The Bridge Chronicles Trilogy by Gary Ballard Page A

your promise is worth. You owe me. AGAIN.”
    He cut off the connection, muttering under his breath, “More than you know.” With creeping dread, he switched Net ID’s, accessing the Bridge mailbox. Buried among the assorted spam offers and regular mail was a message from Kira, bloated with an attachment. Kira must have been good to float an attachment past Bridge’s filtering system. He sighed and jacked out without reading the message. He’d wait to get to Angela’s, where he could open it from the detached safety of a clean room. He called another cab, beginning an hour merry-go-round of cab switching, route retracing and obfuscation. By the time he reached Angela’s place exhausted and bruised, it was almost two a.m.
     
    *****
     
    Chapter 6
    August 30, 2028
    2:07 a.m.
     
    “You look like shit, Artie. Is that blood?”
    The crackling static of Angela’s disembodied voice was a painfully welcome reminder of past days. Bridge stood at her door, disheveled and battered, staring up at the camera above the door, which was no doubt displaying his sorry self on a window in Angela’s crèche. “You should see the other guys,” Bridge quipped. “They look like a million bucks.”
    “You always were a cream puff. Door’s open.” Bridge heard the latch on the door click and pushed through quickly, keeping an eye out until the door closed. The latches and bolts slammed back into place automatically as soon as the door was shut. Even so, Bridge flattened against the wall and edged up to the front window overlooking the apartment complex’s deserted pool. A pricey place like this likely attracted a 9-5 cont>rporate clientele that would rarely be up this late on a work night. Angela had done well since ditching him.
    “Nice place you got here.”
    “Business is good.” Angela’s voice came from all around Bridge. Her wispy body materialized out of thin air, the perfect holographic representation of one of her avatars. Her real body looked almost nothing like this. Seven feet tall, bleached-bone white skin and jet hair flowing to her knees, with fingernails just short of being claws, this was Santhariya, the queen of the night realm, Orphonus.
    Bridge raised an eyebrow. “Very good, apparently. Those holo projectors aren’t cheap.”
    “Kim got me a got a good deal on them. This guy wanted me to steal some prototype designs, so he gave me the old models for like half price. I can’t resist a bargain.”
    “Especially when it involves a run, right?” Her avatar nodded quickly, that cute mischievous smile Bridge was so familiar with in the flesh transferred to this apparition perfectly.
    “So where are you?”
    “Back in the bedroom,” she said, indicating a room past the open kitchen. The apartment itself was so sparsely furnished Bridge could barely tell it was occupied. An expensive, barely creased couch was a deserted island in the middle of a desolate living area, positioned directly in front of the wall screen. The kitchen was the only area that appeared used, and badly used at that. Dishes caked with crusted food piled in the sink, used cardboard food containers left torn on the filthy counters. He’d seen this type of thing in so many different hackers’ homes that it might have been its own interior design style for the cyberpunk set. Most of the dedicated hackers spent more time in the crèche than the flesh, and as a result, they needed little furniture and cared even less for homemaking.
    “Can I at least talk to your face?”
    A tiny frown creased her lips. “I’m hardly decent,” she joked. “I’m deep in, Bridge, I don’t have time to swab off and be a hostess. There’s food in the fridge if you want, the couch is as good as a bed. Now what the fuck happened to my hacker?”
    “I told you, something he found got him killed. You said he was hitting pedofarms. What did you do?” His accusatory tone sounded harsher than he intended.
    She put her balled fists on her hips, the first