The Final Evolution

by Jeff Somers

  “Stay back!” I shouted. “I’ll give the all-clear!”

  They couldn’t do any good anyway; the tunnel was too constricted here. I looked back at Mara’s grinning face—she suddenly twitched, taking an unlucky bullet. I hated it. I hated the face, because it had led me all over Europe on a fool’s fucking errand and tried to kill me, in the end. I hated the intelligence animating it because it was Michaleen, Canny Orel, whatever his fucking real name was, and I could lay just about every bad thing that had happened to me in the last ten years at his feet, somehow.

  “You’re in charge of security down here,” I said, unclenching my teeth with effort. “What the fuck does that mean, exactly? That’s your fucking security?”

  Mara twitched again at the crack of a rifle, but kept smiling. “We could keep you inching along at a snail’s pace for years in this tunnel, Avery, with just fifty goons with rifles. Did you think we wouldn’t cover the old aqueduct? Hell, boy, of course we covered the tunnels. Aside from me and my twin and the incredible melting assholes behind me, we got charges laid to collapse an archway or two, close off the access in case y’get too deep in.” He rolled Mara’s eyes upward. “We’re about twenty feet from one right now.”

  He was being fucking chatty, but I didn’t have time to wonder about that. The tunnel was widening out slightly, not enough for a second person to walk alongside me. The stones were getting larger and the ceiling was rising up. Behind Mara’s tall frame I could see an archway, and beyond it a much larger space—the basement of the palace. The rhythmic thunder of the assalt on Split was stronger, making the floor twitch beneath me.

  I looked back at Mara’s face. “At the entrance to the basement proper,” I said, and she nodded, looking like she’d just eaten something delicious. Fucking overconfident motherfucker. I wanted to change that expression. For once in my life I wanted to make Canny Orel blink, wanted to make him wonder if it had been fucking smart to poke me with a stick over and over again like he had.

  “When we get there,” I said carefully, keeping my gun on Mara’s face, “go left and stay out of the way.”

  “They’re innocent folks, Av’ry,” she said, still smiling, cocking her head. Fucking with me. “Y’gonna kill ’em just ’cause they’re in yer way?”

  “They got about forty minutes left to live, from what I can tell,” I spat back, adjusting my grip on the gun. “And it doesn’t look like a pleasant forty minutes. Putting them out of their misery’s a better way to put it.”

  We cleared the archway into the basement proper, each of us ducking down to avoid the low transition, and then Orel leaped to the left and pasted Mara’s body against the sandy off-white wall of big, head-sized blocks. I took a half step back and ducked down a little; there was a logjam of about five people, all with the empty eyes and slack mouths of the Pushed. I’d seen it often enough—hell, I’d been Pushed often enough—to recognize it.

  I hesitated for a second, horrified. They were all bloody messes. Big yellow-blue bruises bloomed on their arms, on their necks and faces, their hands—everywhere. Blood leaked in watery rivulets from their noses, the corners of their mouths, their fucking eyes. They didn’t blink, or wipe it away. They aimed their rifles dully and stared, momentarily confused because I’d crouched down below their line of sight. The Pushed didn’t think too well; they only had the instructions they’d been given to work with.

  “Go on, Mercy Killer,” Orel said jovially. “Put ’em down.”

  My left eye twitched with a sudden wish I was Psionic, so I could twist his avatar in pieces, so I could bash it against the walls until it shook apart, until I could make him feel his mind coming apart like the pieces of a machine. Then I duckwalked forward three steps, pushed the lead guy’s rifle aside, and stood up an inch away from him. I put the barrel of my gun against his forehead.

  “If you can hear me,” I said in a low voice, surprised at myself, “I’m sorry.”

  I squeezed the trigger and the fucking cop-issue handgun jumped more than I liked in my hand, and the guy’s head exploded, splattering me with blood. I had to imagine it was warm.

  His body dropped softly to the floor and into a weird kneeling position, the rifle still clutched in his hands, and the other four simultaneously fired into the tunnel behind me. I heard someone shouting curses back in the shadows, and I realized I was on the clock. I stood up and spun around, backing up to put all four of them in front of me, and squeezed off four more rounds, dropping them one after the other. They made no noise; they just slid to the floor like they were finally free to relax a littl in /font>

  I looked up at the archway we’d just come through, Orel standing next to it with his arms up in a perfunctory way, like he was humoring me. My augmented eyes clicked in, sharpening the scene, and I could pick out the thin, almost invisible wires leading from a rusted-looking pressure plate up into the ceiling of the tunnel we’d just emerged from. I straightened up and stepped forward, carefully avoiding the soft, cooling bodies around me.

  “Damn, boyo, you sure are—” Orel started to say, laughing.

  “Fucking hell, Cates—” Hense somehow bellowed from deep in the shadows of the tunnel.

  I took the last two steps with a little hop, reached out, and slapped the pressure plate as hard as I could. There was a quick, blue flash, a tiny snick sound like glass breaking, and then a low, annoying whine that started rising in frequency.

  “You fucked, Cates?” Orel hissed, suddenly bounding from the wall and knocking into me. As we hit the floor there was an explosion, and my HUD snapped into clarity to show me my audio status bars turning an angry red. I let Orel’s heavy momentum carry us along the floor for a foot or two, then bent my knee and caught us on the heavy rubber tread of my rad suit’s boots, taking hold of Mara’s thin shoulder and letting her roll us so I was on top. Then I jammed the barrel of my gun into the soft fake skin under Mara’s chin.

  “Just twitch, you cocksucker,” I said, panting inside my helmet, “and I blow your circuits all over the floor and I won’t give a shit because I’ve got a spare you down here I can go deal with, all right?”

  Orel raised Mara’s delicate eyebrows and rolled her eyes to look over at the collapsed tunnel and then, with exaggerated care, to look down her own face at my gun. Then he looked back at me.

  “All right, Av’ry,” he said slowly. “All right.”

  I smiled, hoping he could see it through the helmet. “Good. Because the only fucking person you should be fucking making fucking deals with down here,” I said quietly, “is fucking me.”

  XXX

  THERE’S A LOT OF WE IN THAT SENTENCE

  The basement was a huge series of rooms studded with thick, heavy-looking columns and low, rocky ceilings. It felt strangely open and airy, though, as if the stone were made of something less substantial, like it was really smoke and light, an illusion. Every now and then shafts of weak light stabbed downward from holes punched up to the floor above us, giving my augments something to work with and keeping the space from complete darkness.

  The place was crowded with Orel’s soft resistance, both alive and dead. Some long-dead, burst-open corpses turning into blackened pools on the stone floor, flies and maggots—apparently unconcerned about radiation—swarming in thick clouds and rippling layers. The ones still alive weren’ven all armed, and they patrolled the basement with a sleepy-eyed unconcern, often looking right through us and letting us pass without seeming to see us at all.

  “What’s the fucking point of these poor assholes?” I asked Mara’s back, ramrod straight, her hips swaying gracefully as she walked in front of me. “They’re fucking useless. Soft doesn’t even begin to describe them.”

  “They need orders, Av’ry,” he sang back over his shoulder. “They’re Pushed, which takes away some o’ their initiative, y’see. They’ll take an order from me or my twin, or that freak show who used ta be me.” He paused for a few steps. “They’ll take an order to shoot you down now, if I give it,” he ad
ded. “They’re stiff, so you’d like as not manage longer ’n I’d like, but by sheer weight o’ numbers they’d take y’down.”

  That was Orel giving me the word, letting me know that if I’d surprised him for a moment, he still had me in the vice, and not the other way around. I was playing along. I was willing to play along with whatever he decided to throw my way, because each step brought me closer to the real Orel, the flesh-and-blood brain inside an old Monk chassis. I could pretend anything for the duration.

  I kept my shredder aimed at Mara’s back and eyed the half-dead victims around me. “Looks to me like I could just find a nice dark corner and wait for them all to bleed out.”

  Mara’s laugh was the same humorless, harsh bark I remembered from Hong Kong. I wondered if that had really been her laugh, or if this was a translation error, Orel being filtered through Mara’s audio circuits. The laugh cut off suddenly. “So, exac’ly what kind of deal are you proposin’, Cates?”

  I scanned the immediate area as best I could in my sweaty prison, keeping myself just out of reach behind Orel, the shredder braced against my shoulder. The Pushed folks kept drifting past us, mouths open, rifles up. Every third or fourth one had no rifle and just held their hands up in front of them like they were in a dream, a dream in which they were chewing off their own tongues, pushing their own eyeballs out of their sockets. The explosions topside were louder, and each one was followed by a lingering groaning noise, like the ancient stones above us were being slowly worked loose from their moorings. My HUD was faint and hard to read, but a bunch of status bars were inching into yellow; the rad suit might be keeping me from cheesing out like Orel’s Unluckiest People in the World, but it was suffocating me.

  “You put the real you in my pocket,” I said, “and you get to be the one and only Canny Orel again,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Some’tin tells me you ain’t lookin’ to freight me out of here for study, Av’ry. You lookin’ to double-cross dear Janet? ’Cause in my experience she’s not someone I’d advise crossing.”

  “You know Hense?” I was just making chatter as we moved. If Orel wanted to talk, that was fine. I kept my eyes open and ran through my limited inventory as we walked.

  “I worked with everyone, Av’ry. She’s an old hand,” he said casually. “I remember when she came up right outta the testing dorm. We’d just elevated Ruberto and formed the fuin’ cops to begin with, and she was the first star.”

  I nodded mechanically, then focused on Mara’s back suddenly. “There’s a lot of we in that sentence, Mickey.”

  He laughed. “You ought to ask yerself: Why does Cainnic Orel, if he’s just a fuckin’ Gunner, have Dick Marin’s override codes?” Mara’s shoulders rolled in a shrug, but he didn’t turn around to look at me. “They said, make Unification happen. So I made it happen. I made it happen by murderin’ every single motherfucker who was in a position t’stop it. Then they decided they needed a security force to keep all the shitkickers in line—so much for peace on earth and all that high-minded jumbo. They were already beginnin’ to split and spit at each other, and some of ’em—this was the Joint Council, still, but the undersecretaries had plenty of juice to throw around even back then—didn’t trust me anymore. So I had nothin’ to do with the cops.”

  We were headed toward a shallow, dark staircase leading down farther into the depths. The crowd of Pushed was getting thicker, and I couldn’t avoid pushing through them like moving through tall grass. As I followed Mara, two of them just paused as if suddenly remembering something and fell down, a noiseless slump they were never getting up from.

  “Then the cops scared the balls off of ’em. Salgado, especially. So they wanted a Big Dog to keep the pack in line, and so they made Marin. I had full access to everything. I just downloaded the codes, covered my tracks, and got that robot’s overrides, but shit, they were fuckin’ useless. They basically didn’t do shit except under certain specifically shithole situations. You had to drop a house on the King Worm before his system would accept any sort of override instruction.”

  I put the shredder on Mara’s back. Even though this was just a digital copy of Orel, it felt good to think about pressing the toggle and turning his avatar to a fine mist, just for that split second of panic and surprise I could imagine in his fucking spider brain. I pictured that short fuck dickering with Salgado, with Marin, all of them, moving people like me around like pieces on a board so they could feel safe.

  “You were, what, their attack dog?” I said.

  “I was their facilitator,” he snapped, jerking Mara’s head to glare at me. “Those fucks had everything—money, power, and shit. But they didn’t know how to get anything done. That’s where I came in.”

  Mara laughed again, the sound absorbed by a sudden swell of cracking, groaning noise from above. Ten or fifteen feet to our left, the ceiling caved in with a bloom of dust, making the floor shake and crushing three or four of the Pushed under big slabs. I swung the shredder around and crouched down as two plump, round figures dropped to the floor where they promptly toppled over onto their backs and waved their stiff arms and legs around helplessly. I squinted through the dust and gloom: radiation suits.

  I started to stand up, and then there was a gun pressed against the side of my helmet.

  “You’re slippery, gorgeous,” Mehrak said amiably enough. “But that is why we have trackers in the rad suits. Don’t move, please. And drop the shredder.”

  Hense stepped around from behind me, looked over at where Grisha and Marko were struggling like baby turtles to regain their footing, and then turned to face me with her hands on her hips. Her face was bland as always, though I imagined I saw a haze of frustrated anger there, making her blurry.

  Mehrak gave me a tap, and I let the rifle slide from my hands to the floor.

  “You have broken our contract, Mr. Cates,” she said. Her voice reminded me of Bellevue, of her telling me she wasn’t going to kill me because there was no need to waste the fucking bullets. No matter how tiny she was, or had been when she’d been alive, I never doubted for a second her rise in the System Security Force. It had never occurred to me to doubt she’d been promoted to take Marin’s place as Director of Internal Affairs. Janet Hense had been born with a stare that made tough assholes look at their shoes. “You tried to fuck us.” She cocked her head. “As we’re in a state of emergency here and I am the ranking officer here—I am the ranking officer anywhere in the fucking world—I’m invoking SSF Charter Rule 3.”

  I blinked. “The SSF,” I said slowly, “has a charter? What rule discusses summary executions in back alleys, ’cause I’d like to chat about that.”

  Hense actually smiled. It was hideous, and I wished she would stop. “Actually, that’s also Charter Rule 3.”

  “You can’t field trial him,” Mehrak said, sounding surprised. “We don’t even know what happened.”

  Hense’s face went still again. “Captain, did you just instruct me about what I cannot do?”

  “I—”

  She cut him off. “Captain, invoking Charter Rule 3—which I am within bounds to do despite your opinion—I find you guilty of insubordination.”

  The gun in my ear went slack. “What the fuck?” Mehrak almost whispered, the first time since I’d met him that he’d sounded shocked or surprised.

  She’s the slippery one, Marin whispered in my head. She had to make a deal with you to get Orel’s location, but now you’ve broken your end by going after Orel alone, which she can interpret as you going to kill an SSF asset. So she can cut you loose. I had a sudden, clear memory of Marin—one of him, anyway—underneath Westminster with me: “I am programmed to obey all Joint Council resolutions, standing orders, and enacted laws, in both spirit and letter, so I cannot directly harm a citizen of the System or act directly against a certified religion.”

  Faster than I could track, even with my augmented vision, Hense drew her sidearm, took a bead over my shoulder—impossibly precise, impossibly quick—and fired
twice. I twitched away, spinning around and putting my back against a column. Mehrak slid a few feet, crashing through the Pushed and knocking them over in weird, static silence, his head turned into a white and silver flower, coolant spewing onto the dry floor.

  I looked up, and Hense already had the gun on me.

  “Avery Cates,” she said in a clear, steady voice. “In my capacity as an officer of the System Security Force under the instruction set of the SSF Charter Rules, I accuse you of treason against the System of Federated Nations in that you have planned to destroy an asset deemed vital to the survival of the System of Federated Nations.”

  She fucked you, Marin whispered in my head. She’s bound by the same fucking rules I was, and she waited for you to act so she could fuck you. Bizarrely, Marin began something close to singing: I’ll try… the whole… cause…

  “Invoking Rule 3,” Hense continued, Orel’s barking laugh filling in the thick, dusty air behind her, “I hereby field trial you and find you guilty, and condemn you to death.”

  “About fucking time,” Orel sighed.

  XXXI

  I WENT FOR SOMETHING MORE EXCITING

  I stared at Hense, my mind stuttering like it had tripped over something. As I stared, she cocked her head quizzically, shrugged slightly, and pulled the trigger. All she got was a dry click.

  “Jammed,” Orel said, leaning against his own column.

  “I know it’s fucking jammed,” Hense snapped, cracking the auto and peering into the chamber.

  “What the fuck is going on?” I said, moving my head enough to spot the shredder on the floor at my feet. I glanced back at Hense, who was frowning down at her gun, then at Orel, who winked at me. I knew I couldn’t take on Hense physically; avatars were too strong, too fast. But a shredder made us all the same size. I didn’t care that much what was going on, really. My own priority hadn’t changed, and it had nothing to do with whatever dirt these two artificial people were trying to do. But if Remy were still alive, still following me around like he was this close to having something better to do, I would have told him that people liked to talk, and if you were in a tight place it never hurt to try and let them do it. “Are you fucking partners?”