Maris Fero
Riff-raff, Street Rat.
Efavan, Vorzy V,
Lower-L District
Outer Rim Regions.
From her shadowed vantage point the Shrike crouched precariously and gazed into the murky dark of false night and watched the flickering neon lights pulse unevenly across the rain soaked flanks of the surrounding megabuildings. At once both high above the smog filled undercity, Maris was simultaneously still several hundred storeys beneath the vaunted upper city, high atop the clouds. Up where the mega casino’s and resort hotels dominated all aspects of life, a world she had inhabited once before - a very different life. An age that seemed like a lifetime ago.
Lower-L existed in perpetual twilight. The thrumming cascade of the acid rain tumbling down on the corrugated metal of her shelter brought back memories of those earliest years of existence when this was the only world she had known. The only world she could have hoped to know before the inevitable premature end that befell so many of her peers.
But Fero was not destined to be another lost soul, in fact, she had come to wonder whether or her own path had been set into motion far from this world of darkness and smog, far from the life she had known.
Maris tilted her head up to gaze up toward the false clouds, the leaden smog bank that starved both the lower and undercity of all daylight, all sense of night or day, all hope. The oily yellow-purple film of fat droplets of acid rain rain harmlessly across the faceless glossy black polymer glass visor that obscured any trace of the Shrike’s visage. Maris was as a ghost in this place, a shadow of an urban legend. She knew in her bones that somewhere nearby a half dozen youth gangs would be engaged in their own grand sagas. Inconsequential wars for inconsequential lives. Perhaps even her namesake gang might still survive in some form, whether as an evolution of her passing, or perhaps simply an urban legend of the time of her ascension to sit amongst the miracles of the upper city.
The incautious urge to relive aspects of her upbringing overwhelmed any sense of danger she harboured, and with a deft touch she unclasped the filters on her mask to allow the faintly acrid and recycled odour of the pollution layer to reach her lungs again. She allowed herself ten beats before the seals where reset, and she rose from her crouch and casually swung herself around the edge of the unfinished landing platform to stand with her back flush to the superstructure, and the thin ledge her only defense against a plummet below.
Another flood of memories, a gust of backwash from an airbarge had almost toppled a ragged youth once, but the Shrike’s footing was sure and she turned to crawl along the surface and toward the service ladder she knew to lead to one of the many vertigo inducing slender walkways down into the maze that was the lower city, down a darknening path toward her origins.
WIthin the Lower-L city district, where the touch of the sun or the blue of a sky was little more than a fairy tail, life of a different quality survived. Silent, the spectre stalked the internal avenues and alleyways of her youth. She drifted between crowds of pallid souls; A turgid throng of life, whose toils and burdens meant nothing to the pleasure seekers they served so far above.
She watched skinny kids in phosphoresenent gang rags eyeing one another like opposed armies awaiting a call to charge. She saw street peddlers, conartists and career criminals cautiously checking their flanks for the knife in the dark they all felt coming. She watched wide eyed lunes and stumbling addicts shifting and staggering through the shoals of shoppers and street merchants, wandering hands seeking unsecured credit sticks, and wild gazes daring any to meet them. Here and their the youth gangs had tagged the walls or stalls or their own bodies with loyalty glyphs in neon pink, electric blue and violently vibrant yellow.
And with each measured glance, Maris knew what each of these souls were capable of, and with each step her own understanding of just how far she had come became ever clearer. Maris ducked into another side alley and followed the trail of luminescent green arrows into the familiar gloom, noting the gang signs of truce and parley around - a tradition - a rule of engagement. One she had defied in the course of her first true assassination.
Lower-L-Sec4-MedSanctuary was a little more than a shell. Entropy was a noted constant of the lower city; What had once been a gleaming facet of a rare civic initiative to raise the standards of the populace had fallen into disrepair. Apparently, the initial enthusiasm of some short-lived ‘champion of the people’ living far above the toxic cloud had faded, and the distant benefactor had conveniently forgotten to renew the funding or supplies. In the Shrike’s memories the place was still basically functional, two bonesaws of varying qualifications and a med droid haunted the place and in some few desperate situations a fatal injury had been treated in time. She had been stitched up here, an arm reset and - if her mothers tale was to be believed - she had been born their too. But that was the problem, Maris no longer believed in easy truths.
She walked into the ruins of the MedSanctuary and inspected the burnt out remains of one wall of circuitry and vacant drive bays. All of the relevant scrap and components that could have been extricated from the derelict structure had been picked away over the years of her absence - only the connector sockets to the main city data line remained, intractably embedded into the structural bulkhead. The spectre shrouded herself in the veils of the force, turning the eyes of any onlookers away by sheer force of her practised will, as she drew a slender chrome dataspike from her pouch and deftly buried it into the exposed data line, and for one brief unlikely moment, Sec4-MedSanctuary was once more registering as live on the global data net - and the cunning device devoured the record artefacts the Shrike had sought.
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