Black Glass by John Shirley

Author:John Shirley [Shirley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9781934501078
Google: tsa1NAAACAAJ
Amazon: 1934501077
Barnesnoble: 1934501077
Goodreads: 4245345
Publisher: Elder Signs Press
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SUCK IT UP, DON’T YOU WHINE, GOTTA FACE IT:

CHAPTER NINE

Candle couldn’t tell if Zilia was glad to see him or not.

He seemed to see pleasure, anxiety, irritation, determination flicker across her face, all in little more than a second, as she encountered him outside the door to her loft stairs, her multicolored hair protected from the evening drizzle by a plastic-fiber hoody of emergency-orange. On a strap over one shoulder was a green military-material carry-bag.

“I probably shouldn’t be coming here,” Candle said, sticking his hands self-consciously in his coat pockets. “Some stuff has happened. I almost got shot. Someone near me did get shot. Cops and corporations might be looking for me.”

“Slakon?”

“Yeah. I haven’t found Danny yet, either. So what good am I to you? But I thought ... you might want to hear about it. I don’t know why.”

She took a few moments to digest that, looking at the halo of precipitation around the streetlight. Finally she said, “You can’t come in here. This place has to stay as safe as I can make it. My work’s here. We’ll have to go somewhere else. Come on. There’s a self-op freight train we can take. My brother’s an inspector for Slakon Freight ... You don’t have, like, luggage or something?”

“No.”

“That’s right, you come with invisible baggage. Okay, Candle, come on. This way.”

“You can call me Rick, you know. Or Richard. I’d rather give ‘Dick’ a miss though.”

She didn’t answer, walking around the corner of the squat old warehouse building; he followed, both of them glancing behind, looking for drones. He wished he had the little palm sized detector Shortstack had used ... And he wished Shortstack had thought to use one in the black stock market room ... would it have saved Monroe? Would it have detected an unmoving drone?

Another block along, the street dead-ended in railroad tracks. A self-op freight train was sitting on the track, chugging softly to itself, idling. No one was visible through the windows of the locomotive’s cab. Most trains now were remote control or self operating.

They crossed a moraine of broken rock, the cinders crunching under their feet, walked to within five yards of the train. Tons of living machine, breathing out a redolence of ethanol and ozone. Zilia glanced around to see they were unobserved—as much as you could ever tell, anymore, whether you were unobserved—and took out a small folding palmer. She thumbed its keyboard, stared into the little screen, nodded to herself. “All ready for us.” Her thumb flicked again, and the device made a chiming sound. A metal hatch on the side of the freight train clicked and folded open.

They climbed up steel rungs to the cab, Candle feeling an adolescent frisson as he felt the vibration of the idling engine. He’d never been in a train cab before. They clambered into the claustrophobic cab, found it fusty and cluttered with someone’s discarded empty beer cans: Guinness Chocolate Ale. They sat on seats that were there only for emergency manual-control.

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