The Disruptor
The endless city stretched far out into the night in all directions, even to the west where the sea crashed against the old shoreline. As far as he could see, the glow of spires and streetlights and landing beacons sparkled like the sands of the ancient beaches, dissipating at the edges of the horizon into a pale orange fog beyond which lay more streets and pods and people.
Keph knew, as he gazed out, that far to the north the city began to dwindle and finally sputter out into small villages and towns and then nothing but the giant redwood forests, that to the east, where the previous generations had leveled the mountains that had contained the original city, it now stretched to lay its tendrils in the vast desert, where it too fizzled out in clusters of prefabricated steel shelters and razor-wire. To the south, the city crawled along the coast, finally butting up against the Border, across which lay the lawless and ungovernable factory wastes of the maquiladoras.
He looked to the west, though, as he always did from up here, his eyes tracing the outline of the old shoreline, now mainly a giant concrete bulwark and a network of quays that jutted their grey fingers out into the sea from the Border all the way up north to the Bay. From certain of these quays, causeways and arc-bridges shot like tracers outward to the Platforms, massive squares of city built on pilings out to sea, lashed together themselves by bridges, tunnels, and skyways into another borough of the gigantic Metropole that Keph was sworn to protect.
He had been born in the west, on Platform Drake. Thirteen years ago. Now here he stood, atop the Spire, off-duty for the night, looking at his past. He didn’t need to come up here to know the layout of his city; it was all in his head, literally and figuratively. The top of the Spire was one of the highest points in this section of the city and it afforded an incredible view; it was where the Administrators often took foreigners to impress the scale of the Metropole upon them, where tourists would come to have their pictures taken.
It was the second night of his second week back on the job, after his partner Selan had been killed in the line of duty. A car-bomb in the Westwood Sector, they hadn’t timed their intervention well enough, and Selan had been torn to pieces by shrapnel and melting metal and fire, not even his bodysuit capable of shielding him from the injuries which termed him.
Inadvertently, his eye wandered over to Westwood, a smaller glimmer in the larger luminescent web of the city. It was a hotbed of terrorist activity, car-bombs being the latest rage, but over the past two years of his service, he had been there to disrupt letter-bombs, snipers, bus attacks, all manner of tricks from the urban guerilla handbook. Selan and he had often joked that they would meet their end in Westwood, but it had been a running joke even among the older generation of Disruptors; the place had been bad ever since the Day of the Hours had brought everything into being.
The night air that came in from the sea, scented faintly with gasoline, helped clear his head. It had been a routine night, hopping from hotspot to hotspot as the sun sank into the ocean, acquiring and terming targets as they came up on his display. A city of three-hundred million was bound to have its share of troublemakers, they always said, but lately, in the days before the Anniversary, there had been a severe up-tick in the number and size of terrorist cells and actions.
Just an hour before, he had been arcing through the air, running high above the streets along tramwires and scaling the walls of towers, leaping from balconies across the canyons between to land like a cat on the handrail of another across the way, pursuing his last target as he snaked his way from the Warehouses through the arroyos and the tightly-packed Wilshires to his base of operations in Orange Tower. Keph had orders only for his target and yet, he knew once the target reached Orange, and he followed him inside, he could term the entire cell. Or at least, he assumed.
He had been on the verge of bursting through the plate windows of the cell’s base, high in the Orange, when the thought struck him that Selan would never have allowed him such a rash maneuver, that he had no idea of what was behind that glass, that he could very well be outnumbered, outgunned, or outfought, and it was just that sort of lack of foresight that had gotten Selan killed in the first place.
He had held back, hanging suspended upside down from an air duct outside the cell’s front door, and as soon as the target had exited, he had dropped silently behind him and slit his throat like a ghost, dragging his body into a trash chute, unclipping the man’s bioplate before sending him hurtling down the quarter-mile long shaft into incineration.
Twelve targets assigned, twelve targets termed. Another night at the office.
In his report he had given as much detail about the cell in Orange Tower as he could recall, which was quite enough, he was sure, for them to appear on his next target list. After filing the report, he had come up here, still in his black bodysuit, sweat dried to his skin, other men’s blood dried in droplets on his face shield and chest. He hadn’t gone down to the commissary to eat, as most Disruptors did after their shift, the work burning through whatever calories they had taken in before they’d come on, hadn’t gone to showers to clean himself of the debris of the lives he had taken. He had come up to the top of the Spire.
He watched the flames of Westwood, darker swirls of orange in the phosphorescent glow of the city. He knew other Disruptors were down there right now; if he had wanted to filter sound right then, he could have heard their shouts and gunshots and the screams of terrorists dying or resisting. It was just one part of the city, one small tumor in the body of the Metropole. There were dozens of others, he knew, but this one would always be his; it had cost him his partner and friend, it was where he himself had been wounded the first time. As he remembered, his fingers absently traced the scar on his side, or rather the side of his black bodysuit under which ran the long pale scar.
Selan, he said aloud to the night. It was a violent city, a violent time in the city. Disruptors were lost every few weeks. The past month had seen seven killed; although he had not known any but Selan. Not surprising; there were thousands of Disruptors. All of them like him: boys, twelve to sixteen years old, trained from the age of three in martial arts, assassination, stealth, intelligence gathering, reconnaissance, poisoning, marksmanship, any possible art that could be twisted into lethality for the protection of the Metropole, for as the Metropole was protected, so was the greater Union. Selan had come from the north, a place called Marine City, a place he had vaguely recollected as seeing on a massive, wall sized map of the Metropole, a far-off, almost exotic district on the northern end of the Bay where, according to Selan, the Union had built a needleship port.
Keph himself had never traveled outside the Core of the Metropole; his duties kept him busy here in the deeps of the city. Some Disruptors were sent out as lightning brigades, out into the reaches of the massive sprawl, others were sent deep cover, living for years in far-flung parts of the city, waiting for the signal to dispatch their mission. Disruptors like Keph were the antibodies that kept the heart of the Metropole beating. The terrorist infection was strongest here, despite the years of open warfare waged upon them by the Disruptors and the Union’s forces.
He loved his work, he loved the Metropole. Sometimes, up here, he took in the whole vast scope of everything he could see, and knew it was all under his protection, that his work in the Core kept the rest of what he could see safe. He would look out and try to pick out Platform Drake from amongst the blinking beacons and flashing warning beams and the lights of everyday living out there in the sea, imagining he could see the very tower where he had been born and lived for his first years, before he’d been taken in by the Disruptors and made what he was.
He had not been back since he’d left, Selan had never been back to Marine City. Disruptors never went back, unless it was in the course of their work, and it was highly unusual for a Disruptor to be assigned to a sector even adjacent to where he had come from. Keph never thought of his parents and rarely of his brothers, and on the few occasions he did it was only to recognize some odd affinity with them, for he had no doubt they were Disruptors, too; or had been. They would too old now. He didn’t remember their faces.
Keph pulled back the tight hood of his bodysuit, letting the cool night air run through his thick, sweat-matted black hair. He couldn’t stay up here all night; he needed to get some rest before his next shift. The dormitories were several blocks to the east; he could leap from the observation deck of the Spire and streamline himself down, slicing the air like a knife until he caught a tram cable hanging hundreds of feet above the streets, running along the thick wire until he came to a building‘s outstretched docking quay or slip onto the roof of a passing shuttlecar, pinballing his way east and down, or spring outward as far as his strong legs would propel him and flit across the narrow space that separated tower and spires in the Core and latch himself onto the face of the facing tower across the way and slither down to the ground. All of which would be faster than turning around and taking the elevator down.
He hated walking the streets; his black bodysuit marked him as a Disruptor, and most people respected and feared Disruptors in near-equal measure. He liked keeping to his own kind, other Disruptors. Even when off-duty, they all tended to stay within the Compound, which was itself a sort of self-sufficient enclave that could sustain them all indefinitely. A ziggurat several city blocks wide at its base, it tapered in steps upward; it was not the tallest structure in the sector, not even close, but it was the most awesome. It felt, even to Keph, who lived there, that it was made from pure power. The thick walls and watchtowers bristled with weaponry and satellite dishes and arrays, the blank faces of the layered pyramid made of steel disguised as stone. It was said to delve as far beneath the ground as it did above, and more than one Administrator had bragged that it could withstand any assault, even thermo.
He couldn’t stay out here all night, but he wanted to. Tonight, he didn’t want to go back to the dorms. He was back at work now, had been for a week, Selan was still dead and he was here. He had rarely come up here while Selan was alive, but since he’d been back from leave, he’d been up here almost every night after his shifts. What he was looking for up here, if anything, he couldn’t have said. There was a peace here, though, that there was nowhere else in the city, not even at the old seashore, where he had sometimes gone with Selan after hours, had their targets been in the area.
The Interpreters had sent their reports early in the afternoon, to Selan’s and his targeting queues. The car was parked in the underground of a commercial development along Galvez Avenue, and there was enough explosives inside it to collapse the garage and probably injure the structural integrity of the building itself. There was a timer, set three hours and some minutes from then. Off they had gone, as the sun had dipped behind the tallest towers, giving enough shadow for them to move freely in.
The commercial structure was non-descript, one of thousands of such buildings along the streets of the Core. Several blocks out, they descended into the underground, moving through pipes and conduits toward the development’s own garage, finally emerging from a grate in the floor. Waiting, silent, unmoving, they coordinated and synchronized their plan: Selan would go and defuse the bomb, Keph would move through the garage, terming who needed to be termed, moving to safety anyone who was in danger, keeping their way of exit clear, doing all the unglamorous work that went into getting them out alive.
Selan had crept like a living shadow through the dim of the garage, slithering snakelike between parked vehicles, staying in the shadows, even sliding beneath them until he reached the target car. Keph watched him from his hiding place, as always transfixed by the way Selan moved, like liquid blackness. He watched as his partner slid his body beneath the target car. The plan was for Selan to cut the wires of the bomb, eliminating the prospect of a detonation, but something must have gone wrong. The Interpreters’ report had indicated a wire-type bomb, one which could be interrupted by just the maneuver they had planned. But something was not right. In his earpiece, he heard Selan whisper. It’s not a wire-bomb, he had said. It’s touch-trigger.
Touch-trigger. Far more dangerous to work through. It would take longer than they had planned, maybe even longer than they had. Keph checked his synchrometer; the bomb had seven minutes left before it went. He knew Selan was working in a confined space, doing something he had not planned on doing. But, like all Disruptors, he had been trained in such eventualities. He heard Selan’s breath in his earpiece, heard the faint metallic clicks of his tools tapping lightly against the bomb.
At two minutes remaining, Selan’s voice had sizzled into his earpiece again, breaking the tense silence. Keph had emerged from hiding, creeping now through the dimly-lit garage, peering for any signs of movement, although there were none. They had not expected the terrorists to come down and view the bomb going off in person. Keph was scouting for cover when he heard Selan. It’s taking too long, his partner said. There’s too much left to do.
Keph started toward the car, but stopped. Get behind something, Selan said in his ear, and Keph had turned and run as fast as he could up the long ramps of the garage. Into a duct, up and over pipes, finally crashing into the backroom of one of the commercial shops, he burst through the door, shouting at the startled onlookers to evacuate the place immediately. They knew who he was and .what it meant, and they were gone almost before he had finished yelling. He went from shop to shop, but the words had traveled and people were scattering.
Long after the time it seemed like it should have taken, he felt the building shake and rattle, the floor below his feet rolling like a wave. He kept his balance and ducked out of the way of a sheet of glass that had come loose and fallen from an upper storey, grabbing a young woman as he did and tossing her out of the way. Alarms rang loudly and water began to spray from the ceiling, and people continued to flee all around him. He yelled at some, directing them to safer places, leading some outside. Somewhere in him, he knew Selan was dead, but he also knew that somehow he had succeeded, for this entire building should have collapsed around him.
He’d gone back to the Compound by foot, flanked part of the way by a crowd of terrified survivors who peeled away the closer he got to the ziggurat. Going the other way, a Forensic team passed him to assess what had happened, what had gone wrong. One of them nodded to him as they passed, but Keph had glazed over, barely even seeing the tall, white-clad Interpreter in their midst, barely registering the stricken look on his strange, elongated face.
As required, he’d been assigned to a week of leave, but he had gone stir-crazy staying in the dorms. He’d tried going out once or twice in civilian clothes, but he didn’t know how to act like one, and found himself on perpetual alert as he walked the congested streets of the Core, nearly having a panic attack in the throngs the moved in Pershing Plaza.
So he’d come to the Spire on his first night back, the totality of the Metropole spread out before him, to the edges of the world. Three-hundred million people were down there, counting on him to protect them. It was the largest city in the history of the world, it was the jewel in the crown of the Union, the capital of an entirely new system that had swept out the old classes and strata and conflict in a wave of blood and horror. It was a city devoid of history because it encompassed everything new.
Somewhere, far below him, he heard a gunshot, or an old-style car backfiring. His body tensed, his enhancements tingling. He forced himself to relax. He was off-duty, he told himself, although even the greenest Disruptor knew he was never truly off. He missed Selan, he missed having a partner; he’d worked solo since he’d been back, as was often the case for those just off leave. And the worst part was, was that he liked it, he liked working alone. Selan and he had been partners for nearly two years, almost since his induction into the Disruptors. They had become friends, not uncommonly, and he had loved him like a brother. His death had been unnecessary, an error in Interpretation, but there was some part of it that made the whole not so painful: he had done something right. The building had not fallen down, thousands had not died. In fact, Selan had been the only fatality of the car-bomb.
Three days later, he had been out on the streets, wearing a sweatshirt with a hood up over his head, because he felt naked with his head exposed, and tight jeans and boots, crossing Las Palmas, weaving between rickshaws and bike and rattling old-styles, his head down, carefully watching where he was going. At the very edge of the kerb, he glanced up and saw a girl staring at him. It was the girl he had tossed from the path of the falling glass in the shops. She recognized him, somehow. He froze, she froze. An old-style honked at him like a dying goose; it was trying to make a turn and he had halted before sidewalk began. He stepped up and the girl unfroze, her eyes wide and her lips quivering.
He wanted to run, but she was there standing before him in what seemed an instant. She was older than he was, maybe seventeen. He noticed she had freckles spangling the bridge of her nose and a little scar on her forehead, and again his fingers went toward his side before he knew they were moving and he had to force himself to stop them.
You, she had said, her voice almost lost in the racket of the city. He had a cut on his chin, he knew, something had caught him across the face in shops, but he didn’t remember anything about it, but right then it was all he could think of, my chin is cut, my chin.
What were the odds, he wondered later, after they had parted and he had eventually doubled back toward the Compound, ducking into the underground tunnel to get out of the daylight. What were the odds we would meet like that?
You, she had said, and he had said, Me.
They had been still and silent for what seemed an hour before she reached out and touched his chin, the cut on his chin. He flinched, but not from any pain. A man on a motorized bicycle careened past them, cursing them out for just standing on the sidewalk, leaving behind him a foul stink of diesel. A woman with a cart of pale green vegetables wandered past, half-heartedly calling out in Mandarin. Overhead, shuttle cars and trams rattled, popped and zipped. This city is alive, he thought, strangely, it never stops.
He had reached up and taken her fingertips from his chin, wrapped his own lightly around hers and pulled her hand away, as though his face was something she should know better than to touch. He let it go and stepped to the side, ready to sprint away from her. She half-turned but seemed to sense he was almost gone. She said something, but this time it was consumed by the noises around them and then he was off, running faster than anyone ever could have run, dodging and weaving between people until he threw himself down the gullet of the tunnel entrance.
Up here, he thought of Selan and the girl in almost equal measure now. At first of course, it was Selan, but little by little the girl had crept into his thoughts. He knew nothing of her and did not want to, she was part of the city, part of the work he did. But something about how she had reached out and touched his chin, something about taking her fingertips in his own, had placed her in his mind alongside his best friend.
He let the night wind unstick his hair from itself, from his forehead. His hands gripped the cold metal of the handrails and he felt the chill move up his forearms. His internal synchrometer told him he had four hours before sunlight, when he would be required to return to the Compound. He needed food. He needed to rest and let his body recover from the night’s work. Every night was a punishment to the body, to the mind, every Disruptor knew it, and also knew that maintaining the self was the primary line of defense. He was risking his very effectiveness by being up here and not in bed asleep.
A minute longer, he told himself. Keph closed his eyes and the city disappeared, although the pinpricks of its light still imprinted themselves on his eyelids. He took in a deep breath, smelling the salt air and the gasoline and the human throng below. He held the breath for one minute, then two, then three, finally letting it out in a slow, controlled rush. With a quick, fluid motion, he leapt onto the handrail, perfectly balancing himself. He looked out at the tower across from the Spire; an easy leap. He wanted something hard. He looked down. His eye picked out the silver thread of a tram cable, several hundred feet down and still several hundred above the street.
Keph let himself tumble forward, rolling in the air into a swan dive, hands outstretched, wishing he’d pulled his hood back up as the air tore at his face and hair and the hood flapping behind sounding like an attack of birds. In his peripheral vision, he was shining glass swimming up in sheets of glowing light as the towers on all sides rushed past him as he fell. His body screamed through the air, he was gaining speed, he had streamlined himself into a javelin, and the cable was coming up fast.
The cable would be slick from the oil that the tram cars used to grease their way, and as he fell he keyed through his bodysuit a new polymer surface for the palms of his gloves to reduce the slip, to gain him some traction. He was falling fast. The wind whistled in his naked ears, the sensation so foreign it was like he had never done this before, although he had, hundreds of times. He felt the air rushing over and around him like water, like a blanket, like the caress of a lover’s hand, or a lover’s body against him. He kept his lips sealed tight, although the whole thing made him want to smile.
A jolt like a frozen knife juddered up his arms as his palms crashed into the cable and his fingers instantly gripped the thick woven-metal strands. He jackknifed and swung around and around several times, controlling his momentum and letting it dissipate until finally he hung above Chavez Parkway, looking down on the rooftops of old-styles, omnis, the odd low-flying shuttlecar. He hauled his lower half up and crouched on the cable. The wind sent vibrations along the wire and he felt them from his feet to his groin. This cable held the Yellow Line, and he knew the next was due in three minutes fourteen seconds.
He scuttered along the wire like a cat, running on all fours to the nearest pylon, wrapping his legs around the cable as he reached out for the nearest rung on the ladder leading down. Fingers latched on, he unfolded his legs and let his lower half swing against the pylon. The rungs were spaced too far apart for a boy of his stature, perhaps to thwart vandals. Instead, they were a twice his size apart. From the ledge of each rung he had to let go and drop his own length down to the next rung. This he did some fifteen or so times before he reached the station platform.
At this hour of the night, there were few commuters, just a handful of late-shifters milling on the scorched, unadorned steel of the high-perched Red Line platform. The Red and Yellow ran parallel, at different heights, across most of the Core. They all looked up at him as he dropped like a feather into their fringe, pulling up his hood as he landed. One or two backed away.
One of them was an old man, probably in his sixties, a rare sight at this time of night. Keph stood in the shadow cast by the pylon, while the others were washed in the pale orange of the platform’s floodlights. The old man kept his eye on Keph, and eventually approached him.
Keph was on alert; even the elderly could be terrorists, he knew, remembering the Pavilion Hotel Incident. His body was ready to spring at the least sign of danger, but he held himself like a statue, calmly watching the approach of the old man until finally he stood just out of Keph’s reach.
Far down the line, Keph could hear the rattle of the oncoming tramcar, and saw from the corners of his eyes the others shuffling forward. He waited for the old man to do something. The squeal of the tramcar’s brakes sliced the night, and he automatically dampened the sound through his earpiece. From the shadows, his eyes watched the old man, who stared back at him, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat.
Finally, the tram squealed up to the platform, a brief blistering of sparks and a rush of air. The doors clanged open but no one got off. Quickly, the others went in, but the old man stood motionless, waiting it seemed for the next tram.
“You’ll miss your tram, sir,” Keph finally said from the darkness.
The old man started, as though he had not expected that Keph could speak. From inside the tram came the low, insistent burping of noise that indicated the doors would close and the tram depart in seconds. A hiss of air and then Keph saw the tram doors behind the old man sink back into their tracks. Just then, the old man pulled his hand from his pocket so quickly that Keph darted to the side into a crouch, to avoid whatever attack the old man had initiated. He was about to spring onto the old man, when he realized he was gone, dashing past the closing doors of the tram just as they slid shut and the car began to roll away toward Vaquero Square.
Keph stood, adrenaline rushing through him, wondering what the hell he had just seen. No old man he had ever seen could have moved like that. He watched the tram disappear along the wire and in the blowback kicked up by its departure, he saw something on the ground where the old man had stood.
Bending down, he saw it was a data card, a small rectangle of robin’s-egg blue, perforated by tinier rectangles and dots. With his gloved hand, he picked it up and turned it over; there was nothing unusual about it, no strange markings. But one thing was certain: it had not been there when he had landed on the platform. The old man had dropped it before he’d rushed to the tram. On purpose? Keph zipped the card into his side pocket and glanced around the platform for any other suspicious sign.
There was nothing. Nothing but the blue data card. Keph called up the man’s face in his memory and committed his description into voice/text. Then, with a deep breath, he ran to the edge of the platform and jumped into the tram cable, running along it as though it were a broad avenue, sprinting.