Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (24 page)

The trucks were in worse shape than I’d thought at first, and I could smell something chemical and sweet in the air—fuel, I decided. Exactly what, I wasn’t sure.

I looked back at Takahashi’s man, still giving me polite, his eyes still glowing. But I wondered if he was hooked up to anything. It was possible to run a private net off solar generators and your own booster dishes, but that was expensive and difficult and wouldn’t have much range anyway. I decided he wasn’t getting any signal from anywhere. The eyes just glowed.

I nodded my head, trying to match his dry approach. I didn’t even look at Takahashi himself, who was frowning at the tiny screen of his handheld, his long, elegant fingers working the gestures so quickly I wondered how he held onto the small square of hard plastic. Takahashi obviously thought he was above things like conversation and paying attention to known contract killers. Then I noted his lack of even a sidearm, and I took a breath and started lying.

“It was my understanding that I was under Mr. Takahashinders protection when we made our agreement. I was attacked just seconds later and no attempt to secure me or my party was ever made.”

The kid suddenly looked up, fingers pausing for a moment. A fucking reputation whore. People were always glad-handing me about my stellar
reputation
, but I knew it was just polite bullshit. I’d known assholes like Takahashi before. They thought it all meant something, and they were fucking prickly as shit about theirs.

Takahashi looked back down at his handheld and his man spoke again.

“Mr. Takahashi regrets this misapprehension. You had reached an agreement
in principle
,” he said smoothly, glowing eyes creeping me out. “But you had not transacted your business, and thus no responsibility was transferred to Mr. Takahashi. He regrets this, and wishes you to know he would have very much liked to have worked with you in Hong Kong. It would have been an honor.” Suddenly the black man grinned widely, his whole face unfolding into glee like a flower. “In fact, Mr. Takahashi would like you to know that if your current commitments allow for it, he would be happy to make you an offer for service in his organization, at a very high level.”

I thought back to Morales. Everyone wanted to hire me on.

I gave a stiff, overdone bow. “Tell Mr. Takahashi, when you fucking see him next, that I regret I cannot accept his generous offer to go sit in the mud and jack off for the remaining couple of months we all have left. And that I accept his fucking apologies concerning Hong Kong.”

The kid looked up sharply again, stared at me for a moment, and then as one he and his man turned and walked back to their truck.

“You always take the piss out of people who have a hundred guns pointed at you like that?” Mehrak whispered.

The trucks all started with a roar and a huge belch of black smoke. I turned my head to look at Mehrak, who was pin-perfect from the ankles up, and a slop of mud from the ankles down. “We’re under
par-lay
,” I said, remembering the word. “That stiff asshole wouldn’t even use harsh words as long as we’re negotiating with
honor
.”

As the trucks spun around us, heading back toward the woods, Mehrak and I both turned and started slogging our way back to the SSF hover.

“You didn’t really want to talk to him, darling, did you?” Mehrak said quietly, maybe with a note of unexpected understanding.

I shook my head, pulling out my pack of cigarettes and shaking two loose, holding them out to him without thinking. “Nope. Just wanted to get a look at him and his people. We were never going to make a fucking deal with that asshole. He’s been a tiny king for too long, too used to getting his way, being bought off instead of run off.” I shrugged, putting both cigarettes between my lips. “I’m going to have to just kill him.”

IF YOU WERE PAYING ME, I’D TELL YOU THAT COSTS EXTRA/font>

What are you up to, you crazy bastard?
Dolores Salgado whispered in my head.
You’ve been too calm. I’d say you’ve been “happy,” but I’ve never seen that before so I don’t have a frame of reference
.

I looked around at everyone and tried to imagine a shrug for her.
It helps to have a reason
, I thought back at her.

“Bring up that image,” I said. Marko started to move, then hesitated, looking at Hense. She looked like she had something furry and sour stuck in her throat. After a second or two she nodded, and Marko gestured at the table. A sharp image of the area around Split popped into the air. I gestured and it zoomed down to a close-cropped view of the city and a crescent of wilderness around it.

The translucent map lit up the modified hover bay in an eerie green glow. Hense ruled a kingdom that was pretty much a few dozen hovers parked ten miles southeast of Split on a wide black sand beach, seawater lapping up against everything in this maddening, endless rhythm. Each hover had a big, bulky solar panel spread open on top like glass wings, but there hadn’t been much sun, and I wondered how far each brick would get. We scuttled across the damp sand from hover to hover taking emergency meetings, the System Security Force a fucking bureaucracy to the last.

At night it freaked me out, because none of the fucking avatars needed light. It was pitch-black, with everyone moving around easily. My own augments stuttered, sometimes bringing the night into perfect clarity, sometimes leaving me nearly blind.

“Looks like Takahashi’s bedding down here,” I said, pointing at a large clearing north of the city. “It’s clear of the radiation bloom and gives him old-road access to most of the rest of countryside. You can see his truck yard over here, and these are tents. The possible landing areas are also visible here, here, and here, and you can see his mining operations pretty clearly. Takahashi owns the immediate area.”

“Working for Orel,” Hense said.

I nodded. “Sure. The old man’s not stupid—he knows someday someone comes after him. Step one’s gonna be setting up camp outside the city, so he gets Takahashi to secure his ass. So if we’re going after the old man, first we have to take Takahashi out of the picture.” Hense opened her mouth and I talked right into it. “In years past, Director, I would have pegged the SSF for shoving a fleet of hovers right into his groin, a real scorch-the-earth, damn-your-own-casualties kind of operation, just so you could piss into his skull and show the world that no one denies the System Pigs
permission to fucking land
, right?”

I waited until she tried to talk again. I was enjoying being Janet Hense’s boss, whether she realized our roles or not. “But you
can’t
,” I shoved into her open mouth. “This is your wad, and once you shoot it, you’ve got nothing left. You spend it wiping Takahashi off the map, you’ve got nothing left to take on Split. So this is
my
problem, then.”

Glancing left, I saw Grisha hiding a grin behind his hand and a burning cigarette, and I threw him a wink. He was crammed between Marko and Mehrak in the tiny space, looking yellow and sweaty.

Hense waited me out for half a minute, holding back as I grinned at her. “We don’t have time,” she finally snapped, biting off the words like they were bits of leather in her mouth. “Recon, intel gathering—there isn’t
time
to plan another operation.”

Her voice was absorbed by the dense, soft soundproofing that lined the interior of the hover, just dying a foot short of me and sinking into the floor. The SSF couldn’t mount a raid on a two-bit warlord because they didn’t have the fuel and bullets to spare, but they still had kick-ass soundproofing on their hovers, which seemed like yen fucking well spent.

I shook my head. “We don’t need time. I go tonight. I don’t need anyone, but you can send Mehrak with me if you want.”

Mehrak scowled at me. “Brilliant. Thanks a fucking
lot
, you knee biter.”

I remembered Orel telling me that even if you could be rebooted from cold storage, no one liked dying, and I extended the middle finger of my right hand in his direction.

Hense leaned forward and put her skinny stick arms onto the table. “Avery—”

“I have everything I need,” I said. “Takahashi’s fronting. He doesn’t have ammo; half the guns he brought with him yesterday were props. He doesn’t have manpower; half the fucking
people
he brought yesterday were fucking
props
.” I held up my hand and began ticking off fingers. “He’s been operating since before the war ended—that’s a long time for a warlord to hold his crew together out in the cold, Janet. He’s got solar panels bolted to his trucks, but they’re not connected—he’s running those trucks on fuel, ethanol most probably. He brought a hundred fucking
props
with him to meet little old
me
.” I closed my hand. “He’s fronting. He’s weak and he’s trying to fool us to hold us off. I can get in there, slit his throat, and get out without breaking a sweat.” I glanced at Mehrak. “Well, maybe a little sweat if I have to drag your boy behind me like a lead boot.”

Mehrak leaned back and flipped me an elegant finger right back. I was starting to like him, avatar or not. Which wasn’t good for him. Everyone I liked was dead.

Hense was shaking her head. “We don’t want quiet. We don’t want slit throats in the night.” She studied me, chewing a rubber lip. There was so much unnecessary programming in the avatars it was stunning, sometimes, when I noticed shit like that. Then she leaned back suddenly. “We need noise. If you cut him down in the night, we still have a huge number of fuckheads with guns in our way. We need to chase them off. We need them to feel like the universe just kicked them in the head. We need them running for their fucking lives into the forest.”

I winked. “Sure. If you were paying me, I’d tell you that costs extra.”

“Hold up.”

I turned to find Marko, Mehrak, and Grisha following me. The sun was hidden behind a scum of gray clouds, and the air smelled like salt, a constant, endless pushing wind of it making any movement aside from the one the cosmos wanted difficult, exhausting. The three men didn’t look right togethern I’d first met Grisha he’d seemed like a typical Techie—a skinny fuck with fake glasses and a perpetual squint. So had Marko. Marko had gotten dark, but he was still just a Techie, a little round at the middle and his hands twitching like they were gesturing at a handheld all the time. Now Grisha looked like someone I would have taken a meeting with back in New York, someone who would have
hired
me, and argued the price. Mehrak was all cop, all the time, smooth and smug and self-assured behind his shiny square glasses. The three of them didn’t fit.

“Hello, Avery,” Grisha said as they caught up with me. He offered me a cigarette with a breathless smile. “That was an excellent presentation.”

“I’d hire you, dear,” Mehrak said with a grin, his eyes on Grisha’s offered smoke. “Shit, I miss cigs.”

I looked them over and slowly accepted the cigarette. “All right,” I said, turning to resume my walk to the beach. “Let’s hear the pitch.”

We walked in silence for a moment or two, and then Grisha cleared his throat. “Avery, you are… too fucking calm.”

I lit my cigarette and climbed a dune, the glittering black sand crumbling under me and making it a slow job. My damaged augments moderated my breathing and circulation, still doing that much for me. “Too
calm
?”

Grisha’s breathing was like a chainsaw, heavy and wet. His cigarette dangled from his lips as he talked. “Just days ago you were killing random strangers. Now you are humming happy songs and planning a side operation with gusto, like nothing happened these past few years.” He twitched his hands up. “It is disturbing, especially as we plan to accompany you.”

I stopped and spun. Marko was right behind me and squawked in surprise, stumbling back and then falling over, landing on his ass in the damp sand, arms splayed out behind him.

“Fuck, Avery!” he hissed under his breath.

“You’re not coming with me on Takahashi,” I said, looking at Grisha.

Grisha smiled, smoke rising slowly around his face, the damp twilight reflecting in his glasses. He’d never once seemed concerned I might hit him, in all the fractured time I’d known him. “Yes, we are, Avery. I do not mean to insult you, but you are a very important resource, Avery. We must take steps to ensure your safety.”

I took the cigarette from my lips and spat tobacco. My teeth ached. I had several molars missing, but I was used to that. Now my whole jaw ached with my pulse, like someone was going to punch me so hard in the future it reverberated backward in time. Grisha and I studied each other for a few seconds. He was on the balls of his feet—his arms were lazy and hung at his sides easily, and he was grinning at me, but I knew that if I dived forward and tried to get my hands on him he’d spin away and give me a good shot in the kidneys. If I pulled my gun he’d surge forward and clamp both hands on my wrist, forcing me to aim at my feet. Grisha was trying hard to look relaxed. When people worked at looking relaxed, my experience was they were ready to break your fucking neck.

“My safety, Grisha?="0ont>

He shrugged, giving me a crooked smile. “We have one shot at this, Avery. One shot at saving what is left, before we go gentle into that good night, yes?”

Mehrak turned toward the breaking waves and muttered, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” in a low, singsongy voice. “I miss getting shitfaced, too, if anyone’s wondering. End of the fucking world, and I get to face it sober.
There’s
justice.”

“As I said: Your calm is disturbing, Avery,” Grisha said, stepping forward a half step and putting a hand on my arm. I tensed, and then forced myself to relax. Grisha was not going to stab me in the belly with a shiv. If Grisha decided to kill me—and I could think of plenty of scenarios when that might come to pass—he would come at me from the front, with a word of warning. “Do you understand that you represent our last maneuver? You go up against Orel, your winning or losing determines whether the
entire human race
withers on the vine, fades from the universe. Yes? It is you.” He shrugged, releasing my arm. “I must be sure you make it to go after Orel. And I must be sure you understand that you
must
take him alive.”