I flipped down the latch and palmed the slide as it slipped from from the guides beneath the barrel. The springs were next and then the barrel itself. I laid the parts carefully out on the oilcloth. The familiar movements were calming, but my hands knew them so well that my mind was free to wander. The meeting with the Tween had gone down like Sarah had said it would and now she and the arms merchant were headed into the sprawling megalopolis that had sprung from the bones of old Atlanta after the firestorm of ’33. There was powder residue inside the barrel. The twisting hexagonal sides stayed much cleaner than the old lands and grooves system and the caseless rounds burned cleanly, but full auto was a bitch on machinery no matter how high the tech and lead was still lead. The silvering was still good and the barrel shined in the dim light against the darkness of my skin. My fingers found the cleaning materials where they always were and began brushing out the barrel. People in the cities never took much effort in preventive maintenance. Their lives depended on tech that could die during the next solar flare, but if they didn’t think about it then they didn’t have to worry about it. After all, there was always some ‘nician just a vid away and who’d want to get their hands dirty like that anyway? It was different out in the open spaces. Parts were precious and some nearly impossible to come by until you hit the next concrete and steel aberration covering hundreds of square miles, choking out anything that dared push its impudent head up to the sun. The drifters knew the value of good tools and solid tech. Survival wasn’t glamorous but it beat hell out of bleeding out down in the neon cesspools where the city threw its failures because your carry piece decided to throw a shitfit. A gun that can’t shoot straight doesn’t even make a decent paperweight.

I’d grown up so far down the food chain of the city that the mutated roaches thought we were a step in the wrong direction. I sighted down the slide, checking to see that the almost imperceptible marks around the sights still lined up perfectly. My Gramps used to talk about the old ghettos and the terrible things that happened to black people back when anybody cared what color your skin was. Sounded like a bad movie plot to me when I was a kid. Who cared what color you were, everyone bled red if you fucked up in the wrong part of town and it still came out black in the shadows. Machines were predictable; they treated you right if you treated them right. They didn’t have a crying fit at midnight for no apparent reason and jump out the window. The loud snap of the slide as it slammed forward pulled my head back to where it should have been all along. Heckler and Koch built to last. I picked up the shotgun next. The action on the pump had been a little rough the last time I’d had occasion to use more than one shell. I loaded my own explosive rounds and one 10 gauge shell with that much boom was usually all that was necessary. I’d replaced the wood pistol grip with a kevlar composite the last time we’d been through Atlanta and I still missed the organic feel. I’d had some extensive work done on my arm, but below the wrist it was still meat. I could handle the shotgun easily with the ramp-ups in the arm, even hot-loading. I had to be careful with leverages and counter-balance, but I could handle a lot of weight with that arm.

Gramps had been the reason I’d struggled my way through mechanics and engineering lessons from stolen textbooks. He’d nearly beaten the words into my thick skull. Anything that wasn’t perfect wasn’t done he’d tell me as I checked and re-checked my calcs before giving them to him to judge. I’d made the mistake once of hurrying through the problems he’d given me. Once. What was her name? Taerla, yeh that was her. She’d almost been worth the skin Gramps had pulled off my hide for goofing my calcs. I wasn’t exactly small, even in those days, which was precisely why Taerla had liked me in the first place, but Gramps had shown me just exactly how little I knew about keeping my head attached to my shoulders. I missed that old man, missed him fiercely. I hadn’t bothered to count the years after I’d lost my first family. I trudged from job to job in a fog of chemicals that kept the screaming nightmares wrapped up and stuffed deep enough that I couldn’t remember them in the morning but the torn pillowcases and ripped sheets that mocked me each shuddering dawn never let me forget what it would be like when they finally burst completely free. I replaced the foregrip and put the brass screwdrivers carefully back into their oiled leather case. The action moved smooth as the wind through a graveyard as I worked it back and forth before a few times. I set it aside and switched to the revolver.

One day I was far out on the edge of some city, I didn’t even know which one it was, or care. Some idiot had managed to screw up a magnetic lock. How the hell you could screw up a maglock I couldn’t imagine, but I didn’t really care either. They weren’t the hardest things in the world for a good ferret to bypass, but you really had to try to screw one up so badly that it wouldn’t work at all. I stroked the glowglobe behind me to life as the last of the sunlight leaked out of the sky. Men had been inventing better ways to kill each other since there had been men, but the revolver was in many ways the pinnacle of weaponsmithing and design in my opinion. Minimal moving parts, solid metal to metal contact, helluva lot more reliable than even the best caseless pistol. The right load could take down a man anywhere from six inches to sixty yards away even if he was chromed so shiny he glowed in the dark. You just had to know where to place your shot, that was all. The cylinder dropped into my palm and the copper wire brush slipped into the barrel.

I’d gotten seriously lost that day and was wandering around looking for landmarks to guide me to the moron who’d promised me hard curry. I usually got what they promised once they saw what years of hard work had put on my near seven-foot skeleton and the gleam of my chromed arm. Wasn’t anything particularly dangerous on the arm, but they didn’t know that. As long as I got enough to keep the fog closed in, I didn’t really care, but I didn’t tell them that. Problem was, looking for landmarks is not a good play when you’re surrounded by sharks and sharks there were aplenty trailing along in my wake. I hadn’t tumbled to them yet and probably wouldn’t have until they started playing jump-rope with my intestines. I stopped by this old white-haired drifter who was swinging one leg over a really nice Harley hog. The motorcycle caught my eye and the clean lines drew me in like nothing human could have. They were a matched set those two, worn down hard and sleek with all the non-essentials left roasting in some desert dune never to be found again. I don’t know what I was going to say to him, I just knew I had to see the finely tuned machinery lurking there. If I’d taken the time to think about him I still wouldn’t have been worried about the drifter. He wasn’t sporting any obvious cyberware and didn’t move like any of the chromed-out street punks I knew. He saw me coming and swung his other leg over and off the Harley to end up facing me. A wide-brimmed hat concealed his features but his hands were calloused and sun-burnt as he swept back his long coat. That monster Harley should have made him look like a kid next to it, but it didn’t. Maybe that was what finally got something percolating through my thick head. It was way too late, years too late, by then. His left hand flashed up and back-handed me across the face hard enough to turn me halfway around and drop me to my knees.

I smiled in the soft mercury vapor glow as I put the revolver back together and holstered all three weapons, hanging them by the bedrolls for easy access. I’d never been hit so hard in my life. I wouldn’t have believed it possible that some lanky old guy with long white hair and hands like sandpaper could drop me at all, much less like I was some half-grown punk teenager. Three explosions ripped through the space where my chest had been a second before and I looked up to see a shining silver hogleg, as Gramps used to call those big revolvers, belch flame out the end of the barrel. Warm wet droplets showered the back of my head. Instinctively I ducked even farther down and twisted to look back the direction I’d come in time to see the blood pouring and spurting through a hole the size of my fist in the throat of some mohawked, chrome-boy thrillseeker wearing Screamin’ Demons leather barely an arm’s reach away. His blood splattered me as he and his three running buddies thrashed out the last of their lives out on the pavement. I was certain they’d never seen him clear the pistol from the holster. Hell, I certainly hadn’t! Probably watching my fool ass hit the ground as he put his rounds dead center into their throats. He damn near decapitated them with a single shot each.

Next thing I knew the big pistol had disappeared back wherever it came from and he had two fists balled up into the neck of my working coverall. He leaned down and yanked my face up close to his and all I could see was a hawk-nosed face with terrible scars all around his right eye. His left eye seemed dark as midnight with a faint gold ring surrounding the pupil. For a long moment I was trapped in his unblinking stare. I didn’t know what it was then, but I’d seen him with his wolves since and then now I knew exactly what it was; absolute certainty that if one of us was going to die, it wasn’t going to be him. I jerked my eyes away only to be captured again as his right eye swirled with grey storm clouds, literally. Somewhere inside me I knew that it had to be cybermods, but right then it was as if I looked straight into the heart of a raging thundercloud. I was stunned by the force of the spirit behind those eyes, paralyzed in the gaze of the predator.

“Is this how you respect your teacher?” he growled at me. He shook me by the throat, the stainless steel zippers gouging into my skin. “Your sensei would be ashamed of you, whelp. He lives on behind your eyes and you nearly throw away his life’s work to these curs?”

His anger was like a razor cutting through the layers of despair I’d layered my heart with. I tried to twist away from that terrible, knowing gaze and he shook me like a rag doll. His teeth ground together in frustration as the blood dripped down my face.

“Such a waste you are! And you waste your teaching you disrespectful sack of shit! He wasted his life on you?” Contempt laced each and every word with acid that burned straight into my soul. I howled like a madman and swung at him as hard as I could, wanting nothing more than to die so long as I took that voice with me. He dropped me and leaned away and my fist missed his chin by centimeters. His hands slapped at my wrist and elbow and I spun halfway around as I hit nothing but air. A knee slammed into my back just above my kidneys and pain lanced through my entire body. An arm seemingly made from cold-rolled steel wrapped around throat from behind and a terrible pressure forced my head downward over his forearm. My heart pounded like a triphammer in my head as he cut off blood and oxygen.

“Look at it boy! Look at what waits for you. Is it enough for you” his voice hissed in my ear. The lifeless eyes of the punk on the asphalt stared up at me blankly, like marbles, in a face surrounded by a pool of blood. My world started growing black edges that quickly funneled my vision down until the only thing I saw was that unmoving face.

“I’m sorry Gramps” I said to myself as the darkness obliterated everything.

I woke up with my back against the Harley that had started the entire affair. My white-haired savior squatted down in front of me. A choker of beads and silver and other things wrapped around his throat caught my eye as he looked intently into my face. His eyes were just normal eyes now, but deep and dark and full.

“So, you remember yourself now, do you? You have been given such a gift as to lift your spirit high above clouds. Choose to use it or you squander it. Choose! Are you a student to make your teacher proud?”

Tears that hadn’t touched my face in too many years mingled with the dried blood on my skin.

“Then you have another choice to make. I will teach, you will learn; that I promise you. Or stay here and make your own way.”

I stretched out my hand shakily and his long fingers wrapped around my wrist as he stood and hauled me to my feet. He was at least a foot shorter than I, but it seemed that I looked up at him. He brushed off his hat and put it back in place, his face disappearing into shadow. “I am called Walter White Wolf” he said as he threw his leg over the fairing of his bike once more. “You are welcome to ride behind me, Black Cloud. Until we find better transportation.” I popped open the leather saddlebags hanging from the rear seat and placed my tools inside. It really was a huge motorcycle and, while it wasn’t exactly a comfortable fit, the bike took the extra load gracefully, settling solidly down on its heavy-duty shocks as I took my seat. I haven’t answered to any other name than Black Cloud since. My brother carries heavy weight, but we share it now between us; White Wolf and Black Cloud.

It was a long time before I asked him how he knew the things he knew when we first met, but by then I really already knew the answer. He made it his business to know.

<em>Copyright © 2007. All rights reserved.</em>

“There seems to have been a problem with the credit transfer.”

“There is no problem. There is no payment for unfulfilled commissions.”

“What are you talking about? Completion was guaranteed. The oversight inspection returned perfectly clean results.”

“Incorrect. Three billets were improperly handled. We have a troubleshooting team reviewing the situation.”

“Three? Send me the data and I’ll take care of it. There’s no need for a separate team.”

“Negative. The team is already in the field tracing the billets.”

“Now wait you…”

“Repeat, the team is in the field and will complete the commission. Your assistance is no longer required nor desirable. There will be no further business relations between us. Ever.”

Unlatching her dented and dirty hardshell armor to pull out a nicstik, Dera shook it alight as the light-sensitive camera mounted on her left shoulder whirred quietly, following a preprogrammed pattern across the crime scene to record the carnage for forensicomp analysis later. Shards of glass littered the floor about the mangled remains of what, at some time previously, had been a human being. Her partner slipped quietly around the room with a portable inspection unit, careful to stay out of the camera’s field of view as it whirred and clicked its way back and forth across the small room.

“DNA scan negative, ID scan negative.”

“You’re wasting your time, Del. The Bumblebee popped up outside the window, emptied the magazine and, just like that, problem all gone. No evidence either. And cybercypher here,” she pointed at the corpse with the glowing end of the nicstik, “won’t have a past or a present on record and sure as hell ain’t gonna have a future.”

“Yeh, I know, but they’ll wanna see the scans anyway” Del sighed, “even if it is just a case of business as usual.”

Chapter the 1st: Ain’t No Effin’ Angel
Imagine all the sleazy bars in all the vids you grew up on: the punks, the whores and the hard men mixing in the urban soup called a city. Condense all that into a single gestalt of the quintessential bad place to be. Welcome to the Fallen Angel. Try not to die before you leave, the bartender really hates to clean up.

I do business down here sometimes, away from big lights, big city. Some call me The Tween, some call me Mister Fixit, a very few even use one of my names. Most people would think that a geek in a suit like mine would last inside the Effin’ Angel, as we regulars call it, about as long as a cherry in a third-gen corpwar. Just goes to show that most people don’t hang around in places like the Angel. Which is good or the bartender would be cleaning up lily-livers 24/7. The only two things that matter inside the Angel are the two A’s: Attitude and Armament. Attitude is my life, armament is my business. All kinds of business greases through the Angel: a thousand eurobuck whore might be translating two vials into a hundred-thousand folding downpayments on her next black-market biosculpt with the rest going to feed her pimp’s taste for expensive cars. The whores slum to the Angel when they need hard curry in a hurry. Sex with grimers and drifters don’t add up in a hurry so they supplement their usual fare with a more esoteric menu. The buyers of these high-priced wares? Three road gypsies in long coats hanging past their knees with just that little bit of extra stiffness that means armor plates and enough metal laced into their bones that the floor creaks with their every movement.

My eyes roamed over my own customers seated at my usual corner table. The low-level video feed transmitted to my associates outside guaranteed revenge if not survival. Hey, every business has some risks and you just do your best to cover your ass. If the girl hadn’t been old input, and unfinished besides, they never would have heard of me and couldn’t have found me with a GPS beacon, satellite lock and IR gear. My catalog makes the hookers’ wares look like prizes in a penny-ante arcade in comparison. The gypsies that roam the dirtlands in the cracks between one megalopolis and another don’t usually have the funds or the need for my services. Wanderers don’t generally shop much in hard to get, harder to keep, heavy armament. They were a cash and carry bunch and most carried everything they owned on their backs. Small groups traveling together might have a need to protect, or take, something more than their bike and their pistols, but most knew their best safety was staying off the radar and under the ground swell. What they had to steal wasn’t worth the pain it would take to get it away from them and everyone knew it. The big groups, the ones that stayed together as they roamed places everyone else had the sense to stay the hell away from, they occasionally had a …situation… that could use my particular brand of solution. The slim woman leaning forward intently across from me over the indelibly stained and cracked plastic tabletop knew that. She also knew how to get to me, in more ways than one. She knew what I could do and was pretty sure about what I couldn’t. She hadn’t been so sure about what I wouldn’t and that was how we ended up when she ran out. Now the lady had a name in the streets and a rep dogging her heels.

“Nightshade,” she said, her startlingly green eyes bright with pride in her animated face, giving me her street name.” I allowed that I had heard of it, which was true. I keep track of mobile up-and-comers on the scene. They can be very useful to someone in my line of work. “I run . . . ran, I mean, out of the Starshine Followers . . . from down, down by the, the . . .,” she stammered and then faded out. The sparkle in those eyes dimmed behind the tears on her smooth cheeks as she tried to forget what she knew was true: the Starshine Followers were gone. She dropped back in her chair, dwarfed by the black giant next to her as he continued to watched me impassively. I gave him points for the lack of passion in his voice as he continued her words; “She means the Starshine Followers that formed down by the waterfront. I’m sure you know the story” his deep voice rumbled. I did. Everyone did.
He never moved but I could almost feel him hovering protectively around the woman as she continued to sob softly, gathering it together slowly. At least seven feet of proud ebony sculpture, his hard features expressionless, he watched for my reaction to the news. Good luck to him on that score. I retired my reactions years ago. I watched his bald skull glisten in the dim light and thought about that superchromed cybernetic arm of his oh so carelessly draped on the table, pointed at me.

“I don’t do hopeless causes” I said to him, matching his even tone. “Too hard on material I work too hard to get.” Subtle, that’s me.

“Not hopeless!” she broke back into the conversation. I heard the echoes of past arguments in her voice, arguments I’d never forget. “Not hopeless, not when the message is heard.”

“You think someone is listening? Do you really…” I stopped short, no point going there.

“Not hopeless” she repeated.

“We sold everything” rumbled the camo-clad giant. “We can pay the freight, friend. You saw the broadcast,” not a question, everybody had seen that one! “And you know my brother is serious. We were told that you were a serious man. You want some folding floating your way, fine. Not? We find someone else.”

Now that was a persuasive argument, folding money is always persuasive. Too many ways to track electrons on the wire or in the air. Sure, I did business that way too, but the black market ran on hard currency. Then there was the gypsy angle. Nomads went everywhere, saw everything, and lots of people pointedly ignored them which suited them just fine. The best of them held their wandering families together with a code of honor as old as gypsies themselves. If you weren’t one of them, then you were fair game, and if you were one of them, well they went to extreme lengths to protect their own. It was frequently the only the comfort the friendless wanderers had. Not a bad idea to have people like that in your debt, or at least as return customers.
Nor did I miss the implied threat: drifters have long memories for their friends, but even longer ones for their enemies. The Starshine Followers had been news in the undercurrent of the shadows as something to watch for a while before their name had been splashed across practically every flat surface in every city in the northern hemisphere. The Followers were unique. They were just what they said; followers. That might not sound significant unless you knew firsthand the fierce independence that drove most of them to take to the open road, never settling down, never settling in. For months there had been a slight but steady migration down to the sprawling docks district that had once thrived near Savannah. The drifters had gathered together before, but this time they hadn’t left after a few nights of bonfires.

Nightshade, still Sarah Mary to me, leaned back into the table. The raven waterfall of her hair tumbled across her bare shoulders, sweeping my eyes into hers. “We need the best. We need you. We are going to do this,” she said, intensity lacing her voice like diamond wire.

“Besides,” whispered a new voice beside me. “We’re good people to know.” I managed to keep from sending for the cavalry, but barely. What I deserve for letting myself get distracted during biz.

He’d apparently eaten a lot of gravel in his life; his voice sounded like he used it once a decade or so. He stepped around to the other side of the table and nodded to Sarah. His business with the two vials had obviously concluded. His two companions had disappeared somewhere, as had the hooker. “We heard. We’re here. I’m Sunny, like the stars.” And they say that cyborgs got no sense of humor. I wondered if he ever used more than five words in a sentence. The mirrored goggles grafted to his face tracked over Sarah and her carefully motionless companion.

I could almost hear the dust in the gears as the newcomer grated out, “Where’s the man?” in a tone of voice used to getting answers. A faint shudder rippled through the muscular black giant as he replied coolly.
“Not here. Might be later. Might not.” The diction must be contagious. I gave the guy points in Attitude and hoped that he had more than chill to back his play.

“You finish here, we’ll talk” the semi-human walking freezer replied. He wrapped himself up in his ragged trailduster and headed for the bar. The bartender’s repeating shotgun disappeared and he wiped down three glasses as the other two flanked the loquacious one and they all put an elbow down on the chipped marble. The normal sounds of the bar returned and I realized I had been holding my breath.

Sarah speared me with triumphant eyes. I gave her a brief nod to acknowledge the point. I removed my own mirrorshades and let my backup know they weren’t needed any longer. Good cover is expensive by the hour, but it’s just ‘parta da’ bizness’ as they say.

“So. You have a list for me I assume?” I smiled at them and the negotiations were on.

<em>Copyright © 2007. All rights reserved.</em>