The Digital Plague (17 page)

Happling stepped forward, crowding him and making him step back. “Did you just offer to bribe us, you piece of shit?”

The man’s confident smile drained off his face. “No! No! Of course not,” he said quickly, putting up his hands. “I was just—”

The big cop slapped him across the face, moving so fast there was no time to react. The gorgeous man’s head whipped back instantly, his lower lip split open, blood running in a weak trickle down his chin. His expression told me he’d never been hit before. In his entire life. He wasn’t even afraid, he was fucking
amazed.
And I thought,
Who grows up without being hit? How rich did you have to be?
I wanted a number. I wanted
statistics.

“You stupid fuck,” Happling said, turning away.

He marched past us toward the field. The Crusher stepped aside as the bigger man approached, and without saying anything more we followed him onto the field to a decrepit hover that had once been silver but was now a charred sort of gray. It was a small, ancient model, but designed for long trips over water. Happling climbed in without a word, and we followed him, one by one.

“Ah, hell,” Marko muttered as Happling and Hense disappeared into the cockpit. “It smells like
shit
in here.”

I had to agree with the kid’s delicate nose, though my own—probably broken—wasn’t working too well. There were seats, however, a great luxury, and I sank into one with a snort of pain. Nothing seemed to be working right. It was as if I had a million tiny fractures, all waiting for the right moment to snap.

My hosts didn’t waste any time. The hatch snapped shut, the cabin pressurized, and the roar of displacement, somewhat muffled, sprang up outside. With a lurch we were off the ground. I turned to look out the tiny window by my seat and saw the two Crushers standing there, paralyzed. I knew they were wondering who to be more afraid of, Dick Marin, who they imagined was a single man in an office far away, or these crazy cops who were right there, who’d been close enough to touch.

“Mr. Cates.” Hense’s voice filled the cabin. “Where are we going?”

I hesitated just a moment, but there was no margin in keeping it a secret. “Paris,” I said. “There’s a beacon. In my nanobots or some shit.”

As we rose higher and higher, I heard Marko muttering darkly to himself as he got settled in, bringing out an endless array of devices and setting them up fussily around his seat. I kept my eyes trained out the window, watching as the city spread out below us. We floated over downtown, and instead of the serene emptiness we’d just left, there were masses of people, smoke, and other SSF hovers, most with the thin silver threads pouring out of them that meant Stormers being deployed. Downtown hadn’t paid any fucking attention to any curfew and wasn’t going to sit idly by while everyone died of some mysterious disease.

I wondered if there’d be anything left to save, if I ever had the choice.

Day Seven:
Freezing Over the
World Around Us

Mentally I relaxed. After an hour or so, the world zooming past us at incredible speed, it was peaceful, and I had the opportunity to really analyze and enjoy each and every ache and cut I’d recently acquired. I probed each one carefully, savoring the pain. I pushed my tongue into my broken teeth, I pressed fingers against my broken ribs, I tried to pry my swollen eyelids apart. The dim, humming interior of the cabin felt like privacy, and I was so tired I almost dozed off in the seat. Then Marko cursed softly, dropping one of his tools onto the floor of the cabin, and I sat up with a jolt of pain through my back, cursing myself for falling asleep like a fucking rookie.

“So you’re really Avery Cates, huh?”

I looked over at the kid. He’d connected a series of fist-sized black boxes together with cables, one of which ran to a small, handheld screen. He was staring at the screen while he manipulated some switches on one of the boxes, the sick green light of the screen making his face look rotten.

“Sure,” I said, lisping painfully. “And you’re no one I’ve ever heard of.”

He didn’t look up, his eyes dancing, his fingers moving gracefully, like independent creatures on the ends of his hands. “You really kill all the people they say you did?”

I looked out the window at swirling clouds. After a moment I said, “Maybe half.”

“They all deserve it?”

I thought about it. There’d been a time when I’d been reasonably sure everyone I’d killed—mistakes aside—had deserved it, on some level. Now I wasn’t so sure. It was different, somehow, when you weren’t being hired for it, when you were doing it for your own agenda.

“Most,” I finally said. “What are you doing?”

“Analyzing the signals from our friends the microscopic bots. Seeing what I can figure out, trying to reverse them.” I had no peripheral vision left, but I felt his eyes shift onto me. “You really know Ty Kieth?
The
Ty Kieth? Who wired up Amsterdam six years ago?”

“I knew him. He’s an annoying little shit, but then all you Tech boys are.” I considered the persistent ringing in my ears and wondered if Happling had shaken something loose. “He did good work for me, though.”

“He’s a genius,” Marko said without embarrassment. “A real-life genius. Up there with Amblen and Squalor, you ask me. Criminal, of course, beyond redemption, like every other pre-Uni genius, right? Squalor goes and starts the Electric Church, his pal Amblen’s holed up in The Star, doing lord knows what.” The Star was an island fortress off Manhattan, all that was left of some monument or statue or other waste of time. Rumor was that not even the SSF could get into it because of all the illegal tech Amblen had built into it, but I knew what those sorts of rumors were worth. “Kieth’s number thirty-four on the SSF list, did you know that? Was fifty-three before he met you. You advanced his career quite a bit.”

“Always glad to help.”

“His name’s all over this shit. It’s like he
wanted
people to know it was him.”

I turned my head to look at him, my neck making a gravelly popping sound. “Wanted you all to know it was him in the two days before you choke on your own blood and die?” I considered. “Why in hell would he do that?”

He looked back down at his little screen. “Mr. Cates, not
everything
will be dead. No vector for the Monks, you know.” He leaned forward slightly, peering at his little screen. “There’s another signal emanating from you, Mr. Cates. It’s being touched right now by several encrypted fingers.”

I closed my eyes in order to really revel in the aching that suffused my whole body. “Subdermal chip. My people use it to track me down if any of my fans manage to get the drop on me. Some of my friends in Europe are being notified of my approach.”

“You’re just that important, huh?”

If I’d felt any better, I might have leaped up to twist his nose a little, but I was too tired, so I let it slide. “Yen buys you a lot, kid. And I’ve got yen coming out my
ass,
thanks to your boss.”

“Colonel Hense?”

I opened my good eye and trained it on him. He was serious though, and wasn’t even looking at me, his piano-player fingers waving gently like grass underwater. “No,” I said, closing my eye and sinking back down into the soft red ache that was my body. “Director Marin. We’re old friends.”

A noise from the cockpit made me open my eye again, and then Hense was in the cabin, a tiny black wind freezing over the world around us. She moved gracefully despite the vibration, and I admired her as she picked her way to the seat opposite mine, sinking into it and strapping herself in with one smooth movement. I kept my eye on her as she reached into her coat and pulled out her flask, liking her trim little figure and her soft, perfect skin. It didn’t look like anyone had landed a blow on her in years. Some of the System Pigs, they were almost supernatural when they got going.

She poured a blast into the collapsible cup and handed it across to me. “Mr. Marko?”

He nodded without looking up at her. “I’ve got the signal and I can track it to its source. It’s pinging the nanos in Mr. Cates about five times a second. I can’t yet see what information it’s getting back, but I can see Kieth’s name pretty clearly. I can get us to the source of that beacon signal.”

I stared down at the evil liquid in the little cup, thinking that some liquor would probably kill me in my present precarious state of health. And I wasn’t a young man anymore. I was pushing thirty-three. I was ancient.

“Mr. Cates,” Hense said, her voice as neutral and controlled as always. “This is fair warning: I’m considering asking Captain Happling to come in here and hog-tie you so we can carry you around like luggage. This will prevent you from acting against our wishes again, as you did back in the loading bay. It occurs to me that your little germs can keep us all healthy just as easily if you’re bound and gagged. In short, Mr. Cates, I think we need to renegotiate our arrangement.”

I was still eyeing the cup, my stomach already curling up into a frightened ball at the thought of drinking its contents, but I was onstage, in the unblinking spotlight of Colonel Hense’s regard, and I knew I had to start to dance. Stomach flipping, I raised the little cup to my lips and knocked the burning gin back, forcing my spasming throat to accept it. My whole body flared up into sensible protest, but I kept my eyes blank, my smile easy, and held out the little cup for a refill, like the cold-blooded bastard everyone thought I was. It was always better to be the most terrible person in the room. Always.

She studied me for a moment, and then leaned forward to pour.

“You don’t look dumb, Colonel, so I’m going to assume the good captain has been giving you some really bad advice,” I said, snatching the cup back as soon as she was done to conceal the way it shook in my hand. “Sure, you can find Kieth. But Kieth never masterminded this. Kieth is a hired hand. I needed you to get me to Paris, but once we touch down, Colonel, I don’t need you anymore. You, on the other hand, need me. You need me to get to the real architects of this clusterfuck, and you need me just to stay alive for the necessary extra few hours it’ll take to sort all this out.” I downed my second drink by sheer force of will, swallowed my own stomach as it tried to claw its way up my throat, and leaned forward. “I don’t need
you.
You can tie me up, sure, you can instruct that gorilla you’ve trained to bop me on the head whenever I get unruly, but in that scenario you’ve got me unhappy and determined to be rid of you the moment we hit Paris. Right?” I shook my head, hoping the cold sweat that had blossomed all over my body wasn’t totally obvious. “No, Colonel, we’re still partners.”

She didn’t blink or react in any overt way. I tried to remember if she’d ever blinked, and couldn’t.

“Hey, Colonel?” Marko said suddenly.

She held up one small hand between them, not taking her eyes off me. I dug the nails of my left hand, hidden from her, into my palm to try and scare up a new jolt over the smear of steady pain that had enveloped me, trying to keep my head clear. She stared at me. I was getting mighty sick of the staring, which was Hense’s prime tactic. I imagined a lot of people broke under that stare in Blank Rooms.

“Colonel,” Marko tried again, tentative but determined. She flashed that hand out again, and he shut his mouth with a click.

We were all silent for a moment, the hover humming beneath us, and I thought I could feel her considering her options as she looked me over. I had her over a barrel in a sense, and she knew it. Maybe Happling and his big shovels for hands could hang on to me, but maybe not. And maybe if we worked together I’d shave valuable days off her trip. An extra couple of days roaming around might mean coming back to an entire East Coast eaten by these things. A week might mean North America gone.

She cocked her head and regarded me. I held her gaze as sweat dripped into my eyes, digging my nails in as hard as I could while she just sat there, completely still. Then, without warning, she straightened up. “Your terms, then, for
part-nership?
”

I was ready. “Two things, Colonel, and that’s it. One, I am going to kill every last person involved with this. Someone put this fucking hex on
me
and I plan to make them eat it, okay? No one is going to try and stop me from making whoever it is eat a bullet. Okay?”

She kept up the stare for a moment and then nodded. “As long as it doesn’t interfere with cleaning up this mess, Mr. Cates. If I need someone alive in order to stop this from spreading further, your chances of killing them will be severely reduced.”

I considered this, my whole body starting to shiver, my muscles twitching in a complicated dance that rippled through me on an obscure schedule. Gripping the armrest with my free hand, I sat forward, stiffening my body and hunching over to hide the reaction. “I can live with that, as long as it’s understood that my revenge is deferred, not forbidden.”

She nodded. “All right. Two?”

I shrugged my eyebrows. “I walk away after it’s all said and done. We’re probably going to die, Colonel Hense, but if by some miracle we
don’t
end up watching each other be eaten alive from the inside out, I don’t want a goddamn bullet in the back.”

Her eyes shifted up over my shoulder and stayed there for an uncomfortable amount of time. Marko leaned forward urgently into the frame my working eye offered me.

“Colonel! There’s a signal—”

“All right, Mr. Cates,” Hense said, bringing her eyes back to my face and extending a hand. There was, to my surprise, a subtle smile in her eyes, and I had the bizarre feeling she
liked
me. “We have an understanding, and I give you my word that your wishes will be observed, assuming my stipulations. You help us track down whoever orchestrated this. You stick by us at all times to ensure our health and well-being. You get to kill whoever you deem responsible for this mess unless I ask you politely to wait, and you walk away if we happen to survive. Agreed?”