Total Conflict by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewCon Press
Published: 2015-01-31T07:00:00+00:00

Sussed

Keith Brooke

I walk up Central High, head tucked down, collar turned up against the drizzle, face hidden as far as possible from the cams and the goons. All around, people jostle and harry, places to go, things to do, while the streetsellers hawk noodles and innoculations, and cars and bikes cut paths through the bustle.

I reach the Slash, the crowds thinner here. To left and right there’s a clear swathe bisecting the city, buildings cut clean through, the ground burnt to black glass. Kids ride boards among the ruins, and cars use the Slash as a throughway as if it had been part of some radical act of urban planning and not a war wound, a vast particle-beam burn from the heavens.

I head left, the Slash offering the most direct route towards the transit depot. I have a ticket out of here, a settler’s permit for some backwater planet something like fifty light-years away from the war zone, a fresh start.

All I have to do is reach the depot in one piece.

I dip my head. The gel-refits have rewritten my facial geometry enough to fool any pattern-matching programs scanning the cam feeds, but I don’t have anything that would get me past one of Geno’s goons with a DNA sniffer.

I pass a four-storey office block sliced in half by the Reps’ beam strike. Teenagers sit on the cut-off floors, legs dangling, watching. It feels as if everyone is watching out for me.

I keep walking.

I stand in line. The depot is a big hangar of a building, thrown up overnight about a month ago to process the exodus. The lines of emigrants rank deep across the departures hall, maybe fifty queues in all.

The man ahead of me wears Jensen shades and a sharp tailored suit. Like everyone else, he has no luggage. We will leave this world naked, our only possessions those that can be liquidated and wired ahead in a data-feed. The air is heavy with cologne and perfume, and mingled scents of fear and relief.

Two queues up, voices suddenly rise. An arm flaps, hands point, and security goons close in.

“But it’s clean!” cries the woman, as one of the guards takes her arm. “I’m in the feed, man. I tell you, I’m in the feed!”

Maybe. Maybe not. She could be trying to scam her way on. It could be that she had been on the feed but then someone with better credit and more favours to pull in had knocked her out of the queue.

Two goons haul her away, still protesting, even though she must know that no matter how good her case she could never get back on the feed by arguing with two meat-head security guards.

It takes about an hour, and then Jensen-shades is at the desk, submitting himself to ret-scan, DNA sniffing, voice check. He removes his wraparounds for the scan and leaves them on the desk. He won’t be taking them with him. The transit clerk takes the shades, pockets them, smiles, waves the guy through.

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