by Jeff Somers
“Hello, Avery,” Grisha said as they caught up with me. He offered me a cigarette with a breathless smile. “That was an excellent presentation.”
“I’d hire you, dear,” Mehrak said with a grin, his eyes on Grisha’s offered smoke. “Shit, I miss cigs.”
I looked them over and slowly accepted the cigarette. “All right,” I said, turning to resume my walk to the beach. “Let’s hear the pitch.”
We walked in silence for a moment or two, and then Grisha cleared his throat. “Avery, you are… too fucking calm.”
I lit my cigarette and climbed a dune, the glittering black sand crumbling under me and making it a slow job. My damaged augments moderated my breathing and circulation, still doing that much for me. “Too calm?”
Grisha’s breathing was like a chainsaw, heavy and wet. His cigarette dangled from his lips as he talked. “Just days ago you were killing random strangers. Now you are humming happy songs and planning a side operation with gusto, like nothing happened these past few years.” He twitched his hands up. “It is disturbing, especially as we plan to accompany you.”
I stopped and spun. Marko was right behind me and squawked in surprise, stumbling back and then falling over, landing on his ass in the damp sand, arms splayed out behind him.
“Fuck, Avery!” he hissed under his breath.
“You’re not coming with me on Takahashi,” I said, looking at Grisha.
Grisha smiled, smoke rising slowly around his face, the damp twilight reflecting in his glasses. He’d never once seemed concerned I might hit him, in all the fractured time I’d known him. “Yes, we are, Avery. I do not mean to insult you, but you are a very important resource, Avery. We must take steps to ensure your safety.”
I took the cigarette from my lips and spat tobacco. My teeth ached. I had several molars missing, but I was used to that. Now my whole jaw ached with my pulse, like someone was going to punch me so hard in the future it reverberated backward in time. Grisha and I studied each other for a few seconds. He was on the balls of his feet—his arms were lazy and hung at his sides easily, and he was grinning at me, but I knew that if I dived forward and tried to get my hands on him he’d spin away and give me a good shot in the kidneys. If I pulled my gun he’d surge forward and clamp both hands on my wrist, forcing me to aim at my feet. Grisha was trying hard to look relaxed. When people worked at looking relaxed, my experience was they were ready to break your fucking neck.
“My safety, Grisha?="0ont>
He shrugged, giving me a crooked smile. “We have one shot at this, Avery. One shot at saving what is left, before we go gentle into that good night, yes?”
Mehrak turned toward the breaking waves and muttered, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” in a low, singsongy voice. “I miss getting shitfaced, too, if anyone’s wondering. End of the fucking world, and I get to face it sober. There’s justice.”
“As I said: Your calm is disturbing, Avery,” Grisha said, stepping forward a half step and putting a hand on my arm. I tensed, and then forced myself to relax. Grisha was not going to stab me in the belly with a shiv. If Grisha decided to kill me—and I could think of plenty of scenarios when that might come to pass—he would come at me from the front, with a word of warning. “Do you understand that you represent our last maneuver? You go up against Orel, your winning or losing determines whether the entire human race withers on the vine, fades from the universe. Yes? It is you.” He shrugged, releasing my arm. “I must be sure you make it to go after Orel. And I must be sure you understand that you must take him alive.”
His eyes were locked on mine. They were bloodshot and watery, dull brown, surrounded by an intricate spiderweb of deep smile lines. His glasses were just thin panes of glass in a wire frame; the frame was rusted and had stained his nose a dull red.
I kept my eyes on his. “I understand,” I said. I didn’t say anything else.
XXV
OOH, LOOK, AVERY’S TRYING TO THINK
“Mr. Marko,” I whispered as loudly as I dared.
Marko stopped and turned to look back at me. He’d toughened up a little, I could see, but he was still kind of tubby, and moved slow and loud. It was a wonder the Markos of the world had survived long enough to push their genes into the pool. He was letting his hair grow back, and it sat on his head like a frizzy cloud, a shadow of the proud sculpture that had once rested there, which wrapped down the sides of his head to combine seamlessly with his beard, which in turn grew down his neck like mold. He was fucking made of hair.
If Glee was still alive, if I hadn’t let her die, she would have said, Ooh, Avery is judgmental. Avery is blind to his own fucking horrifying appearance.
“Hang back. You’re tech support on this little mission, just in case Takahashi has a surprise in his rusty little pockets.”
Marko scowled in the bright moonlight but let the three of us move past him. We’d been dropped about ten minutes west of Takahashi’s main camp and had been hoofing it in costume, each of us wearing the grimy, mix-and-match military clothing I’d seen all of Takahashi’s people wearing when we’d met, each of us with a rifle slung over a shoulder. We’d emerge from the darkness and just blend in—even if he was blustering about his troop strength, Takahashi had too many people on this detail for a couple of new faces to be noticed. If challenged, whatever language was being spoken we didn’t understand, and Mehrak, Grisha, and Marko were my cover: The idea was to keep me moving, no matter what.
If Remy was still alive, he would have hissed into my ear: You’re breaking your own fucking rule, man. You haven’t done the recon. You don’t know shit about what you’re going to find here.
I didn’t need to. Takahashi had come out of the new army, and I knew how he’d set up his camp: He’d be in the middle. There’d be clear lanes of foot traffic toward it. If there was power to be had, his tent would have it and it would very likely be lit up like a fucking beacon in the night. Takahashi probably had a core of people who were trained and experienced and loyal, but he was infected with shitheads. That had been obvious from our meeting. Either they were conscripts plucked from the local shitholes or they’d been offered some hazy bounty in the future for a year of service or something like that—but they were either too low quality or too untrustworthy to get working guns. That meant that if alarms got tripped, our strategy would be to make noise. Stir shit up. When an armed camp didn’t have cohesion and discipline, it was pretty fucking easy to turn it into chaos, and chaos was my friend.
If Glee were still alive, she would have said, Oh, Avery’s all chaos theory and shit. Avery is fucking chaotic. And I suddenly thought of Adora, who would have smiled and asked me if I thought I was so much more disciplined.
The edge of Takahashi’s camp was a garbage dump, a few dozen square feet of cleared ground piled high with plastics, animal bones, and twisted, scorched chunks of metal. I stared at the bones and my stomach flipped, the rusty rounded ends, the bits of flesh still clinging to them here and there; it was fucking disgusting. It smelled pretty ripe—they were using the area as an open-air latrine, too, I guessed, my boots sinking into the mess two inches deep.
I could see tattered tents and the familiar blue tarp just a few dozen feet beyond. I turned and signaled to Grisha, Mehrak, and Marko, the three of them glowing blue in the moonlight and looking pretty much like a trio of worn-down mercenaries. With a nod from each, they drifted off to the left and right, putting some space between us.
From above, the camp was a fairly clean layout of concentric circles, travel lanes spiraling around. Takahashi had been here long enough for everything to take on a sheen of permanence: The lanes between the tents were packed down and lined with stones. The cook fires—fucking cook fires, like something out of an old Vid—had complex structures for hanging pots erected over them, and the mercenaries lounged outside their pathetic shelters with an easygoing familiarity. This was home.
As I walked between them, I could feel eyes on me. I kept mine straight ahe
ad. Marko, Mehrak, and Grisha were fanned out in the midst of the tents, matching my stride but weaving their way through the fields, hopefully unnoticed. If Remy had lived, I could have told him to not look at anyone, to just keep his head up. Looking at people you were trying to walk past was a sure way to get them to say something to you. The trick was to act natural, to keep up some business.
I turned my head slightly and spat onto the path.
My heart kept string in my chest, which was new. It would beat normally, then suddenly pause for a count of two, then slam back into a steady rhythm with a lurch. It wasn’t bothering me, physically, so I ignored it and blamed it on my rusting augments, which had never been meant for long-term deployment anyway, much less long-term deployment after blowing through the termination sequence unsuccessfully.
It was quiet. There was a murmur of conversation, and occasional shouts in the distance, but in general the camp felt calm and peaceful, a semipermanent city that had settled in. Considering the state of the rest of the world, I figured Takahashi hadn’t had to deal with too many armed groups at his level—if you had troops and guns and some sort of control over them, you did like Anners and created a little duchy for yourself, or you took a big-ticket job like Takahashi and spent your days guarding Canny Orel’s ass. You didn’t roam the wilderness wasting lives and ammo on pointless fights. Takahashi’s little private army felt flabby and sleepy to me as I walked—just a sense. I didn’t know anything. I had no raw data. Just my gut telling me the hunting was easy around here if you didn’t mind a little radiation in your meat, and these fucks had had nothing to do for years except occasionally intimidate a few civilians on a raid. They were soft.
If Remy had lived, he would tell me I was being an asshole, thinking I had some magic gut that told me shit without needing any actual facts.
I kept the image of the camp from above in my head as I walked, hearing my feet cracking twigs and pieces of glass embedded in the soft ground. The air smelled like fifteen kinds of smoke and fifty kinds of burning flesh, and my stomach rose up again. I loved N-tabs, and dreaded the day they would say, Sorry, Avery, you ate the last ones yesterday. It’s fucking charred animal meat for you from now on. I didn’t give a fuck about the animals. They tasted like death and I wanted to throw up every bit of them I ate, was all. With N-tabs you were always hungry, but I’d never thrown one up, not once.
I looked to my left and saw Marko and Mehrak threading their way around tents. I looked to my right and Grisha was close to the pathway, and he jerked his chin at me in greeting, a cigarette burning between his thin lips.
I looked straight ahead again. Having competent people felt good and was a nice change of pace. It was eerie, the soft voices all around, the smoke hanging in the air, the soft snaps and pops of my passing. I felt like a ghost.
As the pathway curved to my left, bringing me more or less in direct line with what I’d assumed was Takahashi’s tent—larger than the rest, in better shape, roughly in the center of the camp—I spotted a trio of women coming toward me. They were all short and tiny, but all three had leather ammo belts crisscrossed on their chests, sidearms on their hips, and rifles slung over their shoulders. Something about their gait and the fact that they were wearing precious ammunition told me they were probably old hands on Takahashi’s detail. I looked at them for a few seconds, obvious about it, and when they glanced at me, I nodded. If Remy were here, I would have told him that when someone was staring at you already, ducking your head and trying to be invisible was a sure way to be noticed in a bad way. So you get yourself noticed in a neutral way. These women ran into new shitheads they’d never seen before every day, and it was better to draw attention away from my three friends in the shadows.
As we drew close together, the one nearest me looked and chucked her chin at me. Her dirty-blond hair had been hacked short in a violent way, and her face was deeply lined and covered in dirt. The whites of her eyes seemed bright and pure, though. She came up to my shoulder.
“They heavy tonight, brother?”
A surge of adrenaline ran through me and I thought rapidly, imagining Glee taunting me: Ooh, look. Avery’s trying to think.
I took a chance—there were only three right answers, anyway; yes, no, and fuck if I know. If Remy had been standing next to me, scowling, hungover, and pissed off, I would have told him that getting paranoid was just stupid—there was no reason for them to suspect anything, so just bluster your way through.
“N’bad,” I muttered, grinning and trying to project “dumber than dirt.” Then I decided to get a little creative. “Got a smoke?”
She snorted as they passed me. “Fuck, grandpa, you find any smokes, you kick ’em up like everyone else, yeah?”
I snorted back and kept walking. My ragged heartbeat thudded in my ears as my adrenaline crashed, leaving me jerky and shivering. I looked up, and Takahashi’s tent was straight ahead. Four men stood outside the flaps, rifles in their hands, but they didn’t seem particularly alert or concerned. They chatted with each other, looking around and keeping their eyes open, but not exactly keeping fucking army discipline about it.
The tent itself was just a fucking tent, though it was made of good strong canvas and was pegged securely into the ground, with heavy-looking logs sunk into the soft earth on top of the pegs to stop anything or anyone from just pulling the tent up. There was a hard shell of some kind that the tent was erected over, too, which had shown up on the SSF’s scans as metallic alloy and most probably was a bullet-resistant shielding, so just spraying the tent with bullets wasn’t going to get me very far. I pictured Takahashi with his fucking handheld and figured that if they had any sort of network up over the camp, he would likely be able to summon assistance pretty fucking quick if I just ducked inside the tent and tried to shoot him in the face or some other equally complex bit of genius. When thinking this through after my meeting with the man, I’d known I needed to get him the fuck out of his tent, and I needed to convince him to not pull the alarm—or I needed everyone to pull the alarm.
When I was still a few dozen feet away, I angled to my right and, without the guards paying me any mind, I stepped off the path into the field of tents. I looked around and caught sight of Marko and Mehrak, and we raised a hand into the air in acknowledgment. Then I looked and found Grisha a few feet away, and we did the same. With a nod, I reached into my pocket and brought out the plastic bottle of accelerant, flicked the cap off with my thumb, and began spraying down the tents around me. It was almost silent, just a drizzle of liquid, and I moved fast from tent to tent while Grisha and Marko and Mehrak did the same, dancing and spinning in the darkness.
When I had about a quarter of the bottle left, I crept up on Takahashi’s tent from behind and doused it heavily, using every last drop. I brought out my lighter in one hand and my Roon i the other, clicked off the safety, and turned to find Grisha in the shadows. When we saw each other, I nodded. A second later, tents started lighting up, a sudden orange bloom of light everywhere all at once.
I counted to ten and then flicked the lighter into flame. When it was a healthy, steady yellow in my hand, I tossed it onto the tent, which immediately burst into a thick carpet of fire.
I didn’t pause to admire it. I put the Roon down by my hip and moved around the cone of fire I’d just created. The camp was erupting into chaos as people fled their burning tents and shouted in the night. If they were following the plan, Marko, Mehrak, and Grisha were angling around to cover me as I approached the front of the tent, where three of the guards had taken off to investigate the fires. I took a bead on the fourth, a tall black man who held his rifle with a modicum of experience, and whose scalp popped off his head in an almost comical way when I shot him. As he dropped I stepped quickly over to where he’d been standing and matched his position and posture, just staring out into the night.
Then, with shouts and gunfire suddenly filling the night, I waited.
It didn’t take too long. Even with his bulletproof shie
lding, he couldn’t stay in the tent; he’d be cooked. A minute or so after I’d killed his guard, the kid emerged calmly from his burning tent, a satchel under one arm, his handheld in another. He took two steps into the night and paused, standing right next to me as he scanned the camp, watching tent after tent burst into flame. For a second I just studied his profile, wallowing in the sense that I commanded the universe, that I could keep him standing there as long as I liked. Then, almost regretting the necessity of shattering the moment, I raised my Roon and shot him in the ear. He dropped to the soggy ground soundlessly, and I paused to put two more shells into him before stepping quickly back onto the main pathway and crossing to the other side.
Mehrak found me first. The fires had spread pretty well, with tents blooming up one after the other, and Takahashi’s men were already a fucking mess, shouting and running, no one in charge. As I converged on the avatar, we were both shoved and pushed by people running just to run.
“I lost your little friend,” Mehrak said in his clear, distinct accent.
I nodded and we started walking south, toward our predetermined rendezvous a mile out. “I told Grish to keep an eye on him. He’ll probably show up carrying Marko on his back.”
Mehrak nodded. “Nice work, this. Didn’t think a pro like Takahashi would go up this easy.”
I nodded. “He was ready for a war, for an army trying to dislodge him.” I holstered my gun, the heat of a hundred fires beating against me. “He wasn’t ready for dirty fucking pool. He wasn’t ready for me.”
XXVI
NOT AS MANY PROBLEMS AS BEING TURNED INSIDE OUT BY RADIATION
