The Final Evolution

by Jeff Somers

  I gave her a wink. For a moment I thought she was going to dive across the table and try to twist my head off.

  Grisha smiled at her. “This is your opportunity to go your own way on this project, Director Hense.”

  I loved Grisha. This was why we had held back Orel’s location. If Hense already had that, she’d have cut us all loose without a moment’s hesitation and gone her own way. Now she’d burned off even more valuable days working with us, and was in even worse shape regarding her looming deadline. We had her under our thumb, and Grisha, as horrified as he’d been with me in private, was putting the screws to her like a pro, following the first rule of a criminal partnership: You never throw your partner overboard unless it was an absolute necessity.

  Hense looked down at the table and folded her hands in front of her. For a few seconds she just sat there; I guessed she was conferring with the rest of her, all the other avatars of her in the field, as well as her primary; within Berlin they still had power and signals in the air. When she looked up at us, she was suddenly all calm and happiness again. “Very well.” She swept a hand in my direction. “The floor is yours, Avery.”

  I looked at Grisha. He’d told me that Hense by virtue of her promotion was now bound by some of the same programming limitations as Marin had been, and thus was bound to honor deals made in her official capacity as director. We were about to find out if he was right. His glasses caught a glare from the lights and looked like two white circles on his face. He nodded once at me, and for a second I felt a sudden, powerful affection for Grisha, tinged with regret for putting him in a position where he had to defend my competence. Then I took a deep breath and pushed everything else aside. I was Avery Cates, and Avery Cates did not get all blubbery even when he’d fucked everything up, even when people died for his mistakes. And everyone in the room was watching me for signs of weakness, for any evidence that killing poor fucking Murray had been crazy instead of brutal, that I was unhinged instead of cold-hearted.

  I had to sell cold-hearted. Luckily, I had experience with that.

  I stood up and opened my hands; Grisha tossed the tiny remote at me and I snatched it from the air with augmented dexterity. I held it in my palm and gestured, and a holographic image, a flickering, faint blue, appeared in the air over the table. It was a ruin, a faint square outline with a few surviving structures. Newer buildings, some also ruined, had been built inside and outside the old walls.

  “Diocletian’s palace,” I said. “Split, Croatia. Yeah, I never heard of it either until a few weeks ago. Big old place, turning to dust, and the city around it was turned into a big cloud of radiation during the war—half an hour, tops, I’m told, without a level-four rad suit and you’re puking your kidneys up.”

  “Orel is protected in a standard Monk chassis,” Grisha said. “They were designed to withstand such conditions.” He smirked. “Dennis Squalor was a genius, yes, but a paranoid man as well.”

  I gestured and the hologram telescoped down, piercing the earth. “The basement is where he’ll be. The topside is ruins and cheap structures that don’t give much protection. Underground is thick stone, more or less preserved. Easy to defend entrances, hard to get anywhere bombing it—he’s pretty safe down there.” I shrugged, and gestured again, and the hologram zoomed wildly out again and swerved south and east, showing another set of ruins like a long, narrow bridge disappearing into the ground. “This was the water supply back in the land before fucking time. What it is right now is a small way into caverns that lead to the basement of the palace, big enough for a small party to worm its way in.”

  “He may have set up security perimeters out that far,” Grisha said. “We cannot know.”

  I shrugged. “He may have dragons and unicorns guarding the way, too. What the fuck difference does it make? This is where we go in. You land a shitload of System Pigs on the shore, rain ’em down from hovers since you got a fleet still operational, you make him feel your presence. I take a small party in and try to sneak up on the old fuck.”

  “And take him alive,” Grisha said immediately. “Yes?”

  I nodded, scanning the room, my plastic smile in place. “That’s the plan. You get creative and get the code from him, and then I get him back.”

  There was a second of silence. Hense had taken her seat and now sat like she was a real human being, hands steepled under her chin. Mehrak, who I realized I’d never heard speak a word, still sat with his hand on the butt of his gun, making no attempt to conceal the fact that he was ready to shoot me in the head at a moment’s notice. Marko was staring down at the tabletop, frowning, his hands limp in his lap, and Gall appeared to be asleep, mouth open, head back.

  “Cainnic Orel is guilty of treason,” Hense said slowly. “Whatever arrangement he had with Marin or—or the fucking Joint Council—is null now. We will arrest him, interrogate him, and he will be in our custody.”

  I shook my head. “Think of me as an execution, Janet,” I said. “You can write a memo and make it legal if you want, but part of the deal is, I get him back.”

  She smiled, leaning back. The smile was instant and so insincere it hurt to look at her. “There are more parts to this deal than I could have imagined, Avery.” She gestured at the hologram. “We know where he is. So why do I need you?”

  I looked at Grisha. He looked down at his hands as if vaguely embarrassed. “This is a calculated risk, Director,” he said quietly. Hense’s eyes shifted to him. “We suspect that, as a first-generation avatar, you are programmatically precluded from negotiating in bad faith.”

  I smiled again. “In other words, you’re fucking bluffing, and wasting my time. We have a deal.”

  Another long moment of stuffy silence. Hense dragged her eyes from Grisha to me, and then she sat forward. “You have requested Mr. E. Marko as part of your team. Mr. Marko, do you have any objections?”

  He didn’t look up, but his face took on a comical expression of exaggerated surprise. “Now she asks if I have fucking objections. No. I’m a volunteer.”

  Hense nodded, no hint that she’d just lost a ploy or was irritated in any way. The weird thing was, avatars were designed to be human, and several had fooled the hell out of me. This was who Janet Hense was, or had been—cold, controlled, and no fucking fun whatsoever.

  “Mehrak will continue to liaison on this, so he is also part of your team,” she said, standing up. “I assume you wish to keep the numbers small, but I insist one more representative of SSF interests be included.”

  I shrugged. I’d expected her to hand me a dozen System Pigs to deal with. Just one more felt like a gift.

  The door opened and a well-dressed, short, compact woman with long black hair pulled back into a severe bun entered. Her suit was a deep, velvety blue, and it looked like it would have been expensive back when you could still buy suits and didn’t have to make them yourself from old leaves and bits of wire.

  She was Hense’s exact double, and as I watched, they both cocked their head at me, in perfect sync.

  “You can’t be trusted, Avery,” they said together. “So I’ll be there to supervise you.”

  PART IV

  XXII

  HERE WE ARE, AND WE ARE SO SPECIAL

  I’d forgotten the nauseating whine hovers made when they were in the air, the feel of violent humming under your feet, the freezing cold inside one when you were high up and moving fast. For a second I could imagine the past few years hadn’t happened: I hadn’t assassinated Dennis Squalor, setting off the Monk Riots and indirectly causing the Plague; I hadn’t been arrested and put in the same yard as Cainnic Orel; there hadn’t been a civil war that destroyed everything. For a second I could imagine we were all back in the System. I’d been arrested again, and I was about to take a beating over something in a Blank Room in New York, and Kev Gatz would buy me a few glasses of gin at Pickering’s when I was tossed out again.

  It was oddly pleasant, imagining that fucking hellhole of a world again.

  I’d com
e up in the world. I was sitting next to a tiny window in a fairly luxurious hover—it had nice seats and some effort at climate control, although the seat fabric was torn and the stuffing was spilling out of them, the walls were scorched, and ugly metal plates had been bolted over damage in several areas. The windows were thick and cloudy, but afforded you a vertigo-inducing view of the world below, looking so peaceful for a fucked-over globe filled with people like me, roaming around free. My only friends in the world were three avatar System Pigs—one of whom was Director of Fucking Internal Affairs, the new Queen Worm, or at least a copy of her—the founder and leader of SPS, an ex-cop who’d once been the second-in-command of the entire SSF back before they decided to go forcibly digital, and a Techie who’d once been a midlevel success in the SSF. Aside from Grisha, it was all-cop, all the time.

  There wasn’t much conversation. We’d spent a few days more in Berlin’s wrd, ultraclean bubble, gathering whatever intelligence we could muster—which wasn’t much, and mostly supplied by Grisha and SPS, since the System Cops were pretty fucking useless, as a rule, outside their own narrow borders these days—and figuring out details. Rad suits for the extraction team, weapons and ammo for the assault, hovers to get everyone in position, electromagnetic pulse trips for me for use against… well, Orel officially, but Mr. Marko had been nice enough to amp them up beyond specs for me. If the cops I was suddenly surrounded by became troublesome, the EMPs would knock them out temporarily.

  I’d used the EMP trick once before on a Monk, back in Newark, prepping for the Squalor job. They had a wonky range and their effectiveness depended on a lot of factors. If it worked on Orel in his modified Monk body, I still wouldn’t be out of the woods; the EMP might take down his circuitry, but I didn’t know if that would knock his organic brain unconscious. Still, taking his guns away from him seemed like a good start.

  A voice, all treble and static, screeched into life around us.

  “We’re currently ten minutes out from designated landing zone. Please follow safety protocols.”

  No one paid any attention. No one buckled their seat belts or took hold of the safety netting. No one double-checked the door seals or made sure all the crap we were lugging with us was secured. There was no point.

  I looked out my tiny window and squinted down. After a moment my old augments kicked in and my vision zoomed down a little, bringing the strip of land we were approaching into sharper focus. After another second, though, my vision swam a little and my extra focus disappeared, leaving me just an old fuck squinting out a window. Croatia looked exactly like every other spot in the world. It had once been a country, I’d been told, before Unification. Maybe it was a country again, now. No one knew. I assumed the scab of red-roofed buildings on the coast was Split, and I tried to pick out the palace, but it had been subsumed into the city itself and I couldn’t spot it, even though I’d seen plenty of renderings over the last few days.

  It looked like a model of a city, mountains rising behind it, blue ocean stretching out in front of it. It was hard to believe it was deadly to step into, hard to believe Canny Orel had buried himself there, like a spider, waiting for everyone else to die so he could pick through the graveyard.

  Grisha, who’d been sitting next to Marko having what appeared to be a friendly conversation about molecular shred constants, whatever that was, stood up as if he’d never been in a damaged, crashing hover in his life and strolled over to sit with me. Hense glanced up from a huddled conversation with her bodyguard/attaché, who looked like a young-looking girl named Digby, all tight blond hair and rosy eyes—but since she was an avatar, who knew what she really was, inside. Maybe she’d been an old man before being tinned, or a black woman.

  “This is the last of it,” Grisha said. “Amazing, that we are here.”

  I frowned. “The last?”

  “The last of our combined strength. The last strength anywhere, I think. The last time we will see hovers in the air. The last time anything like authority,” he saidreached out his arm in front of us, making a claw with his hand, “stretches out its power to try and order up the world.”

  I stared at him. “Are you fucking drunk?”

  He smiled at me. “Avery, don’t you realize how many people in history have thought themselves so special that the universe had chosen them to witness the end? Of the world, of civilization—call it what you will. And they are all wrong. Yet here we are, and we are so special. The world ends; we are here to watch.”

  I smiled again. “You are drunk.”

  He laughed, an easygoing roll of laughter that was shockingly relaxed and normal. Grisha sounded like a man who’d spent the last few years growing vegetables in his garden. “Avery, based on my own intelligence sources, the SSF has committed all of their remaining strength to this operation. They very rightly believe the recovery of Marin’s override code—and thus recovery of their own autonomy—is worth applying every bit of their last strength. Every avatar unit, every hover, every bullet has been committed.” He shrugged. “If they fail here, if they are smashed against the rock that is Canny Orel, there will be nothing left in the world that resembles order.”

  I thought about Blank Rooms. I thought about Chengara, and Dick Marin’s flash grins when he was telling you that this particular unit didn’t have the authority to prevent your execution. I thought about snuff gangs and cops in beautiful silk suits kicking the shit out of you in the street.

  “That,” I finally said, “is a fucking shame, isn’t it?”

  Grisha laughed again. After a moment, I couldn’t stop myself from joining him. This was what it was like, I thought, to have narrowed everything down to the essentials: revenge, survival, whatever. No one in the hover with me had any ulterior motives. We were all fucking pure, for once.

  The tinny voice crackled through the crank air again. “Uh, Director Hense, to the cockpit.”

  Everyone glanced over at Hense, who looked up, hesitated a moment, and then stood, smoothing down the utilitarian black coat she wore over the SSF field uniform, which resembled the old Stormer kit except it was black, her five silver pips shining in the dull hover interior lights. Without a word she stepped through the hatch and disappeared up front.

  “Not good,” Grisha said in a tone so serious I immediately laughed. After a moment, Marko joined in, and the three of us hooted deliriously for a minute while Mehrak and Digby stared in robotic confusion.

  We were still catching our breath when Hense re-entered the cabin.

  “Emergency protocols,” she said tersely. “Pack everything up tight and check weapons. Prepare for evasive maneuvers. Digs, priority message the rest of the convoy.”

  Digby nodded, her pink-and-white skin too perfect to be believed, and then did absolutely nothing, sitting there staring while she worked her internal circuits.

  “Whatht="0em up, boss?” Gall said, suddenly shaking himself out of a doze. “We hit Croatia yet?”

  Hense nodded, consulting a tiny handheld that lit her face up in a purplish light. “We are. We’re being prevented from landing, though.”

  We all sat forward in a moment of comical synchronicity. “Prevented?” Gall asked, bunching up his puckered face into a frown. “What crazy shithead is left out there who thinks they can trade body blows with you?”

  Hense didn’t look up. “A crazy shithead named Dai Takahashi,” she said.

  XXIII

  EVERYONE WANTED TO HIRE ME ON

  “Get Berlin,” Hense snapped at Digby. “And find out why in fuck we didn’t know this asshole had set up camp here. Find out if he’s on Orel’s payroll. Find out anything. Then find out who gets their fucking server space wiped.”

  Through some magic, Digby suddenly looked five years old, as if her avatar shell had some advanced capillary response simulation.

  I looked out the tiny window again, but couldn’t see anything. “How in hell does he stop you from landing?”

  Hense didn’t look up at me. “By finding all the possible la
nding zones within a few miles of Split and mining them, parking burned-out tanks on them, mounting whatever big guns they still have, and offering antiaircraft screening. By generally being a pain in the ass when I don’t have the resources to spare to turn Dai Takahashi into an outline of ash burned into the rock.”

  Dai Takahashi. I’d never met the man, but I’d heard plenty about him, and I’d been within a mile of him in Hong Kong all those years ago, when Orel and Belling had been having fun making me look like an asshole. He was just one of a million ex-army officers who set up their own private little army during the civil war, renting out their troops and materiel to anyone who could pay. When everything just sort of fell apart, guys like him and Colonel Anners found themselves the only thing resembling authority within a hundred miles, and most set themselves up as tiny little kings. Five years ago the System Pigs would never have allowed that shit to stand, but the System Pigs weren’t what they used to be.

  I remembered hammering out a deal with his girl with the funky glowing eyes, and I looked over at Hense, who was talking in a low voice as she gestured violently at her handheld.

  “Director,” I said, giving it a little grin to remind her that I didn’t give a shit that she’d taken over for Dick Marin. She held one finger up and didn’t stop speaking or look at me. I pushed a smile onto my face. “Janet,” I said loudly.

  She considered just ignoring me again, but then obviously thought better of that strategy and looked up from her handheld to stare at me, still talking quietly to someone either in the cockpit or a million fucking miles away, probably shitting diodes out their aluminum ass at the tone she was us.

  “Tell Takahashi I want a meeting.”

  She kept talking for a second or two, and then without transition raised her voice. “What?”