‘Can I help you?’
I didn’t have to feed Montenegro’s face into the algorithm to know this was the Ratking, I recognised him just fine. He adopted a pleasant, neutral smile. He was impeccably dressed in some kind of dark, high-collared shirt, embroidered with geometrical patterns. A full spectrum-implant in his skull pulsed cyan like the blinking of a distant star. Not a quickpatch job like the ones down in Changhao. This was authentic neuralware.
‘I’m after something special today,’ I said, matching his smile.
A subsurface device beamed a holodisplay between us, blinking with icons and datastreams. Montenegro enhanced a neural-lace that looked like an explosion of black ink, frozen moments after discharging. ‘Latest shipment came in from offworld. Feeds straight into a drone’s matrix terminal, delivering a full-spectrum of sensory feeds. The long-range edition lets you hook into astro-exploration drones performing deep-sea excavations across the Common. There’s enough radiation on these planets to wither your DNA in hours. With these, you can smell the ozone, hear the—’
‘Not after any of that,’ I interrupted. Without breaking eye contact, I said, ‘I’m after a G17 Module with Systems-Wide Range and full haptic support.’
Montenegro didn’t bat an eye, but his pleasant veneer dissolved into cautious suspicion. Stormdealers and buyers aren’t stupid enough to just say what they’re buying and selling. They’ve got codes, key-phrases rotating on a weekly basis, used so customer and buyer recognised each other. Grim had found this week’s phrase on the database.
‘Never seen you around here before,’ he told me. ‘Need some verification.’
‘Of course.’ My shib chimed as I flicked over the virtual passkey stamped with Animal Kingdom’s passcode that told Montenegro I was a verified purchaser who had history with his stormdealer syndicate. It had taken Grim less than three hours to create a very good duplicate and rack up a solid history of purchases. He’d quite enjoyed turning me into the drug-addled psychopath.
Montenegro’s eyes glazed as he took his sweet time inspecting the passkey, routinely levelling a stare my way. I feigned irritation and folded my arms. Only I knew he was already reaching out to his fellow stormdealers, authenticating the passkey. I also knew Grim would be waiting on the other end, like a grinning panther in the long grass of the virtual landscape. He’d intercept the transmission, feeding Montenegro falsified intel to confirm my identity and answer any queries Montenegro had. They’d better be good enough, because now I’d entered negotiations, if Montenegro got suspicious, I wouldn’t leave this floor alive.
The virtual panes dissolved and swept away like ash in the wind. The Ratking’s eyes flicked up at me, an undercurrent of steel in his expression. ‘We’re good. How much colour did you want?’
‘It worked,’ Grim breathed down the other end of my commslink.
He never used the phrase stormtech. Smart. ‘Three phials,’ I said. I scratched at my chest, a flare of blue spiralling up along my ribcage. Montenegro nodded and stabbed a button under the counter, a partition of the white tiled wall swinging backwards without any visible mechanisms. I locked my nerves down as I followed him into the room. Taking my suit would have attracted too much attention. But without it, the stormtech was amplifying my every twitch of body-language with big neon signs. If I was used to buying from stormdealers, dealing with one more wouldn’t raise any issues. Had to lock it down, hard.
The Ratking didn’t have a room. He was the room. The walls were laced with a fibre-optic system underneath some sort of pliable material, glistening like rubbery obsidian. It was breathing, moving up and down like a torso. A steady pulse pounding out of the speakers. The room was wired to his heartbeat, his breathing. Spindly dark fibres thick as my fingers jutted from the walls like crystalline hairs. They quivered with excitement and tension as the Ratking approached, before swerving around to me. Don’t know how I knew, but they were inspecting me with suspicion. It was like getting sniffed at by a pack of dangerous, rabid animals. Unsettling didn’t even begin to cover it.
I heard Grim whistle down the commslink. ‘He’s running a full-body skinroom. They grew the walls from his skin cells, laced every circuit of this place to his DNA, his biometrics. It’s a darkmarket, military-grade defence system. Vak, you’re literally standing inside him.’ He snorted so hard he almost choked. ‘This guy’s got some really messed up issues.’
I really love when a world of complication just gets dumped on your head without warning. Makes life that much more interesting.
I swallowed a grimace and made a note not to touch anything that resembled anything remotely organic. Hunks of black machinery were growing in the corners of the room, twitching like the foetus of a biomechanical monster that hadn’t yet hatched. The room was still developing. Flexiscreens with dark gold trimmings extended out of the ceiling on spindly supports. A mainframe, dripping with cables. A geometric glass desk, littered with fibre-optic wire. No idea if they too were infused with his biometrics, but always better to be sure.
I made to follow the Ratking into the adjoining annex, but he wasn’t having it. ‘You can wait here.’ He gestured at a pale pink armchair, expecting me to sit. I didn’t. ‘I don’t show my stash to customers.’
I smiled thinly. ‘Might be I want to check the quality of your stock.’ If the Ratking was smart, his stashroom would be in lockdown, wired with a self-destructive sequence that would trigger if anything went wrong. All our data and leads
