Cates 04 - The Terminal State (17 page)

Looking down into the gloom of the exposed subfloor, I didn’t think I’d ever find my teeth if they got knocked out.

“All right,” I said carefully, looking back up at her. There was no seat for me, of course. “Here I am. Talk.”

“This is,” she said slowly, “an
unofficial
contact, Mr. Cates. On Director Marin’s authority. Officially, you’re a wanted man and we’re offering a serious payout for your capture or execution.” She took one tiny hand from her lap and pointed a finger at me. “You’re going after Londholm.”

I didn’t say anything.

She sighed. “Fuck, Cates, of
course
you’re going after Londholm. Half the fucking talent in the System we haven’t bricked, killed, or penned is after Londholm. There are sixteen contracts on him
simultaneously
, twelve to kill, three to protect and retrieve, and one to make sure he stays in Hong Kong either way, which frankly we can’t figure out.”

I shrugged. “That’s fascinating.”

She went still, and I knew that under different circumstances—a few years ago, or a few hours ago, before she’d gotten her newest orders—I’d already be on the floor with her knee in my neck, reconsidering my attitude. After a few seconds, she visibly relaxed. She was an android, but there was a messy human intelligence calling the shots. She was faster, more precise, stronger—but she still had to master her impulse to strangle me. That made me feel good, and a wave of good cheer bubbled up within me.

“All right,” I said. “So what do you want from me? Let’s say for sake of argument that we’re humping across your fucked-over System to go after this asshole in Hong Kong—instead, as I maintain, for our health and education—why the soft-shoe? If you wanted me off the project, I know the fucking SSF—you’d just pop me in the head and walk away.”

She nodded. “Are you going to kill him? ”

I blinked. “What? ”

“You’re not working a contract, Cates. Your little team is freelancing it to Hong Kong. So I want to know if you’re freelancing there to kill that Techie motherfucker, or if you’re going to snatch him, or do gutterball surgery on him in the middle of the street, or ask him to dance, okay? ”

Not working a contract
. I struggled not to react. “Because why, Janet? ”

The
Janet
made her eye twitch again, and my cheer rose up to new levels. One more, one more time I didn’t call her Major and I knew she would fly over the desk and knock into me, weighing a lot more than she looked, and we’d find out how much my military augments were worth.

“Because,” she finally said, leaning back in her chair, “it is the unofficial policy of the System Security Force and Director Marin’s office that Londholm
be
killed. The sooner the better. With a headshot, if possible. With a cranial retrieval if not possible.” She leaned forward suddenly. “That augment he’s devised is the fucking
end of the world
, Mr. Cates. You’ve had some interaction with Psionic Actives, yes? ”

I nodded, thinking of Kev Gatz, long dead and mostly forgotten, thinking of Bendix and his mean little smile back during the Plague.

“There were a couple of ’em after me on my way here, actually,” I said. “One of them lifted a fucking
train
into the air, trying to shake me out like I was stuck to the bottom.”

She nodded curtly. “Old man, wild white hair? ” I nodded back, trying to look wise and clued-in. “We’re aware of that crazy fuck,” she said. “Angels. Putting everyone in the world on trial because they’re taking over.” She smiled thinly. “Pretty much every officer in the SSF is on their list of criminals. We’ve got plans for
him
, though. Don’t worry.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I’ll bet,” I said.

“The other PAs you’ve encountered have been, for the most part,
ours
,” she continued. “We trained them from youth, from birth if possible. We put the fear of
us
into them and made them worker bees. They were
controlled
.” She leaned back. “What Londholm has done is make anyone a Psionic. And not just a Psionic, a meta-Psionic, with every ability so far encountered in the wild and a few we haven’t. Imagine everyone having these abilities, Cates. Imagine every psychotic criminal, every megalomaniacal undersecretary, every rogue cop in the System able to tear you apart from a hundred feet away, able to make you sing and dance with a glance.” She nodded firmly. “Londholm has to die. And Garda doesn’t want him dead, no matter what he’s told you.”

I paused, angry at myself for not even once wondering if Mickey had been lying to me—we were Gunners, we killed people for contract money, it made sense. But Michaleen Garda, who’d built the name Cainnic Orel into legend, wasn’t
just
a Gunner, and I should have known better.

“He wants the God Augment.”

She nodded again, a precise, prerecorded movement. “Among many other things, but yes.”

I spun away, my hands bunched into fists. “I don’t have any goddamn choice. I’ve got a head full of tech and that fucking midget has the strings on me. You want me to guarantee I kill Londholm? Free me up. Tear this shit out of me and set me on it, freelance, on my own.
Pay
me, goddammit.”

For a few seconds she just stared at me like I was slowly crawling across her desk, leaving a thin trail of slime behind me. Then she smiled. Her smile was the most horrible thing I’d seen all day. “I cannot, Mr. Cates. The SFNA implants are specced to be one-way. Removing them will almost certainly kill you. I also cannot turn them off—your friend out there will simply turn them back on again.” She spread her hands. “I am sorry, Cates,” she said, sounding pretty much the exact opposite of
sorry
. “The army’s tech is a different gauge.”

“Fucking liar, Janet,” I said without thinking, angry. “Put some
resources
into it.”

I expected an explosion, a demonstration of violence. Instead she just shrugged. “Cates, does it look to you like I have a lot of spare resources for shitheads like you? I blew my wad shaking down the Poechenellekelder to carve you out. We’ve got the Seventh Army just fifty miles away, the supply lines into Brussels are razor thin, and ...” She stopped, looking down at the desk for a moment.

“Fine,” I ground out, feeling suddenly desperate. “Hong Kong’s yours. Why not just order a couple officers to take him out? ”

She was still looking at the desk, her hands very still in front of her. “Hong Kong’s ours on paper only. It’s surrounded by the Eleventh and Seventeenth Armies and portions of the Fourth. We can’t get in or out in force, and the native cops in the city have ...” She looked up at me, her face as impassive as ever. “They’re unprocessed biologics and they’ve basically told us to go fuck ourselves. We don’t have any authority inside the city, and we can’t break through the forces surrounding it to reestablish ourselves.” She shrugged. “So we’re left with freelancers. Small units, individuals. If Orel hadn’t gotten to you, we’d have hired you. We have our own solo agents in the field, too. Since Orel
did
get to you, all I can do, privately, is offer you resources.”

I snorted, staring at her. I hadn’t seen Janet Hense in three years. She looked exactly the same. I figured she’d look exactly the same a century from now. She wasn’t human. I didn’t know what that made her.

“Resources?” I said, shaking my head. “You just said you didn’t
have
any resources.”

She didn’t say anything. She just stared at me.

I smiled. I was tired. I felt like lying down on her floor and taking a nap. “All right. You’ve put a price on my head, but unofficially you’re a member of the Avery Cates fan club and you want me to take Londholm’s head off so he can’t become god. You can’t give me anything useful toward that goal except a chuck under the chin and a fucking ‘attaboy.’ Is that about it? ”

She sighed and gestured at her desk. The wall behind her suddenly formed the outline of a door and swung inward. I marveled for a moment. For all the rough-shod construction, the wires everywhere and the dry-rot debris, the System Pigs had found a Techie somewhere who knew what the fuck he was doing. The hidden door swung inward, revealing a deep shadow.

In the distance, a faint, keening siren began wailing.

“Your augments cannot be removed or disabled,” Hense said blandly, staring at me as a figure shuffled forward from the secret hallway. “But they can be
hacked
, Mr. Cates. At least, in one important way.”

A Monk stepped into the room.

It was dressed in street clothes—baggy, tough-looking pants, black boots, a heavy, hooded short jacket. Its plastic face was still spotlessly white, twisted into one of their limited pre-programmed grins, and its tiny, fragile camera eyes flicked this way and that with delicate precision, but its hands were blackened and charred. It entered in complete silence, and for a moment the only sound was the distant siren.

I looked at Hense and tried to beam
What the fuck?
at her. She just stared back at me, her face impassive. When I looked back at the Monk, it had produced a small handheld LED screen. Smiling silently, it held it out toward me at chest level. I looked from the screen to its face and back again; I hadn’t seen an operational Monk since the Plague. I didn’t think any had survived.

Bright yellow words began streaming across the screen.

HELLO, AVERY.

I blinked, my hands twitching, and the message changed.

I AM TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE.

I sat with my legs up on what was probably the last intact table in the Poechenellekelder, which was what Hense had called the place, smoking cop cigarettes and drinking cop whiskey. Where the cops fucking got it from was a mystery Hense wasn’t willing to part with, but they had it in spades; Hense had given me a carton of unmarked coffin nails and a flask without blinking an eye. Back in Englewood I could have bought half the fucking town for what I sucked down greedily, and I regretted not a goddamn moment.

My head still ached, and the flashing red exclamation mark in the corner of my HUD was annoying. I glanced at the Monk, who stood silently next to me like a statue, which is what most existing Monks were these days. After I’d destroyed Dennis Squalor—except for the ghost still living in my head, sometimes deigning to speak to me—and the Electric Church, the resulting Monk riots caused by several million Monks around the System suddenly being free of the Church’s control and able to express the sizzling horror and pain they’d been feeling had ended with most of them shot in the head by the cops, who for once were good for something. The few who’d survived
that
got erased after my old pal Kev Gatz had tried to murder the world with the Plague—after that, I don’t think more than a few dozen operational Monks remained. You still came across a rusting one in a dark place now and then, but even the ones that had survived all of that had succumbed, mostly, to incidental damage, faulty power skeins in their chassis, or dumb luck like brain tumors.

This one was in decent shape. I wondered if it was the last working Monk in the System. It seemed impossible—there had been millions—but it was certainly the first I’d seen since the Plague.

Around us in a loose circle were no fewer than four Stormers, guns drawn and held at the ready at their sides. The Obfuscation Kit these wore still worked, and the stormers kept fading into the ruin and debris of the bar, stoking my headache.

A noise at the door made me look up in time to see Mara and the Poet duck under the ruined header of the rear entrance where we’d run into Hense the night before, followed by a trio of Stormers with sidearms drawn, shredders hanging from their shoulders. Mara’s eyes were everywhere as she took her long-legged strides, hands hanging ready at her sides, elbows bent. The Poet was wearing his sunglasses and smiling his dim-witted grin. They both looked dirty and tired.

Mara stopped at the table and stared down at me. She looked like her head was about to explode. I was setting records for pissing off women, and that was saying something for me. She jabbed her hand at me, the tiny remote pointed at me, and gestured. Glancing at the piece of black plastic, she nodded once to herself and then turned her snarl back at me.

“What the fuck,” she said slowly, as if biting the words off of a hunk of rock and spitting them at me, “happened to you? And what the
fuck
,” she added with a sharp tick of her head toward the Monk, “is this bullshit? ”

“Hello, Mara,” I said back pleasantly. I found I enjoyed annoying the women in my life, and wondered, briefly, what that meant, exactly. I’d been with Hense and the Monk for hours, and when I’d finally emerged, Mara and the Poet were gone. I’d been
escorted
back to the bar.

The Poet whistled softly. “You are a brave man,” he said, shooting the cuffs of his long coat. “I’m in awe of your courage. You are on your own.”

She opened her mouth again, but suddenly our minders snapped as one to attention, holstered their weapons, and marched out of the bar as if we’d suddenly ceased to exist. We watched them silently, and when Mara looked back at me I gestured at the tiny projector on the table and it sprang to life, a flickering holographic representation of a city floating in the air between us.

“Hong Kong. City plans, straight from the SSF servers. Got everything they have: sewer plans, grids, specs, census information, dossiers on the cops still inside the city. Turns out the System Pigs want Londholm dead as much as everyone else.”

She stared at the floating city, a sprawl of buildings and veinlike roads sitting on the ocean. “So all this, this is you workin’ fer the fucking
cops
now? ”

I smiled. I tried to project confidence, cockiness. I tried to play my part, even as my heart pounded and my HUD edged into yellow despite my attempts to control my breathing. You couldn’t talk it over; you couldn’t
discuss
shit. Discussion was for pussies, and pussies got fucked over. The world might be falling apart but there were rules that lasted forever. “They like my work. We’re old pals.”