The Terminal State

by Jeff Somers

  “No need for that, now. We’re all—”

  “Spare me the fuckin’ professionals speech,” Mara snapped. “You ain’t here to talk, boyo, follow? ”

  The Blob nodded, composing himself. “All right,” the kid said. He’d lost his snarl, though; a bright red imprint of Mara’s hand was on his face. She didn’t like him talking about her situation, and I decided to take some time later and wonder why.

  “Weapons,” she said, giving him back his space and brushing imagined dust off her shoulders. “I need army-issue, remote-safety equipment with burnable chips—”

  I moved my jaw until the joint cracked. “No.”

  Mara paused and looked at me. “No? ”

  I shook my head. “I’m not going into a job like this with a fucking gun that can be fucking remotely turned off.” I looked at my chest and shrugged. “You want to pop a vessel in my head, fucking fine. Do it. Do it now.” I looked back at her. “If not, step back and let me make my own fucking arrangements, because I am not going into this with a piece of shit, remote-controlled, blow-up-in-your-hand military piece, goddammit!”

  I hadn’t realized I was shouting until the silence around us washed in. It lasted only a second, and then the Poet whistled appreciatively behind me. The noise rushed back around us, and Mara smiled.

  Energy bubbled through me, fire in my arms, my heart steady but rapid. Every surface and opening had been calculated—I could leap up onto the table with just a thought, spin and bury a fist in the little kid’s hair, yank him down, smash an elbow into Mara’s face hard enough to dislodge some teeth, and roll off her holding onto her wrist, spin her off-center to the floor with a snap. The augments made it possible. The augments made it impossible with Mara’s finger on my button.

  “All right, Avery,” she said, sweeping her arm in front of her. “My brief is to let you run this job. If you’ve decided this is your moment, by all means, make your arrangements. Goren, attend to Avery now.”

  The Blob turned his shining eyes on me and licked his lips. I watched my HUD bars slowly shrink back into the green, and licked my lips.

  “What can I get you? ” the kid said. I kept my eyes on the Blob.

  “I’ve got a long list of heavy items,” I said. “But we can start with a Roon 87a, series three or earlier,” I said immediately. “Two.”

  The Blob blinked, and scowled, putting his hands up and rumbling away as the kid chattered. “87a no good, Mr. Cates,” he said. “Prone to jamming.”

  I shook my head. “Not if you shim the chamber.” I held up two fingers. “Two. Plus ammunition, of course—as much as you can get. Three shredders, standard SSF issue, and a series-16 fuel-injected SLR snipe.” I looked up at the Poet. “What do you want? ”

  “Hamada two nine,” he said immediately. “Cut barrel, with sanded stock.” He winked. “And a steel garrote.”

  I grinned. “Hamada. How old are you? I never met anyone under a hundred that still went for Hamadas.” The Hamada corporation had disappeared thirty years ago, sinking under the waves of Unification. “Besides, it’s a piece of shit gun.”

  He frowned, hesitating, but quickly recovered and looked almost happy. “Three series, yeah sure. Two series will punch through walls, never jammed for me.”

  “So you consider ‘exploding in your hand’ a feature, huh? ”

  Before he could formulate his response, there was a sudden wave of noise at the front of the tavern, following a ripple of commotion. My HUD flashed as all three of us spun around. Someone shouted from behind us.

  “Politie!”

  “Fucking cops,” I muttered, turning my head slightly as my eyes scanned the room. I looked at the Blob and smiled. “How fast can we get those guns? ”

  XIII

  A SURGE OF BLOODY JOY

  In an instant, the bar was turmoil. The Blob suddenly seemed to rise up into the air; I blinked and saw that the group of bearded men behind us had stepped forward, laced their arms together under his bulk, and lifted him up. I watched them carry him back through the crowd and he stared back at me, the glowing circles of his eyes fading.

  When I spun back around, the scene was so familiar I almost forgot I was in Brussels. People struggled back from the entrance, shitkickers in a panic and a few pros staying calm, standing their ground. The world around us melted into a blurry noise I knew well and felt at home in. The cops at the front looked like officers, but who the fuck knew these days: Everything was mixed up, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the quality of your average System Pig had dropped a little—although I reminded myself that being able to run fresh units with old brains out of a factory probably reduced brain drain. I pictured the interior of the tavern in my head as my eyes roamed the chaos. If this were a typical raid, the rear was already cut off and the roof was going to get popped in a few minutes—the cops at the front caused a rush, and all the fish swam right into their net in the back, and the smarter or slower ones would get plucked up into the air.

  My heart pounded; everything suddenly slowed down like it had back on the train.

  Suddenly at leisure, I looked over at the bar; the beefy guys were gone, and I hadn’t seen them vaulting over the bar or heading for either of the exits. If they knew their business, there was a way out right under them, a way to skip the crush of assholes and just slip under the radar. The cops would know about it, too—or would have, back a few years, when the System Pigs raiding the joint would have been locals who made it their business to know.

  My hands twitched, empty.

  While bodies surged around me like they were trapped in syrup, I smiled, feeling limber and energized, almost happy. I turned back to Mara and the Poet in time to see Mara break a big blond Viking’s nose, just slamming her flattened palm up into his face and sending him staggering back into the crowd, blood floating in the air in tiny droplets. It cleared a little space around us, but we were about to get swamped by the shitkickers and then we’d be sitting ducks when the cops eventually got the situation organized.

  The Poet suddenly leaned down and grabbed hold of the table the Blob had been sitting at. He flipped it over and with a savage kick freed one of the thick wooden legs from it, the broken, bent screws and the remnants of a cheap metal bracket like spikes at its far end. He tested the weight in one hand and looked at me, suddenly tossing the makeshift club my way. I snatched it from the air and it was a nightmare: top-heavy, too wide for an easy grip, splintery and brittle feeling. Mara leaped forward and they each kicked a leg free. For just a second, we eyed each other, twitchy little disbelieving grins on our faces—three professionals amazed that we were we really going to club our way past System Police with table legs—and then it was the crowd, everywhere, the only thing in the universe.

  The Poet hefted his stick, planted himself, and with a loud animal growl stretched out in my ears he spun around, sweeping his perimeter with it and planting the rusty end in the neck of a tall, bald man just trying to scamper toward the back. The Poet tore the club out immediately, sending a spray of blood everywhere, and immediately swung back the other way, grunting with the effort, ignoring the blood dripping down his face.

  “Head for the bar!” I shouted, just as the roof blew, a nicely synchronized series of charges that sent the whole thing crashing down on us, the rotten joists and slats vaporizing, turning magically into Stormers, Obfuscation Kit swirling as they slid down their drop wires, masks giving them one blind eye. I moved easily to avoid having any of them drop on me, my brain operating at clock speeds. The lights blinked off and we were in darkness, lit only by the cops’ swinging nova lamps, a confusion of spotlights. My vision immediately snapped into a sick, bad shade of green that outlined every edge in sharp detail, turning everyone and everything into nauseous shadows.

  A Stormer landed right in front of me, dropping into a combat-ready crouch, slow enough for me to choose which ear to smash my table leg into. I dropped with him, both of us hitting the floor in a frenzy of legs and boots, mud and sawdust
. I leaped onto the Stormer, pinning his arms and preparing to smash a fist down into his face mask, but the body beneath me was limp, and as I stared he seemed to fade subtly, appearing to go dark. I shifted my weight and clawed at the holster strapped to his hip, tearing the piece of shit auto from it and squinting down at it. After a second, I made out the telltale red dot on the grip—the gun was linked to the Stormer and wouldn’t fire for anyone else. This was a new policy for the SSF, since up until a few years ago the thought that some shithead would nick a piece from a System Pig was ridiculous. I tossed the gun aside and jumped back up to my feet, table leg poised.

  The Poet had jumped up onto one of the tables and was liberally swinging his club around, his big reflective glasses askew and his face split into a smile, almost beautiful, his arms rippling, his teeth perfect and white. I’d known people like him, psychos who enjoyed it, liked the taste of blood. They usually got sloppy because they tried to turn every situation into a brawl, chasing death until it finally turned around and caught them, but they were usually pretty fun to watch from afar. Mara was on the floor behind him, ducking down to stay below his swings, and together they owned a small spot of clear floor.

  “The bar!” I bellowed. “You can’t just stay there!”

  Mara nodded at me, her eyes on the crowd, and she shouted something over her shoulder at the Poet. It was strange, everything was slow, but I moved at will and didn’t feel slow. It was like I saw and heard everything a second before it actually happened, the future rear-projected for me.

  I took one step toward the debris-strewn shadow of the bar in front of me, and right on time the back exit of the place blew inward, a soft charge that knocked half a dozen assholes to the floor as more officers crammed into the place. The System Pigs had lost some of their style, but they still knew how to take down a dive when they wanted someone.

  A broad-shouldered ape of a cop swam up in front of me, a jolly sort with a big red face, his necktie too tight, his hair sweaty and chaotic on his balloon head. “Cop cheerful” was an expression—that crazy light in their eyes that told you they knew they could kick you in the balls and get away with it—and this guy had the classic version lighting up his face. The whole place smelled like beer, a sweet, rotting smell that made my stomach roll as I swung the table leg hard at his face; he ducked fast, but I had spidery wires laced through me these days and I caught him on the forehead, a solid impact vibrating up my arms.

  He popped up with balletic slowness immediately, but I expected it, had foreseen it. He had a very believable contusion on his temple, and he grinned at me. Avatar, I thought. A fucking android with a cop’s brain downloaded to it, fifty of the same cop scattered all over the place. I tried swinging my club back around, but my momentum was all wrong and the cop knocked it aside with one arm, shooting its other hand in and grabbing hold of my throat and squeezing, instantly choking me.

  “Avery Cates,” it said, grinning, cheerful eyes shining at me in the sudden night inside the bar, and then it convulsed, letting go of me and dropping to the floor. I spun away, finding the Poet at my side, crouched low, having just swept the cop’s legs out from under him with his own club. We locked eyes for a second, his ringed in blood splatter and crinkled at the corners from his wide, crazy-ass grin, and then we leaped onto the cop, smashing our clubs down on it three, four, five times, its arms and legs leaping into the air comically with each hit.

  The Poet stood up and shouted, “One goddamn cop down, five hundred thousand to go!” Another wink that almost made me flinch. “We make a good team!”

  Mara was somehow in front of us, making room as she went, heading toward the bar. We arrived almost simultaneously, dodging chaos and putting our backs to the old wood, a glorious stretch of bar I regretted having to use as a shield.

  I scanned the dim space; it was just bodies moving, lit up green by my sudden, involuntary night-vision. I was a goddamn freak too, just like these cops, just like every other little ant with god’s magnifying glass trained on them—I stared around at the slimy-looking green bodies and wanted to hit them all, wanted to hit everything and just keep hitting it. Some skinny mope with a long, curly beard crossed into my sight and I flicked the leg out at his face, knocking him backward with a spray of fluids, white in my night-vision. A surge of bloody joy swept through me, and I wanted to stand there all day cracking skulls, punishing the world for my situation.

  Mara leaped up onto the bar as I noticed a group of SSF officers closing in, tossing aside tables and shoving their own Stormers out of the way as they approached. I pushed myself up onto the bar and swung my legs around the back, running my augmented eyes along the floor behind it, spotting the faint outlines of the trapdoor almost immediately; as I looked, the outline of it seemed to glow suddenly, making it clear and easy to spot. The crooks in Brussels did it the same as we’d done in New York: The trap was there to give you a head start, not to confound the Pigs forever. I pointed my table leg at it.

  “There!” I shouted. “We can—”

  I glanced up, something catching hold of my augmented vision. Through the crowd and the dust and the gloom, a flash of white that froze me for a moment, everything getting impossibly slower. I stared at the spot while Mara shouted at me, while the population of the bar squirmed away from the tattered arm of the cops. After a few long, stretched-out seconds, I saw it again: a white, fake-looking face staring at me from across the bar. Staring at me, not just looking around. Staring at me and grinning.

  Without a word to Mara, I leaped back down to the floor and started carving my way toward the rear. Mara screeched behind me, ordering me to hold the fuck up. Everyone else was swimming down toward the rear as well so the going was easier at first, but everyone clogged up the doors and windows as the cops streamed in, so about five feet from the door, I had to start swinging my club freely at about neck height. I didn’t care about Mara; I didn’t care about the System Pigs. I wanted to know why a Monk, fully operational after all these years, happened to be in the same bar as me in fucking Brussels, staring at me like it could hear my thoughts.

  As I clubbed my way closer, sweating freely, arms burning, it was gone. I stared around wildly, trying to spot that white face again. I worked my arms, shoving the crowd away savagely, and then a hand slapped onto my shoulder, and Mara’s voice was hissing in my ear.

  “Boy, you don’t fucking—aw, now here’s some fine bullshit.”

  A clump of Stormers forced their way through the door, backing the crowd up with their shredders held out stiffly in front of them, the fucking macho assholes. In the middle of them, like a queen, was a short female officer, wearing a sumptuous-looking leather coat with four shiny pips gleaming on one lapel. She was tiny, but she moved like she was floating on air and stared at me with a bland, disinterested expression I suddenly remembered well.

  The officer held up her hands, palms outward, stepping forward through the Stormers, who spread out and formed a tight ring around us.

  “Everyone calm down,” Janet Hense said in that same flat voice. “I just want to talk.”

  XIV

  WITH A HEADSHOT, IF POSSIBLE

  As she walked, flunkies kept sprinting to catch up with her and hand over razor-thin digital pages that glowed text up at her; she carried on a profane one-way conversation with her earbud without missing a beat.

  Janet Hense had moved up in the world. Or at least this version of her had. She was still tiny, loomed over by her entire entourage, but I doubted any of them realized it, the way she flicked them away with little waves of her hands. She was the first avatar I’d ever met, as far as I knew, and I still remembered being left for dead in Bellevue Hospital, the touch of her dry palm on my cheek. I see no reason to kill you, Avery. She could have, of that I was certain.

  “How have you been, Janet?” I asked, forcing a smile and some volume into my voice. Every System Pig I’d ever known was sensitive about rank, so I used her name. It was petty, but you used what you could. And here I
was days in on this little adventure and I still didn’t have a fucking gun.

  She’d led us just a few blocks through the strangely deserted narrow streets of Brussels. Fires burned in barrels on every other corner, sending black smoke into the air, the flames not casting much light in the dark, dirty city. There was almost no noise at all once we turned a corner and left the bar behind, but here and there as we passed the massive, weather-stained stone buildings you caught a flicker of light behind a blacked-out window. Brussels was a secret city, underground and behind walls. The streets had been abandoned.

  “Pleasantries, Avery? ” she said over her shoulder, exchanging one digital reader for another from one of her aides, a sour, yellowed man in a dark suit, cigarette dangling from one corner of his thin mouth. “I thought you would be at my throat, vowing revenge.”

  “One asshole at a time, Janet,” I said.

  Hense was a major now, an SSF demigod, and her personal HQ was set up in an old hotel that sat like a rounded box on a corner. An old, tattered awning declared it to be HOTEL PLAZA. All the windows—dozens on each side—had been busted out, stationary shredders set on pivots, surrounded by sandbags. Getting in looked hard, with dozens of officers and Stormers at the entrance, which had been ripped out and replaced with a bulkhead of welded metal. Hense didn’t even bother waving an ID; she just charged past them all, daring someone to quote protocol, and I would swear they all took a half-inch step backward as she passed.

  “You’re a hot property, Cates,” Mara whispered without looking at me. “I’m walking into a Pig Nest without a struggle. Oy, the humiliation.”

  I glanced behind me at the Poet. He swaggered through like a star, glasses back on, his table leg still held in both hands across his belly like it was a magic charm that would get him out of stir if need be. He didn’t say anything, just kept that dim-witted grin on me, so I looked forward again. The lobby of the building had been huge, all high ceilings and arches and marble floors—completely empty, without a stick of furniture anywhere—but here on the third floor it was a maze of narrow hallways and closed doors. A thick, ruined carpet muffled all the noise, making it seem like we were gliding along an inch above the ground.