Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (18 page)

I stood there with my gun on him, staring. A deal. The Angels had just offered me a fucking
deal
. I tried to think of how many of them I’d killed over the last few years—eight? A dozen? Now all I had to do to earn their fucking
pardon
was work for them. Everyone thought I was just there to do their dirty work. The Angels, Grisha, fucking Canny Orel in his little god suit in Split. I was just a fucking windup toy—point me in the direction of things you wanted destroyed.

Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds, huh?
Dick Marin whispered, sounding amused.

“Mr. Gall,” I said evenly, keeping my eyes on the old man. “Can you spot these motherfuckers out there?” I didn’t know anything about this neat new Psionic ability—whether the old man could survive it or if he’d just fall over, vacant, when the Angel abandoned him, or what the range was on popping into other people’s skulls, but I was willing to make a little side bet with the cosmos that it wasn’t far. I was also willing to bet this little trick of Traveling required some fucking concentration could barely remind myself to breathe and walk at the same time, so I couldn’t imagine how hard it was to Push yourself into someone else’s body and do anything else at all.

I heard him moving behind me, breathing heavily and grunting as he struggled to peer out the windows without exposing himself to any Tele-Ks that might be spotting on the windows.

“Sure, sure, I see ’em,” he said after a moment. “Three ugly bastards in dark suits. One woman in the middle, tall, long salt-and-pepper hair, standing there with her eyes closed.”

“Do me a favor and throw some bullets at them.” I nodded at the old man. “Tell god this,” I said, and pulled the trigger, aiming for his feet and chewing up the floorboards.

The crowd of old men scattered, screeching in Italian, and there was a scream, suddenly, in the near distance, and then the roar of half a dozen guns being fired simultaneously behind me. I vaulted over the railing and landed awkwardly on the escalator, managing to avoid a fall by taking a handful of splinters off the makeshift railing, and skidded onto the floor just as the front door was torn open, framing a tall, skinny figure. For a moment we stared at each other; I couldn’t see his face, which was bathed in shadow, but I somehow had an impression of dumb shock.

“You don’t have to be fucking psychic,” I said. The figure took a step toward me, raising his hands, and I fired three times, making him dance and jig and fall in toward me, landing on his face. People who didn’t try murder on a regular basis usually thought they were inventing everything right there on the spot, like some sort of murder prodigy.

As I stood there congratulating myself on being a genius, something huge filled the now-empty doorway, and my HUD suddenly sharpened up, my laboring augments kicking in. Everything slowed down just a tiny bit; I shifted my weight and launched myself to the right just as a large crate crashed through the door, widening it by a couple of inches and shattering on the floor. I landed on the gritty floorboards and rolled until I hit the front wall, where I braced myself and pushed up into a crouch. The gunfire above me was still being poured on; there was a clear pattern as a thunderous roil of shots would trail off to a single
pop-pop-pop—
the rifles having their say, and then Gall emptying a clip while they reloaded. Gall had said just three, and I’d nailed one, but Psionic Actives were worth a dozen assholes.

“The world is dying, Mr. Cates!” a woman’s deep voice shouted from outside, the same round Creole accent the old man had sported—our Traveler, I decided, giving the term a capital letter. “You know this. In fifty years, there will be no one left, only the sullen monuments of arrogance we leave behind. We are here to bring meaning to these final years of humanity, to judge those who have ensured its destruction. You cannot prevent this extinction, no matter what your friends in SPS have told you. If you try to derail god’s plan, he will simply find a new route.”

Hell
, I thought.
Why is it that the crazies always find god, and always talk so fucking fancy? Any theories, Squalor?

The ghost of Dennis Squalor, who’d founded the Electric Church and been the world’s first digital intelligence, remained silent.

“They want you to
protect
Orel, Mr. Cates,” she went on. “They wish you to find him and collect him, and then he will make a deal, and he will
live
. They will grant him protection in return for the information he possesses. These are your
friends
.”

Another rain of bullets from above, and I duckwalked over to the doorway and leaned out carefully, trying to spot our Spooks. I wanted to kill them with my bare hands, feel the bones in their necks snapping, see the terror in their eyes. I wanted them to feel what Remy had felt, shot while I lay there unconscious. I wanted them to feel what Gleason had felt, being eaten alive by tiny robots, bloating and swelling as her body was devoured. I wanted them all to feel it. I wanted
Michaleen
to feel it. It seemed like Michaleen had been in my life forever, since before I was born. I’d been hearing the name my whole life, and I wondered, suddenly, if it had truly been a coincidence that Wa Belling had showed up in London all those years ago, claiming to
be
Orel and inserting himself into my Squalor operation.

The cosmos didn’t do coincidence. There was a Rail.

The square outside looked exactly as it had, empty and dusty. I could see only a chunk of it in front of me and off to my left, a disorienting slice of the world, but if I leaned out farther to get a better view I’d more than likely be in the air. I stayed still and forced myself to breathe, trying to will my HUD to stop flickering and either disappear or at least stabilize. Patience, I would have told Remy: Patience kept you alive. When you had the urge to run, to blast away, to throw away ammo, take a breath and wait.

And Remy would have said, Fuck it, I can’t die this way.

As I crouched there, a medium-sized woman with red, almost unnatural-looking hair streaming behind her ran across my field of vision and ducked into the large building across the way. I could just see her white shirt in the dark doorway almost directly across from me, but I had no shot while I hid behind the wall. I saw myself squaring around to take a bead on her and being sucked into the air, sailing gracefully until I smashed into something ungracefully.

I turned and looked at the Spook facedown on the floor, a big guy, broad in the shoulders and sporting the same shade of unbelievable red hair, his black pants damp with piss. I grunted my way back from the doorway and hooked the cuff of his pants with one hand, pulling him slowly toward me. When I had him out of sight, I slid my arms under his shoulders and pushed to my feet, pulling him up with me, my knees popping and back screaming. When I had him up in front of me, I settled the weight in my legs and staggered toward the door, staying out of the line of sight until the last moment. With a grunt, I surged forward and swung myself around into the doorway, letting go of the corpse just as it was pulled away from me.

The dead Spook jerked up into the air and I put myself into motion, my augments smoothly dumping adrenaline and endorphins, allowing me to hit top speed in three strides, holding the Roon out in front of me. As I ran I aimed at the white patch of her shirt, the gun made steady by the curious focusing of my augments, and squeezed the trigger three times. With the third shot the patch of white shirt disappeared, and the corpse hit the ground in front of me.

dropped and rolled, smacking into the stucco wall hard enough to make my HUD blink off for a moment. In that flash, I thought I heard Remy, somewhere inside me like the other ghosts.

Stop, Avery. Don’t
.

Then it was gone, and I shook my head, trying to clear it and get my focus back. I jumped to my feet and took a breath, leaping forward to land in the doorway, my augmented vision adjusting to the darkness immediately. The Spook was on the ground, her chest a red bloom, her eyes staring.

I had myself in my nostrils. I smelled like someone else’s piss.

“Next time you decide to make a charge, Avery,” Grisha shouted from behind me, the crunch of his boots approaching, “perhaps warn the people shooting indiscriminately at the ground, yes?” I felt him get close, and then he was standing next to me in the doorway. He stood there for a moment and then he clapped me on the shoulder.

“The third one, the leader, has run,” he said.

I turned and holstered my gun.
Stop, Avery. Don’t
. I replayed Remy’s voice in my head. Something fist-sized had appeared in my throat, and I wanted to punch Grisha in the face.

Gall was coming up behind him, scowling. “You shot at Carlo, goddammit,” he groused. “Why the fuck’d you do
that
?”

“I’ve shot a lot of defenseless old men,” I said gruffly. “You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

Grisha held up a hand to stop Gall’s approach. “Avery, you have made the right decision. These people, these
Angels
, have only their own twisted agenda. We are trying to salvage what is left of this world.”

“The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for,” Gall said. “A wise man once said.”

“We have an agreement, then,” Grisha said so seriously I wanted to laugh, at him and the rest of SPS, their pretensions to saving the human race. We were unsavable, I knew. “You will get us into SSF-controlled Europe and make introductions.”

“Sure, I’ll get you in touch with an old pal o’ mine,” Gall said. “Mr. Cates, I believe you know her, too.”

I stared at them both, and nodded, then turned back to look at the dead Spook in the shadows. “Tell her to bring Mr. Marko. For laughs.”

I didn’t say anything they might take for agreement. I had my own plans.

I HEAR I MIGHT ACTUALLY OUTLIVE
YOU

“The border’s tighter than my ass,” Gall said in his easy, booming way. “Which is pretty fucking tight. The cops who are left thought they were hunkering down to preserve the System for the Second Coming of Marin or something. Now they’re starting to fure out Marin ain’t coming, that the
Shutdown
is coming, but they’re still grinding the gears and walking the wall.” He shrugged. “They don’t know what else to do.”

Everyone had cleaned up nice. Gall was still a crispy fritter of a man, everything about him hot and red and scaly, but he’d gotten himself a clean suit of light pink that matched his general skin tone pretty well, making him look like a big clown. Grisha had changed out of his grubby overalls and into a snazzy suit that looked about twenty years old, based on the style and the sheen of the worn fabric, and he’d pulled in a dozen more people from SPS, quiet men and women who did anything Grisha told them to with a speed and dedication that meant they either were terrified of him or thought he was a genius. Maybe a little of both.

It was fucking madness outside Berlin. Grisha had come up with more four-wheelers and we’d made decent time north, the roads getting better and better as we drove until, finally, about thirty miles south of Berlin we’d clambered over a pile of rubble and bounced onto the widest highway I’d ever seen, in good shape, too. The roads hadn’t been maintained for decades, sitting out in the weather, ignored while people sped over them in hovers, but they’d been sitting there, waiting, like the world knew we’d all come back to the roads eventually. Most of them had been torn up at some point, by bombs or weeds poking up through cracks an inch at a time, but long stretches were still usable, as long as you didn’t mind the taste of your kidneys in your throat. We’d hit speeds that reminded me of hover rides, complete with constant low-level terror and the urge to always know exactly where your safety netting was. That had been great for six hours or so, and then we’d hit the camp.

It was a tent city, if you wanted to be generous with the word
tent
. I saw the blue tarp familiar to me from Potosí everywhere, stretched and folded in ingenious ways that gave me hope for the future of humanity no matter what Grisha said. It was a huge settlement, thousands of people crammed onto a rubble-strewn area pressed up against the fortified border the System Pigs had set up, straight across the road like it wasn’t even there. We pulled up, secured the four-wheelers with thick, rusty chains through the axles, and started walking.

The border was just an overpass the cops had barricaded with two burnt-out hover hulls overturned to block the road, guns mounted on the bridge stretching perpendicular to the road above, a mass of pissy-looking officers gathered at the choke point where they scowled and, I assumed, interviewed people who wanted in.

“Why is everyone camped out here?” I asked the ex-cop. The world was filled with abandoned real estate; you could have a mansion somewhere if you wanted it.

“They want in,” Gall said. “They don’t know any better; they think the System is their best choice. Sure, there’s power up there, some order maybe, but it’s all fucking
cops
. The cops don’t need a bunch of mewling assholes to watch over, now that they don’t have Marin’s programmed requirements to protect and serve and all that pushing them along. They need slave labor to keep the gears turning and they need every Techie they can get their hands on to work their little autoshutdown problem.” He laughed, a bitter cough. “These assholes are trying to get
in
because they think there’s yen up north, work, jobs, safety. There’s work, all right, but that’s about it.”

I shook my head, staring around. I knew these people. I’d never met them, but I’d walked around the streets of New York with them. I’d been knocked around by System Cops with them. I’d plotted to kill, beg, and steal with them. And here they were, begging to get back
into
the System, or whatever scraps of it were left. I fucking hated them for it. They didn’t know the world was dying—or maybe they did, who knew? But they could have been trying to make something better. To
do
something.