Cates 04 - The Terminal State (19 page)

With my foot I nudged the Monk’s shoulder. “Tell me something. Why are you—your group—going after Londholm? Why work with the cops? ”

The Monk didn’t turn or move its head. It immediately reached inside its coat and held the LED screen up behind it, more or less in my line of sight.

WE PROTECT THE TECHNOLOGY. THE MOMENT HE USED IT ON HIMSELF HE LOST OUR PROTECTION.

Immediately, it lowered its arm and stuffed the screen back into its coat.

“And the cops? ”

The screen came back out in one smooth motion.

WE ARE AGNOSTIC CONCERNING RESOURCES.

I grinned as the screen was hidden away again. Everyone thought they were using everyone else—I was the only honest man in the fucking room. I knew
everyone
was using me. “I like that,” I said to the back of its head. “I’m going to use that.” I shut my eyes and tried to imagine myself inside a clear glass bubble. For a while, when I’d had voices in my head constantly, I’d gotten pretty good at summoning the image, and it had helped, trapping everything outside of me and leaving me alone in a silent bubble, at peace. I was out of practice, but it didn’t take long.

I thought about Michaleen.

Cainnic Orel, Michaleen Garda—whatever his real name was. I pictured the Little Man back in Chengara, small and tight, leathery and cheerful. He’d played me in prison and he’d played me into this bullshit. I’d been sleepwalking, but my session with Hense and the Monk had left me feeling more in control than I’d felt in weeks. I had
something
under my control. A resource I might be able to leverage into turning my course back on the Little Man and making him eat it.

My hands twitched. I concentrated on the bubble, on shutting everything, even my own thoughts, out. I hadn’t slept in days.

 

 

“Avery.”

My hand shot out and took hold of her wrist as my eyes opened. My HUD went from a pale, almost-invisible gray to bright.

Mara made no move to snatch her arm back or fight me, so I relaxed, looking around. We were moving, the train car vibrating with speed. It was dark and at a glance everyone else looked to be sleeping.

“My turn at guard duty? ” I asked, trying to stretch without jostling my neighbors too much.

“I think we have a problem,” she said, gently pulling her arm back. She held out her tiny card-sized handheld, which she’d tuned to one of the few government Vids still operating on a regular basis. It was useless for real information; I hadn’t bothered tuning in even when I’d found myself back in civilization. I squinted down at it and saw the same picture of me the SSF had been using at the border crossing.

“Your price has gone up,” Mara said. “You’re fucking
valuable
.”

The reward had doubled, and now resembled a fortune, even if you needed a bag full of yen just to buy a cigarette these days. I gave Mara a grin calculated to be the sort of half-proud bullshit she’d expect from Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds, and winked.

“I’ll kill myself and we’ll split the proceeds.”

She put her blank eyes on me. “I
suspect
, you stupid fucking slab o’ beef, that we’re not the
only
people on this train who’ve noticed you’re worth more than all the crap everyone’s carting in their goddamn rucksacks combined.”

I paused, my HUD immediately lighting up as the gloomy train car seemed to brighten up, clarifying. Almost everyone appeared to be asleep, their heads in their chests like birds, the standing-room-only section on the floor remaining upright apparently through friction and surface tension.

Somewhere, nearby, there was whispering.

The moment I noticed it, a hissing noise filled my ears and I could just make out every other word, my own name popping up three or four times in quick succession. I turned my head to the right and there they were, an entire bunk of people, staring at me. They weren’t rough; their coats were too new and too conservative, their collars popped up in the current style. And they were too old; I was the exception to the rule, but most people from my sort of neighborhood died young. These were just people, a little dirtier and hungrier than they were used to, but just civilians. I gave them a hard stare, carefully calibrated, and one or two looked away. The rest stared back, leaning this way and that to whisper at each other.

I counted. There were fifteen men and six women crammed onto that row of bunks.

Word was spreading, too, leaking downward to the bunk beneath them. It was strange to watch it happening, people being shoved awake, something whispered directly into their ear, two sets of eyes on me. Then again, with the next person, sometimes with a handheld like Mara’s held up for confirmation. I looked back at Mara; we were all armed now, and I had no doubt any one of the three of us could handle a half-dozen shitkickers—assuming, of course, that Mara and Adrian would be bothered to step between me and a mob. But there were sixty, seventy people crammed into the car, and sixty or seventy more in the next.

The exclamation point in the corner of my vision beat in time with my heart.

I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. These were just civilians. Before the System started unspooling around them, they’d had jobs, families, dinner dates, and the idea of sharing a train car with someone like me had been ludicrous. I didn’t want to do any more damage here than I had to.

I opened my eyes and was fully awake, humming with a slight adrenaline edge. I put my hand inside my coat and closed it over the butt of my Roon auto, not new but well-loved, its grip glossy from use and sweat. I looked across the aisle at the first group of people and stared at them until one of them, a kid with a scum of gingery beard on his face, stared back.

“You don’t want this, junior,” I said loudly. “Stay alive.” It was too fucking late; I saw that immediately. He had too many people at his back, pushing, and I’d fucked him by singling him out. Or he’d fucked himself by meeting my gaze—it didn’t matter. I felt an icy black ball of nausea in my belly, realizing that this chump had no fucking chance here and I’d invited him up onto the chopping block. I looked around the car, quickly, trying to see how we could get past this without killing half the fucking world. I couldn’t see a way; if I backed down, it would just encourage them, make them think this reward was the easiest thing they’d ever done.

“Can’t do that,” the man said, shaking his head. “We’ve already contacted the police.”

My HUD told me otherwise—I could see pretty plainly from the tiny icon in the upper right corner that there was no connection with the grid. A few years ago you could have gone to the fucking south pole and gotten a signal, but things got sketchy away from the cities these days. I didn’t know how far out we were, but if someone had sent the cops a note, it wouldn’t get there anytime soon, and if it did, I wondered if Janet Hense or someone like her might not do some unofficial voodoo on it, since the System Pigs were playing against themselves on this one.

I shook my head. “No, you didn’t.” I wanted to give him—all of them—every chance.

They looked around at each other, flicking their eyes up and around. Counting. Crunching the odds. I was doing the same thing, trying to figure how many would take a chance, how many would crowd to the sides of the car, heads down, eyes shut. How many would follow five seconds in if enough of the others made a move. How many I could take on. Nineteen rounds in the Roon, and the possibility that Mara and the Poet would have my back. It was tiring, doing the math.

Shoot him in the mouth
, Dick Marin whispered in my head, the ghost of a...brain still clicking and whirring somewhere, a multitude of somewheres, a ghost outdated and gamy from seclusion.
They’ll all calm down, then
.

I gritted my teeth. It had been so long since the ghosts—introduced when I’d been halfway bricked in Chengara, my brain sucked into a mainframe—had bothered me, I’d lost my touch at ignoring them. Silence had settled into the tiny spaces between us; I kept my hand on my gun inside my coat and slid the safety off, looking slowly around. No one moved, but most of the car was staring at me. If these had been my sort, from my neighborhood or its like, we’d already be trading body blows—I was valuable. As I looked around, I could almost see the backbone draining out of them. It was one thing to plot over a reward while the subject napped a few feet away. It was something else to read the list of things I was wanted for—murder, kidnapping, conspiracy, treason—and be the first to come at me. The System Pigs had made me sound dangerous.

“All right,” I said, and suddenly a man who’d been standing in the press of people on the floor pulled himself up onto the side of the bunks, hooking one arm into the supports and hanging there. He was wearing an expensive coat, but his clothes underneath were grubby and torn, and his silvery beard was mangled and knotted. His eyes were shock white in the midst of his dirty face, wide and fierce.

“This man,” he shouted, pointing at me, “is a murderer! And a thief! A piece of human shit! And every person who puts a hand on him right here, right now, gets a goddamn share of the reward!”

The train rumbled on, the steady rhythm and sway so fast and constant as to be silent and still.

He stared around with wide, frantic eyes. He drew in a deep breath and pointed at me again. “This man—”

Next to me, Mara’s hand flew up. In the tight space of the car the sound of her gun was intensely loud, louder than anything most of these people had ever heard. The whole train seemed to duck as the shouter’s face exploded into a spray of blood, revealing a grisly lump of bone and flesh that had been hiding within, and for a moment the Poet and the Monk were the only things standing upright.

Someone grabbed my arms from behind, and I was jerked backward. I let them pull me, and I got my feet up onto the edge of the bunk, giving myself a powerful push and slamming back into them, their hands snapping loose. I yanked my Roon from its holster and jabbed it up at the ceiling, firing two more booming shots. It should have been enough. It should have scared the shit out of them all.

They swarmed us.

A small figure in a big coat leaped from the bunks to my right, landing on top of me in a triumphant moment of bad dumb luck, and before I could remind myself that these were just people, just civilians, I’d shot her twice through the chest, sending her sailing backward into the suddenly surging crowd. I had no headroom and squirmed up on the bunk trying to position myself on my knees; I wanted the high ground. Whirling around, I found the rest of our bunk cowering behind us, arms up over their heads, people just hoping that if they stayed very still and didn’t get involved, it would all pass them by.

How’s that working out for you?
I asked them silently. I wondered when trains had gone fucking sentient, and when they’d decided they hated me.

Forcing myself back around, I lashed my gun hand out at a tan, oblong head as it rose up over the edge of the bunk, crunching a nose into pulp with a shout, the jolt disappearing up my arm, absorbed by augmented nerve-suppression and circulation monitoring. I felt light and fast. I was a machine, and being a machine was turning out to be kind of fucking cool.

Everyone was shouting. Mara and I were still side by side, kicking and firing and pushing them back. I was amazed—we’d shot three with some prejudice.
Desperate
, I thought. With something akin to panic, I realized we weren’t going to intimidate them. We were going to have to kill most of them.

Another head popped up over the edge of the bunk, a sweaty mass of dark hair; as I tried to snap my arm back someone grabbed it, and then another pair of hands joined them, slamming my arm painfully backward. I kicked at the head I’d seen and made some contact, and then someone crawled on top of me, putting a foot on my neck so precisely right I almost thought there might have been a pro or two in the crowd. Choking, I reached back in desperation, hoping for a lock of hair or an ear to grab onto, but instead my free arm was seized, and two more people pulled themselves up onto me. I heard Mara’s gun go off twice, three times as my HUD swelled into a red sea of flashing icons and data streams. Then there was a volley of shots, suddenly cut off.

I was being smothered. In the corner of my vision, the flashing exclamation point seemed to grow with every steady, augment-regulated heartbeat. Then I was sliding, being pulled down from the bunk by my shoes, suffocating. I mashed my finger down on the trigger, the Roon barking out fifteen shots in rapid succession, and I stabbed at the exclamation point in my HUD just like the Monk had explained it to me.

They were like paper in my hands.

Everything got slow, but crisp. So fucking crisp, like everything was being run through a filter before it got passed on to my brain. I pulled the gun up toward my face and my arm tore free from the three people holding it down. It was effortless, my arm popping up in front of me, bruised and scratched, the coat torn. One of the figures that had been sitting on my arm, trying to wrestle the gun free, was sent rolling off the bunk, smashing into the crowd below us in slow motion.

Frowning, I decided to experiment, and I tore my other arm free with the same easy effort. Two people leaped onto my back, but it was easy to time their spastic, wavelike efforts and flick them off of me with my gun-heavy hand, tearing the thin skin of their faces, a tooth flying like a bloody comet through the thick air.

It was
easy
.

Mara was pinned on the bunk next to me, wriggling and kicking but trapped. On the floor, the Monk had thrown back its hood and revealed its waxy fake head, and a discernible circle of empty space had opened up around it as people recoiled from the first monk they’d seen in years. Next to it, the Poet was struggling with three women, his fist slowly connecting with the chin of one, her face screwed up in a comical grimace.