by Jeff Somers
THE
FINAL
EVOLUTION
JEFF SOMERS
www.orbitbooks.net
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To my Danette,
whom I regularly try,
and fail, to deserve.
PROLOGUE
HE REALLY ENJOYS THIS PART
“Tell me something,” I said, easing the barrel into the soft spot on the back of his neck just below the skull. “How’s someone as stupid as you get a job like this?”
He tensed for a moment, then slumped a little. “I used to be smarter.”
I smiled, pressing the gun down hard while I hugged him with my free arm, feeling him up for surprises. I was alive and I felt good. “We all used to,” I said. “Me, I used to be a fucking genius.”
I found a gun shoved down into his crotch, a battered old alloy auto with the safety chiseled off, ready to blow his balls off if he zipped up wrong. I weighed it in my hand.
“It’ll go easier on you if you tell me what else you’ve got.”
He chewed on this for a second or two. It was dark and cold as hell, the wind whipping up over the ruined outer wall of the old church and smacking into us. I stared over his shoulder at the glowing whitewashed walls, twin bell towers sticking up into the blue-black sky like broken bones. The church proper was ringed by the remnants of the old wall, a tiny, squat cottage connected to my right, the roof a vague memory. The whole world was being worn down, erased, one inch at a time, filled with empty, abandoned buildings like this. In twenty years the cottage would be gone down to the foundation. So would I.
“Nothing,” he said, giving me a little shrug. “I’m just supposed to yell the alarm, give ’em some warning, anybody gets past me.”
“Yell if you want to find out what your brain feels like flying through the air,” I said. “Besides, it doesn’t matter. We’re inside already anyway. Walk me in.”
If he was in the mood to be reasonable, I was in the mood to let him live. I’d killed enough assholes already. Why be greedy.
“All right,” he said after another moment.
I pocketed his gun and let him put an inch or two between us, then followed him toward the church. We scraped along the frozen dirt for a few seconds in silence.
“Listen,” he said quietly. “There’s two guys on the first floor, right inside the doors.”
I nodded. “We know.”
“Let me take the slip,” he said. He didn’t say it pleading. He just asked, like he was asking for a cigarette. “I’ll catch hell if I walk in there with you pushing me along.”
I studied the back of his head. He was younger than me, but so was everyone. His head was shaved and a delicate tattoo of a spiderweb had been penned onto his skull, a blurry blue design done in a shaky hand. It glinted slightly in the cold moonlight. For a moment I considered just letting him run. My gut told me that he would just melt away and never bother me again, but I hadn’t lived this long by taking stupid chances, so I sighed as if thinking about it and then I brought my Roon down on top of his head as hard as I could.
He dropped to the ground silently, and I stepped over him, glancing up at the hill that framed the church against the sky, a dome of green and brown. There was no noise aside from the crunch of my boots on the frost.
I crept forward. When I was a few feet from the big wooden double doors, they swung outward on silent, greased hinges.
“You stupid fuck,” I hissed. “What are you thinking? You check your field, or you’ll get punished.”
“Yes,” Remy said, leaning against the doorway with one of his ersatz brown cigarettes hanging from one lip. “The day you can’t handle one guard who doesn’t know you’re coming, Avery, I’m dead anyway.”
I looked him over. He’d grown like a weed over the last three years, getting broad and tall, every movement taut and powerful. He’d let his black hair grow out, hanging over his face, and he’d started a beard, a thick scum of hair that enveloped his cheeks and neck, making him look even skinnier, strangely. He dressed in black, like an asshole, but I pardoned him; he was still just a kid. And I liked him. It always surprised me how much I liked Remy.
“All right,” I said, giving him a little slap on his cheek as I pushed past him. “Then today’s lesson is, don’t rely on someone else doing their job to keep you as lou stupid fuck.”
“Stupid fuck” had become my term of endearment for Remy.
Just inside the doors were two bodies, big guys sprawled in the sawdust poured all over the floor, a bloody mess. They were both locals, tall beefy guys, tan skin and long, dark hair tied back into tails, guns in their slack hands. Both had tiny, small-caliber holes in their heads. Remy favored big guns but he could work small if the occasion called for it. I’d taught him that, and I had a moment of weird pride, instantly soured. I stood there studying them for a moment while the kid closed the doors behind us.
“You didn’t have to kill them,” I said, carefully. I didn’t want to prompt another speech about the military augments in his head that might explode at any moment—from decay, or stray microwaves, or an old SFNA officer with a spare remote in his pocket. I’d heard it too often. I had the same augments, forced on me by the Press Squad, but mine had been damaged. The one time someone tried to pop me with a military remote—a blackjack, the old soldiers called it—it hadn’t killed me, though I wished it had, for a while. When Remy didn’t respond, I sighed. “Quiet work, though,” I said, looking back at him. His face was impassive, as always. He hadn’t spoken for the first six months after we got out of Hong Kong, and even now he wasn’t one for speeches.
“I think that was lesson three,” he said, crossing his arms in front of himself. “Noise gets you killed.”
The church had been gutted and was just a cold shell of old wooden beams and empty windows. Up front there was a twisting set of stairs, apparently held together with wishes and good intentions, leading up to a sagging balcony that wrapped around three of the walls. I could see a door at the top of the stairs, a gleaming steel number that sported a nifty DNA-swipe magnetic lock. It didn’t work anymore, of course; electricity was hard to come by in Bolivia. Everything was hard to come by, everywhere, since the System had fallen into a million little pieces.
“No one at that door?” I wondered aloud, walking forward and turning my head this way and that, trying to see everything, get the place fixed in my head.
“Assholes,” Remy said by way of explanation. “Garces is nobody. A local strongman. I’m amazed he has a steel door instead of some glass beads on string.”
I clucked my tongue. “Don’t be fucking cynical, Remy. Yeah, Garces doesn’t run anything half a mile away from this fucking building, but Morales is paying us a lot of worthless yen to kill him. And my intel says there should be two assholes at the front door and one asshole at the back door.” I gestured up at it. “That bothers me. This lack of assholes.”
“Well, there’s us,” he said with his usual flat tone.
I checked my Roon, scorched and battered but still smooth as silk—no one made guns like the old Roon corporation, rest in peace—then I took out the first guard’s iron and looked it over. It was no Roon, but it looked like it wouldn’t blow up in my hand, at least, so I slipped it back into my coat pocket.
“Well, let’s find out what’s up there.”
I walked toward the stairs, thinking. Remy was right—Garces was a local boss, one of a million who’d sprung up when the army and the cops had dissolved, scattering, the System of Federated Nations getting unfederated over the course of a few chaotic months. The fact that the best people he could hire were low-quality wasn’t surprisin
g. It still felt wrong; I’d learned that when unexpected things happened, it usually went badly for you. We’d been working so much lately, I was in practice, and in shape—my augments, my gift from Colonel Malkem Anners and Michaleen Garda, were damaged but still partially functional. I still had a flickering heads-up display in my vision, pain got washed away immediately, and when my heart rate kicked up I got calm and clear. There was no reason to discount my instincts.
I paused at the foot of the stairs and listened. The steps were old wood, bowed in the center and reinforced here and there with metal braces; they would creak like hell. The hallway behind the door was about twenty feet long, and there was another door that led to Garces’s office. I was standing there, judging the physics and the chances I’d be heard when the steel door swung open and a skinny, short man with his long black hair tied into a tight, thick braid stepped out onto the landing.
For a second we stared at each other. “¿Qué la cogida?” he said, taking half a step backward.
I put my gun on him, moving fast, my old augments giving me an adrenaline-sick edge of speed.
“Aqui,” I said, using one-third of my usable Spanish and gesturing at the floor. “Aqui.”
He nodded, raising his hands up like an ass. Never do anything you aren’t ordered to, I always told Remy. Don’t give shit away—if someone forgets to tell you to put your hands where they can be seen, keep your fucking hands where they’ll do you some good. He started coming down, muttering something I couldn’t quite catch with each step. Watching him, I cheated my way to his left, and when he was a few steps from the floor I reached out, took hold of his ankle, and spun him crashing to the ground floor.
Remy was suddenly there, one boot on the poor guy’s neck, his massive double-action revolver pointed at the guy’s head. Startled, I dashed forward and gave Remy a shove, knocking him off balance and sending him stumbling into the wall, his heavy gun making him lean. I hooked one hand into our new friend’s collar and dragged him behind me as I stomped after the kid.
“Why the fuck do I have to always remind you to not just fucking kill every-fucking-body?” I hissed. Remy was hunched over, staring up at me from around his own shoulder, his cannon aimed at the floor. It was a ridiculously large gun, heavy and loud, but it would put a fist-sized hole in someone’s chest, and Remy was attached to it despite the fact that bullets for it were rarer than clean water these days. His hair hung in his face and he made no attempt to move, to challenge me. He just stayed hunched over as if expecting a kick, and shrugged awkwardly.
“That’s what we do,” he pointed out.
“Fuck,” I said and sighed, looking back up the stairs. “Maybe it would be nice to ask our new friend here what’s behind that door? Howmany men up there?”
He nodded, slowly straightening up. “Sure, okay, Avery.”
I stared at him again, my prisoner just waiting politely for our attention to swing back to him. Remy disdained caution, because Remy thought he knew how he was going to die, and thought the knowledge made him immortal in every other situation. Until his augments popped, he figured he was protected by fate. And no matter how many times I told him he was an asshole for thinking that, he was never convinced.
“Okay,” I finally said, letting my guy drop to the floor and turning to put a boot on his chest and my gun in his face. “Hola, muchacho,” I said, gesturing up the stairs. “¿Cuantos?”
He grinned, again putting his hands up by his face to signify that he wasn’t a threat. I didn’t need his hand gestures to know that; he’d already shown me his belly and asked me to scratch it. “No mas,” he said eagerly. “No mas, señor.”
I nodded. “Gracias,” I said, smiling back. His tan face lit up and he looked like he was going to keep talking, so I leaned down and smacked my Roon into his forehead just hard enough to knock him cold—the rusting augments in my head made such precise adjustments easy enough. I straightened up and gestured at Remy to precede me up the stairs.
“Don’t be an asshole,” I warned him as he slipped past me, all youthful energy and grace, sinews and adrenaline.
“We are here to kill Garces, right?” he whispered back. “We’re not just going to be rude to him, call him some names, right?”
I started up the stairs behind him. As I’d suspected, they creaked and wiggled under us like it was going to be the last thing we ever did. “Shut up and keep your eyes open,” I suggested. “When you have the urge to be an asshole, ask yourself if I can still beat the shit out of you. If the answer is yes, think twice.”
Teaching the kid was hard work.
He reached the sagging balcony and stepped to the right, pushing himself against the fragile railing and raising his cannon. I stepped to the door and put my hand on the handle, glanced at the kid, and then pulled the door open in a sudden, smooth lunge. Remy tensed and then relaxed, shrugging.
I stepped in front of him and took lead. The hallway was made of warped wood slats on the floor and pockmarked drywall. Two doors on the sides had been boarded over crudely, leaving just the big, heavy wooden door with the shotgun slat at the other end to worry over. It made sense to limit the approaches; Potosí was not exactly a stable little city, and Garces hadn’t become one of a dozen or so tiny chiefs in it through glad-handing and arranged marriages—a direct assault on his offices wasn’t out of the question. If his guards weren’t all local simps who couldn’t be trusted to raise an alarm, the hallway would have been an effective way to bottleneck intruders and poke a gun through the slat, raking them with fire from behind the door, which I expected would be steel-plated on the other side.
We paused just outside, standing with our backs at the opposite walls, and looked at each other. Putting a finger up to my lips to forestall Remy’s traditional approach of Extremely Loud and Shoot Me If You Can, I reached over and gently pressed down on the door handle. It moved easily and unlatched with a soft click that sounded like a shotgun blast to my ears. Wincing, I froze and waited to see if the door was going to explode, but nothing happened. I took a deep breath, my HUD flickering in my vision, all levels green, and pushed the door inward, stepping immediately to the left, gun out but held low.
Feeling Remy step in behind me, I took in the room. It was a nicely appointed office and almost felt civilized; Potosí was the definition of the sticks, but this place was old-school: wood paneling on the walls, a stained but thick and sound-swallowing red carpet on the floor, the opposite wall dominated by two huge floor-to-ceiling windows. The left wall was all shelves, empty, the sunburned outlines of something or many somethings, square and all different heights, still staining the old wood. In front of the empty shelves was a massive wooden desk, dark stain with deep scratches, flat and empty. Two men sat on my side of the desk in old, busted-up, plush leather chairs, the upholstery blistered and bursting. One was a huge blob of a guy, pale white with dark red hair, a face made of freckles and sweat. The other was almost as big, dark tan and with glossy black hair spilling back over his shoulders like a wave of ink, a thin pencil mustache adorning his upper lip.
Behind the desk sat Manuelo Garces, who ran half of Potosí with all the imagination and verve of a drunk pissing on his shoes.
He was about my size, and ten or fifteen years younger. He wore what passed for a nice suit in these shattered times, and his head was close-shaved and sported a few scabs where an unsteady hand had cut him. He was a good-looking kid, his face round and happy, symmetrical and balanced. He didn’t look like a guy who’d come up in the slums of Potosí, slitting throats and stealing anything not nailed down, a guy who’d survived the breaking of the System and the civil war that had left Potosí and everything around it for ten miles or so a scab of destruction. He looked like a kid I would pay a thousand yen to run messages for me.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Remy step in after me, shut the door quietly behind him, and then step forward and right a little, getting out of the door’s way in case someone unexpected came in. When he just stood the
re with his ridiculous gun held down by his crotch, I relaxed. The kid liked taking chances and sometimes caused trouble.
I looked at Garces. He had his hands under the desk.
“I’m not here to kill you,” I said. “So don’t pull that boomstick out unless you want to piss me off.” Then I glanced at his two guests. “You two aren’t on my list of chores today, so you have a choice here: You can jump out the window, or I can shoot you both in the head. You’ve got five seconds.”
They both stared at me for a beat, then looked at Garces, who shrugged his eyebrows at him in the international gesture for I don’t give a fuck. The redhead looked at me.
“We’ll go without a fuss—”
“You’ll go out the window,” I said, affecting boredom, playing my role like I’d done a million times before. “Or you’ll stay here forever.” We weren’t that high up—they might break a leg; they might get messed up, but the drop wouldn’t kill them. If they made me kill them I was going to make it hurt, out of sheer irritation.
In some ways, the world was easier, now. The System didn’t exist anymore—except for a hunk of Eastern Europe, where a rump of the old System Security Force hung on. Dick Marin—The King Worm—was gone. At some point the Joint Council’s army had nuked Moscow into a shallow crater, vaporizing his servers. The news had already been a few months old when I’d heard it, and I’d felt nothing—which was curious. On my list of people to hate, Marin had been number three. Knowing he was gone should have felt like something.
The cops were hanging on, though. Everywhere else had just fallen to pieces. City states, small countries, a constantly changing ocean of sovereignties. Most places were run by people like Garces, gangsters who could pay for muscle to keep the peace, or by mercenaries who’d settled down with their troops. A lot of the old army officers had set up tiny kingdoms for themselves after the army had collapsed, with their units as security. It was fucking chaos, and chaos was good for business. There were no System Pigs breathing down your neck, beaming your face across the ocean, hunting you down. There were no Vids pasting your name everywhere and telling people to report seeing you. I could throw these two slobs out the windows and no one was going to investigate, no hovers were going to rip the roof off the place and dump a battalion of Stormers into the room. No one was going to care.