Read Online Necrotech by K C Alexander - Free Book Online

and shoulders, warming my tech arm, I struggled to hold on to the details I’d seen in that lab. The whole thing felt like a nightmare, like something that happened in a dream after a bad night’s colordust snorted off a hired asscrack.
    As I walked, forcing one foot in front of the other, I made myself go over the things I’d learned. The things I’d seen. The digital file, the security forces, the variety of darkened rooms.
    The sound of bullets pattering the shatterproof glass.
    I forced myself to go over Nanji’s last words, over and over until the echo of my seething rage overwhelmed the clamor of the pedestrian rats sweating all around me; incessant drones eager to get nowhere.
    Honestly speaking, there were any number of ways I’d fucked this mess up, and my own systems were on that list.
    I flashed back to all the signs of corruption I’d learned to look for. Irrational behavior was one, but I wasn’t sure current events counted. The black tint to my eyes and blood had looked pretty bad, but since I’d downed the boost, my nanos had settled enough that I figured I’d eased back from nanoshock. This was a good sign – maybe. But I should still check it out.
    My arm was working okay, give or take the stuff I needed to turn on, and I didn’t exactly feel the need to squish anything for kicks. I wasn’t sure how corruption was supposed to feel, but Lucky said it worked like a virus. A technological fever. I figured I’d know.
    Small victory, but fuck it, I needed one. It gave me the leeway I needed to put off seeing my mentor. Explaining what I didn’t have a handle on felt like an overwhelming task.
    It took me forty-five minutes to drag my sorry ass all the way home. The place was a towering shack, squeezed in with a block of them, stacked like crates threatening to crack. It had been fenced in by the ramshackle offerings of tenement hoarders determined to protect what was theirs by any means necessary. Rusted iron, fragments of car frames jacked from who knows where, old bed frames, rotten couches. Probably the remains of trespassers.
    I let myself in through the back entry, took the stairs until I was ready to give up and roll my aching body right back down them in desperate need of oblivion. The place was dank, dingy, rocked like a scream queen group and a chilldive technician were having some kind of soundwave orgy, but it was safe.
    Enough. Safe enough.
    You take what you can get.
    I slammed open the door, muttered the passcode that let me bypass the temporary security I’d set up – a portable voicelock capsule stuck to the wall, rigged to drop toxic shells if my voice didn’t register within four seconds of entry.
    No bodies greeted my bleary survey, so I must be leaving an impression with the locals. The first two jackwagons who’d tried to break in, I’d tossed out front with the rest of the “treasures” the neighbors collected. Either they’d been nabbed by carnivorous dogs or regained enough mobility to get the hell out.
    Kicking the door closed rearmed the security, and I made my way down the narrow hall, up the short set of creaking stairs, and into the single bedroom.
    I didn’t even bother to disinfect myself. A million credits weren’t bribery enough to care. I collapsed face first onto my cot – liberated from said neighbors and liberally doused with sanitizer – and closed my eyes.
    I’d have a lot to do when I woke up. I had to try to get a hold of the contacts in my roster I hoped would help, try to figure out the price I’d have to pay for it. Try to explain to Nanji’s brother exactly what happened. Whether he did or didn’t believe me, I’d need to find a team, steal a file from and generously pay back a certain nosy cop, get my tech system scrubbed and turned back on, put my girlfriend to rest – and for all that, it’d take a crowbar to peel me off this