Cates 04 - The Terminal State (37 page)

I stood there for a moment, panting. I couldn’t take a deep enough breath, and my head hurt with every heartbeat, a lance of sharp pain that skipped and lurched like my pulse, random and ragged. The building roiled beneath me again, almost knocking me off balance and into the dark, damp air, so I limped backward, scanning the floor until I found my handgun. Leaving the duffel and the shredder, I staggered for the doorway and back out into the hallway, where some ceiling tiles had shaken loose and smashed onto the floor.

“There is approximately five minutes of operational power,” the hotel’s shell announced suddenly. The PA system was exceptional and it sounded muted and local, like someone invisible was standing next to you. “Please proceed with evacuation.”

To my left, splayed on the carpet in a thickening pool of pink-tinged coolant, was the Poet’s body, the avatar’s fake skin still flickering with the silent movement of its animated tattoos. It lay chest down, the head missing, one arm bent back at an unnatural angle, the Hamada still clutched in its hand. Michaleen, in whatever body, was a pro. So was Belling. And not a fucking ounce of mercy between them. I stared at the body and realized I felt like I’d lost a friend, even though I’d never actually had one.

“Cates.”

I startled, whirling on the last fumes of Berserker Mode and almost pitching forward when my delicate balance on my bad leg was upset. I didn’t see anyone, swinging the Roon around in a sloppy arc, and then glanced down to see the Poet’s head, pristine except for the ragged line of fake flesh just below the chin, looking at me.

It blinked.

“Cates,” it said, sounding normal. “Battery backup. Only a few minutes. Supposed to give you a chance to upload your recent experiences if you get caught out.” It blinked again. “You look
terrible
, Mr. Cates. If I had to guess, I’d say you look like you’ve had a small stroke.”

I just stared. I thought that if Belling asked me to carry his head around for company, I might just sit down and wait for the fucking building to collapse.

“You’re like a roach, you know? Every time I think you
must
be dead, you crawl out from under it and strut about. You’re a miracle of science. I have always thought you were a mediocre Gunner, Mr. Cates, not in my league, but I think I have overlooked your true talent: survival.”

I wondered if I could get away with kicking him like a ball, or if that would topple me to the floor. I started to walk toward the stairs, wondering how I’d summon the elevator if my tongue continued to elude me.

“Cates,” Belling hissed after me. “You and I have one thing in common now: Cainnic is coming after us both. You might want to find me. We could be useful to each other.”

I closed my eyes.
Translation
, I thought:
You can’t trade body blows with Canny Orel either—even with the fucking God Augment, if it actually works, so you’d like to stand behind me while I absorb bullets for you
.

“That crazy old man has a modified Monk chassis waiting for him. He figures he can live forever, and with that augment he can be a god,” Belling said behind me, sounding suddenly weak and tired. “You think I took this on out of greed? Mr. Cates, I am a fucking
hero
.”

I nodded, opening my eyes and limping away.
You sure are, Wa
, I thought.

As I reached the door leading to the stairwell, the hotel’s shell spoke around me again. “Emergency Shutdown Protocols engaged. Thank you for choosing the Shannara. Good-bye.”

The lights faded out, leaving me in darkness. I heard Belling whisper, “Ah, fuck, not in the
dark
, please.”

After a moment, my visual augment managed to scrape up a pale green image that somewhat resembled the stairs, and I made for them, swinging my bum leg down and tottering on the verge of falling over with each step. When I’d made it down the first flight, the whole building shook again in response to a dull explosion, the metal steps vibrating under me, the handrail humming in my hand. I was pouring sweat and trembling, and I estimated that it would take about an hour to climb down the whole way, and if I sat down I’d never get up again.

I stopped thinking. I just swung my leg, tottered left, grabbed the handrail, stepped down. I breathed in short, painful gasps. Every now and then, everything bucked and rumbled and I clung to the handrail desperately, wondering if the whole place was going to come down on top of me. When the sickly green glowing EXIT sign loomed up in front of me, the dust of the bottom landing making me gag and cough so hard flares lit up in my vision, I just stared for a moment, unsure of what the next step was supposed to be. Slowly, I limped toward it, crashing through and out into a greasy-looking alley just off the boulevard.

The noise immediately surrounded me: hover displacement multiplied by a thousand and poured down onto the street steadily, explosions, and the sharp, quick punch of small-arms fire. The air smelled like smoke, charred wood, and something darker and more rotten, and my lungs tried to kick it back up for a better sample, sending me down on my hands and knees, shivering and coughing, every part of my body burning. I wasn’t sure what I’d accomplished when I’d triggered my Berserker Mode, but it had maybe saved my life when Michaleen had triggered my remote.

The sound of boots thumping along closer and closer didn’t really register until it had stopped, and I slowly raised my head to find about a dozen soldiers in soiled whites, cowls up and face masks on, standing in a loose semicircle around me. A tall officer with shiny pips on his shoulder had one hand up in the air, signaling a halt, and he looked down at me with his head cocked for a long moment, silent. Then he slowly lowered his arm and peeled back his face mask, grinning, just as faded text boxes bloomed everywhere, giving me the names and ranks of a bunch of assholes I didn’t give a shit about.

“Well,
sheeyit
,” Colonel Anners said, sounding breathless but pleased. “It’s Mr. Moneybags Cates. Motherfucked, Cates, you look like nine hundred types of crap rolled together.”

For some reason I couldn’t identify, I smiled, sinking back onto my haunches. Without seeing it, I knew that the smile was a travesty, but once it had leaked out onto my face, I found it impossible to recall.

Anners looked around as if we’d met in some bar somewhere, old friends. “We got ourselves a beachhead, here,” he said as the ground rumbled beneath us. “But these Hong Kong cops ain’t givin’ in
easy
, and I got shit to do.” He looked back at me. “I got bitches out there ain’t got no
idea
what to do with a bridgehead once you got one, and I got fucking
superiors
who seem like they’re afraid to get some kids shot to hell.” He spat on the ground. “I’ve only been at this war shit for a few years, Mr. Cates, but I got a
belly
for it, as some don’t. But I’m stretched mighty fuckin’ thin here trying to keep up. On top of it all, we got malfunctions on the unit implant settings and I had six decent grunts keel over from false frag alerts this past hour. It’s fuckin’
chaos
, and I love it.”

Somewhere nearby, something approximately the size of New York exploded, and the night air got brighter for a moment. The next few things Anners said were lost to the roar, but the colonel just stood there yapping like nothing bothered him much.

“So, you got anything to offer me, Mr. Cates? ’Cause I got a fucking bevy of generals up my
ass
and I can’t have you just wandering around behind the lines knowing my name. But it might be worth it, if you still got your wallet.”

I stared up at him. Even smudged with dirt and sweat, he was so fucking happy and healthy I was overpowered by the bright light that was Colonel Malkem Anners, so I smiled and spread my hands in front of me, trying to say,
Sorry, I threw my wallet out the fucking window
.

He nodded once, crisply, and turned to his squad. “All right, we got ourselves a drum trial, and as presiding officer, I waive the fucking drum and the fucking trial. Who wants to walk Mr. Cates around the corner and pronounce him dead in the name of the constitutionally legitimized Joint Council and its undersecretaries? Nothing in it but extra credit.”

After a moment of quiet, one of the soldiers stepped forward and peeled back his face mask, his beaten-up face impassive, his eyes locked on me. I imagined there was something in them aside from hatred, but it might have been my imagination or my downward-spiraling brain.

“I’ll do it,” Remy said.

Field dump of flash storage unit retrieved from Sector 97, Hong Kong Offensive, during routine investigation and benefits analysis. Retrieving Officer Hayes, 657483-560.

 

It began after Nickles took it, the fucking moron. We’d been ordered to take the fucking building—who knew what the hell it was, it was just a building, gray and square and all the glass shattered out of it like someone had picked it up and shaken it a little. Why those fucking cops wouldn’t just fall back and give it up was beyond me; why Crazy Anners wanted it so bad was beyond me, but six times he’d formed up an assault team from the stragglers streaming back from the bridgeheads and tossed them at it. Building 159. One-fiver-nine. On the map. Nickles had been acting sub-louie since Barnes ate it in the tunnel, and somehow he’d survived all six assaults, limping back from one-fiver-nine with two or three survivors, and Crazy Anners would scrape up another fifty assholes and hand them to Nick and say, “Take the fucking building.”

One-fiver-nine. I thought, fuck, it must be filled with Dry Compressed Rations or booze, he wants it so bad. But what did we know. Crazy Anners says, take that building or I’ll fry you, you had better odds taking the building.

Me and Nickles and the kid, Remy, we were in all the waves. Six fucking times we jazzed up and tore ass across the little square right in front, fire raking down on us from their superior position. Six times we were fifty percent down just getting to the building. Nickles screaming orders—this many left, this many right, door pounders out and loaded, goddammit. Nicks kept me and the kid close as his aides, and we weren’t arguing. Nickles was a lucky charm.

Stair fighting. The first three times, we waited for the promised bombardment like suckers. After that, we just went for the stairs, small squads, backups stepping forward as people fell, fighting for every fucking step up. Crazy Anners thought we could take the building that way, but he was fucking wrong and we all knew it. We were never going to take one-fiver-nine.

On the third wave, we made it to the third floor, somehow. Maybe it was the big guy, Mendoza, we picked up when forming up for the third try. He was fucking
huge
. When he was on the stairs, he blocked out the light, and he screamed like a lion the whole way, just pouring shredder fire—reloaded his rifle like a natural, like he’d been born passing clips every eight seconds into the beast. We all hid behind him, figuring if he got nailed, his bulk would be a shield and if we could outrun his falling corpse we’d probably live to wave four, which was the best we could hope for. We were massed behind him on the landing when his head exploded, and then it all turned to shit and chaos and we went tearing ass back into the open air for a re-form and replacements.

That’s what Anners and his crazy pals didn’t understand: They could stick a knife up our ass and make us go
into
one-fiver-nine, sure. But we were just waiting for an excuse to turn around and get the fuck
out
. A successful assault was just one where we never got an excuse.

After the sixth wave, I thought, hell, they can’t make us go again. Not until we’d scraped up a full assault-strength unit, not until they got the big guns set up and the hover drones in the air, not until special-ops had taken out the air defense grid. No fucking way. I told Nickles, no fucking way, as I lit a butt, panting in the shelter of a crumbling concrete wall. And then Anners hit us all with a broadcast flag:
form up
. Form fucking up. The words imprinted on my vision, blood red. I looked at Nicks and he shook his head and I’ll never forget the expression on his face. It was fucking defeat, fucking doom. Surviving six times into one-fiver-nine was impossible. A seventh sortie was kicking us over into bullshit.

One of the noncoms started shouting behind us, and I looked over. A trio of privates were lying on the ground, gasping like fish behind a scrap of old wall, and the NC was trying to lift them back onto their feet with the power of his voice. It wasn’t working, and one of the privates had a moment of fucking awesome when she lifted one arm weakly and gave the NC the finger, just jabbing it right up into his face.

“Fucking-A,” Nickles muttered behind me.

The NC didn’t find that humorous, and in a flash the private’s blackjack was in the NC’s hand. “You wanta get gimped, private? ” the NC shouted. “You form the fuck up or I’m gonna light you up until your eyes boil outta your skull.”

The private did it again—arm up, hand out, finger extended. She couldn’t even talk, she was so winded. A ripple of laughter went up and I looked around, startled. Half the fucking party was watching.

The NC knew it, too, and without another word he jabbed the remote at her and the laughter stopped like it had been edited out. The NC was gonna pop her. For field insubordination. That was fucking
unfair
, and I could feel the whole unit tensing, outraged.