Damage Time - Softcover

Harvey, Colin

 
9780857660640: Damage Time
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0857660640 ISBN 13: 9780857660640
Verlag: Angry Robot, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Damage Time is a rock-hard sci-fi thriller from the acclaimed author ofWinter Song: no-one here gets out alive.

NEW YORK IS A MESS. It's 2050 and sea-levels have swamped the coastal regions. The walls are failing, the city has been carved up between the Chinese and the Muslims, and the USA is bankrupt. Detective Peter Shah serves with the NYPD as a Memory Association Specialist - reading the last memories of murder victims. When he's accused of killing a glamorous woman in a bar, he must find the killer, save himself... and the city.

File Under: Science Fiction [ A Decaying USA | Shattered Cops | Wrongful Arrest | Murderous Secrets ]

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Colin's first fiction was published in 2001, since when he has written novels, short stories and reviews, edited anthologies and judged the Speculative Literature Foundation's annual Gulliver Travel Research Grant for five years. Colin's reviews have appeared at Strange Horizons and he was the feature writer for speculative fiction at Suite101. The author passed away on August 16th, 2011.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

DAMAGE TIME, by Colin Harvey

CHAPTER ONE

Less than ten hours before the dead woman’s body was pulled from the icy clutches of the East River, Detective Pete Shah sat watching hockey. Each time the New York Rangers surged forward in search of the goal that would take them into the Stanley Cup final Shah stood up, his feet on the cross-struts of his stool’s legs, making him six inches taller. “Come on,” he growled, deep in his throat, ignoring his drink. “Come oooooon!” As the attack fizzled out, Shah slammed his palm down onto the antique stainless-steel bar in time with several hundred other fans. “Dammit!”

The bar reeked of unwashed bodies and stale sweat. Its walls were lined with flock wallpaper and faux-mahogany smart surfacing that ate gum or any other material that didn’t move for more than sixty seconds. “That guy oughtta watch out,” the drinker queuing behind Shah’s stool nodded at a man resting his palm on the wallpaper. “People lean on it too long, it absorbs them.”

“Urban myth,” Shah muttered. No one ever knew anyone it had happened to. In any event, the wallpaper was almost hidden by rows and columns of sports pictures, from antique black and white prints from the early twen-cen of men in ludicrously cut hockey uniforms, through color to the latest three-dee of Kuntsler smacking a Red Sox pitcher almost out of the stadium. Most of the bar’s largely blue-collar clientele had , like Shah, come straight from the office, shop or work site.

Leaning on the bar, Shah sipped at a carbonated water and sighing, shredded a toasted bagel while trying to ignore the grumbling of his stomach. It was dry, of course, and had no more flavor than the cardboard packaging that it had been served in that bore Matty’s logo. He’d spent most of his daily pittance, so to buy the coffee and meatballs whose aroma drifted by would eat into next day’s pay. Unlike most of the kids who were raising a rumpus around him he had neither the time nor the energy to supplement his calories by taking second and third jobs, so had to get by on the twenty-two hundred a day he earned. That the kids burned off all the calories they earned wouldn’t occur to them, but it turned up one corner of his lips.

To take his mind off his hunger and the cardboardy bagel, he wiggled his butt to stop the stool’s ventral ridge from giving him hemorrhoids and dreamed of punching out the windbag on the next stool.

Shah wanted to watch without constant interruptions from social networkers and work calls, so he’d switched his eyepiece off. The guy next to him also stared at the screen, but kept talking – so his piece was switched on. He’d kept up a steady stream of snide comments about “East Coast putzers” all evening, until Shah wanted to slap his fat face and smash his – no doubt – fifty kilocalorie eyepiece. It looked like half a pair of antique spectacles from his left ear to the bridge of his nose, with a bud spiralling into his eardrum. 

  The game resumed, and in the last seconds of normal time, the Rangers’ attack foundered, and the Islanders countered. Shah saw the Rangers’ defence-men look up at the clock as they entered damage time, the limbo between normal and overtime, and a hundred-twenty three-dee screens and several hundred eye-pieces showed the momentary lapse, and Jari Kaarinen jamming the puck into the net. 

  Kaarinen’s arms went up in sync with the other player’s, and as Shah closed his eyes in despair, the klaxon sounded, counterpointing groans from the other Rangers’ fans. Mixed with the groans were cheers from the few Islanders in the corner, who were watching the game in the enemy territory of Manhattan.

Karl behind the bar shook his head sadly so that the beads in his hair danced. “Bad enough to lose,” he sympathized. “But to lose to the second best team in New York?” Shah had heard that Karl lived in Queens, and was sure that the barman made equally scathing comments about the Rangers to the Islanders’ fans.

“Third,” Shah corrected him. “Rangers; Rangers’ reserves; then the Islanders.” It was a feeble joke that couldn’t conceal his disappointment. The Rangers were out for another year.

 “Shee-it,” someone snarled behind him. “If they hadna chalked off Page’s goal, it wouldna gone to overtime anyways. We was robbed by the bastards that decided referees could add a little” he lapsed into a soprano whine, “damage time.”

Damage time, allowing the referees to add a few last seconds in their own judgement for any missed stop-clocks by the timekeepers, had proven a hugely controversial amendment, which had the NHL accountants rubbing their fat little hands with glee. Controversy was good for the box office, and Allah knew the NHL needed good box office.

“Don’t matter anyway.” The windbag half-turn ed on his stool. His little exec carry-case leaned up against its base. “The Senators’ll kick the Islanders’ asses in the final.”

Tension made the sudden silence almost crackle.

Shah surreptitiously clicked his eyepiece on-line. You have five new messages, his eyepiece said via the insert into his ear. They would only be ads. “Delete all , “ Shah whispered and flipped out his badge.

NYPD hadn’t used badges for a generation - Shah had bought his on-line from a Chinese vendor. He’d bid the calorie equivalent of seven hundred new yuan, almost a year’s salary, but it bore the name of an Officer P Shah from the 1970s, so Shah thought it worth it, even though it was so heavy it sometimes felt as if he was carrying a brick in his pocket.

The other men’s eyepieces would have identified Shah – his eyepiece was sending out the identifier of an off-duty cop, but the movement of flipping open the shield stopped the drunken local lowering his forehead into the windbag’s face and glower at Shah.

Shah stared at the windbag. Jean Drake; Shah’s eyepiece ran Drake’s data. Canadian, Shah read. No priors, a typical ten kilocalorie a day exec who thinks that ’cause he pays Supertax, the sun shines out his ass.

Shah knew the other man. Owais Klass was a tattooed construction worker who unlike Drake had plenty of priors, most involving alcohol and violence. His tool-belt carried laser bradawl and sonic hammer, and more traditional tools like monkey-wrench and screwdriver.

Shah didn’t want to think what any one of those could do to Windbag’s skull. Nor the paperwork accruing from it Klass was smeared with dry sweat and dust, and his eyes were glazed with too much drink while his nose-ring swayed in time to his body. “Why don’t you…” he slurred, “rack off back to where you belong, scumbag?”

Drake blanched. He would be no match for Klass, so Shah interrupted, “Hey, Owais, easy.” 
At one-eighty-three Shah was nowhere near as big as Klass, but his badge might make him a mite taller in the construction worker’s mind. Or it might make him a better target. Only one way to find out.

“Come on, bud,” Shah said. “Bad enough to lose to them,” he jerked his thumb at the cavorting Islanders’ fans in the corner, “without a night in the cells for assault. Mr Otta-wah here will buy you a drink as an apology for mouthing off.”

Otta-wah opened his mouth to protest and Shah, who had nudged his way between them, thrust his face into the other man’s rippling jowls....

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Verlag
Angry Robot
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0857660640
ISBN 13 
9780857660640
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
476
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchpark GmbH
gpsr@buchpark.de

Krügerweg 1
Trebbin
Brandenburg
14959
Deutschland

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