by Jeff Somers
With a glance at the battle raging to my left, I stepped out directly in front of the trio. They stopped about ten feet away, the German leveling the gun at me. That didn’t bother me. I’ve had plenty of guns pointed at me, and recent adventures had forced me to reconsider who really was a threat to my life. If you weren’t a cyborg killing machine or an elite System Security Force officer, you just didn’t get my blood pressure up.
“It not worth it, friend,” the German said. His accent was so thick he seemed to be picking the words from a muddy stream. I flicked my cigarette at his feet and exhaled smoke. The cigarettes used to be better. It was like booze. Sure, you could find them, and if you had the yen you could even buy good ones-but the best were pre-Unification. Maybe that was romantic bullshit, but everyone swore they tasted better despite the age and even the shit cigs were ungodly expensive. For most of us, shit was all we ever saw.
“Listen, you Teutonic fuck, you know me. Kev Gatz was your roommate. We’ve met.”
He squinted at me, his shoulders and arms twitching. It was unappetizing.
“Ya,” he said at last, his flat, red face breaking into an ugly smile. “I see you before. Sure.” The smiled snapped off. “Get the fuck out of way.”
I held up both hands. “I just need to find Marcel.”
The smile came back. “Marcel? Ya, I know Marcel. He hiding. I tell you where he is. Five hundred yen.”
A wave of tired rage rippled through me. I was tired of obstacles. The grinning red potato of a face pushed the wrong button, so I took him down. It was ridiculously easy. Big men-especially big men who have paid dearly and suffered much discomfort for their hugeness-usually overestimate the amount of force required to break them.
It didn’t take any special kung fu. I nodded and glanced down at the street, waited a beat, and then launched myself forward directly at the shotgun. Before the German could react, I slammed into the barrel of the gun, ramming it up into his nose. He went down, his nose shattering into a bloody pulp. I held on to the shotgun as it slipped from his fingers. Since the last thing I needed was some drug lord coming after me in addition to all my other admirers, I whipped the barrel down and held it on the two mules.
“Stay,” I advised. “Our business will be done soon.”
As the German writhed on the ground, an explosion went off near the store, blowing a warm wind past us. The mules glanced over but I kept my eyes on them. I kicked the German lightly and he moaned.
“You’ve got bones like a fucking bird, friend,” I said. “Just give me the skinny on Marcel and you can finish your deliveries. Fuck with me some more and I’ll break every single hollow bone you have. You understand?”
The German moaned. “Ya, ya.”
“Good.” There was a second explosion, a second blast of warm wind. I winked at the two mules. “No worries, then.”
Everything was on fire. Outside the beat-up old hotel, every fifth building was burning, and most had already burned once or twice in previous uprisings.
“Why do they always burn shit down? Every single time things get out of hand, all they want to do is burn shit down. Took us hundreds of thousands of years to get to this point, and they want to fucking piss it all away in an evening.”
I shrugged. “None of it’s theirs. Burning it’s just entertainment.”
Marcel was a plump man of indeterminate nationality; so used to being tracked down and accosted he didn’t bat an eye when I emerged from the sewer drain down the block and walked into the old hotel he was living in. He’d made the ornate lobby his headquarters, and it was like a goddamn oriental court: People just lounged lazily around him looking bored, all of them young, good-looking, and heavily armed. Polite, too, with a few Crushers on the payroll standing uncomfortably here and there. Except for the Crushers, they’d all had a lot of cosmetic augmentation done, men and women, and drifted about in silky threads, not looking dangerous at all. Which made me think they just might be.
His people did nothing to stop me introducing myself, and for five minutes Marcel was happy to shoot the shit with me about the weather, the summary SSF executions he’d witnessed outside his windows, about the fact that no one knew how to riot properly anymore.
I’d heard of Marcel through Gatz and scraps of talk here and there, but there were a thousand operators in New York. They all thought they were the fucking Godfather and usually ended up dead before too long. Marcel had shown up in gossip about a year or so ago. He was heavy, had lazy eyes that remained half-shut, and since I’d arrived he hadn’t moved so much as an inch from the plush chair he was ensconced in.
“Well, Mr. Cates-who is such a good friend of Kev Gatz that Kev never mentioned him-I appreciate the social call under such extreme circumstances, but what can I do for you?”
I nodded. “I’ve come to beg a favor.”
The porcine little eyes widened just a bit and then settled elastically back to half-mast. “A favor, Mr. Cates? Alima, honey, go do a credit check on Mr. Cates while he tells me his tale of woe.”
A Middle Eastern-looking woman sitting on the floor hoisted herself up with animal grace and disappeared into the interior of the hotel.
“I’m not suggesting there’s no payoff for you,” I said quickly, trying to maintain my smile, my calm, and my hardass look all at once. It was exhausting. “But there’s no immediate payoff. Long-term, I’m willing to offer you a fair price. Double a fair price.”
Marcel studied me. “Mr. Cates, your name is out there, so I believe you’ve got a big job on the hook. Okay. Let’s stipulate you got a big payday coming. What do you need from me?”
I shrugged. “I need to get to London.”
Marcel laughed. After Dick Marin’s sudden barks, this sounded decadent and bottomless. His whole body jiggled with amusement. “Oh, Mr. Cates,” he said finally. “That’s rich. Transport’s normally expensive. In these unsettled times, it’s fucking impossible. I don’t care what you’ve got on the hook. You can’t afford it.”
I swallowed. “You’ve heard of me?”
Marcel shrugged, still giggling, wiping his eyes. “By reputation, Mr. Cates. A fair Gunner. Reliable. No Canny Orel, maybe, but competent.”
Canny Orel again-he was becoming my patron saint. Rumored to have killed over a hundred contracts in his time and retired rich. His name had been out of circulation for a while. When they’d been active, Orel’s organization had killed everyone-criminals, cops, politicians-with legen-dary impunity. You never knew with old stories like that, that tended to grow with the telling. But even if you subtracted three-fourths of what you heard as bullshit, they’d still been a bunch of hardasses I wouldn’t want to mess with. Anyone who had any kind of legit link to the Dъnmharъ was instantly promoted to Chief Asskicker in the room. “You know my rep. You know I don’t fuck around.”
Marcel shrugged again, all the good humor draining from him. “A desperate man can forget his rep pretty fast.”
The Middle Eastern woman re-entered the room, crossed to Marcel, and leaned in to whisper to him. Marcel’s piggy eyes widened again. He looked at me for some time before speaking.
“Mr. Cates, your credit is good. I think I can get you on a flight tonight. We will have to arrange a price.”
I blinked. “What the hell did she find out?”
Marcel smiled. “Only that your credit is good, Mr. Cates. Our price?”
Thank God, I thought, for loose lips. Marcel must have heard my payday was huge. And very real. I flipped open a small notebook and tossed it to him. “Write down a number. I’ll pay you when my work is done.”
He paused for a moment, still studying me, and then began to laugh as he laboriously wrote numerals onto paper, with a schoolboy’s care. When he tossed the book back to me, he was laughing full-strength again. “Mr. Cates, are you ready to impersonate someone very rich, someone very powerful, someone authorized to fly to London during a riot?”
I glanced at the number he’d written, struggled to hide my horror,
and shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”
Marcel kept laughing, and soon his entourage joined him. “Ah, Mr. Cates, what will you do about your clothes?” Marcel finally exploded. “The nobility is not accustomed to traveling through the sewers!”
I looked down at myself. I was caked in filth from head to foot.
I grinned back up at Marcel. “Well, fuck. It’s a riot. I’ll steal some goddamn clothes.”
XVII
ALL HUMAN BEINGS, SAVED OR UNSAVED
01001
It was about the time they served the coffee that I really started to freak out.
Marcel had come through in spades. He didn’t just get me passage, he got me first-class passage-handed over with a fake ID and a stern command to find myself some appropriate clothes and clean up a little. That part was simple enough. Night had fallen and the SSF was closing in methodically, not rushing things, probably because they were enjoying themselves too much. I followed a small band of merrymakers through the streets uptown and waited for them to sack an appropriate house. The owner was one of the foolish rich shits who’d decided to stay and defend his property; he popped up, silver-maned and wearing a silk smoking jacket, with a brand-new automatic Roon in each hand like he was Buffalo Bill or something. He nailed about four of the merrymakers before they stormed his windows, and the last I saw of him he was running down the street with his hair on fire.
His house quickly followed, and the merrymakers scurried out like rats in twos and threes, bearing away anything that could be sold quickly. I waited until they were all gone, judged the fire, and then went in for a quick shower and a change of clothes. Rich people fireproofed their homes, which stopped fires altogether for a few years, and even when the antiflame compounds aged and started to break down it slowed a fire down considerably-it took hours for them to burn down, and I knew you could pack a bag and take a nap before a fire became a real concern. It was burning slowly but steadily when I emerged, shaved and rubbed pink by expensive towels, wearing one of the poor sap’s suits.
I couldn’t bring myself to wear his underwear, and the merrymakers hadn’t left anything else of value.
It would have been nice to steal a hover and arrive at the airport in style, but the SSF had grounded New York and would have knocked me out of the air immediately, so I had to hoof it. The System Cops had the Madison Square AirPad under their control, so air traffic was still moving in and out for VIPs and necessary commerce. It was a long walk, but I was passed through the gates by two bored Crushers-luckily, strangers to me-who were as polite to me as any had ever been, if still grouchy. They called me “mister” and told me to have a nice day after running yellow eyes over my ID. It was the clothes-no one saw much more than a clean guy in an expensive suit. If they looked closer they might notice the bad teeth, the scars, the accent-but they didn’t look close. You could hand them a hand-written ID with the name spelled wrong and they’d pass you through if you looked rich. Looking rich was a skill any criminal worth his salt learned early.
Then it was straight onto the heavy-duty long-range hover, a comfortable seat behind an attractive, porcelain-skinned red-haired woman I recognized from the Vids, and a glass of beer pressed into my hand, all within the first five minutes. The seat was soft and supple. The air inside the hover was clean and crisp. The fabric of the poor sap’s clothes was dry and sumptuous against my skin.
I began to freak out.
The woman, a few years older than me but gorgeous, twisted around to smile at me. I’d seen her reporting the news a few times, her face ten feet high, her smile permanent and frighteningly unchangeable. “Time to get out, huh? These people.” She shook her head in dismay. “They’re so ignorant. Burning down their own city. I think the System Police should just ship them all somewhere.”
I swallowed anger. The fact that this rich bitch thought New York was my city made me want to grab her by the nose and smash her head into the armrest. Instead I smiled. “It’s the SSF’s fault. They’re too slack.”
She nodded, but didn’t seem to like my smile. It might have been my teeth, which hadn’t had the benefit of a dentist. Ever. “Yes. I quite agree,” she said, facing forward again without another word. I imagined I could smell the soap on her skin. Or maybe that was my skin; I was so clean I itched.
The meal service started, brought soundlessly by human-looking Droids who smiled but couldn’t speak, and my will to retire rich tripled. Rich was the only way to live in the System. When you were rich, the System Pigs called you sir and wished you a good day. When you were rich, they served you breakfast on the hover-real eggs, real bacon, and sweet lord, when the coffee came, hot and strong in a cup so white I had to squint at it, I lost all reason. I promised myself I would do anything it took to be rich. And then it occurred to me that I was already doing whatever it took.
The flight to London was only two hours. After breakfast they dimmed the lights and put on the Vids, each of us getting a small but serviceable private Vid screen. Only the Legal Vid feeds, of course. In New York alone there were fifteen illegal underground Vid feeds I knew of providing news and such on a constant basis, beaming from Safe Rooms around the city. The difference between the legal and illegal feeds was startling. The legal feeds were certainly censored, but the illegal ones had their own agendas, so who knew what to believe. I was half-asleep, feeling exhausted and beaten, when the news came on and I sat up straight, startled. The anchor was the woman sitting in front of me; the caption read Marilyn Harper. She was reporting on the riots, standing blithely in the midst of the merrymakers as they looted a row of stores. She looked smart in a short suit, her hair up, her skin too white, too pale, too clean to be standing in New York in the middle of something like that.
She signed off and I was about to try to get some sleep, when the next news segment came on and I almost puked up my breakfast. It was the Marilyn Harper again. The caption underneath was: “BROTHER BARNABY DAWSON: Former SSF cop, now Monk, suspect in two assaults.”
I gestured the volume up so violently it shrieked up to full blast, causing all the other passengers to twist around in annoyance. I gestured it to a low hum and sat forward.
“-son, former captain in the System Security Force recently detained by Internal Affairs on charges of official misconduct, is now suspected in two assaults on System citizens in New York City.”
I stared at the file photograph. His crazy blue eyes seemed to dance even on the flat screen.
“The System Security Force has declined to comment on Captain Dawson. The Electric Church, in a statement issued from its London office, said only that, quote, ‘No brother of the Church would ever be violent or seek to harm any other human being. The Electric Church regards all human beings, saved or unsaved, as its family, and seeks only to bring the entire human race into God’s embrace.’ Dawson, who served fifteen years in the SSF primarily in the New York area, reportedly identified himself several times while viciously beating-”
I gestured the sound off again. Dawson’s face continued to stare at me from the screen for a few seconds as Harper wrapped up her report, and then it disappeared. I gestured the Vid off.
She twisted around again. In person, she looked older-more lines around the face-but they had that “smoothing” technology now and could make anyone look any age they wanted. “Scary, huh? First time ever a Monk is officially suspected of violent behavior. Guess it had to happen sometime. They start off as humans-and usually not the best kind of humans either.” She studied me. “Don’t I know you? You look familiar.”
Fucking Vid reporter. I could have been seated behind some aristocrat, sneering at the riffraff they let onto flights these days, but I get someone who’s had her nose in SSF databases all her life.
I shook my head. “No.”
She studied me for a few more seconds, then made a big show of losing interest. “Must be tired. I’ve been knee-deep in shitkickers burning their own houses down the last twenty-four hours. Sorry to bother you.”
I stared at the back of her seat. This was shit I didn’t need. I knew she was going to remember my face and do some checking around. She wouldn’t be a Vid reporter otherwise. I thought about Dawson, too. She was right; no Monk had ever been involved in or accused of a crime, and certainly not a violent one-not counting, I thought sourly, the millions of apparent murders they’d committed in their routine recruitment activities. Marin had told me that the Monks were controlled by a behavioral chip of some sort, that the human brain inside was probably screaming as it provided the basic operating system and motor control subroutines-not to mention the brainwave ID that kept the Monks citizens of the System. I considered the possibility that this control chip had malfunctioned somehow in Dawson’s case. That he was maybe the same crazy fucker I’d tried to kill, only now in a metal body, armed to the teeth, with access to the Electric Church’s database and network. Under that rock was the squirming, wriggling possibility that Dawson had been set loose on me on purpose, to kill me with plausible deniability for the EC.
It was certainly turning into a banner day for Avery Cates. I called for the attendant Droid and demanded a bourbon. It was brought to me immediately, a double in a crystal tumbler, frozen granite cubes instead of ice. I hadn’t had decent liquor in a decade. It was smooth and perfect, and made me a little giddy. I thought to myself, If I live to pull this off, I’ll probably go mad in a few years from all the meals, the booze, the fucking Droids tending to my every need-everything.