by Jeff Somers
He pointed at Grisha. Hense looked at him for a withering second and then turned her dead eyes on me. I did my best to stare back, circuitry for circuitry. Hense always made me feel like I was beneath her.
“You’re working for Techies now, Avery?” She made the word an insult. I forced myself to grin at her, my tongue poking into the gaps in my teeth.
“Gunners always work for ourselves,” I said. “We just find people to pay us for what we were gonna do anyway.”
She squinted a little at me. “Last reports we had on you, you had an apprentice.”
Cold water splashed through me. I went still, and I forced myself to keep staring back at her despite the urge to look away. Remy flashed through my mind—he’d been an asshole. Complaining, morbid, disobedient. He’d refused to learn a fucking thing and he got in the way every time I planned something out, and I’d let him get clipped right under my nose.
“He’s dead,” I said, my voice flat. I swallowed and stayed silent, and after a moment she looked at Grisha.
“Grigory Baklanov, born Arkhangelsk, interred Chengara Penitentiary presumed dead on site. Obviously not dead, as you are the founder and current leader of Superstes per Scientia, aka SPS. SPS is listed in SSF servers as an Opposition Group.”
Grisha nodded, affecting a tiny little bow in the cramped quarters. “And you: Janet Mitchen Hense, ostensible age forty-three, currently occupying what looks like Gen-Four Squalor Series Two nonbiological individually controlled deployment unit, also known as avatar. You are Director, Internal Affairs, System of Federated Nations Security Force. You have thirteen avatars with your imprint in the field, and you have not long to live.” He shrugged. “So to speak.”
Another second of thick, oppressive silence, and then she nodded. “Why am I talking to you, Mr. Baklanov?”
He nodded back. “We have mutual problem, mutual solution.” He smiled. “We are both mortal.”
Her nostrils flared, and I distracted myself from my pounding heart and clenched fists to ponder the fucking programming and resources that went into getting an avatar to do that. Why? What the fuck was the point that Janet Hense be able to flare her fucking nostrils?
“And the solution?”
“Former Director Marin’s override codes. We know where they can be found. We need SSF’s help to get to them.”
She cocked her head slightly. “Why?”
Grisha paused, gauging, I figured, how much it was safe to give away. I leaned forward. I knew Janet Hense, her type. She was going to get more out of us somehow, and she knew more than she was letting on.
“You know exactly why, babe,” I said, and her visible clench at being called babe made me happier than I’d been in a long time. “Orel—Michaleen Garda, whatever his real name is—has the code. He’s holed up in a uranium museum you assholes created during the civil war, so any carbon-based life forms get within ten miles of it, they start to melt.” I shrugged. “We need an assault force that can withstand radiation levels like that.” Belling had told me Mickey was in Split, Croatia. If the System Pigs didn’t know that, I wasn’t going to tell them.
“We estimate dose of approximately seven Gy,” Grisha added without looking at me.
Outside, somehow we were back in the wilderness: trees zoomed past us, green and brown and red blurs. We were still on a wide, paved road, but it was as if the big, empty city we’d been in had melted away. A hazy feeling of confusion infused me; for a second I almost panicked, my heart lurching in my chest. Then my old augments kicked in and a sense of calm filtered through me.
“Garda,” Hense said, looking out the window. “Fucking Garda. That makes sense.” She continued to stare out the window for a moment, and then turned back to us. “I don’t have access to Garda’s SSF file. It was single-copy-only on Marin’s local server and it got turned into mulch along with him. But I know he wasn’t just some random Gunner.”
In my head, Dolores Salgado suddenly spoke up. Random? Michaleen was there from the beginning. The Dúnmharú didn’t take jobs. They took assignments—all designed to push Unification. That man made Unification happen, by the simple expedient of murdering anyone in a position to oppose it.
I blinked her away. “He’s fortified,” I said quickly.
“Wired up in modified Squalor Series One,” Grisha inserted. “And the Londholm Augment. Which he uses to Psionically compel a security staff that dies off at an alarming rate.”
Hense was unreadable. She settled back into her seat as we emerged from the trees and into a cleared circular driveway in front of a big, domed building. The dome was just a skeleton of bare metal, but the rest of the building looked to be in great shape. Several other four-wheelers had been parked in front of it, and the open space crawled with System Cops in their fraying suits and heavy overcoats and other people, all wearing gray uniforms, all engaged in manual labor of some sort. A group of men tugged an ancient cart along the road, sweating and straining to haul whatever was under the heavy canvas sheets. Half of the four-wheelers we passed had two or three people working on the engines and the solar panels, faces blackened from grease.
“No Droids, huh?” I said to the window.
“And not enough vehicles or power,” Hense snapped, sounding irritated. Her irritation lifted my spirits. I felt like if I could irritate Hense, I could do anything. “Where is he, then?”
“No,” I snapped back, turning to look at her. “Not until you commit.” Garda’s location was our last chip. I wanted to be there, to be put within reach of that short bastard or whatever he was now. And Grisha didn’t want the System Pigs to get the override codes without him there to supervise.
I exchanged a quick glance with the Techie, and he winked at me. I had to admit, I liked the crazy fuck, and I was glad we were working the same angle for the moment.
“Avery will be acting as Taker on this,” Grisha said. “We take him, and we extract the information from him and share it with you. We need SSF to breach outer defenses, help get our team inside.”
The vehicle rolled to a stop, but Hense sat there for another moment, her eyes swiveling from me to Grisha. “Taker. Avery Cates has never taken anyone he could kill. He’s a fucking savage. His type is one of the reasons I tested into the SSF, Mr. Baklanov. He hates Garda, has a personal vendetta against him. And you wish me to believe he will take Garda instead of shooting him?” She cocked her head. “Assuming you can even get him next to Garda without he himself dying of radiation exposure. Seven Gy will take about twenty minutes before he’s on his knees puking blood.”
“We have rad suits that can withstand such exposure for perhaps an hour,” Grisha said, leaning forward. “We must work together, Director Hense. Are we different species? Perhaps we are. But we are species on the brink of extinction, both.” He leaned back again. “We offer you a way. But it must be our way.”
She shook her head. “I arrest you, and search radiation zones—preserved settlements with lethal-dose ionizing rad levels. I find him without you.”
Grisha shrugged his face, pulling the corners of his lips down. “Yes. Maybe you even find him before your automatic shutdown routines kick in. Maybe you go through a dozen false leads and then time runs out, yes?”
She continued to stare. Without transition, or any movement on her part, the doors to the four-wheeler popped up, letting in the brisk Berlin air. “I will have officers as part of the extraction team. Cates can be your Taker, but I will have hands there to keep him on target.”
Before I could say anything, Grisha nodded. “Agreed. Yes. But they will follow Avery’s orders. Avery will be lead on the extraction team.”
I closed my eyes, feeling the gentle rock of the chassis as everyone struggled to unglue themselves and exit. I didn’t like any of this. If he were here, I would have told Remy to always exit a vehicle last; if there was an ambush waiting, let someone else take the brunt of it. And then I would have told him to also always know your exits, so you don’t get trapped inside. And then
he would have nodded and yawned and asked me if I had anything alcoholic to drink stashed away somewhere.
I opened my eyes and shook myself. I had work to do. I pushed myself along the oddly comfortable upholstered seats and pulled myself from the four-wheeler; Hense and Gall and Grisha were already on the huge stone steps leading up into the building, which stretched away majestically to my right and left. Some weak, watery sun had poked its way through the clouds, and the sensation of open space felt strange and oppressive.
One of the poor assholes in a gray uniform, similar to SPS’s jumpsuits, stood in front of me. His head had been shaved to a pink, round ball, and he squinted at me with a dopey, ludicrous grin on half his face.
“Hullo, Avery,” he said.
I looked back at him, and after a moment a shock of recognition hit me. Without his bloom of hair, his stupid glasses, and the extra thirty pounds, I would not have recognized Ezekiel Marko under most conditions.
“Zeke,” I said, giving him a grin, for a moment everything else forgotten. I had a soft spot for Mr. Marko. Then I frowned. “You used to have better fashion sense.”
His whole round head turned crimson, and his face folded up. It took me a moment to realize that good old Zeke Marko was fucking livid.
“I’ve been assigned to be your technical liaison,” he said. Then he paused and looked over my shoulder, his eyes squinted. “I made my way south after we crashed, and did okay for a while. Then I got caught between a press unit for the army and the police, and I chose what I thought was the lesser evil.” He indicated his uniform with a sweep of his hands. “I’m a fucking indentured servant here, now. Because I got burned and ran, they don’t trust me to put me in an avatar—which I’m glad for—but they need people like me to work on their little problem.” Suddenly he looked back at me, and I was shocked at the sustained anger and directness of his gaze. The Marko I’d known had been a timid little shit, worming his way through life. “Don’t p them, Avery,” he whispered, leaning in.
I blinked. “What?”
“Let them all go dormant,” he whispered, his eyes jumping around nervously. “Every last fucking one of them.”
XIX
YER GONNA NEED MORE GUNNERS
“If this is what they’re calling booze,” Gall said, “I haven’t been missing much by way of fucking civilization by staying out in the cold.”
We all stared down at our glasses with a mixture of dismay and embarrassment. When our minder, a blank-faced, skinny captain named Mehrak, who never smiled or reacted in any way to anything we said to him, had told us there was liquor to be had in Berlin even Grisha had gotten excited. Mehrak had been assigned to escort us around the city, and he’d taken us to a grand-looking restaurant on the other side of the big forestlike park we’d ridden through, directly across from ancient, rusting rail tracks. The place was staffed by unhappy-looking workers in the gray uniforms—slaves, basically, who’d been brought into Berlin one way or another and implanted with a chip that set off alarms if they strayed too far outside the city limits. The cops swore they’d set them all free once things settled down, but I knew as well as they did that things never settled down. Not that much.
The menu consisted of three items: potato stew, bread hard enough to commit murder with, and potato liquor. The greasy sheen on the stew made me gag, so I’d contented myself with a tall glass of cloudy booze, which turned out to have been made from dead rats and old cheese, based on the taste.
Once convinced, Hense had proven almost eager to cooperate, which made me nervous. She’d hammered away at everything, pushing for advantages and control, which was to be expected, but she’d bargained, instead of dictating, which meant either she was in a weaker position than we suspected, or she was playing us. Since she was right in the middle of a long line of people who’d fooled me, and badly, in my life, I wouldn’t have been surprised. In the meantime, she’d agreed to put what was left of the SSF at our service. She’d even agreed to let us keep the actual location of Michaleen’s fortress, where he was incubating or molting or greasing his hinges or whatever, until the last minute. Either she was desperate, or we were going to get brutally fucked in the end.
Either way, a drink had sounded about right.
I raised my glass. “To the end of everything,” I said. “And about fucking time.”
It was a strange moment. It felt calm and almost happy, like everything was draining out of the world and leaving a brief moment of static before it all went black, and suddenly Horatio Gall and Grisha felt like my friends. Some of the other tables in the place were filled by gray-uniformed workers—on breaks, I guessed. They stared and kept silent. I figured the fact that Hense had issued orders to let us keep our weapons didn’t make us seem too friendly.
“Fuck you,” Gall said,re kling as he winced his way into a sip of his drink.
“Nothing ends,” Grisha said with a faint smile. “There are just new ways of doing things.”
Mehrak said nothing. He stood a few feet away with his hands in his pockets, his sunglasses on to ward off any attempt to engage him. He was an avatar, of course, but he looked like he’d been quick and nimble as flesh and blood, the sort of cop who would chase you into places you didn’t expect to be chased into.
“Besides,” Grisha said, suppressing a cough after his swallow of deadly booze, his whole body shivering, “that is why we are here, to make sure things continue.”
A group of workers emerged from the interior of the restaurant, each bearing two glasses of booze in dirty hands. There were three of them, one man and two women, all middle-aged and tired looking. Thinking that if they actually drank both I’d be in some personal fear of them, I watched them pause awkwardly when they saw us, and then sit down at a table behind me.
I looked back at Grisha. He sat easily, studying me with a frown. He was the most competent man I’d ever met. Not especially talented in many ways: not the best shot I’d ever seen, not a brilliant inventor, nothing like that. He was just a collection of pretty fucking good at everything rolled into one person. I never would have pegged him as someone wanting to save the world.
“You think of your friend,” he said suddenly. He held up his glass, smiling archly. “He would have enjoyed this?”
His kindness made me angry. I thought of Remy, again, saw him going inside and demanding a jug of this acid, getting into a fight when they said no, getting hauled away and beaten up somewhere, then crawling back to where I was, bruised and scabbed, not sorry. Never fucking sorry.
I’d never had friends. Running with snuff gangs in Old New York as a kid, tossing a handful of dirt into some dandy’s face and knocking him down, fifteen, twenty sets of hands invading every possible pocket in seconds, ripping everything free and then running through the twisty old streets—you kept whatever you got your hands on. No sharing. If you wanted something someone else got their hands on, you had to take it. I hadn’t had some worn-down old Gunner showing me the ropes, some old man to make jokes about death with. I’d learned everything on my own. My first job gunning, I didn’t even have a gun yet. Guns were expensive. Knives you could make out of shit you found, sharpened pieces of soft metal, plastic. No one showed me how. No one listened to me bellyache for hours on end about my hard deal, how I had metal in my head, how I’d been abandoned.
Friends made you weak, and weak made you dead. I looked weak to Grisha, I thought, the Russian fuck laughing at me, really. Of course he was. I’d laugh at some old asshole misting up over one particular dead body in a long road made of dead bodies.
I thought about smashing my glass into Grisha’s face, finally finding out just how tough he was. I thought about telling him to fucking mind his business. I thought about telling him I kept seeing Remy in my mind, staring eyes empty, hands curled into stiff half fists, that I’d had hopes for him, of finally teaching someone something useful. I thought abut drinking off my entire glass in one gulp and seeing what happened.
Instead of all that, I just lo
oked away. “Yeah, he would have.”
“It is not your fault. That old man was the most powerful Pusher I know of. You had no chance.”
“Fuck you,” I said before I even thought it. “I’m forty fucking years old, give or take. I’ve survived. I know better. Turning my back, relying on him, letting that old cunt Belling distract me.” I kept staring off into the distance. “I’ve been fucking pushed and pointed for years by Michaleen Garda. Cainnic Orel. Whatever his name is. Years. Who knows how long—I’m so fucking stupid it might be from fucking birth. And along the way, anyone I tried to keep fucking alive got killed. I could keep us here a month just talking about the people I’ve killed, or let be killed.” I laughed suddenly. I didn’t feel it; it just crawled out of me. “I’m motherfucking death, Grish. You spend enough time with me, you’re dead.” I laughed again. “Shit, for a while during the Plague, that was the literal fucking truth.” I was glad I’d put my glass down. My hands were clenched so tight I would have crushed it, slicing my hand to pulp. “Fucking cops, Grish,” I said. “They hired the Pusher. Put him on me. They killed Remy. And here I am, working with them, showing them my belly.”
I didn’t have to look to know that Grisha and Gall were exchanging a lingering look of alarm. I’d been on the other end when someone you were working with suddenly started to bark. You saw all your plans go out the window. You saw all your investment wasted, and you started thinking about cutting your losses and getting a new partner. I blinked my eyes rapidly a few times and took a long pull off the glass, resisting the urge to pound the table, and looked back at them.
“The translation is: Fuck you,” I said.
Grisha narrowed his eyes at me a moment, then nodded. “Yes, fine.” He pointed at me. “You have a chance now, you self-pitying asshole,” he said slowly, steadily. “You are concerned about those who have gone before? Save those who are still here.” He leaned back again. “We need you, Avery. You have a skill set and experience no one else in the world has anymore. We cannot simply advertise for world-class assassin, intimate experience with legend Canny Orel preferred. And we cannot pursue petty revenge. We also cannot choose our partners.”