She was three miles down the Genocide Highway to New Red Star City when she realised something was wrong. Not the parasite in her head wrong and not militiamen in black armour coming to arrest her wrong and not swarms of Asura descending wrong but the usual kind, mundane-ish – she was being shadowed as she went through the valley of death, rolling along the empty rocky terrain of Junsha au naturale with the sweet earthlike beauty of New Red Star City and its surroundings cut off by the high walls of old colonial security vintage which hid the projectors that made the false sky that stopped people from killing themselves. She’d passed the Karl Marx Mining Community where all the miners lived (and usually died, from sludge poisoning – M.) and had passed the militia checkpoint with its own high walls all around the compound and the drone turrets that locked onto her as she rode by, and now she was atop the Ridge with the view of the Canyon of Souls and Workers’ and Peasants’ Bridge all the way onto the other side where the city walls stood, the wind in her hair and the bike rumbling like a hungry beast beneath her and the breathing mask pressing against her face, her ass in the air and her fingers hurting from the merciless material of the handlebars even through the leather, the speed reminding her of the good kind of death; all of it a nice distraction from that unshakeable sensation/visualisation of a worm snaking about the darker recesses of her nice human brain. Slimy alien flesh slithering against the pale grey of her cerebellum, boring into the frontal lobe and all the way down to her brain stem…
She arced the bike into the cargo lane, herself snaking by rushing trucks and flatbeds and lorries, scaring away the monster with the rush of adrenaline that that came from being a stupid piece of shit. Then looping around the front of a speeding militia vehicle laden with combat suits she passed back into the transit lane, which comparatively was empty. Mel pushed the bike harder, heard its engine scream and felt the chassis rumble with life, saw the rock formations either side quiver in fear as her Sunkisser let out a cackle and bucked forward at 70 miles per hour. Her shirt blew about her spasmic almost ripped from her back and her body catching the vibration and coming to life with it (hope you enjoy it, invader – M.). But in her wing mirror they were still coming; the trick with the cargo lane hadn’t worked. Mel counted seven of them. It had been a very long time since the slash and burn that had cleared out the highways and led to this one being called Genocide; the tanks rolling across whole settlements, spraying liquid flame. But these were honest-to-Emituofo bandits in ragtag outfits of mining gear and old militia tech, men with low hats and dirty bikes who moved as one long still creature creeping along the highway about sixty metres back from her.
Mel was not good at many things – relationships, addiction, finding a way to account for the grand failure of astro-socialism in her Marxist-Ghanist understanding of everything in the world – but she was good at spotting threats. Grandfather with his tendency to hurl spoons over dinner. Qu’y a-t-il, mon vieux? Espèce de petite pute communiste! And a clang of metal as it hit the wall. Old bastard, she had growled, come on and hit me with your fist like a real man! Seven of them now speeding up she saw in her rearview mirror as the great concrete shame of the Ridge Tunnel loomed and the endless convoys of cargo and transport and etc., the bloodstream of Junsha, all that now parted ways with her; peons took the monorails further down the canyon, not these blasted roads…she would soon be up atop the ridge and to the bridge and there was a lonely place to die. Sweat from the Crimson Eye’s glare stuck to her back and dribbled down her forehead. Tied her hair back; shiny new scar on one side. Melanie, what is it with your weird new haircut-
She banked right onto the leftmost transit lane, dangerously close to the rock wall. It then fell away as the road lifted up, rising at a steep angle up the back of the ridge. The bridge waited about two miles away, brutalist spans rising up to the false heaven of New Red Star’s sky. They were closer now, forty-five. She sped up proportionally and Sunkisser whined beneath her. “Come on.” she said. “Come on. Come-” They were atop the ridge now, atop the blasted landscape of the real face of Junsha, the truth – she had once drunkenly proclaimed to Andy – of all they did here, the bitch’s honest self; this is all we’ve done, hollow out a bit of rock and stick our greasy cyberdick in there, we’ve come so far into the universe only to end up jizzing inside it same as back home…a whole universe, Andy, of human mecha-cum…she, an ant on a bike, zipping across land too vast, too alien, the rock not earthrock the air only just breathable but (she was used to it now – M.) tasting faintly of Other. Close your eyes and speed up and ram into the barrier onto the Workers’ and Peasants Bridge, hit the wall of it and slide off mangled into the pretty little abyss, gaping maw of another world, and find out what’s at the bottom.
BANG, someone said behind her. It hadn’t been a person she realised but a gun.
The highway was empty now and it was eight lanes of empty and the bikers were moving into an inverted-arrow formation behind her and closing in despite her efforts. Another bang came and she felt the goddamned bullet whistle past the top of her head. Quick glance back – rightmost bandit, top of the arm, had an RL-60. Another was backpacked and the barrel of a rotary cannon was rising above his helmeted head, spinning up. It roared and hit nothing (backpackers with implants could drive and shoot but implants were never as good as hands – M.) but the sound was hell enough and Mel was aware of how flimsy she was, just an old lady on a bike and two more had weapons in one hand and were still driving and holding formation somehow how do you get that good at riding a fucking bike out here in the space desert. The moment stretched on, oddly peaceful. Just she and her boyfriends who wanted to kill her rolling along the empty highway. Mel couldn’t keep looking back but she could keep hearing the gunshots that weren’t yet hitting her.
Her right hand left the handlebar. Sunkisser wobbled, throwing her heart out of whack – speeding asphalt below going so fast if you fell you’d skin your face off on contact – but held firm. Ahead the bridge, closer now. She felt her right hand go to her waist and find the holster for her RL-60 which she hadn’t brought – she hadn’t put the holster on either, had she? – and was surprised to find against her fingers the gun’s chunky stock, gripping it tight then drawing it. Mel was busy driving; she glanced back again at the bikers and then swerved the Sunkisser right as the backpack gun’s latest volley tore chunks out of the road too close for comfort. Her right arm worked on its own. Her finger squeezed the trigger once and she heard a crash from behind and then the rotary gun fired again, blasting apart where she had been apart to lean into. SORRY, the voice in her head said, and her hand twisted the handlebars to the right and the bike turned sharply that way, tyres screeching heart in her fucking mouth this is not how bikes work and her legs detached themselves from the seat and she was flung in a controlled way over the side of the bike which now was horizontal in the middle of the road.
Mel landed on her back and tumbled in a roll and came out of it bent low with legs outstretched back arched and it was not how she had ever really landed anywhere before. She stood up and raised the RL-60 as the bikers came speeding towards her but she was holding the gun wrong and her back was hunched and she did not know what noises were coming out of her mouth. But the RL found one target – pop- and another – pop – and another – pop – and then three of the bikers were gone, spurts of crimson as they were struck their bikes knocked out from under them. The third wasn’t so lucky as his bike fell and he fell and it landed on top of him and he popped like a tube of toothpaste splashing gore over the asphalt. Two more bikers. The rotary cannon sprayed and Mel’s body hurled itself down, twisting and bending, and ducking the bullets she returned fire as he sped by, the slug from the RL hitting his chest and knocking him off of his bike. He rolled in the dirt, grunting.
The last biker roared past. He turned one-eighty degrees, bike spitting smoke, and faced her there this guy in his leathers with his helmet and his visor and mask so he didn’t seem to be human at all but some kind of hellish robot, spikes on his shoulders and – she saw – two guns one in each hand and the bike screwed to his waist by metal rods. They were Type Forty handcannons customised with high-velocity barrel extensions shaped like roaring dragons and he was holding them up both aimed straight at her face. Fuck she wanted to say but her mouth which was not hers only made a guttural kind of roar. The enormous man on the bike roared back. Mel ran or (what the fuck is this? what am I DOING – M.) sort of leapt, staggering, her legs not working like human legs, and she was moving at full speed for the bike and the twin guns belched fire and she bent herself the wrong way in mid-air so the hails of bullets went nowhere. She landed on the bike, wobbling, and leant down and her hands grabbed the biker by the throat. They as claws pushed through the leather around his neck and squeezed the soft material beneath and she hunched over clung to him legs now slipped about his waist crushingly tight, hugging him so close he couldn’t move his guns properly he clubbed her with the stocks slamming hard metal into her back and it hurt but not and she gripped him harder and harder until things in his neck started to crack. He grunted and slammed one gun into her head, right side, and the pain was painful and she hissed at him and with a jerk snapped his neck, the dry crack ringing out, and he was still moving, hitting her again, and she grabbed at his helmet and yanked it free – soft skin bone flesh – her fingers drove at his vulnerable face. He didn’t scream as they went into him.
Mel came to leant against the fallen Sunkisser with red and goo all the way up to her forearms and splashed over her vest, feeling a pain in her head. Her father telling her if her headache was so bad she could tell the teacher, try going to school first. Migraines run in the family, grandfather grumbling, don’t they? She’d better get used to them! Those are just hangovers, you vile old shit-eater, her mother said. Grandfather throwing his plate at her. “Fuck.” she said. It was nice to hear her own voice and not a strange little animal noise instead. The other bike – the bike the leatherman had ridden and been hooked up to – was a few metres away facing her, and he was still atop it but he didn’t have a head. Or he had most of a head but a large part of his skull had been sheared off, face and eyes and muscle beneath, and what was there stood in the blazing heat of the Eye slowly cooking, grinning with an open mouth down at her. Mel stared at this for a long time. She resisted the urge to wipe her hands upon her trousers. Instead getting up on shaking legs she went to the side of the Sunkisser and opened one of the rear hatches and took out the big-ass water canteen there – size of a bucket, for emergencies out in the desert – and unzipped it and put her arms in all the way to the bottom. The water went a murky black-red in a few seconds. She glanced back at the headless leatherman on the bike and suppressed a bit of vomit and went on washing her arms. Soon they were clean -bits of meat under her nails but never mind – and she stood up and looked over again and now she did for a second remove her breather and throw up all onto the road.
There were other bodies, the other bikers, all around in the lunchtime quiet, with the city ahead and its walls sat there in silent disapproval. The gun was back in its holster at her hip and she didn’t remember taking either with her when she’d left the prefab earlier. A wriggling inside her head, a flailing slimy tentacle brushing against her motor cortex. SORRY. Mel jumped as the voice filled her up and she put all of these terrible thoughts together and powered by a kind of anger/fear she took the gun out again and put it to her temple and clicked the safety off. This time her finger around the trigger was her own. “Alright!” she said. “Fuck you, you alien fucker! What are you fucking doing in my head?”
A long pause followed. Then: I AM ACTING AS FORTY-FIVE PERCENT OF YOUR BRAIN MATTER.
“What?”
I HAVE EATEN THAT FORTY-FIVE PERCENT.
“What?”
DO NOT WORRY. THE REMAINING FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT IS YOURS. Her hand shook. She threw the gun aside and slowly slid down to the road, sitting there with her knees in the dirt, and cried. It was ugly crying, break-up crying like she had made Andy do once, animal bleats and sobs and swearwords in French and English as the tears rolled down her face and onto the road, and like a frightened dog she whimpered and rolled about. Then all of that passed; like an eclipse in which the sun had disappeared for only a short moment her consciousness returned and Melanie remembered where she was and who she was and what she was doing. She was going to see Andy. Wiping snot from her face and cleaning it off the back of her hand with an antiseptic wipe from the bike and replacing her mask she sat down on the stricken Sunkisser then and sighed. For a long time she didn’t speak. “Why…did you say sorry?” she asked the air.
HUMANS SAY SORRY.
“Do you know what it means?”
NO.
She had picked up the gun again at some point and held it on her lap like a pet, stroking it with her free hand. Her mask was up, the air hurting her lungs by the second but seconds were okay. The other hand held a cigarette. “How did you get in my head?”
MADE A HOLE.
“Why did you do it?”
I AM ASURA. I HAVE A MISSION. I NEED YOUR BODY.
She watched the walls of New Red Star, the great hulking shape of the bridge between here and there. “Why not just take over or whatever?”
DON’T KNOW HOW TO MOVE.
“What do you plan to do with me?”
KILL ANOTHER HUMAN.
She gestured to the corpses all over the road. “One of them?”
NOT HUMAN. Mel got up. She walked and smoked and peered at the body on the bike; peered deep into the devastated ruin of its cranial cavity, where pulped brain and bone were mashed together with liquified muscle tissue. But half of the brain was gone – there was nothing there, an absence of an entire quarter of the thing. Or forty-five percent of it. Of the worm or alien or Asura or whatever the fucking fuck she found nothing. “Like me?” she asked.
WORSE.
“Who sent ‘em?”
ASURA.
“Why?”
I DON’T KNOW. INFORMATION NOT GIVEN. BUT KNEW THEY MIGHT COME.
“Information not given?”
I AM ONLY A DRONE.
“Okay. And you can move me. My body, I mean.”
IF REQUIRED. DO NOT WANT TO.
“Why not?”
A very long pause followed. She wondered about how exactly it used language; some kind of interfacing between the pulsing squirming thing that had eaten her brain and the remains of said brain – or was it slurping away at her language centre, trying to learn Standard? OVERT INFLUENCE INCREASES PERCENTAGE OF YOUR BRAIN TISSUE THAT I HAVE CONSUMED. DO NOT WANT TO CONSUME YOU.
“Why not?”
BEING HUMAN IS DIFFICULT. Mel considered this. Finally she returned the RL-60 to its holster. Her cigarette was almost down to a butt and she spat it out and pulled her mask down. The invader told her – without those uncomfortable shouting words but a momentary, more elegant kind of worm-to-brain connection – that it could not tell her what its mission was. She stood, picking up the Sunkisser and with effort hefting it back upright. “Ok.” she grunted. “Well, you just tell me if we find it. I’m going to see Andy.” She clambered back onto the bike. “I don’t know if you know who she is, but if you’re sucking shit out of my head you can pick up a little in there. We loved each other once. It was very sad. Do you get those parts?” I HAVE RECREATED ALL OF THE CONSUMED AREAS OF YOUR BRAIN EXACTLY WITHIN MYSELF. INCLUDING MEMORIES. “Good.” Mel gunned the engine once more. She looked around at the corpses. Felt human blood on her fingertips, the sensation of her hands being shoved rudely inside someone’s skull. The city waited for her. “Enjoy ‘em.”
She rushed across the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bridge at full speed, through the barrier gate and all the way over in minimal traffic just as the reports came in of another gang incident on Highway W-2 – Genocide, the guy on the radio didn’t quite say – and the whoosh of militia vehicles going the other way with their sirens blaring came to meet her, armoured trucks and tanks and a squad of bikes with rotaries and backpacks. She just a civvie on an obnoxious show bike met them and watched them roar towards the scene of the crime with a little odd smugness. She had fired at bandits before, far-off figures in the night lurking near the prefab, or maybe bandits or ghosts or Carlos, but – her hands deep in the gore of the leatherman’s face – first time she’d killed one or seven people. No legal conviction for offing bandits (Settler’s Right Paragraph 2 Article 2, passed 2120 – M.). Lots of loopholes there. Scum and villainy. Her little wormy invader had saved her from the kind of shit Carlo had always bragged about pulling off. She hoped it wouldn’t have to kill someone important.
Over the bridge by mid-afternoon and she was starting to get hungry. The traffic at the ring road around the base of New Red Star was a little more frantic, civvies and cargo chasing the gates for a shortcut for some delivery job or family errand, lanes a coming and going of various ugly types of Qingting personal one-seater, some Gajah long-haulers, a Freebird or four, an Indo-American Bijalee with burning headlights and six-wheel chassis and roaring solar fans at one dangerous point she swerving by its enormous grill without caring enjoying the rush. Mel reached A-Men and under the great steel locks with the drone cannons and the militia guards in heavy armour she parked her bike and with her mask off – the filtration towers hummed nearby, making the air breathable – she walked for a bit next to the roaring traffic to find a diner. She punched in her order outside and slipped it a fifty yuan note and went in with her ticket to wait. Inside was gloomy and dusty and the great server worked as a metal spider strung up from the ceiling, whirring as it slid about on its rails, its many arms hanging low over her head. The rows of plastic seats were almost all empty and the place was quiet. She went and sat down, little table before her. After a minute or so the spider came over and deposited a steaming hot bowl of wonton before her. “EN. JOY.” it said, scurrying off. Mel picked up the chopsticks and did so.
The other customer in the diner was in one corner, a white boy with dragon tattoos and big muscles and a beanie cap, skirt loose about his waist and sandals hanging off his feet as he slurped up noodles and read from a book which she saw at a glance was Dragon lit, The Space Race And The Coming Conquest. Shaved head and sunken eyes. Mel knew the type – spaceport thugs with little else to do who grew up on dreams of the War of Reclamation (the 2150 restoration of Junsha to Eurasian sovereignty after the collapse of the Socialist League – M.) as the crowning moment of offworld victory over the localists. They were outsiders who wished to shred localist meat any day, any time just like the great ancestors of two decades ago, men who beat anyone who hung about speaking Standard with a local inflection or not speaking Standard at all, who fought with the union gangs, with the militia, with anyone…once Andy had told her of a night when they had come to her house to see her father and had waited outside with knives. The emblem was there on the boy’s vest: 外省. The badge of Waisheng Power.
With her wonton finished Mel went up to him. “Hey.” she said in her own pitch-perfect Standard. Or English as the old man called it. The boy turned from his noodles. “You’re reading Dragon.”
“Aye, whatofit?”
She pursed her lips. “You know all that stuff about fucking men is bullshit, right?”
Suddenly the boy was all focused. “What?”
“Yeah. He doesn’t actually do it. ‘I keep my wife for my family and lay with the inferior men for pleasure, to show my strength’.” She blew a raspberry. “He fucks robocunt, I read. Animesque. Can’t get it up for real people anymore, after so many hours plugged in pretending to be a samurai. Ain’t it sad?”
He started to rise from his seat. The fuck you sayin’-”
“Saying your hero isn’t a cut-sleeve. He’s just a boring old straighto.”
Fists clenched. “You bitch-” She smirked. The spider whirred, crossing the room to go back to the kitchen over their heads. At the last second something had stopped the boy from getting up, and he sat there all tense ready to swipe at her but didn’t. He turned back to his book. Mel left him, secure in showing him her back, heart pounding just as it had when she – the invader – had twisted the bike into a drifting turn in the middle of the road under gunfire. Something there. She had felt it, she was sure. The sensation of the other one beneath her skin. There was something intoxicating to it maybe. Dangerous to play with fire, guenon, he had said when he had caught her at ten imitating him by drinking whisky from one of the bottles in the drinks cabinet. With one last look back at the Waisheng boy hunched over his noodles she went back outside to her bike, and she mounted it and resumed her ride deep into the city. The invader said nothing all the while.
–
Evening by the time she made it to Andy’s. Deep down Liberation Road, neon-specked boundary between Waisheng turf and worse – on the eastern side were the banners of Waisheng, Boss Goodwill’s boys having taken the rusted cracked-apart once-neat space-age apartments of the Squatter’s Sector and dressed them in a mishmash of orientalisms, Chinese dragons and Mid-Century Revival Minarets stuck to some of the balconies alongside neosov guns and shrapnel shields; a great Shinto gate had been erected, wreathed in hanafuda at the entrance to one of the alleyways (the Waisheng had always been mad that the majority of authentic Chinese temples on Junsha were either in the union side or in Duofu where the company staff lived – M.). On the west were union flags and in a few places the hammer-and-sickle-and-autobolter emblem of the old League, and here the ramshackle terraces were not armed to the teeth and did not look to present much of a threat, but thanks to those banners – and the faint presence of workmen, miners in company coveralls in various states of disrepair lurking around the steps and fire escapes and windows of some, not even all, of the terraced houses – it was made clear to all that the Galactic Union of Miners stood by as a greater shield than all the weapons and gangsters in the world. Andy lived on the union side, eighty-six doors down, and Mel was cruising along the barren road (the only vehicles parked in the street here, where the battles had been fought back in the 1850s, were burnouts – M.) trying to get there.
Above the fake sky was an earth-evening, not the barren blackness of a real Junsha dusk, the stars beyond filtered through an atmospheric shroud to trick the human brain it was looking at home; beyond this were the towers of Duofu where the real money-makers lived, and sketched as a silhouette beyond everything was the D-25, three-hundred-metre long fifty-metre wide orbital defence cannon the broken-off leg of a collapsed titan larger than any other structure on the colony, the god of Junsha, staring up with its one plasma-spitting eye at space just in case the Asura ever came back. Mel passed a party in one of the union gardens, men and women dancing to some Gaddafi tune, and opposite a mob of Waisheng boys were conducting review in an open apartment, saluting and bleeding together as they chanted.
She saw the house before she got there, the cracked-open old truck outside and the statue of Ghani on the corner behind the sandbags, rotary cannon mounted there a relic from the war squat and flat and sheepishly tucked away beneath a metal awning as if it didn’t really want to be there. The house was on the corner of the terrace and so had bars over its windows and a drone-gun on the roof screeching as it turned to scan the sky overhead. It was a slightly melted redbrick building with six bedrooms and a wide garden and a red door with half of the paint scratched away. Life on the frontlines: a political statement, some said, but Mel knew that Andy had lived here since she had been fifteen. Red House had been the heart of the union’s grassroots since before then, since before Andy’s parents had been shot to death by – who? what had been the motive for it, the union’s smartest and most popular organisers gunned down BANG BANG BANG, three barks that had rang out across the Squatter’s Sector just as Mel had been two-fingers down to the knuckle deep in their daughter – she had not killed Robert and Amahle Sanchez herself but she had at least persuaded Andy to stay home and drink and fuck instead of going out on that dangerous demonstration against the company’s response to the Shaft 4B disaster…did Andy want to die, then, with her parents back there, was all this youngest-ever-general-secretary-of-the-union bullshit only a means to try to claw her way back to that moment when politics had gotten her family killed and to join in with it, was it true as Mel had once shouted at her that you fucking love death, don’t you, you fucking want to lie there with your dead fucking stupid parents and never get up again and leave me here alone?
Everything, she thought, was full of old ghosts. There were fairy lights strung up across the garden, from the statue of Ghani outside to the palm tree in the far corner, and upon the paving stones amidst the weeds, just to the right of the weed which grew in its little allotment, were gathered some of the old Red House gang talking to a low rumble which had to be one of those Colony-5 dance tracks bum-bada-bumbumum-bum-bada-TSH etc.. Mel from her bike saw Shan short for Shantyman, enormous black-skinned beauty in red leather neither a man or really into shanties but the closest kind of figure Junsha had to a leading musician, old Guppy Jones the grey-haired stooped Anglo-ish veteran welder and the union’s least intimidating most powerful powerbroker, Xingqi Chiang, the handsome – goddamn him – stealer of Waisheng aesthetic, bright suit and long hair and dangerously feminine face, but for union ends. She was not wearing her glasses; her vision was fine without them. Mistake, she realized. Could be another invader perk. She took the glasses from their case and put them on and parked the bike up by the old truck, and casual as she could Mel dismounted. She did not button her shirt and did not bother to hide the enormous gun on her hip but walked in through the busted old iron-wrought gate (we have to fix that, she would joke with Andy sometimes from the bedroom window as they lay together wrapped up in the sheets) and took a drink from someone she didn’t know, bearded Asian-y, who held it out to her from where he and some pals were cuddled over in the corner on cardboard chairs talking about whatever. The glass was plastic and the liquor was hot sake and it greeted her tongue warmly on its way down.
Shan saw her first, pausing mid-sentence, smoothing back their short bright red hair with a large hand. Guppy then turned his head and caught her, old bloodshot eyes betraying him. Last was Xingqi, razor-sharp in his suit, who did not show anything at all.
Mel wandered up to them drink in hand. “Hi.”
Shan narrowed their eyes. “Melanie? Is that a gun?”
“Oh.” Mel said. “Um. Is Andy here?”
“She’s-” Guppy began, but Shan stepped forward, peering at her with red eyes. Mel tried to smile and felt by Shan’s deepening frown it hadn’t gone very well. “You been drinking, Melanie?” they asked.
“No.” she said. But she had and that was why she was so late here, because the invader, she had thought, might have gotten drunk with her, and she wasn’t really thinking but had this idea that someone, Andy maybe (small voice), would give her a hug, and she didn’t want that thing to share the feeling being hugged by Andy would give her and maybe if they were both drunk that would even out to no one feeling anything. But now she was a few whiskeys and a little bit of sake deep. “Yes.” she said. “But it’s important. I-”
Shan crossed their arms. “Oh yeah?” They sighed. “Look, Melanie. An-an can’t afford to have someone like you around anymore. She’s professional now.”
“I’m very professional.” she said.
“Why do you have a gun?”
“Out of professionalism. Let me past.”
Shan scowled. “No.” Something like fire catching in her chest. She squared up to them, a full head shorter without any fancy muscle enhancers but she had killed seven people earlier that day. But they were a head taller and did have muscle enhancers. Her hand (what the fuck no stop it – M.) went to the holstered RL-6. “Mel.” Xingqi said. All concerned turned to him. Mel’s hand did not draw the gun and fire. Xingqi tapped a slender finger against his sharp chin. “What do you want to speak to her about?” His Standard as clean and offworld as her own. Mel looked at his soft blue eyes, mild surgical gift. “I want to congratulate her.” she said quietly.
“Coulda sent a message.” Shan grunted. But Xingqi only let out a sigh, finger now tapping his own collar as he thought about her. Through his open shirt she glanced the string of the buddha he wore about his neck. Namu Emituofo, she offered. “Go in.” he said. Shan did not say anything but glowered. “But that’s it, you understand? Congratulations and then you leave. You say anything…you touch her or anything weird, then I’ll send some boys over to break your legs.”
“Got it.”
“I’ll ask her, Melanie. To tell me everything you say to her.”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked for a second as if he was going to say something else. Then he didn’t. “Get outta here, anyway. Be back in five minutes. And don’t touch another drop of alcohol, you got it?”
“Got it.” she said. She had seen one of the coverall chaps go inside earlier with a bottle of baijiu and wondered where that might have ended up. Xingqi frowned. Shan frowned. Guppy leant forward. “I liked your last article, Miss Gaston.” he said.
“Thanks, Gup.” she said. But there was little more to be said between them and so she flounced off as per the old style, the Hurricane Melanie style of when she had last been out here. It was strange; being back beneath the false sky and in the dirty sweaty stinky world of men instead of in her prefab writing and poisoning her liver and lungs. She felt great; like she could ruin a bunch of peoples’ lives all over again. In the old hallway with its floral wallpaper and stinking carpet were the usual planners and union types, and one of them was the man with the baijiu who filled her glass for her and told her how much he fucking hated her last article. Mel thanked him and drank up. She edged past two portly official types who were discussing financing in the fourth quarter into the living room, where the table was adorned with sheets of paper and a whiteboard was decorated with scrawled diagrams in Andy’s terrible handwriting, strategies for growth, for countering company propaganda, for the campaign over the shaft worker accidents last year…wasn’t it all so real, she thought, compared to scribbling about Marx and other animals in articles that people liked or disliked the same way they disliked sports teams or TV shows…but then it didn’t escape her that so much of this was as it had been decades ago under the senior Sanchez organisers, and perhaps decades before that too. What was a union if not a kind of reverse-policeman, its purpose defined by solving the endless little cases instead of the one big one. Had said as much once: maybe it wasn’t a fucking gun that killed ‘em, hey, An, but just fighting the same battle every day their whole lives.
She came to the dining room, currently site of a meeting of W-Sector boys and girls, tough fuckers who all carried guns and who noticed hers at once even as they were bent over the table studying a map of Revolution Square and the surrounding apartments. A pale Indian boy with a big moustache looked up at her, and with his buzzcut hair gestured to the stairs, where compared to everywhere else there were almost no hangers-on or union heavies or weird drunk socialists. A man tried to offer her a joint on the way up the varnished steps, he hanging from the banister leaning out over the forest of severe W-Sector heads. “Wild.” he was saying. “Just wild.” Mel agreed it was and went past him with her glass of baijiu in hand. She trampled past the big ole’ ugly painting of Frida Kahlo and past the bathroom where she’d once taken a clothed bath with Andy when they’d both been clueless teenage girls, past that horrible light fitting with the six faux-crystal bulbs, past what had been her parents’ room – the only door firmly shut – and then there it was, the old bedroom/study/fuckbunker, door open like it was telling her this was really a good idea and not a terrible one. Mel glided inside, stepping along in time to the distant rhythm of the Colony-5 song. The room had changed since then, of course; she was kind of hurt to see how much. Gone were all the old Marxist posters and propaganda pics and in now was a long desk with a typewriter and a personal computer and – she hated to see it – a med station by the window, where once there had been the bed they’d always shared. Now the bed was a little thing in the corner with a wooden frame like something from a story, and the bookshelf was a real bookshelf above it and all of the old stuffed animals had been replaced with a filing cabinet. And amidst all this that had been changed was she still the same. Andrea Sanchez who Mel had never ever called anything else – not that name Andrea, not fucking An-an – but Andy, her Andy, brown skin and black hair, something Asian in there but also East African like her mother, some kind of German too maybe? a churned-up, fully-fledged Eurasian of the classic propaganda type; hair long and untied down to her shoulders, blue flannel shirt with overly-large belt and dark jeans, silver bracelet on her left wrist that slid down her arm as she lifted it, pen in hand, sat down studying something on her desk.
Mel told herself to be cool. She told herself not to think of that brilliant face with its soft eyes and thick lips and the little way she smiled like she didn’t want to give it to you and the body beneath that overlarge shirt with those cute little breasts and that mole near her navel and the way she had of looking away at the vital moment, all of her firebrand self-confidence evaporated, and told you in that most definite but subtle way that she was yours. Mel did not think about any of these things for two and a half seconds. Then: “Hi! Andy!”
Andy turned at once, prey on alert, and she saw Mel and her face went through two dozen emotions in the space of a single moment, a kind of painful-looking spasm. Then her mouth opened and closed. And she seemed to settle finally on something like compromise: “Mel. Hi.” Then she seemed to gather herself, those gentle almond eyes finding composure: “What are you doing here?” The Standard peppered with spice of the Bensheng, who had always been on Junsha and never anywhere else. An original settler family. Mel tried to gather herself and found only bits and pieces scattered in the dirt. “I-” eyes to the door, “can we talk? Like, in private?”
Andy was facing her and she was tense. “Talk about what? Mel, I- I can’t talk – we’re busy tonight, you know? We won the election. We’re in charge. I can’t talk about the ghosts of capitalism or whatever with you.”
“There’s no ghosts or whatever.” Mel said. “I just – hey, did you ever see an Asura?”
Andy frowned, worst expression in the world. “What?”
Mel was there with the music, trying to figure out how to not continue fucking this up. “I mean.” she began, and something in her hand twitched. Her right arm was moving down to her waist. She felt her fingers crawl like spider limbs down her side all the way there until they were at the holster which held the RL-60, and she felt them grab the gun and begin to pull it free. A sudden urge to kill something came to her. Andy leant out of her chair to peer at it. “What’s…Mel, is that a gun?”
“No.” she said, as she pulled the gun from the holster. What the hell, she said in her head. TAKE IT EASY, the Asura said. Mel felt herself holding the RL-60, its metal pressed against her palm its weight pulling her arm towards the earth. Andy was staring. “Mel, what is this?” SHE IS THE TARGET.
A great number of feelings rose up in Mel’s gut and didn’t go anywhere, stifled by the invader maybe. “Why?” Mel asked. Andy almost but not quite flinched at the question, sat there with a weapon almost pointed at her. Her hand rested against her thigh relaxed but not really. Classic Andy, supposedly ready for death – shoot cowards you are only going to kill a man, who had said that, guenon, do you even know? She gripped the gun tight. SHE IS THE LEADER OF THIS COLONY. Leader, the invader said. I AM HERE TO KILL THE LEADER OF THIS COLONY. THAT IS MY PURPOSE. I WILL KILL THE LEADER OF THIS COLONY. Melanie was sweating with the effort of it. She thought about the election and the union and the state of Junsha where gang versus union remained the only politics there were. She put a hand on her right arm to force it down where it was trying to raise itself to take aim at Andy’s chest. Andy gripped the sides of her chair. “Melanie, what the fuck are you doing?”
“I-” Mel with grit teeth, forcing her arm away, “I’m just – thinking.”
“About…what?”
“I know you’re the union’s gensec now. And all.?” THE LEADER OF JUNSHA, the invader said with booming glee. “Is that really, like, worth anything, though?” she spat, a fire within her head. Hate this fucking cunt kill her shoot her head a few times show her who the fucking boss is. Andy’s frown deepened, worse than the worst expression in the world. “What?”
“I mean – are you really the leader?” Mel’s voice becoming too high. “Are you, huh? I mean, you won that election, but surely Dr. Khan…he still controls the committee, right?” Her arm did not relent at this. Mel thought very hard. “And…anyway, nobody takes the GUM that seriously anymore. It’s Waisheng Power who call the shots on the ground. It’s Boss Goodwill who runs Junsha, isn’t it?”
“…What?”
“Please!” Mel hissed. “It’s Boss Goodwill who’s in charge, right?”
“What?” Mel was too close to her now, ready either to shoot her or not, the RL-60 in both hands and both hands no longer her own but kind of and everything now resting on this. She looked straight into Andy’s pretty face. “It’s the gangsters, right?” she wheezed. “They’re the…let’s say, leaders, aren’t they? The leaders of this colony? Boss Goodwill and his boys? Please?”
Andy wrinkled her nose. “Mel, you’ve been drinking.”
Hand on her shoulder. Other hand on the gun still twitching. They- “Please just tell me right now that you’re not the most important person on Junsha!” Mel snapped. “You’re not the fucking leader! You’re just a kid, right? Just some – politician. Please!” Blood boiling remember the time you stayed up late at night to record a live performance on the Net of Skins of Demons and you sent it to her and she didn’t even fucking say thank you for it the urge to pull that trigger, to squeeze and ruin, building. She stared into Andy’s beautiful face. “Please!”
A hand on her shoulder now. Hard and strong and mighty. She tore herself away from Andy and saw Shan there holding onto her face like thunder. “Melanie.” they said. “This is not ‘congratulations’.”
“Fuck off.” Mel said, then regretted it. She was hauled back but she also wasn’t because her body had gone all tense and she had grabbed Shan’s hand and twisted it away with that same strength that had clawed open the leatherman on the Genocide Highway and now she had the gun aimed at Shan and was trying very hard not to pull the trigger too. Shan stared at it, too outraged to speak. “Sorry.” Mel said. She twisted her head back to Andy. “Please, Andy, tell me-”
“Alright.” Andy said. Everything went quiet. “Alright, whatever the hell. You know I’m not in charge. You know Waisheng have sewn things up ever since my parents died. You know the union is fucking done. You know all of this – you know I’m on the losing side here and I know it too and you know I know so what the fuck are you doing here coming in and telling me that, you fucking bitch? What the fuck is wrong with you?” Tears running down her face silently, her voice full of nothing but hard black anger, her fingers digging hard into the material of her trousers. But Mel’s own fury was also dissipating; she no longer wanted to shoot anyone here. She thought she had won over the invader. “I don’t know.” she said. Shan grabbed her from behind roughly, both of their wide arms pinning hers to her back, and she was wrenched away from the sight of the miserable broken Andy – who she had made miserable and broken for what, the fourth time now? – and frogmarched down the stairs, Shan hissing swearwords in her ear all the while. The invader did nothing although it could have; they together in this one body were marched past a watching Xingqi and Guppy and all the others and thrown out through the busted gate into the street, where Mel skidded on the pavement for a moment before being helpfully stopped by the bulk of her own motorbike driving itself into her gut.
She fell over winded and lay there for a little while serene on the asphalt. Visions in her head – she and Andy furiously fucking in a tube hotel one night a decade ago, the firing of the orbital defence cannon over Junsha with its roar breaking all the windows and shattering all the brickwork of this haunted old slum, a battalion of Asura Class-2 soldiers advancing on a human outpost out near the end of the Tyler Array keen to claim one of their heads for the Ritual of Scorn – she sighed and did not get up. YOU TOLD THE TRUTH.
“Huh?” she managed, studying the intricate patterns on the side of her bike’s front tyre.
YOU DID NOT LIE. ANDREA SANCHEZ IS NOT THE POLITICAL LEADER OF JUNSHA. OUR INTELLIGENCE WAS OUTDATED. I UNDERSTAND THIS NOW.
“No fucking shit. Maybe…twenty years ago, the union ran the place. But…you can’t count ‘em out, but they’re not in charge. That’s what you want, right? You’re here to assassinate the leader. Ain’t the union gensec, not these days.”
YOUR FRIEND WAS NOT LYING.
“Yeah. She’s aware of it. I just had to make sure you were aware of it too. So you didn’t kill her.”
SHE WAS ANGRY.
“Very. And I’m angry.” Mel said, angrily. “You took my fucking gun without telling me and brought me here without telling me and now my gut hurts because that asshole Shan threw me into a bike. “
SORRY.
“Did you figure out what that means yet?”
NO. THE TRUE LEADER IS THE LEADER OF THE GANG? BOSS GOODWILL.
“Yep.”
I HAVE BONDED WITH YOU TO GET CLOSE TO ANDREA SANCHEZ. CAN YOU ALSO GET CLOSE TO GOODWILL, THE LEADER OF JUNSHA?
“Uh, maybe. I don’t have any other plans for the near future.” She giggled at this. Wished she hadn’t lost her cup of sake somewhere. A car trundled along in the middle of the road with driver peering out cautiously, roof-mounted rotary swivelling left then right at the shadows on the rooftops. “You’re suddenly talkative.”
I AM SLOWLY INTEGRATING WITH YOUR BRAIN MATTER. I AM TAKING ON MORE HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS AS THE BARRIER BETWEEN MY CELLS AND YOUR OWN BREAKS DOWN. IF WE DO NOT FULFILL OUR MISSION OBJECTIVE I WILL BE FORCED TO FEEL ALL OF THESE AWFUL THINGS FOREVER.
“…What happens if we do fulfil our mission objective?”
I WILL KILL MYSELF.
“Oh.”
IT WILL BE BLISS.
“Right.” She reached around and found the gun, fallen from her hand when she’d hit the bike, and then went for the bike itself and used it to haul herself upright. YOU WILL NOT DIE, the invader added. Mel holstered the gun and took a very deep breath. HALF OF YOUR BRAIN WILL SIMPLY BE SHAPED A LITTLE LIKE MY CORPSE. That didn’t sound like a bad deal, she thought. IT ISN’T. So they moved on into the night, scurrying away towards the Waisheng Power side of the road, and both trying hard not to think about how Andy had looked at them at the end of their conversation. They went to go find Boss Goodwill and to try and kill him instead.
Video City 