by Jeff Somers
When Grisha found me in one of the empty hovers on the beach, he paused f a moment in the hatchway and burst out laughing.
“You look like a piece of spoiled fruit,” he said, stepping into the hover, followed closely by Marko and Mehrak. The three of them were apparently my best friends in the whole world. Everywhere I was, they went.
I was sitting enveloped in the heavy, bulky rad suit Grisha had supplied to me, except for the headgear, which lay on the filthy, muddy floor of the hover next to me. It weighed about the same as a planet, was about five thousand degrees, and smelled like the last guy who wore it had melted and been absorbed into the weird, coarse fabric of the lining where he’d continued to rot on a molecular level. I had a canteen of the terrible German liquor they’d had in Berlin and I’d been drinking from it for two hours. My head pounded in time with my heartbeat, and my mouth was filled with sand.
I raised the canteen up and waggled it at Grisha as he approached. He made a face.
“Fuck, Avery, you stink. What will you do when you have to piss?”
I winked. “The question should be, what did I do when I had to piss.”
He laughed again. “You are a fucking animal, yes?”
I tried to shrug, but the suit was too heavy. It appeared to be a single piece of strange, gray material, seamless and stretchy. There was one slit in the back you stepped into, which mended itself magically when pressed together. When you put on the helmet it sealed itself and somehow generated an air mixture, though I couldn’t see any kind of tanks.
Grisha knelt before me as the other two inspected the bay for seats. This was one of the old drop hovers, used to dump Stormers on our heads. There was no furniture, aside from narrow benches along each side, and the interior was a mess of damp sandy mud. Mehrak was wearing a spiffy, old-fashioned suit, complete with vest and gold links on his huge white cuffs, and he stood there pondering the muck with an expression of total confusion on his synthetic face. Marko was back in Techie scrubs and after a second’s hesitation just sat down. He seemed to have gained an inch of hair overnight.
“How is the weight?” Grisha asked, studying the suit.
“Like I’m carrying you,” I said. He reached out and took the canteen and tilted it back into his mouth. “It’s hot, doesn’t bend well, and the headgear gives me about an inch of peripheral vision.”
He nodded, grimacing as he swallowed and held the canteen over his head. Marko leaned forward and took it. “Yes, about what was expected. You foresee problems?”
“Fuck yes, I foresee problems,” I said thickly. “But not as many problems as being turned inside out by radiation.”
Marko dissolved into a paroxysm of spluttering coughs, holding the canteen out and away from him like it had bitten him. After a moment Mehrak shrugged and plucked the canteen from his hand and just held it, looking, for a moment, incredibly sad. I thought about never drinking again for the rest of fucking eternity and felt sorry for a System Cop for maybe the fist time in my life. For a second I had drunk tears welling up in me, and I swallowed with heavy, bitter effort. I was not some fucking kid plotting his first-ever rat-cart takedown with some other snotnosed orphans still wondering if Mom was coming back to claim them.
Grisha stood, turned, and sat down next to Mehrak without even considering the filth factor. Grisha was fucking practical. If the only seat was filthy, well, you sat in filth. “He will be in Monk chassis. Stronger than us, faster. More precise with aim. Reloads on the weapon will be nearly instant. Then he will have his mental abilities, the God Augment. He will Push us. He will pick us up and fling us about.”
I laboriously raised a heavy arm to waggle a thick gloved finger at him. “He isn’t Pushing me, if that cunt back in Spain is to be believed. Said it took time and planning to keep me under. And if he’s stuck with original Monk issue, those guns jammed like nothing I’ve ever seen. But don’t forget his new fun little thing, Traveling. He’ll pop into Zeke and make him turn on us.”
Marko blinked and straightened up, his hairy face red and damp under his whiskers. “Why me? Fuck, he might do it to you.”
I started to shrug amiably, but Grisha shook his head and spoke first. “No. Avery… Avery’s brain is fucked up.” He threw a smile at me as he fished cigarettes out of his pocket. “No offense, Avery. After Chengara, his brain was fundamentally changed. He should have been erased, like everyone else who went through second-pass version of AV-79 Amblen processing, but he was not. His brain… re-wired itself. Accommodated Salgado and… others, repaired itself.” He reached over and claimed the canteen from Mehrak. “I doubt Orel can ‘travel’ into Avery. If he does, he may not find what he expects.”
I remembered Marin, far away and long ago, telling me, Now you, you’re from imprint one. Imprint one scans out at one hundred and fourteen percent complete. Which is, of course, impossible. I wondered how I always remembered shit like that so perfectly, every word, exactly. He’d been trying to brain fuck me, of course, to convince me I was an avatar unaware of himself, but I wondered if the data he’d been using had been real—rule number one of lying to someone was to use as many facts as possible. It made your lie seem real. If Remy had lived, I would have leaned over and told him that, and he would have opened one eye, then reached out for the canteen and gone back to pretending to be asleep.
I came back to myself and winked at Marko. “See, Zeke? Has to be you. I’ll apologize in advance if I have to shoot you.”
Marko stared at me, then looked down at his muddy shoes. “Fuck,” he whispered, stretching it out into one long noise.
I wondered if I’d be able to stand up on my own with the suit on. I thought I probably should have considered that before getting shitfaced on the floor. My vision seemed to have waves in it, and when I shut my eyes everything started to spin, so I opened them again.
“We go tomorrow, yes?” Grisha suddenly said, looking at Mehrak.
The cop glanced at Grish and then nodded. “Assuming we get a full day’s sun to charge up the panels, yes. The panels only supplement the fuel supply, though, running electric motors alongside the solid-fuel cells—we have only enough overall juice, assuming a full day’s charge, for one long-range trip with full weapon activation. But, yes, tomorrow.” He looked at me, raising a jolly eyebrow. “Unless you think we ought to give princess here—”
“Avery will be fine,” Grisha said decisively. “He drinks professionally. Take the canteen with us and let him hydrate.” He looked at me. “You are ready, yes?”
I nodded and tried to give him a thumbs-up, but my arms were too heavy to lift, so I just nodded as assertively as I could manage.
Mehrak’s expression was bland and unconvinced, but he shrugged. “Bricks in the air before dawn, darlings; the assault hits half an hour later, drawing whatever muscle the old man’s got around the palace. He’s got a surprising number of people working security around the palace. They die off pretty fast, but people keep streaming in.”
“Pushed,” Marko suggested quietly, scratching at his neck beard.
Mehrak waggled his brow. “Maybe. I’ve never seen the Pusher could maintain hundreds of people like that over a period of fucking days, weeks.”
Marko snorted. “That old fuck traveled with his brain to Berlin from Split and took over a series of poor fucks,” he pointed out, sounding admiring. “I think it’s safe to say this is a new kind of thing for you to wonder about.”
I laughed. “Shit, Zeke, you got mouthy.”
I almost said, I’m gonna miss your fucking stupidity, but stopped myself. No reason to state the obvious about Mr. Marko’s chances of surviving me.
“So, we will go at the same time, find our sewer hole, and begin infiltration,” Grisha said. “By the time we attain the main part of the underground complex, our friends the police should be in full swing, drawing Orel’s forces and, hopefully, attention up and out.” He made a fruity little flapping gesture with his hand, and I started to laugh a little. I felt pretty good,
despite being sick to my stomach, way too old, friendless, and sitting in a urine-soaked rad suit so heavy it was smothering me by increments. I felt at peace. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I avenged everyone, everything.
“What if he has a reserve of people down there?” Mehrak said, frowning. “We can’t assume he’ll be rattling around down there alone.”
Grisha shrugged. “Regular people, we do not worry about them. We have Avery. We have ourselves.” He paused and glanced over at Marko, who seemed absorbed in his own fingernails. Then Grisha nodded firmly. “Ourselves. Orel should worry about us, not us about his slaves.”
Mehrak raised an eyebrow, seeming amused. “And when we run into the glorious Mr. Orel himself in his golden jumpsuit? When he starts tossing us around and making us see visions?”
Grisha nodded. “I have some surprises for him. SPS has not been idle, and we have done much research into the Psionic active.”
Surprises, I thought murkily, my head swimming. And then, as my vision folded up on itself, I chased that with me too.
XXVII
A MOMENT OF CRAZY
“Light goes green, you bend your fucking knees! You put both hands on the guide clip! You do not fucking hesitate!”
The cop had been a real bruiser in his flesh life—a big, red, round face, a thick neck with cords that stood out and big, buggly eyes, bloodshot and genetically outraged. He’d been yelling since birth, I figured, and had been assigned to drop-ship duty because it was the only place in the world where his congenital volume made any sense.
The wind was fucking intense, tearing at us as the hover moved through the air, everything vibrating, the rhythm of it drilling up through my feet into my body, moving my organ around and making my teeth chatter. I was strapped to a harness made of wires so thin and nearly invisible I could not believe it would hold me on the way down. I was about to find out what it had been like for all those Stormers through the years, waiting for roof charges to pop and blow the top off some dive and then plummeting down on their thin, silver wires, seeming to appear out of fucking nowhere. There was no time for us to make an overland approach—we had to be inside the palace on a schedule, so we had to jump out of a fucking hover. I didn’t care. I hadn’t come this far for the cosmos to kill me this way.
That had been Remy’s line, that certainty about your fate. I’d always thought he was a self-pitying asshole for it, expecting him to one day just wake up and be over it. Maybe he’d just learned it from me.
The cop smacked one of his mitts against the big light bolted to the side of the bay, protected behind a metal grate. “Light goes green—”
“Say it again and I’m pulling you down after me!” I shouted back over the howling wind. “What am I, a fucking recruit? Shut up.”
The cop popped his eyes out at me, and again I was amazed at the artistry involved in the fucking avatars. Then he smirked and clapped his hands together, mimicking washing them, and snapped them apart as he backed away from the open bay. I translated that into Fuck if I care if you catch a crosswind and get broken in half, asshole.
Behind me, Grisha leaned forward to shout in my ear. “Light goes green, you bend your fucking knees!”
I tried to stay pissed off, but I burst out laughing. I was going to miss Grisha.
We were wearing the radiation suits already, of course, and in twenty minutes mine had become intolerably heavy, pushing me down relentlessly, squeezing my lungs. They’d been fitted with hip holsters on each side; in the right I had the Roon, oiled and cleaned. In the left I had some random automatic the cops had handed me, no personality. We each had a shredder slung across our chests in a precise way that would make it awkward as hell to quickly deploy but difficult to shake off accidentally as we hurtled downward through the air. I’d found a small pocket along one thigh of the suit where a large old hunting knife fit nicely; I wasn’t much of a knife fighter, but a lot of times people saw the guns and forgot there was any other kind of weapon in the world, so a knife was sometimes a nice surprise to have. The pockets of the suit bulged with ammo, and if we didn’t have enough between us to kill everything within a mile radius we were fucked to begin with, so it didn’t matter.
“Put on your helmet!” Grisha shouted. “One minute!”
I took a deep breath and raised the heavy helmet up and over my head. It seemed to pull down on my arms as I let it settle onto my shoulders, sealing itself to the suit. There was a moment of suffocation, and then some chemical reaction began sweetening the air and I could breathe normally. My vision was hampered, but I was comfortable enough despite having another twenty pounds to lug around. I was already sweating, and my heart was still doing its weird little fluttering thing.
Fuck it, I thought. Light goes green, bend your fucking knees and quit complaining.
Out in the distance I could see the flashes and smoke of the main assault, drawing attention and letting the cops vent some of their frustrations. It was beautiful—the explosions and streams of Stormers raining down on their silvery lines, silent and distant, like a Vid being played with the sound off.
The light turned green.
For a second I was frozen. The green light meant bend your fucking knees, grab onto the clip, and push yourself into the open air, but fuck the ground was far away. I was sweating like a stuck pig, and I was jumping into airspace that would cook me from the inside out if not for the suit. I stood for a second staring at the green light, mesmerized.
Jump, dummy, Dick Marin whispered at me.
I didn’t bend my fucking knees; I leaned forward and grabbed the guide clip and then kept leaning forward until gravity reached up and plucked me from the bay. There was a moment of crazy when I didn’t have a center of gravity and just whipped this way and that, and then everything settled down and it was exhilarating, just gliding down through the air. I couldn’t hear anything because of the suit, and I couldn’t feel the wind pushing against me; the sensation was like floating with purpose, and for a few seconds I forgot about everything else.
Then I glanced down and thought, Oh shit.
The ground came up so quickly I made a squawking noise of surprise, suddenly remembering, vaguely, something about going into a crouch while still in the air and letting go of the guide clip at a precise moment. Then I smacked down hard, bouncing once, the impact absorbed partially by the thick, almost-armor-like material of the radiation suit. I skidded along the rough ground for a second or two and then crashed into something unyielding and came to a sudden, ringing stop.
Almost directly in front of me, Marko managed a perfect landing, dropping onto the ground and into a shuffling run, the silvery wire snapping back up just like I’d been told to expect. His momentum took him a few feend then he stopped himself and knelt down, like taking a bow. A few moments later, Mehrak, wearing standard Stormer Obfuscation Kit scrubs instead of the rad suit, hit the ground with similar grace, and when Grisha smacked down like a load of wet shit I was fucking happy, and I watched him roll like a rag doll with something approaching satisfaction. Even the perfect landing Hense’s doppelganger—also in standard issue Stormer kit—managed when it landed couldn’t ruin the moment.
Marko stepped over and reached out a gloved hand. My earbud sizzled into life. “You okay?”
I let him haul me up. “Peachy. Hitting the ground at a thousand fucking miles an hour is a tonic, you ask me.”
“We had mandatory training,” Marko said, sounding almost apologetic. “Even the Tech Associates. This was my fifteenth drop.”
“Two hundred forty-nine,” Mehrak buzzed in. “Two hundred thirty-three live in the field.”
“Compare manhood later,” Grisha panted in my ear, “and someone help me up. There is no time.”
I spun around, taking in the scenery and picturing the aerial images. “This way,” I said, breathing hard already in the heavy, hot suit.
It was hard to believe the whole area was dangerous—everything looked normal, natural. It was easy to think that t
he rad suit was a joke, that Hense was trotting along behind me with her endless fission energy hiding a smile as she imagined me sweating and straining under its weight. I had a crazy urge to just shed it, to peel it off and feel the cool air on my skin.
Hense’s voice buzzed in my ear. “You ready for him, Cates?”
I smiled inside my humid little world. “Tell me something, Janet: Do you hear yourself? Are you just whispering to yourself constantly? Are there, like, forty echoes of your own voice in your head?”
“This unit is off-net, Avery,” she buzzed back, static making her sound thin and distant. “We didn’t want any signals getting noticed. I’m independent.”
I thought about that. Independent. Fuck, I’d thought I was independent for years, but I was on the Rail, being pushed gently into increasingly terrible things. And I didn’t even have circuits where my brain should be, hardwired with who knew what. I didn’t have an automatic shutdown routine if my insane leader somehow got shut up for a few weeks.
We were in the right area, but I couldn’t see the entrance to the sewers. I spun around, feeling constricted without proper peripheral vision, and finally spotted a big clump of rocks too squared off and too precisely piled to be natural. These turned out to be the edge of near-buried ruins, big slabs of worked stone fallen over onto itself, exhausted. I climbed into the midst of it and followed the outline of the stone, finally finding a sloping indentation into the earth, lined with faded, moss-eaten stone, leading down into darkness. What was left of some previous System, I thought. Some other King Worm had built this, then died, and it was still here, being swallowed an inch a century forever.
“Right here, I breathed.
I waited for everyone to catch up, clambering over the stones and swatting low branches out of their faces. Marko and Grisha were like nimble foam men, all bulk and shapeless material but somehow still able to bound from toe to toe, balanced and easy. They all gathered around the hole and paused, staring down into it.