Mr. Stitch by Chris Braak

Author:Chris Braak
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Steampunk
ISBN: 9780982888414
Publisher: Threat Quality Press
Published: 2010-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty

“We need to discuss your recent actions,” the Moral Responsibility officer said. Beckett couldn’t remember the man’s name and this, somehow, disturbed him more than the hearing about his fitness for duty. “Some of the reports coming in are disturbing. Your superiors are worried.”

“Stitch is worried?”

“Mr. Stitch is only your direct superior. The people that I work for are superior to him,” the man said with a quiet sneer. He had a sheaf of papers in front of him. Beckett stopped listening. His mind wandered back to the last night’s raid. It was vivid in his imagination, Bluewater in all its rotten, sagging, destitute glory.

Bluewater was where the poor indige lived. The wealthy hetmen of the indige clans had mansions and townhouses lining the streets of Indigae, where imported gullah-trees and glowing phlogishrubs were maintained at great effort and expense. Indigae was a safe, clean neighborhood, well-patrolled by gendarmes, well-tended to by the city’s many civil services, and far from the poison-smoke-spewing factories at the west end of the river Stark. Indigae was so lovely a neighborhood, in fact, that if it were not for the immense social shame incurred by being seen amongst the indige, even the Esteemed Families would have maintained residences there.

Bluewater was not any of those things. The wide boulevards of Indigae were narrow, crowded streets in Bluewater. The little gardens were patches of dead grass or shimmering blue slime-mould on the cobblestones. There were no gendarmes in Bluewater, and if order was kept by the gangs of thugs and criminals that ruled it, it was only by accident. The neighborhood dissolved from warehouses full of cheap imports, warehouses converted to densely-inhabited, multi-family barracks, and warehouses that were too rickety and unsound even to support squatters, into factories that spewed black smoke, blue smoke, green smoke. Factories that dumped brightly-colored heavy metals into the rivers White and Crook, which had long been covered over by Trowth’s incessant development. The two swift and underground tributaries took the bright-colored and psychoactively charged mud into the Stark, where it sank to the bottom and bred strange species of fish and lizard.

Bluewater was a wretched place, a place whose inhabitants had yet to see the runoff of wealth from their more successful cousins in Indigae. The indige there were easy prey for Anonymous John and his men, for Dockside Boys and River Rats, for Starkies and the Old Trows. Bluewater was as thoroughly villainous a neighborhood as Trowth had known, and who could blame the indige for choosing gang life, smuggling, drugs, and robbery over the meager existence that they might be fortunate enough to eke out in this disused corner of the city?

“Your violent behaviors…Mr. Beckett?”

Beckett snapped back to himself, looked around the room, recollected the situation. “What?”

“You’ve always had a reputation for brutality, of course, but recently…some people are concerned that you’ve become a danger to the organization.”

“Which people?”

After Beckett’s hasty report, and eager to distract attention from their heretical experiments, the War Powers Ministry detached a unit of Lobstermen to serve in the coroners’ raid in Bluewater.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.