by Jeff Somers
Spooks could fuck with you at a distance, of course, but I’d learned to rely on their tendency toward speechifying.
If you could pin people to the wall with your thoughts, you’d get used to captive audiences too, Marin whispered at me. I could almost imagine that digital bastard grinning at me.
Shut the fuck up, I thought back, still feeling ridiculous thinking at the ghosts in my head, even after all these years. I can’t have someone I liked trapped up there? All my friends, dead, and you’re still gassing at me.
You never had any friends, Avery, he said crisply, and fell silent.
“Is this shit going to work?”
Grisha grunted. “Yes, Avery. In the middle of the desert using scavenged equipment and running power from degraded cells I can absolutely guarantee success. Also, we have tested this equipment on exactly three Psionics, including the subject you brought to us. Who we could have tested further if you had not killed him.”
I smiled and started to say something back, but noted that the group had drawn up more or less even with my marker. I mashed my foot down on the switch, putting all my weight on it to be safe.
Instantly, and with a jangling, screeching noise I quickly upgraded to my least favorite noise ever, a metal cage erupted from the loose, sandy ground around the newcomers, staggering upward about ten feet before it stopped, shivering and crackling. It had caught one of the Spooks on one edge as it rose and she hung there, squawking, for a moment before overbalancing and falling inside with the rest of them.
Grisha glanced down at his handheld. “We have about five minutes,” he said. “Then batteries are flat.”
“Shit,” I muttered. “Are we sure it worked?”
“We are not in the air,” he said, looking up at me. “I am not trying to strangle you.”
“All right then,” I said, stepping forward. “That’s a good day.”
I walked out toward the cage, which looked like a bunch of hastily welded metal, junk left in the desert to be eroded one atom at a time. The men and women inside its perimeters had been talking to each other in loud whispers, gesticulating, but as I drew close they stopped suddenly, as one, and stared at me with their spooky, big round eyes. I noticed that each of them had red, rubbery scars on their necks—exactly where Angel marks would have been if they had not been burned or cut out.
I stepped up just outside of arm’s reach, primed to be flung into the air. Then I unslung the shredder from my back, toggled it active, and as the soft whine of the rifle filled the thin, dry air, I looked them over. All kids, all with clear, round faces. They all seemed to be concentrating on me very hard, trying, I figured, to do what they usually did with threats, what they’d done with threats their whole lives: take charge of them, effortlessly, with just a thought.
“We’ve got about three minutes,” I said. “When my associate back there tells me to, I’m going to kill you all. So if you’ve got something to say, say it now.”
As one they looked at the rifle, and then back at me. One girl, softly pretty with round, red cheeks and a helmet of brown hair not even the winds out here seemed able to touch, stepped forward the inch or so allowed to her. “How have you done this?”
“Fuck if I know,” I said. “My associate says that Psionic Actives broadcast a specific brainwave pattern, identical in each of you. He says that by pushing an opposite pattern into you, the waves cancel out and you are effectively neutered.” I turned my head slightly. “That about right, Grish?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
I looked back at the girl. “Okay. So there you go.” I gestured at my throat. “You were Angels.”
She nodded, squinting at me. “We were. We are schismatics.”
I nodded, pursing my lips and estimating the time remaining in my head. “The Angels were pretty easy to understand: They wanted to kill me. I’d been judged.”
She nodded again. “You are judged. But we believe you can yet be forgiven.”
Schismatics, I thought. It was fucking amazing. Even as the world wound down, going still, all the assholes in the world were hard at work making everything more complicated, and more complicated, and then even fucking more complicated.
“So you’re not here to kill me, is what I’m hearing,” I said. “That about right?”
She nodded, once, grim and still.
I looked randomly to my left and squinted at the horizon. “Assuming I believe that shit,” I said, looking back at her and cocking my head. “Okay. You’re not here to kill me. So why are you here?”
She blinked, once, placidly. “To help you kill Orel.”
XXXV
THEY’LL HAVE HIM DANCING AND JUGGLING
I looked up as Grisha entered the room and I held up my hand, feeling tired. I’d expected him to come berate me, and I wanted to cut the conversation down to a minimum.
“I know what you’re here to say. I didn’t agree to their terms. But we could use a team of Spooks against Orel, couldn’t we?”
ht="0em" width="27">He nodded, throwing up his hands and beginning to pace around the ruined lab. The lower level of Chengara was only accessible via a service ladder in the old elevator shafts, a ladder that shimmied and vibrated under your weight, groaning with rusty horror as you descended. The lab was nothing like I remembered it, although when I’d come to I’d been filled with voices and hungover from having drugs and needles and who knew what else shoved into me. The walls were scorched, and the equipment and furniture were shattered and bent. Flaking brown stains mottled the walls and floors, old blood the only sign that anyone had ever been here. I wondered about the lack of remains—no bones, no old clothes. Just the occasional bloodstain. I wondered if the System Pigs or the new army or someone had a team that came around these old battlefields and took away the bodies, the wreckage of destroyed avatar units. After everything I’d seen, it wouldn’t surprise me.
“They are here to destroy him,” he said, pacing. “They are here to prevent us from gaining the access codes. Not to aid us. Not to aid us.”
I nodded, keeping my mind blank. “We use them. We point them at the things we wish to control, and when we have him down, we step in between Orel and them.”
He looked at me, his tight, careful face judging. “You think we can control them? Psionics?”
I shrugged. “You think we can deal with Orel without them?”
He nodded, once, firmly. “Yes. We have a plan.”
“Sure, but they give us a much better chance of success, Grish.” I blinked. “Wait: You left Marko up there alone with them?” I laughed. “Shit, they’ll have him dancing and juggling.”
He shook his head and looked down so I wouldn’t catch the slight smile that played across his face. I felt like I was walking a tightrope, trying to keep Grisha hanging on. It was exhausting. I kicked at a spent shredder clip, empty and crushed by some long-gone boot. It skittered across the metallic floor and hit the far wall, making a tinny noise. It was difficult to believe I’d been in here years before, getting my brains scooped out.
I stood up and stretched. “C’mon. Let’s walk the line and make sure we’re ready.”
“You are so sure he will come,” Grisha said, falling in behind me as I squeezed through the broken doorway and out into the hall.
“And soon,” I agreed. “I’ve been in the same room as Orel only a few dozen times, and half the time I was with him I thought he was someone fucking else. But I know him. He’s a fucking spider, and knowing I have a version of him, can poke in there and find out anything I want—it’ll eat at him. He can’t have that. He doesn’t want me finding out what he’s afraid of, what he did when he was a kid, who he fell in love with, the last time he cried like a fucking asshole, whatever state secrets he might have neglected to erase.” I shook my head. “He can’t have it, Grish. Trust me.”
Grisha fell into silence behind me as we moved through the dark, moldy hallway and toward the elevator shaft. A huge number four still caught the dim light, painte
d onthe wall in the tiny elevator lobby, the opened doors revealing a yawning black rectangle where an elevator had once ferried the SSF staff in and out of their little sausage grinder in the belly of the desert. I was calm. I’d expected to be angry, to get worked up from being back in Chengara, but I didn’t feel much at all. Everything had narrowed down to a point: getting Orel within arm’s length, on my terms for a change. Not me chasing after him, not me being lured along by phantoms and avatars, but him, coming to me, where I could watch him approach and pick my moment. Everything else had fallen away.
We rose slowly up the shaft, one hand over the other, Grisha panting behind me loud and damp. He was more bent over than he had been before, more hunched, his face crisscrossed with new wrinkles. I figured he could feel the end of the line coming, too. The world was petering out, and we were dancing on the final stop.
I gave him a hand up out of the shaft, back into the shallow, sand-filled basement level that had been blown open during the army’s raid on the prison all those years ago. The cold wind hit us immediately, cutting through everything I had on and making me shiver.
“This is our retreat,” I said, loudly, competing with the wind. “If we get into trouble, we head down into the cave. Single point of entry, no way for him to see us or reach for us with his mind unless he comes down. We take potshots at anything that tries coming down.” I pulled out one of the tiny disc grenades Grish had been able to provide; we each had a dozen or so stuffed into our pockets. “Hell, we can toss your grenades into the shaft if he gets that far.”
“If we get into trouble?” Grisha said, shaking his head with a smile.
The sand had banked against the western wall of the old guards’ quarters under the main complex, and we were able to scramble up back onto the flat ground on the surface. The moon was huge and white, making everything look colorless and frozen. Half the old cinder-block wall of the dormitory was still standing, sand halfway up one side as it traced a straight line for a few hundred feet and then veered at a right angle to the east, going another fifty feet or so before ending in a jagged jumble of blocks and shiny shrapnel. We stepped around to the sheltered side of the old dorm, littered with the twisted wreckage of the old bunks and other junk that had blown there, spent clips and random equipment the cops and troops had dropped.
“This,” I said breathlessly, my HUD flickering my vision, the status bars pulsing with my heartbeat, “we can use to break line of sight. That motherfucker might be a demigod, but he’s got to see us. He can’t toss us into the air or latch onto our minds if he can’t see us.” In the corners were neat piles of ammunition for the shredders as well as our autos, which we’d swapped out so we were all carrying the same caliber. “We reload here, too. We keep moving, no matter what. You blow your clip, you keep moving, you duck in here, you reload.”
“Our new friends,” Grisha said, out of breath but managing to sound sour anyway. “Where are they?”
I was already walking, angling my way back to the open air of what used to be the yard, still marked off by the ruins of the old wall. One of the corner towers still stood, creaking and shuddering in the wind. I jabbed a finger at it as Grisha struggled to keep up. “Three Tele-Ks and four Pushers,” I said. “None of them Travel—fucking never heard of such a thing. Two of the Tele-Ks in the tower. They’re up there now, half a canteen of water and ten N-tabs between them. They’re the strongest but they’re not certain of the range they can do anything effective at. The rest are on their own. They’re mobile. The Pushers will try to break the three of us out if he gives us a nudge, and the last Tele-K is just basically going to put him in the air as much as possible.” I smiled. “Where are your people?”
Grisha grunted and gestured vaguely. “Sniping. They are out in the sand, in shallow digouts with scoped weapons.” He coughed wetly. “If they receive a signal from me they are also to try and swarm him.”
I nodded. I finally spotted the old ammo locker, now a dull and drab gray. The rattling cage Grisha had brought in pieces from Spain and assembled had been retracted back into the soft ground, hidden from sight and ready to leap up again, fresh batteries attached to the apparatus, the best batteries we had left, which Grisha thought might give us seven or eight minutes of juice with the cage pulling from them.
“We herd him here,” I said, standing in the spot where the cage would be when triggered and throwing out my arms. “They throw his own shit back at him—throw rocks at him, put him in the air, Push him, if they can. Your people shoot at him. We keep him dancing. Marko’s gonna be in the old basement with one of the old rifles. He’s a shit shot, but I just told him to stay low and out of sight and harass the motherfucker, put shots at him as much as he can. You and I, we’re mobile. Take cover, displace often. Throw shots at him as much as you can. Don’t take chances—he’s a Psionic. He sees you, you’re in for suffering.”
Grisha nodded, hands on his hips, studying the ground at my feet. “We herd him.”
“Marko’s got the switch plate. The second Orel’s standing here, he mashes it, and we’re done.”
“He will have one shot,” Grisha said slowly. “If he mistimes it, if Orel manages to skip free before he is trapped, that is it. We will be done.” He nodded to himself. “This worries me.”
I nodded. “Sure. You think you should be in the hole, taking potshots and pressing the button?”
He nodded. “I do. But you are right: I am better with a gun than Marko, and I am better in the field. It is the stronger disposition of resources to have me out here.” He sighed, starting to cough. “We will just rely on Marko’s judgment.”
For a second we both stood there, silent, pondering the horror of that statement.
“I told them all to wait,” I said. “To let him get close. Don’t waste bullets on a distance shot, and don’t try anything fancy when he’s too far to do anything.”
“The Tele-Ks should take a chance if they see one,” he said, spinning around to look at the crumbling old guard tower. “They might pluck him up and land him on this spot before he can do anything.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. He’s a smart old bastard, though. He’s gonna be expecting tricks from us.”
“Yes,” Grisha said flatly. “He is a god now, yes? Does smart old bastard cover it?”
I tapped my head. “He’s still got the same old brain.”
Grisha opened his mouth, then paused. Clipped to his belt, the small handheld connected to our motion detectors was buzzing and flashing an angry red that was bright enough to light up his face from below, making him demonic. He glanced down at it, then back up at me.
“It’s a feint, you know,” I said, turning to scan the dark horizon.
“Yes,” Grisha said, and I heard the snap of his auto being racked. “But he is here.”
XXXVI
YOUR PROBLEM IS YOU THINK YOU’RE SPECIAL
We had no lights. Suddenly, after weeks of travel and days of preparation, days of thinking about this moment, days of staring at Mara’s decapitated head and listening to Orel’s ghost crack wise and insult me, I wished to fuck we’d thought of fucking lights out here in the fucking desert at night.
Grisha had disappeared instantly, on the move, and I dropped down onto my belly and studied the night around us. My augments tried to brighten up the night and had plenty of moon to do so, but I couldn’t see any movement. He was out there. Thundering around in his heavy, nuke-powered Monk chassis, he was within sniper range. My heart thudded in my chest. All I could hear was the wind.
Somewhere, out in the darkness, I heard the rippling crack of a rifle shot. A moment later, a distant scream, rising and fading—someone being plucked from the ground and sent sailing, about to smash down onto the ground. Grisha’s people were tough as old leather, in general, but they weren’t trained for this shit. No one was.
I stayed on my belly and worked my way back toward the remaining dormitory wall. I had to assume he could see me, unlikely as that seemed. I made pretty rapid
progress, scraping along, the sound of the sand beneath me and my labored breathing seeming loud and amplified in the cold night. About halfway there, a stray cloud drifted between us and the moon, and the old prison was suddenly in near-total darkness. My HUD was bright and clear, everything working perfectly for a change, and slowly my vision brightened as my augments soaked up every bit of light left and focused it.
When I reached the wall I pulled myself behind it and sat up. Sheltered in the old dorm space where Marlena and I had sat and smoked and fucked, I checked my auto and carefully pushed myself out around the edge of the wall, inch by inch, trying to be part of the fucking wall, unnoticed and unnoticeable. I reached into my pocket carefully and found one of the tiny earbuds we’d shared out and pushed it into place.
“Grisha?” I whispered. “Marko?” I didn’t bother raising any of the Spooks who’d come to fulfill their bullshit religious destiny, or any of Grisha’s people. I hadn’t learned anyone’s name anyway. I igured they would all be dead soon enough, and I didn’t need to put more names on my list of people I’d fucked over by my mere presence. At any rate, they weren’t listening to me, and I wasn’t listening to them.
“I am at foot of tower,” Grisha rasped into my ear. The way the sound bloomed and died in my ear was strange, the complete silence and the crackle and hiss of individual words with so much dark silence between sentences. “I see nothing.”
“I’m where you put me,” Marko hissed, sounding like someone was standing on his balls. “I’m freezing.”
