by Jeff Somers
Gall grinned, his white teeth shocking. “You speak English like you learned it from a mime, pal. Presence. I was Marin’s attaché, for fuck’s sake. Every cop in the world reported to me. Of course I still have some people. Besides,” he said and sat forward, suddenly conspiratorial, “I’m not the only old badge who didn’t like the whole avatar business, who cut ties and ran—or tried to. There’s a bunch of active duties up north who tried to run and got caught by Marin’s murder machine before they could. We share a mind-set, you know?”
I leaned forward. “So you can help us get in touch.”
He nodded. “Can help, yes. Will help, maybe. Despite our deep and ancient comradeship, Mr. Cates, as men who have been fucked by Dick Marin, I have to be crude and ask you what’s in it for me?”
Grisha cocked his head. “Mr. Gall, this is not some heist scheme, or an assassination for yen.”
Gall winked at me. “This is gonna be good, huh?”
“Mr. Gall—”
He held up his hand. “Look, I’ve dealt with SPS before—I know you fucking Techies. Everything is for the greater good. Everything is to save the world. I don’t care. You want me to make introductions, give me a reason.”
I was on the verge of leaning forward and giving my old friend Gall a reason, but Grisha surprised me by burping a harsh laugh and putting a hand on my chest like he’d foreseen my near future. “Mr. Gall, I d not believe yen will be worth anything this time five years from now, so you would be welcome to as much of it as we can find.”
Gall grinned again, lowering his hand and picking up his cup to toast us. “Now that’s more like it. Paper?”
Grisha nodded, picking up his own cup and holding it up. “Naturally.”
Gall opened his mouth, but behind us there was a sudden commotion, all the old men shouting in Italian. Grisha and I leaped to our feet, but Gall just sat for a moment, then shouted something back.
“What?” I snapped, pushing my hand into my pocket and palming my gun.
Gall grimaced. “Angels.”
XV
YOU GOT MY PERMISSION TO SHOOT THE LOT
“How many?” Grisha demanded, jumping up and signaling his people with a single, brisk flex of his upraised hand, the sort of confident gesture some people just came to naturally, people who assumed—always correctly—that they would be obeyed immediately, and without question. I’d known a couple of people like that in my time, and I’d never been one. People always argued with me; I usually had to hold a gun to their heads to make things happen, or inflict a few flesh wounds.
Gall shouted something, and the old men—busy carrying their tables and chairs from the street into one of the small buildings along the north side of the square—shouted back in a jangly chorus.
“Five,” Gall announced, picking up his coffee, tossing its contents to the cobbled street and tucking the delicate white cup into one pocket while producing a huge, chrome-plated auto from another. The monster gleamed in the sun and looked big enough to kill elephants. It still wasn’t as big as Remy’s huge revolver, and that made me picture Remy again, crumpled on the dirty floor of Belling’s room. I spun to fix the layout of the square in my head, thinking that the Pusher who’d killed Remy maybe wasn’t an Angel, and had been working for the cops. But the Angels were Psionics, and they would do, for now.
The north side of the square was a row of attached buildings, weathered and dark; the south was a bigger building set back from the street; either direction led to the crush of buildings that was this town. A good place to get lost, and if there were more Angels than Gall’s men had spotted, it was likely they’d be filtering through the narrow, dim streets, sneaking up on us. I didn’t think that was likely, though; I’d never seen more than a few Angels in one place. The world was dying, says Grisha, and manpower was an issue for everyone.
That meant northeast—the town sat on a hill, and there was a sheltered, hidden approach a half mile away, leading up an ancient stone staircase from the valley below. Anyone could creep up that way and be on the main road of the town before we knew it. Once on the main approach they’d be exposed, and if we could risk getting close we’d be able to pick them off pretty easily, but the moment we were seen, either we’d be in the air courtesy of the Tele-Ks, r we’d just shoot ourselves in the head courtesy of the Pushers.
“Cover,” I said, spinning back to Gall and Grisha. Lok was leading Grisha’s four troops at a run from obscured alleyways. “We have to get out of sight.”
Gall nodded. “Follow the old bastards into the dining room, fellas. We own that building and it’s got windows on three sides.”
We all started trotting toward the building, Lok and the other SPS people falling in with us like they’d been trained to do it their whole lives.
“Seems like,” Gall said, breathing hard as we ran, “every time I see you, someone is trying to kill you, Cates. Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?”
I laughed—I couldn’t help it. It was fucking ridiculous. “You live as long as me, things start to skew around, you know?”
As we gained the dark rectangle of the building, Gall stepped aside with his old System Pig reflexes and covered us with his shiny gun, eyes bright white in the setting sun of his face. He grinned, not looking at me as he scanned the street. “Tell me about it. You know how many meetings I took in Old New York about you?”
I pushed into the building and a second later Gall was in behind me, pulling the door shut with a boom that shook the walls and lowering a thick metal bar across it.
“Up,” I said, running my augment-brightened eyes over the cluttered first floor, which contained the disorderly pile of chairs and tables and nothing else aside from dust and a few scattering rats. The house had been retrofitted with an escalator at some point, which had flattened into a slide when the power had disappeared. “Forget the door, we’ll post at the stairs.”
Grisha was ahead of me, impatiently gesturing his people to the old escalator. Lok made it up with impressive speed, and by the time I’d reached the bottom I was watching Grisha’s ass wiggle its way up. I did my best to look professional as I ascended, but my boots kept slipping and I ended up having to half crawl my way onto the second floor, ears burning, and I popped up angry, spinning around to look over our little team as Gall cursed and screamed at his personal bodyguard of fat old men with no English, each one huffing his way up the old escalator like their heart rates hadn’t been this high in fifty years.
“Anyone has a heart attack,” I shouted at Gall, “push ’im down the slide.” I turned to Grisha’s team and eyed their long, slender rifles. “Who’s fastest on the reload?”
They hesitated, all five of them looking at Grisha, who was checking over his handgun, a perfectly serviceable old Hamada. When he glanced up to find them all looking at him, he frowned.
“What the fuck are you all waiting for?” he pointed at me. “This man has died before, and here he stands. Do whatever he tells you to do.”
As one, the five Techies looked back at me. After another moment of hesitation, Lok and a short, extremely hairy man whose beard was inches away from achieving sentience raised their hands.
I nodded and pointed. “At the top of the slide. Don’t hesitate—anything bigger than a rat moves down there, shoot, reload, shoot again. Pour it on as fast as you can until you don’t see anything anymore. Don’t wait. If they see you, fix you in their minds, they’ll have you. Try to anchor yourself, because if it’s a Tele-K, you’re going for a ride.”
They both blinked, but then pushed through the crowd to take position, and I gave Grisha credit for at least having people with half a brain under him.
“The rest of you, on the windows. Stay low. If your head pops up, bad things are gonna happen to you. Try to stay out of sight and only take shots that make sense.”
I spun and looked at Gall’s geriatric waiters. They had immediately crowded against the far wall, away from the windows, which gave me some hope that they we
ren’t as genetically retarded as I’d feared. I looked and found Gall peering owlishly out a tiny triangular window in the center of the room.
“These guys of yours got anything to offer?”
Gall shook his head. “They’re useless. If I’d had time to think, I would have pushed them out the windows. You got my permission to shoot the lot if they get in the way.”
I nodded and edged back toward the windows, angling my head carefully, trying to glimpse the square outside without exposing myself. For a few minutes we all just crouched in the sweat-thick air of the second floor, breathing hard and stretching our necks for any hints.
This is what happens, Dick Marin decided to whisper in my head at that moment, when the Psionic population is left to its own devices. That’s why we snatched every one of them we could find off the fucking streets.
I blinked and resisted the urge to remind Dick that he was dead, that the imprint I’d somehow acquired back in Chengara was probably the last vestige of him left in the universe.
“How far were they?” I hissed in Gall’s direction.
He shouted something over his shoulder and one of the old men shouted back. “Five minutes, he says.”
“Then where the hell are they?”
“We are here.”
I spun around, crouching low with my Roon on the group of old men across the room. One of them had spoken, the voice deep and smoked, old as sin. They were just the same group of men who’d been sitting out on the street, muttering in Italian, but this voice had a distinct, clear Creole accent.
“What the fuck?” Gall snapped. “One of you fuckers speaks English and you never thought to tell me? I ought to shoot you all right now.”
One of them pushed his way to the front of the pack. They were all swarthy, short men with broad chests and distended bellies, their faces leathery and sunworn. This one was maybe an inch taller than the others and had a jaunty strip of red cloth tied around his neck.
“I have Traveled from t’outside into t’is body,” he said, his accent lazy and fat. I had a sudden memory flash, back to Hong Kong, to a girl with glowing blue eyes apologizing because she’d been hacked. But that had been someone with a fistful of tech implanted into her brain on wireless networks, hacked by Techies the same way circuits had been hacked for decades. This was an old man who’d lived his whole life in a tiny village, who’d probably never even heard of SPS or the Angels. “I have come to talk to Mr. Cates before we begin hostilities.”
“This is new,” Grisha said almost conversationally. His tone of awed calm told me Grish’s geeky bones had been rattled by this new phenomenon, and I worried for a moment that if he had to make a choice between saving my ass and destroying some new species of Psionic he wouldn’t make the wrong choice.
“Who are you?” I said, my voice coming out phlegmy and cracked and making me flush a little in shame. “Every time I’ve met you folks before, you’ve tried to kill me.”
The old man ticked his head to look at me. “I am the Angels. You may call me Mikhail. Yes, you have been condemned.”
Marin giggled inside me and repeated something he’d said to me before, long ago: I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury, said cunning old Fury. I’ll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.
“There has been a reconsideration of your case, Mr. Cates,” the Angel said through the poor old man. “I am here to negotiate your pardon.”
XVI
YOU’RE GONNA HAVE TO BE MORE SPECIFIC
I smiled, not feeling anywhere near amused. “My pardon?”
The old man didn’t smile. His fellows were staring at him like he’d turned into something hairy and growling, and I wondered briefly if they’d end up slitting his throat just to be safe later. After a moment he spread his hands in a slow, deliberate gesture that was epically wrong, like every tiny muscle adjustment had to be beamed over from a short distance away. It was like watching a stop-motion video of someone spreading their hands.
I suddenly wished fervently that he never try to smile. I wasn’t a strong man anymore. Something like that might break me.
“Mr. Cates, you have access to information—we were not aware of this before. You have access to information—”
I put the Roon on him. “Too fucking late. I already accessed that information, and shared it with my friends.”
The old man glanced at Grisha for a second, and then back at me. “Mr. Cates, the members of SPS are not your friends, whatever they may tell you.”
I nodded. “I’ve led a lonely life.”
=evertheless,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken. “We still have a deal to proffer. You have informed SPS of the location of Director Marin’s override codes. They intend to use these codes to clear the SSF networks of auto-shutdown and anti-mutiny routines, making it possible to load organic consciousnesses into old avatar stock, yes?” He nodded, a dozen individual ticks of his head, as if I’d answered. “We cannot delete information from the world easily; this we have learned to our regret. So we have another proposal. No doubt you are now working with SPS to organize the discovery of these codes?”
This time he paused and stared at me, as if expecting me to confirm this. “You’re running out of time, buddy. I’m easily bored these days.”
If they thought there was anything we could discuss that would keep me from going after Michaleen, that would stop me from forcing a conversation with that old bastard, they didn’t know a fucking thing about me.
“Mr. Cates,” he said in a firmer, faster voice, “we are schismatics within our own order, and have been ejected. This is because despite your history of violence against your own species, of callous disregard for human life and your ongoing affinity for the very technology that has brought us all down low, we are prepared to lift our sentence of death from you. For this, we ask that you abandon your path. Men of your… talents are rare in these days. You have proven this in surviving our attempts to bring you to god’s eternal justice.”
God. I didn’t hear that word much anymore. It reminded me of the Monks.
“Aid us in preserving the override codes,” he said with a straight face. “Prevent their use. Use your talent for violence and intrusion, your disregard for human life in the service of god’s ultimate plan for us, and you will be spared judgment. We will then also pledge to defend you, to honor your service. You alone in the world will be allowed to live out his years to their natural extent.” He paused and blinked in that bizarre stop-motion way, and I wondered why in fuck the Angel pulling this poor asshole’s strings would bother to blink for him. “Until you die, of course, Mr. Cates. We cannot make deals for god, after all, and you will be forced to answer for your crimes then, if not now.”
I stood there with my gun on him, staring. A deal. The Angels had just offered me a fucking deal. I tried to think of how many of them I’d killed over the last few years—eight? A dozen? Now all I had to do to earn their fucking pardon was work for them. Everyone thought I was just there to do their dirty work. The Angels, Grisha, fucking Canny Orel in his little god suit in Split. I was just a fucking windup toy—point me in the direction of things you wanted destroyed.
Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds, huh? Dick Marin whispered, sounding amused.
“Mr. Gall,” I said evenly, keeping my eyes on the old man. “Can you spot these motherfuckers out there?” I didn’t know anything about this neat new Psionic ability—whether the old man could survive it or if he’d just fall over, vacant, when the Angel abandoned him, or what the range was on popping into other people’s skulls, but I was willing to make a little side bet with the cosmos that it wasn’t far. I was also willing to bet this little trick of Traveling required some fucking concentration could barely remind myself to breathe and walk at the same time, so I couldn’t imagine how hard it was to Push yourself into someone else’s body and do anything else at all.
I heard him moving behind me, breathing heavily and grunting as he struggled to peer out the windows without exposing himse
lf to any Tele-Ks that might be spotting on the windows.
“Sure, sure, I see ’em,” he said after a moment. “Three ugly bastards in dark suits. One woman in the middle, tall, long salt-and-pepper hair, standing there with her eyes closed.”
“Do me a favor and throw some bullets at them.” I nodded at the old man. “Tell god this,” I said, and pulled the trigger, aiming for his feet and chewing up the floorboards.
The crowd of old men scattered, screeching in Italian, and there was a scream, suddenly, in the near distance, and then the roar of half a dozen guns being fired simultaneously behind me. I vaulted over the railing and landed awkwardly on the escalator, managing to avoid a fall by taking a handful of splinters off the makeshift railing, and skidded onto the floor just as the front door was torn open, framing a tall, skinny figure. For a moment we stared at each other; I couldn’t see his face, which was bathed in shadow, but I somehow had an impression of dumb shock.
“You don’t have to be fucking psychic,” I said. The figure took a step toward me, raising his hands, and I fired three times, making him dance and jig and fall in toward me, landing on his face. People who didn’t try murder on a regular basis usually thought they were inventing everything right there on the spot, like some sort of murder prodigy.
As I stood there congratulating myself on being a genius, something huge filled the now-empty doorway, and my HUD suddenly sharpened up, my laboring augments kicking in. Everything slowed down just a tiny bit; I shifted my weight and launched myself to the right just as a large crate crashed through the door, widening it by a couple of inches and shattering on the floor. I landed on the gritty floorboards and rolled until I hit the front wall, where I braced myself and pushed up into a crouch. The gunfire above me was still being poured on; there was a clear pattern as a thunderous roil of shots would trail off to a single pop-pop-pop—the rifles having their say, and then Gall emptying a clip while they reloaded. Gall had said just three, and I’d nailed one, but Psionic Actives were worth a dozen assholes.