the Sionna tower and fired several rounds at a dish-shaped
telecommunications array. A dark-gray road buggy pulled up on the side of the
rubble-strewn street at the edge of their playground, its wheels kicking dust
as it slowed to a stop with an electric whine that descended in pitch to
silence.
The
children went into hiding in the large watertubes beside the dry irrigation
ditch. From their hidden spots, they peeped out and watched as two
dark-jacketed figures left the driver’s and
front passenger’s seats of the covered road
buggy. They were a man and woman, maybe twice as old as Uli. The ambient
radioactivity in the city made her look much older, closer to forty. The woman
carried a tactical repeating crossbow with a clumsy belt of hypermetallic bolts
hanging from the launcher like the ventral ordinance rack of a missile cruiser.
She wore a black luxahyde jacket collared with fake fur. The man wore a black
duster jacket of lighter fabric and was armed with a toy soaker-gun filled with
blue liquid that the kids knew was an irritant or corrosive fluid.
Uli
crept, unseen, into the same piece of glow-tagged tubing as Jayda, that once
supplied the reactors inside the ancient ziggurats with water from the now
antique pipes that ran beneath Cougar Tooth Drive. Sometimes, they liked to
explore those pipes, and even slept down there when it was too cold to sleep
under the shadow of the gas giant, Peltier Prime.
They
were street children, well-learned in the ways of eluding slavecatchers,
wireheads, tranqpoppers, and buzzhounds. Though skittish, they were content
with their daily lives, stealing bread, milk, vegetables and candied fruit from
the stallfolk in the market and playing among the Ruins of the Ancestors by
Cougar Tooth Drive with the discarded guns from clashes between the Disruptors
and the Higher Order’s captroopers.
The
Captroopers of the Higher Order had descended from their mothercarriers in
charred, blackened eggs last summer to quell the riots over Sigmark Glick’s
murder by the militia. The occupying force had outstayed their welcome now by
almost a lunar year. Uli and Jayda had never seen anyone in the Order who was
above the captroopers, but they figured whoever that was had to have even less
of their humanity remaining than the feared soldiers whose service their
masters rewarded with biotech upgrades. Their young imaginations crafted in
their minds a sinister, bat-faced ghoulish subspecies behind the flight
controls of the massive Mothercarrier-class
ships that they knew from the streamcasts still circled their world beyond the
sky. And maybe, something even more sinister in the rank above them. But this
was only their imagination. They could not even see the great ships unless they
crossed before Peltier Prime or its sun, and even though they appeared
deceptively tiny against these heavenly bodies, their presence was felt every
time the dropfighters and gyros flew overhead, and when the captroopers and the
Disruptors clashed in the streets.
“They
gotta be Disruptors,” said Uli, in a low whisper.
“Uh-huh,” said
Jayda, nodding. “Blackcoats. I seen those two
before. At Umbral Core. If the captroopers spot ’em,
there will be a clash,” said
Jayda.
“Aye-yeah,
girl,” said Uli. “I wish
we had real bullets. Then I’d blast any cappies. Seems
like everybody’s running outta bullets but captroopers, huh?”
He
struck a menacing pose with his empty magrail, like he could take on the entire
world. His scar seemed bigger, and more mysterious when he presumed that he
could. Jayda wanted to believe him.
“Cappies
gotta be too much for you to handle, Yoolz. They’re all
modded, like not even human anymore, not really. Can’t go
one-on-one with those kolkers, you
gotta have an army backin’ that.”
“Yeah,
but they were human once,” said Uli. “Still
got blood and veins and all under that armor. So, they can still die.”
They
waited for the inevitable clash. It was better than playing at war. More
exciting, this anticipation. Jayda hoped she and Uli would learn something by
watching the clashes. The children hoped that one day they would take their
place among these honored warriors. Jayda had the idea to pick up discarded
guns they could trade to the Free Streets Army for shelter and training, but so
far, all the guns they’d found were empty. Still,
they scavenged when they could, hoping for their big break, that they could
join Baltisor Locke’s forces and be, at least,
backed up by someone’s army.
The way Jayda thought of it, all their games were merely training, preparation
for a life she was sure she and Uli could wrestle from their futures. For now,
they waited in hiding, until their opportunity came.
They
watched the blackcoats check the readers on their wrists for excess radiation
from the power ziggurats. Finding the radiation in tolerable range, the Disruptors
flicked the activator pads on the sides of the black headsets they wore,
flashing data from headquarters’ feed on the amber-colored
lenses over their left eyes. The kids knew they were checking the estimated
time of the opposition’s arrival. They’d seen
this before when Disruptors showed up on the scene. Their hearts raced,
anticipating the spectacle of the action, the vicarious thrill they got from
this, that kept them going, even when they were hungry, and the stalls were
closed.
The
kids listened for any bits of information they could pick up from the clipped,
brief exchanges between the man and the woman in black coats:
“Signal
tracks here, but I’m not seeing…”
“Graff!
Spotted on Campus Line…”
“- trap!”
“-ight
even streamcast for a squad-gyr…”
“They’re
coming…”
The
man readied his soaker, and the woman gripped her crossbow firmly, and they
girded their stance, ready for action.
Uli
and Jayda found their weaponry amusing. They had heard Disruptors complain
about the crude improvised weapons and antique relics they were forced to use,
now that the blockade stopped most munitions from coming to their moon from
offworld. They had been blockaded a year and all the weapons shipments from the
Starfarers and the sympathetic nations were intercepted by extreme long-range
attack craft launched from the auxiliary racks of the mothercarriers.
Ammunition was so scarce the Disruptors had to rely on alternatives and
improvisations like crossbows and acid-filled soaker guns. The captroopers, of
course, had guns. Magnificent guns. They were long, thin, grey carbocrete
boxes, with round holes on one end, and handgrips and a trigger-guard. They
were magrails, handheld electromagnetic accelerators that threw solid metal
slugs at high velocity. The kids had heard Disruptors called them
hole-punchers.
The
man was tall with ruddy hair, swarthy but not as dark as a typical Peltierite,
though he shared the same bright blue eyes as the majority of the population.
He must have had some offworlder blood. He was broad-shouldered and his black
duster jacket billowed wavily and majestic in the wind. His pants were made of
thick grey fabric and had black spongebark kneepads affixed.
The
woman looked more typically like a Peltier 7 native, more like the children
themselves; shorter, and slighter, with a silvery-yellow sheen to her hair and
a rich brown skin tone. She wore grey-blue tattoos underneath her bright-blue
eyes and on her high-boned cheeks, in the style of the Second Ancestral Era.
Her black, fur-collared jacket flared at her waist and concealed extremely
light, almost unnoticeable armor. She wore dark blue denim pants, a pair of
mirrored sunshades, and a Thrustball cap.
She glanced
at her partner and the children heard her declare, in a mock-whine, “We’re
gonna die, aren’t we Geth? This was a trap.
There’s no message rod here. They just wanted us
naked.”
“We’ll
take’em with us,” said
Geth. “We’ll die
well. Do you harbor doubts, Disruptor?” he
asked her, with exaggerated bravado.
“Always,” said
the woman. “But I’m good
for it.”
It was
a joke the children had heard before, between Disruptors, whenever they got
close enough to a clash before it started. They joke was, the Disruptors had
nothing left but their sense of humor. That was all the dignity these two could
afford.
#
Lieutenant
Azure 9437 gazed appreciatively at himself in the mirror of the squad-gyro’s rear
cabin to make sure he had no vulnerable spots in his black, chitinous armor
from the last clash. Then he turned to the other captroopers, adjusted the
visor on his cranial protector, and said, “This
is it, boys and girls. We tackle these two kolkers
and bring’em in. No kill, cool?”
“Cool,
sir!” repeated the capsule troopers. Their voices
were low, growling, animalistic. Their cybernetic eyes glowed like a storm owl’s, and
their massive bionic muscles twitched in anticipation of their fix. After so
many battles, each of them had earned their augmentations, and they no longer
qualified as Homo sapiens. The system
of upgrades maintained the discipline of their rank structure, like a more
ancient force’s medals of valor and deed.
#
From
their hiding spot, Uli and Jayda watched the squad-gyro fly over the decaying
buildings seeking the rebels’ streamcaster signals and
thermal prints with its pinging E-Scan. They must have detected these at the
ziggurats by Cougar Tooth Drive, where once the great reactors hummed and
powered the Old City that the Second Ancestors built, that now lay beneath
layers of urban decay. The Ruins used to be occupied by the Order of
Genoclerics who studied the mysteries of the ancient Era of Second Ancestors,
but they had abandoned them during the last big clash there. The E-Scan didn’t
notice the two kids hiding in the dried-out water tubes; it wasn’t
searching for them, and they had no reactive hardware to ping.
The
squad-gyro hovered directly above the Disruptors and their road buggy and shot
anesthetizer gas pellets that puffed grey particle clouds around Geth and
Harwyn and drugged them asleep. Then it landed, and six captroopers, unaffected
by the gas, disembarked from the rear hatch.
A
battered white utility swooped around the corner onto Cougar Tooth Drive and
whined to a stop. The utility’s cargo door opened and nine
soldiers of the Disruptors, wearing breath masks to protect themselves from the
gas, spilled out onto the street wielding modded nail guns, soaker rifles and
an assortment of homemade firearms cobbled together from scavenged junk. The
driver wheeled back into action and rammed one of the captroopers, forcing her
sprawling to the ground. The downed super soldier bled crimson, like the human
she once was.
Although
they outnumbered the captroopers, the Disruptors’
makeshift weapons were no match for the hole punchers, and soon, the nine lay
on the street, though the van, full of holes, still circled pesky-like,
harassing the enemy. An archer with a repeater crossbow flung explosive
gel-coated bolts out the front passenger window at the hovering gyro, which
backed off and began firing with its belly-mounted autocannon at the errant
cargo van. The van crashed into the reinforced wall of a ziggurat, and began to
flame up to the trapped archer’s and driver’s
screams, and the five remaining captroopers dragged the unconscious forms of
Harwyn and Geth into a freshly arrived grey-and-black camouflaged Militia road
buggy.
#
Sometime
later, Uli and Jayda regained consciousness from the bombardment of
anesthetizer gas.
“What
happened, Jayda?” asked Uli.
“Gas
attack,” said Jayda. “They
dragged’em off and killed like, a buncha Disruptors,
like six soldiers, and a van with an archer. Not too big a clash. See the bodies?”
She
pointed. He screwed his eyes, and the little pink line of his scar arched
slightly.
“By the
Messenger,” said Uli, in awe.
“Yeah,
right,” said Jayda. “Uh… amen.” She
was no believer.
They
climbed out of the tubes and scavenged what weapons they could find, as many as
they could carry. Their opportunity had arrived. If they could find even a
single weapon that was operable and loaded, they could buy their way into the
Free Streets Army.
“Where
is your headquarters? Which building? Where do you squat?” Uli
demanded of Jayda, in character. He was supposed to be the Commandant. She was
playing the captured Disruptor soldier.
“With
your mother,” said Jayda, who spat defiantly, getting into
the role.
Uli
slapped her in the face with a rough, metal-studded glove he’d
found left over from another clash.
“Kolk you, bitch,” he
said, and he spat back, in her face. Jayda imagined she was facing the towering
commandant instead of her crush.
“She
said, tell my son, ‘hi,’” said
Jayda, laughing despite the pain.
“Where
are you headquartered?” Uli asked again, still in
character. He readied his hand for another facial assault. The metal studs had
left red scratches on Jayda’s left cheek. She hoped it
would scab into a storied scar of her own. Then, they would switch, and she
would be the interrogator. Turn-taking was a deal they made when they first
became playmates.
She
spat back at him, and he slapped her again, this time on her mouth, like it was
nothing to hit a bound girl. For maximum realism, she had allowed him to tie
her wrists together with scratchy yellow rope. Jayda pretended to strain
against her binds.
“I’ll
tell you nothing. You’ll have to kill me. And the
next one they send. Kill her too. But know this- we’ll
keep coming at you. There’s no headquarters. It’s a
myth. There’s no Disruptor Corps. There’s only
your kind, and the real people.” she
said, her bottom lip swollen and bleeding. It felt good to play Disruptor, this
time.
“What
is the name of the Leader of the Disruptors? The one you call the Prime
General? Where can we find them?” Uli
demanded.
“I told
you. With your mother,” said Jayda, and she laughed
at the blood that trickled down her cheek and stained the fur collar of her
jacket. She loved the character she’d
invented of the brave woman they’d seen
earlier today, visiting their place of power. It had been several hours since
they had regained consciousness and went wandering, but they had returned, now,
to their playground. The ziggurats always drew them back. There was no other
part of town like it. They could feel there was power there once, deep inside
the Ruins. They liked to think some remnant of that power still radiated here,
and that it would make them strong, like Disruptors and captroopers were
strong.
Uli pretended
disgust as his “captive.”
Another rough-gloved slap wasn’t worth the effort, he
decided, in character. This Disruptor Jayda was playing would never talk. But
she could still be useful, for spectacle, to cow the populace into accepting
its submission. Captroopers enjoyed spectacle. It helped to quell the rowdy
masses, to satiate their lust for justice, to see it served as great, big,
sweeping, performative acts.
“You
will die tomorrow for your crimes against the Higher Order. You have the Right
of Last Statement. One of my sub-officers will deliver a chalk and scroll to
your cell. Think wisely of your last words, scumkolker.”
“Die
poor, and hungry, Commandant,” said Jayda. “That’s what
I’ll say. Die hungry, and kolk your order, and your mom.”
Uli-as-the-commandant
concluded he would gain nothing more from a Disruptor by talking. He pretended
to turn away on mechanized heels. Jayda imagined a heavy metal cell door
clanged behind him, leaving her alone, in the dark.
They
switched and had one more go at the game of make-believe, with Uli as the bound
Disruptor and Jayda as Commandant, and then, got bored with their imagined
storyline, they counted the bullets they’d
scavenged, and threw away any that didn’t fit
the sliding armatures of their new magrails. They decided this would be enough,
at least, for now, to satisfy the entry requirements of Baltisor Locke’s Free
Streets Army.
#
Later
that evening, Uli and Jayda shook hands with Locke, Life President of the Free
Streets Alliance. He welcomed them into his army and assigned them to the
Junior Wing with the other kiddos, to be trained and disciplined as his
soldiers. They would share one of the unused rooms in the Life President’s
mansion on Melchior Drive.
Locke’s
Alliance was a protection racket. His rag-tag army suppressed any Disruptors on
his “turf,” in
exchange for a minimal presence of captroopers there. The captroopers left his
turf mostly alone and life went on there almost like it had before the
Occupation. It was the only part of town not subject to curfew, and with no
checkpoints. The Disruptors they pretended to be in their play would have
called Locke a collaborator, but Uli and Jayda didn’t
care- they didn’t have any political bones in
their young bodies.
Young
people like Uli and Jayda had no way to pay for schooling, and they were
expected to be economically productive if they wanted to survive. For kids,
Baltisor Locke observed on the range during their Initiation Rites, they were
excellent marksmen, and he had high hopes for them in the Free Streets Army.
Locke had high hopes and high expectations for all the children under his
protection.
#
Jayda
absent-mindedly shoveled fried snacks from a paper sack into her mouth as she
sat in the stands and watched the defiance of Harwyn Vasker on display. The Disruptor,
with her scarred face and swollen lip, now wore an orange-and-gray striped POW
jumpsuit as she faced the Commandant of the captroopers, Onyx 5112. Onyx’s
hands were heavy and clawed and sheathed by metal-studded gloves. He was an
owl-faced monstrosity of a former homo
sapiens specimen. He roared terrifyingly through the larynx of someone
encoded genetically with DNA drawn from the genetically engineered fauna of the
Twenty Worlds of the Higher Order. His nose was as sensitive as a Thothian
razorbear, and he had the agility of a Hylothene springer. He was as loyal to
the Higher Order as a Sycordian South Desert pack dog was to its master. His
massive cybernetic brain was protected by a hypermetallic cranial unit. His
legs were jointed with precision titanium mechanisms, interwoven with muscle
and flesh and blood, and his arms were covered with extendable combat spikes
grown from the same black chitin that encased his torso, chest, and nether
regions in insectile armor. His unblinking eyes glowed red with optical scanner
lenses embedded over his corneas. He had earned his many upgrades at Castelox,
Mercer Prime, and Omega 38x. He towered over the other captroopers, his import
obvious to all who looked in his direction.
His
Vice Commandant, Amber 9844, was likewise a highly augmented veteran of the War
of the Twenty Worlds that led to the formation of the Higher Order of the
Stellar Community. She had glowing yellow scanners for eyes, the same black
combat spikes and armor, and her fingers were tipped with venomous claws. She
carried a magrail with a plasma flare launch mounted on its side. Amber 9844
supervised two subordinates as they brought Gethen Lankleer from the transport
gyro on the floor of the megastadium pit toward the stake next to Vasker’s, to
be tied up and displayed with his comrades. Thousands watched in the rising
benches, the children among them, hungry for entertainment. Before the Fall,
the stadium-pit was used for concerts, sporting events, holographic movies and
light shows with lasers and dancing opticals. Now, a squadron of gun-gyros
rested in the middle of the arena floor, surrounded by a ring of armed guards-
a squad of unaugmented local militia deputies who carried the same magrails as
the captroopers.
There
was a podium with a voxcaster in the center of the pit, and Onyx and Amber
stood on the podium while he spoke, and she brandished her magrail with only
one, abnormally strong hand.
A
squadron of dropfighters flew above, low over the city, followed by a another
squadron of gun-gyros.
“The
Right of Last Words commences,” said Onyx. “I
present to you, the people, two of the Disruptors who damn this city with their
violence and force our continued presence. Look upon your true enemy! Their
names are Gethen Lankleer, and Harwyn Vasker. They have conspired against the
Peace we all seek. But they still deserve the Right! They would not grant it
you or me. But our Order is lawful, and merciful. We will begin with the woman.
Speak your last words, Harwyn Vasker. Speak what we will remember of you after
justice has been served today.”
The
crowd roared, more out of hunger and a need for stimulation than any political
preference.
“Quiet!” Onyx
demanded. He raised his hand as a signal for Vice Commandant Amber to fire a
plasma flare. The flare shot upward at reducing speed and exploded in mid-air
in a flash of hot neon green above the megastadium.
The
crowd hushed. They were wearing simple rags and wide-brimmed hats coated
thickly with counter-rad paste to stave off the radiation from the last time
one of the mothercarriers dropped a tactical fusion warhead on their city. They
looked destitute and angry, and hungry for a quick fix to their problems, or at
least, its appearance. Commandant Onyx understood, as a tactician and
strategist, how to win the loyalty of the wretched.
Harwyn
read from the notes she had scrawled in chalk on her scroll that afternoon in
her darkened cell.
“I
stand before you today, a condemned woman, because I oppose the Higher Order’s
presence on this moon. That presence has only escalated our situation. We
cannot expect to recover from the Glick Protests under a military occupation.
Captroopers killed my husbands, dragged them kicking and screaming from our
bedroom for publishing ‘suspect’
material that was critical of the Higher Order. All of us have lost someone to
this repression. All of us have suffered. Look within your pain and ask
yourselves who the enemy is!”
“You
now, Lankleer,” said the Commandant. “Offer
your words, so that we may remember your death and what it means to these
people.”
“Freedom
cannot be contained!” said Gethen, in a clipped,
determined tone. He, too, had been given a chalk and scroll in accordance with
the Right of Last Statement. He raised his bound fists and shook them
dramatically, then said, in a louder and more declarative voice, “None
of us are free until all of us are free! If it takes tomorrow or a hundred
centuries, we will drive you from this moon, or die trying, and that is the
only justice we seek.”
A
large dirigible, held aloft by synthetic helium tanks and propellers, with a
rack of gun-gyros hanging from its bottom hull, swept the area outside the
megastadium with search beams.
A
captrooper wearing a black leather executioner’s hood
like something from the Time of the PreAncients approached the two Disruptors
with an antique, iron polearm and swung at them theatrically, like the bladed
staff was a juggling stick. Fear welled in the Disruptors’ eyes
as the executioner approached.
Jayda intensified
her chewing, sucking the salt and grease of the fry-nuggets in determination to
make the treats’ taste in her mouth outlast
their digestion. It was rare she ate like this, but with her and Uli’s new
income, she could get used to it.
The
stadium crowd roared at the spectacle of state murder. They howled and laughed
and jeered, anticipating the blood. In their seats, watching this unfold, Uli
and Jayda were spellbound by the performance.
And
then, a militia deputy, lined up with the others, shot the executioner, and
began to fire at his unprepared comrades and the captroopers. In the surprised
chaos, he ran and made it to a gun-gyro and boarded the craft, taking over the
flight controls and lifting into the air with the whipping sounds of rotor blades.
The
excitement did not abate. A truck with an anti-aircraft gun, parked near the
rest of the landed squadron, fired several rounds at the gyro, but it was too
late, the unharmed craft ascended vertically and flew off into the skyline of
the city.
Gethen
and Harwyn surprised a pair of guards and stole a knife, then used it to cut
their wristbonds. They stole another of the gyros and evaded the gun-truck.
They flew after the first craft, and Onyx grunted into the voice amplifier, “Chase
those gyros down! Don’t let them get away!”
The
crowd roared again, this time, enthused by what appeared to be no mere
spectacle.
#
Jayda
popped fry-nuggets into her mouth and held Uli’s
hand, their fingers tentatively intertwined. This, they agreed, was the start
of a new phase of their relationship. The two of them had known each other
since they were mere snotnosed streetpups, and they had attended public
executions before. It was great fun. But they had never considered them dates.
They were young and were not expected to live past their forties. No one was
anymore. So, they figured they were old enough to date. Someone had to make the
next generation, and Jayda’s generative drive was strong.
She wanted her and Uli to have eight kids. No… ten.
At least. She even had names picked out. But first, they needed to soldier.
They needed to earn their way, like the captroopers earned their augments. Now,
they had a path, as warriors, and they would no longer play games of
make-believe in the Ruins of the Ancestors by Cougar Tooth Drive.
Neither
of them remembered their parents. They had been wards-of-the-state. But there
was no more state, only the Order, and so no state children’s
wardens, anymore, either. The Higher Order didn’t
believe it was the government’s role to care for kids no one
cared about. The wardens still tried to look after them, but they had no
authority or resources anymore, and the kids just hid and eluded them,
especially Uli, whose last dealings with a warden had left him scarred.
Uli
glanced over at her during the chaos and said, “Hey,
you think this was staged for show?”
“Who
knows? But it sure is nice to watch and think justice gets served, or whatever.
Like a game show,” said Jayda.
“What’s a
game show?” asked Uli. He knew what a game was, and a show,
but had never heard the terms combined before.
“I saw
an old 3-D once. Games on holostream. People from the audience had contests for
prizes,” Jayda said.
“Oh,” said
Uli. “Gimme some fry-nuggets, how ‘bout?”
“No,
theezth are miiine,” Jayda teased, trying to sound
like a bratty younger child by lisping and drawing out her vowels.
“Oh,
cut it out,” said Uli, and he grabbed the foil package from
her and poured the greasy, crumbling treats into his mouth. Crumbs spilled down
his cheeks.
“Ugh,
you’re gross,” said
Jayda. “Keep’em.
How ‘bout you buy me a sugartea and lignuts?”
Uli
signaled the vendor with his hand and paid for the packet of lignuts and the
tea with his earnings from Baltisor Locke. Jayda drank the tea and chewed the
salted lignuts.
“You
think that guy was a Disruptor?” asked Uli. “The
captrooper who shot the others?”
“He
hadda be a plant,” said Jayda. “Aye-yeah.
Maybe that’s who we should be working for.”
Uli
looked at her and thought, that this was why he liked her. Jayda was smart.
Smarter than he was, though he’d never admit it to her. She’d
never let him forget it. He liked that about her. She wasn’t
easy. She challenged him, and made sure he knew, by the softness of her skin
and the brush of her lips, that the reward would be worth it.
The
captroopers were reforming, trying to project some semblance of order, but the
audience had seen what they had seen, and the propaganda streamcasts the next
day would be that much less convincing for it. The city seemed that night like
it stretched out naked from the megastadium pit, like a beached animal, choking
and dying, a layer of poisoned skin over a city built and rebuilt over itself
so many times, and for so long, that no one could even remember what the
original builders- the Second Ancestors, who built the power ziggurats- called
themselves. Their language, and much of their technology was lost to the depths
of prehistory, and their civilization was only beginning to reach once more the
heights the Ancestors had graced.
But
Uli was happy. And Jayda was happy. This was their world, theirs to inherit.
And with all that action on display, it wasn’t a
bad first date.
