Stray Cat Strut

Chapter Sixty-Five - Reckless

“Once a commodity’s price has reached the lowest it can possibly go without becoming unprofitable to sell, the focus of the market becomes less the price of the commodity, but the methods around the sale of the commodity.

That means shipping cost and speed, packaging, and things like customer support and additional sale incentives.”

--Memo to Amazon subsidiary retailers, 2028

***

I sat on my hoverbike, helmet in hand, and just... took a few minutes to breathe.

I was hovering a couple of kilometres above the city, sitting in the sky in a way that would have been a huge waste of kerosene if my bike was even a little more normal than it was.

“Not too sure what the next step is,” I admitted with a yawn.

Something about the thinness of the air was making me tired. Or maybe it was just shortness of breath, from all the smog in the air this high up.

Your itinerary is rather empty at the moment. Perhaps you might consider returning to the floor you purchased? The renovations should be underway as we speak.

“I could check on Rac too,” I said. Poor girl; probably thought I’d run off. Though I bet she was still worshipping that machine. “Yeah, not a bad way to waste an afternoon. Let’s go pick up Lucy first though.”

I gave you ninety-nine percent odds that you’d want to do that.

“You know, when people call out the odds they gave something, it’s not usually so high,” I said as I tugged on my helmet.

Most people aren’t as certain of things as I am.

“Fair enough,” I said. I leaned down, rooted around with my augs to find the controls that took the bike off of its hovering mode, then I glanced around until I found the glowing path leading all the way back to the hotel.

I gunned it, grinning as I tried to push the hoverbike to its limits and see just how fast the thing could really move. As it turned out, that was ‘pretty damned’ fast.

“Oh shit, shit!” I said as I steered up and rolled over a line of traffic that I probably would have had more time to react to had I not been moving so fast.

Reckless as ever. Do you want to know the odds I give you of crashing?

“No, I don’t think I do,” I said. I took her advice and slowed down as I slid into the next curve.

The hotel wasn’t all that far, so after a couple of minutes of cruising along at a reasonable and entirely safe speed, we swung around and into the parking level I had gotten used to using when entering the hotel.

I slid my bike close to the entrance, then swung off of it while flagging down the nearest valet. “Can you park this thing somewhere close?” I asked.

“Certainly, ma’am,” they said. From the smug look they shot back to the other valets, they’d just hit the equivalent of the bragging-rights jackpot.

I waved them off before heading into the lobby.

Almost as soon as I stepped inside, one of the workers behind the counters at the far end of the room went around and jogged over to me. “Miss Stray Cat,” She said. She was a cute twenty-something, in a stylish burgundy uniform that hugged her in nice ways. “Forgive me, ma’am, we received an urgent-sent package for you, but it flagged our security.”

“Oh?” I asked.

She nodded. “We only just received it. We were going to send a letter to your suite, but seeing as how you’re here now, I thought it wise to inform you in person, ma’am.” She smiled, all big and proud.

“Oh, well thanks,” I said. “I don’t recall ordering anything. What’s in the box? How big a gift are we talking here?”

“It’s just a small package, ma’am,” she said while making some gestures about a foot across. “Our in-house security scans flagged it as potentially dangerous material. Did you want to see it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Where’s it from?”

“The offices of Mister Burringham. Sent express, via private courier.”

A gift from Burringham?

I opened my augs and sent him a quick text. “Hey, Jeff, did you send me anything?”

I got a reply before the cute lobby worker and I had even reached the nearest sidedoor. “Yes! Hope you enjoy it!”

Reassured, I let the lobby girl step up ahead of me and lead me through a couple of long corridors. They lacked the opulence that the rest of the hotel had, but were clean and someone had still made an effort to decorate.

“So, what’s your name?” I asked.

“I’m Eleanor, Miss Stray Cat,” she said.

Using my full name. Or at least my title. She was being all professional. “You work here long?”

“Since I was sixteen. My parents both worked here too. It’s becoming something of a generational thing.”

“That’s cool,” I said.

“Here we are,” she said with a gesture into a room. There was a label above that read ‘Security’ and on entering I found a long room with packages on a slow moving conveyor at one end, all of them sliding through a large machine with enough radiation warnings on it to give a radiophobe nightmares. That was on the other side of a glass wall.

“That’s the package, ma’am,” Eleanor said. She gestured to a table on our end of the room. There was a plexiglass box on it, with an air-tight hatch and a smaller conveyor leading into it. A way to separate the box from the others?

“Right,” I said as I walked over and tugged the hatch up. “I bet it’s something stupid. Guy who sent this is a politician.”

Eleanor walked over to a wall and tapped it, revealing a screen inlaid into it. Fancy shit. “Ah, says here the box was flagged because... residues of something explosive.”

What would Burringham send me that could explode? Fireworks? A gun?

Idly, I upped the shielding doohicky on my jacket and shifted in my armour. I probably didn’t need to worry though. “Well, let’s see,” I said.

I grabbed the box, then shook it a bit.

The box is sending a constant connection signal.

“Weird,” I said. I tapped into it with my augs, and all I got was an ID check. I’d received shit from online retailers before that had something similar. Maybe this was the fancier version of that?

I sent in my credentials.

My hearing shut with a pop.

I tried to scream, but I couldn’t expand my chest to pull in any air.

I blinked, but for a long, long time, I was blind.

No pain. No pain, but disorientation. I was on my back?

Catherine? It’s hardly a good time to be laying on your back. Your vitals read as mostly positive, and your armour’s integrity, while damaged, isn’t compromised. Can you get to your feet, check yourself for injuries, and take stock?

I coughed, and the pressure around my lungs faded. It was my armour, tightening around me like a sort of vice. I took some strange pleasure in breathing easier, and more when my hearing returned with a pop.

An alarm was blaring, water was pouring down from above, and as the glass on my helmet faded, I could make out a room filled with a thick smoke that was quickly being shredded by an active fire-suppression system.

I half turned, then pushed myself up to my feet.

The table where the package had been sitting was a wreck, the entire thing blown apart, and the wall behind it was smeared in black soot.

A concussion explosive. Look at the walls, those little pinpricks of scarring.

There were little streaks all over, and a few little bits of metal stuck to the wall. “What’s that?” I asked.

Shrapnel. The bomb was designed to kill an unarmoured person.

But I was armoured.

I blinked. “Eleanor?” I asked.

I found her behind me, pressed up against the wall, blood pooling around her. Her mouth was opened, one eye wide, the other a gorey mess.

“Oh, fuck,” I said as I dropped to a knee next to her. “Myalis!”

Catherine, I can’t detect a heartbeat. One moment, she has active augs... but they’re not reading anything from her mind but faults.

“The fuck does that mean?” I asked. I tugged her to the side, laying her flat on the ground.

It means she’s dead. I’m sorry, Catherine.

Just like that.

“Fuck.”

I wasn’t attached to her. She was a greeter or something, just another cog in the hotel’s machine, but fuck, she was nice and polite. She’d been helpful, and now she was dead.

“Fuck!” I said, this time with more anger, more confusion in it.

The door burst open and a staff member took one step into the room, stared around with an open mouth, then ran off.

“Myalis, who the fuck sent that box?” I screamed. That thing was going to be sent to my rooms upstairs. It was going to be in the penthouse with the kittens, with Lucy. Hell, with me while I wasn’t wearing any armour.

Some fuck had just tried to kill me and my family.

My hands shook.

***