by Jeff Somers
Lifting my head, I stared down at myself. The Poet had my feet and was dragging me from the cockpit into the bay. His sunglasses had lost one arm and one lens was shattered, and they almost fell off his face when he grinned at me and dropped my feet with a thud.
“Good to see you well,” he said. I turned my head and found Mara sitting on a loose pile of safety netting. “You pilot like you’re angry. At the universe.”
“A necessary procedure,” Mara chuckled, standing up. She looked fresh and rested, like she’d been napping through the whole flight. “The only way to fucking kill those goddamn alarms, I think. You up, Cates? You can walk?”
I nodded, wondering if she’d just shoot me in the head if I’d turned up lame. I sat up and got my legs under me, my back complaining and my stiff leg making me wince. I’d managed to hit the street more or less level and we’d skidded a fair ways, plowing up some concrete and asphalt. The hover was never going to rise again, but we hadn’t broken apart and we’d covered a mile in just a few minutes.
“Any guns out there? ”
The Poet shrugged, swinging his shredder around and checking it over.
I pushed up onto my legs and tested them; I didn’t collapse immediately and piss myself, so I figured I still had some fuel left in the engine. I nodded at Adrian and he shrugged back, turning and popping the hatch with the manual lever, letting the damp blue light in. None of us moved. After a few heartbeats, I took a deep breath and stepped forward, trying to rally what was left of my energy to start running if I heard that terrible click and hum of a big gun warming up.
We’d landed pretty much dead center on the big wide boulevard we’d been creeping up earlier. Right in front of me, to the right of the hover, the lobby of a squat, rust-covered building was burning cheerfully, glass and concrete splashed liberally around—whatever had been tracking the hover had smacked into the building instead, and with any luck, that had put the antiaircraft systems on standby again. The building looked like it was going to melt, the way the orange-brown rust had taken over, and I decided that we’d done it a favor by destroying it.
I looked to my left, and there it was: the Shannara. From street level, it looked like every other building we’d passed. Its ground floor was scabbed with the wooden hovels, although these went up to three levels high in a ragged pyramid structure, complete with rusting metal ladders leading upward. Then it was a greenish-blue metal and reflective glass, blind eyes glaring at us. There was no sign of life. It was as if the city had been carved out of something solid, with no interior, no pathways for people to crawl through, just an island of sculptures. I felt like we were alone in the city.
Hense had told me it had been one of the best hotels in Hong Kong. Big shots had paid through the nose to stay there and it had offered the best of everything: real organic food, real human service staff—Droids only in the unseen areas. Exclusive rooftop access and complete security teams assigned to every guest, absolute discretion guaranteed and pretty much the entire local squad of System Pigs on its payroll, back before the civil war, before everything had gone to hell.
I’d been staring for thirty seconds before I came back to myself wearily, pulling my consciousness back with tired spasms of effort. No one had shot me, and I didn’t hear anything aside from the sizzling death throes of the hover, the wind, and the rain.
“Come on out,” I said.
A giddy sort of energy swelled up inside me. I knew it was just exhaustion and unstable augments compensating by opening the floodgates on adrenaline and endorphins, but it swamped me, making me shaky and excited. I grinned at nothing. The fucking city was terrified of us. Of me. We were standing in the middle of the street after crash-landing a military hover, and the three of us with two shredders and a couple of handguns had the whole city on the run. It made no fucking sense, but it was the goddamn truth. Avery Cates, the Gweat and Tewwible.
A voice from a long time ago echoed in my head. “Hello, rats,” I whispered to Hong Kong. “Time to run.”
“What?”
I glanced at Mara, who looked gorgeous for once: hair disheveled, hands on her hips, her fake skin and tiny servo-controlled expression glowing. Or maybe that was my imagination, my overheated brain swimming in juice and giving everything an extra shimmer. I wondered, suddenly, what Mara looked like naked. How deep those avatars went.
The smile that landed on my face was a fucking nightmare, but I couldn’t swat it away. It stayed there, twitching. I shrugged the duffel, the generator stuffed back into it, onto my shoulders and checked the RPG on the shredder. I felt good again, suddenly. Like my augments had just burned out my pain receptors and turned my endorphins on to max and walked out of the room. “Come on,” I said, my voice cracking a little.
I walked slowly toward the hotel. It dominated the street, a mountain of metal and glass rising up. I felt like I could take the whole building down by myself. This was what massive cell death felt like; this was burning yourself for fuel, your body dismantling itself. It would hurt like hell, eventually, but for the moment it was just getting lighter, faster, sleeker. I didn’t care if they followed, didn’t care if Mara decided I’d gotten her close enough and just toggled me dead. I hefted the shredder and braced it against my belly and walked toward the Shannara Hotel, where our week-old intel said Londholm, the unluckiest bastard in the world, was living behind Takahashi’s security team. Somewhere behind me, around me, in front of me, there were plenty of people who didn’t want me here—Spooks who wanted to put me on trial, Techies who didn’t want the God Augment out in the wild, the usual assortment of assholes who just didn’t like me. I didn’t care.
Mara spoke up behind me. “How are we gonna—”
My finger jerked and I launched a grenade at the hotel. For a jittery second I imagined the whole thing just crashing down, the foundation shattering and miles and miles of steel and glass raining down on us, chunks the size of planets burying us deeper and deeper. Instead, a big section of the wooden stalls exploded, a fireball of impressive size blooming in the shadows of their interior and then pluming out, fading into black, choking smoke that suddenly filled the air. A few hunks of burning wood slammed down around me, but I didn’t stop walking. There was no opposition. Pucker had told me that Takahashi punished anyone who approached—but Takahashi had tried to sell his share to me just an hour ago, and I figured he maybe didn’t have the necessary inspiration to keep people like me away.
“Okay,” Mara said softly. “We walk in. Got it.”
“There won’t be any security on the ground floor, anyway,” I said. “Even someone like Takahashi, with a permanent, trained crew, can’t have assholes loitering in the lobby, especially with power down throughout the city.”
“Yeah, sure,” Mara said, catching up to me and matching my stride. “That’s because y’canna get up from the lobbies. Most of ’em are sealed.”
I nodded, still grinning as we approached the flaming hole I’d blown into the building. “The Shannara is pre-Unification, with a retrofitted building shell made by the MiSun corporation. The elevators, when operational, still go to the lobby level when an emergency shell response is triggered, because if the zoning codes had been enforced and the little folks hadn’t been allowed to build their shitty little shacks up against every building, there would have been a street exit on the lobby level.” I paused right outside the hot lip of the hole I’d created and glanced at her. “So, no, it’s not sealed.”
I turned and stepped through the fire and smoke, picking my way into the lobby. Stepping inside was like moving through a portal: Suddenly it was dark and the air was clear, cool, and moving softly against me as it was sucked out of the space.
The old lobby was as dusty and ignored as the others we’d smashed our way through, remnants of an old way of doing things, but they’d never bothered tearing out the old infrastructure—the old pipes and wires, the old access panels and ducts. They just left that shit in there, online in some cases. Cheaper to just l
eave it, especially if you could think of a use for it. I squinted around and spotted the ancient desk in the middle of the huge space. Once, this had been carpeted, filled with light and decorations and people and chumps in shit suits had sat behind that desk.
I started walking toward it.
“The MiSun Autonomous Building Shell version 11.1,” I recited as they followed me, “was a service release designed to solve a few minor problems with climate control that plagued the production release. It was installed in the Shannara six years ago. It has been off-line since Hong Kong’s power went, which means its backup batteries are all drained and the shell is sitting on cold iron and, as far as it knows, when the power returns it will boot as if it was just installed and run one-time-only protocols.”
“Bullshit,” Mara snapped. “It’ll have security backups in quantum states.”
I spun and walked backward. She was right on my heels, and flinched a little, which made me happy. Happier. I bubbled along on a high that felt dangerous and wonderful, ants under my skin but it was okay, more than okay, I liked it.
My HUD, I noticed, was throbbing in permanent alarm.
“You’d think,” I said. “Assuming the owners follow protocols. Assuming they’re not idiots and have those backups off-site where they won’t be affected by local conditions.” I winked. “I’m making a bet here.”
I’d been told, point-blank, by Hense that there were no backups. I’d been told just about all of this by Hense, as I’d neglected my reading on building shell programming and protocols these past few years. As I spun back toward the sagging desk—which was made of fake wood, particles pasted together and now exploding outward in a rainbow of mold that appeared to be eating the entire building at the rate of an inch a year—I decided there was no margin in offering that up. Why not be mysterious, inexplicably informed, Avery Cates, Destroyer of Fucking Worlds?
I dropped the duffel, still buzzing with my jittery, death-wish energy, and knelt down to extract the heavy, warm disc again, sliding it onto the floor and standing up. The exploded desk still encased an ancient Vidscreen and a weird device with a chunky handset and several buttons, which I ignored as a vestige of old tech. I glanced at Mara, who shrugged an eyebrow at me, and then at the Poet who grinned again, his broken glasses making him look crazy, his dancing ink just blurs in the blue light.
“Little less flair, yes?” he said. “Our friends on roof-tops coming. Won’t just let us be.”
I shrugged. “They won’t matter in a moment.” I knelt down again and gestured the generator on, and the same invisible sizzle slapped over me, making my skin crawl. Anything within fifty feet or so designed to take on power over the air would automatically link to it, and—
A single bright LED flickered into life on the desk, and the screen blinked a few times and then displayed a nifty-looking pair of stylized letters: MS.
“Shannara Custom ABS cold boot protocol,” a neutral, pleasant woman’s voice whispered from somewhere. I stood up and winked at Mara again. “Searching: relevant flags. No flags found. Searching: relevant log files. No log files found. Searching: emergency limited shell login. No account found. Administrator token?”
I was ready, and I spoke before anyone else could get a bright idea. As I spoke, I heard Hense’s voice in that makeshift office, the Monk grinning at me—dreaming of blowing me up, no doubt—echoing me. “DNA bypass, voiceprint on my mark. Mark.”
“Confirmed and stored. Please supply reference.”
“Cates, Avery.”
“Cates, Avery.” There was a pause, and suddenly the lobby flickered into a dim yellow lighting scheme. “Welcome to the Shannara Hotel, Hong Kong, System of Federated Nations, Mr. Cates,” the voice said more cheerfully. “Bringing systems online.”
I was ready for this, too. “Put building into lockdown mode, level four,” I said. “Elevators to my location, no overrides. Terminate climate control, housekeeping, maintenance Droids, kitchen and lavatory systems.” We couldn’t afford the power. “Security systems on standby, low-power mode.”
“Acknowledged. Elevator en route. I am sorry to report only one elevator appears to be in working condition, Mr. Cates. I am unable to raise customer service on local network. I will make a note of it and will request service as soon as local network connection is restored. Elevator will arrive subground floor in twelve seconds.”
I nodded. “Thank you. Brief mode, please.”
“Brief mode.”
I stepped away from the desk. “Well, it’ll only last forty-five minutes or so,” I said, hands shaking, my smile horrible on my face. “But I own this building.”
XXXIII
AGAINST ALL MY BEST INSTINCTS. GO ON, KILL US ALL
“You’re almost a Techie yerself, Cates,” Mara said quietly as she followed me toward the elevator banks. “Maybe all that tech buried in your brain is leaching into your thoughts.”
I think maybe having Dennis Squalor in your head has sucked some knowledge into you, Dick Marin suddenly whispered.
I shook my head, trying to shake him loose, the tingly, electric feeling all over my body still buzzing, still making me grin and urging me forward, faster, faster. We were kicking up a storm of dust as we walked, soft clouds of it shimmering around us. Whatever was making the dust glow and twinkle was probably not good for me, but I was beyond caring and I sucked it in with relish, letting my increasingly feeble, overworked augments suppress my gag reflex and keep me breathing in order to keep oxygen levels high. I could die later; right now I had to fight.
The lobby narrowed down rapidly toward the back, ending in a small elevator bank. There were six on each side. On our left, all three were derelict, toothless yawning squares of blackness; in the center of the wall, several wires protruded and hung, limp and defeated. On the right, two of the elevators seemed to still be in working condition, doors demurely closed and expectant, with the last one on the far end sagging open. As we all settled to a stop, there was a low, sour-sounding noise and the doors closest to the end snapped open an inch, then shut, then slowly opened all the way, the doors drifting apart lazily.
“Three words: do not want,” the Poet whispered. “I doubt these have been maintained. That is a long fall.”
I stepped into the cab, which smelled like damp and mold. It swayed under my weight, but held, and the softly glowing level indicators were a steady light blue. I turned and smiled at Mara and the Poet.
“You want, I’ll go kill this motherfucker myself,” I said. The jumpy nervous energy bubbling under my skin was hard to control, and as I stood there I shifted from foot to foot and tightened my grip on the shredder. Mara spat on the floor and followed me into the elevator, followed closely by the Poet, who was still wearing his broken glasses. The strong urge to smack them off his face rippled through me, and my arm came up halfway before I mastered myself.
The doors rolled shut as slowly as they’d opened, and from inside, a raw scraping noise was audible as they slowly clenched.
“Floor, please,” the feminine voice spoke, sounding flatter and more artificial in the close-up confines of the elevator.
“Twenty-three,” I said.
The elevator lights rippled off and on, and I felt the distinct tug of gravity as we rose into the air. After a few seconds of claustrophobic motion, the light changed, and I turned in surprise to find that one side of the elevator was actually transparent. As we cleared the third floor, we had an unobstructed view of Hong Kong, damp and dim, buildings thrusting up like they were trying to escape. Behind the skyline were soft, green hills, hazy and distant. It was beautiful. I thought of all that space, empty, wasted.
“Ah, shit,” Mara said, pointing. “We better get a move on.”
I squinted along the line of her arm and saw dots in the sky, hundreds, thousands of them, a swarm of insects descending on Hong Kong.
“The army, I guess,” the Poet said quietly. “Come to reduce the city. Soon, no cities left.”
“Doesn’t fuc
king matter to us,” I said. “We’re on the clock. We’re after Londholm.”
“It’ll fucking matter if the whole fucking building goes down on top of us,” Mara said, checking her gun over. I smiled at her until she looked up at me.
“Yeah? It’ll matter to you? You fucking sure?”
We stared at each other. I tried to get the fucking smile off my face, but it was impossible. I was so fucking happy I wanted to just shoot the two of them right there in the elevator.
There was another of those sour off-notes, and the elevator stopped. The Poet crouched down with his shredder held out in front of him, and Mara pasted herself to the side of the cab. I just stood there, too fucking elated to give a shit. I was in my element. I was working a job, and everything felt natural again.
The doors slowly rolled open to reveal a wide elevator lobby, lit by pale yellow emergency lights. The floor was a highly polished white stone, and the walls were half some sort of wood paneling and half some sort of fabric with a hideous imprint of plants and flowers snaking up and down. A large mirror was directly opposite us, bouncing our muddy, unwashed selves back at us like the cosmos was smirking in derision.
It was perfectly silent.
“Wonder we didn’t get torn up just standing here in the fucking elevator like a bunch of assholes,” Mara hissed.
I stepped out into the lobby. “Londholm’s on twenty-five, last I heard,” I whispered, struggling to stop myself from laughing. “We take the fucking stairs from here.”
She cursed lightly as I turned and walked away. Ten feet from the elevators, the hallway, carpeted and smelling of mold, stretched off to the left and right, lit by the same tiny, weak lights. A sign bolted to the wall indicated stairs to our left, and I turned that way immediately, the carpet swallowing my feet and insulating us from every noise. For a few seconds, we glided down the seemingly endless hallway, passing the closed doors of the rooms and the occasional useless, ornate table decorated with dead flowers.