Judas Unchained

Stepping out of the Hotel Conomela’s air-conditioned lobby was yet another unpleasant reminder of his bad choice of luggage. The heat and humidity on the street was already up to sauna levels, and that was with the hotel’s bright scarlet half-moon canopy overhead protecting him from direct sunlight. The semiorganic fiber of Adam’s white suit acquired a silver hue as it struggled to repel heat away from his body. He fanned at his face with his genuine Panama hat. A uniformed doorman gestured to a maroon Lincoln taxi that glided to a halt and popped its door. “Señor Duanro.” His white gloved hand touched the tip of his cap respectfully.

“Thanks.” Adam hurried into the cool dry interior, for once not pausing to consider, all men being equal, the market-enforced indignity of the doorman having to be servile. Today, anyone whose job it was to hasten him into cool comfort was okay by him.

He gave the drive array his destination, and the Lincoln pulled out aggressively into the flow of traffic. The street was jammed full of vehicles, half of them delivery vans and trucks parked on the curb so that angry cars, bikes, and buses were squeezed out into the few remaining lanes. His taxi rolled along at thirty kilometers an hour, its horn tooting about every thirty seconds as pedestrians, powerskaters, and cyclists dodged around it. It was always the same in Tridelta City; twenty-four million people crammed onto a patch of ground barely fifty kilometers across generated a serious amount of traffic pressure.

Eight kilometers and twenty-three minutes from the hotel, the taxi pulled up beside the Anau Tower, a cylindrical skyscraper two hundred fifty stories tall. Its broad metallic silver windows were arranged in a slight step pattern, looking as if the tower skin were twisted around the structural frame in a corkscrew spiral.

Adam took the elevator lift up to the hundred fiftieth floor, the airship docking level, then switched to a local elevator to get up to one-seven-eight. The Agent’s office suite was on the east side of the tower, three modest rooms decorated in cold black granite blocks. The receptionist was an essay in visual intimidation. Her simple charcoal-gray suit was stretched tight around her, illustrating the boosting she’d received, with several seams of muscle wrapped around her original frame. Adam suspected a host of wetwired weapons were lurking in among the dubious additional muscle cells and overstretched epidermal layer. Her neck was a smooth cone of flesh that blended directly into her cheeks. There was no chin, only an eerily attractive set of lips that had been glossed in dark cherry-red. They perked into a smile for Adam when he presented her desk array with his Silas Duanro identity.

“You can go straight in, Señor Duanro,” she trilled in a sweet high voice.

“He is expecting you.”

The Agent smiled in greeting from behind his granite desk. A tall man who kept thin by expending a lot of nervous energy, he had a beak of a nose that came down almost to his upper lip. For some reason he hadn’t modified his scalp follicles; a receding hairline was only partially disguised by a very close cut. “Señor Silas Duanro? Humm.” He smiled at his own humor. “You are allowed to use the same name with me, you know. After all these years, what have we got if not trust?”

“I’m sure.” Adam hadn’t visited Tridelta for several years; yet the Agent always managed to recognize him. Last time he’d looked very different, older and chubbier. Right now he’d morphed his face into that of a forty-year-old, with rounded cheeks, green eyes, and thick auburn hair. The skin was thick and slightly pocked as it finally began its protest at so many hurried cheap and unprofessional cellular reprofilings. He had to apply moisturizing cream every morning and evening now; even so it felt as if he were stretching scar tissue every time he spoke. His cheeks were always cold these days, the capillaries were in such a bad way from constant readjustment. There was a limit to how much reprofiling anyone could undergo, and Adam knew he was fast approaching the time when he’d have to quit.

But not yet.

Becoming Silas Duanro had also involved shedding a lot of fat, and receiving some extra muscle boosting. He hadn’t been this fit and strong for a while now, though it was taking some very sophisticated genoproteins to maintain his heart and other organs at a level where they could support the added muscle. He’d also had to correct his body for the onset of type two diabetes, which had developed over the last couple of years. But whenever the call came through to start the blockade-busting run he was assembling for Johansson, he was determined to be ready for it. No way was he going to see that from some backseat, shouting advice across the unisphere. He fully expected it to be his swan song.

“Drink?” the Agent asked. It was part of their ritual.

“What have you got?”