Cates 04 - The Terminal State (12 page)

The door exploded outward, knocking all three to the floor in a sudden outburst of noise. The Poet, shirt-less and barefoot, leaped into the hallway, the fake, sentient muscles of his arms and chest writhing as he took a moment to preen, flexing the tree trunks he called biceps and howling.

“Shut up,” I whispered to myself, for my own amusement. “You’re about to go for a ride.”

When he shot up into the air, I just smiled. When he somehow snaked an arm out and sank his fingers into the hair of one of them, taking her with him to the ceiling of the corridor, I blinked in surprise. For a moment, they were a blur of limbs up above, screeching and kicking. Putting the gun on them, I closed one eye and thought about letting both Mara and this idiot go, just letting the Spooks crush their skulls with invisible fists and walking away.

I took a deep breath. I couldn’t do it. Even ignoring the remote and the fact that I’d drop dead if I got too far away from Mara, even a turd like the Poet was a brother in arms. Even Mara—we were all making our way and if I was on Michaleen’s hook, they were too, probably. I didn’t think Mickey inspired a lot of affection and loyalty.

I opened my eye and took in the scene again, trying to judge which one was the Pusher. The Telekinetics were tough, throwing you around like a puppet and making heavy things slam into you, but they could be dealt with. A fucking Pusher could have you doing dance moves with a fucking glance.

It wasn’t the one currently getting to know the Poet better than she—or anyone—would have wanted up at the ceiling; she would have had him barking on the floor in a flash. I gave a second to the other two. One stared up at the ceiling intently. The other stared into the cabin, a still-life. Ticking the gun over, I took a bead on that one and squeezed the trigger. The cheap auto bucked in my hand like I’d kicked a dog, and the Spook’s head jerked forward and left, splattering the wall red, with flecks of yellow.

The second triplet whipped her head down, big round black eyes on me like magnets, and then I rocketed backward, my feet lifting off the floor, my arms dangling in front of me, everything shrinking.

I thought,
Shit, here comes the door
.

The door came, and the door wasn’t happy. I managed to close my eyes just before impact, which was good, seeing as I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life searching for them on my hands and knees.

 

 

I snapped awake with a jolt—one second, darkness; the next, my HUD flaring to life, my chest heaving with sudden anxiety, conscious. My status bars flared emerald—except for one in the middle of the pack that had yellowed a little—and then dimmed. A faint sense that something was wrong, something out of place, licked at the edges of my thoughts without forming into anything solid. I turned my head and a sharp pain stabbed up my neck, making me wince. I blinked, looking down the corridor. The Poet was struggling with one of the triplets, his huge hands clamped murderously around her neck, his own eyes bulging from a face far too dark with blood—even though the woman hung in his grasp like a rag doll, her eyes were locked on him, choking him right back. They were pasted up against the wall like they’d been glued there. I squinted, trying to see if there was anyone else, another Spook doing the heavy lifting, but there was no one. Something was flashing in my HUD, a tiny dot, and as I concentrated, it swelled up, firming into a gyroscope that was slanted dramatically off-kilter. The wall had become the floor; I was sitting on the pocket door between cars. I could hear, dimly, screaming below me, and I pictured all those frozen people, suddenly awake again, smashed in together with gravity plucking at them.

Wincing again, I turned my head until I could squint out the cloudy plastic window. My stomach lurched as the world reset itself, the ground rolling some ten or fifteen feet beneath us, the train car at a crazy angle, still connected to the rest of the train, the other cars hanging on like tin sausages. I was suddenly aware of a groaning metallic sound, continuous and irritating.

On the ground, near the tracks, a man stared up at me. He was old, with thick gray hair hanging down to his shoulders, but his face had the same familiar roundness to it—a Spook. And since he was staring up at me while the whole fucking train was floating into the air, I had the sudden brilliant intuition that he was a Telekinetic, and the most powerful fucking Tele-K I’d ever imagined.
The whole fucking train
.

I was sweating. The screams below just went on and on, like animals howling.

I rubbed my hands on my coat and looked down at myself; my stolen gun was in my lap, held in place by gravity. I grabbed it and twisted my head around again to look out at the freak below. I had no shot. Even if I could angle my arm, the glass was thick enough to queer me, and if the Spook was good enough to get the whole train in the air, chances were one shot was all I was going to get.

I turned my head again and looked at the door’s latch. Tightening my grip on the gun, I took a deep breath, reached up behind me, and yanked.

The door rolled into its pocket with a mean-spirited suddenness, and I dropped down onto the next car, catching my leg on the coupling as I fell, doing a half spin and landing awkwardly. I spent a second making sure I wasn’t sliding, and then I rolled to the edge, hooking one foot into the coupling and swinging my arm around. I put the gun on him, reminded myself of the way the piece of shit barked, and braced for impact.

Just as I squeezed the trigger, the motherfucker looked right at me and the train lurched under me. I lifted up for a second and slammed down, rattling my teeth and knocking the gun from my hand. Before I could contemplate the ways in which this train hated me, I felt something like gravity grabbing onto me with invisible wet fingers and trying to pull me off the train. My foot was lodged pretty firmly in the coupling; I felt my leg being stretched as I snagged. Blood rushing to my face, I craned my head up to look down at the Spook, who stared up at me without expression. The screams and the metal grinding had blended together into one formless blast of noise, and a rushing howl in my own ears joined it as the little status bars in my eyes started to wither into yellow.

Behind him, creeping down the embankment, was Mara.

She looked tiny—tall but thin, her limbs too insubstantial to be any threat. She looked rough—red hair a mess, a deep scratch across her forehead, her nifty leather pants torn across one thigh—and she had a long, black stick in one hand, one of those collapsible beat-downs that telescoped from something you could hide in one palm. How she’d gotten off the train and circled around was a mystery, but I tabled that thought, shifting my eyes to the cold, rocky ground below me. I had a sudden vision of my future. It involved the ground, gravity, and sixty tons of fucking train right behind me.

I looked back up in time to see her plant herself behind the old Spook and rear back. My heart pounded into overdrive and the little bar that represented my adrenaline levels skyrocketed, and then everything suddenly ... slowed down.

I watched Mara raise her baton as if she were enveloped in syrup, her face contorted in a mask of red violence that ruined the delicate lines of her unpretty face, the baton rising so slowly I had time to look at the old man’s face in detail: unlined, red skin, with hideous eyes that were dark pools of shadow surrounded by yellow-black bags, swollen and unhealthy looking. His mouth hung open slightly, revealing teeth that looked likely to be even worse than his eyes. I stopped looking at him, preferring Mara’s rictus of rage to the Spook’s grooming. She’d only managed to get the baton cocked behind her by then.

My HUD had turned a shade of pink, like a haze had been smeared over everything.

Before I could think too hard about all of it, the gentle pulling sensation disappeared, leaving me limp against the warm metal of the train. The old Spook spun with surprising agility to face Mara, his hands flying up between them, but she took the opportunity to angle the baton and catch him on the chin with an upstroke, sending him spinning backward, feet off the ground, in a slow-motion ballet.

Beneath me, the train jerked and for the longest moment I’d ever experienced, it seemed to float in the air, my stomach flipping over. When we started to fall, it was beautiful: slow and graceful, a sudden wind around me, my body lifting off the train slightly, the ground drifting up like a dream. A stream of numbers flashed across my vision, tiny and fast, obviously not meant for me, really; a dump for the field technician who would retrieve my corpse, I supposed, a record of how I went down to make sure it hadn’t been any kind of technological malfunction.

Gripping the edge of the coupling with my hands, I pulled my feet under myself, crouching on the side of the train as it rolled slowly toward the ground, my own heartbeat a distant, mournful drum, and when the ground was still a few feet away I launched myself horizontally, my HUD suddenly streaming calculations concerning wind speed, inertia, mass, and velocity I ignored. It was easy, like I had all the time in the world. I planned on a dramatic tuck and roll, to come up like an acrobat smoking a cigarette and impressing the only lady in view. Instead, I hit the ground like a bag of shit, scraping some of myself off on the rough ground, and time snapped back to normal speed as I dissolved into a rough, unbalanced roll, bars and numbers flashing across my vision in jagged little spurts until an obliging rotten log on the embankment stopped me.

I stared up at the clouds above, feeling and hearing the impact of the train as it smashed back into the earth. Half the little bars in my HUD had gone an alarming shade of pus yellow, and a mean-spirited adrenaline dump was keeping me conscious despite my intense unhappiness about it. And then Mara’s face, back to its serene, flat-nosed expressionlessness, floated above me, looking down at me like I was a bug tied to a pin, crawling around endlessly.

“You still alive, then? ” she said.

I blinked and moved my dried-up tongue around. “If you call this living,” I croaked, and with a flash in my eyes I passed out.

I studied Mara’s face. Lit by the fire, she was almost beautiful—almost. I tried to imagine her smiling, as an experiment to see if that would push her over the edge, but I couldn’t manage it.

“So, are we gonna talk about this? ”

The Poet danced into view behind her, holding a solar cell up over his head, trying to find a final ray of sunlight to get a little extra juice. We hadn’t been able to get in touch with anyone since the attack, and none of us wanted to hoof it through the wilderness. Mara didn’t seem worried and had said arrangements had been made, though she’d declined to explain further, which was becoming her trademark. If we’d been able to just use straight, aboveboard nets we’d have been fine, but if you used the mainstream networks, you popped up on a dozen watch lists and sooner or later got a visit from someone you didn’t want to see.

He looked fucking ridiculous, but I replayed the scene of him snatching one of the Weird Triplets as he was smashed up against the roof of the train car, and gave him a little more slack. The kid was a freak, but he could kill.

Mara could kill too. The old Tele-K had vanished, she said, after the dust had settled, but I’d seen her work him and was pretty sure he would have been dead if she’d had anything better than a lightweight stick to work with.

“Talk about what?” she asked, settling herself on the damp ground in stages, like she didn’t know what to do with her limbs.

I smiled. “You’ve got that Stupid Disease, huh? ” Leaning forward, I plucked up a stick from the ground and thrust it into the fire. “I’m a Carrier—everyone I meet comes down with it. That’s okay. I’ve got therapy for that. For starters, we’ve been on this job for what—two days? And already we’ve got major static.”

I glanced through the darkness at the shadowed hulk of the derailed train, lit up by dozens of small lights. The other passengers had elected to use the train as shelter, which made sense, except for the fact that just a few hours ago it had been bait for murderous psionics, which was why we were out in the fucking bush freezing our asses off.

“It’s a high-profile job,” she said, shrugging as I put my eyes back on her. “High-profile jobs get static. That’s why you’re
here
. Because you c’n handle the static.”

“That’s just it. The little man, he tracks me down, pays me out of the army, flies me all the way over here for this—we don’t have competition, babe. We’ve got people
coming at
us.” I leaned back again and wiped my hands on my filthy coat—I’d managed to be clean and neat for about five minutes, which was a new land record for me. “So, you want me to believe Michaleen Garda—Canny Orel—is going at this blind? ”

We stared at each other over the fire again. The Poet dropped to the ground next to Mara, letting out a long stream of creative curse words. “We are abandoned.” He sighed, arranging himself in a ludicrous pose of idleness, stretched out on his side, elbow bent, head resting on one palm as the fire reflected in his ridiculous sunglasses, which he still had on as if there was sun glare only his sensitive eyes could detect. “The modern world has moved on—we’re in a dead zone.”

He always sounded like he was singing, somehow, when he spoke, and it got on my nerves. “Maybe you should go try again,” I suggested.

He oriented his shades on me and smiled, and with a jerk of his free arm he sent the solar cell flying toward me. I twitched, but stopped myself, and let it sail over me with a mask of something approaching calm. Then we had a little love affair made up of longing gazes and unrequited violence. I was beginning to warm up to the Poet, stupid name and all. If we ever got a chance to beat the shit out of each other, I’d probably have to propose.