Blackfish City(84)

We’re on the same page.

How would Go be different from Podlove, from every other rich and powerful player who sucked the blood of the poor, made them pay until they couldn’t pay anymore and then pushed them into the sea to sink? Soq doubted there’d be any difference at all.

The question was, what could Soq do about it?

Podlove pulled the sack off Barron’s head.

“Hello again,” he said.

Barron smiled. “You don’t look so good, friend. You look . . . unhinged.”

“I’m going to unhinge you,” Podlove said, and there was the fear again, the uncertainty. He wasn’t Go. Threats and violence were not his native soil. His own rage frightened him. “Like a door. Take you apart like a jigsaw puzzle going back in the box.”

Barron’s smile only widened. “I know.”

“Laugh as long as you can. Pretty soon you won’t be able to. Because you won’t have lips, a tongue, most of the skin on your body.”

“It was way too easy to turn you into a medieval barbarian,” Barron said. “You, who always believed yourself to be so civilized. Another way I achieve victory over you.”

Podlove put the sack back on and turned to Go. “Was there anything else?”

“No, sir,” Go said, bowing in exaggerated deference. Exaggerated, but still real. Go really did admire him. She really did want to be him.

“I’ll be in touch. Once I’ve gotten a little more information out of this one, and I can assess how to proceed.”

“Of course. I’ll wait to hear from you. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

They did not shake hands. But they smiled, and Soq saw oceans of information surge in that smile. They were the same. Go didn’t want to burn down anything. She might kill Podlove, but not because she hated him. Because she wanted to take his place.

Soq had been there. In Podlove’s place—in Fill’s. Physically, but more important, emotionally. The breaks had taken Soq there. They knew how empty all that comfort felt, how little it helped to hold off the dark.

Once, Soq had wanted to be what Go was. To have power, to have wealth, no matter who else got hurt. To plunge the rest of the city burning and screaming into the sea, if that’s what it took. Soq didn’t want that anymore.

It was stupid. Soq knew it was stupid. Soq did it anyway. A plan was in place, dependent on a delicate balance barely preserved. The balance demanded that Soq wait to run the software. That’s what Go had told Soq to do. Go had been very clear about what to do and when.

Fuck Go, Soq thought.

Six swift taps on the palate and against the inside of Soq’s cheek, and it was done.

Everything happened far faster than they’d anticipated. They’d imagined that, if it worked at all, the decades-dormant software would take some time to get started, to trigger whatever safeguards and tripwire warnings might be set up, to say nothing of how Podlove would get word—but only eight seconds passed after Soq triggered the savage breakin software that Podlove had given to his grandson, that Fill had unwittingly given to Soq along with the breaks . . .

The old man’s head jerked sharply, like he’d heard his name called from a great distance. He shut his eyes and listened to something his implant said. Then he opened them.

“You fucking idiot,” he hissed to Go.

“What?” she said, her inveterate smugness certainly damning her in his eyes.

Above them, lights flickered. Sirens began to wail. The software read updates into Soq’s ear. It had been detected by a monitoring bot, one of millions of ancient defense systems lurking in the municipal infrastructure, set up by the shareholders to check their little monster—by releasing an identical copy.

One of them was bad enough. Two of them, running in a state of open warfare, might make the city melt.

Glass shattered. Soq dropped to their knees, convinced this was it, Podlove would have triggered the bullets or explosives or whatever other weaponry had been trained on them for the entire parley. And maybe he had, but the system was not responsive. Most systems, it seemed, were not responsive. A whole lot of people were yelling out on the grid.

“Podlove, I swear . . .” Go said, her eyes terrified.

And nothing and nobody tried to stop Masaaraq and Ora and Kaev and Liam from breaking the front windows, walking right into the Salt Cave, armed and angry, and heading straight for Martin Podlove.





Ankit


Ankit stayed in the little skiff when Kaev and Masaaraq and Ora and the polar bear got out. She moored it in a two-hour spot across the Arm from the entrance to the Salt Cave.

I am the getaway driver, she thought, but she knew her role in this heist was significantly less glamorous. And exponentially more important.

A stream of data opened on her screen, became a river; became a sea. The software was working well. Terrifyingly well.

“Soq launched,” she said into her implant. “Early.”

“That sounds like Soq, all right,” said the man from Soq’s slide messenger agency.

“It’s every bit as big as they said it would be.”

“This is fucking crazy,” Jeong said. “There’s got to be five hundred units here. Easy. And they’ve all been empty? All this time?”

“According to Soq. Go had a lead on a handful of them, ten or twelve she’d spent a ton of resources on recon to identify. But this . . .”