String City
STRING CITY
Graham Edwards
First published 2019 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-78618-199-2
Copyright © 2019 Graham Edwards
Cover art by Vince Haigh
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
For Pete
See a penny
Pick it up
All the day
You’ll have good luck.
The Tartarus Heist
1
THEY STORMED MY office brandishing clubs. Some carried torches, burning despite the torrential rain. Orange flames flashed off sulking puddles but the body of the mob was a mass of shadows, more like ghosts than people.
Here in String City, they could have been either.
I checked the locks: six down each side of the door, all singularity-bonded. Each lock had internal gravity equivalent to a dwarf star and the door itself was quarter-inch glass. With two extra dimensions woven into the panes, it rated an effective thickness of three miles. More than enough to stop a crowd of angry citizens baying for my blood.
Like any good private detective, I make security a priority.
A thunderbird swooped low, gold wings obliterating the jagged city skyline with a shadow the size of six city blocks. The torch flames jostled in the darkness. When the thunderbird climbed again, its hurricane slipstream opened the clouds. Watery sunlight splashed down over distant neon-crusted towers and soaked the street in an uncertain glow.
The mob reached the door and stared in at me. There was a round man in a square stetson carrying a battered leather satchel, a tall woman with her arm in a sling, a dockside worker in greasy overalls. I watched as the anger drained from their faces—all faces that I recognised. I didn’t like what was left when the anger was gone.
It looked too much like hope.
As soon as I turned my back on the door, the anger of the mob came back. The glass might have been three miles thick but I could still hear the shouts. Someone screamed for my blood.
I hurried to the big walnut desk at the back of my office. To get there, I had to weave through the piles of case folders stacked from floor to ceiling. It was like a maze. I wondered how many hundreds there were. I must have been crazy to take on so much work, but times were hard. I’d have been crazy to turn it down.
Nobody knew what had started the financial collapse, and even the quantum economists could see only a single downward spiral ahead. Folk trudged the streets with their heads down and their hands stuffed deep in their pockets, and talked grimly in bars about the end of the world. It was nothing you could put your finger on, but it was also everything. If life was a symphony, it had suddenly started playing in a minor key.
You might not think a city-wide depression would be good for business. But I’m a private investigator. When money’s tight, decent folk will burn down their homes just to get the insurance and who do the loss adjusters call in to rake through the ashes? Gumshoes like me. Then there’s the hopeless unemployed who cheer themselves up by cheating on their wives. There’s nobody more ready to pay a shamus his fee than a jilted dame. Need I go on?
Think of them all. A whole city full. All those poor saps who figure that, with the world going to hell in a handcart, they’ve got nothing to lose. Like the man said, it’s an ill wind blows no sucker any good. For the first time since Laura died—geez, had it really been ten years?—I was making good money and the sun was shining down on my shabby little office. Could you blame me for making hay?
I took a sheet of paper from the desk and wrote a single word on it in black pen. I picked up a roll of sticking tape. Dragging my boots back over the frayed carpet, I returned to the door.
The mob held its collective breath. Expectant faces bobbed like buoys in the ocean. At the back, a hooded man loitered. His features were lost in shadow. Had he been there before?
I took a breath, made ready to tape the notice I’d made to the glass. The notice that read:
CLOSED
The city exploded.
I saw it over their heads: a spear of dazzling purple light shooting straight up out of Tartarus, String City’s gambling quarter. A dozen gaudy nightclubs tore themselves apart and the ring of tower blocks surrounding them folded to rubble. Cars flew skyward on jagged arcs of electricity as all the neon in the district shorted out, big colorful volts that stabbed the clouds before arcing over and down into what was left of the neighborhood. Bricks and bodies flew clear of the epicenter, riding the lightning. Dust billowed into a seething black mushroom that ate the sky. The thunderbirds scattered.
The ground bucked like a mule and in my office stacks of case files collapsed like the statues of dictators on revolution night. Outside, a crack tore down the middle of the street. Asphalt strips unrolled like clocksprings, tossing hapless pedestrians into the air. A big one tipped a municipal garbage truck on end and ejected its golem operators into the gutter.
The people outside my door clung to each other, screaming.
Something was tumbling out of the dust cloud, turning end over end: a rectangular chunk of debris thrown up by the explosion, trailing sparks and showering rubble. It reached the top of its trajectory and started to fall. It looked about the size of a railroad carriage. It was tumbling this way.
I screwed up the paper and tossed it aside, then swiped my hand down the row of locks. One by one the singularities inverted and I yanked open the door. Wind howled in, laced with the last of the rain; with it came a rumble like the belly-ache of the gods.
“Get inside!” I yelled.
The mob poured through the open doorway, a liquid, terrified throng. The chunk of debris bore down on them like Armageddon.
“Hurry!” I hauled the woman with the broken arm over the threshold. “You all in?”
I looked for the hooded man, but he was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he’d run away, or been swallowed by one of the sinkholes opening up in the street. Outside, a hundred more folk were running and bleeding. There wasn’t anything I could do for them.
The rectangular missile was rushing straight toward my office.
I slammed the door and engaged the locks a second before it hit. One corner of the thing hit the sidewalk like a pile driver, embedding itself six feet deep in the exact spot the mob had been standing. The rest of it crashed against the door, buckling as it tried to smash its way through. It was like someone had dropped a whale on the world. A crack split the glass from bottom to top, but the door held. Everything shuddered. The mob and I waited, shuddering too. Ash from the distant explosion rolled over the street and smothered the glass and everything went black.
Everything except the neon lettering still spitting fitfully on the broken slab of steel that had flown halfway across the city to fetch up against my door. The letters flickered electric red, dying one after the other before my eyes. I had just enough time to read them before they went out altogether. The words they made filled me with dread:
TARTARUS CLUB
2
WE EYED EACH other across the office, the mob and me. The light from the burning torches picked out my desk, the couch, the stacks of case files.
“What in the halls of Hades was that?” said the round man in the stetson. Sweat beaded his chubby upper lip.
“Out where?” said the woman with the broken arm. “There’s nowhere to go.”
“You can still get a Greyhound out over the Scrimshaw Bridge. They’re saying the Gates of Gehenna have opened.”
“Yes,” said the round man. “But at what price?”
“A heavy one.” The docker took a step toward me. “Which is why I want my money back, gumshoe.”
His words spiked the mob like a cattle prod. Shock from the events outside drained away. The anger was back, and in force.
“Yes.” The round man smeared the perspiration from his lip. “I paid you in good faith and you’re not a step closer to finding my son.”
“You promised me I’d have my insurance money within a week,” said the injured woman. “I haven’t worked in two months and the rent’s due tomorrow and...” She broke down.
They came toward me. I retreated until the backs of my legs hit the desk. “Wait up, folks. We can work something out.”
“Don’t jerk us around, buster.”
A new voice. I looked for its owner, saw nobody. Then a lens of air advanced through the little crowd. It was shaped like a woman. My nostrils caught an unmistakable ozone tang.
“It’s cash or blood,” said the sylph. “Your choice.”
I held up my hands. The dame might have been made of fresh air but experience told me the fist she was waving could still pack one hell of a punch.
“You’ll get your money.” It was a promise I couldn’t deliver on, but I was desperate to buy time. I cursed myself for taking their cash up-front. In the past I’d always played a no-win, no-fee game with my clients. The depression might have made these poor suckers desperate, but it had made me something worse.
Greedy.
“I’ve got a safe in the cellar,” I said. They didn’t need to know it was empty. As fast as the money had come in, the spiraling rent had sucked it back out. “I can give you the readies right now or—” I sucked in a breath “—or I can give you my signed guarantee that your cases will be solved by the end of the week. All of them.”
“Cash or blood,” snarled the sylph, floating nearer. The air inside her carried its own weather systems. Tiny black clouds told me a storm was brewing.
“Then I’ll open a vein and sign in whatever comes out.” I scanned their faces, looking for the hope I’d seen earlier. It wasn’t there.
“I say we take the money,” said the docker. “Then burn this place to the ground.”
There was a rumble of assent. I considered stretching over the desk to the drawer where I keep my gun. I figured they’d take me apart before my fingers reached the handle.
“No,” said the woman with the broken arm. “I didn’t come here for this. I want answers. I want the evidence I need to survive.”
“False evidence for a dodgy insurance claim?” said the round man. “My son is missing—do you have any idea what...?”
“He’s supposed to be investigating my workforce for fraud,” called a woman from the back of the crowd.
“My son-in-law’s been fooling around.” This came from a shifty-looking satyr with scruffy legs and double recurved horns.
“Like my wife,” growled the docker.
They pressed closer. The heat from the torches baked my face. Smoke coiled against the ceiling.
“And you?” I said, staring at the sylph.
“You don’t remember, do you?” she replied. Her words crackled like lightning. She waved her transparent arm toward the maze of heaped files. “You’ve taken on so many cases you’ve lost track. You’ve lost touch, gumshoe. Lost touch with the whole world. Time to burn.”
She grabbed the docker’s torch. The flaming brand seemed to float in her heat-haze grip. How exactly did sylphs interact with the physical world? I had no idea.
The telephone on the desk rang.
3
"I’M GOING TO take this call,” I said slowly. “Then I’m going down to the cellar to the safe. You want your money, you’ll get it. You want me to stay on your case instead, just say the word. But you set this place burning, you’ll burn with it. And so will the cash.”
I stopped, mouth dry. As gambles went, it was a poor one. But it was all I had.
I held the sylph’s gaze for two more seconds while the phone continued to ring. Tiny thunderheads roiled behind her smoky eyes.
Slowly, I moved my hand to the phone. Nobody stopped me. I picked the receiver off the cradle, licked my lips.
“Hello?”
“We got trouble,” said a voice like a road grader.
My eyes went to the neon sign lodged outside the door. My heart imploded.
“Hyperion,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”
Meanwhile, the sylph was lowering the torch toward the nearest stack of files. At the last second, the round man with the missing son stayed her hand.
“Let him take his call,” he said. “Maybe somebody else needs him.”
A sound like an airstrike came down the phone line. I pulled the receiver from my ear. When a Titan coughs, you make space in a hurry.
“You should gargle, Hyperion,” I said when the detonations had died away.
“It’s the dust. We got one Hades of a mess down here.”
“The explosion?” It figured. Hyperion owned the Tartarus Club. Whatever calamity had hurled that neon sign halfway across the city, he was sitting in its aftermath.
“Yah. I want you to come down here. Take a look.”
“Why? I thought you Titans cleared up your own messes.”
“Usually we do. This time we got a big mystery. Too big for us.”
I wondered what kind of mystery could be too big for guys who used trees for toothpicks. I also wondered if it was possible to turn down a Titan and live.
I hadn’t done business with the Titans since the affair of the dead wolf in the hat. That debacle had resulted in Hyperion’s brother Iapetos vanishing into a stray dimension and a very nasty stain appearing on my carpet. Iapetos hadn’t been seen since. That stain sure lingered though.
“That explosion must have taken out half a block,” I said. “I’ll bet the cops are all over it. Why not let them handle it?”
Hyperion laughed. My fillings sang like church bells. “When did a Titan last call the cops? You kill me, gumshoe!”
I sighed. “Well, all right. But I’m kind of busy right now. Maybe I could stop by tomorrow?”
Six octaves fell off Hyperion’s voice. He sounded less like an airstrike, more like mutually assured destruction. “You will be here in five minutes.”
There was a click and the line went dead.
I studied the faces of the expectant mob. If patience was gasoline, they were running on fumes. Jump ship now and there’d be no ship to come back to.
Snub the Titan and I’d end up in hell. Literally.
What I needed was a way to be in two places at once.
4
LIKE MOST CELLARS, mine’s dark and damp. The plaster is cracked and warped, but that’s just the dimensions, jostling for space. String City’s full of dimensions.
A little light drips down from the street grille and makes long shadows on the walls. The only other source of illumination is the boiler. It’s an old-model ZZ-Redstream Tokamak Afterburner, big as a bus and ugly as Frankenstein’s pineapple patch. It was built to power an airport. It serves to keep off the chill.
Just as I reached the bottom of the steps, the tokamak’s plasma burner kicked in. A small volcano hit the cellar with fusion light. The extra brightness picked out the shape of the doorway in the corner that some previous tenant had bricked up, long before I’d arrived. It also showed me what I’d come down for: the crate in the corner.
The crate was one of the things I’d inherited when I took over the business from its former owner—an old friend called Jimmy the Griff. I’d been in a bad way—two weeks previously, my wife Laura had di
ed. I was drowning. Jimmy threw me a lifeline.
“They’re just gumshoe gadgets,” Jimmy had said when he’d pointed out the crate. “Disposables. You use them once, you throw them away. I got them at this trade show. Most are just gimmicks, nothing any self-respecting detective would ever use. But some... well, they might come in handy.”
He’d shown me round the place, told me how this was the oldest brownstone in String City. “There’s a foundation stone buried somewhere,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the date. The dimensions are tight here—the tightest I’ve ever known. I’ll bet you can feel it. There’s more than three hundred ways in and out of the cellar, and I’ve tried them all except one. I reckon you’ll feel right at home.”
He said all that, and then he left. Jimmy knew how hard it is to steer your whole life on to a different compass bearing, and he knew I had to turn the wheel myself. I’d already signed the lease and taken the keys; what else was there to say? Besides, Jimmy had always been a restless soul, even when we were kids.
As soon as I was alone in the cellar, I sat down and cried.
Not long after Jimmy sold me the business, he turned to crime. First he was arrested for holding up one of the mail trains headed out to the Unknown Worlds. After breaking out of Wulan Penitentiary he started a run of bank heists that sent him straight to the top of the Most Wanted list. Got himself a hobby too: playing chess with the gods. Then he lost a game to Cronos and everything changed, and I mean everything. When you lose to a god, you pay one hell of a forfeit.
Ten years had passed since then. Another time. Another story.
I pushed back the past, opened the crate and rummaged inside. Doing so made me think of Laura. I think of her a lot, even now. The mob’s low murmur drifted down the stairs from the office. I ignored it.
At last I found what I was looking for: a brass disc the size of my palm, a bit like a dame’s compact. I flipped it open. There was a mirror in the lid. Below the mirror was a button marked ON. I punched it and the thing powered up with an almost imperceptible whine.