The Chimera Code Read online

  Praise for The Chimera Code

  “An ambitious and kinetic debut, packed with neat ideas.”

  — Antony Johnston, NYT best-selling author

  “Snappy prose, electric action, crackling intersection of magic and technology, nano noir, adventure—what more do you want? Fans of science/fantasy will get the ride they’re looking for!”

  — John Shirley, author of Stormland

  “A full-throttle magical cyberpunk superhero thriller; Santos has really hit the ground running.”

  — Peter McLean

  “Stylish, bad-ass, and above all immersive. Wayne Santos excels at the top goal of genre fiction: creating a novel you can open on any page, any paragraph, and deep-dive right into its world. Every line sings of holographs and sprawling megapolis, every sentence is an offering to cyberpunk gods. You emerge a part of the Chimera Team, as ready to die for Cloke, Marcus, and Zee as they are to die for you.”

  — Edgar Cantero

  Published 2020 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-321-7

  Copyright © 2020 Wayne Santos

  Designed & typeset by Rebellion Publishing. Cover art by Jon Dunham

  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.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names. characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  For Charlene,

  The horse didn’t die;

  it just took a while to hit the finish line.

  Prologue:

  The Brass Ring

  HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY, August 5th, 2119

  CLOKE DIDN’T REALIZE it then, but her entire life had changed in the moment the tank decided to run her down.

  Technically it wasn’t actually a tank; it was a GCV Infantry Fighting Vehicle, a big, armored personnel carrier that was almost 100 years old and built for the kind of mechanized artillery-based wars that people back then had expected to fight. But it had tank DNA in it: the treads, the single cannon, the old American excess of being clunky enough to run roughshod over streets and cars with only some scratches to its paint. And Toriyama was driving it like he was drunk.

  But he wasn’t. He was just new to tanks, and mad. He had every reason to be mad. Cloke had just cooked his little brother. Probably to death.

  “YOU FUCKING, FUCKING BITCH,” Toriyama shouted over the tank’s public address system. He plowed through the corner of a building as if to emphasize his point and Cloke just pumped her legs harder, trying to get to the corporate residential compound she knew was around here somewhere.

  What had started as just another gang clash in the decaying slums of downtown Hoboken had gone south faster than anyone had expected. Cloke was the main “weapon” of the Crosstowners; the black box that maintained their hold over their territory. Someone in the Darks had finally realized that guns and knives weren’t going to cut it with a teenage girl who could throw fire and lightning out of her hands. The Crosstowners had been lured into a surplus military warehouse where the GCV had tried to do a number on all of them.

  Toriyama, leader of the Darks, had run over Cloke’s friends. Cloke had responded by flaming his brother.

  And now here they were.

  Cloke didn’t see Toriyama anywhere behind her; she must have taken the corners too fast. She raised her hand, ran the keys through her mind and let fly with a flare soaring into the sky, just to make sure he kept up.

  Then she saw it. The gate to the compound. Warm, cozy lights beyond it. Plenty of guns in front of it, keeping the riff raff out, like the street gangs.

  The security at the gate entrance looked at her.

  She was waving both arms at them now, never dropping the pace of her run.

  “Help!” she shouted. “He’s trying to fucking kill me!”

  The security at the entrance put their hands to their holsters but didn’t pull out their guns.

  One of them, the bigger guy with more muscles, looked on; calm, but cautious. “What the hell are you talking about, kid? This is company property, authorized admittance only.”

  The GCV finally caught up with Cloke again, and rumbled in the distance, increasing its speed.

  “You tell him that,” she said. She moved closer to the guard. Toriyama, in the GCV, angled himself so that now he was in a straight line that was going to hit Cloke and whoever was standing too close to her.

  “Hey,” the other guard called out. “Hey, hey, hey!”

  He pulled out his gun and waved his arms in warning. Toriyama didn’t even hesitate or slow down.

  The guard finally took a shot at the GCV. Cloke didn’t think anyone was surprised when the round bounced off and did nothing. It was getting closer by the second. Both guards were firing now, but the bigger one with the muscles had finally gotten it into his head to call for back up. He murmured the situation to someone on a wireless while still keeping up the fire.

  Neither of them noticed that Cloke had kept right on backing up until she was at the gate itself. It was only as she was hiking herself over that the muscled guard finally said, “Hey. HEY!”

  She ignored him and dropped onto the other side. If he was going to shoot at her rather than at the tank that was coming down the pipe, he wasn’t going to get a decent shot off before he got run over. If he was smart, he would be concentrating on the more immediate threat of trying to survive the next five seconds.

  She sucked in her breath as she took in the scene around her.

  Houses. Grass. No grit. No decay. This was a place she’d only seen in ads. The streetlights all worked, and there was a warm glow coming from many of the windows. She could see silhouettes of people sitting at tables, eating, the flickering of lights from a screen or maybe a sim unit. People could actually have a life here. A good one, without fear or uncertainty about whether they were still going to be able to sleep here in a month.

  It was safe.

  Cloke wondered what it would have been like. Growing up in a place like this, taking all this for granted.

  Toriyama caught up to her. She could tell from the crash behind the walls, and the scream of at least one of the guards. She hoped someone had had the foresight to actually call this in.

  She could see people moving to their windows to find out what was happening.

  She cut through a lawn when Toriyama busted the GCV through the wall and lurched into the compound. The front of the tank and part of its treads were covered in dust and blood.

  No going back. They were on company property now. It was only a question of just what flavor of Totally Fucked was coming down the pipe after this.

  She didn’t need to hold his attention anymore: now she just needed to stay alive long enough for whoever owned this compound to do something about him. She just needed to stay out of the way. The time for fireworks was over.

  She kept a house between herself and the GCV she could hear trundling on the other side.

  Once again, the speakers on the tank squawked to life. “You killed my brother, you fucking bitch,” she heard Toriyama spit out. “You think you can hide from me?”

  She was actually pretty goddamn sure she could, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

  She heard a high-pitched whine come from the GCV. “Think
I don’t know shit about my new ride? Think I don’t know about this little switch here? Terahertz imaging? Sees through fucking walls, bitch.”

  Cloke rabbited.

  The GCV came through the house. She heard screaming. She didn’t know how many people were in there, but they’d just been smeared by Toriyama. That had to get someone in one of the other houses making a call, there was no way they were going to let him just keep knocking houses down.

  She staggered as a flying piece of broken house winged her back. It wasn’t enough to knock her off her feet, but the pain slowed her down. She turned to see the GCV coming out of the new hole it had just made in some family’s home. Where the fuck was the rest of the security in this place? Was this company that cheap?

  She floundered, trying to keep her footing and headed for the next house. There was a fence in the way, but she was young and riding a charge of adrenaline the likes of which she’d never experienced. She almost bounced over the fence in her fear, and realized immediately that she finally had a real opportunity at hand.

  She ran a quick circle around her potential salvation and waited for Toriyama to come through, hoping that his eyes were fixed on the Terahertz Imager and too untrained to read it properly.

  She’d read the situation correctly.

  Toriyama howled in triumph and came at a good speed through the fence. It was nothing to his tank, but he’d only cleared it by a few more feet when he tipped the entire thing forward into a swimming pool.

  No hesitation from Cloke.

  “You fuck,” she hissed and put her hands out, fingers arched. Keys in her head, fast and big and full of pain.

  Lightning.

  The bolts lanced from her fingers and hit the pool with the GCV and Toriyama in it.

  She heard him scream before the speakers on the tank shorted out. She laid on the electricity for a few more seconds, upping the power for good measure and then cut it off for the finish. He wouldn’t be dead; he was probably at least tough enough to withstand a few seconds. Smoke was coming out of the seams in the tank’s armor.

  She waited. She heard the movement of the hatch.

  Moving. Running around the pool, chest tight with anger now as her hand reached in to pull at the hilt of the knife. Pulling it out and twisting it in her hand so it was ready for a downward stab.

  The hatch raised, Toriyama’s arm visible.

  Cloke jumped, landing on the tank, almost sliding off the wet armored surface. She regained her footing and scrambled to the top. Toriyama was out now, looking dazed. She raised the knife into the air.

  Keys in her mind. Focused. Painful.

  Lightning again, dancing around the blade.

  She plunged it into Toriyama’s shoulder, felt the tingle as the current briefly ran through her own body, throwing her clear and away from the pool, back onto the yard.

  Toriyama screamed again, his body thrashing as the embedded knife delivered its charge. He flailed and slumped over the tank, completely finished.

  Cloke watched from the edge of the pool, lying on her side, trying to catch her breath.

  Up above her, shafts of light cut through the dark, first focusing on the totaled GCV, the body of its driver, finally settling on Cloke herself.

  Another speaker kicked in, this time from above. “Throw down any and all weapons and remain on the ground.”

  She got to her knees and covered her eyes to stare up at the lights. She couldn’t see what it was, but she could hear. A Gyro of some kind, one of those one-man, urban combat pacifiers, probably with an autocannon trained on her right now to turn her into a red paste if they so much as caught a glimpse of a gun.

  Cloke turned and looked at the house that belonged to the pool. There was a family there: a father, a mother, one little girl. The father was looking at her with a mix of horror and venom. The mother was clearly not processing anything. Only the little girl looked at her with fearless curiosity. Another light was trained on her.

  “ON THE GROUND. NOW,” came the order from the second Gyro, with a pilot obviously much angrier.

  Cloke sighed. She looked at the money around her. The comfort. Saw the smoke coming from Toriyama’s body, from a failed, stupid ambush that had all come about because the Crosstowners had entered their territory one time too many. This had been the result. All this death because her mob couldn’t afford to show weakness to the rival mob. This was her life. Fighting for scraps of pride while people like this family and the pilots above watched with morbid fascination as they killed themselves.

  16 years old and she already had no future. One stupid fight had taken everything away from her.

  It couldn’t go any other way, could it? No matter what she did here, they were going to end her, one way or the other. That’s what money did to people that didn’t have any.

  Money always crushed everything around it that wasn’t money.

  She looked up at the Gyros. They were the mobile kind, no cockpit to speak of, clear unobstructed view for the pilot, no shielding, largely patrol and recon, normally the first on the scene.

  She raised her hands, apparently in surrender.

  “That’s right,” she heard above her. “Just comply with the orders and—”

  Keys. Simple. Straight. Fire.

  Even as the fireball left her hand and hit the Gyro she was moving, diving for the pool and getting under the shelter of the GCV. The pilot in the Gyro was screaming, his ‘copter spiraling away as he rocked back in forth in his seat and burned. She hit the pool with a splash and maneuvered herself under the tank, hearing the eruption of full auto rounds coming from the other Gyro, feeling them vibrate against the armor of the GCV.

  A break in the fire and she leaned out, following the shaft of light to its source, unleashing her lightning. The second Gyro went screeching down towards some point in the middle of the compound and Cloke made her move.

  Out, out, out. Out of the pool, running out of the yard, hearing the motors of more aerial vehicles whirring distantly and getting closer. She was wet, and cold, and angrier and sadder than she’d ever felt in her life. She was never going to see her sister again, and the stupid bitch probably wouldn’t even notice.

  More lights on her, throwing long shadows of her body across the ground.

  She turned her hand back, let loose with another fireball, didn’t even bother to aim it, and kept running.

  She felt something hit her in the back, taking her off her feet.

  The ground rushed up to meet her.

  As everything went black around her, Cloke found she only had one lingering thought left. She wished she’d turned around so she could at least get one final spit at the people who had killed her.

  SHE WOKE TO find that she was not only alive, but clean.

  The first thing she saw was black. Shiny black. She realized the ceiling had been polished to look like the keys of a giant synth keyboard. When she sat up, she saw the hospital gown she was wearing, the similarly black floor, and the pristine white walls around her. She was in a bed, and a machine was recording her vitals.

  Dizziness hit her and she slowly sank back down. Even the act of sitting up had disoriented her.

  The only thing she could do in relative comfort was blink and think. Extremely slowly.

  Some time may have passed. Or none at all. She couldn’t be sure. But the next time she could focus on anything, it was because a door she hadn’t even known was there opened from no apparent joints, seams or other indicators in the wall, and a man walked through.

  He was in a grey suit guaranteed to cost more money than Cloke had ever owned her entire life. Thin, fit looking, white old man. His hair was cut close and neat, and he hadn’t bothered to dye the grey out of the sides. His brown eyes swept across her and seemed to evaluate her with the precision of a laser. She could almost feel him plugging her into some kind of equation to see what the end result would be.

  She wanted that calm, confident look on his face to be set on fire. She tried pointin
g towards him, could barely raise her hand, let alone pull together the focus to run the keys properly through her head. Sitting up had almost wiped her out.

  “Remarkable,” he said. “Even after all that, you’re still trying. You’re so pumped full of drugs right now you’ve probably got to think just to breathe. Even if you weren’t, the intensity of your attacks would have left you drained. You’re in no condition to fight.”

  “Why am I not dead?”

  “And here I thought you’d be grateful about that,” the suit said. “Because orders came down to use the riot suppression gear instead, that’s why. It’s hard to question a pile of meat and blood on the pavement. You’ve got a bruise on your back in the shape of a big rubber ‘x’. It’ll fade in time, but it’s the calling card of a non-lethal takedown. Now then, let’s have a nice chat, shall we?”

  The suit pulled at a stool, then at a nearby table for meals, and sat down. He reached into his inside pocket and Cloke almost choked when she saw him pull out a clear, clunky old OLED flex screen, unfolding it and setting it down on the table. He pushed at an icon to make it rigid and then another to make it opaque and accessed something on it.

  “So. Your name is K—”

  “I know what my name is,” Cloke said, harsh but weak. “Who the fuck are you?”

  The man’s eyes fixed on the screen momentarily before shifting to her face. She could make out a smile at the edges of his mouth. “Irish father, Filipino mother. Sixteen years old, born May 10th, 2103, indeterminate time and location; insufficient funds for hospital supervised birth. No NEASA social or identification registration; insufficient funds for administration and processing. No formal schooling, one entry for a rejected application to the Thomas G. Conners elementary school; insufficient funds for admission. No prior police or corporate activity report, no credit record, no transaction history.” The man set aside the display. He reached into his suit pocket once again and pulled out something small and white. “My name is Victor Chapman.” He placed the small white thing at her bedside. “My card.” He leaned back in the chair, seeming to appraise her. “I hope the accommodations are sufficient.”