by Jeff Somers
He shrugged. “No offense, Cates, but we all think we’ve got bigger problems than you sneaking in and cutting one asshole’s throat. You wanna make it more difficult, I’d be happy to blindfold you and spin you around a few times.” Taking the cigarette from his mouth, he pointed with it toward a wide boulevard stretching away from the plaza. “Take that about a mile and turn . . .” He flicked his hand at my map and it spun dizzying, finally settling back to a long shot of the city. With another curt gesture the boulevard lit up, an orange line stretching away from the knot of old twisted roads off the tunnel. “Here. You can see your way to to Londholm from there pretty clearly, and that approach takes you through the least populated territory. Just remember to duck when you get within sight of the building, because they will try to take your head off, trust me.”
I nodded, studying the map one more time before gesturing it to save the last settings and snapping my hand shut, making it disappear. “All right. I should thank you . . .” I looked at him and raised my eyebrows.
“Fuck it,” he said, white teeth flashing in his red face. “No need for names, and no need for thanks. We’re both likely dead in a day or two.” He held out his hand. “Pretty soon none of this shit matters anyway, what we were in the past, right? Everything’s fucking changing. We live, this time next week I might be king of fucking Hong Kong and you might be a tax-paying citizen, right? ”
I grinned a little, a wave of exhausted dizziness passing through me, and took his hand. His skin was scaly and rough, and I kept my grip gentle. “Taxes are for suckers.”
“Suckers, fuck,” he said, extracting his hand and turning away. “You stay around after I’m king, you won’t have no fucking choice.”
My grin stayed. Fucking cops. They never changed, no matter what you did to them.
I walked rapidly. My leg ached again, the old familiar pain shooting up my back, my augments maxed out and apparently unable to compensate for it anymore. I was strangely happy to have it back, settling into my familiar limp with a twitchy smile playing across my face.
The cops all stared at me as I passed them, tired-looking men and women far removed from the arrogant bruisers I’d known all my life. These were grubby, their clothing more utilitarian and worse for the wear, sweating and silent. I pulled my auto and made a show of reloading it as I walked, keeping my eyes off them all because they weren’t worrying me and I wasn’t imagining the shot to my head as I walked away.
When I reached the shadowed edge of the plaza, I tried to make my final drop from the overpass onto the street below smooth and calm instead of suddenly rushed, and I forced myself to walk steadily around the first corner that presented itself, pushing my back against the cracking concrete foundation of an old building. I listened for a moment, the uncanny silence of an empty city pushing down on me. After a few seconds I relaxed and stepped away from the wall.
I was on a wide street, lined on each side by gleaming buildings of glass and metal, each more or less the same height, with many of them achieving that size through several ugly additions bolted on top of them. All along their bases, more grubby wooden shacks had been built, swarming up in loose pyramids like insect nests, spilling crazily and narrowing the cracking pavement, crowding what should have been a dizzyingly wide space. Nothing moved, aside from a few listless pieces of trash being pushed around by a chill breeze finding a way between the towering buildings, the rows of massive skyscrapers and mushroomed shacks stretching east and west as far as I could see. I stood for a moment considering all the space here, all the rooms inside those aging metal boxes, all the air between them. I was the only person in sight, and it made me dizzy for a moment, all that fucking space.
“Cates.”
I blinked but didn’t turn around. “Hello, Mara.”
“About fuckin’ time. I thought you were going to trade promise rings with him.”
I turned. The Poet stood behind her, glasses on, looking calm. I opened my mouth to tell Mara to go fuck herself when the Poet cocked his head, something in the reflection of his glasses moving. I threw myself at the ground, knocking into Mara and the Poet in the process, and we tumbled into the gutter as the street exploded into gunfire.
XXIII
WE WERE ALL ROBOTS
The pavement at our feet became a fountain of asphalt shooting up into the air as we all pushed ourselves back against the warm wall. My HUD flickered in my vision, giving me a headache on top of the headache I already had and making me blink.
After a second, the droning noise of gas-powered ammunition cut off, leaving my ears throbbing.
I pushed myself up, using the wall for leverage. I kicked Mara savagely.
“Move!”
The Poet surged up to his knees and gave her body a heroic shove, launching himself over her as I turned to run. More gunfire exploded, and I felt a shimmer of concrete dust against my neck as I pounded toward the wooden shacks built up against the nearest skyscraper. With a shout I slammed my shoulder against the plywood door. The simple hinged latch of cheap metal snapped with an unsatisfying ringing surrender, sending me skidding to the floor under my own wasted momentum. My cheek scraped against decades of the world wearing down underfoot: tiny bits of glass, hardened dust, cracks and ridges in the old, melted and refrozen street. As the Poet sailed in, tripping over my legs and falling on top of me, a line of daylight was carved into the wall a foot or so above us, approximately where my chest had been a moment ago. The whole wooden frame shuddered with the dull impact.
“Fucking hell!” I shouted.
Mara followed, doing a nice roll and coming up behind us, flat to the ground. Another booming, loud rat tat tat of gunfire, and more fist-sized holes appeared at exactly the same height. The sound ate everything in the tiny stall, which had a hastily abandoned glassed-in counter running along its back.
The gunfire cut off. My ears rang.
“They can’t swivel any lower!” I shouted, gesturing at the line of splintered holes punched through the old wood. “We have to keep moving!”
The Poet was on his feet, moving quickly down the rear wall. “We cannot go out!” he shouted. “We’ll be sitting ducks out there.” He paused at one darkened, charred-looking panel of wood and put his shoulder against it, wrapping his arms around himself. “Let me try something.” With a sudden lunge, he took three steps backward and launched himself at the wall, which gave way like paper. In the sudden booming silence, I heard him cursing as he crashed into several breakable things.
I paused to take hold of the duffel bag he’d dropped on the floor and dashed through his ersatz door with it, Mara scrabbling at my heels. We all dropped onto the floor—rough concrete now, instead of asphalt. I looked around; it was a slightly larger plywood cube filled with soft, rotting cardboard boxes. One had split open, spilling dozens of small black discs into the space.
I rolled over onto the duffel and flipped the tiny map of Hong Kong open in one hand, quickly gesturing it down to our present location. My eyes roamed over it, then jumped to the flimsy wall across from me.
“Through it,” I said, snapping the map shut and pointing. “Make a hole.”
The Poet nodded and sprang to the rear wall, feeling his way from one end to the other.
“Are you fucked?” Mara snarled. “You intend to carve your way through every fucking wall in the city? ”
The Poet turned and shook his head; this wall was better built. I nodded, and he dropped down again and crossed back to my side of the tiny space.
“We can’t go outside,” I hissed, speed-crawling across the gritty stone and flopping up against the far wall. She was still snarling at me, so I gestured at the hole the Poet had made. “Well, you are free to go outside.” I snapped the map back into life in my palm. “This boulevard is lined with buildings, the old lobbies are behind these shacks, and every fucking one of them, I’ll bet your ass, are made of old plate glass.” I snapped the map shut again and gestured at the Poet’s hole. “Whoever’s trying to tur
n us into a fine mist is getting boots on the fucking ground right now, so shut the fuck up and let’s make a fucking hole.”
Outside, on cue, the thunderous pounding noise of the big gun erupted again, and the wooden walls of the shanty shook with each impact.
I took a deep breath. My HUD was yellow across the board, but looked pretty steady. Adrenaline had swept away my aches and exhaustion, leaving me jittery and unable to take a deep enough breath. I wondered what the average life expectancy of the common soldier in the SFNA was; my guess was, even assuming no fatal gunshot wounds, about two months, tops. Panting, I pushed up and unslung my shredder, thumbing it into life and checking the status screen. I fished a grenade from my pocket and loaded it into the hideous RPG mounted on top of the barrel, ruining the weight and balance and making the shredder a dancing pig when you squeezed the trigger.
“Brace yourselves,” I said, leveling the shredder at the wall.
“Grenades are bad news,” the Poet said behind me, sounding out of breath. “Grenades in enclosed spaces,” he paused, and I pictured him spreading his hands and waggling his eyebrows, “are even worse news.”
I pushed the rubber toggle.
The wall dissolved in front of me as I was peppered with splinters and I turned my face away at the last second, catching most of them—propelled fast enough to be projectile weapons—in my neck. Smoke filled the small space and blood poured warmly down my neck, but my HUD flashed into life in the darkness of my closed eyes and assured me nothing was fatal and clotting was proceeding normally. Turning back, I opened my eyes and fished in my pocket for another grenade to feed into the launcher.
“Go!” I yelled. Behind us, I heard shouting—lots of it. I knelt down stiffly and tore open the duffel, extracting a flat black piece of metal with an SFNA serial stamped on one side. The Poet drew two handguns and flicked off the safeties with his thumbs, and Mara slung her shredder around, thumbing it into life, the sour whine familiar and terrifying. I followed them briskly through the hole I’d blown in the makeshift wall, flames still licking the blackened edges, then I stopped and turned around to face the way we’d come, dropping the duffel and slapping the metal brick against the remaining wall.
“What’s that? ” Mara shouted behind me. Sweat streamed into my eyes, blood was soaking into my shirt.
“Trip mine, motion sensing,” I shouted without turning. A small red light blinked into life on the edge of the brick and I stood, stepping back carefully. Turning, I said, “No going back.”
We were in a large, dark space. The ceiling soared high above us, lost in shadows, and with my military hearing I could tell a large crowd of something—birds? bats?—was nesting up there, hidden. Which meant a way in, but I ignored that for the moment. The floor was expensive marble, covered in inches of pale dust. In the center of the space was a large, rotting cube of old wood, gaps like missing teeth here and there where banks of equipment had once sat. The walls were all glass, thick and greenish in the dim light, the outer walls looking out onto the cheap wooden walls of the stalls built up against the base of the building. Glass from my grenade blast crunched under my feet as we stood for a moment.
I flipped my little map open again, the wireframe blazing bright in the darkness. “We head west,” I said, gesturing to my left. “We keep heading west until we can’t anymore. I’m making a bet all these buildings have these plate-glass exteriors and we can just blast our way through.”
Wordlessly, the Poet strode off in the direction I’d indicated, Mara following. I picked up the duffel and started to follow, my Roon in one hand.
“Adrian!” I shouted.
He spun and walked backward a few steps.
“If we don’t own these buildings, shoot anything that moves.”
He nodded curtly, spun back, and stepped quickly toward the large glass wall. When he was about three feet away, he raised both guns and spat six shots in quick succession, shattering the glass in front of him and creating another sudden doorway. He stepped through, followed quickly by Mara, who held her heavy shredder like someone who’d spent time with one before.
No one had used these street-level lobbies in decades. Newer buildings didn’t even have street entrances at all; everything was through hover pad on the roof. Kept the riffraff out. Older buildings still had their vestigial lobbies and empty elevator banks, dusty and stale—the elevators usually were capable of hitting the lobby in emergencies, but not during normal operation. Back twenty years or so, a group of heroes in New York had taken over six or seven lobbies in secret, running a hover chop shop and all-purpose pawn business right in the middle of uptown Manhattan, a few blocks away from the Rock, cop central. They were running for weeks before the System Pigs even noticed.
As I stepped through the smashed pane and into the next building, there was an explosion behind me and several of the panes around me shattered as the old concrete floor beneath me shuddered. “Here they come!” I shouted, spinning around and steadying the shredder on my shoulder and walking backward. I found my augments easily kept me on a straight line as I walked, and I kept Mara and the Poet pictured relative to me by the sound of their fast, scraping footsteps. After three backward steps I heard the quick spit of the Poet’s guns again and more shattered glass.
Movement in the gloom behind us, and before I even thought of it consciously, my finger twitched, sending a contact grenade through our new doorway, filling the lobby with an instant of fire and noise. As I spun away to jog a little, I had a momentary sight of several figures on fire, dancing.
I caught up with Mara just as she stepped through the next hole created by the Poet. The third lobby along the block was in bad shape; some sort of disaster had happened in the building at one point that had burned it up pretty good, the ceiling tiles littering the floor, along with charred hunks of piping and wires. The whole place smelled like smoke and rot. Up above us, the ceiling had been repaired, sealing off the lobby from the rest of the building, but they hadn’t bothered cleaning up the ground floor. All the glass encasing it was cloudy and warped in its frame, frozen bubbles and waves that let in the light as a silvery cloud. My eyesight immediately sharpened, taking on a green tint that made me nauseous.
“Mara!”
She spun, shredder up. She wasn’t sweating. She looked ready to do some sit-ups and then call me names.
I motioned her over and then turned to face the entryway, bending stiffly and awkwardly onto one knee. I let my augments kick in and hold the gun steady. “Let’s make ’em think twice about following. I’d rather have them in front of us, if it comes to that.”
I was running on invisible fumes, but I felt steady. Not like I was eighteen again, like I had before, but pretty good.
“Sure, the two o’ us will just kill every fucking asshole in Hong Kong,” she muttered darkly, but put herself in position next to me, angled slightly to get a good crossfire going. I studied her again for a second, that strange, uncanny feeling hitting me. And then, suddenly, I felt like an idiot. Her calm, greaseless expression, her dry, easy energy—Mara was a fucking avatar, and I should have known it from the very first time the tiny little bastard had introduced us.
I was frozen for a moment. I am the stupidest bastard in the fucking world, I thought, wonderingly. I expected one of my ghosts to confirm this, but they were silent.
She turned her head and stared back at me. “You fallin’ in love, Mr. Cates?”
I blinked and forced a smile, shaking my head. We both strained to see some movement. So fucking what. Half the fucking people you met these days were made of silicone and circuits, their brains backed up via shortwave and defragged every week. So what if Mara had been sucked into a brick? I had my brain wired up. We were all robots, these days. Everything else was just semantics.
Movement in my peripheral vision made me jerk my head back. Mara sent a whining stream of metal into the next building, two seconds of noise and shattering glass. When she relaxed, I squeezed my trigger and followed
it immediately with another burst, moving the humming rifle in a tight sweep, clearing the air.
Silently, we both displaced, rolling in opposite directions and climbing to our feet to run at an angle toward the new hole the Poet had created.
“Now what’s t’stop ’em,” Mara shouted as we ran, my HUD levels bouncing up and down as if affected by my gait, “from creepin’ up ahead o’us or maybe even—”
There was a sudden explosion up ahead of us and way up above, followed by the tearing roar of bending metal. The whole empty lobby around us shivered.
“—from above,” she finished.
The Poet was suddenly running back toward us, guns holstered. I slung my shredder over my shoulder and popped the map up in my hand again, gesturing down until I had the building plans spreading out in the air around us.
“It’s no-go that way,” the Poet panted as he joined us, smoothly extracting his guns again and keeping his eyes moving. “Party crashers on the way. Want to be elsewhere.”
Mara checked her rifle over. “Well, perfesser, where do we go? ”
I kept my eyes on the tiny building in my palm, searching the plans, and then looked up, squinting into the bluish gloom. My augments adjusted and the ancient lobby slowly glowed into life, and I saw the old stairs sinking into the old transit system in the back, past the old, empty elevator shafts.
I sighed, snapping the map shut. “Down,” I said into the freshening darkness. “We go down.”
XXIV
YOU SURE DO MAKE FRIENDS EVERYWHERE YOU GO
“This,” Mara said beside me, her voice swallowed up and muted by the still, hot air, “is the cleanest fucking subway I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been in some fucking subways.”
I finished placing the last of three trip mines and slowly backed away from the dusty stairs leading down from the lobby. When I was five or six feet past their specced range, I spun and swung my shredder around into my hands.
