Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (31 page)

I’d have to run with Grisha as far as he was willing to go, and then cut him loose.

As I studied the ground for my shredder, I kept Grisha in my peripheral vision as best I could with the fucking helmet in my way, with my own sweat condensing on my visor, my own fetid air congealing around me inside the rad suit. The noise was getting hard to think through, between Mehrak’s low groaning and the Pushed’s rising screech.

And then, right in front of me, one of them blinked his bloody eyes and looked right at me. He was a kid, sick-skinny and covered in bleeding sores, his arms still locked in position to carry a rifle he’d lost long before. His hair was white and black, falling out in clumps, and his eyes were like two dull coals, just red with a speck of blackness in their center.

Without warning, he sagged forward and grabbed onto my suit.

“Dita,” he whispered so quietly my augments and the suit’s microphone barely registered it. “Where is she?”

I staggered backward in surprise, bringing my auto up in shock, and he slid off me, hitting the floor and staying there. I looked around. Half the Pushed in the room were showing signs of life, of awareness. Orel’s Push was wearing off, and all these people had just graduated from Unluckiest Fucks in the World to Unluckiest Fucks in the
Universe
.

I spun and barreled my way toward Grisha, who turned instantly to put his gun on me.

“We’ve got to go,” I said, loud, but trying not to shout. I needed to be persuasive. I needed to be reassuring. “We’ve been fucked with.”

Grisha kept the gun up, but studied me through the muddy visor. I had faith in Grisha. Grisha was a thinker, and he would give me the seconds I needed. “Avery, we must proceed.”

I shook my head. “We’ve been
fucked
, Grish. Orel’s not here.
He’s not fucking here.
” I gestured in the air. “Look at these poor shits. They’re waking up. The Push is fading. He Pushed them and then he left—he wasn’t here when we dropped.” I curled my free hand into an involuntary fist. “He’s somewhere else.”

Grisha turned bodily to take in the room. “It may be,” he said slowly.

“His avatar sure seemed to know to expect us,” Marko put in. “It was sitting down here, waiting in the tunnel.”

“Fuck,” Grisha said in a flat, low voice. Around us, more and more of the Pushed were dropping to the floor. The ones with any strength left began screaming immediately; others just writhed there, getting slower and slower, like fish plucked suddenly from water. “Fuck!” He turned again, fast, but kept the gun down by his hip this time. “How can we be
sure
? Avery, the future counts on
us
. How can we be
sure
?”

I holstered my gun and began fishing in my suit for the big hunting knife I’d brought along with me. “I’ve been on the dangling end of Orel’s pole before,” I said. “I know how it fucking feels. The only thing missing is the sound of him laughing at me.”

“Fuck!”
Grisha shouted, lashing out a leg and kicking a body on the floor, then stumbling backward as his center of gravity went wonky in the heavy suit.

“It was too fucking easy,” Marko said, waving his arms. “I
knew
this felt too fucking
easy
!” I decided to let Marko rant. I didn’t have time to remind him that he didn’t rank high enough to have unsolicited opinions.

Abruptly, the explosions and shaking from above stopped.

Knife and gun in my hands, I stormed over to where Mehrak was lying on the floor. “Marko!” I snapped. “Help me!”

He jumped and then scurried over to me, slipping on the sweat and blood and crashing into me in a kneeling position. I steadied him with my gun on his shoulder as I pulled the knife from its hiding place with my free hand.

“Go over to Orel,” I shouted, putting my auto in Mehrak’s face. I fired twice, then pushed myself up and put two more shells into his chest and belly, making sure. Who the fuck knew where they might put a brain in these tin men. I dragged myself, breathing hard, over to where Marko stood over Mara’s avatar, hands hanging limply at his side.

“That was—” he started to say, but I shoved him aside and stepped over to where Orel’s avatar slumped, eyes open like Hense’s. Without Orel’s personality it was just the image of a tall, plain woman, reddish hair in curls around her face. I knelt down and yanked on her feet to straighten her out, then took hold of Marko’s shoulder and yanked him down with me. He fell into a kneeling position, squawking in protest.

I pulled out his hand and pressed the knife into his glove.

“What are you doing?” Grisha shouted at me.

I ignored him. Time was closing in on us—another avatar of Hense was on her way, System Pigs in tow, and even if she believed me that Orel had played us, she’d already decided I was expendable.

The noise level kept climbing and the slow, drugged shuffle of the dying bastards around us was herking and jerking into an alarming flurry of jagged movement. The Pushed weren’t in any physical condition to be a threat, but a couple dozen warm bodies could slow anybody down, and some of them did still clutch their rifles, assuming Orel had even bothered to give them ammunition.

I tugged the shirt under Mara’s jacket down, exposing her white neck. I looked up at Marko. “I want the head,” I rasped. “You’re the trained technical associate.”

“Aw,
fuck,
” Marko muttered, leaning down and tracing his chubby fingers along Mara’s neck. He was murmuring something softly as he worked, reciting specs from the avatar designs.

Suddenly Grisha was looming over me. “Cates, there is no time for souvenirs—”

“I’m done following that bastard around, playing by his rules,” I said, lungs burning. I watched Marko take the knife with a precise, strong grip that hinted at competence and certainty, press it against the avatar’s fake white flesh, and begin
sawing
. Coolant oozed everywhere like sap, slow and cold. “I’ll bet you he didn’t manage to erase
everything
from this avatar. I’ll bet you he doesn’t want lowly old Avery to have it. I’ll bet you he comes after it.” I grinned. “This time, Orel’s gonna come find
me
.”

PART V

XXXIII

SHEER DETERMINATION AND WILLINGNESS TO HURT

“Three hundred and sixty-two cigarettes left,” Grisha said.

“In the world, probably,” I said, shivering uncontrollably. The fire we’d built three weeks before and had kept going continuously was huge, but it seemed to offer no heat whatsoever. “Time to quit.”

“Quitting is easy,” he said, smiling as he knelt down, putting his hands out to warm them and leaning forward with a cigarette in his mouth to light up. After a second he leaned back, exhaling smoke into the air like he was making clouds. “I have quit many times.”

I didn’t remember it so cold. Or so flat, and so empty. You could still see the basic outline of the buildings, and about half the wall was still standing, sand creeping up on both sides, catching the moon now and then and glinting like a beacon in the distance. The silence was complete. When the fire died down and Marko and Grisha and the ht="1em" aa>others had gone below, all you would hear was the wind, the sky above crystal clear and filled with stars.

I held out my hand. “Give,” I said. Grisha snorted, amused, and handed over two cigarettes. I settled back into the weird little seat I’d made in the sand and stuck one behind my ear, the other in my mouth. I didn’t bother lighting it yet. Grisha was getting cagey with his cigarettes, and I could see the near future when he would simply refuse to give me any more.

A few hundred feet straight ahead of us the tail end of an old SSF hover jutted straight up into the air. In the daylight it was charred and dented, more than half-buried, a permanent sculpture in the middle of fucking nowhere. At night it looked sleek and shiny, the firelight playing off of it giving an impression of infinite possibilities, thousands of shadows. I’d been staring at the hover for days now. I was pretty sure I’d seen it crash, in some alternate universe thousands of years before, when I hadn’t had any metal in my brain, when Remy was alive and far away from me.

If Remy had lived, I’d have told him that patience was the most important thing a Gunner could learn. Canny Orel was legendary for his patience, for waiting in rooms for days just to get the drop on a mark, for pretending to be an entirely different person for weeks, for months. Any asshole could score a cheap gun or a good knife and walk around like a hard case, calling himself a Gunner, and maybe even get someone equally stupid to pay them to kill someone. If they didn’t learn patience, if they didn’t learn to wait for the right moment instead of charging in, stoned out of their minds and convinced sheer determination and willingness to hurt would carry them through, they usually died fast.

And Remy would have said, “Shit, Avery, I put up with you, don’t I? I know all about fucking
patience
.”

The world
felt
empty. Grisha had called home to his SPS troops and gotten a hover to us in fifteen minutes, skimming easily through the chaos in Split. The System Pigs were embroiled in an assault on Diocletian’s palace that proved to be tougher than they’d anticipated, because the Pushed topside had been given clear instructions to resist and didn’t let minor things like gunshot wounds slow them down. They fought until they bled out, and then someone stepped up from behind them and took their place. The cops actually took losses. The SPS hover had gotten us to Spain in decent style, back to Grisha’s people. Even there things had felt wide open and loose, like my every step had an echo that had been muffled before.

Sitting down next to me with a grunt, Grisha glanced past me at the old crate I’d set up as a makeshift table, shook his head, and settled in, smoking contentedly.

“How many N-Tabs?” I asked.

“About a thousand,” he said immediately. Grisha’s competence was startling sometimes. “Mr. Marko has determined baseline survival can be maintained with a half a tab each per day, assuming adequate water. Which we cannot assume, as we have found no source of fresh water yet. Please do not ask me how much water we have left on hand.”

I nodded. Half an N-tab wasn’t much, but I’d done worse. I’d done worse in this very spot.

We’d made no effort to be stealthy, making a lot of noise on our way from Spain. We’d stolen what we needed, often at gunpoint, and I’d used my own name everywhere, obnoxiously. Not that it mattered, I didn’t think—Orel could certainly track us electronically if he had some power to draw on and a functional satellite in the air. But everywhere you went these days there was old tech, abandoned, rusting, useless, so you couldn’t make any assumptions. I wasn’t taking chances.

“Why here, Avery?” Grisha said suddenly.

I didn’t answer right away. I felt small in the hugeness of the world around us, suddenly, comfortingly certain that I was too tiny to really matter, that nothing I did was going to nudge the cosmos this way or that. I was off the Rail, I thought. I’d jumped the tracks and I was skittering down a steep incline, scraping myself off on it, eroding myself on the way down, but at least I was choosing the path.

“I wanted someplace familiar,” I said, leaning forward with some difficulty to light my cigarette in the flames. I wanted New York, but New York was gone. There was nothing familiar there anymore. “I wanted someplace where I would know where I could put my back, where I could grab some cover. I wanted someplace empty so I wouldn’t have to worry about collaterals.” I waved my hand around. “There’s no fucking place on
earth
more empty and familiar than Chengara Fucking Penitentiary.”

The underground complex was still usable, depending on your definition of the term. The topmost level was a wreck, bombed to hell and invaded by sand. The old elevator shafts were sturdy enough and the lower levels were clear enough and stable enough to use as shelter. I didn’t like being down there, both because it reminded me of them shoving needles into my brain, that moment when hundreds of voices had poured into me, screaming and chattering, and because I didn’t want to get trapped down there. Shelter could become a tomb if someone got the drop on you.

“Familiar, yes,” he said sourly. “I remember it well, also. I did not realize it could be so
cold
here.” He sent another plume of smoke into the air. I heard a commotion from my right, but didn’t bother lifting my automatic from where it sat on the ground next to me. Grisha had brought two dozen grimly silent men and women, all our age—fucking old—and all wearing the plain gray jumpsuit that was kind of an SPS uniform, but I’d come to recognize Marko’s thunderous entrances into any situation; if he didn’t have a knack for tech and a kind of unquestioning obedience I admired, he would have been nothing but a lethal weak link in any operation.

“But it is good choice,” Grisha went on, studying the coal of his cigarette, which inspired me to finally light mine. “Defensible. Wall still in place, mostly, which is both good and bad—masks approach but gives us protection from long-range attacks. Wide open so we can keep watch and no one can sneak up on us. Underground bunker that has proven to withstand aerial assault, plus it gives us movement under the ground.” He nodded. “With the tech we have wired, and the sun that never fails us out here, we are in best possible position.” He snorted. “Except for
not being here
, best possible position.”

Marko lumbered up to us, bundled up in several layers of clothes. His beard and hair were growing back nicely, and at a startling rate. The man was like the God of Hair. He tossed a pack of cards into my lap, their >

He’d asked us the same question every night for a week. “I’ve still got about five million yen in dormant accounts,” I offered.

Grisha snorted. “Five million digital yen is worth as much as this sand here. We might as well play for sand.”

“You’re just pissed you don’t have any yen in dormant accounts,” I said mildly, sucking in smoke. I couldn’t remember how the old cigarettes, the pre-Unification ones, had tasted. These seemed fine, but I thought the old ones had to have been better, even as stale and dry as they’d been. “This is just grousing.”