Cates 04 - The Terminal State (16 page)

The Poet had jumped up onto one of the tables and was liberally swinging his club around, his big reflective glasses askew and his face split into a smile, almost beautiful, his arms rippling, his teeth perfect and white. I’d known people like him, psychos who enjoyed it, liked the taste of blood. They usually got sloppy because they tried to turn every situation into a brawl, chasing death until it finally turned around and caught
them
, but they were usually pretty fun to watch from afar. Mara was on the floor behind him, ducking down to stay below his swings, and together they owned a small spot of clear floor.

“The bar!” I bellowed. “You can’t just
stay
there!”

Mara nodded at me, her eyes on the crowd, and she shouted something over her shoulder at the Poet. It was strange, everything was
slow
, but I moved at will and didn’t
feel
slow. It was like I saw and heard everything a second before it actually happened, the future rear-projected for me.

I took one step toward the debris-strewn shadow of the bar in front of me, and right on time the back exit of the place blew inward, a soft charge that knocked half a dozen assholes to the floor as more officers crammed into the place. The System Pigs had lost some of their style, but they still knew how to take down a dive when they wanted someone.

A broad-shouldered ape of a cop swam up in front of me, a jolly sort with a big red face, his necktie too tight, his hair sweaty and chaotic on his balloon head. “Cop cheerful” was an expression—that crazy light in their eyes that told you they knew they could kick you in the balls and get away with it—and this guy had the classic version lighting up his face. The whole place smelled like beer, a sweet, rotting smell that made my stomach roll as I swung the table leg hard at his face; he ducked fast, but I had spidery wires laced through me these days and I caught him on the forehead, a solid impact vibrating up my arms.

He popped up with balletic slowness immediately, but I
expected
it, had foreseen it. He had a very believable contusion on his temple, and he grinned at me.
Avatar
, I thought. A fucking android with a cop’s brain downloaded to it, fifty of the same cop scattered all over the place. I tried swinging my club back around, but my momentum was all wrong and the cop knocked it aside with one arm, shooting its other hand in and grabbing hold of my throat and squeezing, instantly choking me.

“Avery Cates,” it said, grinning, cheerful eyes shining at me in the sudden night inside the bar, and then it convulsed, letting go of me and dropping to the floor. I spun away, finding the Poet at my side, crouched low, having just swept the cop’s legs out from under him with his own club. We locked eyes for a second, his ringed in blood splatter and crinkled at the corners from his wide, crazy-ass grin, and then we leaped onto the cop, smashing our clubs down on it three, four, five times, its arms and legs leaping into the air comically with each hit.

The Poet stood up and shouted, “One goddamn cop down, five hundred thousand to go!” Another wink that almost made me flinch. “We make a good team!”

Mara was somehow in front of us, making room as she went, heading toward the bar. We arrived almost simultaneously, dodging chaos and putting our backs to the old wood, a glorious stretch of bar I regretted having to use as a shield.

I scanned the dim space; it was just bodies moving, lit up green by my sudden, involuntary night-vision. I was a goddamn freak too, just like these cops, just like every other little ant with god’s magnifying glass trained on them—I stared around at the slimy-looking green bodies and wanted to hit them all, wanted to hit
everything
and just keep hitting it. Some skinny mope with a long, curly beard crossed into my sight and I flicked the leg out at his face, knocking him backward with a spray of fluids, white in my night-vision. A surge of bloody joy swept through me, and I wanted to stand there all day cracking skulls, punishing the world for my situation.

Mara leaped up onto the bar as I noticed a group of SSF officers closing in, tossing aside tables and shoving their own Stormers out of the way as they approached. I pushed myself up onto the bar and swung my legs around the back, running my augmented eyes along the floor behind it, spotting the faint outlines of the trapdoor almost immediately; as I looked, the outline of it seemed to glow suddenly, making it clear and easy to spot. The crooks in Brussels did it the same as we’d done in New York: The trap was there to give you a head start, not to confound the Pigs forever. I pointed my table leg at it.

“There!” I shouted. “We can—”

I glanced up, something catching hold of my augmented vision. Through the crowd and the dust and the gloom, a flash of white that froze me for a moment, everything getting impossibly
slower
. I stared at the spot while Mara shouted at me, while the population of the bar squirmed away from the tattered arm of the cops. After a few long, stretched-out seconds, I saw it again: a white, fake-looking face staring at me from across the bar.
Staring at me
, not just looking around. Staring at me and grinning.

Without a word to Mara, I leaped back down to the floor and started carving my way toward the rear. Mara screeched behind me, ordering me to hold the fuck up. Everyone else was swimming down toward the rear as well so the going was easier at first, but everyone clogged up the doors and windows as the cops streamed in, so about five feet from the door, I had to start swinging my club freely at about neck height. I didn’t care about Mara; I didn’t care about the System Pigs. I wanted to know why a Monk, fully operational after all these years, happened to be in the same bar as me in fucking Brussels, staring at me like it could hear my thoughts.

As I clubbed my way closer, sweating freely, arms burning, it was gone. I stared around wildly, trying to spot that white face again. I worked my arms, shoving the crowd away savagely, and then a hand slapped onto my shoulder, and Mara’s voice was hissing in my ear.

“Boy, you don’t fucking—aw, now here’s some fine bullshit.”

A clump of Stormers forced their way through the door, backing the crowd up with their shredders held out stiffly in front of them, the fucking macho assholes. In the middle of them, like a queen, was a short female officer, wearing a sumptuous-looking leather coat with four shiny pips gleaming on one lapel. She was tiny, but she moved like she was floating on air and stared at me with a bland, disinterested expression I suddenly remembered well.

The officer held up her hands, palms outward, stepping forward through the Stormers, who spread out and formed a tight ring around us.

“Everyone calm down,” Janet Hense said in that same flat voice. “I just want to talk.”

As she walked, flunkies kept sprinting to catch up with her and hand over razor-thin digital pages that glowed text up at her; she carried on a profane one-way conversation with her earbud without missing a beat.

Janet Hense had moved up in the world. Or at least this version of her had. She was still tiny, loomed over by her entire entourage, but I doubted any of them realized it, the way she flicked them away with little waves of her hands. She was the first avatar I’d ever met, as far as I knew, and I still remembered being left for dead in Bellevue Hospital, the touch of her dry palm on my cheek.
I see no reason to kill you, Avery
. She could have, of that I was certain.

“How have you been, Janet?” I asked, forcing a smile and some volume into my voice. Every System Pig I’d ever known was sensitive about rank, so I used her name. It was petty, but you used what you could. And here I was days in on this little adventure and I
still
didn’t have a fucking gun.

She’d led us just a few blocks through the strangely deserted narrow streets of Brussels. Fires burned in barrels on every other corner, sending black smoke into the air, the flames not casting much light in the dark, dirty city. There was almost no noise at all once we turned a corner and left the bar behind, but here and there as we passed the massive, weather-stained stone buildings you caught a flicker of light behind a blacked-out window. Brussels was a secret city, underground and behind walls. The streets had been abandoned.

“Pleasantries, Avery? ” she said over her shoulder, exchanging one digital reader for another from one of her aides, a sour, yellowed man in a dark suit, cigarette dangling from one corner of his thin mouth. “I thought you would be at my throat, vowing revenge.”

“One asshole at a time, Janet,” I said.

Hense was a major now, an SSF demigod, and her personal HQ was set up in an old hotel that sat like a rounded box on a corner. An old, tattered awning declared it to be HOTEL PLAZA. All the windows—dozens on each side—had been busted out, stationary shredders set on pivots, surrounded by sandbags. Getting in looked hard, with dozens of officers and Stormers at the entrance, which had been ripped out and replaced with a bulkhead of welded metal. Hense didn’t even bother waving an ID; she just charged past them all, daring someone to quote protocol, and I would swear they all took a half-inch step backward as she passed.

“You’re a hot property, Cates,” Mara whispered without looking at me. “I’m walking into a Pig Nest without a struggle. Oy, the humiliation.”

I glanced behind me at the Poet. He swaggered through like a star, glasses back on, his table leg still held in both hands across his belly like it was a magic charm that would get him out of stir if need be. He didn’t say anything, just kept that dim-witted grin on me, so I looked forward again. The lobby of the building had been huge, all high ceilings and arches and marble floors—completely empty, without a stick of furniture anywhere—but here on the third floor it was a maze of narrow hallways and closed doors. A thick, ruined carpet muffled all the noise, making it seem like we were gliding along an inch above the ground.

Hense stopped at a nondescript door, nothing particularly heavy or secure. It had once had numbers nailed to it, but these had been pried off, leaving just a pale spot in the wood. She turned and looked at Mara for a moment.

“Disable his frag settings,” Hense said. “And wait out here.”

Mara didn’t move; she put a smirky little grin on her face. “I’m afraid I canna
acquiesce
to your request, Major,” she said, playing up the accent. “It’s set wide. He’ll be fine unless y’take ’im to fucking Moscow.”

Hense nodded as if this was reasonable. “Disable them or I’ll have you shot in the head.”

The words were soft and had been spoken without any dramatic emphasis at all. For a second we were all still, and then Mara shrugged, pulling out the tiny black square of the remote. “You get ’im killed or let him loose, my boss’ll come to claim damages.”

Hense didn’t react, her brown eyes watching Mara’s hands on the remote. “Your
boss
,” she said, “is a cunt, and he wouldn’t show his little ferret face within a
mile
of me.”

Mara nodded, putting the remote away. “You fucking Pigs, always so sure of yerselves. Don’t forget your team of ass-wipers here when you go out for a smoke, Major. He’s all yours.”

“Thank you,” Hense said as if the previous forty seconds hadn’t been filled with insults and veiled threats. She turned those horrible blank eyes on me. “Mr. Cates? ”

“Do I have a choice? ”

She nodded. “Yes. This is a
request
, Mr. Cates. You are not under arrest.”

I decided to push the limit a little. Why not? This was like a dream anyway: Janet Hense the asskicking robot cop shows up in fucking Brussels and asks me politely to have a conversation with her. Under these circumstances, I thought I might ask for a unicorn, or a carton of pre-Unification cigarettes, or some other impossibility.

“You have rewards posted for me all over the fucking place,” I said. “Dead or alive. You’re encouraging people to
slit my throat
. But I’m not under arrest?” I shook my head. “Janet, give me a fucking break.”

Watching her impassive face, I thought I could see a slight twitch under one eye. The avatars were
built
, that was for sure—they looked and smelled and felt human in every way. I amused myself by trying to guess how many times I could call her by her first name before she smacked me. My guess was four, and I’d used up three.

“It’s just a conversation, Mr. Cates,” she said, turning and opening the door. I settled my coat back onto my shoulders and followed her in. The door swung shut automatically behind me, and as I heard the click of its latch, the silence that crowded in was a familiar, buttoned-up atmosphere. The room had been gutted—the walls torn off, the floors pocked with open holes, out of which thick cables and wires spilled, snaking around the edges and into the walls, wrapping around studs until they exploded into a huge web in the exposed ceiling. Flat panels of dull metal were fixed into the corners, top and bottom, facing each other perfectly.

“This is a Blank Room,” I said. My voice made it three feet and then dropped to the floor, absorbed.

A crude plywood desk and a surprisingly expensive-looking rolling chair were set up where the windows had been; the whole wall had been plated with metal. Hense moved to the desk and sat down, leaning back and crossing her legs at the knee. “Yes,” she said. “We had to gut half this tech from old installations. No one’s making some of this stuff anymore.”

I nodded, looking around. The Blank Rooms of my memories were clean, white places, antiseptic and mysterious. This looked like something a hobbyist had built over decades, collecting junk from the local dumps. Still, it worked—I could
feel
it working. I knew what it was like to be in a Blank Room, and this was it. Nothing we said would be recorded or even heard outside of these walls. No record whatsoever, aside from my memory and Hense’s redundant data storage. I was tense, my HUD lit up yellow and my heart racing; most of my visits to Blank Rooms had ended with me picking pieces of myself up from the nice, clean floors.