Cates 04 - The Terminal State (13 page)

“If he’s boring you,” the Poet said, shattering our moment and turning to beam those blank glass eyes on Mara, “I am more interesting. And close to your
age
.”

Mara’s expression of almost unrelieved contempt would have had me crawling into a bottle, but the Poet just grinned into the maelstrom and flexed his biceps a little, as if certain of their hypnotizing powers. She gave him the withering stare for a few seconds, and then cocked her head. “Where you gettin’ the Spooks tatted, boyo? ”

“The back of my head,” he said immediately, giving me the creepy feeling he planned where he was going to ink you before he actually planned on how he was going to
kill
you. A pragmatist. “Any Spook tries to sneak up, they see what awaits.” He capped this off with a little superstar grin, and I thought, with an echo of disbelief rattling in my head,
This bastard thinks he can bag her.

Of course he does
, the ghost of Dick Marin suddenly whispered.
You’re the only Gunner I ever met who didn’t think the fucking sun set on his ass, Avery
.

I startled. The ghosts in my head had been quiet for so long I’d almost forgotten them.

Mara turned to face me without a word for the Poet. She flicked her eyes at him and then back at me. “What’re you circling around to, Mr. Cates? ”

I had my answer ready. “Why are Spooks hot on our trail? What did Alf Londholm do to get the whole goddamn world hepped up about him? ”

She shrugged. “The Psionics weren’t here for us. As for Londholm—if—if Mr. Garda chose not to tell you, maybe I should take that as a guideline to follow.”

“Londholm’s a tinker,” the Poet suddenly said, stretching his whole body out with a grunt, his massive arms reaching behind his head as he rolled in the dirt. “Made himself the God Augment. Now he’s a dead man.”

I kept my eyes on Mara. Unpretty as she was, she was better looking than the Poet. “What the fuck is a God Augment?”

“Where you been hiding?” The Poet laughed, rolling onto his back and folding his arms behind his head. “I forgot: in the suburbs. Land that time forgot.”

Mara pursed her lips. “The so-called God Augment, Mr. Cates, is an implantable piece o’ neurotechnology that stimulates a portion of the brain now known to be associated with Psionic abilities.” She stood up and stretched her thin, toned body, shadows making her face hard and demonic. “Once installed, someone who previously did not have any such abilities suddenly has them
all
—Tele-K, Push, limited precognition.”

“Plus a few new ones,” the Poet said happily, eyeing her body up and down like he was in the tug joints down on Bowery. “Ones we don’t have names for yet. Scary magic stuff.”

Mara frowned in his direction for a long moment, shaking her head slightly. “What’s
wrong
with you? ” she said quietly, turning to me. “So, if you’re tired of bein’ tossed about by the Spooks, you can pay Mr. Londholm to cut you open and turn you on, eh? Sure, sure. Half the fucking world is trying to buy it from him.” She shrugged. “The other half hired us to kill him before he can sell it.”

I could hear, in the distance, a rumbling sound that put my nerves on alert. I pushed up onto my feet, thinking about the implications of something like that. I’d met only a few Spooks in my time, and only had to go up against them briefly. The idea of half the world suddenly gearing up to make me think I was a butterfly didn’t sound appealing.

“And that’s why half the world’s comin’ at us,” she added, turning and taking a few steps away from the fire. “All right? Any more questions? ”

“Has he built a prototype? Done any tests on humans?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, and I had a sense of a woman gathering the frayed ends of her patience. My hands curled into fists and my HUD suddenly sharpened and brightened up. If Mara was going to try and teach me to shut up, she was going to find out why I hadn’t learned a goddamn thing my whole life.

Instead, she opened her eyes. “All right, Avery. I can see I won’t have any peace until we have our conversation.” The rumbling noise had resolved into the throb of an engine. She didn’t seem concerned, although I somehow sensed the Poet rising from his position to stand behind us, turning my head to find him with his arms up like he was spoiling for a fight, his head moving as he literally sniffed the wind.

“He built three working units,” Mara said, and I turned back to her, feeling grit in my boots and on my hands, the sandy, cold dirt getting into everything. “And implanted two. To demonstrate viability, you see. Both subjects are now dead, their units destroyed. His funding, lab, and safety have disappeared; he has been relying on paid mercenaries for survival, and from what we understand, his cash is running out.” I realized with a start that I could see her face a little better, and I spun to look along her sight line, finding a pair of bright lights approaching, bouncing crazily up and down as they did.

I looked back at Mara. She was obviously not surprised at this, and a sour feeling of irritation spread in my belly. It was bad enough I’d been sucked into this by Michaleen, bad enough to be on the Rail again, pushed along by the hateful cosmos. It was something else to have a goddamn teenaged girl pulling my strings along the way. “How’d you call for transport?” I asked, gesturing at the approaching headlights. “Hamhocks back there danced around for half an hour trying to get a signal.”

She smiled without looking at me. “You think Mickey just lets us wander out here
unsupervised
? Count on it, Avery—the Little Man’s eye is on us always, like a fucking guardin’ angel.” Her eyes slid in my direction slyly. “I’d like to see you run, boyo, I really would. Just to see the fuckin’ hand o’
god
reach down and flick you away.”

I clenched my teeth. Mara, I decided, was my problem, not the Poet. The Poet and I were practically best friends by comparison. Mara was Michaleen’s girl.

With a belch of acrid pollution, a vehicle shimmied from the darkness, almost rolling itself as it crested a ridge, slamming down and roaring toward us. It looked gerrymandered, odds and ends fused together through a combination of rough black welds and old-fashioned machine screws. It was a big square hunk of metal with four swollen rubber wheels, bouncing along erratically, black smoke pouring out of the rear. It skidded to a halt just a few feet away from us and sat there, humming and vibrating like a living thing.

“Come on,” Mara said, walking toward it. “We got work to do.”

I stood my ground. “Hey!”

She paused and then slowly turned to look at me. Her face was blank. The Poet stepped past me, shoulder nudging me as he did so. I had a quick vision of grabbing one of his skinny legs and giving it a savage yank, but resisted.

“What, you goddamn rash on my ass? ” Mara demanded, putting her hands on her leather hips and pushing her non-existent tits at me.

“You said the Spooks weren’t after us,” I said. “What the fuck did
that
mean? ”

Avery’s grown attentive
, I heard Marin whisper at me. Mara sighed, pursing her lips. “They weren’t,” she said, turning again and stepping around to the front passenger’s door and climbing halfway into the transport. “They were almost certainly here specifically for
you
.”

“They like to call themselves Angels,” Mara shouted over the murderous bouncing of the vehicle. “Psionics. Not under anyone’s control, untrained, wild.”

I thought of Kev Gatz, who’d come close to killing the world not too long ago—he’d been a Psionic, too, a Pusher. “Okay,” I shouted back, “before my kidneys start to bleed, what the fuck do free-range Spooks want with me? ”

The ride was not smooth in the four-wheeler, tumbling over the broken and occasionally bombed-out countryside. Sometimes we were almost vertical, scaling an impossible crater wall and apparently trusting to momentum to get us over the lip, and sometimes we were on two of the wheels, wobbling alarmingly for a few seconds until we crashed back down onto the chassis. I’d peered into the cockpit when I’d first climbed in behind the Poet—who’d been a few days without a bath now—and I wasn’t sure yet if I should be alarmed or relieved at the fact that the vehicle was completely automatic.

She didn’t look at me. “You’ve been convicted,
in absentia
, boyo, of being a fucking danger to humanity as a whole.
Angels
ain’t a
metaphor
for them, follow? They think they’re the next step in human evolution. They think they’re here to set things right. Part o’ that is gettin’ rid of the tyranny of evil men, see? So you’re on a list.” She turned and winked. “Our boss is on the list, too.”

I considered a band of Psionics bent on tearing me into small pieces. It didn’t feel appreciably different than my every day. As I considered it, we took a rock under one wheel and the whole cab went bouncing. The Poet hit his round, shaved head on the roof and howled in protest.

“Sorry,” Mara shouted back over her shoulder from the front. “We didn’t have time to arrange nothin’ fancy.”

We hit another huge bump that sent the whole goddamn thing into the air, and a second later we slammed back down to the ground. I’d learned the hard way to clench my mouth shut whenever this happened. Traveling by train was bad enough, but this was fucking ridiculous. When I’d been a kid, the only hovers I ever saw the inside of were System Pig bricks, taking me to various beatings around New York. Then I’d had a brief taste of the good life. The good life was better. Flying in hovers everywhere was better. My offices in the Pennsylvania in Manhattan seemed like another man’s life, so long ago it looped back and became my fucking future. I’d been rich. I’d had people on salary. I’d been independent for the last time in my life, doing what I wanted.

I thought of Wa Belling, who’d betrayed me and put my feet on this road, strapped me into the Rail. I thought maybe I hadn’t been giving Wa the proper attention over the last few years.

The Poet and I were crammed into the backseat of the vehicle ass to ass. He’d helpfully put his huge arm around my neck to make some room, giving me an intimate view of his swampy armpit. I was hungry, my stomach clawing away at my ribs, and I felt dirty and unrested, although my HUD had gone green across the board again and I felt that still-alien sense of being limber and strong. I turned and stared at the Poet, putting my eyes on his ear and leaving them there, hoping he’d notice and look at me so I could twist his nose. I’d never wanted to twist someone’s nose more.

The Poet turned his head finally and stared back at me from behind his huge mirrored glasses. He was unshaven and greasy looking.

“Do I remind you,” he said slowly, “of someone you used to know? Or am I just pretty? ”

“You remind me of a lot of people,” I said with a smile. “It’s a common type.”

He pursed his lips and then reached up to his face, removing the glasses. His eyes were sunken and tired looking, a dull brown. They made him look a lot older than I’d guessed him to be. He didn’t look at me; he looked down at my knees, squinting. “You do not know me. What I am capable of. The place I come from.”

“Where do you come from? ”

“City called Belgrade. It is not there anymore.” He shrugged awkwardly. “This is not a loss. But it was my home. I knew every stone there, and now I’m an orphan.”

I thought about that, fighting against an upswell of weird emotion. I knew what that was like, walking down a street and knowing something was wrong because a tiny detail was off, knowing where you could get whatever you needed because you knew everything there was to know about the city you lived in. It had been taken from me, too. Before I could start squirting tears like an old woman, I turned to watch the wilderness flash by at a terrifying speed.

“You getting paid for this job, Adrian?” I asked suddenly. “You with the Little Man? ”

He snorted. “With the Little Man? Is anyone
with
that prick? I am owned by him.”

A question I should have asked right away, from the beginning, instead of comparing balls like I was fifteen again. I turned back to him and leaned in, making the decision to throw caution to the wind. What was I being cautious about, exactly? I was a fucking biological prisoner, a puppet dancing. It seemed obvious that Mara was Mickey’s girl and the Poet was just a dim bulb like me who’d gotten fetched up by the great Cainnic Orel, trading under the equally ridiculous name of Michaleen Garda—which meant that to feel really smart, I had to figure it was the other way around, and to be fucking
brilliant
it had to be
both of them
, playing me. That was okay. I’d been a fucking moron for so long I was getting used to it.

It all swirled back to the simple fact that if I was wrong and trusted the wrong person, I lost nothing. They’d laugh at me and press a button, and I’d sizzle like a beefsteak while they explained everything to me. So fucking what. That was how this was going to end anyway. Or with me dead.

“I’m not dying for Michaleen,” I said in a low voice.

“Brother, me neither,” he whispered back. “Much rather he dies for
me
.” He slipped the glasses back on and turned a mild grin on me. “You get pressed as well? ”

I nodded. “First Platoon, Shitkickers Division.”

Looking ahead again, he nodded once, curtly. “All right.”

I found myself waiting a few beats for him to say more, and then I looked out the window again. The world streamed by in jerky, sudden leaps, something to look at while I thought, trying to see a way to get out from under. I considered the situation: Michaleen had my remote, which he’d passed on to Mara, which meant she could knock me down anytime she wanted, fuck with me on a core level I had no defense against. Sitting in the tight, hot interior of the four-wheeler, my hands clenched into fists. A direct assault on Mara was useless; I couldn’t do anything with the remote and assumed she had a backup unit as well. And none of it mattered, because without a gun or at least a nicely weighted knife, I couldn’t get close enough to her to do anything without invoking the anti-frag mode of my augments. And even if I
could
kill her, the moment she flatlined I’d be dead, too, something going
boom
inside my head in protest.