“Welcome to the Dragon’s Lair.” came the snide voice of Nathaniel Draco, politician utterly poised in his demeanor as the trio stood slack-jawed.
Steele took a long drag off his cigarette. “Don’t tell me I ran down a clone.”
“No, that hurt.” smirked the statesman, dusting his shoulders. “It just didn’t kill.”
“Any cute speeches you care to share?” a now-intrigued Lita asked, fixing her jean jacket.
“Let’s pop back into the office.” The Drake held a fine pistol in his gray-furred mitts as he ushered everyone back into Lucille’s room. Once all were seated, he got real cute about things. “Well, well, well, three revolutionaries sitting in a row. What to do with them all?” He kicked the door close, the bang echoing through the silent halls of the lit-up building.
“So you got all this alternator tech from the Queen Bee, huh?” Lita probed.
“I haven’t a clue what you’re on about.” Draco sighed. He threw his jacket off his shoulders, taking care to keep the gun trained on his captive audience. “Not a thing has changed here. I’ve just taken it all over. And anyone who didn’t take care to heed me…well, I think you can fill in all those little blank details.”
Devenreux could only scowl. “What possessed you to do something so miserable as this?”
“Your peace-and-love trip doesn’t hold the sway, sweetheart.” Draco preciously declared. “I’m ready to do the real dirty work.”
“What’ll it get you?” she growled.
“All the power I could ever want.” the thin gray statesman smirked. While Devenreux kept him talking, Agent Steele’s right hand inched closer and closer to the lever sat on the table. A single shot of laser-fire dissuaded him.
“No trapdoors, m’dear.” he chuckled. “Besides, you also did me a service back there at Empire. Cleaning up the defense mechanisms on the castle walls.”
“How the hell did you–”
Before he could finish, Draco grabbed Devenreux by her scruff and pointed to the back of her neck with the barrel. “It’s amazing what you can learn when you get your hands on chip codes. Amazing what you can hear thanks to the micro-transistors.”
A look of horror came over Devenreux’s face at first, but soon, those delicate features contorted into a feral rage as she grabbed the corrupted hound with both legs and swung him to the floor. His pistol went off, blowing out the lights above the table. All three came down on Draco like a ton of bricks, wrestling the gun from his mitts and pinning him to the ground. That cold blue light raked over the slender statesman’s face as he cackled, Steele’s Mauser trained right between the eyes.
“What does SHE want?” Steele growled through clenched teeth.
“I don’t want a fucking thing to do with her!” Draco barked, enraged at the thought. “I’m sick of those mealy-mouthed shitstains up on the screens in that glass-coated ivory tower, and I’m sick of their rules. I’d unplug that digital bitch and fix the whole fucking city brick by brick. I’d be the fucking hero of the goddamn age, that’s what I’d be. I’d–”
He took a blow from the butt of Lita’s Wildey before coming to something resembling sense. “Listen hear you crackass bastard” she snarled, the dark gray punk blending into the shadows. “You don’t just unplug a bitch like that. I don’t love ‘er, but I ain’t stupid. So your ass better come clean. You really believe this shit?”
“I–I–I…I…” He couldn’t say. Something clenched his throat. It wasn’t Lita, it wasn’t Roger, and it wasn’t Devenreux, though Lucille’s thin digits were awfully close to his neck.
“Let’s see what he makes of this.” Roger got up and pulled the lever. The black room went white once more, but when the light came for Draco, sparks ripped throughout the room.
When the sparks settled, and the decay of the real complex had returned, everyone looked over where the body of Draco had been.
There was only a black shadow. Flat on the ground, in bold white print, read “DRACO.”
Devenreux was the first to realize. “My God…he was…was he even real?” She looked down at her hands, searching for Ray’s blood, only to see that it wasn’t there. Soon, her mind rocketed back to the sight of her revolution in chaos, from dream before this whole night had blown up in her face. The thought of all those brothers and sisters pitted against one another. The blood-stained fur, the torn flesh, it all came over her. Were her visions real, or were they the hallucinations of simulated horrors, the ones that befell Ray, if Ray was even alive to begin with? Were those she’d gathered here even alive to begin with?
It was all too much too soon, and with a gut-churning gasp, Devenreux blacked out. Lita and Roger turned to one another, the punk in her own state of shock. Steele, matter-of-fact as ever, slipped both arms beneath the mousy activist and carried her off. If it hadn’t been here and now, there would have been a tinge of romance in the gesture. The most he could manage was setting the fair-furred lady behind the ammo crate of his Charger, and remaining dead silent as Lita rode shotgun.
“Right then.” he said carefully. “Let’s get her laid up on a cot and we’ll go from there.”
Lita nodded as the Charger tore away. She pulled a messenger out of her jacket and tapped out a few letters: PO;PU. Party’s Over; Pack Up. In a few seconds, her sanctum would be vacated and the base of operations moved elsewhere.
Her gloved mitts clung to her guns as Steele tore through the streets. The Charger was running red hot as he drifted through turn after turn before reaching the brick-wall door. Lita leapt out and kicked one of the bricks, the door sent rocketing up. Steele and Lita helped the unconscious Devenreux to a rack on the wall before closing the door and peeling away.
Lita, at last, spoke.
“MOTHERFUCKER!” she roared.
Steele snuffed his cigarette out in the ashtray and met her raging fury with customary calm. “She’s a walking recorder then. No ‘droid, but not convenient. I get it.”
Lita balled her fists, every knuckle cracked in a wretched crunch. Steele kept his eyes on the road. “Computer: MJ Pronto.” Sure enough, from out of the glove compartment came a fully-rolled joint, and a lighter to hit it with. Lita dove for the smoke, blazed it, and took a heaving drag. The smoke came roaring out her nose like a dragon before, at last, the feral rage within her was tamed. Steele nodded contently.
“Let’s talk rationally now. Draco was a simulation. He was part of what A.C.E.S. wanted in that compound, wanted those revolutionaries across the city to see. I’m not chipped, and neither are you, but Devenreux is. Chips got geo-location, and single-side recording of vitals, thoughts, and anything spoken by her. She isn’t a mic, she’s her own tape deck with an endless blank reel. Him saying he’s got dirt is no different from the feds at Empire saying they got your number. A.C.E.S. is always in control of these things.”
Lita sighed as she took another puff. “Alright. So she ain’t a conscientious traitor. She ain’t a conscious traitor. If that whole deal was alternator-provided, what the hell does that make my time in that dome?”
Steele went silent, taking a moment to probe the facts for himself. Ringing across his mind was another chapter from the godforsaken access code run of 2475. One of the many strange moments from the case came in Glenn Deighton’s final moments. It was the hint of something residing with in A.C.E.S. Not just the sentient personality that had melded maternal protectionism with an ice-cold logic, fast spinning out of control, but that someone else haunted her circuits and sub-networks. Someone whom Steele had “met” when he finally used the codes himself.
He thought of what it must be like to live in cyberspace, the cold extra-dimensional horror of body divorced from mind, a subconscious reduced to data. He thought of that mysterious stranger within cyberspace who had spoken but two phrases via that damned terminal and vanished: “Tell me” and “In here with her.” The second was crystal clear, but the former was as puzzling as it ever was. It was only when his mind pivoted from the dead end to thoughts of a simulated Draco that he pieced it together.
“Cyberspace.” Steele replied. “This is all cyberspace. You all, Haven that is, live in a protective shell, right? The tower network. Have you ever considered that Ace’s power has grown so that the force-field protecting you has now been weaponized to control the state of being within it? That you can now tangibly feel things that weren’t there, speak with wolves who never were? It’s beyond holographic, it’s the complete reconstitution of matter. You needn’t be chipped when the whole world before you is encased in a giant electric bubble, under the control of a centralized intelligence.”
Lita slunk down into the seat and pondered, her joint pinched tight between the pads of her fingers.
“Maybe the dome was a trial run.” Steele continued. “Laying the groundwork for this expansion of cyberspace and why Leo’s hounds at Am Base couldn’t make hide nor hair of the electro-magnetic tape M.A.D. Dog brought home. Technology made incomprehensible by virtue of how advanced it was. After all, we’re talking centuries of code going sentient and inheriting the infrastructure of an entire city.”
The punk caught on fast, her mind racing to make sense of it all for the present predicament.
“That leaves us with lotta whys.” she started. “Why Devenreux’s the focal point, why play smoke-and-mirrors at all if they just kill ‘em in the ‘space, and…why DeVol only left us three lines on the Reformation.”
Steele opened the Charger up some more before flicking a switch on the central monitor. “Let’s try these on for size: Devenreux’s the focal point because she’s the real deal. She’s got the charisma, the commanding presence, and even after a night like tonight, she can still rally hard. She’s the one to make an example of if ever their was one. Why did DeVol get snuffed? I think he got real answers, the answers we’re putting together, and Ace couldn’t stand for it.”
Lita nodded slowly, processing it all.
“And why the smoke-and-mirrors?” Steele continued. “I don’t think those in the compound were real to begin with. I think she’s got real supporters, but I think everyone on base was there to signal to those out across city. To come to Empire. To come get fried. And come see Devenreux, the belle of the activist ball, get fried before everyone.”
Lita smacked herself upside the head in epiphany. “Get every damn revolutionary out in Empire and ZAP.”
“With the biggest face in Haven politics up front and center,” Roger added, “Nothing like a mass execution to scare the rest into silence.”
“Who do you think’s scaring though?” Lita pressed. “The Board wanting to get all us off their backs, or dear Mother Acc wanting to make a real show of herself.”
The gray agent sighed. “Both. The Board to cling to power, and A.C.E.S. is pulling to keep that meticulous stasis of hers in perfect balance. After a certain point it doesn’t matter, what matters is stopping them from slaughtering a few thousand freedom fighters.”
It was then that a grim detail dawned on Lita. “But he knew! Draco said he knew! That means Ace knows about the limiters you and Lucy rigged at Empire Square!”
“Let’s check the wall then. Might not have laid enough down.” Roger floored the Charger, the great black beast racing for the park. The hour was 0200, and all that remained of the impromptu autocop junkyard were scorch-marks on the ground like a police chalk outline.
The limiters were still on the conical spires, overlooking the misty garden outside Paradise’s headquarters, but they were not as the gray agent had left them. Smoke seeped up from each box, reaching skyward like a sea of extinguished candles.
“Anyone got a Plan B?” Steele asked.
“I say emergency broadcast.” Lita replied. “If we can hack the airwaves again, maybe our sleeping beauty can put on the show we need.”
Steele agreed and the duo raced back to check in with Devenreux. When they found her, she was still out, but with a calm shaking of her side, came back around to the sight of Steele and Lita standing over her.
“Lucy,” Lita said softly. “We gotta do something big.”
She was half-delirious, but Roger managed to prop the off-white wolf up, and soon she recognized the two.
“Miss Devenreux,” Roger said. “The limiters have failed, no one knows about the plot against you and the Reformation. That means we could have 5000 citizens fried before hundreds of thousands. We need you to broadcast a warning to everyone. Tell them not to come. Where did you hack the Comm/Ent video lines from?”
“From the Town Hall.”
“Meaning you didn’t have real access.” Lita sighed.
“Given the state of everything,” Devenreux answered, “I guess not.”
Steele looked her over. “Tell you what then; let’s hack it ourselves.” The women looked to him, puzzled.
“There’s one last stone none of us have had a chance to turn over in all the excitement.” the gray agent said. “What the ‘White Coat’ told me before he died: 22 Acacia. Want to know where that street lies?”
He let the question linger in the room of the barren sanctum. “Comm/Ent. The broadcasting capital of Haven.”
TO BE CONTINUED…