Read Under Dark Sky Law for Free Online

He put his hands in his pockets and rocked
back on his heels. Looks like we don’t have much of a choice in
this matter, though—you better get a move on.”
    She smiled but her eyes were hard. “Don’t
screw this up, or we’ll all be sorry. Another war with Mexico would
seriously fuck up our groove.”
     

CHAPTER 5
    Some serious doubt lingered in the pit of her
stomach. Argon was actually a brilliant chemist, and not bad to
have on your side in a fight, but he could be a total moron when it
came to common. Usually the rest of the Grease Weasels helped keep
him in line, but that wasn’t an option at the moment. She almost
would have sent him on to the domes ahead of her if it had been
possible, but there’s no way his Zone Pass alone would have gotten
them through security without going through the backend. And this
wasn’t a backend job.
    Fortunately their flats were not very big—it
had been a test dome before the big Phoenix dome went up, and had
never been a fully fledged city before it was cut from the grid and
left to rot along with its rejected citizens. Sometimes she felt
sorry for the people trapped in the flats. Their lungs were too
weak to withstand the harshly polluted and oxygen depleted
wastelands of the pits, but since they were able to survive with
reduced oxygen they weren’t allowed Zone Passes for the domes.
Their lives were miserable, but they were perfect customers for
Alphamine. And for that, they held a special place in her heart and
in her wallet.
    It didn’t really matter though. In the end,
they were all slowly dying of cancer.
    She zipped over mounds of trash and smoking
debris behind the wheel of a souped-up armored all-terrain vehicle.
It had a camo paint job that would have been totally inappropriate
in this kind of an urban area, but it was now almost effective
amongst the piles of rubbles that had overtaken the once productive
city. She laughed at the image of her and her ridiculous pink
business suit driving what basically amounted to a camouflaged
tank. Dome squares were such idiots.
    She had the windows rolled up in the vehicle,
and the filtration system was on full blast. The machine was fairly
new, and the filtration system was still doing a decent job of
removing some of the more detectable noxious chemicals and odors
from the incoming air. She had doused herself with an odor reducing
spray before climbing inside, which would hopefully neutralize
enough of the river stench to keep her out of a scalding decon
bath. She shuddered thinking about it. It was one of the most
unpleasant parts of dealing with official dome entry. The
California domes were the worst—you could never escape a decon bath
in those parts. They had so many laws that changed every two or
three months that she could hardly keep track of them. At least the
Arizona domes got lazy sometimes. As long as you weren’t covered in
pig shit and brandishing an illegal laser, you had a good chance of
getting through with limited hassle.
    Even with the modified power-efficient
engine, the vehicle still had decent speed capabilities, and it
wasn’t long before she’d skirted a quarter of the flat’s area and
ended up at the north end of the ruined dome. The flats’ exit point
was small, but heavily guarded. They didn’t really care if anyone
escaped out into the pits—they would die within a few days anyway,
but they didn’t want any riffraff sneaking through the corridor to
the Phoenix dome. Heaven forbid they had to treat people like human
beings. It was so ironic—those more equipped to survive were
actually more likely to die an untimely death because of the dome
exile policies. Technology was a strange beast that raped nature on
a daily basis. It pissed her off, but Xero knew it was nothing but
a waiting game. Eventually the domes would run out of resources,
the sad parasitic flats would die along with them, and all that
would be left would be the pits. It probably wouldn’t happen within
her lifetime, but