by Jeff Somers
Hacked. Someone like Mardea, with her wired-up brain, had enough tech buried under her skin—fuck, so did I—to almost count as a Droid. We were all turning into cyborgs, and crazy Techies like SPS could dive in over the air and crack us open. I studied her calm, flat face.
“Yeah,” I asked unnecessarily, “but who is SPS? ”
Again, a heartbeat went by before she tilted her head slightly. “There are many. We are committed to salvaging what we can of knowledge and technology through the coming Dark Age. The whole System is falling apart. Warfare, revolution, coming on the end of decades of stagnation and rot—if something is not done, if steps are not taken, civilization will fade and regress. SPS intends to shelter technology and the knowledge necessary to create and use it until things stabilize.”
The delay was short but significant. Whoever had seized control of Mardea was over the air and had some lag on their connection—a second, two sometimes. Maybe enough to take advantage of, if I timed it right.
“But you don’t want this particular piece of tech protected, huh?” I asked, taking a step to the left, casually, slowly, just shifting my weight. The Poet came into my peripheral vision, and I felt his eyes on me. Good man, waiting for a signal. “You don’t want the God Augment preserved.”
I counted to two before Mardea shifted her focus to match me. “That augment will be the end of everything. That augment will be the end of the world. We protected Londholm at first, as one of us. We do not protect him any longer. You cannot be allowed to remove the augment from Hong Kong.”
I nodded. “We’re not here to remove it. We’re here to blow his brains out.”
After a moment she turned to look back at Mara. “Yes? Indeed? ”
This was our moment. Trusting that Adrian would follow my lead, I spun, pushing my hips out a little and letting the shredders swivel on their straps around my torso, sending one into my hands. Without waiting to see what anyone else was doing, I toggled off the safety and fired as I spun, cutting down one of the three behind me before the rifle barked out a flat empty-clip warning, going numb in my hands. Sliding my hands down to the stock, I pushed it out straight in front of me as a ram and launched myself forward at the next man in front of the stairwell, jamming the gun into his belly and knocking him over. As he dropped away in front of me, I couldn’t stop my forward momentum, and with shots blasting out behind me, the floor slid away and I went bouncing down the stairs on my ass, teeth clicking painfully with each impact.
I hit the tiled floor of the platform below with a grunt, a gun in my face; still sliding with forward momentum, I grabbed the thick black wrist and pushed, the gun redlining my audio status as it exploded right next to my ear. I went for his balls, a savage punch into his groin as I used his own arm as leverage to pull myself up on top of him, digging my fingers into the thin flesh of his wrist and twisting the delicate tendons within. He was big, but he panted with a cracked-rib wheeze and looked dopey, like the lag on his CO’s feed was confusing him. Some officers, I knew, kept their units on short, short leashes. Anners let his troops have a little illusion of free will. Looked like Mardea had kept this bunch locked down on her signal, and when she wasn’t issuing orders they got slow.
I punched the motherfucker again, and this time he howled and the gun dropped from his hand.
I scrambled up onto his chest, trying to pin his arms with my legs like I’d done to Remy just—fuck, just a few minutes ago. I threw myself down onto the mercenary and then had to hang on for dear life as the fucking giant surged beneath me, suddenly getting his shit together and putting his back into it. I was almost flipped right off of him but managed to hang on, clenching my thighs tight on his waist. With my free hand, I reached across myself and pulled my Roon, whipping it down to put two in his face, but as I brought it in line, he suddenly surged forward using nothing but his stomach muscles and smacked his own head into my hand, knocking the Roon off into the air.
“Mother—” I managed to hiss before he did it again, slamming his forehead into my already broken nose.
My HUD sizzled into static for a moment and I went rolling backward, my whole body going limp. I skidded along the dusty tile of the platform for a second or two, coming slowly to a stop, and then just lay there, suddenly peaceful. There was a dull ringing in my ears and my arms and legs felt incredibly heavy, so I opted to just lie there and rest for a moment. I lifted my head to look down the length of my body, curious, and saw the big motherfucker lumbering to his feet. He was slow. So fucking slow, my augments stretching things out for me. I watched him getting up and thought I could have fucking built Hong Kong by the time he managed to rise. He had a gash on his forehead that was pouring blood into his eyes, and he staggered a little when he was up.
I thought about him. He’d been pressed, maybe, or maybe he’d joined. Did people join the army? I didn’t fucking know. And then he’d gotten his ass sold to Takahashi and here he was. I had nothing against him.
As he spun, wobbling, peering through the gloom, I thought about maybe opening that conversation with him. Comparing augments. We were both owned by the augments in our heads, why not sit down and figure this shit out?
Then he turned and saw me, and our eyes met. He started for me, the ground shaking as this fucking leviathan leaped, and it seemed like I had all the time in the world as he hung there. I reached across my other side and pulled my second Roon, lifted it up, and shot the leviathan in the face just before he crashed into me, all dead weight and warm brains and blood. His hardware jammed into my abdomen as gravity grabbed him, sending a jolt of pain searing through me. I snapped back into clarity, head pounding, suffocating under him as his blood seeped between us, soaking me and filling my nostrils with copper and rot.
Every limb aching, I rolled from under him, picking up a fine coating of dust and grit. I pushed up onto my knees and leaned on my hands, my whole body shaking for a moment, the Roon still in hand. The air seemed thick and unbreathable, an oxygenated syrup, and above me, distant and vague, there was gunfire; I took a deep, painful breath and got on my feet and stumbled for the stairs. Halfway there, I realized I still had a shredder looped around me, and I pushed the Roon into my coat pocket, swinging the rifle around into my hands.
In the shadows, I ducked low and pushed myself up against the bottom step, peering up. I couldn’t see anything, but the noise suddenly swelled to deafening levels. I took another deep breath, feeling like fishhooks had been pushed into my lungs, and took the next few steps in a rush, staying low and moving diagonally across them to stay in the shadows as long as possible. As I rose, the silence firmed up around me, the peculiar vacuum that snapped into place after violence. Standing up with a wince at my stiffening back, I found the Poet on the other end of the lobby, strangling one of the beefy mercenaries with his bare hands, powerful arms vibrating with the effort. He glanced up at me as I emerged from the shadows.
“So many tendons,” he shouted breathlessly, grinning. “These bastards are dumb, but big.” He sat back on his haunches, breathing hard. The Gunner twitched and gurgled beneath him. “Have fun in the dark? ”
I glanced over at Mara, who had her skinny arm locked around Mardea’s neck, a small shiv pressed against the black woman’s throat hard enough to draw a steady stream of blood. Mara’s hands were still bound, and I elected to not puzzle out how she’d overpowered the woman. Mara grinned at me, too.
“We was just takin’ the vote whether t’kill this or not,” she said jovially. “We’re tied.”
I knew how Mara had voted—a more bloodthirsty bitch I’d never encountered. Fighting the urge to sit down and take a little nap, I scanned my own HUD—which was a grim snapshot of failing systems—and shrugged. “Just knock her out and leave her here. We can’t take her; she’s compromised. But there’s no need to kill her. Besides,” I said, gummily struggling for an argument that would resonate with Mara, “she’s here under a white flag. You can’t just kill her.”
Mara’s grin was
mischievous. “You’re a soft one, Mr. Cates. You had New York in your pocket? You killed System Pigs for a hobby? I don’t fucking believe it. You’re a weeper.”
Mara stared at me a moment more, and then dragged the knife across Mardea’s throat. The black woman’s eyes widened in shock for a second and then shut tightly as blood spurted from the wound. I stared back at Mara and we watched each other while Mardea died, and I felt nothing. No regret. No blame. I just shrugged and turned away, walking slowly toward the duffel bag, sitting exactly where I’d left it moments before.
“Let’s go, then,” I said. “You can fucking figure out how to get your cuffs off yourself.”
XXVIII
A REALLY POOR QUALITY OF HARDASS
“You are not happy,” the Poet said, falling in next to me. “You would have preferred she live? Last rung of ladder.”
I shifted the duffel bag’s weight on my shoulder. “Adrian, by most recent fucking calculation, the last time I was happy was several goddamn decades ago. It had something to do with a dead basehead in an alley and a plump credit dongle I found in his pockets. I just think that slitting throats for no good fucking reason is bad business.”
We were walking rapidly through the lobby toward the nearest plate glass. I reached into a pocket and pulled out a grenade to feed into the launcher. I wanted to look over my shoulder and keep Mara in sight, but didn’t want to look like I was worried about her. I was. I was suddenly concerned as fucking hell that she was not only behind me, but in fucking charge of me. I wanted her as nearby as possible so I could keep a boot on her neck and I wanted her as far away as I could; she made my skin crawl. Fucking avatars. White coolant and who knew what else pulsating under that synthetic skin, complete with a layer of skin and tiny blood vessels ready to seep blood on demand.
When we were fifteen feet away from the glass, I toggled the rifle and it disintegrated with a loud boom, sucking the stale air out of the building in a breeze that pushed past us roughly.
“She was compromised,” the Poet said. “Even restrained, dangerous. Killing her was best.”
At the edge of the lobby we both stopped and I knelt down in the spray of broken glass, and he did the same. I leaned out the hole carefully, ears wide open, and squinted around: We were at a high point, the old roads sliding down a gentle grade from here, the roads spinning off like thick threads into overpasses. Across the road was a grubby-looking retaining wall, dirt brown and much abused. Right next to it was a squat, ugly structure made up of shadowed open-air levels. I paused. Sitting like a hidden jewel on one of the floors of the building was, unmistakably, a hover. It looked new, too, though at distance I couldn’t tell what shape it was really in. I filed the image away and spat on the floor, flipping open my wireframe map, which bloomed like a bright flower in my hand, scoping out to small scale and slowly rotating. As Mara joined us, I gestured at the map and it zoomed out, giving us a bird’s-eye view.
“You ain’t fucking serious about these,” Mara said, thrusting her hands into my face, holding the loose metal straps in one. She dropped them at my feet. “I don’t care how fucking stupid you are, Cates—and I’m beginning to think maybe you’re brain damaged in some subtle way—but even you don’t wanta head out into those streets again with one gun down, huh? ”
I glanced at her wrists, then looked back at the map. “We’re headed here,” I said, gesturing and making the Shannara Hotel light up orange. I looked up through the gash we’d just blown in the building and pointed. “Right there.” It was a needle of a building rising up about half a mile away, silver and impossible looking. It looked like someone had spun an entire vein of metal into a thin, smooth thread and pushed it up into the air. It looked like it ought to be swaying back and forth, slowly falling to the ground.
“It’s a straight shot,” Mara said, gesturing at the map. The boulevard lit up, showing our position. On the map’s scale, it looked like we were about an inch away.
I nodded, snapping the map shut and taking my shredder in both hands. Dropping my ammo clip, I fished in my pocket for another. “The minute we step outside, it’s gonna be harsh,” I pointed out. “Whoever tried to perforate us back there is still on the high ground. So be ready to move once you hit the air. There won’t be much time for consultation.” I looked back out into the street, which once again appeared abandoned and peaceful. Squinting, I cocked my head for a better angle.
“The overpass,” I said, pointing at a spot where the road we’d been following suddenly lifted up for a few hundred feet to allow a smaller road to wriggle below. “Stop there. We take this in quick stages, dashing from spot to spot. You stay out in the open too long and they’ll nail you, no doubt. Make for the overpass and stop. We’ll regroup and plan the next dash from there.”
I looked at Adrian, who nodded, smiling. “It is like a game: Kill me if you can catch me. We must keep moving.”
“What about goin’ back underground? Now that your fanboy has been put down, that seemed fucking idyllic compared to this.”
I shook my head. “No tunnels that way. Wherever we come up, we’ll regret it.”
For a moment we all just peered out into the open air, the wide street, the canyon walls of buildings on either side, crawling with death.
“Well, what’s not to love about a plan cooked up in five minutes after you’ve been beaten half to death twice in an hour?” Mara suddenly said, grinning, guns magically in both hands. “I sure ain’t got anything better.”
I slapped the fresh clip into the shredder while the Poet produced his own autos. “Remember, you can’t hit anything up high, so don’t waste ammo.”
“Fuck you,” Mara said cheerfully. “I done this before, follow?”
I gave her a tired grin. “Fuck, I hope your head gets blown off out there.”
To my surprise, she grinned back. “Welcome to Hong Kong, Mr. Cates,” she said. “You’ll do well.”
A moment of quiet slipped past us, and then I pushed off. “Go!”
The second I hit the dim twilight, gunfire. The asphalt and concrete erupted around me, a sudden spontaneous fountain of material pinging my face and hands with shards and pebbles. The noise was deafening; I couldn’t hear my breath or the scraping of my boots as I sprinted with everything I had for the overpass—I could feel myself breathing, I could sense my feet hitting the pavement, but all I heard was the crunching roar of high-caliber bullets being spat at me, a half second behind my pace.
Whoever was manning the guns was absolute shit as far as gunning went, but I knew if I slowed down for a second, I’d be turned into a satisfying red mist.
The overpass tilted and swung in front of me as I ran; I couldn’t tell if Mara and Adrian were keeping up. I judged I was about halfway there, and without thinking any harder, I veered sharply to my left, toward the road, angling smoothly.
For a brief second the firing stopped, and there were three pounding steps where I could hear myself breathing. It wasn’t a pretty sound. I counted three in my head and veered back to my right, the ground behind me exploding in a spray of chewed-up pavement just as I changed direction. With the overpass jiggling up and down as I ran, a second gun suddenly bloomed into life from above and behind me. He was too eager and carved the ground up in front of me, allowing me to change directions again, zigging suddenly left and then immediately right. I summoned every bit of strength and pushed myself across the last ten feet as both guns blended together into a single chest-rattling rhythm. The duffel and shredder on my back seemed to get heavier as I ran, sweat pouring into my eyes, and the thick air smelled like burning metal and I hated sucking it into myself—it clawed at my throat and made me nauseous.
My HUD started blinking on and off. Head pounding, I felt my legs giving out and I leaped for it, slapping down onto the pavement and skidding into the shadows—followed immediately by the invisible scalpel of the guns—tearing up my stomach as I scraped up against the wall of the underpass.
Suddenly, the noise stop
ped.
Someone was laughing—the Poet, I realized—a deep, sawing laugh. In the sudden silence my ears rang, and his laughter seemed to come from far away, from inside something insulated and thick.
“That was less than fun,” he said, chuckling. “Now we have, what, five more runs? No, I surrender.”
As I flopped over onto my back, chest heaving, Mara came skidding in from the light, sliding in feet first, graceful and annoying. Only her last dozen feet or so had been tracked by the guns; she’d held back until their attention was focused on Adrian and me, and then scampered in our wake.
Smart. I wanted to fucking strangle her, but I was too busy drowning in my own phlegm.
The sudden quiet boomed in my ears. Distant, someone started to shout. It was a language I didn’t understand. We all sat listening for a moment.
“What he is saying,” the Poet suddenly said, “is, he doesn’t wish to kill, he just wants to talk.”
“He must get a really poor quality of hardass through this town,” I gasped, and then lifted my head and peered through my faded HUD at him. “You fucking speak... whatever the fuck that is? ”
The Poet grinned. “I’ve been here—” He stopped suddenly, as a small red disc sailed on a steep arc from the light, skidding along the gravel under the road to come to a rest in the midst of us. A small red light blinked rapidly on top of it.
The disc blinked twice more before we all moved. My heart thudded, stopped, and then burst into a staccato rhythm against my ribs as I rolled onto my feet, hands scrabbling against the gravel to get some forward momentum. The Poet shot forward, pebbles flying as he kicked them up, and he plucked the grenade from the ground without even a second of visible hesitation, flinging it sidearm back out into the open air. It detonated a second later, a burst of smoke and flame. The bounce from it knocked me back onto my ass.
With effort I forced myself back onto my feet. I was shaking, my heart rattling off-rhythm in my chest, skipping a few beats with a twitchy restlessness, then thudding back into time for a few seconds. I limped quickly to the blurry edge that divided our shadowed shelter from the killing field and knelt down, scanning the street again. I looked over a dirt-brown retaining wall snaking its way along the left-hand side of the road, about ten feet high. It looked older than everything else, older even than the unused roads that were already crumbling years before we had gotten here.
