by Jeff Somers
“No, Avery,” Belling said and shrugged. “We’re here for you. No one else. I don’t want to hear your bleeding-heart bullshit. In or out, that’s it.”
I scowled. “Listen, goddamn—”
“In or out, Avery! There’s no room for anyone else.”
“I’m in,” I said quietly. Let Belling think he’d beaten me down. Let him think I was too tired to go after him. I felt like a fucking newborn. “So how much did you pay for me, Wa? ”
He dug through his coat and produced the plastic remote control, appraising it. Then he looked up at me. “Oh, for god’s sake, Avery, I didn’t buy you. Michaleen did. He’s Canny Orel, after all. He is the Dúnmharú.”
V
THE MAN’S A HERO
Stepping onto the hover that Belling had somehow gotten permission to haul through SFNA airspace was like going back five years in time.
The hover was first class. Even five years ago it would have been first class, and these days, when just getting a hover into airspace without seeing it shot down was impossible, it was like some sort of miracle hover. The interior was luxurious, with polished wood everywhere, thick carpeting, and soft leather seats that moved any way your body shifted, always offering maximum support. A tiny Droid roamed up and down the aisle, offering cocktails and food, clearing away trash the moment you set it down, and humming a soothing little tune that made me want to smash a fist into its tiny plastic face. But I didn’t want to be rude so I contented myself with obstructing it with my foot every chance I got, making the thing vibrate in frustration until I moved.
Belling had a suit of clothes waiting for me in the hover. At first, I’d been angry, but the clothes I’d been given on our way off the army base weren’t mine; they smelled like someone’s sour cologne and were two sizes too big, handed to me from a huge pile in the processing tent where Belling signed me out. The suit from Wa was beautiful: black, quality, and close to a perfect fit. The moment I’d peeled off the creepy military issue and had it on, I felt like a human being again and decided to forgive him. Until I managed to kill him.
I sat in my ass-hugging seat sipping a glass of gin that was absolutely perfect except that it was completely unlike any gin I’d ever tasted. It was perfect: chilled, with a curl of something green and fragrant hooked onto the glass—and I hated it. I hated Belling, I hated Michaleen or Canny or whatever the fuck his real name was. I stared at Belling while he made a show of strumming a small handheld, his elegant hand swirling around in lazy patterns, data glowing in bright clumps. He looked like a dandy, like a rich old man who’d been eating well and drinking well and fucking well his whole life. I knew better. I watched his hands and knew that Belling was better than me, and always had been: faster, dirtier. Crueler. Even as an old man, Belling would beat me, with or without his remote control.
I hated him even more for being better than me.
For a moment, I was filled with so much hatred my hands shook, and I wanted to try and strangle the bastard despite the bleak odds.
I closed my eyes and imagined my globe of glass, everything else on the outside. Inside, just peace and quiet. I realized my hands were clenched into fists, and I forced myself to relax them just as Belling spoke.
“Avery, I can almost hear you plotting from over here.”
I opened my eyes. The Old Man was looking at me, calm and relaxed, the plastic remote held idly in one hand. I put my eyes on it for a moment and then smiled back at Belling. “Why would you think that, Wallace? Because you sold me out to Kev Gatz? Because you made me Patient Fucking Zero in the Plague? Because you’re a fucking liar? Because you’re working for Michaleen?” I shook my head and offered him a smile. “Wallace, you’re not afraid of me, are you? ”
He smiled back, shaking his head. “No.”
His finger twitched, and I almost bit my tongue off.
Pain like I’d never felt before flooded into me like liquid being pushed through a needle directly into my nervous system. White hot and corrosive, it shattered my imagined inner peace and in the second or two that I remained conscious, it taught me that whatever I’d been defining as pain before was just a shadow of the possibilities.
Cold, wet, and awake.
I surged up to consciousness, still twitching on the floor under my seat. I was damp everywhere; I’d pissed myself and the carpet around me. As I lay there, shivering, a huge snot bubble inflating and deflating on the tip of my nose, I could feel gravity tugging on me; we were in descent.
“Behave yourself,” I heard Belling say cheerfully, his voice muffled by the leather upholstery between us. “You’re now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Dúnmharú. Fuck up and I’ll stroke you out.”
My whole body ached like a shallow echo of what Belling had just done to me, softly vibrating. I squirmed to get my hands under me, my fingers sinking into the damp pile, and pushed myself over onto my back. I lay there gasping, legs still twitching every few seconds. The ceiling of the hover was smooth white, with small round lights set every two feet or so, making me blink. After a moment, Belling’s weird, smooth face swam between me and them.
“Up and at them, boy,” he said, giving me a little tap with one shined boot.
“Where are we? ” My voice came out rubbery, soft and stretched.
“Amsterdam. That’s where the man is, so that’s where we have to go.” His upside-down face scowled at me. “Michaleen does not do any kind of electronic communication. You want to talk to him, you go where he is. Now, get the fuck up before I get irritated. This is probably the last hover flight we’ll sneak out; our usual contact with the System Pigs can’t help us anymore, having been shot to death in the recent Northern Europe campaign. The army’s in charge up here now and we don’t have any contacts with the Europe Central Command.”
I gathered myself slowly and pushed up onto trembling arms, finally maneuvering my way around so I could hook an arm onto the seat and support myself sitting up. A shock of adrenaline hit my bloodstream; I was going to see Michaleen. I was going to be in the same fucking airspace as the little fucker, and I would have a window when the remote was still hooked to Belling. A window when maybe I could take a shot at Michaleen, aka Canny Orel, aka the greatest Gunner in history. And me, piss-soaked and shaking. I squinted at Belling, who was primping, smoothing himself down like a peacock. The Old Man would slit someone’s throat for a better view of a Vidscreen; I didn’t see him diving in front of a bullet to save Mickey.
I struggled to my knees. I felt about as quick as a corpse, but I was going to be within arm’s reach of Michaleen for the first time since escaping from Chengara, and I was going to make it count.
“Come on,” Belling said, smoothing down his white, short-cut hair. “We’re landing. Time to meet your coworkers.” He paused and looked at me, grinning with barely contained humor. “Avery, I can tell you still hold some sort of grudge against me.”
I pushed myself onto my feet and stood for a moment with clenched fists. “Wa, you’ve got me all wrong. All I ever needed to know, I learned from you.”
He laughed, pushing his hands into his pockets and rocking on his heels. “Avery, I know you too well. Never could let things go in favor of good business decisions, could you? ” He leaned forward. “I’ll make you a fair offer at penance, Avery. When Michaleen approaches you in a few minutes, you’re likely to have one of those Cates-brand lapses of judgment, yes? I’ll be a little slow with the remote. Give you a few seconds.” He nodded. “If you can do something with a few seconds—and any Gunner worth his rate could—consider it a gift.”
I concentrated on breathing, trying to figure out Belling’s play here. There was no risk here for him—if I somehow killed Michaleen, he had my remote and could disable me immediately, and Cainnic Orel would no longer be around to give him orders. If I failed, he would just shrug and apologize for being unfamiliar with the remote. Michaleen no doubt would know better, but if Belling’s lack of loyalty surprised him I’d eat my shoes.
I swallowed bile. I felt like I had eaten my shoe already. I had no weapon. My eyes roamed the cabin for a few seconds and finally lit on the glass tumbler I’d dropped when Belling’d zapped me. I crouched down and snatched it up, slipping it up into my sleeve and holding my hand bent at the wrist to keep it in place. Then I stepped behind Belling, fighting my inner ears as they tried to tip me sideways into the seats again, and followed him to the hatchway just as the hover touched the ground with a thump. I twisted my neck around until I got a satisfying pop.
I knew him, a little. I remembered Michaleen telling me, about my father. Not long and not deep.
I didn’t like being lied to.
As the hatch opened, a set of tiny stairs automatically lowered, and Belling stepped down easily, throwing back his coat as a blast of cold wind hit us, lighting me up and making my damp clothes burn unhappily. I ignored the fresh coat of shivering that descended on me and concentrated on stepping off the hover without checking my footing, my eyes open and sweeping the scene.
It was a large airfield, old, ancient. The open space reminded me of the wilderness at first, just grass and weeds and the occasional skinny young tree trunk. A second glance showed the broken concrete and asphalt, the buildings in the near distance, the accumulated trash and collapsed fencing of a long-abandoned complex being slowly swallowed by the world. I felt instantly exposed.
As I stepped around Belling, I saw Michaleen immediately. He was wearing a suit badly, everything cut wrong, his tie undone, a ridiculous wide-brimmed hat set on an angle on his head. He was at least two feet shorter than each of his companions, both young. One, a leggy girl, with bright, unnaturally red hair done up in a complex set of braids and sweeps, wore a pair of skintight pants of tough-looking material that shimmered slightly in the pale sunlight and a tightly zipped leather jacket. The other was a boy, dark skinned and hollow cheeked, with a shaved head that was like half an egg set on top of his artificially thick neck. His legs were skinny, trembling little sticks popping out from under a thick, leather long-coat that looked hot and uncomfortable, but his neck and chest and arms were huge, heavy hunks of meat, almost throbbing with their own alien intelligence.
He wasn’t the type for stupid augment-junkie security assholes. Therefore the kid wasn’t security. I ignored him. The girl, maybe. She looked fast and mean, her face all angles and shadows, her eyes set too deeply into her face for beauty. Both of the kids looked too clean and scarless, which was either an expensive surgery habit or they were two jumbo softies who’d never scraped a knuckle.
I was careful: I contained my body language and followed Belling slowly, nonthreateningly. The weight of the glass was comforting in my sleeve. I asked myself what Michaleen would expect from me; he’d expect anger, so I stared at him and ground my teeth—that was easy. He’d expect something reckless and immediate, so I had to stutter the timing, try to throw him off. This was the man known as Cainnic Orel, I reminded myself. He’d had weeks to case me, and he’d done it well enough to play me like a fucking child back in Chengara—I had to go random, try to shock the fuck out of him, and count on Belling to be the unlovably selfish piece of shit he’d always been in the past.
Physically, Michaleen hadn’t changed at all. He was the same short, powerful-looking fellow, old as sin with a craggy, leathery face that was always screwed up into a fantastic expression that resembled either incredible pain or incredible amusement. His nose was long and rounded, his eyes bright and young in that tanned face, framed by thin, ghostly threads of white hair. He looked prosperous, like he hadn’t spent the last six months drinking paint and eating wild rabbit, shivering with the fumes over Bixon’s. Like he hadn’t even thought of me once since leaving me to be processed into an avatar in Chengara.
As Belling and I approached, unbelievably the little man smiled and threw his arms wide.
“Avery Fucking Cates as I live and breathe,” he shouted. “I told these pups here that a great hero from the past was comin’ to lend a hand to our li’l enterprise. Pups, you’re lookin’ at the genuine article, a man who has done things.”
Belling stopped a foot or two away, and I stopped too. “Hello, Mickey,” I said. “Got a cigarette? ”
His eyes were merry, on me at an angle. His tiny hands, his plump middle—it was immediately unbelievable that this man was the most dangerous Gunner in the world.
He roared laughter, a good, natural sound pouring out of him. “Cigarettes! You fucking ballbuster. Sure, I got—”
A split second of peace settled on me. I’d been thinking of Michaleen for months, kicking ass on spec in Englewood, plotting, sending out my feeble feelers. Here he was, the cosmos rewarding me for a change, for years of steady service. I unkinked my hand and the tumbler dropped into it like gravity had been designed for that express purpose. I swung my arm up and leaned forward, and when the glass actually shattered against Mickey’s tiny head I was fucking shocked.
He staggered to his right, absorbing the impact, and as blood splattered everywhere he ducked under my arm and drove his bleeding skull into my stomach, knocking the breath out of me. I hung onto the broken glass desperately, the edges digging into my skin and peeling the flesh away from my fingers, but it was the only weapon I had and I wasn’t going to fucking drop it.
Michaleen was heavier than he looked, and he put me off my feet and we fell as a unit to the broken asphalt beneath us. My head smacked into the ground and I heard Gupta for a second, distant, telling me how many fucking concussions I’d had. Then I dug my elbow into the ground and pushed off, rolling us until Michaleen was under me. I raised the lump of raw meat and shattered glass that had once been my hand into the air, and Michaleen squirmed under me, suddenly yanking his arm free, swinging his hand up between us. In his hand was the world’s smallest gun. It was an old Roon model 56—a peashooter, small caliber. At a distance, it was like setting off a firecracker—the best you could hope for was to annoy your target. Two inches from your face, it would do the job.
For a second, we were frozen like that, panting, dripping blood, my hand in the air, his tiny gun aimed at my eye.
Then my whole body lit up again, white fire snapping everything rigid and making rigidity a torture. This time I bit down on my tongue hard, blood flowing into my mouth as I tried to scream. Michaleen pushed me off of him like I was an inconvenient piece of scenery and I just rolled away, the shattered glass dropping away, forgotten.
As my consciousness narrowed down to a dot, I heard the little man laughing breathlessly. “I told you, pups,” I heard him say, fading fast. “You been working wit’ me six months, you take whatever the fuck I hand you. He’s here two goddamn seconds, he’s trying to kill me. The man’s a hero.”
Turned to cinder by Belling’s remote, I disappeared into darkness, and was glad for it.
VI
THE MIDDLE FINGER OF GOD
Hot, stiff, and awake. I opened my eyes and had a distorted view of a well-used tabletop, pitted and scratched, covered in endless layers of varnish. A glass of something brown and transparent loomed directly in front of me, a giant’s glass, everything receding from there. A heavily tattooed pair of hands were folded far away, impossibly tiny. Stamped on top of everything was the tiny text and graphics of my heads-up display, which was going fucking insane. Text was streaming from bottom to top at a furious pace in the left of my vision, and status bars were jigging and jiving in my right, going from red to green, one after the other. My HUD distilled everything about my physical state into a stream of numbers, code words, and unexplained graphics that didn’t mean much to me beyond a few basics.
“Better be careful. The Middle Finger of God. Give you brain damage.”
I lifted my head from the table and squinted at the freak who’d been with Michaleen at the old airport. He’d taken off his jacket to reveal a sleeveless black shirt, his arms lying on the table in front of him like heavy burdens he’d just dropped, lifeless and ridiculously humongous. His right arm was heavily inked star
ting at the elbow, bright, animated tats that moved constantly, a flickering horrorshow of colors and movement that I didn’t want to see. I shifted my eyes to his face, trying to wet my lips, but my tongue had turned into a swollen toad living in the dark cave of my mouth and didn’t want to do anything except make breathing difficult. I managed a grunt.
I was seated at a dark wooden table next to a huge plate-glass window that had been starred pretty badly and was held together now by a complex system of gray tape. It was dark inside and raining outside, a muddy river creeping up a crumbling bank. Evidence of an old paved road and a concrete sidewalk could still be seen, slowly being sucked into the brown water, an inch a year. Across the river was another strip of crumbling pavement and a row of narrow, neat-looking buildings, rough stone, and peaked roofs. A line of trees adorned each bank, twisted, overgrown roots bursting from the ground, undermining the bank further, everything working together to destroy everything else.
I glanced down at the table and found a glass of whiskey. I picked it up, staring at it. The weight felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. Gravity was pushing me up, and my tongue was a toad lodged in my mouth. The whole place smelled, a sweet, heavy scent that was pleasant at first but became sickening pretty fast. We were the only people in it aside from a terrified-looking blond girl behind the bar, hugging herself on the far end, as far away from us as she could get without leaving her post, her eyes fixed in our direction.
“Old man is out back,” my minder said with a grin. “Taking Belling’s confession. This is Amsterdam.”
“I know where I fucking am,” I said, leaning back. The bars in my vision suddenly stabilized and turned green, and I realized that I didn’t feel bad at all. I even felt good. I raised the glass and paused with it awkwardly in the air, and nodded in his direction. “Nice work. Expensive? ”