The Atomic Question -

It wasn't a long wait for the taxi. Within fifteen minutes a Crown Victoria pulled up to the square in front of the Orchard, painted with glossy yellow and black in the style of Knight Errant uniforms. An elven individual got out of the driver's side and adroitly opened one of the rear doors for Dawson. There was a barely perceptible raise of one immaculate grey brow when she told them the destination but no commentary was proffered.

The Crown Victoria was lovingly cared for inside as well as out. Dawson judged it to be a 2064 model, maintained to be like factory-new in an effort to provide Ares passengers with a tasteful mid-luxury experience even if they were just lower ranking assistants on errands. Tinted ballistic glass windows had the interior dim in the way Dawson always preferred cars to be dim, shrouding her in menacing half light that made questioning people from the driver's window slightly easier to achieve.

In the spacious rear seat however she had nothing to do but wait. Sometimes driving could help with thinking about existing problems but other times it could lead to thinking about the past. If she disassociated, Dawson would end up leaning against the door and watching San Francisco roll by, the pristine opulence of Silicon Valley gradually giving way to the decay and squalor of the neighborhoods by the bay proper.

So she focused on the driver instead. Elven, given away by the ears and brows and a little by the chin and nose. Lines around their eyes suggested habitual worry but lines around the mouth suggested frequent smiling, and more than just the polite side. Androgynous with no particular fullness of their upper body, and a subdued gray-blue sweater vest over a thinner black dress shirt. A name tag on their chest displayed the first initial M. and a surname, Richland.

Of more interest was the driver's hands. Their fingers were lightly calloused in an easily predictable way, indicating that it wasn't from exercise but from repetitive motion. Probably cleaning the Crown Royal fastidiously both inside and out, while wearing gloves for the more sophisticated automotive work on the battery and circuitry beneath the hood. Immediately a fondness blossomed in Dawson for this person; people who cared about their cars to this extent reminded Dawson of her uncle, and were in her experience always good people.

Richland's eyes flicked up the rear-view and caught Dawson staring at her and it took some restraint to keep from reaching out with her essence and touching the elf's. It would have been rude to start prying on someone just doing their job.

The elf spoke. "You looked stressed, ma'am." Their voice was calm, controlled and deferential. Vaguely feminine in enunciation of words, but vaguely masculine in its depth. "It is not unusual for my passengers to enjoy a cigarette during a trip."

At the suggestion Dawson could detect a faint, distant trace of soylent nicotine somewhere in the car's upholstery and carpet, so faded and mitigated by Richland's vigorous cleaning that she would never have noticed it on her own. She detected also a faint trace of displeasure in the driver's voice and in spite of her attempt to keep from connecting to them she picked up a stray sentiment: the resentment towards decorum preventing them from adding please open a window, hoping the idea would occur to the passenger on their own, though it so rarely did.

So Richland's relief was as plain as day when Dawson said, "It's been a long time since I smoked." And yet again in spite of her efforts, Dawson's eyes wandered to the window and she thought of the past.

Her last cigarette. A late afternoon in late summer in 2068. Climbing out of the High Mobility and stretching. In two days Salesforce Tower would explode. In two weeks the occupation would be declared over. Patrol nearly done, but Vic couldn't wait until they got back. Claimed he was starving. Dawson joking that with his reserve he could go a week without eating.

Him going into the convenience store. Pickers nearby at a trash can across the street, dumping empty soykaf cups and snack wrappers. Vayger inside just holding her Desert Strike in her lap and not making a sound. Broken, it seemed.

Soylent tobacco had no carcinogenic qualities. Didn't pay to kill the customers. Dawson had never really gotten much out of them, but the feeling of something in her mouth was worth walking a little ways down the street to light one up with her little black and yellow electric lighter.

Her standing there on the street corner, twelve meters from where she should have been by the truck, Alpha on its strap over her chest. Pulling on the cigarette and thinking If this habit can't kill me is it even worth keeping? But doing it anyway because habits made her feel nearer to being a normal person, in a moment where she should have been vigilant. What a hypocrite she was, telling Gaines that he shared no blame when she herself still felt flecks of this blood on her throat.

Her back turned, not seeing the orks creeping down the other side of the street. Vic coming out of the store with soy pork burritos in both hands. When the bloody tusk in front raised the filthy Defiance T-250 and pulled the trigger it jammed. Dawson had heard that and spun around immediately.

Victor Reyes with his hands full and his gut exposed, dropping his burritos too late to go for the Ares Lightfire 75 at his hip in its holster. Not before the tusk could switch the firing mode on the Defiance and pump it once. Not before he could pull the trigger.

By the time Dawson had her Alpha up and the safety off, the tusks had pulled off half of Vic's clothing. They were trying to tear his boots off when she opened fire, nearly hitting one in the head. The bullets scared them off immediately, clutching a Knight Errant employee's equipment in their hands and holding it in the crook of their arms.

"You fucking bastards!" Pickers' horrified scream as he pulled out his Ares Predator and started firing after them. Too far, and he was emotional. Not using his smartlink or his ocular implant. Vayger popping up out of the gunner port and racking a bloodhound round, firing and hitting the center ork in the back. Trackable radioactive dye splashed on all of them and within two weeks they'd all be caught. Dead within a year, in prison.

Dawson dropping to her knees at Vic's side. His last words in her ear. Her last words to him in his face. The cigarette still in her mouth.

Richland spoke into the silence of Dawson's memory, tearing her back to the moment. "That's to your credit," they said softly. "Heroes don't smoke."

Dawson shut her eyes, a small tear escaping out of the right one to trail down her face. She turned towards the window to keep it from being seen. She said evenly, "I agree. They don't."

She would have been content to endure the rest of the ride in polite silence but Richland, likely sensing that Dawson was melancholy, tried more conversation.

"I recognize you, from the newscasts. Am I taking you somewhere dangerous?"

"There might be a fight," Dawson admitted, running the fingers of her right hand through her hair on the right side of her head, without removing her hat. "I doubt anyone will try to kill me. At least not any of the people I'm intending to find."

Richland said courteously but without hesitation, "If I drive you somewhere and you end up getting shot there, I'd feel terrible."

The small smile the elf was wearing helped to dispel Dawson's sorrow. "Guess I should have you take me home, then. Though I could die there too, of too much sex."

"For that," Richland said, "You could thank me."

It felt good to laugh, however softly, without bitterness. "It's alright," Dawson said, "You're only doing your job. Take me to the arena so I can do mine."

"Is this a job for Knight Errant?" Richland said, conversationally. "Or Lone Star?"

At this question Dawosn put one fist in front of her mouth. "Ah, no," she replied carefully. "In fact no one wants me on this task. But it is still my job."

Richland nodded their head sagely, like they had figured this out already. "That is behavior befitting a hero."

Difficult to argue with that. "Can a hero enjoy any music?"

At this they only smiled, sparing one hand from the wheel to interface with the stereo. A button press and a turned knob later and energetic music began to spill out of the speakers: guitar, horn and steel drums. Dawson turned her eyes to the passing city and let San Francisco in 2080 connect to her.

"It's a beggar's life, said the queen of Spain! But don't tell it to a poor man! 'Cause he's got to kill for every thrill, the best he can..."

The familiar urban decay crept up on her view, building by building. The further north one went the more frequent the bombed-out structures and empty lots, the more common the dive bars and cybernetics shops. The more fortified the gun stores and pharmacies. The more frequent the passing DocWagons, and the faster they drove.

People sitting on porches and lounging in chairs outside open garages looked at her as the Crown Royal passed. When eyes met her she sensed for a single moment the span of their lives, the complexity, the bravery and the surrender, the tapestry of perseverance and desire, fulfilled or otherwise. Just a hint, just a thread. So many threads.

"Everywhere around me, I see jealousy and mayhem! Because no men have all their peace of mind, to carry them..."

Had she always seen them before the storm struck her? Before she'd taken that monster's hand in her own and tried to save him? Because she'd seen herself lost in the rain and thunder and remembered all the times she'd uttered under her breath god, please. Someone save me.

"Well I don't really care, if it's wrong or if it's right... But until my ship comes in, I'll live night by--night!"

No, she told herself as the Crown Royal stopped at an intersection. The threads were always there, and anyone could see them if they cared to. Guess where they led to. The only thing different now is she could touch them. Feel their pull, and pull back if she needed to.

"When the joker tried to tell me, I could cut in this rube town! We he tried to hang that sign on me I said 'Take it down!'"

Congregating at the corner was a group of orks dressed in the style of the Bloody Tusks. They looked Dawson's way and one raised her fist to her chest, a Remington 990 slung over one shoulder.

"When the dawn patrol got to tell you twice, they're gonna do it with a shotgun! Yes, I'm cashing in this ten-cent life for another one..."

The light changed and the driver took them cruising by a cafe where at a table outside two elves and a troll in berets and small round glasses sipped real coffee, if the sign on the window were telling the truth. Beside them was a mechanic's shop where a Japanese woman in blue overalls was tapping languidly on a display screen while a dwarf man rummaged beneath the hood of a leaf-green 2071 Testarossa.

"Well I ain't got the heart, to lose another fight..."

Dawson had felt stirrings of this sort the first time she'd laid eyes on San Francisco from the air. She'd been too mired in the mentality of a soldier of fortune to accept the feeling then, too guilt-ridden to accept it after the occupation even as it tried to grow on her like ivy on a statue. Ever since Alenia forced her way into her heart the feeling had grown and after the lightning it had become louder than ever.

These people, with all their flaws and struggles, needed her, or something like her. They needed all the help they could get to shield them from predators above and below.

"So until my ship comes in... I'll live night by--night!"

- - -

It was early afternoon when the Crown Royal pulled up in the vast parking lot outside the arena. Dawson thanked Richland for the pleasant conversation and released them, walking the rest of the way towards the place the tusks considered sacred ground. To the northwest the stadium loomed, its sounds of machinery and hammering ceaseless until after sundown.

Calista reportedly had a hands-off approach with how the go-gang shamans treated their automobiles and seldom visited the stadium so it wasn't a good place to start. She probably wouldn't even talk to Dawson in public. That in mind she marched across the barren concrete field separating the arena and the stadium from the street proper, feeling her pockets for her various implements: Commpad, balisong, water, railgun. Badge in the inside pocket out of habit, though it wouldn't likely open any mouths here. Stars would be more likely to grease teeth on go-gangers but those were in the glovebox of the car.

At that thought her commpad chimed. Dawson pulled it out while walking and read Instinct's messages about her meeting with the commissar. A mentor spirit helping the world's most anti-corporate state, and it looking like her? Another damned enigma on top of all the others.

I'm coming with your restitution, Instinct said. That at least was a relief, but Dawson couldn't wait for backup without inviting trouble... Or getting into it. She'd spent all morning fucking Gaines and could spend all afternoon fucking the next person to smile at her broadly enough.

The last few times she'd come here the orks on guard had been hostile and belligerent, reluctant to let her in and happy to bay for her blood when Ionfist was keen to spill it. That fight now was months behind them and Calista's influence had already altered their outward behavior.

That fact was more apparent than ever when instead of switching the safetys off their AK-97s and calling her a breeder, the half-dozen tusks seated at a long folding table were playing some kind of game. There were no holographic projectors, no cyberdecks, no electronics of any kind present. What they had were forged metal dice, repurposed sheets of paper, and in the case of the one at the head of the battered table a twice-folded sheet of cardboard that obscured his own dice and paper from the others at the table.

As Dawson approached she could hear one of the orks speaking, hands folded in front of him on the table His blood-red hair and the blue ink tattooed entirely over his right hand from wrist up marked him as an Ivanist.

"The elf's tone displeases me," he declared. "I punch him in the throat."

The ork behind the cardboard, her teal neck brand identifying her as a Justice, gestured in his direction. "Make an attack roll."

The Ivanist rolled a metal die which clunked five times across the table. "Total of twenty-three."

"You hit the elf in his throat with your balled-up fist and he goes staggering backwards, struggling to breathe and grasping at it neck with both hands. He falls to his knees."

A third ork, this one bearing the Dark Star on one side of his face, took advantage of the violence. "I step into the space between them and say to the gasping elf, 'You can see our companion has a short temper. It might be in everyone's best interest if you let us pass.`"

"No need to roll intimidation," the judge said, "He's in no position to..."

The Judge trailed off when she saw Dawson standing some three meters away from their table by the door to the arena, hands in her pockets. All the other orks twisted in their seats to look at her.

A moment of slightly awkward silence followed before the Star ork said, "Hey."

Dawson relaxed her stance. "Hey."

Their guns were under their seats but none of them reached for them. The Ivanist asked, "You need to go in?"

"Yeah," she said.

The Judge gestured assent. "Door's unlocked, don't let us stop you."

Dawson rolled her shoulders restlessly. "Sure you don't want to fight about it?"

One of the other orks grinned. "You rolling seduction?" Dawson couldn't help but smile. She recognized him from the tussle the day before in the field.

"Maybe when I come out," she replied.

The orks returned to their game and Dawson thought, wish it was that easy every time.

The interior of the arena was better lit than it had been in the past, and the walls were clean. The aesthetic was mostly the same, the spaces filled with seats and the trappings of raucous celebration. It was nearer now to the sports stadium it once had been, before the long decades of the awakening had driven away the investors who made such things profitable. During the occupation the Protectorate had used the parking lot of the stadium as a shooting range for marksmanship training, which their death squads would go on to apply in the nearby neighborhoods.

In the aftermath of that period the Bloody Tusks made this place their own. Even now it smelled of old copper with a faint tinge of gasoline, scents that Calista's vision was unlikely to ever dispel fully.

Dawson made her way to the stadium proper and from a place at the top of the stairs she could see down into the pit where she and Instinct had fought Ivan Ionfist, not knowing the rest of the world would see it soon afterward. In the time since the sound system she destroyed by jumping in through the roof had been replaced with a modern one, high-end speakers affixed with bolted brackets to the rafters and beams above. Expensive stuff... Even if the go-gang was modernizing in some ways, they were getting money from somewhere if they could afford things like this.

On the side opposite to the one Dawson had come in, an area had been cleared of its seats to accommodate a large round table. At that table sat Calista, Dramatis Regina of the Bloody Tusks of San Francisco. Other orks in the colors of the go-gang in other cities answered to other figures, some every bit as brutal as Ivan Ionfist, but here in the Bay area they answered to her. A satyr about a meter and a half tall, Calista's upward-angled horns gave her a countenance like a dusky marble gargoyle while her choice of clothing made her look like the frontwoman of a band that would find punk too mainstream a term for their material.

The half-dozen other orks at her table were of a peculiar sort: older than the typical Tusk and more elaborately dressed while still leaning towards the fourth world warrior-poet aesthetic. One of them Dawson recognized as the blonde-haired conductor who had directed the makeshift instrument players at the field the morning before. As Dawson watched he pointed towards Calista and said something severe from behind his small half-lens spectacles, inaudible at the distance but impossible to mistake for anything but an accusation.

Calista said something brief and guarded. Dawson had been present at enough corporate boardroom meetings, field debriefings and criminal interrogations to recognize when a group of people wanted to know something and the person with the answers wasn't interested in giving them any.

The satyr was playing something close to her chest and her supporters in the go-gang wanted to know what it was. If Dawson approached now Calista would probably have her thrown out rather than look like she was trading secrets with a cop while her inner circle was demanding to know what the hell she was up to.

Dawson thought for a moment. Though it was her preference to be low-profile when possible, this was perhaps a fitting situation in which to be melodramatic. She began walking down the steps towards the arena and after cupping her hands around her mouth, Dawson shouted out "Hey Calista!"

All the orks turned in her direction, uniform in their surprise, but only Calista's face flashed pure panic. Only for a moment and quickly contained, but it was there. This was the last thing she needed right now, and that meant Dawson had a position of strength.

So true to her nature as a bully, Dawson intended to rub it in. She reached the base of the steps and put both hands on the railing, and it was clear from Calista's desolate glare she understood what Dawson meant to do. The railing complained briefly about her body weight as she lifted her legs up over it and hung down into the arena proper, and then the magic in her welled up in her hands and feet to communicate with the surface of the wall. She descended adroitly around the spikes built into the perimeter of the arena to arrive at the dusty hardwood floor where months before they'd fought Ivan Ionfist, not knowing the world would see it.