The Neo-Metropol Heist

9: Jaeger

On the other side of the city, deep within the bowels of the Neo Metropol Patrol Force department, First Grade Detective Yasmin Jaeger sat slumped over her too-small desk, peering with tired eyes into a too-bright personal terminal screen.
Scrolling across the screen were details that she had long stopped reading about a crime that she had long stopped caring about.
Around her, people stormed from desk to desk, all delivering some urgent news of some kind about the same thing.
Five days ago, somebody had managed to infiltrate one of the most secure buildings in the city almost without alerting a single soul and escaped with more than one hundred thousand credits in jewels, not that there wasn't a single person in the whole city that didn't know that by now.
That person was entirely responsible for the clusterfuck of frantic police activity within the NMPF organised crime department that had been almost constant since.
"Fuck this," she grumbled, suddenly feeling a wave of something that felt a lot like 'eighteen hours without sleep' washing over her.
She gestured for the screen to hibernate and stood up, catching a glance of the clock in the corner of the room and realising that it was the first time she'd stood up in more than eight hours. Her ass was numb and her legs struggled to remember their basic functions, this condition persisting for at least a minute after she stumbled to the other side of the room, heading to the coffee machine with extreme prejudice.
She hit the button that she knew only as the button that made coffee, only to receive an obnoxious buzz that she recognised as the noise that the coffee machine made when it didn't feel like making coffee.
"Aw, you piece of shit," she snapped, resisting the urge to pull the machine from the wall and throw it across the room in blind rage, swallowing it.
"No coffee?" A voice came from behind her.
She turned and saw the face of Detective Oscuro, her partner. The man was built like a brick wall, six foot six at least, with legs like tree trunks and arms to match. He was also striking in the unattractive way - his shaved head sloped lazily at the front, hanging over sunken, dark eyes set above a twice-broken nose.
"Exactly zero coffee," Jaeger told him, unintentionally leaning against the kitchen counter in a way that she hoped wasn't sending unintentional messages. She stood straight again just in case.
"I didn't think this place couldn't get any worse," Oscuro rumbled, the muscles on his torso tensing visibly under the grey vest he wore that Jaeger was sure went against every dress protocol in the book, "you look like shit."
Jaeger chuckled involuntarily at the joke that wasn't funny.
"Well, fuck you too," she replied, walking back towards her desk, Oscuro following.
"I'm just trying to be helpful, you've been pulling doubles for the last week, you need sleep," Oscuro said.
Jaeger sat down in the swivel chair she'd had for six years that dug into her back and creaked like the piece of plastic crap that it was every time she sat in it.
Oscuro was right, but she wasn't going to let him know that.
"If I leave then this Astoria thing will never get solved, god knows there isn't another capable cop in this entire department," there was a kernel of truth in the cutting statement, but Oscuro just laughed.
"You can tell when you're tired because your sarcasm suffers," he said, looking around the room and narrowing his eyes with a sharp intake of breath, "as your partner I'm ordering you to go home."
Jaeger laughed again, mentally scolding herself but not letting it show.
"You have to be above me to pull rank," she told him.
Oscuro nodded.
"Well, call it a spiritual pulling of rank, we both know I'll beat your ass to sergeant," he chuckled at himself.
Jaeger wouldn't argue, Oscuro had the right aggressive attitude and correct level of dull-headedness to submit completely to the people that paid the salary of the people that paid his salary to succeed in the force. She felt the familiar feeling of doubt and uncertainty about her entire life that had become so familiar recently but pushed it as deep down as she could into her mind.
"And we both know I could just plain beat your ass," she told him, "fine, I'm going, purely because it means I don't have to listen to your stupid voice anymore."
Oscuro laughed.
"That'll do," he said, "see you in the morning, partner."
He left the desk and disappeared back into the scrum of the maze of desks. Jaeger rubbed her eyes and decided he was right, at least about her being tired. She'd clocked enough hours this week.
She switched off her desk-terminal, pulled her jacket off the back of her chair and grabbed her work bag from underneath the desk and headed out of the office, leaving the buzz of activity behind her. As soon as she was in the elevator and heading down to the street, she noticed how used to it she had become.
When she reached the lobby, she threw her jacket on - thick and lined to protect her from the cold night air, and checked that her gun was tucked firmly in the breast pocket.
The sight and feel of the dark metal handgun immediately soothed her, a possibly less-than-fantastic mental response in the eyes of any certified therapist, but she didn't care.
Even though, or possibly even because, she was a patrol officer, she no longer felt safe even within the heavily-checkpointed city centre. Neo Metropol was a den of depravity enjoyed by all manner of people regardless of where they sat on the income scale, and it was barely safe for them, let alone somebody who was actively working against the flood.
Crime skyrocketed year upon year, and as an officer she felt she had a personal stake in the fact that it kept rising, as ridiculous as that was.
She stepped out into the street, the coat protecting her from a particularly severe gust of wind funnelled by the towers above, and began walking the eighty-six steps down to thirty-eighth street, as she had done almost every day (ignoring the occasional weekend she managed to steal) for the past nine years.
There, she would wait at the jumpcab rank until one decided to drop from the roof of traffic above, only marginally less busy than how it was during the day, and collect her.
Tonight, she didn't have to wait that long, for a moment she had an amusing thought that the fates were on her side for once, then laughed it off and filed it away firmly in 'shit that will never happen'.
The jumpcar, sleek and pointed and painted yellow with white squares as a retro throwback that some idiot in some office somewhere must have thought was hilarious opened with a hiss, and she slid inside, only for the door to close again, sealing her in like a cocoon.
"Please confirm your destination, Detective Jaeger," the cab, which no longer required a driver, had automatically read the ID chip in her palm. One benefit of being able to be automatically identified and analysed by a machine was the fact that it was at least respectful.
Jaeger leaned in towards the screen set into the console in front of her, aware like she was every night that she didn't need to.
"8120 Cagney," she said clearly. The computer took a moment to plot the course and lifted from the ground with a hum, the engine quieter than most but still not silent, and shot into the traffic above.
She attempted to make herself comfortable in the seat which was quite obviously made to be functional and not much more, before eventually giving up and removing her personal slate from her workbag, switching it to 3D mode.
Around her, in the solemn darkness of the cab, or at least the darkness that wasn't infected by the obnoxious light cast from the neon adverts and headlights whizzing past, three dimensional images flickered into life.
They were the files from the Astoria case, details of the security system that she didn't care to understand, reports from the security guards on that night, an analysis of the situation, including the suggestion that there had actually been two criminals working the same place at the same time, which she thought actually made a lot of sense.
Jaeger exhaled sharply, realising she couldn't look at it anymore, and gestured for it to disappear, wishing she could make it all go away forever.
Checking the ETA counter, which sat next to the much less friendly fare metre in the console in front of her, she gestured casually in the air for the terminal to bring up her personalised news feeds.
Even though she had been careful to select the most unbiased feeds (mostly unofficial pirate feeds), there was still a lot of partisan writing finding its way in lately. She tried her best to delete it as she saw it, but the task was becoming more difficult by the day.
She was greeted by, as she expected, yet more news about the Astoria - most of it total crap probably fed through to the press by the conglomerate that owned the place, Bluewall, in an attempt to curtail all the negative press. Again, she sighed, and cast the feeds from her sight.
Before she could even readjust to the darkness of the cab, a bright light erupted into life, projected from the console at the front of the cab.
"Detective, feeling unfulfilled? Wish you had more excitement in your life?" The abhorrent advert lit up the cab and burned her eyes, filling her brain with colour and sound.
Jaeger gestured angrily but the advert remained.
"Why not try Frontline Six, the new, action-packed sim-game from Gravity Productions!" It was a demand, not a question. Your life is horrible, buy this, it seemed to shout.
It screamed at her until she finally found the correct gesture, just as the option to purchase the game through her ID chip appeared.
As it dropped away, the fare counter jumped up by three credits as cost for skipping it.
"Screw you, you flying piece of crap," she almost snarled.
It was another twelve minutes before the cab arrived at Cagney, her neighbourhood. It looked almost as depressing from above as it did from below.
Part of the lower east side of the island, Cagney was part of the sprawling mass known as the Dockyards. It supposedly had a 'proud heritage' of import and export, but now all it had become was corridors of modular cube homes stacked five-high like shipping containers.
There was no sense of community, people used the boxes for sleeping, eating and washing, then went out to do their job, whatever was. Sometimes the boxes would lay empty for weeks, god knows hers had, Jaeger thought.
The Dockyards, like most of the lower end of the island, was rundown and long abandoned by the city above, but at least it wasn't Playa Perdido.
As the cab dropped to the ground with a hiss, Jaeger wasted no time in scanning her palm chip to pay the cost and jumping out of the door.
"Thank you for your custom, Detective," the cab called after her, before the door hissed shut and the car jumped back into the air.
She considered making a sarcastic comment as the car hummed away, back towards the stream of traffic, then realised abruptly how ridiculous it would be, so instead turned towards the maze of towering containers and walked.
Despite its outward appearance, Jaeger felt safer here than she did anywhere else in the city. The phrase 'don't shit on your own doorstep' was a shared neighbourhood mantra, and that gave it an air of chaotic civility.
The cubes were stacked high above her, staircases either side leading to catwalks that ran across each level.
Arriving at her box, a less-than-tidy ground floor plot with one sliding door, designed to provide the absolute minimal amount of space required by a human being to live. She placed her palm against the door and it detected the unique information coded within her ID chip, sliding to the side with a hiss.
Inside, she was greeted by a flickering as the strip lights in the ceiling flickered to life, revealing the basic, clean interior.
It wasn't anything special, barely ten square metres. Jaeger swiped her palm once and a section of the wall to her left sparked into life, revealing itself to be a concealed TV screen. She scrolled it to a news channel, caught a glance of the word 'Astoria' and quickly flicked it to another channel which was showing a weird cartoon which lazily mimicked classic Japanese animation.
She lowered the volume and brightness, again with a lazy palm gesture, and tapped the opposite wall, revealing a hidden hatch reserved for her clothes, into which she placed her jacket.
The cubes, if a person could get over the tiny space allotment, was actually a wonder of utilitarian design - Jaeger tapped her palm twice more, and two squares appeared on the floor on either side of the cube, her bed and a small kitchenette area rising up from the gap with a quiet hiss.
Jaeger washed her face and sat on the bed, laughing to herself quietly when she realised she couldn't actually remember the last time she'd slept in her own bed.
She changed her clothes and slid under the covers, her mind lazily constructing an image of the person now at the top of NMPF's most wanted list - the person who was the cause of her desperate tiredness. Of course, they would look nothing like that, her conscious mind argued, but she was asleep before she could form a coherent counter-argument.