Cliff again. For a robot, it sure had gone down easy. Maybe he’d punched out a fuse. Not a great design for a mechanical gangster.
Rad coughed and sniffed and turned away, directing his attention to the closest stack of wooden crates behind him as he wrapped his arms around his chest, trying to beat some warmth into his body. His feet shuffled through the straw on the floor, his toe nudging a small silver metal rod, like half a pencil, the blunt ends wrapped in copper.
Rad picked up the rod and turned, holding it out, but Jennifer was hunched over Cliff. Rad closed his mouth and slipped the rod into his pocket and turned back to the crates.
He pulled on the lid of the one nearest him. The nails slid out with surprising ease; the crate had been opened before, recently.
Rad pushed his hat back on his head and pulled a few handfuls of straw out of the crate, his punching hand functional but sore.
“I don’t know what these guys were moving,” he said over his shoulder, “but it’s not booze or guns.”
Rad pulled a gunmetal grey something out of the crate. It was a cylinder about six inches long and three wide, capped at one end by black glass and finished at the opposite with some kind of electrical terminal. Rad shoved more packing out of the crate and found a length of curly cable secured with a wire twist, long plugs on each end, clearly designed to mate with the end of the cylinder. He looked for a third time in the crate, and saw at the bottom a sort of trapezoidal box like a radio with dials and buttons on the front, and a handle in black plastic on the top. He gave the handle a tug but the object didn’t move much. It felt heavy.
Rad turned back to Jennifer and the robot, cylinder in one hand and cable in the other.
“You wanna start telling me a little about all this? Because if you want my help then you’re going to have to fill me in on this one. And we’re going to need to discuss my retainer.”
Jennifer stood and looked Rad in the eye. “He said you could be difficult.”
“Who did?”
“Captain Carson. Who else?”
Rad blinked. “You know Carson?”
“Sure I do. I work for him – worked, anyway. Nobody’s seen him since–”
“Since he walked over the ice and disappeared into the fog,” said Rad. “Yeah, I know. So you wanna tell me why I’m rescuing one of Carson’s agents from a robot gangster? I would have thought the Commissioners would send the big guns in, one of their own in a mess like this.”
Jennifer laughed. “Big guns? There aren’t any. Or haven’t you noticed? Not since… well, not since before, anyway. Carson had some grand plans, but now with the Fissure and the cold, the whole place is a mess and…”
Rad waved his hand. He didn’t like to be reminded of the status quo, because the status quo was bad. Carson, the new City Commissioner was gone, abandoning his post when the transdimensional tear that connected the Empire State to New York City – the so-called Fissure – vanished. And with the Fissure gone the city was slowly turning into a solid block of ice, one apt to shake itself to pieces too, if the tremors were going to keep up like they were.
Rad had heard things were bad at the Empire State Building. There was no one in charge, no one to give orders, no one with any kind of solution, because the one man who knew how any of it all worked had apparently committed suicide.
“Yeah,” said Rad. “I got it.”
Jennifer nodded. “Carson spoke highly of you. Said you were the best. Said to call you when things got difficult.”
“So things are difficult?”
“Something like that.”
“You said they’d started already.” Rad gestured around the warehouse, his eyes scanning the lock-ups. “I take it you’re on the trail of something?”
“Yes,” she said. She straightened and moved to the nearest of the roller doors, giving the padlock at the bottom an experimental kick with her boot. She pushed at the door, rattling it, but it held firm. “We need to see what they’ve got in here.”
Rad gently pushed Jennifer to one side and knelt next to the lock. He took a pair of lock picks from inside his coat pocket, holding them up for Jennifer to see. She smiled and folded her arms.