Cates 04 - The Terminal State (24 page)

I stood dripping, my empty gun still clutched in my hand. I shook uncontrollably, and was glad for the darkness to hide in. I looked at the square of light again and tried to decide if I had the energy to walk it. “You gonna shoot us in the back after we pay up?” I asked as Mara and the Poet joined us.

“Fuck, no,” he said immediately, spitting forcefully onto the floor. “You’re a fucking gold mine, Mr. Cates. I’m gonna be waiting right here to get your custom on the way
back
.”

Mara joined us, her credit dongle already out. “Just fucking transfer your fucking money and get me out of this shithole,” she said.

The colonel swiped his thumb across the proffered dongle; Mara gestured and showed the display to him. He nodded crisply. “Pleasure. Most likely you’re dead in a few hours, sure, but if y’want an extraction, Mr. Cates can dial up my frequency on the SFNA net.” He looked around once and winked. “Good luck.”

He spun around. “On
me
,” he shouted. “Keep the way fucking clear. I got to pull a trigger, Remy, and I will give you a fucking dose of misery, you hear? And for fuck’s sake, watch for the fucking
clingers
on the ceiling.”

I watched the soldiers fade into the gloom, and then the Poet’s hand was on my shoulder. I spun and stalked after Mara, adjusting the strap of my gun. I felt hot and dizzy, and my feet hurt, sending shots of pain up my legs with every step.

As we edged toward the exit of the tunnel, emerging from the shallow, scummy water, we slowed and got down low, crawling forward. At the edge of the shadows, we paused and studied the scene—almost a mirror image of the other end: barricades, security gates, and a few dozen heavily armed men and women. The only difference was the lack of uniforms. The silence and stillness of the scene was unnerving.

The cops were out in force, and they were all lying on the ground, some squirming and struggling, others just panting. After a moment, I saw him: the old man from my train adventure, dressed in a cheap black suit and sitting on a burly-looking cop who was splayed on the ground, sweat streaming down his blank face. The old man had a face made of beard, gray-white hair wiggling everywhere as he chewed tobacco.

“Come on out, Mr. Cates,” he said with a grunt. “Before we pull you out.”

“Don’t fucking move,” I whispered. “Tele-K holding them all down. There’s no Pusher or we’d already be marching out there with our pants down.”

Outside, someone shouted hoarsely: “Avery Fucking
Cates
?” We all paused for an awkward moment, waiting for him to say something more.

“You have a friend here,” the Poet said, grinning, his tattoos dancing. “How nice to be welcomed here. You must be famous.”

“Fucking hell, I hate these freaks,” Mara hissed. “You want to beat someone or kill someone, do it with your bare hands like a fucking human being.” Her thin, pretty face was lit up with an ancient sort of rage. “This bullshit gets old.”

The Poet was lying on his belly, squinting at the scene. “There’s no way to move. The moment we leave shadows, we will be exposed.”

“And then we’re in the fucking air,” Mara spat. “I remember that cocksucking Tele-K.”

For a few heartbeats, we lay there in silence, listening to the wind. My body was bonding with the rough pavement, my eyes getting heavy. I wanted to just put my head down and sleep, wake up a thousand years later, when the persistent spiky throb in my head might have faded away. Rolling over onto my back, I took a painful, deep breath, swallowing a spasm of coughs, and stared at the cracked, corroded ceiling, shadow bleeding into the damp, weak light. “Anyone seen the fucking Monk? ”

For a second, we were all still, and then they both rolled over, searching the gloom.

“Well, that’s fuckin’ disturbin’,” Mara said after a moment.

“I wished it to go,” the Poet said contemplatively. “Now I wish it would come back. A lesson here, yes? ”

A tremendous shattering crash made us all jump. Concrete dust rained down just outside the tunnel’s exit.

“Mr. Cates,” the old man called out. “I know you are cowering in there. Attend to me, please.”

“
Attend
to you?!? ” I shouted up at the ceiling. “I’m gonna have to ask you to rephrase your request in a language other than
asshole
.”

“Maybe we split up,” the Poet said. He was completely himself again, all the quaver and strain out of his voice. “Each in his own direction, hell-bent for leather.”

I felt peaceful, suddenly, staring up at the ceiling of the tunnel. “That asshole picked up a fucking
train
with his
mind
,” I said. “He’s squashing, what, fifty, sixty cops to the ground simultaneously. You think he’s going to have trouble with three more people?” I rolled over onto my belly and peered out at him. The poor fuck he was sitting on looked like he was waiting for permission for his heart to explode, his face purple, sweat dripping off his nose. A few feet away, in a similar position as if someone had recently been sitting next to the old man, was another cop, his suit a shiny silver job that clashed with his blistered, lobster-red skin, his whole body one big third-degree burn. My HUD was yellow everywhere. I
felt
fucking yellow. I pushed myself up onto my knees and my heart did a crazy little dance in my chest, fluttering.

“We snipe his ass,” I said. “Adrian, how’re you with a scope? ”

He made a face behind his grimy-looking glasses. “I am average,” he admitted. “Can kill most things at a distance; can’t say kill for sure.”

I nodded. He was honest. “You? ” I asked Mara.

She gave me a smile that was almost pretty, but I had a creepy shiver, staring into her eyes. The idea of fucking Mara was so distant and alien I wanted to look away, keep my eyes off her.

“I always prefer my kills up close,” she said, shaking her head. “And I’m the sort who does everything okay, nothing great, and gets by with gettin’ everyone else to do her dirty work.”

I nodded. “Okay. Pass me the needle—just keep low and move slow.”

The Poet crawled over to our deflated duffel bag and unzipped it without raising his head. Fishing inside, he quickly found the sniper rifle I’d specified back in Brussels and slowly extracted it, inching it from the bag while lying flat beside it. When he had the whole rifle out, he slid it along the damp floor of the tunnel’s mouth until I put my hand on it and pulled it in the rest of the way. Carefully flopping back over onto my belly, I squinted out into the light.

This had once been a system of rising roads, concrete, and asphalt, spinning upward in wide loops and then shooting off into different directions. Shacks had been built up on all of the crumbling overpasses, loops within loops of dirty, tiny huts mixed in with a few larger structures. The wood all had a gray, weathered look to it, most of the slats warped, ancient nails being pulled inexorably from their homes. Some shacks were just a few feet wide, some had been built up to dangerous heights—I could see the stories waving in the winds like reeds or branches—but they were all on the verge of turning into dust. A single path wound its way through the crowd, slowly widening until it led directly into the heart of the city. When it had been built, people had used roads to get into Hong Kong, but now people used hovers. Unless they couldn’t afford hovers, and who gave a shit about them then?

I reached up and slowly pulled out the built-in barrel supports until they clicked into place, then slowly extended the gun, trusting to instinct for the proper angle and elevation.

The ground suddenly pulled away from me, the rifle dropping as I sailed up, and I was in the middle of an invisible fist being dragged through the air. For a second it was so fast my whole body tensed in preparation for impact, but a second later I stopped cold, hanging a few feet in front of the old man.

And he was
old
. His body was barrel shaped and stretched the cheap fabric of his suit uncomfortably, and his round head had wispy, thin white hair on top of a pink, burned scalp and thick, dirty white whiskers all over the bottom two-thirds of his face. His eyes, round and empty like every other Psionic I’d ever seen, were bright green in a cloudy yellow milk. They were old eyes, and I didn’t like looking into them.

“Should’ve stayed
down
, Mr. Cates,” he chided me, chewing his mustache. “That was stupid.”

I could hear the gasping breath and moans of the cops around us, floated up by the fierce, damp wind that swirled everywhere. “I’ve never been very bright,” I gasped, the invisible fist tight around me. “Maybe that’s why I keep killing all the fucking Spooks I meet. I keep thinking if I eat their brains, I’ll get smart.”

Someone laughed, one of the cops, a dry, pinched sound.

The Pusher moved his mouth, his bushy mustache like steel wool rippling on his face, a faded caterpillar. “It’s men like you, Mr. Cates, with their
technology
that they use without knowing anything,
monkeys
with
buttons
, that have led the world to its present state. Not only are you not going to be allowed to free Londholm’s invention and distribute it to the rest of the monkeys out there, Mr. Cates, but it’s high time you were put on trial for what you’ve personally done. Done with guns, with hovers, with circuits and chips and logic gates. With
technology
.”

Forcing myself to breathe shallowly, I kept still, my face blank. Something moved in the shadows of the overpass behind him, and instinctively I kept my eyes off it.

“The whole world ruined by technology,” he said suddenly, as if in response to something. “Parasites like you—you, who would be sweeping up refuse in the streets, who would have
died young
if not for the prop of machinery. Misguided servants like the SPS think preserving technology is our future—technology is
destroying
us. They will be dealt with.” He shifted his weight a little on the poor cop, whose arms and legs were trembling, his whole suit of clothes stained with sweat. “God has appointed us, Mr. Cates, to cleanse this world. We are representatives of his organic power. We do not need machines or electricity or silicone minds. We do not need batteries or wireless uplinks. We were
created
by God, and we will tear down all of this.” He raised one hand and waved it about randomly. Then he cocked his head a little, regarding me. “And we will punish men like you who have done so much damage.”

Behind him, the Monk stepped out of the shadows. It was still grinning. I kept my eyes moving past it and then shut them, giving in to the excruciating pain that crept up my back and down my legs, beating in time with my fluttering heart. I didn’t know if Mara and the Poet could maneuver out of the tunnel without being seen, and I didn’t know if either one would chance a rescue attempt. Mara, I was pretty sure, wouldn’t shed any tears if I got snapped in half by this freak.

Black spots appeared in my vision, and I felt like my eyes were popping out of my head.

“Perhaps you will tell your people to reveal themselves before I begin to make you
really
suffer.”

I couldn’t help it. I started to laugh, or tried to, my body shaking painfully. “My people will probably be halfway back to the mainland by now,” I managed to squeak out. “You want to talk about tech—I got a head crammed full of the shit, and none of it is doing me any good.”

He squinted at me, and suddenly I spun slowly in the air. “I see,” he said as I revolved back around. The Monk had crept a few feet closer, its smiling face a frozen, terrible mask that appeared to be staring directly at
me
, like the grinning face of fucking death floating toward me. “This is just your damnation writ large. You’re no better than a cyborg. You’re no longer even human.”

My HUD had faded red; breathing was becoming more and more difficult. “At least . . . I still . . . have my looks . . .”

Next to us, the cop being used as a chair by the old man laughed. “Cates, I’ll take up a fucking collection to pay you to kill that hairy motherfucker,” he panted. “He’s been crushing us for fucking
hours
.”

I concentrated, trying to find my calm, quiet sphere, keeping my eyes open through stubborn will. It felt like I’d been fed into a vacuum, like my inner pressure was bulging out, threatening to splatter me everywhere. I put my eyes on the Monk as it stepped gingerly behind the crazy old bastard. I knew that I shouldn’t look at it, that I should pretend it wasn’t there until it did something useful, but looking away seemed like so much work, so much trouble. I just stared.

“We will not allow you to claim the augment for Mr. Orel’s use. I find you
guilty
, Mr. Cates,” the old man said as I shut my eyes to rest them as they bulged out of my head. “I sentence you and your kind to death.”

Said the mouse to the cur
, Dick Marin’s voice suddenly whispered lightly in my thoughts.
Such a trial, dear sir, with no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath. I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury, said cunning old Fury. I’ll try the whole case, and condemn you to death
.

Good to hear you, Dick
, I thought dreamily, my own thoughts echoing in the sudden dry emptiness of my head.
I thought I’d lost you
.

I opened my eyes again and slowly focused them as the last bit of leeway disappeared around me, locking my diaphragm under tons of invisible pressure. The Monk took one final step, pausing just a few inches behind the old man. For a second, I looked right at it, and it was as if the fucking thing grinned right at me. Then it lunged forward and wrapped its fake arms around the old man’s chest. He startled, and I was suddenly tossed into the air, the invisible fist dissolving around me.

And then, the Monk exploded.

I was hurled backward, suddenly free, and for a second there was a bizarre bloom of joy and relief as I could breathe again. This was immediately replaced with a sudden damp surge of terror, and then the usual vague hope that I wouldn’t bite my own tongue off when I hit the ground.