by Jeff Somers
I decided to go old-school and just put my hands around his neck, pressing my thumbs into his windpipe, squeezing for all I was worth.
The near-silence buzzed in my ears. It was just our grunts and my whistling breathing, the scrape of our shoes on the floor, the click of his teeth as he grimaced and writhed. He pounded at me with his fists with decaying strength, and kicked savagely at my legs; then he suddenly remembered his sidearm and tried to scrabble for it, but he was getting dumb from lack of air and my arms were in his way.
His mouth hung open, making a dry sucking sound, and we stared at each other, his eyes bugged out and bloodshot, and suddenly he just let his hands fall onto my shoulders, his eyes going dim and desperate. I thought there was an element of shock in there, too, like Colonel Anners had never imagined this was the way he’d go. Not like this.
I let him slide to the floor slowly and released him, stepping back, my chest heaving and my arms shaking. I stumbled backward and sat down hard, panting, and just sat there staring at him. I felt fucking fantastic. All the rage was gone, replaced by a sense of having made things right. Fuck the cosmos, fuck the Rail it always tried to put me on. I made my own decisions. And Anners had it coming.
Still breathing hard, I stood up and stepped to where the blackjacks had fallen. Deliberately, I stomped my boots down onto them and put my weight into it, crushing them as thoroughly as I could. I didn’t want another asshole officer to pick them up and make some other poor shits who’d been pressed back in the war miserable. I made my way slowly to the front of the house, where Adora and Remy were still standing with three or four of Anners’s people. The guards weren’t paying us much mind; they were watching thehot, and ts, confirming my impression that they had more to worry about from the people they ruled than anything else—and they were soldiers and didn’t know you could kill a man without shooting him a million damn times. Adora stared intently at me, biting her lip, vibrating with a desire to speak. Remy, despite his darkest fear come to life in the form of Malkem Anners, was still studying the ground, silent, appearing unconcerned. Looking at him I had a sudden wave of nausea, like there was some sort of lens between us distorting the view, and then it passed.
Shit, I thought. This is a fucking bad time for my augments to grow a tumor. I put it on a list of things to worry about after I was dead.
“Come on,” I said, trying to sound unconcerned. “We got work.”
I started walking, and Adora and Remy fell in behind me. I was glad that Adora at least knew better than to assault me within hearing of Anners’s men. The guards let us go; Anners had told them to wait outside, and as far as they knew I’d taken my orders from the colonel and that was it. We had a couple of minutes. When we were a few dozen yards from the little house, I turned a corner into a narrow alley with cobblestone paving that had been torn up, piece by piece, by people looking for building materials.
“We’ve got about five minutes to disappear,” I said quietly, eyes searching the shadows and the people who hurried out of our way. “And then we’ve got to get the fuck out of Mexico City, fast.”
Adora swore in Spanish. “What is wrong with you?”
I liked that. I looked at her and liked her, and gave her a smile. She turned to look at me, defiant, and then frowned and suddenly looked away. The pit of nausea in my belly spread, and my head started to pound.
“You said something about transport?”
She didn’t turn around. “You said something about owing me ten thousand yen?”
PART II
VIII
MY NEW HOBBY: IGNORING THE SMELL
Hold him down. Avery, calm—I said down, you fucking desk jockeys!
My eyes snapped open, and as usual I was confused and panicked for a second, everything dark and cold and damp. My augments found some scraps of light leaking in from somewhere and firmed up some edges for me, the snaking lines of the pipes and the square, sharp corners of the humming black cubes. Something small and warm climbed up onto my leg and paused for a moment, as if sniffing the wind, and then moved on. I was getting used to the rats.
For a moment everything was unreal and insubstantial—the rough metal floor felt wrong, like it had gone soft overnight, rotting beneath me. The shadows seeor ong, too, moving—for a second one felt almost like a person leaning over me, arms extended, and then it was gone.
I shook my head. It ached, like always these days.
I sat up slowly, careful of the pipes overhead and the general lack of space. I patted myself for cigarettes and then caught myself—I hadn’t had a pack of cigarettes in years. The smell and heat crowded in on me—I’d been sweating continuously for days, boiling in my own clothes, and I imagined mold growing on my skin, fur trapping even more heat, more damp, tiny threadlike roots sucking the life out of me.
“Avery?”
Adora’s voice, somewhere in the murk. Slowly, my eyes were adjusting again, and things were taking on a ghostly gray coloring, just taped-off edges in the dark.
“Whatever we agreed to pay this bastard,” I said, my voice thick and phlegmy, “it’s too fucking much.”
She laughed. “We did not require too many details when making our deal, remember?”
I nodded to myself. We’d hitched a ride on a wagon being pulled by fucking donkeys out of Mexico City—we’d had plenty of cover; half the city was hitting its heels to get away from Anners’s troops, who were busy tearing the city down around them, free from his boot heel for maybe the first time in five years. Maybe I should have stayed and revealed myself, Avery Cates, the Gweat and Tewwible, their savior. Maybe they would have been glad to see me, the man who finally killed Colonel Malkem Anners.
Donkeys. I couldn’t get over it. I’d sat and stared at the gelatinous sway of their tails as they plodded along, heads down, happy to just keep pulling the fucking wagon forever. We’d have made better time except for Remy, who was suddenly allergic to walking and just complained about being tired all the time.
someone tie his fucking arms
I shook my head again. I was starting to get worried, really worried, about the headaches and the creeping hallucinations. My augments, I figured, finally corroding inside me. When I’d gone after Michaleen’s avatar in Hong Kong he’d pressed my button, tried to use the anti-frag settings wired into my implants to kill me, and I’d had the bright idea of sending my system into overdrive at the same moment, pushing my entire body way past its limits for the second time in a week. It had saved my life, somehow, but I didn’t talk for three months and only got the use of my hand back over time—my augments never worked right after that either, and I figured I’d fried a connection or five. That made my military implants just a little better than a tumor made of metal in my brain.
I got up onto my knees and stretched as best I could, then made sure my Roon was still tucked into my pants, dry and accessible. The constant vibration buzzed up through my knees and into my chest, making my teeth chatter.
“Did you sleep?”
I sat blinking in the darkness. “I’m not sure.” There had been voices and flashes—not voices like my resident ghosts, digitized brains I’d swallowed when they tried to brick me in Chengara. The voices were just in my head, silent except to me, and I’d gotten really good at blocking them out.
Because we let you, Dolores Salgado suddenly whispered at me. A wave of light-headedness swept through me, making me reach back and touch the wet, gritty metal of the floor to steady myself.
Those voices didn’t bother me—I was used to them.
“A little,” I finally said, reluctant to say anything else. I was an old man, but I was old because I’d learned my lessons well. One of those lessons I’d pushed into the soft spot in Remy’s brain a million times: Never reveal weakness. You hide your limps, you smile through searing pain, you never beg off, because when people smell fear they swarm you.
I squinted around the tiny space and tried my new hobby: ignoring the smell. I remembered standing on the rotting
docks in Veracruz and staring at the tanker. The hugest fucking thing I’d ever seen, a slab of metal floating on the water, big enough to carry thousands. No one had seen a hover in the air for months, so I could believe this was how they were getting shit across the oceans these days, but when Javier, the broker Adora made contact with, swept his arm out and announced we were going to be traveling on the biggest fucking boat I’d ever seen in my life, I looked him over, from his old boots with the soles held on by rubber bands and the sleeve of his yellowed shirt held on with a series of rusting pieces of wire, and pointed at him.
“You’re telling me you”—I shifted my finger to point at the tanker—“own that?”
Javier laughed. I could still hear him laughing. “No, Mr. Cates, I do not own the boat. But I know how to get you on the boat.” He smiled, miming us with his hands. “You walk on, you stay hidden, two weeks later, you are in Spain.”
Two weeks. I’d gone from New York in the midst of a riot to London in two fucking hours, once, in a hover.
It was funny, actually. We were in the biggest fucking thing in the known universe, but we were in the smallest possible fucking space in it, trying to be quiet like mice. Javier had come up with a bag of what appeared to be pre-swallowed N-tabs and a box of plastic bottles of water. I thought about asking him if the water would make me spend the two weeks shitting myself, but thought better of it.
“Anything happening?” I asked Adora. I couldn’t see Remy, but there was only one spot in the tiny room where he could be without physically touching me. The kid had been talking even less than usual, which made him mute.
“Nothing,” she sighed. “I heard the crew very close an hour or so ago, but Javier was right: They do not come in here.”
We lapsed into silence. My head was pounding, as usual, and my stomach growled almost painfully—I’d gotten used to actual food, and living on N-tabs was no fun.
“He is sleeping,” Adora suddenly said. “This is all he does, your friend.”
I shrugged even though she couldn’t see me well enough to appreciate it. “He’s been through a lot. He’s a project of mine.”
“A project? What are you trying to do?”
I shrugged again, feeling tight and hot. “Keep him alive.”
She paused. “That is not easy, in your line of work.”
I let that sit for a moment. Adora had told me she was coming along because, first off, I owed her a lot of money and, second, because the System still endured, sort of, in Europe. Headless without Director Marin—good old Dick; it cheered me to think of his buried servers melting under a mushroom cloud in Moscow—and populated mainly by avatar cops who’d had their brains downloaded into bricks, it was still civilization, kind of. A few years ago I would have thought she was crazy, but I understood. The old ways of doing things still counted over there, and Adora was sick of getting hijacked every five minutes and having no one to complain to about it.
“Well—”
I paused, shutting my mouth with a click as Adora sucked in breath. Outside the rusty hatch that sealed us into our hiding place voices boomed, echoing off the steel walls. I pulled the Roon and crouched in the darkness, forcing myself to breathe steadily. My HUD flickered into life for a moment, and then faded, and a spike of eye-melting pain flashed through my skull, making me wince.
his fucking arms get his fucking arms under control
The voices grew louder, approaching. I heard Remy stirring behind me, creeping up to kneel next to me, and I hoped he knew enough to stay quiet. We’d never seen the crew; Javier had led us to a rusted, painted-over hatch at the rear of the tanker, had pried it open with a crowbar, and quickly led us down a maze of shafts and ladders until he’d found this little room behind an unmarked hatch. He’d cheerfully admonished us to stay quiet and out of sight, had pointed out the latrine bucket and supplies he’d set up for us, and left us with basic instructions to wait until we heard the tugboat horns that would indicate we were being guided into Cadiz. I’d paid him every yen I had left, leaving me nothing to cover my debt to Adora, but that remained the problem of some future version of myself.
My head cleared, and I crept forward the four or five steps to the hatch, my own breath beating back at me as I crouched there inches from the corroded metal. I made out three, then four separate voices, trading off with one another, getting louder as they approached. The pain in my head, like a worm growing and squirming, gave a violent wrench and I shut my eyes, almost losing my balance as the nauseous agony swept through me, and the voices swirled and got confused.
here’s where I heard it
get the kid in
don’t listen to him, for fuck’s sake, he’s a
you sure? Seems quiet now
As the pain receded, gone as quickly as it had hit me, I heard the voices outside our little hiding place stop. For three heartbeats I waited, staring blindly ahead of me, finger along the side of the Roon.
“Stowaways!” a deep, wet voice shouted. It sounded like he was vomiting as he spoke, spitting up lungs and spleens and mucus as he went. The accent was harsh, German sounding. “My name is Captain Hermann Kaufman! You are not welcome on the Daniel Krokos! Step out, or we will come in! And if we come in, you will be dead! We have guns!”
I let the echo of his voice ping around the tiny space a bit, thinking. Somehow we’d given ourselves away. I considered our circumstances: The hatch was small, and if thrust open they’d be faced with pitch-black darkness. Only one normal-sized person could fit through the opening at a time. With a choke point like that, I could hold off an army with nothing more than a bag of stones and patience. They could trap us in, but there was no way for them to force us out.
I cleared my throat. “My name is Avery Cates,” I croaked out. “And I have a gun, too. And I’ll bet I’ve killed more people with mine than you have with yours.”
IX
THEY SAY SHE IS A FLOATING HELL
“You okay?”
Adora was only a faint outline in the gloom, a foot or two away. I squinted at her through the pounding in my head, in time with my heartbeat, which wasn’t pushing blood through me anymore, just poison. My HUD had started pulsing in time with it, too.
I scrubbed my face with my hands and tried to force myself to concentrate, to get clear. I’d tried summoning my imaginary glass shield that I used when my usual ghostly voices got too intrusive, but the throbbing pain defeated me. I didn’t have time to contemplate a grapefruit in my brain, a mass of black cells gathering around my implant like spiders spinning webs with themselves. We’d been in our little hidey-hole in the Daniel Krokos for sixteen days, according to Adora, whose estimate I was prepared to accept. Sixteen days of stewing in my own sweat, alternating between a gnawing hunger that no amount of N-tabs could cure and a sweaty nausea that veined its way through my body like a vine growing inside me.
The crew had kept up a steady guard outside the hatch, presumably armed, but they had, at least, taken me seriously and not tried to open the hatch and rush us. I cleared my throat and tried to take a deep breath, but the crew had done its best to make life hard on us; they’d filled all the ventilation shafts with debris and the air was stuffy and thick with our own exhalations.
“I’m okay,” I said, forcing some energy into my voice. “You?”
I made out Adora’s shrug. “We must escape.”
I remembered a single phrase from a song. I didn’t remember where I’d heard the song—my father, maybe, when I’d been a small kid, before he died and Unification and everything else. They say she is a floating hell. That’s all I could remember. They say she is a floating hell. It was one of those things I’d forgotten for so long, suddenly remembered; I might have just created it, invented it.
We’d heard the tugboat horns the day before, distant. I’d expected some action after that; we were in port, and the crew was unloading its cargo, whatever it was—no doubt they wanted us off the boat before making the return trip. When nothing had happened,
overnight or today, I’d begun to wonder if maybe they’d decided the easiest thing to do was just keep us buttoned up in our little room until we starved to death, skeletal corpses always being easier to debark than pissed-off, armed assholes.
“Shit,” I said. “Next time someone says, here, hide in this tanker for two fucking weeks, we fucking say no.”
can y’hear me, Avery? Avery, can you—it’s
I blinked the voice out of my head as she laughed a little, a forced noise that was more of a gurgle. She was right—we weren’t going to last much longer in this fucking disease incubator, our eyes turning white and our watery N-tab shit slowly filling up the place. I shook myself and forced a deep breath, then gave myself a thunderous slap on the face. Nothing hurt as much as my head, but it did snap me up a little, so I did it again, getting on my knees and pulling the Roon. I knew it by feel, and I began to check it over.
“We have some advantages,” I said in a hoarse whisper. I reached out and gave Remy an indiscriminate smack to wake the sleepy fuck up. All the kid did these days was sleep. Another epic wave of pain swept through me, burning off brain cells and nerve endings as it went, then passed.
“What the fuck?” Remy hissed, sitting up. “I said don’t fucking hit me.”
I paused and squinted through the darkness at him, then smiled and flashed out my hand, giving him a gentle smack on the face like a friendly reminder.
“Stop me, kid,” I said. “Until then, quit complaining about it.”
I braced myself for another convulsion of pain; they came regularly after I lost my temper. Nothing happened though. Remy sat there breathing hard for a moment, and then cleared his throat softly. “What is it?”
