by Jeff Somers
“So you’re really Avery Cates, huh?”
I looked over at the kid. He’d connected a series of fist-sized black boxes together with cables, one of which ran to a small, handheld screen. He was staring at the screen while he manipulated some switches on one of the boxes, the sick green light of the screen making his face look rotten.
“Sure,” I said, lisping painfully. “And you’re no one I’ve ever heard of.”
He didn’t look up, his eyes dancing, his fingers moving gracefully, like independent creatures on the ends of his hands. “You really kill all the people they say you did?”
I looked out the window at swirling clouds. After a moment I said, “Maybe half.”
“They all deserve it?”
I thought about it. There’d been a time when I’d been reasonably sure everyone I’d killed-mistakes aside-had deserved it, on some level. Now I wasn’t so sure. It was different, somehow, when you weren’t being hired for it, when you were doing it for your own agenda.
“Most,” I finally said. “What are you doing?”
“Analyzing the signals from our friends the microscopic bots. Seeing what I can figure out, trying to reverse them.” I had no peripheral vision left, but I felt his eyes shift onto me. “You really know Ty Kieth? The Ty Kieth? Who wired up Amsterdam six years ago?”
“I knew him. He’s an annoying little shit, but then all you Tech boys are.” I considered the persistent ringing in my ears and wondered if Happling had shaken something loose. “He did good work for me, though.”
“He’s a genius,” Marko said without embarrassment. “A real-life genius. Up there with Amblen and Squalor, you ask me. Criminal, of course, beyond redemption, like every other pre-Uni genius, right? Squalor goes and starts the Electric Church, his pal Amblen’s holed up in The Star, doing lord knows what.” The Star was an island fortress off Manhattan, all that was left of some monument or statue or other waste of time. Rumor was that not even the SSF could get into it because of all the illegal tech Amblen had built into it, but I knew what those sorts of rumors were worth. “Kieth’s number thirty-four on the SSF list, did you know that? Was fifty-three before he met you. You advanced his career quite a bit.”
“Always glad to help.”
“His name’s all over this shit. It’s like he wanted people to know it was him.”
I turned my head to look at him, my neck making a gravelly popping sound. “Wanted you all to know it was him in the two days before you choke on your own blood and die?” I considered. “Why in hell would he do that?”
He looked back down at his little screen. “Mr. Cates, not everything will be dead. No vector for the Monks, you know.” He leaned forward slightly, peering at his little screen. “There’s another signal emanating from you, Mr. Cates. It’s being touched right now by several encrypted fingers.”
I closed my eyes in order to really revel in the aching that suffused my whole body. “Subdermal chip. My people use it to track me down if any of my fans manage to get the drop on me. Some of my friends in Europe are being notified of my approach.”
“You’re just that important, huh?”
If I’d felt any better, I might have leaped up to twist his nose a little, but I was too tired, so I let it slide. “Yen buys you a lot, kid. And I’ve got yen coming out my ass, thanks to your boss.”
“Colonel Hense?”
I opened my good eye and trained it on him. He was serious though, and wasn’t even looking at me, his piano-player fingers waving gently like grass underwater. “No,” I said, closing my eye and sinking back down into the soft red ache that was my body. “Director Marin. We’re old friends.”
A noise from the cockpit made me open my eye again, and then Hense was in the cabin, a tiny black wind freezing over the world around us. She moved gracefully despite the vibration, and I admired her as she picked her way to the seat opposite mine, sinking into it and strapping herself in with one smooth movement. I kept my eye on her as she reached into her coat and pulled out her flask, liking her trim little figure and her soft, perfect skin. It didn’t look like anyone had landed a blow on her in years. Some of the System Pigs, they were almost supernatural when they got going.
She poured a blast into the collapsible cup and handed it across to me. “Mr. Marko?”
He nodded without looking up at her. “I’ve got the signal and I can track it to its source. It’s pinging the nanos in Mr. Cates about five times a second. I can’t yet see what information it’s getting back, but I can see Kieth’s name pretty clearly. I can get us to the source of that beacon signal.”
I stared down at the evil liquid in the little cup, thinking that some liquor would probably kill me in my present precarious state of health. And I wasn’t a young man anymore. I was pushing thirty-three. I was ancient.
“Mr. Cates,” Hense said, her voice as neutral and controlled as always. “This is fair warning: I’m considering asking Captain Happling to come in here and hog-tie you so we can carry you around like luggage. This will prevent you from acting against our wishes again, as you did back in the loading bay. It occurs to me that your little germs can keep us all healthy just as easily if you’re bound and gagged. In short, Mr. Cates, I think we need to renegotiate our arrangement.”
I was still eyeing the cup, my stomach already curling up into a frightened ball at the thought of drinking its contents, but I was onstage, in the unblinking spotlight of Colonel Hense’s regard, and I knew I had to start to dance. Stomach flipping, I raised the little cup to my lips and knocked the burning gin back, forcing my spasming throat to accept it. My whole body flared up into sensible protest, but I kept my eyes blank, my smile easy, and held out the little cup for a refill, like the cold-blooded bastard everyone thought I was. It was always better to be the most terrible person in the room. Always.
She studied me for a moment, and then leaned forward to pour.
“You don’t look dumb, Colonel, so I’m going to assume the good captain has been giving you some really bad advice,” I said, snatching the cup back as soon as she was done to conceal the way it shook in my hand. “Sure, you can find Kieth. But Kieth never masterminded this. Kieth is a hired hand. I needed you to get me to Paris, but once we touch down, Colonel, I don’t need you anymore. You, on the other hand, need me. You need me to get to the real architects of this clusterfuck, and you need me just to stay alive for the necessary extra few hours it’ll take to sort all this out.” I downed my second drink by sheer force of will, swallowed my own stomach as it tried to claw its way up my throat, and leaned forward. “I don’t need you. You can tie me up, sure, you can instruct that gorilla you’ve trained to bop me on the head whenever I get unruly, but in that scenario you’ve got me unhappy and determined to be rid of you the moment we hit Paris. Right?” I shook my head, hoping the cold sweat that had blossomed all over my body wasn’t totally obvious. “No, Colonel, we’re still partners.”
She didn’t blink or react in any overt way. I tried to remember if she’d ever blinked, and couldn’t.
“Hey, Colonel?” Marko said suddenly.
She held up one small hand between them, not taking her eyes off me. I dug the nails of my left hand, hidden from her, into my palm to try and scare up a new jolt over the smear of steady pain that had enveloped me, trying to keep my head clear. She stared at me. I was getting mighty sick of the staring, which was Hense’s prime tactic. I imagined a lot of people broke under that stare in Blank Rooms.
“Colonel,” Marko tried again, tentative but determined. She flashed that hand out again, and he shut his mouth with a click.
We were all silent for a moment, the hover humming beneath us, and I thought I could feel her considering her options as she looked me over. I had her over a barrel in a sense, and she knew it. Maybe Happling and his big shovels for hands could hang on to me, but maybe not. And maybe if we worked together I’d shave valuable days off her trip. An extra couple of days roaming around might mean coming back to an entire Ea
st Coast eaten by these things. A week might mean North America gone.
She cocked her head and regarded me. I held her gaze as sweat dripped into my eyes, digging my nails in as hard as I could while she just sat there, completely still. Then, without warning, she straightened up. “Your terms, then, for part-nership?”
I was ready. “Two things, Colonel, and that’s it. One, I am going to kill every last person involved with this. Someone put this fucking hex on me and I plan to make them eat it, okay? No one is going to try and stop me from making whoever it is eat a bullet. Okay?”
She kept up the stare for a moment and then nodded. “As long as it doesn’t interfere with cleaning up this mess, Mr. Cates. If I need someone alive in order to stop this from spreading further, your chances of killing them will be severely reduced.”
I considered this, my whole body starting to shiver, my muscles twitching in a complicated dance that rippled through me on an obscure schedule. Gripping the armrest with my free hand, I sat forward, stiffening my body and hunching over to hide the reaction. “I can live with that, as long as it’s understood that my revenge is deferred, not forbidden.”
She nodded. “All right. Two?”
I shrugged my eyebrows. “I walk away after it’s all said and done. We’re probably going to die, Colonel Hense, but if by some miracle we don’t end up watching each other be eaten alive from the inside out, I don’t want a goddamn bullet in the back.”
Her eyes shifted up over my shoulder and stayed there for an uncomfortable amount of time. Marko leaned forward urgently into the frame my working eye offered me.
“Colonel! There’s a signal-”
“All right, Mr. Cates,” Hense said, bringing her eyes back to my face and extending a hand. There was, to my surprise, a subtle smile in her eyes, and I had the bizarre feeling she liked me. “We have an understanding, and I give you my word that your wishes will be observed, assuming my stipulations. You help us track down whoever orchestrated this. You stick by us at all times to ensure our health and well-being. You get to kill whoever you deem responsible for this mess unless I ask you politely to wait, and you walk away if we happen to survive. Agreed?”
I took her hand, Marko panting in impatience behind us. Her skin was warm and dry, soft, the tendons beneath the skin taut and powerful. I liked touching her. You didn’t touch anyone in the System, not unless you were trying to choke the life out of them or something, or at least not unless you were going to try and choke the life out of them. I was reluctant to pull away but let her extract her hand without protest.
“Yes, Mr. Marko?” she said, still looking at me.
“A signal, Colonel,” he said, touching the brick. “It’s SSF, encrypted, and there’s a lot of traffic.”
She frowned. “And your analysis?”
“I think-”
The hover shuddered, seemed to jump under us as if hitting an invisible bump in the air, and then went dark and dead, all the vibration gone, the three of us plunged into opaque, total darkness for a second. For one heartbeat it was like floating in a void, and Marko’s voice drifted to me through the perfect silence, the perfect dark.
“-we’re fucked.”
XVIII
Day Seven: Littered The Space Around Us Like Sullen Monuments
You never get the easy way, I thought as the emergency lights flickered on, bathing us in a weak green glow. Everything tilted wildly. Hense, too small for the restraints, flew up and around and saved herself from smashing into the ceiling by grabbing my arm, her grip a painful vise on my wrist as her weight yanked me against the chair’s restraints, almost choking me. Marko grunted as he slapped against his own restraints, but his chain of black boxes flew up and dashed against the roof, making dull, heavy noises. From somewhere outside the cabin a tearing sound replaced the muffled humming that had embraced us. As Hense flapped above me like some sort of human kite, I could see flashes of her gold badge.
Happling’s voice, tinny and small, buzzed from somewhere above me.
“Boss? You all strapped in back there? I don’t know what the fuck is going on. The stick’s dead, I have no control. Repeat, no control.”
“You’re busted,” Marko gritted out through clenched teeth, his hands white-knuckled on the armrests. “They remote-disabled the brick. Standard operating procedure when an SSF vehicle is stolen.”
“Fucking hell,” Hense said with zero emotion, her voice strained, her eyes on mine. “You hear that, Happ?”
“Copy. Tell Mr. Fucking Wizard that would have been fucking useful fucking hours ago, then send the stupid little fuck up here to see what he can do.”
“Ever hot-wire a brick, Marko?” Hense said, her voice sounding calm and unconcerned, as if she experienced fucking free fall once a day to stay sharp.
The kid looked like he was smiling. “I can take this piece of shit apart and rebuild it,” he spat, one hand working at the chair restraints. “How much time do I have?”
“Happ?”
There was a delay, during which Marko freed himself and almost went shooting off to a broken neck before catching himself. He began doggedly climbing upward to the cockpit, hand over hand, using the seatbacks. Then Happling’s voice buzzed above me again. “Four minutes forty-six until we’ll be too low and too fast to recover.”
I heard Marko curse. “Tight ship you’re running here, Colonel,” I said.
“Shut the fuck up,” she said, her dead mass making me feel like my arm was being pulled from its socket. “Do you have anything useful to offer?”
“My job description with this endeavor doesn’t include flying the fucking hover, Colonel,” I said. “Got any emergency packs on this tub?”
Happling’s voice buzzed from her coat again. “We’re over the fucking Atlantic Ocean, jackass,” he hissed. “If you want to kill yourself and all of us with you, please find a quicker way.”
The tearing noise was getting louder, and the vibration made everything jump and sizzle in front of me. I looked up at Hense. I’d never met anyone in the System who was that calm when death was all around-except Monks. I was terrified, holding my shit together by some thin miracle, panic like a bubble inside me expanding and pushing against my control. But Hense, she just hung on to me and looked down at me, her face serene. Suddenly I wanted to be that sure of myself.
The lights flickered and went out. I thought, Fuck, not in the dark.
The lights came back on, and then Happling’s voice was barking again. “Hang on, Mr. Wizard here thinks he can get the displacers back online but I’ll have to dead-stick, so it’s going to be rough.”
“It’s going to be rough?” I muttered. I looked up at Hense. “You got a good grip?”
She didn’t answer immediately, as if seriously considering the question, and then nodded once.
The tearing sound now became a scream that hurt my ears, and the sensation of being sucked up out of my seat was replaced by one of being pushed down into it by a huge invisible hand. Hense came crashing down, half on top of me and half in the aisle, letting a soft grunt escape. As if by magic, the normal gravity of the hover was restored. I celebrated by leaning forward, putting my head down between my knees, and puking up a thin gruel of stringy phlegm.
The vibration snapped back twice as bad, jittering me up and down in my seat and shaking loose anything not welded in place. Marko’s bag of tricks started burping up its contents, which jumped around the cabin like living things. Hense pulled herself into her seat and strapped herself in again more tightly. Before I could say anything to her, the hover flipped over and I was being sucked out of my seat again, the straps cruelly digging into my shoulders, whatever rancid blood I had left inside me rushing to my head.
“Hang on!” Happling’s tiny voice shouted. “This ain’t gonna be pretty!”
Turning my head wasn’t easy; the invisible hand didn’t like it and pushed back, hard and smothering. Hense was being pulled out of the seat slowly but irresistibly, her body just too damn sm
all for the restraints to be of much assistance. Slowly, fighting for each inch, I got my arm extended toward her and took hold of her lapel, digging my bony fingers into the material and trying to exert some downward force on her.
The noise became a wall of sound, impossible to discern individual parts, like god tearing the universe apart. My stomach started doing flips and I realized we were in a spin, gravity jumping from top to bottom over and over again. Something heavy and solid thunked into my head and I barely noticed, the new pain swept away on the river of my other discomforts.
Then everything went quiet and still. The cabin stopped shivering and resolved into a solid room again, Hense and I dropped snugly back into the seats, and aside from a tinny screeching noise, it was peaceful. I blinked, staring at Hense, who stared back at me with something close to amazement on her face.
I realized the screeching noise was Happling screaming in the cockpit a second or two before we smacked down into the earth.
It was common knowledge that the SSF had only one factory still building hovers. It was automated and dated to sometime just after Unification, located somewhere in fucking Indiana or some shit like that, the middle of nowhere, not a city left for hundreds of miles in any direction. Droids churned out hovers from raw materials, and the hovers were perfect-not a single seam, not a single loose bolt, 100 percent operational upon delivery and built to fucking last. Which was good, because the SSF had been hot-fixing that single plant for twenty fucking years, making repairs as needed but unable, or for some reason unwilling, to build a new goddamn plant. You had to admit, Droids took away every damn job there was, but they built some high-quality hovers.
