Incorporated with DeepSeek
Sktr Br
The rain wasn't water. Not really. It was a chemical mist, a byproduct of the arcology's atmospheric scrubbers mixing with the unfiltered exhaust of a thousand illegal hover-rigs. It tasted of ozone and burnt copper, slicking the permacrete of Level 12's Sktr Br in a film of rainbow-hued petrochemical sheen.
He stood at the bar. Not leaned. *Stood*. Spine ramrod straight despite the oppressive bass frequencies of the hardcore gabber track vibrating through the floor. He was a cut of sharp, outdated Savile Row wool in a sea of patched neoprene, reactive carbon fiber, and scarred synth-leather. His name was Bond. James Bond. And he was an anachronism so severe it was a physical provocation.
The bartender, a woman named Cogs whose left arm was a beautiful, whirring mess of titanium rods and hydraulic pistons from a skating accident ten years prior, stared through him.
"Martini."
She didn't blink. The ice in the well didn't shift. The chrome-plated skull of a long-dead pit-bike served as the tip jar; it just stared with empty eye sockets. *...stares...*
"Steard not shaken."
Her gaze moved from his face to the heavy iron handle of the "Jameson" tap, then back. *...stares...*
"Martini!!"
A sliver of irritation, cold and precise, entered his grey-blue eyes. The music was a wall of noise. "Do you hear me?"
*...stares...*
"I want..."
He didn't finish. The sheer, dense wall of indifference was too thick. He pivoted on his heel—handmade leather, real leather, not vat-grown—and walked toward the door. The walk was a statement. It said, *I am leaving because this establishment is beneath my notice.*
"HEY!!"
The shout came from a table of sktrs near the broken jukebox. Bond didn't turn. The heavy, lead-lined door swung shut behind him with a pneumatic hiss. *...does not come back...*
"Ah." Cogs exhaled, a sound of profound relief. She pulled the lever on the Gentleman Jack and filled a chipped ceramic mug with the amber liquid. *...keeps serving others...*
The night wore on. The chemical rain fell harder. The music got louder.
Then the door hissed open again. It was the same man. But the wool suit was now damp, and he held a crumpled, laminated flyer in a gloved hand. He looked less like a predator and more like a confused tourist who'd taken a wrong turn into a combat zone. He slapped the flyer onto the sticky, beer-logged bar top.
"Look. Sir." He pointed a gloved finger at the smeared ink. "It says there Jameson, JB, LaPhroaig, Ardberg, Bullit, Rye Bulleit, Connemara and the special ain no Martini. Ever." His voice was clipped, precise, and utterly alien in this place. "Girls do not come here. We drink out of misery or go dancing. Its a Sktr Br as it says outside." He tapped the glass door. "Redbreast today. Only long drinks and hard music."
He stared at Cogs, waiting. His eyes, for just a second, flickered with something other than arrogance. Confusion. *???* "Did you get lost?"
He turned, taking a step toward a table where two sktrs nursed beers and watched him with the detached curiosity of alley cats observing a wounded pigeon. *...one table away...*
"Did he get we only serve Jack Daniels with Pepsi?" one of them muttered, his voice a low rumble like bearings grinding on dry concrete. His name was Jolt. His leg was carbon-fiber from the knee down, the boot a custom-machined SoulPlate.
"Nah." The other, a wiry girl with fiber-optic dreadlocks pulled back tight, didn't look up from adjusting the mag-clamps on her gloves. Her street name was Wires. "And its Gentlemen Jack."
Jolt tilted his head, taking in the cut of the stranger's suit, the antique watch on his wrist. "What he ask for?"
"Beans." Wires finally looked up, her eyes hard as the anodized aluminum of her skate frame. "Wet Beans."
---
They found him two blocks over, in the acid-rain shadow of a collapsed mag-lev pylon. He wasn't lost anymore. He was bleeding.
Three RazorBoyz, a splinter faction of the larger Yakuza-affiliated Ronin-gumi, had him pinned against the crumbling ferrocrete. Their cheap, military-surplus cyberware sparked and hissed. One had a monofilament whip coiled around Bond's forearm, drawing a line of bright red through the soaked wool.
Bond’s movements were economical. Brutal. A palm strike crushed a trachea augmented with a cheap respirator implant. A low kick, perfect form even in the slick muck, snapped the patella of the one with the whip. But he was outnumbered. Out-teched. And he was old.
Jolt and Wires watched from the top of a nearby ramp, perched on their boards.
"Should we?" Jolt asked, his hand resting on the worn grip tape of his deck.
"He's a suit. Works for the people who own the people who try to bulldoze our spots," Wires said, her voice flat. "Let the chrome-junkies have him."
But then they saw the fourth figure. Not a RazorBoy. A shimmering, almost invisible distortion in the rain. Thermoptic camouflage. Military-grade. The kind that cost more than the entire Sktr Br block. A long, slender rifle barrel materialized, aimed at the RazorBoyz.
The sniper didn't fire. Not yet. They were *herding*. The sniper was with the RazorBoyz. This was a play. And Bond was the piece being moved into position.
Jolt sighed. "Aw, frag it."
He dropped into the ramp. The sound of his board hitting the wet permacrete was a sharp *thwack* followed by the low, guttural hum of ceramic bearings spinning at 60,000 RPM. Wires was right behind him, her board silent, her fiber-optic hair streaming behind her like a data-spike.
Jolt hit the RazorBoy with the broken knee first. A simple skateboard deck, gripped with coarse 36-grit, slammed edge-first into the back of a skull. The sound was a wet *crack* that cut through the gabber beat still echoing in their ears. Wires used her board like a shield, deflecting a wild swing from a razor-edged cyberarm, then slammed the trucks into the thug's temple.
In three seconds, it was over. The RazorBoyz were down. The thermoptic shimmer retreated, vanishing into the urban canyons.
Bond straightened his tie, ignoring the blood dripping from his wrist. He looked at Jolt and Wires, not with gratitude, but with a cold, clinical assessment. He pulled a thin, flexible datapad from his inner pocket. On it was a grainy image of a man with dead eyes and a nose corroded by years of "Blue Heaven" cocaine aerosol.
"Francis Sterling," Bond said, his voice carrying perfectly despite the rain. "CEO of Apex-Dynamic BioSolutions. He's funded three different terror cells in the underlevels this quarter alone. One of them is moving a bioweapon through the old drainage canals—the ones that run directly under your primary skate park on Level 9."
He flicked to another image. A schematic of the drainage system, with the Level 9 park—a cathedral of smooth concrete and rebar known as "The Cathedral"—highlighted in red.
"Sterling wants a war down here. Keeps property values low so his shell companies can buy the mineral rights. He uses the gangs as a smokescreen and an asset-denial weapon. And he pays me to make sure the *right* assets are denied."
Wires stared at him, her eyes narrowed. "You're a fixer. A trigger-man for the people who put the poison in the rain. And you want *us* to do your wetwork."
Bond didn't deny it. He just stared back, his face an unreadable mask of cold professionalism. He was a weapon. He had always been a weapon. But for the first time, staring at these two kids on boards, with their homemade gear and their clear, drug-free eyes—the only sober people in a city drowning in chemical bliss and digital nightmares—he felt the weight of the trigger he pulled.
He worked for the toxics. He was the instrument of their elegant, destructive whims. And he had just conscripted the only pure thing left in the sprawl to clean up a mess made by a man who snorted coke off platinum mirrors while whole blocks sank into toxic sludge.
"Sktr Br," Bond said, putting the datapad away. He turned and began to walk back toward the bar, his silhouette swallowed by the neon-tinted chemical fog. "I believe I owe you both a Redbreast."
The Redbreast sat untouched between them. Jolt used his thumbnail to peel the label off his bottle of Ballygowan water—the only drink they actually paid for. Bond nursed his whiskey, the blood from his wrist now dried to a dark crust on the bar's ancient wood. The gabber had softened to something low and industrial, a grinding bassline that felt like the city's heartbeat.
"You're dead, y'know," Wires said, not looking at him. She was drawing patterns in the condensation on her glass. "Sterling finds out you gave us those schematics? He'll have a drone-strike rerouted to your flat before you can pour your morning tea."
"I'm aware," Bond replied.
"Then why do it?" Jolt asked. "You're his man. You're the sharp end of the stick he pokes the world with."
Bond swirled the whiskey, watching the legs run down the glass. "Even a sharp stick can be turned around."
Silence. The bass throbbed. Cogs wiped down the other end of the bar, her titanium arm whirring softly.
"There's someone," Wires said finally, her voice low. "One man. The reason the Yaks don't touch skaters. The reason no dealer offers us product twice. The reason Sterling's bioweapon runs through *our* drainage and not our veins."
Bond's eyebrow lifted a fraction.
"He's old. Older than the sprawl. Older than the arcologies." Jolt leaned forward, his carbon-fiber leg scraping the floor. "Provo. IRA. But the old kind—the kind that came from France, when the Irish were learning war from monks and knights. *Probus fortis*."
"Cuirasse," Wires said. The name fell like a stone into still water. "French for 'breastplate.' No one knows his real name. No one knows what he's running—what his real game is. He's geared up. Full conversion? Maybe. But he's still a sktr. He rides the Cathedral every full moon, alone, and he doesn't miss a line."
Jolt nodded. "He taught us everything. Not just how to skate—how to *be*. He said viruses don't harm the sober and athletic. They just make the immune system stronger. Turn it into a fortress. He said skaters are the only ones who understand that. We're not runners or gangers or corpo-puppets. We're Trolls."
"Trolls," Bond repeated, the word foreign on his tongue.
"Aye. Ugly to the world. Strong inside. Under the bridge, watching the billy goats cross. And we don't break." Wires met his eyes for the first time. "He won't like you. You're an arrogant feudal lord on cocaine, even if you don't snort it yourself. You work for the people who make the poison. You wear their colors."
"Then why tell me about him?"
"Because you asked." Jolt's voice was simple, final. "And the code is the code. *Qui demande aide, sera aidé*. 'Who asks for help will be helped.' Since Charlemagne. For eternity."
---
The Cathedral was not a church. It was a forgotten flood-control basin three levels down, where the old city's storm drains converged into a vast, domed chamber of smooth, ancient concrete. Over decades, skaters had sculpted it—adding ramps, grinding ledges, quarter-pipes that curved like flying buttresses. Bioluminescent moss, the only thing that thrived in the chemical damp, painted the walls in shifting blues and greens.
Bond descended a rusted ladder, his handmade shoes slipping on the wet rungs. The air smelled of stagnant water and ozone. In the center of the basin, under the faint glow of the moss, a single figure stood motionless on a battered longboard.
He was not what Bond expected. He was tall, lean, clad in what looked like articulated plate armor made of scavenged carbon-fiber and ceramic composite—actual *cuirasse*. A full helmet obscured his face, the visor a single slit of polarized glass. The board under his feet was a work of art: inlaid wood, metal trucks that gleamed with a dull, oiled sheen, wheels that looked like they'd been turned from solid polymer blocks.
He didn't move as Bond approached. The only sound was the drip of water and the faint hum of some internal system within the armor.
"You're the Brit," the voice came, filtered through the helmet's speakers. It was calm, with the faintest lilt of the west of Ireland, but educated. Precise. "The one who drinks his whiskey neat and his loyalty shaken."
"James Bond," Bond said, stopping ten feet away. "I need your help."
"Need." The word was a scalpel. "Need is a currency you've never had to spend, Mr. Bond. You trade in wants. The wants of men who think they own the rain because they paid for the cloud-seeding license."
Bond said nothing. The silence stretched.
"A man named Sterling wants to flood the underlevels with a bioweapon. You know this. You've given the children a map." The helmet tilted slightly. "Why?"
"Because even a weapon can choose its target."
A long pause. Then, a sound from within the helmet—a soft, low chuckle that held no warmth. "You think that's noble. You think turning on your master makes you a free man. It doesn't. It makes you a stray dog. Dangerous, but still a dog."
Bond's jaw tightened. "I didn't come here for philosophy."
"No. You came here because the children told you I would help. And I will." The figure on the board shifted, the trucks creaking softly. "But not for you. For the Cathedral. For the Trolls under the bridge."
He reached up and unlatched the helmet. As he lifted it, Bond saw a face that was not old in years, but old in weight. Pale skin, a close-cropped grey beard, eyes the color of a winter sea. A thin scar ran from temple to jaw, old and white.
"My name was Séamus. Once. Cuirasse now. And I will help you burn Sterling's house down, Mr. Bond. But you will do it on my terms. No more wetwork for the toxics. No more looking away. You will become a Troll, or you will become nothing."
He stepped off the board, the wheels rolling silently to a stop against a cracked coping. He extended a hand—not in greeting, but in command. Bond hesitated, then clasped it. The grip was metal under the glove, cold and unyielding.
"Now," Cuirasse said, his voice carrying the weight of Charlemagne's oath. "Tell me about the drainage canals. And tell me about the man who pays you. Because if we're going to war, I want to know whose throat I'm cutting first."
The moss glowed blue-green on the ancient concrete. The bass of the city above was a distant thunder. And in the Cathedral, the knight and the stray dog began to plan.
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