Cates 04 - The Terminal State (32 page)

I forced myself to stay calm. I glanced at her and saw the Poet trailing behind us slowly, thoughtful, examining the wall, too.

“We’re still out of range of the big guns if we climb,” I said. “It’s not an issue of vertical height.”

She spat on the ground, growling. “And what’s t’stop them from just grabbin’ some unsexy needle guns and just snipin’ us the old-fashioned way? ”

I shrugged. “What’s to stop them from doing that right
now
? ” I said. “Aside from the general quality of thug you leave sitting on a gun installation for weeks on end, bored out of their mind. Fuck, Mara, if we hit the ground again, we’re not gonna outrun those guns forever, and if we stand here having a fucking conversation about it we’ll end up sniped eventually.” I reached back and slapped my duffel. “If it’s in decent condition, I think I can get it up in the air. I’ve worked with some talented fucking thieves in my time, and I learned a thing or two.”

She didn’t say anything. The Poet stood next to her. “Famous though you are, you’re no Milton and Tanner, please do not forget.” He nodded. “But, I like this plan,” he said, stepping past her. “Better than sitting on thumbs, play target practice.”

I wondered where he’d heard those names, but there was no time for comparing careers. “If the hover’s a dud,” I said, “at least we’re on the far side of those guns.”

She threw her hands up in the air. “Fuck, every block of this city’s owned by someone else. They’ve all got these installations, dammit. Hoppin’ the fuckin’ wall ain’t going to solve
that
.”

I nodded. “Then hope the hover lifts.”

The Poet slapped a hand against the wall. “Here is a good spot,” he said, eyes moving appraisingly up and down the old, corrupt stone. “Good handholds and the wall slopes.” He looked at me, the tiny images of murder on his skin flickering, endlessly killing each other. “I should go first, then.”

The urge to argue with him was weak. We were all professionals here and if Adrian thought he had the best shot, I wasn’t going to volunteer. “We’ll try to distract them,” I offered. “Move fast, in case there
is
a bright boy up there with a sniper rifle and half a brain.”

He smiled, white teeth breaking through his beard like the sun through clouds. “Always teaching, you. I’m able to climb a wall.” He gave me an obvious look of appraisal. “Will
you
be able? ”

I grimaced. “I got twenty years and a couple of fucking major surgeries on you,” I growled, trying to sound mean. I liked Adrian, but even folks you liked you had to keep in line. “You want me to carry you up and over?”

He laughed, waving a hand. “When was the last time,” he said, backing away, “that you took a bath, Avery? No, I’ll go alone.”

I couldn’t help but smile. I thought, maybe, if we both survived this, I might see where the Poet ended up and see what we might do together. See if he was pissed off at Mickey enough to take a hand in my business there, see what we might do working our own line, without augments in our heads forcing us into someone else’s.

He spun away and without hesitation leaped up onto the wall, his hands finding decent holds. For a moment he just hung there, arms and legs splayed, suspended on the wall as if stuck there. Then he reached out his right hand and found another hold.

“A little faster, eh? ” Mara shouted. “Or they’ll be able to walk over here with pistolas and beat us to death before we’re over.”

The Poet took a moment to wave a hand at us, and I shrugged the duffel onto my back. I took the wall on a short run, launching myself up and grabbing some shallow holds with my fingernails and the narrow tips of my boots. One foot slipped and I had to scrabble a little, determined not to punk in front of Mara, finally catching hold and pushing myself up. I began sweating again immediately, my legs getting shaky. After three or four pulls I paused, hanging there and blowing like a fat man at dinner again.

Mara was suddenly at my side, clinging to the wall like she was glued to it.

“Don’t say a fucking word,” I managed to wheeze. “Or I’ll—” I stopped myself, shutting my mouth and grunting. If she didn’t know I’d figured her for an avatar, there was no margin in letting her in on it. As far as advantages went, letting her think I was stupid was about the best I could do for one. I allowed myself to start coughing, and she smirked and pulled on past me.

When I was halfway up, the Poet’s feet disappearing over the edge above me, the hum of the big guns suddenly cut off, leaving me clinging to the irregular wall in almost total silence. I closed my eyes and settled into a rhythm for a few minutes, just concentrating on pulling myself up a few inches at a time. When I opened my eyes, I was a foot from the top, and the Poet was lying flat, holding out his hand.

“Come on up, old man,” he said. “All you have to do is jump. I think we’ll make it.”

I took his hand and with one last push I was on top of the surprisingly wide wall; it was about two feet thick and we could crouch on it easily enough. The crumbling structure across the way from us loomed higher, but since every floor was open to the air, it would be possible, I thought, to leap the fifteen or so feet and angle down through one of the gaps. It would be a hard landing, but with any luck my augments had enough juice left in them to give me a decent tuck and roll I’d never have pulled off in my previous incarnation as a fucking human being.

Mara and the Poet I had no doubt about. They’d make it without breaking a sweat.

“All right.” I twisted my head until I got a satisfying crack from my neck. “I go first. If I eat it, go for the duffel. You’ll need it.”

I let them ponder that for a moment, and then stood up. I felt immediately exposed and had to resist the urge to rush, to get out of sight. The wind blew the rain into my face, a gentle mist that kept me blinking, as I stood for a moment judging the load on my back and shifting the straps of the rifle and the bag slightly. The Poet and Mara just stared at me. I put my eyes on the spot I wanted, about five floors down, and fixed the black rectangle of empty space in my head. Then I took one step backward, found the edge of the wall with my heel, rocked back, took one bounding step forward, and threw myself off the wall, feet first.

Slapping my arms down at my sides, I tried to be aerodynamic. My HUD lit up again, a tiny number popping up on a transparent overlay announcing how many feet from the ground I’d just become. For one second it was serene, the happiest moment of my recent life, and I thought,
This is what suicide is like. The happiest you’ve felt in fucking
years.

The gap screamed up at me and just before I hit it, I knew I was going to make it; the opening was pretty wide and I sailed through without hitting my head and decapitating myself, which would have been my vote for most likely end to this little experiment. When my HUD counter was just about to turn zero, I balled myself up, knees in my chest, and hit the concrete floor hard enough to bounce, then managed a decent roll, ass over tits, until I smacked into the far wall.

I lay for a moment and felt myself vibrating. A few seconds later I sat up as the Poet sailed through the opening, landing bad and scraping himself, squawking, along the rough floor for several feet before the friction of his own body managed to stop him. He flipped around and sat up and we stared at each other.

I heard Mara a moment before we saw her, her words unintelligible as she came flying toward us. She misjudged it and smacked into the floor at about waist height, immediately dropping out of sight.

The Poet and I looked back at each other.

“If she falls, we die,” he said in a flat voice, a slight lisp his gift from Hong Kong. “Beginning to think, Why not? A moment of peace.”

I grunted, hauling myself up. “If she’s going to crap out and take us with her, I’m going to at least enjoy the fucking moment and kill her myself.” My leg sent a sharp lance of pain up my side as I limped over to the edge. I leaned out and looked down; Mara was dangling from a piece of rebar that jutted from the concrete just a few feet below us. She glared up at me and we said nothing.

I turned and walked back toward the Poet. “You reel her in. I’m going to see if there’s any hope of getting that hover up. I’m tired of running from lines of fire.”

“Much better to crash,” he said as he got to his feet, looking steady despite the ugly landing. “I have always maintained this. The best way to die.”

The hover was an amazing sight: With just a few feet of clearance, it sat in the rough center of the empty slab of floor and looked to be in pretty good shape, at least on the outside. Whoever had piloted it into this space had been a master, and getting it out was going to be impossible. But I wasn’t going to make it to the Shannara if I had to run the whole way, and if we could avoid for about thirty seconds the antiair munitions Pucker the Pig had mentioned, we’d be home free.

It was a military-issue craft; I recognized the sleek silver design and the SFNA logo—a globe surrounded by arrowheads—was painted up near the front. It was shaped like a cigar and looked to seat about five people at most, maybe six if you didn’t need to actually sit down in flight. The hatch was up, a yawning rectangular wound in the hover’s silver skin. Swinging the duffel off my back, I dropped it on the floor and drew my Roon, keeping my finger off the trigger as I stepped up to the hatch and leaned in.

It smelled like damp and dust, but the interior of the hover was empty, just a wad of safety netting and nothing else. I hopped in, feeling the whole thing rock and settle under me, and took two steps to the cockpit hatch. Gently pushing it open, I found the controls abandoned as well. Stuffing the gun back into my pocket, I limped to the pilot’s seat and sat down, instantly feeling tired.

I studied the controls. I was no expert; in the past, I’d always had someone to do the flying, but I knew the basics, and at a glance I could see that the military had just adjusted the standard old SSF hover designs for its own use. The control panel was almost identical to the ones I’d seen in plenty of SSF hovs, and I had a list of standard gestures that usually worked to get things unlocked. I raised my hand and then hesitated, thinking that it might be trapped, rigged to blow.

Did I care? I wasn’t sure. As I sat there, I noticed my HUD had a new icon just above the blinking exclamation mark my mind’s eye still shied away from. It was a tiny representation of a hover; my military augments recognizing I was in a military vehicle. I wondered if that was good or bad.

Closing my eyes, I tried a gesture. Nothing happened.

I ran through the ones I could remember, ones that had worked at one time or another for waking up hovers. None of them worked. With a sigh, I stood up and retrieved the duffel from outside, dropping it in the belly of the hover as the Poet and Mara, both looking scratched up and bruised, joined me.

“This is fuckin’ unbelievable,” Mara said, touching the silvery skin of the vessel with one bloodied hand. “I need to find this pilot and hire ’im.” She looked at me as I reached into the duffel and extracted one of the gifts Hense had given me back in Brussels. It was a large black disc, its surface rough and nonreflective, swallowing all the light and looking like a piece of the night sky in my hands. It vibrated slightly, a barely there ripple from inside it, and it was hot and heavy.

“Why, Avery,” she said, “you’ve bin keepin’ secrets. What t’fuck is
that
?”

I stood up by increments, holding the disc carefully in my hands. “This is how we’re getting this tub in the air, and this is how we’re getting into the hotel to pay Londholm a visit,” I said, turning slowly toward the cockpit. “This is a multiuse, SSF-property uranium hydride portable reactor, capable of generating sustained two hundred and fifty megawatts over the air.”

“I confess I’m slow,” the Poet said. “Too old for the latest tech, but what does that
mean
?”

I could picture Mara grinning behind me—I
knew
her, somehow. “Old friend,” she said, “it means, don’t fucking drop it.”

“You know how to pilot one o’ these bastards, right? ” Mara said from where she’d perched on the copilot’s seat, sitting with her legs splayed, leaning forward.

“I’ve crashed several times,” I said. “And once jumped out of one that
wasn’t
crashing.”

Behind us, the Poet, hanging from his beefy arms in the hatchway, barked a short, compact laugh. After a few hours of dodging bullets, we were all enjoying that weird euphoria that came during lulls. I’d seen it get folks killed, but it was hard to resist.

I’d set the disc on the floor of the cockpit and gestured it online; it had started to hum loudly, and the temperature in the cabin had risen immediately, making me sweat. In my head, I ran over everything Hense had told me back in Brussels, trying to remember every detail.

“It all depends on whether the hover was locked down,” I said, reaching out and pulling the console’s plastic cover off; it came easy, popping off like it was supposed to and revealing a mass of thin, threadlike wires. “If the pilot encrypted it before leaving the cabin, there’s no way I can do anything without a Tech Associate.” I looked at Mara while leaning forward and reaching into the mass of wires up to my shoulder. “You got any Techies in your pocket? ”

She shook her head, looking for a moment just like a real seventeen-year-old girl. “I never had any way with tech,” she said. “I’m old-school. Anything more complex than a gun is too much for me.”

“Me too,” I grunted, finding the diamond-shaped short-term battery the hover used when main power was off-line. It was cold, which told me the craft had been completely without power for some time. “Okay,” I said, retrieving my arm, “let’s put some juice into her and see what happens.”

I gestured at the disc, and the humming revved up, pulsing through my chest. I glanced up at the Poet, who raised his thick eyebrows at me.