The Terminal State

by Jeff Somers

The door to my left sighed open. The wind grabbed hold and snapped it wide in a blink, a howling world of dust tearing into the cabin and pushing me out. I stomped my sleeping legs on the hard, scrabbly soil and looked around; not too far off to the east were the jagged outlines of a large city. A half mile or so north of us was the remnant of an old road; I’d seen similar ones in Paris and elsewhere, old wide slabs of broken pavement and twisted metal, faded signs. This one had been pounded pretty hard in bombings, torn up into islands of serene whole road in an ocean of raw earth and twisted metal.

  “All right,” Mara said, pulling off the slim backpack she carried everywhere and placing it on the four-wheeler’s hood while the thick black exhaust swirled around us. “N-tabs, ID cards, and a quick primer. Either of you speak French? Dutch? ”

  The Poet and I exchanged a quick glance, and then we both shrugged simultaneously. “Nope,” I said. The fact that there was a language called Dutch was news to me.

  “Good. Don’t. Easiest way to get fucked with local bullshit in this burg is to be one or the other. This is still a big population center; the cops have had it in their tiny little fist all along, and held it against some serious work from the army, so there’s been some stability. Comm lines with Moscow are still open, too, so the Prince of Fucking Darkness Marin can still get his way here, anytime he wants. Keep it in mind: lots of people, lots of cops. You can pick ’em out easier, though, ’cause they’re all struttin’ around in fucking uniform.” She scowled. “Didn’t even know the fucking Pigs had dress uniforms, but there you go. Step light.”

  She handed us each a shiny new ID card, stamped with the familiar globe-and-stars of the System of Federated Nations. The hologram was a decent image of me, popping up when the card was held flat, my tiny face scowling at nothing in pale, transparent red. I squinted at the tiny name displayed beneath me.

  “Hugo?” I said, glancing at her as she counted out N-tabs for us. “Do I fucking look like a Hugo Gonzalez? ”

  “Matches the ID print on your augments,” she said immediately. “Just in case you get snagged by a deep scan.”

  “I am Tomas Pisk,” the Poet said thoughtfully. “I knew someone named Pisk, once. Of course, he’s dead now.”

  Mara tied off two small plastic baggies of N-tabs and tossed them to us, one after the other. I snatched mine out of the air with one hand without thinking and stuffed them into a pocket.

  “We’ll try to get some real food, of course,” she said briskly, pulling a nice-looking Roon auto from her bag and checking it over with a casual ease that indicated great familiarity with the weapon. “But if Brussels is like every other fucking city in the System these days, we’ll be lucky we brought our own N-tabs.”

  By the scorched-metal look of the grip, it was an old Roon—a 73 or 74. Both of those guns were outdated before she was born, so the way her hands moved over it and found the hidden safety without trouble was strange—but you could always come across old guns when you had to buy them on the black market. I remembered having a fucking revolver, once, afraid it would explode in my hands the moment I pulled the trigger. If I’d happened upon a Roon 73 for cheap from a clueless broker, I’d have bought it, too, and polished it like it was a diamond.

  My hands twitched. As it was, I would be happy to have any kind of gun. Even that heavy, pre-Uni revolver from London. I’d searched for Little Mother’s piece around the train, but had come up empty.

  “All right,” she said. “We walk. You boys won’t have any trouble humping it, I’m sure, with your special hump augments doing half the pull for you. Keep your eyes peeled. There’s no fucking law outside the city, and there are Press Gangs out here, too. We don’t want to have to fucking buy you out twice.”

  “How far? ” I asked, falling in step behind her, conscious of having no weapon. How in the fuck Michaleen expected me to fucking assassinate someone like Londholm with just my bare hands and whatever clever gadgets I could make from shoelaces and N-tabs was a mystery to me. It was strange to think that the world I’d once known, the fucked-up System with its fucked-up police, was civilization , something to be longed for.

  “Quarter mile,” she said, striding off. “Keep up. The anti-frag setting has an outer perimeter too, you know.”

  I looked at her ass for a second, and then shared another look with the Poet. After a second, we both set off after her.

  It didn’t take long; Mara had been right about the augments; I fell instantly into a steady, muscular pace that didn’t feel like work at all, a tiny bit of my HUD suddenly lighting up and reporting how far we’d walked and what my average speed was. My legs felt strong and I didn’t even start breathing any harder.

  The city crept up on us. We scaled a steep wall of grass and were in a neat pile of concrete rubble, a minefield of sharp edges and rusty points out in the middle of a wild field of long, swaying grass, enclosed by a sagging, rotten wood fence. Another five minutes of walking and the road on our right began to resemble a road instead of the surface of some distant moon, and Mara stepped over the rusted, paper-thin guardrail and led us onto the wide, six-lane road, choked with weeds and riddled with cracks, meandering through the thinning woods. After another few minutes, we were no longer the only people in creation; we caught up with a small band of tired-looking folks pushing small carts laden with what I assumed were their possessions, all of them wearing about seven layers of clothing, everything they owned.

  The crowd thickened as we approached the city proper, people of all shapes and looks just tramping along. By the time we came across a makeshift SSF checkpoint manned by one bored-looking officer and five grubby Stormers whose Obfuscation Kit was malfunctioning, leaving them wearing what amounted to stained and torn off-white scrubs, we were just three people in a large crowd. The Stormers looked about as terrifying as kittens in their sad uniforms, but everyone fell into line like sheep.

  Mara suddenly stopped. “Shit,” she said. “Mr. Cates, you’re popular—we should put out trading cards of ya. Looks like the cops have figured out you ain’t dead anymore.”

  I followed her gaze to the Vidscreen, which suddenly had my face on it. I didn’t understand the language it was pumping out, but I could read. Above the photo—an old one, enhanced to make the shadows on my face deeper and more ominous—were large, bold letters: REWARD LIST: INFORMATION LEADING TO THE CAPTURE OR ELIMINATION OF THE FOLLOWING CRIMINALS IS PAID FOR BY THE SYSTEM SECURITY FORCE!

  Below my photo, smaller but still clear as day:

  AVERY CATES. NO KNOWN ALIASES. LIST CLASS: AAA. DOA. MURDER, SEDITION, ASSAULT OF FEDERAL OFFICERS, CONSPIRACY, GRAND THEFT, KIDNAPPING, WEAPON POSSESSION, AND TRANSPORT. DO NOT APPROACH. REWARD PAID OUT DEAD OR ALIVE.

  “Congratulations,” the Poet said in a friendly tone, slapping my shoulder. “You are real fucking famous. Hope it don’t kill you.”

  XII

  DEATH AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

  The Poet handed me my glass and shifted his eyes pointedly over my shoulder. I nodded. “The creep with the blinkers? Yeah, I saw him.”

  The noise of the tavern closed over us again. I’d never been in a quiet bar, but this one was the noisiest damn place I’d ever been in. My HUD indicated that my auditory augments were turned all the way up into the red just to make sense of what the Poet, standing a foot away, was shouting at me. It was strange to think that tiny circuits were inside me, feeding off tinier batteries, molecule-thin wires spidered through my veins. I didn’t feel anything. I just felt better.

  Every now and then my auditory augments captured a single line of the roar and brought it to me in perfect, noise-removed clarity.

  “In een box enkel van Steeg Taitou, vraagt tweede van de linkerzijde, om Shen.”

  I held the glass up to my face. It was small, but thick and heavy, and filled with the cloudy, dark, sweet beer they were serving. It was flat and warm and was dispensed from a huge, leaking barrel behind the bar. Two large, pale guys with flabby, natural muscle stood blank-faced guard ove
r it. It was cloudy, but I’d already observed the locals letting their glasses settle for a few minutes before drinking.

  “Vijftig aan u, maar als wij don’t vertelt Gerry over het it’s zeventig aan u, volgt?”

  There were several large Vidscreens bolted to the walls, dark and useless. There was no power. The city’s grid was still up, but it was damaged and spotty, with constant blackouts rolling through the neighborhoods, and the System Pigs stole the power they needed without warning, just rerouting it on an as-needed basis. There was no heat, so we were all bundled up against the cold, crushed in together. While Mara had disappeared into the crowd to locate her contact, the Poet and I had gotten seats at the bar simply by asking for them; their prior occupants had taken one look at us and thought it best to occupy different space.

  It wasn’t a big place; one story, with a flat, leaking roof that was bare to the rafters, gaps in the ancient shingles wide enough to stick your fingers through if you got up that high. Like the whole fucking city, the place smelled like sour deodorant. You didn’t mind at first, maybe even thought it was pleasant, and five minutes in you wanted to cut off your own nose.

  “Seize à vingt-deux, treize à cinquante et un.”

  Brussels felt like a small city; every block was the same: narrow, winding cobblestone streets, tall, narrow buildings of old, bleached stone, skinny, ghost-pale citizens talking like they had rocks lodged deep in their throats. It felt damp all the time, as if the city were built on a swamp. And everything smelled like no one had taken a shower in a long time, and a thin, invisible sheet had been placed over the city to trap the odor. After getting past the bored and overwhelmed Pigs at the checkpoint simply by putting my head down and walking briskly—a tactic dumbasses throughout history had always disdained—I’d fallen in hate with Brussels immediately.

  The fucking sweet, flat, warm beer was just the icing on the hate cake.

  “So what do you think?” the Poet said, downing his cloudy beer in one heroic and probably ill-advised gulp. “About old Blue Eyes back there. A Spook? Augment? What? ”

  The Poet’s speech patterns were fucking hypnotic. Every time he spoke, I wanted to slap a beat on my thigh, tap my foot. I was starting to like the bizarre motherfucker. He was my only hope. I hated having Michaleen’s thumb on my head, hated having his proxy following me around, and hated the fact that even when she’d taken a powder I didn’t even think about making a break for it. The remote had a long range, and I didn’t want to collapse into red agony just as I was hitting the open country. I was resigned to being on the Rail for the universe. I wouldn’t be on Michaleen’s rail.

  I turned around in my seat to look right at Blue Eyes. He was a blob, a fat boulder of a man in a heavy-fabric coat that had seen much, much better days. It had so many food stains on the front it looked like you could boil it up into a nice soup, as long as you didn’t mind the fingernails and neck hairs that had probably gotten lost in it years ago. His eyes glowed a bright, neon blue, bright enough to light up a dark room, I thought, and they were fixed on me in an unblinking stare.

  “Augment,” I said. I knew the type. A Broker, selling information. Wired up to the nets—legal and otherwise—with an always-on connection, eyes sending images of everything he saw upstream and getting back data on the downstream, all stored on a data cube, kept in his pocket if he was cheap and embedded in his skull if he was rich. Did the same job Pickering used to do, except Old Pick hadn’t needed augments. Pick had just done research, and remembered.

  As he stared at me, my face was being processed by his offshore servers and a full report was coming back to him. The SSF was offering a reward for me, dead or alive, and this bastard was going to know it in a second or two.

  I looked at my glass of beer and considered: Did I feel lucky? My augments weren’t going to do much against invasive microorganisms. Hoping the alcohol would kill whatever lived in that barrel, I downed the whole thing in one swallow, warm and off-sweet. Wiping my mouth, I stood up. “Let’s say hello. See what kind of trouble we can get into before Mara gets back.”

  His hand appeared on my shoulder like a slab of cold fish, restraining me. For a second my HUD flashed red as I had the sudden, urgent desire to grab his wrist, twist hard, and spin him around. I swallowed bile and forced myself to stay calm.

  “Mara is absent,” he whispered to me, my augments catching each word with a sizzle of noise reduction. “Perhaps we take advantage, and absent ourselves.”

  I shook my head, settling my coat onto my shoulders. “How far do we get before she knocks us on our ass—what did you call it? The Middle Finger of God? No, we’re stuck with Mara for now.” I nudged my chin at Blue Eyes. “Him we can scrape off.”

  The Poet shrugged, removing his hand and falling in behind me. I had to push a few people aside to make my way to the Blob’s table, sharing a few stares until word got passed on and a narrow tunnel opened up for us. You didn’t have to speak the language. The same process happened in New York back in the old days: You shoved, you sized each other up, and someone grunted and stepped aside. Or shoved back. The results varied, but the opening steps were always the same.

  When we were looming over Blue Eyes’ table, he looked up at us serenely as a kid scrambled into position next to him, a short, runty kid who resembled a monkey in just about every aspect you could think of. I glanced at the kid as the Poet shoved a thin, white-haired old man from a chair and spun it around so he could sit with his arms crossed on the back, putting himself level with Blue Eyes, who didn’t even glance at him. After a moment, Blue Eyes said something I didn’t understand. Immediately, as he was still speaking, the monkey kid began screeching out an English translation.

  “You’re gonna have a harder time pushing me out of his chair,” the kid shouted. His teeth were tiny black pebbles. I didn’t like looking at him. “Mr. Cates out of New York, and Mr. Panić out of Belgrade.”

  The kid’s English was perfect, with an accent, but clear. Before I could say anything back, Blue Eyes was growling out syllables again, and the kid began overlapping him immediately.

  “It’s funny. The SSF database still lists you officially as dead, Mr. Cates, but there’s a reward on your head. I’d say that was strange, except these days death ain’t what it used to be.”

  I didn’t know whom to look at when I spoke—the kid or the Blob. “I know you can upload a report just by blinking your pretty eyes in code,” I said, looking at the Blob. “But I wonder how you imagine you’ll spend it after I inspect your cranial implants by hand.”

  The kid translated in the chunky language they shared, and the Blob smiled at me.

  “As I said, Mr. Cates: Death ain’t what it used to be.” The kid grinned at me. “And here is your associate.”

  I turned and was startled to find Mara at my side. A flat slab of self-contempt dropped into my stomach, letting her creep up on me like that, a fucking kid. A kid with skills, though, I had to admit—Mara knew how to handle herself. She wasn’t even paying me any attention as she smiled blandly at the Blob.

  “Hullo, Goren,” she said.

  “Ms. Mara,” the kid said, translating so fast I almost thought he was just making shit up as the Blob rumbled. “Regards to my dear friend Mr. Garda.”

  She nodded, once, regally. “We need weapons, intel, and sundries.”

  The Blob grinned. “Luckily, your credit with me is good.”

  Mara’s smile vaporized. “It better be, you fat fuck, or I might give Mr. Cates permission to inspect your augments, right?” She nodded once, smirking, as the Blob’s shining eyes flicked to me in a sudden change of mood. “Right. To business, then.”

  The word permission hung there in the air, and I clenched my teeth.

  Mara tossed a data cube onto the table. The Blob moved with surprising speed and snatched it up. “Londholm,” Mara said.

  The Blob nodded, talking. The kid chattered away like he had a cable up his ass feeding him his lines. “Of course. Still in Hong K
ong. Trapped. Hong Kong is going to declare independence from the System of Federated Nations any day now. Officially. The System Pigs”—here the kid paused to spit viciously onto the floor, immediately resuming his duties—“still claim the city, but word is a number of officers have gone over. Mutiny. The army sits outside like a spider, waiting to go in for the kill. Londholm normally would be long gone, but there’s no easy way in or out of Hong Kong these days.” The Blob inclined his head at us. “This is why Garda has resurrected Avery Cates, I assume, a man known for getting in places he is not supposed to.”

  Mara nodded. “We need everything you have on the city. Everything. Sewage plans, building plans, SSF assignments, water approaches, defenses, cultural synopses. Everything. Everything on Londholm, too, though I doubt you have anything we don’t.”

  The Blob raised an eyebrow, but said nothing to this.

  “We need better papers,” Mara continued. “Too many checkpoints out in the open these days.”

  The Blob pointed at me, rumbling, and the kid jabbed his sharp, bony chin at me. “He’s famous. Papers won’t help much if he gets OFR’d. I can recommend a good sawbones to give him a new nose or something.”

  I touched my nose before I realized it. “No fucking way,” I said. I’d had enough surgery to last a lifetime.

  Mara studied me for a moment, and then shrugged. “No go. Papers, then. Best you can do. We’ll hit a price when I see what you can come up with. We ain’t payin’ premium for simple forgers, follow? ”

  The Blob nodded, smiling. The kid said for him, “You know, you are officially dead, too.”

  There was a beat of bar noise, and then she leaned forward and simply slapped him across the face, a full-on, open-palm, roundhouse slap that jerked his head all the way around. She turned to glance at the kid, and then reared back and slapped him just as hard, sending the kid flying three or four feet in the air, crashing into a group of lanky men with unfortunate facial hair. When they turned to scowl in our direction, I stared back until they looked away and bent to help the kid to his feet. He pushed them away with a growl and scrambled back to the Blob’s side, just in time to translate the flood of consonants pouring from him.