Ark of the Lost Angels

Glance _{(Credit: Tony Skeor)}

This is another short story which takes place in the same continuity as the other Tales from Millennium City. Millennium City is a cyberpunk setting which I first created with the short story “Killswitch“, though that piece actually is the latest piece chronologically. The protagonist was originally named Aaron Pierce, before I renamed him Grayson Carver for the second short story I wrote in that setting, titled “Dead Men’s Cash” which was written to celebrate 100 posts on this website. I’ve had multiple ideas for cyberpunk stories and found that following the same characters and world made it easier to tell this story in a more piecemeal fashion. I have ideas to turn Killswitch into a full novel, and may be incorporating ideas from these short stories into the full version, but it is still a long way off and may not necessarily reflect everything as originally written. For now, please enjoy another story in a series I am beginning to call Tales From Millennium City.

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There are no happy endings in Millennium City. That’s what we’re told when we enter this life. It’s the defining creed of every hacker, mercenary, corpo ladder-climber, and anyone else who wants to become a legend or live life on the knife’s edge. I’ve heard it since I was a boy. It makes me envy the normal people. The ones who work regular jobs, and go to normal bars, chase cheap thrills, and find a way to stumble back to their beds in the small hours of the morning. They’ll never know what a stakeout in acid rain feels like. They’ve never had to face down a nest of drugged out scavs furiously guarding their hoard of bodies awaiting the carving knife for implants to sell on the black market. They don’t think about looking over their shoulder every time they get dragged to a meeting in the middle of the night with some client that has a job which needs to be done right away. They always need to be done right away. Everyone feels like their problems are the world’s priority.

Carly Velasquez used to be a beautiful soul. She was as aspirational as any other mercenary in our circle and reveled in chaos. However, she was charitable and kind. She took pro bono work for many of the city’s poorer residents to try and get them a taste of the justice so often kept out of their reach. One of my contacts at the MCPD told us when they found her. Seven rounds through her chest, and a katana wound that would have killed someone twice her size with military chrome in one strike. The why is interesting to me. The who even more so. She probably got in over her head and that’s business. But the streets have their own sense of justice and I can’t let her down again.

When my evening began, I was in a high rise apartment with none other than Ariel Stanton, Millennium City’s pop queen. Airel and I have a complicated entanglement. She was faced with an embarrassing, costly problem, and her manager called me to solve it. A copy of her sophomore album was being transported across town in an armored car. Some idiots hit the truck thinking it was carrying a piece of corpo technology they could boost and sell to the highest bidder. Ariel’s management hired my partner, Dominic Hauser, and I to track down the album and deliver it to its intended destination. I decided to track down the aforementioned idiots, which took me three days, to teach them the virtues of confirming their targets before hitting them with explosives. A year later, one of them joined our mercenary organization, the Corsairs, and became a very reliable member of our merry band. Her name was Carly Velasquez.

As a byproduct of the proceedings, Ariel and I struck up an unusual friendship. My friends in the life disapproved of what Ariel and I shared. Truth be told, she is the first person who understands the necessity of being a liar in all aspects the way I do. Her nights are glitz and glamour, mine are danger and cruelty. The masks we wear are different, but the fact that we both wear them binds us. I don’t care that she’s famous, and she doesn’t care about the blood on my hands. In a way, we work.

Of course, by the time Carla’s body was already cooling and the MCPD were on their way to investigate, I was ignorant of her fate and preoccupied with my evening. Ariel’s apartment is high above a town where the stars have long since faded from view, but the glowing canyons create a delightful kaleidoscope backdrop to an evening of secrets and relief. She gets to enjoy a precious few fleeting seconds away from the limelight, and I get a reprieve from the torment experienced by only the luckiest of the city’s denizens. That was our pattern. Her residence is a refuge from the storms of Millennium City for both of us. That’s how it was that night as well.

At that hour, we were swimming in good whiskey and better company. Ariel uses those piercing blue eyes of hers to strip away the lies with which I cloak myself, and that evening was no exception. Still, there were some secrets I stopped from sharing. The grisly truths of my work and the ugly stains on my clothing it brought. I normally carried a few changes in my car at all times, and Ariel had a small section of her rather ample wardrobe reserved for things I could wear when she was entertaining me. Most of them were gifts from her I was too polite to throw away.

Our great tragedy was that neither of us could cross the chasm which divided our worlds. She was too precious for mercenary work, and too talented to do anything other than sing. I was too dark and ruthless for the civilian world. So we existed in the dark shadows of clubs shady enough for me but safe enough for her, the occasional moment when I could pretend to be a member of society, and these evenings in her apartment.

“Why do you do what you do?” she sighed, draping herself atop a black and gold couch which fit the Japanese stylings of her minor palace in the heart of the city. The way she laid, fixing me with that warm stone gaze of hers, was a challenge. She expected to fall off, and dared me to catch her. I took her challenge, and even though she was in my arms, I was wrapped around her finger. Ariel remains a weakness of mine I am too reluctant to give up, and I am her great mysterious sorrow. Somehow she hopes that if she can understand my soul, she can change it. That night was only the latest in a long line of encounters where she questioned my reasons for my particular career choice. That question was repeated every time we spoke to each other. I had never come up with a satisfactory answer, despite all my efforts. It was a fair question, no doubt.

There are two types of mercenaries within this city. The first are the kind that seek glory, that want to be legends with their names spoken of for generations and the right to have a drink named after them at the most famous merc bar in the city: The Lighthouse. The second kind of mercs live the lifestyle to which Dom and I are subscribed. We work professionally, discreetly, and are very handsomely paid. We complete the jobs others can’t be trusted to do or refuse to take on due to their secretive nature.

Dom and I ruled out fame long ago as our driving motivation. The closest I can come is that we were forced to learn how to run scams and cons as children to get by, and by the time the world was approaching, we were too good to quit. The other motivation is that the two of us, along with our organization, have the ability to put our fingers on the scale of this city. We can only affect change from the shadows or at the end of a gun barrel.

Ariel could never understand that.

The night’s rerun of our philosophical debate was cut short when I received a call from my business partner and best friend, Dominic Hauser.

“Dom, it’s my night off.”

“G, we’ve got a fucking problem.”

I sighed, knowing Dom wouldn’t have interrupted my night of peace if it wasn’t important.

“Go.”

“Just got a call from one of our boys in blue. A body dropped in front of the safehouse. It’s one of ours.”

“I’m on my way.”

Ariel protested my getting dressed and preparing to brave the grimy darkness of Millenium City once more. It was only when I told her that one of my people was killed did she relent. Her eyes are so beautiful and they’d get her killed if she did what I do for a living. There’s always a beat where the truth can be seen before her mask is placed firmly on her face. That beat causes no problems for a pop star. That beat is the difference between life and death for a merc.

“Grayson, I am so sorry.” I like the way she says my name. I have always liked the way she says my name. I could never articulate why, and even that night, while offering condolences with a melancholic hug that begged me not to leave, I still liked the way my name sounded on her lips. It was almost enough to hold me in place, to place an unbreakable barrier in front of the door to her apartment even as it swished open with barely a whisper.

“It’s the life we live.”

We both hung the unspoken part of it above our heads, unwillingly, unknowingly, undeniably. That if I lived a different life, this could be more than what it is. Yet without the life I live, we’d never know each other at all. Life keeps forcing cruel choices, and deciding whether or not to leave Ariel to look after one of my people was one of them. I had no doubts that Dom could handle it, but I felt obligated to check in on whoever it was.

The city was its typical neon, grime choked, crumbling hellscape which somehow managed to be beautiful and oppressive at the same time. Cracked streets beneath my wheels took me past projected advertisements taking up entire sides of buildings which soared into the dark clouds pouring rain overhead, and the horde of city dwellers trying to make it through their evening without being eaten by the sprawling, shadowy metropolis. I arrived at my destination while a crowd gathered. As I stepped out of the car, I was hit with the dissonant chorus of dozens of languages being spoken melding into each other, crisscrossing like the highway interchanges which make entire city blocks even grimier and dirtier than the rest of this godsforsaken place.

They were all speaking about one subject. The wounded woman laid out on the smashed windshield of a car. My heart sank as I discovered her identity. And despite being in this life for well over a decade, the sight of Carly’s mutilated body still turned my stomach. While the badges kept everyone back, Dom found me.

“What’s the scene like?” I wasted no time in cutting to business. Whoever put Carly out on the street like this would shortly be joining her in the ground. There was no disagreement on that.

“It’s not pretty. Don’t bother going up, I can handle the cleanup. I watched it happen live through the cams.” Dom was normally good cheer, so the sorrow and anger dripping from his voice set me on edge.

“Do we know who-”

“Scavs.”

My fist instinctually curled. This city was rife with crime, both organized and unorganized. Scavs were a different breed of cretin than most of the bottom feeders in Millennium City. One of the cardinal rules of a city which sees so much death so frequently as ours is that every person has the right to grieve their dead. Scavs would routinely break this covenant by intercepting bodies before they made it to the mortuary. The most frequent source of their wares, however, were innocents they snatched off the streets and dragged back to their lairs to extinguish and then carve up for their implants. Those would then be resold to back alley greydocs or other, more nefarious figures which could make use of them.

The scavs were also, by and large, idiots. In a city as rife with illicit trades as ours, scavs committed some of the ultimate transgressions with alarming frequency, even when they weren’t drugged up beyond all belief. As a result, even the cops tended to turn a blind eye whenever a group of scavs ended up butchered in some abandoned apartment, or an old warehouse suffered an unpredictable act of spontaneous detonation. I had stopped dealing with scavs personally years ago, they were beneath me. Delegating became one of the perks of upper management, if such a thing exists in the life of a mercenary. This time, however, I was willing to make an exception.

“She was on a job?” I asked, scanning the crowd, hoping that this particular group left an observer to keep an eye on the investigation. Had they done so, I would have taken them apart piece by piece until they gave up the location of their friends. Then I’d put a bullet in their head. That evening, I had no such luck in finding an outlet for my grief who could also offer information.

“I think so, but I don’t know who for. Inquired with our usual fixers but nobody hired Carly.”

My response was abandoned when eyes caught something more interesting than a scav observer. A slender, dark-haired woman with a deep despair in her soul. I knew this woman’s name, Sofia Karazon. She had been in a relationship with Carly until that evening cut it tragically short. I tapped Dom on the shoulder, and we made our way over to her.

Sofia collapsed into me, and I held her tight. A small comfort with the total loss of control she was experiencing, but I wanted to do what I could. She attempted to speak a few times but she stammered and stuttered and choked back sobs because she did not want to be one of those people who cried on the streets. I gently squeezed her and whispered that it was okay to let it out.

The way this city grinds people down is not that the frequency of death makes it easier to deal with. Every loss always feels like the first time you receive that horrible news that someone you love was snuffed out. Millennium City has a unique way of making you feel so strongly for people only for them to be taken in brutal, inglorious ways.

The city melted away around us, leaving Sofia and I in a cloud of the same grief. Eventually, she was able to speak and answer my questions about Carly’s recent activities. Including the name of her most recent employer, a woman named Dana Starling. I had never heard of her, neither had Dom. But he made a call to one of our regular fixers and before long we had a location on Ms. Starling and an exhortation to getting revenge for Carly.

Dom agreed to stay behind and tend to the safehouse. I called our friend Isabel and asked if she could come look after Sofia. I stood with Sofia in the cold and quiet rain until Isabel’s car pulled up, a little blue thing, and Sofia climbed in with the energy of a zombie. I then returned to my own vehicle and drove to one of the city’s many entertainment districts. The club in question wasn’t anything remarkable, a seedy joint but not a complete dive. It existed in that halfway point between respectability and indecency where so much of the city dwelled.

In a side room, with a door flanked by grim looking hired muscle, was Dana Starling’s makeshift throne room. She lounged lazily on a plush armchair, while plainer chairs were reserved for guests. I greeted her politely from beyond the threshold of the door and explained that Carly was one of my mercenaries. Starling bade her guards to stand aside and me to enter. I drew closer and was able to size her up.

Starling was a fit woman, obviously able to handle herself in the field, but seemed content to farm the work out to others. Her gaze was cold and arrogant; her smile was slimy and predatory. This was a women who fancied herself a member of the Millennium City nobility and had the pride of someone much higher in the pecking order.

“Grayson Carver,” I extended my hand in greeting. Without losing her satisfied smirk or getting up from her pathetic excuse for a throne, she stretched hers out far enough to be clear about her gesture, but not far enough where she could reach me. I opted for diplomacy and closed the gap myself, but I understood that Ms. Starling believed she was above the code among Millennium City’s mercenaries. The reason we survived for so long is because there was always an agreed upon code of mutual respect, that business came first, and politeness was crucial. The person in front of you, of whom you may not have heard, may be much more powerful than you thought. Common wisdom would lead one to believe that rule applied to mercenaries towards fixers, but the inversion bore itself out to be true on countless occasions.

In Starling’s case, I knew she wasn’t the owner of this bar though she pretended to be the one calling the shots. No, I knew the owner from before last year’s remodel. Stepping inside sparked the memory. I cultivated a great many friends in this town through favors and other grisly actions, on purpose. A network of information and a favor always able to be cashed in goes far. My organization lived by a set of rules to avoid heat from the cops and corps, and do some good amidst all the evil in Millennium City. Most people respected that. Most people appreciated that. Most people were willing to play along with that.

Dana Starling was not one of those people. She sat up only to lean back in her chair. Some amateur power move, such as the way she looked me up and down, wet her lips, and spoke with almost condescension, “I am sorry to say that I’ve never heard of you. Carly came recommended from a fixer she had worked with before.”

I couldn’t quite ascertain whether Starling was lying. My gut told me she was, so I decided to let that color the remainder of the interaction from my end. Under the guise of scratching an itch, I unbuttoned the cross-draw holster hidden inside my coat. She did not notice. That was strike two.

“Well, my organization is more focused on delivering results than fame and glory.” I took a harsh, but businesslike tone to mark my disgust with the mercenaries looking to become legends in this city. Legends tend not to live very long.

Starling scoffed. “Isn’t that all any of us are trying to do? Grow our legends?”

I sighed, looking away to the wall for a moment to compose myself. “We are not trigger-happy mercs looking to get a drink named after them at The Lighthouse, Starling. We’re professionals. Those who have need of us know our names. If you don’t know how to reach us, you don’t need to know who we are. We’ve stayed alive and in the game for as long as we have because we follow our rules.”

“How boring,” Starling smirked sickeningly, the limited lights in the club bouncing off her eyes and giving them an eerie evil glow.

“How long have you been living the life?”

“Four years.” In two self-satisfied words, I understood Dana Starling completely.

This was a woman who did not realize that she was talking to a veritable veteran of the scene. That was because this woman was far less aware and cunning than she perceived herself to be. I understood immediately that she would be a problem but didn’t grasp how bad it would be until that moment. She was inexperienced, hungry, and selfish. It was always a winning combination.

I elected to change tact at that moment, adopting a more congenial tone and body language. “I am here to inform you, sadly, that Ms. Velasquez was killed. My organization believes in honoring its promises, so I would like to fulfill her contract personally.”

Starling’s eyes lit up as though she had just found a wounded gazelle. A fresh kill without much effort was easy bait for a person like her. “Well, your customer service outranks just about every other hired gun in this city, Mr. Carver, I’m impressed.”

“Of course, I’ll need the particulars of the deal.”

“Absolutely. An associate of mine, a man named Chandra Parrish, was grabbed by scavs. I knew of the hideout, but I don’t have the muscle to take it on myself and walk away with my organization intact.” At that moment, Starling forced a single tear down her eye and looked away as if she couldn’t bear the thought of what was happening to Parrish. I had seen it before. Crocodile teas worked on sentimental mercs. I knew where to draw the line with my own sentimentality, and lying clients were on the far side of that line.

“You believe that they took Parrish back to their hideout and Carly got clipped on her way to it? Maybe the scavs were watching you and saw you hire her? Took her out before they could get to the prize?” I sold the story with gentle musing and barely disguised disdain. I knew Carly. She’d have gotten the job done when something went wrong, especially if she had gotten killed at the safehouse.

“Exactly!” Starling fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. She gave me the address and begged that I make haste. Then she added a request that I not leave any scav alive to both avenge Carly and send the message that neither of our organizations were to be trifled with. That was the single point Starling made with which I was in total agreement.

After taking my leave, I called Dom and gave him the address. In less than half an hour, we were both standing before a dilapidated apartment building, crumbling with failed dreams and the lost hope of people who used to call this place home. Dom launched a scan and informed me of the scav nest on the sixth floor, with five scavs and one other individual inside. We ascended via the elevator and planned for a blitz attack which I would lead. I could handle five scavs with ease. I drew my pistol and clicked the safety off.

Moments after Dom hacked the door open, my well-seasoned skills allowed me to take out the first three scavs in the living room area before they knew what was happening with a hail of gunfire. As I made the turn down the hallway to one of the bedrooms that was used as the operating theater, one scav charged me. I drilled two rounds into his chest and one into his head, silencing him for good.

The last charged me from the second bedroom, knocking my pistol down the hall. I responded with a swift kick to his chest, which sent him back into the bedroom. He roared in a drug-induced fury and charged towards me again. I drew my knife off my belt with my left hand, tossing it up in the air. Making the catch with my right, I sliced the scav’s neck open in one smooth motion. His body tumbled back into the bedroom, blood gushing from his neck before he choked on it.

I felt it was too merciful a death. I still do.

Dom made his way into the apartment and made his way to Parrish in the back bedroom. I began investigating the apartment for clues as to what happened to Carly. One of the computer terminals gave me the answers which I sought and cast the entire affair in a much uglier light.

Starling had tracked down the scavs on her own and cut a deal. Parrish was too valuable to her to lose, so she offered a hardened mercenary in his place. A life for a life. Carly was the unlucky soul chosen to be the sacrifice. An audio log from one of the scavs recorded their entire plan. Give up Parrish easily, follow whoever came to retrieve him, then ambush the mercenary at their safehouse. Only they never intended on killing Carly and leaving the body, which ruined their whole plan of killing Carly and keeping Parrish.

As I said, the scavs were the lowest of lifeforms in this infernal city. Despite being more ubiquitous than cockroaches, the scavs contributed even less to society. That was one of the reasons why my organization squashed them whenever we had the chance. We’d never solve the problem, but every scav in the ground was one not carving up innocent souls to sell their implants on the black market.

“Grayson, c’mere a sec,” Dom hollered from down the hall. I joined him in the crude ‘operating’ suite. “This wasn’t just any run of the mill muscle, this was a military android. He’s still locked up, but he’ll come around soon.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem is, Starling didn’t employ him. She enslaved him. He had traumatic memories he didn’t want affecting his job, so he asked that they be locked away. Starling had a technician under her thumb who could do the job, some guy by the name of Trench.”

“Let me call-” I began saying that I would call one of our police contacts before Dom cut me off.

“Already done. Guy bit it over a year ago. Shortly after the procedure performed on Mister Parrish here.”

“What’s the catch?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

“The encryption key was held by Starling. She held the key to his memories as a way to control him.”

I knew Starling was a snake, but I hadn’t realized until then just how serpentine she was. While I understand androids’ place in our society is still being figured out, it takes a special kind of cretin to invade someone’s mind and hold their past hostage as a way to secure loyalty.

“Can you unlock them? Burn her hold over him?”

Dom shook his head with a trembling lip and fury in his eyes. “I already tried to travel into his mind to unlock the information, only to find it was destroyed and the resulting gap was encrypted. She’s been holding him hostage with an empty hole.”

That statement broke me inside even worse than I already had been. I had come down firmly on the side of androids being equal to us fleshbags long before that moment. It was one of the reasons why Dom and I founded the Corsairs in the first place, to provide an organization that could be a haven for those combat androids who weren’t accepted elsewhere, and to advance the cause of android equality using any methods we knew how. The Android Liberation Organization was one of many android equality organizations which hired us, and we often did work for them pro-bono.

Dom’s boyfriend and our resident wheelman, Ethan, was already downstairs, ready to take Parrish wherever he needed to go. Dom wanted to keep Parrish safe and get him settled before helping him disappear. I promised that I’d smooth things over with Starling but that I wanted to see Sofia first. Dom and I parted for our respective tasks, and I found myself traversing the city’s choked and cracked arteries one more, musing on the rain and the evils of this town.

Before too long, I made it to Isabel’s apartment building and headed up. Isabel Anderson is my other best friend. Dom and I had known her for several years. Isabel was the first android Dom and I met who disdained the life of mercenary work. She was one of many androids that attempted to live a normal life, but we didn’t’ cross paths with them very often. Isabel was different and became a treasured friend. She was our anchor to the real world outside of our mercenary work.

When I arrived, Isabel was sitting on the couch in her apartment with Sofia. They were friends who met at work, that’s ultimately how Dom and I met Sofia. We then introduced Sofia to Carly. The rest was a beautiful history that turned to tragedy only a few hours earlier. From tragedy comes vengeance, and I felt I owed it to Sofia to let her know in person.

The moment I walked in, the conversation between the girls ceased. Sofia dried her tears on her sleeve and looked at me expectantly. I gently informed her that the people who hurt Carly would never hurt anyone else again. She nodded solemnly but never said a word. There was nothing for her to say.

Isabel’s morbid curiosity, however, got the better of her. Sofia politely excused herself to the kitchen to get another glass of water and I was able to tell Isabel everything. The gap from her armchair to the couch across her table felt like it was a thousand times the length of her whole apartment. Isabel had an ordinary job, she had a book club with her friends, and she did the shopping for Dom and Ethan because she knows the two of them are hopeless when it comes to buying food, and she liked to smell the fresh ingredients shipped in daily from the massive greenhouses on Mars even though she could never afford to buy them.

She could not have been any less part of my world if she tried.

But we lived in the same brutal city, and despite all odds, Isabel had come to care for Dom and me very dearly, as we had with her. She cared for Sofia too, and because of that, she came to care for Carly. But Isabel had always avoided everyone else in our social circle, because she didn’t want to handle the incessant losses the life of a Millennium City mercenary brings with it. But that day, she was insistent. So, I told her the whole story. About Dana Starling’s smug little performance. My anguish and despair. when I saw Carly’s body. How I killed the scavs. And the circumstances of the man we were hired to rescue.

Isabel took it all in leaning forward as if to make my words reach her audio receptors faster, with her fingers interlaced, elbows resting on her knees. She always had such a sweet face, and seldom had I ever seen it drop into an expression of disgust the way it did upon completion of my tale. She fell against the back of the couch, leaning her elbow on the armrest and propped her head up with a clenched fist. Her jaw was tight, and her gaze fixed on some indiscriminate point on the wall behind me.

“Those motherfuckers,” the normally soft spoken Isabel bellowed with rage while leaping to her feet. A mournful look towards the kitchen door, as if she was apologizing to Sofia for the tirade she was about to unleash. “I cannot believe there is someone who would twist someone’s mind like that. To use their own memories as a weapon against them…” Horror dawned on her face. “Our minds aren’t supposed to be hackable. They cannot be intruded upon.”

Isabel started hyperventilating.

Androids were built to mimic most human functions, ostensibly to fit in, but there were some pragmatic reasons for it as well, like breathing facilitating some cooling in some body models. One of the theorists about AI development concluded that the X factor which made the first AI take to the first humanoid body all those years ago was that making something so closely in our image was the only reason they were able to exist at all. Isabel’s involuntary physical reactions to emotions were some of the many ways she embodied the blurring of the line between android and human, and underlined the desperate struggle for civil rights she and her fellow androids made their chief concern.

“They didn’t hack him. He let them in,” I corrected her gently, taking her hand in my mine and gently rubbing circles with my thumb on the top of her hand. I knew that was one of the small gestures she used on herself when she was feeling anxious or upset. I knew she’d have done it herself had her other hand not been clenched into a fist of rage.

“The molestation of our minds is why the android rights movement is so important. There’s no legal recourse when something this barbaric happens!”

I stood up and pulled my friend into a tight hug. She lost some of the tension.

“Did you get them?” she whispered into my ear, shuddering as she did.

“The technician has been dead for a long time. I got the scavs that were carving him up, the ones that got Carly.”

“And what about the one pulling the strings?” Isabel’s voice was colder than I had ever heard it. She had never advocated violence before. But Millennium City pushes everyone to their breaking point, and Isabel Anderson was no exception. I promised her that I would and took my leave. Sofia deserved the chance to grieve undisturbed, and I had a promise to keep.

I made my way through Millennium City’s grimy streets once more. The rain blurred the thousands of lights, painting a kaleidoscope of haloes around the town’s endless cavalcade of advertisements. The cold silence inside my car kept at bay the madness from advertisements barking chirpy, cheery, grating jingles and slogans; a series of greasy artificial salesmen hawking wares which were better left gathering dust on their shelves. The other denizens of this infernal place faded into the background of gray buildings as a collection of even grayer souls.

I pulled up in front of Starling’s court once more. A grave, eerie calm draped me like a cloak as I stepped in out of the rain. I descended to the club itself and made my way to the throne room. Lounging on her chair was Dana Starling, arrogantly and blissfully unaware of her impending fate.

“My man hasn’t returned, why is that?” She breezily checked her nails. She might as well have been asking why a loyal minion had not run to the store to fetch her groceries because she was too important to do such tasks herself.

“Your man isn’t coming back.” I nonchalantly unbuttoned my holster once more, again without her realizing. The arrogance had already proved to be her undoing, a fact known to everyone but herself. She would come to understand within the next few moments.

“Did the mighty Grayson Carver, leader of the Corsairs, mercenary extraordinaire fail such a simple task? I would have thought that was utterly impossible.” Starling mocked me with her tone, a faked condescending disbelief. She rolled her head, trying to stretch out stiffness in her neck.

“See, I hadn’t quite clocked you for what you were. My partner took a look inside Mister Parrish’s head. You were a naughty girl. You broke one of the cardinal rules of dealing with androids. What’s worse, you bumped off the technician who did it. Yeah, I got a glimpse at the fat MCPD file on that guy, and plenty of evidence tying you to him.” My own sinister smirk slowly made its way across my face as I monologued.

“Parrish was a tool. He asked for my help, I laid an insurance policy.”

“What your guy neglected to tell you was that he deleted the files by accident and encrypted the hole. Once Parrish found that out, he would have killed you anyways. I did you a favor.”

Starling leaned back in her chair, satisfied at the conclusion. “Maybe I’ll give you a bonus. You may go.” She waved her hand dismissively, as if to shoo me off.

“I am certain you were unaware that Carly Velasquez was also an android.”

Her eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open. The sweet moment where the knife is twisted was so very satisfying. See, what I had put together was that Dana Starling was one of those anti-android types. She believed that our synthetic brothers and sisters were inferior to us meatbags. The idea was to get Parrish back so she could continue using him as her muscle and pay the scavs off with Carly as a way to keep them off her own back. An android life for an android life. Only Carly took Parrish back to the safehouse when she realized the extent of the situation, and the scavs decided to do a two-for-the-price-of-one deal of their own accord.

I was unsure if Starling had known about Carly’s true identity, or if the shock was at her genius plan being undone so rapidly. My slow advance towards her was the perfect way to make her squirm and inform her that her luck had finally run out.

Her two guards both moved towards me. The first one had his windpipe crushed with a quick blow to the throat. As he was choking to death, I redirected the second one’s punch before hyperextending his leg, bringing him to his knees, and then snapping his neck.

“You-you can’t do this!” Panic made her voice shrill, shooting up a few octaves.

I let out a pitch black chuckle which quickly turned into manic laughter. “You broke all sorts of rules, Miss Starling. You never guaranteed your safety because you never bothered to go through a fixer. Then you sold out the merc you were working with. There isn’t a person in this life that doesn’t see you for the worm that you are. I’m doing Millennium City a favor.”

Starling realized in horror that her anti-android sentiment is what got her killed. Without a fixer to protect her or guarantee the deal, it would not have been seen as bad business for me to pop Starling. I savored the moment of cleaning up our rather amoral way of life just a little bit.

“I have friends all over this town!” That was her way of pleading for her life. I had grown accustomed to ignoring such appeals over my years, but this was the first time in a long time that I was actively enjoying toying with my target. I developed a strict code of killing quick and without much drama. Even my professionalism had its limits.

I drew my pistol and thumbed the safety off. “All of your friends were my friends first, and they like me a lot more than you.” One round through the eye and Dana Starling was silenced for good. A message job to every would-be kingpin who refused to heed the lesson that Millennium City had its laws for the lawless, and never to repeatedly betray the people responsible for guaranteeing your livelihood.

There are certain situations in which forsaking payment is the optimal outcome. That night was one of them. I have often thought, in the years since, if I would have done anything differently. My answer is usually a no, though occasionally I wonder if I should have killed Starling to conclude our initial encounter. Still, I am able to take comfort that one of the harshest rules about life in this infernal town applies to everyone equally.

There are no happy endings in Millennium City.