by Jeff Somers
“Sure, sure,” Mickey said sagely. “Half the fuckin’ System is going to think about it.” He looked at me sideways. “Way I hear it, Hong Kong’s the test case. They’re gearin’ up for an official declaration, tellin’ the cops and the army to stay the fuck out. Way I hear it, a bunch of old cops who gave Marin the slip and never got turned into fuckin’ androids are there, ready to be the city’s security.”
I sucked in smoke. “I doubt the people with the guns are going to let that just happen.” The sun suddenly peeked out from behind some clouds, hitting me with a pleasant warmth. One of the status bars in my vision flashed briefly. “Why give me the current events, Mickey? ”
“Y’know I’ve asked you not to call me that, Avery. I do you a courtesy and use your proper name, don’t I? ”
I smiled. Michaleen Garda, aka Canny Orel, legendary killer, miffed that I had a nickname for him. “You want to trade with Adrian? I’m calling him Nancy.”
I felt his eyes on me for a moment. I thought of him in Chengara, in his prison scrubs, the fast way he moved, the secret strength in those short arms. I saw in a flash exactly how he’d been so good as a Gunner: Michaleen could walk into any situation and no one would look at him twice. And then he’d move so fast you’d be dead before you could startle. Michaleen was always hidden in plain sight. I could feel my body tuning up; hell, I could see it in my HUD, which suddenly clarified, brightening up, giving me an adrenaline dump graph and a spiky endorphin readout. Everything seemed to slow down just slightly, the whole world getting bled of color and tightening up.
Then it passed. Michaleen’s posture softened and he spat onto the street. “You with the needle, all the fucking time. All right, I wouldn’t have this little bit o’ tech in my pocket if I expected you to have warm feelins for me, eh? All right.” He stopped walking.
“Let’s be clear, Avery,” he said quietly. “You ain’t an employee and you don’t get a share and I know you’d shiv me in the belly and leave me to bleed out as soon as you’d wish me a good mornin’, and I don’t give a fuck ’bout you either, pup.” His eyes were roaming the street, calm and clear, his whole posture relaxed, like we were talking about the weather. “Know this: I will punish you if you fuck with me. I will punish you until your brain leaks out of your ears, copy? ”
A wave of intense, white pain slammed through me, shattering my bones and turning my blood into sand. I dropped to the freezing pavement and jittered there, eyes popping slowly out of my head, throat swollen tightly shut, my hands out above me in a ridiculous pose, the fingers curled into claws.
Slowly, with a lazy grunt, Michaleen knelt down next to me. His eyes were still everywhere.
“So listen good, eh, Avery? I am your boss on this. I leave this on you for a few minutes and you don’t come back from it. This shit is how they get all the chaff o’ the world to run directly into shredder fire, eh?” He sighed, sounding almost sad. “So, your choice: You can do what you’re told and play ball and you walk away at the end. Or this is how you end, pissing yourself on the street. Understood?”
With a private nod to himself he stood up and held the little remote out in front of me. “All right,” he whispered, and the pain stopped, just like that. He made another minute gesture with his hand and a sudden soothing warmth flooded in behind it, scraping away the acid marks and embers. Seconds later, I almost felt good.
“All right,” he repeated. “On your feet, boyo. You keep in mind I will be watching. You play by my rules, and we have ourselves an agreement.”
Slowly, I sat up, still feeling shivery and weak despite the pleasant rush of endorphins. I climbed unsteadily to my feet and Mickey started walking again, forcing me to limp after him, hatred smoldering, hidden, almost as bright as the memory of agony he’d flashed at me.
He cleared his throat as we entered the square. It was dominated by the huge monument in the center, a glorious fucking waste of concrete that jutted up into the air for no reason at all that I could detect. A few dozen people were standing around chatting in the damp air, but as we moved through the square they all stepped away, leaving us with a bubble of space that traveled with us as if it was invisible foam attached to us. The wind suddenly swelled up, pushing around us, whipping our coats up into fluttering chaos. Michaleen turned and tossed something at me.
My HUD flashed in my eyes, and the little data cube seemed brighter than everything else as it flashed in the air. I snapped my hand up and grabbed it from the air, holding it up in front of my face.
“Our mark,” Michaleen said, looking away and stuffing his hands into his pockets in a gesture I recognized instantly from Chengara. “Techie. You’ll work this with Mara and Adrian.” He snorted. “Can you fuckin’ believe it? That’s how low we’ve sunk. Thirty years ago I was hired to kill presidents and prime ministers. Now it’s Techies. Fuckin’ grease monkeys.” He shook his head. “We are in low times, indeed.”
I slipped the cube into my pocket. “Techie,” I said, squinting around. The square, I noted, was emptying out, people leaving in their clumps, twisting their heads around to stare back at us. I wasn’t worried; usually when places emptied out like this it was a warning, the hairs on the back of my neck rising up in alarm. This time it was just Mickey, I was sure. He was just the worst thing that had ever happened to these poor people.
I cleared my throat. “So, low security, if any. But tricky. You can get me my own technical advisor? ”
He snorted. “Avery, you got bigger problems. This one is hot, and you’re gonna have competition.”
I frowned. “I’ve worked jobs against other Gunners before, Michaleen,” I said, shrugging. “It’s an easy problem to get past. Who’s it gonna be? ”
He turned and stepped past me, patting me on the shoulder. “Everyone.”
VIII
I WILL BE IRRITATED. YOU WILL ALL BE DEAD
“We’re being boarded.”
I glanced up from the reader screen; Mara’s plain, round face was just a foot or so away. She had warned me that she’d set the anti-frag perimeter of my remote to three inches—though she’d included the Poet in the speech, which made me wonder if I was the only recent army recruit suddenly working for Michaleen. Three inches. Enough to make a physical assault problematic, but not enough to stop me from shooting her, if I had a gun. Which I didn’t.
She looked out the cloudy window of our compartment, the sun making her red hair look brittle and fake. She wasn’t bad looking, I thought. No beauty, but young and tall. But her face was blank and her skin rough, her nails short and her hands covered with tiny spider scars.
Next to me, the Poet’s hip pressed against mine. He was snoring, his head back against the metal seat back, his eyes hidden behind his mirrored glasses. Every few minutes his hands twitched like he was strangling something in his sleep.
“Where are we?” I asked, my voice rough and phlegmy.
“Maybe outside Antwerp,” she said without looking at me.
I squinted out the window, my augmented eyes instantly adjusting. I’d heard of Antwerp, and I knew it was vaguely on the way to Brussels, our ultimate destination. I felt the same; the idea that I’d been wired up seemed impossible, as if I should feel the wires pinching my ribs and the cables crowding my throat. The train had stopped in the middle of a forest, or what had once been a forest. As many trees were cracked and on the ground, charred black and rotting, as were still standing, and huge scoops of earth had been carved out of the embankment here and there where shells had exploded. A small crowd of troops stood almost directly outside our window, their uniforms dingy and torn, their shredders bright and polished. One short little woman with a single, angry eyebrow had two dark pips on her shoulder, and she sent the others scurrying with silent looks.
“For us?” I asked. We had boarded without weapons on Mara’s advice. Against twenty-five soldiers, we had fists and shoes and whatever else we could throw at them, unless the Poet could manage to annoy them to death, which I thought possible.
She shook her head. “No, no, not for us.” She sighed and shifted her weight in the seat. Mara was always fidgeting, always stretching her long limbs like they pained her. I filed it away for future reference if we ever got into a scrape; being able to stay still for at least a few minutes was an important skill. “Standard inspection.” She looked at me, her eyes green and perfectly white. “That’s why we came on naked, Mr. Cates.”
I nodded; I didn’t like having no weapons, but I accepted her logic. I didn’t know if I could trust this Taker, this kid who’d probably just gotten her boobs the year before, but it made enough sense, especially since nothing in the fucking world made any goddamn sense anymore. I was on a fucking train. We were comparatively rich, so we’d managed to acquire a small private cabin—private in the sense that we were not smashed in with fifteen or twenty people, like just about everyone else. Standing room only, no toilets, no restaurant, and a sixteen-hour trip not counting the endless delays. In a hover, while sipping something nice and maybe getting some sleep, it was a half-hour flight. I was on a train. I kept wondering at it. I’d been on trains before—being shipped to Chengara Penitentiary like a side of beef—but those had been fast, and sleek. This was a bloated tube trundling along at a fast walk, smelled like garbage and smoke, and hit gaps in the tracks every few miles that stopped us cold while the crew scrambled out to fix the problem, which sometimes took hours.
Michaleen had said that getting a hover clearance when you were paying freight for a colonel in the SFNA was one thing; getting clearance to fly over battlefields for private business was fucking fantasy. So, the train. I’d traveled worse ways.
I looked back at the screen in my hands. Our mark was named Alf Londholm and his photo made him exactly like every other Techie I’d ever seen: skinny, squinty, and with a puzzled expression I’d come to associate with them as a class. His hair was black and plastered against his skull, drooping over his left eye like a scar. He was twenty-three years old and prior to the civil war had been a technical associate with the Joint Council, working with one of the undersecretaries in a support role. No one had suspected a genius in their midst; his performance reports—which Michaleen had acquired somehow—were mediocre and unenthused.
Just prior to the war, he’d been terminated from employment and his name had been handed over to the SSF for detention and interrogation. He’d never been arrested.
Six months later, while the army’s tanks were rolling into Belgrade, he’d appeared in Hong Kong, where he’d somehow arranged a meeting with several rich and extra-legal personages who viewed a single presentation and proceeded to shower Londholm with yen and resources, including a lot of muscle, and Londholm had been set up in Hong Kong ever since, working. There was nothing in the report about what, exactly, he’d been working on. Recently, something had gone wrong and his protection had dried up, his funding vanished, and his lab disappeared—and a bounty was placed on his head, with one stipulation: A complete body had to be presented in order to collect. No parts, no damage. Pristine except for the mortal wounds, the fewer the better.
This last requirement had narrowed down the talent capable of taking on the job, but probably hadn’t affected the number of complete assholes who would step up and try anyway.
I glanced to my left at the Poet.
I puzzled over the report. Big money, sure, even in these days, but Michaleen had money—shit, in the middle of a civil war, he had a major city under his heel. The legendary Cainnic Orel didn’t scramble after yen. It didn’t make sense that he’d come halfway around the System—the world—to buy me out from the army just to round out a team. Cainnic Orel, the legend, didn’t do things this half assed. Not for yen.
I turned my eyes back to Mara as shouts and ominous banging noises filtered into the cabin from the corridor. “Where’s Belling? ”
Her eyes leaped to me instantly. “Wallace is working another angle.”
I held her eyes for a moment. A first-name basis. A strange feeling stole over me, like I’d met her before, held this gaze before. For a second my HUD tightened up again, everything getting suddenly and perceptively clearer, status bars quickly flaring into life and spiking, like I was about to scrap with this kid. I couldn’t know her.
Then it flicked off, everything settling down. “Okay,” I said, and the door to our cabin banged inward, old varnished wood splintering into our laps. The narrow doorway was crowded with dingy white uniforms, with Little Mother I’d seen through the window in front.
“Thumbs, or we cut them off,” she screeched, her whole little body vibrating with the volume. Her accent was pure New York; I’d heard it a million times, in better days. “On your fucking feet and thumbs out or we shove ’em up your asses.”
We all hesitated, of course. We knew how this was going to play out: We were going to stand up, present our thumbs like obedient citizens, and eat the shit sandwich. But we didn’t have to be enthusiastic about it. It was like being in Pickering’s during a raid, the good old days, except I wasn’t drunk and Kev Gatz wasn’t snickering next to me, making ridiculous stoned jokes. As I stared at her, the little box bloomed in my vision again.
ANGELINA R. ROCCAFORTE, LIEUTENANT (2), SECURITY INFANTRY.
Little Mother Roccaforte’s eyes were bugged out and watery, and they jumped around the cabin in jerky, outraged leaps. I figured the army wasn’t assigning its top rank to train inspections. I thought of myself and all the rest of Englewood being prepped for fucking urban assault; how fucking terrible did you have to be to get train duty?
She suddenly stared hard at me, and I pictured one of those little boxes blooming in her own HUD: Avery Cates, Shitkicker, Deserter.
“I said on your feet! ” she screeched, and this time we all stood up, slowly, slouchingly. One by one we held out our hands, and with a curt nod Little Mother sent one of her grunts, a tall black kid whose knees were too high up on his legs, into the cabin with a small DNA scanner. At the same time, one of the other uniforms began working a larger handheld. The skinny guy waved the scanner at each of us in turn like he was afraid we’d snatch it from him. I came up green. The Poet and Mara got a yellow.
“Not in d-d-database,” the skinny one said like the word had been taught to him recently, and at great cost.
Little Mother nodded, still staring at me. “And you are—”
“I have a safe passage from General Icahn,” Mara said immediately. “If I may reach for it? ”
I blinked. I’d never heard of Icahn, but if Michaleen was drawing that kind of water, I wondered again why in the fuck my card had been pulled for this.
Little Mother had transformed at the name Icahn, suddenly getting quiet. After a moment, she nodded, and Mara reached into her jacket and produced a data cube, which she tossed at the short officer, who caught it with a lightning move that reminded me that even the shitheel of the SFNA had some serious tech stuffed inside their skins. She didn’t even glance at it, just held it in her hand for a moment and then nodded, tossing it back. Mara snatched it from the air with equal ferocity, dropping it into her cleavage with flair.
“They’re clear. Weapons? ”
The soldier in the corridor looked up from his handheld. “Clear.”
Little Mother nodded, and the whole lot of them walked off without another word, leaving us alone in the suddenly spacious-seeming cabin, the door swinging weakly from one hinge. In the hall outside, a crowd of people three deep was crushed up against the far wall, miserable and sweaty. I stared back at them for a second or two, feeling that static electricity that preceded mob action, but just as I was convinced we were about to be rushed, the Poet stepped into the doorway, leaned against the broken hinges, and studied his nails.
“Anyone enters,” he said, “I will be irritated. You will all be dead.”
He waited a beat, still making a show of looking at his own hand, the tats dancing and spinning on his neck, and then he turned and sat down again. I found myself looking at a filthy little kid, his eyes t
he only white part of him, clutched to the legs of a woman not much taller than him and looking dirtier, which didn’t seem possible. After a moment, I stepped forward, causing a sudden rustle to sweep through the crowd, and pushed the door back into place, trusting to friction to hold it shut. I glanced at my feet. It didn’t take much to threaten fucking civilians. It didn’t take much to push around people who’d never held a gun or killed for survival. That was easy. And cheap.
I didn’t look at the Poet as I took my own seat. Time wasn’t right, but I was keeping an invoice for him, and I planned to collect on it someday.
More shrill shouting from Little Mother down the corridor. I looked at Mara again. “Why Brussels?” I asked. I felt good. I’d been feeling good. Aside from the new suit, my second in two days—this one blessedly free of piss smell—I looked like the same broken-down bastard, my hairline a little higher, my nose a little more crooked. Inside, I felt fucking fifteen again. My leg still ached, but it was a distant, impersonal thing that I could easily ignore. I felt light and sharp, relaxed but energetic, like I could go to sleep in an instant or stick to the walls, whatever the next moment required.
She had closed her eyes and feigned sleep. “The eternals, Mr. Cates,” she said without opening her eyes. “Weapons and information. You can’t just hit the nets and ask questions—either the army or the cops are gonna pick up your feed and backtrace you. Keyword recognition—I hear they even have a box that analyzes keystroke patterns and gives ’em a good shot at guessin’ who you are just based on what you type into a terminal.” She shrugged. “So, we go to a friend of mine.”
I grinned. “You’re pretty useful, for a Taker.”
“It’s a job requirin’ multiple talents, Mr. Avery.” She opened one eye. “I wouldn’a be expectin’ a fucking gunmonkey to understand the complexities.” She sighed and shut her eye. “You can’t shoot information.”
“We need less talking,” the Poet suddenly said, “and a lot more listening. Tell me what you hear.”