The Digital Plague (13 page)

There were two or three beats of silence. “Understood, sir.” Happling finally said.

When she spoke again, the harshness was gone for a second. “If what Terries and this piece of shit say is true, Nathan, we’re dead if he gets more than a few feet away from us. Dead like your asshole partner back there. What do you think happens if we log Cates in? Do you think the fucking King Worm is going to let us tag along?”

Happling grunted. “I said
understood.
”

The corridor beyond the Blank Room was empty and clinically white: clean and monochrome, the bright lights hurting my eyes. I counted fifteen lighting fixtures as I was dragged backward, and then the world tilted and I was pulled into an elevator. In the second before the doors snapped shut, I saw three fat drops of blood on the nice clean floor. This cheered me up for some unknown reason.

We rode in silence, the floors dropping away in a blur, until we had to be underground. None of us said anything. There was something wonderful about being securely bound, buried under endless tons of cops—I didn’t have to make any decisions. Everything just flowed over me in an incomprehensible wave, keeping my head under.

When the elevator doors popped open, no one moved. Four System Cops blocked our way, all young men, jackets off, the sleeves of their uniformly white shirts rolled up even with their holsters, a cloud of cigarette smoke around them.

“Colonel Hense,
sir,
” said one in the middle, a pale, sweating man whose black hair was plastered to his forehead, his frame too slim and girlish to be a fucking cop. “With all due respect, why in
fuck
is Avery Cates still alive?”

Day Six:
And The Universe
Spun On

Raising one hand so she could stare down at her nails, the colonel spoke calmly. “Captain Happling, draw your weapon.”

Behind me I heard the familiar sound of a gun being pulled.

“Who’s feeling fast?” Happling said cheerfully. I could tell from his voice that he was smiling.

The four cops in front of us shifted uneasily, and I got the distinct feeling that Captain Happy behind me was the big cock in the room. The second biggest, I decided, considering the freezing wind blowing from the colonel’s direction. The skinny, pale cop looked past me and didn’t seem happy. “Hap, you know this shit is fucking wrong. That piece of crap is a cop killer. He should’ve been executed upon capture. What, you’re gonna put him in the
system?
Fuck, Hap—the King Worm’ll snap him up and he’ll just disappear somewhere.”

The King Worm. I’d always liked that name. Dick Marin, director of Internal Affairs, the de facto leader of the whole SSF. We hated the cops, the cops hated
their
cops. And the universe spun on.

“I do as I’m told, fellows,” Happling responded. “In a second or two, the colonel’s going to order you to step aside. You might gain some brownie points by doing so
now,
of your own free will.”

It was amazing—there were four of them, each armed. The colonel remained stock-still, no weapon in sight. But the four cops blocking our way suddenly looked doubtful.

“Otherwise,” Happling continued, “I’ll be forced to kill you all, and I’ll come out clean when I file the SIRs.”

I wondered idly what the fuck an SIR was. The four cops stood there a moment longer, but I knew they’d move on. The energy had gone out of them; it was obvious none of them wanted to go up against Captain Happy or his boss. Their line broke, the three silent ones moving off, hands in pockets, sullen. The skinny one stood there a moment more, a faint layer of color coming into his face.

“This is bullshit,
sir,
” he said to Hense. “This is gonna come back on you.”

No,
I thought.
You’ll be dead in two days.

“If you have a misconduct charge,” Hense said in the same level tone of voice she’d used when telling me she was going to kill me, “file it with the Worms and see what happens. I guarantee you’ll be patrolling Chengara in hours.
Hours.
Continue to piss me off, Lieutenant, and you might have an accident one of these days.”

The skinny cop looked worried, as if realizing he’d made an error. From behind me Happling’s impossibly cheerful voice bubbled up and over me like laughing gas. “Now move along, you stupid prick, before she gets
really
annoyed.”

The skinny cop hovered a final second or two, for pride’s sake, and then turned to slink away. After a moment I was spun around and dragged out of the cab.

“Hands in pockets?” Happling said over me. “Good boy. We’re going to be friends. Right up until I put a bullet in your fucking ear, you cop-killing piece of shit.”

His cheerful tone was maybe the worst thing I’d ever heard in my life. I took some consolation from the thought that I was murdering every cop who came near me, in slow motion, by remote control. That warbly voice in Newark again,
This is an assassination. Not yours.

The corridor was disappointingly similar to the last one: white, bright, spotless. As I glided along, the chair legs scraping loudly on the floor, cops glared back at me, all sorts of cops: big cops, short cops, fat cops, good-looking cops. I tried to smile but my mouth hurt, so I just stared back at them, imagining death. Then the world rotated again, and I glided backward into a lab. Glancing up, I saw level 4 tech services painted in neat black letters on the door.

A Techie, I thought. The worst kind: a
cop
Techie.

The door snapped shut as I cleared the threshold, and I was left sitting there. Now that I’d gone ten minutes without a fist smashing into me, everything was aching and throbbing. I was a purplish blob of bruises and bleeding nanobots. After a moment, I was spun around to face a lab cluttered with equipment. It reminded me of Pick’s old office, except with blindingly white light, white walls, and a lack of dust that was horrifying in its completeness. Otherwise it was the same narrow lanes between piles of black boxes and circuit boards, looped wires and other, less identifiable things.

We burrowed our way in deeper until I was swung around to face the inner sanctum of the lab. Techies everywhere were exactly the same: surrounded by crap, living their lives in the eye of a slow-moving storm of ruined tech. In the midst of the piles were two kids in gray SSF jumpsuits lounging on broken-down rolling chairs, wearing bizarre goggles that trailed thick cables connected to a monolithic black box. They both started and tore off the goggles, staring at us. One had a clean-shaven head that shone in the bright light, the other had a thick, dark beard and mustache blending into a dense head of hair, giving the impression of two small eyes peering out from behind a mask. The bald one leaped up, his shiny face turning red.

“What the fuck? Colonel, you know you can’t just waltz in here without a ten-eighty-nine form and a precall from the fifteenth floor,” he said in a nasally voice. “I’m going to have to—”

“Shut up,” Hense said, snapping her fingers at Happling and pointing to a spot on the floor. I was dutifully dragged there, and the big cop took up his station next to me, his piece still in his huge, ham hand at his side, so near my face I could almost smell the fucking powder. He held it casually, his finger along the side. In my pockets my hands twitched, and I kept my eyes on it.

“Colonel,” the skinny Techie continued, puffing out his chest, “I’ll remind you of protocol. You’re not my fucking boss. You’re—”

Hense suddenly reached out and took hold of his nose, and the kid started to squeal, crouching and doing a little dance under her tiny hand as she squeezed. Her empty eyes watched him for a moment—there was no joy in them, none of the usual System Pig arrogance and cruelty. They just stared down at the kid as he struggled to break free. She waited until he started to cry and then, with a snap of her wrist, she broke his nose and let him drop.

Smoothly, silently, her eyes flicked to the other kid, who was half crouched in his seat, frozen in shock. His pink tongue ran over his lips as he watched her carefully, as if he were tracking a wild animal.

I glanced at Happling’s gun.

“Mr. Marko,” Hense said in an even tone, “are you going to quote protocol at me?”

Marko shook his head so fast I imagined his beard making a
whoosh
ing sound in the still air. “No, no—never, Colonel, not me. I’m your man. What do you need?”

She hesitated as if considering the depth of his sincerity, and his face tightened as if he expected a slap. But she just gestured in my direction. “Take a blood sample and listen while I explain the situation.”

He nodded and rubbed his hands together, staring at her blankly for a moment, and then started into motion. “Right! Yes, I’ll take a blood sample … uh,” he paused, peering uncertainly at me.

I grinned, imagining my teeth nice and bloody. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You’re dead already.”

“Go on, Mr. Marko,” Hense said, sounding bored. “Mr. Cates will not molest you. Unless he wants to find out just how much pain a man can be in and still not be dead.”

I tried to shrug my eyebrows, but wasn’t sure what my face was doing, exactly, in response to my commands. I kept my eyes on the Techie, who stared back in obvious horror. “I think I already know, champ, but there’s no margin in finding out
for sure,
is there?”

Marko blinked and dove for his workbench, where he scrabbled through a box of junk until he located an autohypo that looked exactly like the one Terries had used on me. Hense began running it all down for him, in clipped, impressive phrases that betrayed an organized, quick mind—she gave it to him in three or four horrifying sentences. Then he approached me like I was a wild animal on a long leash. I kept my eyes off him, looking first at his partner, who was slowly pulling himself from the floor, his nose strikingly crooked and his mouth and chin covered in dark blood, then at the colonel, who stared back at me with unblinking eyes, her arms crossed under her breasts.

Marko’s hands were shaking as the autohypo smoothly sucked blood from my arm. When it
ding
ed softly, he yanked it out awkwardly and almost stumbled backward. He whirled around and disappeared into the maze of crap. His partner pulled himself onto a workbench and sat with his head in his arms, dripping blood onto the white floor and snuffling pathetically.

“Aw, c’mon,” Happling said cheerfully. “Are you kidding me? You ain’t hurt. Come here, I’ll straighten that out for you with my thumbs, good as new.”

The kid lifted his head to stare in horror at the big cop, which inspired a guffaw from the red-haired giant. I lifted my eyes from his gun just as he glanced down at me.

“Can you believe this kid?” he said, and then looked back at the Techie. “You know who this is, kid? This is Avery fucking Cates, cop killer. In other words, he’s the one man in this room who needs to be worried about me. But look at ’im! The old bastard is free and easy. So why are you afraid of me?”

The Techie just stared. I let my eyes fall back on Happling’s gun.

“Hell, it was
her
who snapped your nose, buddy, not me.”

“That’s enough, Captain.”

I dropped my eyes quickly, studying the floor and the tiny pattern of blood droplets I’d produced there. After a moment, Happling said, “Yes, boss,” in a tight, subdued voice.

I considered. Hense was keeping me off the grid because she didn’t want to take the chance that what she’d been told was true, that she’d die quickly—and horribly—once I was out of sight, and the first thing her superiors would do if my name got put in the System was bundle me off somewhere. I could tell she was the sort of coldhearted bitch who would never lose a moment’s sleep over putting one in my head, but she
needed
me, in a strange way.

Still, a feeling of freedom was singing inside me—I had nothing,
nothing
to lose. At the end of this little adventure, I was dead. There wasn’t a fucking scenario that didn’t end with me dead. I’d been here before. It was a good place. It clarified things.

The four of us sat in a tense silence for a while, Happling and Hense standing perfectly still, the other Techie from time to time moaning and snuffling back blood through what was left of his nose. When Marko returned, I saw him first and watched him make his way slowly back into the tiny clearing amid the mess.

“Mr. Marko?” Hense asked.

He nodded, staring at me, the expression on his face hard to pin down. It resembled the look of some of the hungry dogs that prowled the old stadium, hoping to snag a scrap or a slow-mover from some of the camps inside. I had the feeling Marko would gladly have slit my belly open and peered inside, just to satisfy his curiosity.

“You’ve got it right. I’ve never
seen
Tech like this. Ty Kieth—you know the name? Fuck, he’s a legend. Totally unreliable, of course, but fuck, the man’s gifted.” He leaned toward me as if a strong wind were pushing him from behind. “I’ve never
seen
anything this elegant.”

“Mr. Marko,” Hense snapped. “You can confirm Dr. Terries’ statements?”

He nodded again, slowly. “We’re fucking dead, all right. The moment he’s not in the room with us.” A smile, wide and rapturous, spread across his face, his teeth shocking in the midst of the dark beard. “This is
amazing
work.” He glanced at her. “I didn’t have time for a thorough look. There’s a lot going on there. But the basics are right.”