Cates 04 - The Terminal State (27 page)

She turned her head and stared back at me. “You fallin’ in love, Mr. Cates?”

I blinked and forced a smile, shaking my head. We both strained to see some movement. So fucking what. Half the fucking people you met these days were made of silicone and circuits, their brains backed up via shortwave and defragged every week. So what if Mara had been sucked into a brick? I had my brain wired up. We were all robots, these days. Everything else was just semantics.

Movement in my peripheral vision made me jerk my head back. Mara sent a whining stream of metal into the next building, two seconds of noise and shattering glass. When she relaxed, I squeezed my trigger and followed it immediately with another burst, moving the humming rifle in a tight sweep, clearing the air.

Silently, we both displaced, rolling in opposite directions and climbing to our feet to run at an angle toward the new hole the Poet had created.

“Now what’s t’stop ’em,” Mara shouted as we ran, my HUD levels bouncing up and down as if affected by my gait, “from creepin’ up ahead o’us or maybe even—”

There was a sudden explosion up ahead of us and way up above, followed by the tearing roar of bending metal. The whole empty lobby around us shivered.

“—from above,” she finished.

The Poet was suddenly running back toward us, guns holstered. I slung my shredder over my shoulder and popped the map up in my hand again, gesturing down until I had the building plans spreading out in the air around us.

“It’s no-go that way,” the Poet panted as he joined us, smoothly extracting his guns again and keeping his eyes moving. “Party crashers on the way. Want to be elsewhere.”

Mara checked her rifle over. “Well, perfesser, where do we go? ”

I kept my eyes on the tiny building in my palm, searching the plans, and then looked up, squinting into the bluish gloom. My augments adjusted and the ancient lobby slowly glowed into life, and I saw the old stairs sinking into the old transit system in the back, past the old, empty elevator shafts.

I sighed, snapping the map shut. “Down,” I said into the freshening darkness. “We go down.”

“This,” Mara said beside me, her voice swallowed up and muted by the still, hot air, “is the cleanest fucking subway I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been in some fucking
subways
.”

I finished placing the last of three trip mines and slowly backed away from the dusty stairs leading down from the lobby. When I was five or six feet past their specced range, I spun and swung my shredder around into my hands.

“Give me your thoughts and impressions on the move, Mara,” I said, pushing myself to trot into the gloom. “If we’re standing here hand-jobbing each other when the welcome wagon gets down here, we’re all going to be
part
of the fucking subway.”

“Don’t fucking tell
me
,” she huffed behind me, her voice bouncing off the tiled walls around us and pinging back and forth. “Been at this longer than y’been
alive
, kiddo.”

I ignored her. We had to keep moving, to distance ourselves from the blast if our pursuers fell for the same damn trick twice—and shame on them if they did—and because I didn’t know what we were going to find down here and wanted to cover as much ground as I could before the cosmos caught up with me with a new dance in mind. We were on a short, dusty platform, the tracks running alongside and stretching off forward and back into darkness. A few scraps of furniture were still rotting away, and a few square tiles still clung to the walls. I made for the edge and dropped over into the rut.

The Poet fell in beside me, pistols still in his hands, sunglasses still on. They were certainly made to adjust to all lighting conditions, but I found myself irritated that he’d leave them on like some punk interested in looking like a fucking Gunner instead of actually doing the job right. I didn’t say anything. There was no time. I felt like the cosmos had put me back on the rail a few weeks ago, but that I’d jumped the track, that I wasn’t
supposed
to kill Londholm, wasn’t
supposed
to take the God Augment and turn it on Michaleen. I couldn’t explain it. It was just a feeling. I thought if I kept moving, kept my head down, I might tell the fucking cosmos to go fuck itself for a change.

“Something on your mind, Adrian? ”

The tunnel was slowly grinding down to pitch-black; my augments were struggling to make it visible. My HUD showed my climbing respiration as I jogged with the duffel and shredder hanging off me, some of my stats edging down into the red—I was pretty much staying upright with augment power at this point: If someone had been able to dissolve them out of me by magic, I’d probably drop dead. I hoped the fact that the subway entrance had been completely unmonitored or defended indicated that the Triads, or whoever owned the tunnels, had forgotten about lobby entrances, buying us some time. If we were quiet enough, we might make it through without having to pay a toll.

I didn’t think we could afford any tolls.

“You’re improvising,” he said, his voice picking up the strained pitch I’d heard before, in the tunnel. “This makes me very nervous. Bag of secrets, too.”

“Noted, and who gives a fuck. You got a better idea, let’s hear it.”

He didn’t say anything for a few steps. “That disturbs me, too.” He looked over his shoulder for a second. “We are not out from under. Push button.”

“I’m right here, assholes,” she whispered. “I can fucking
hear
you.”

“You surprised we’d gladly twist your head off? That hurts your feelings?” I whispered into the air without turning. I glanced at the Poet. “You see any opportunity to get out from under, Adrian, and I am listening. Until then—the only way out is forward.”

We walked a few steps, the darkness tightening up around us. With a silent stutter, my vision suddenly turned murky green, lighting the place up a little better.

“Also disturbing,” he said suddenly, his voice pitched lower, “someone is following us. Stealthy but clumsy.”

I kept moving, but strained my augmented ears. After a moment I heard it, the creeping scrape of someone being careful with their foot placement but sloppy with their advance. “One person,” I whispered after a moment.

The Poet nodded.

I considered: They’d either already been down here, or they’d somehow bypassed my trip mines. Nothing was impossible, I knew that—you put down trip mines, someone walked right through them; it could be done. If they were already down here, they were possibly Triad, a guard, or just some poor shit wandering around. Either way, noise would be a mistake.

Wordlessly, the Poet faded back, and I hoped he didn’t freak out again. I kept my eyes forward, struggling to pick out details. The tracks snaked under us clearly enough, and the rough concrete walls slipped past us in a steady scroll. The air was getting thick. I couldn’t imagine a train barreling through these narrow tunnels, pushing through this fog—I couldn’t imagine anyone voluntarily rushing through the darkness in a fucking tube, clinging to each other for dear life. If I’d been in charge during Unification thirty years ago, I would have poured concrete down each of these holes and not looked back.

Walking along, knowing that someone was shadowing us, was stress. My hands were tight on the body of the shredder, still warm. I wanted to spin and just send fire everywhere, taking down everyone, taking down Mara, too, and feeling my head explode as a result of the frag. It was tempting.

The only way out is forward
, Dennis Squalor whispered, the sound of a ghost, a man long dead even before I pulled his plug.

Something sizzled through the air to my right, and I stopped, shredder coming up and trying to track it as it landed with a hard-sounding skittle across the tracks. Something small and dense. For a second, there was no sound.

“That’s an RD mine,” a voice called out from behind. “If I toggle it, we’re all dead. No one move.”

My eyes strained to pick it out, though I wasn’t sure what I planned to do if I found it. “You blow it, you’re dead too.”

“That’s what ‘we’re all dead’ means, Mr. Cates.”

I closed my eyes.
Mr. Cates
. I suddenly recognized the voice. “How’d you get down here, Remy?”

“I’ve been trained in live explosive decommission,” he said, sounding older and colder than I remembered. “Those are military-issue trips; I know ’em well. Don’t worry, I set them again when I was through.”

I nodded. Remy had always been a smart kid. “How’d you get away from Anners? ”

He didn’t answer for a second or two. “I just walked away. It’ll be a few hours before he realizes I’m gone, and then he’ll probably pop me. Or maybe he’ll wander out of range and I’ll get popped automatically. I don’t know. I don’t care.”

I opened my eyes again, HUD automatically fading to a transparent film on my vision. For a heartbeat or two, we were all silent again, and then I took a breath. “I tried—”

“Yeah, you tried real fucking hard, Mr. Cates,” he said coldly. “You paid that asshole a fucking fortune to get you escorted into Hong Kong, but I guess I wasn’t worth that much.”

“Who the fuck is this pip, Cates?” Mara snapped. “One o’ your bastards come to pay his respects? ”

Just someone on my list
, I thought. “What do you want, Remy?”

“What do I
want
? You’re a fucking piece of shit, Mr. Cates. If they hadn’t pressed you, you’d have just run for it back in Englewood. You didn’t give a fuck about us then, and you didn’t give a fuck about
me
here. So what do I want? What do you think I want? My head hurts, Mr. Cates. I got a blinding headache every fucking day from these augments. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. They push tabs down my throat to keep me alive. Whatever they want me to do, I do. I can’t not do it; I’m fucking plugged in. They push a button, I’m on the floor, screaming. They push a button, I’m comatose. They push a button, I’m killing people with my bare hands. Some of the officers . . .” He paused, his words bouncing around us. “Some of the officers like to
have their fun
with us. Make us dance, like puppets. So dying, I’m okay with. I’ve been thinking of just wandering off, seeing how long I got before Anners pops me. And then you showed up and sailed on past and I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to kill him first. If I can.’”

“Hell, Cates,” Mara said cheerily, “you sure do make friends everywhere you go, huh? Kid, am I to understand that you’re only concerned with Cates and his less-than-noble past? ”

“Stop talking.”

“Sure, sure, but let me be more blunt: Are you sayin’ if we give ya Cates, we can just walk on off?”

I froze.

“You cannot do this,” the Poet hissed. “You cannot just leave him here. We will
need
the man.”

“Mr. Panić, you’ll do best to shut the fuck up before I pop you, right? Now, kid, what’s the word?”

Another few seconds of quiet passed us by. “I don’t give a shit what you two do. I want Mr. Cates to stay right here.”

“Done,” Mara said immediately. “He’s all yours.”

“You—”

“Mr.
Panić
,” Mara snarled. “Say one more word and your brain’ll be mush. We’re going.”

“Go ahead, Adrian,” I said, surprising myself. “No sense in both of us getting killed.”

“If you come back, I’ll just blow the mine,” Remy said flatly.

I heard the scrape of Mara and the Poet getting to their feet and walking toward me. I felt someone looming up behind me, and then there was a hand on my shoulder. “We ain’t comin’ back,” Mara said cheerfully.

“I am sorry, friend,” Adrian said, his voice tight and shaky. “This is not how I want it. I would—”

“Just fucking go,” I said, not moving. “This isn’t your fuckup.”

His hand stayed on my shoulder for a moment, and then slipped away, and the two of them crept into the gloom, dissolving slowly into particles of light too diffuse to be coherent. I thought the Poet looked back at me as he was swallowed by the darkness, but I couldn’t be sure. At least Adrian wasn’t on
my
list, I thought. On someone’s list, sure, but not mine.

“Remy,” I said slowly, still not turning. I was curiously calm, my HUD still pus yellow and pulsing in alarm here and there, but I felt nothing aside from vague aching in my leg and a general weariness. The bold exclamation point in the corner of my HUD was still blinking, and it expanded slightly as I focused on it. I could go that route, I thought. Go into Berserker Mode again and go for Remy, if I didn’t stroke out, if I didn’t just kill myself in the attempt.

The exclamation point shrank down, slowly, as my thoughts slid off of it. I could hear the kid approaching, stuffed full of augments, but still dumb enough to think that just having me with my back turned made me defenseless. Made me easy.

“Don’t talk, Mr. Cates,” he said, closer.

I decided to irritate him, on the premise that it couldn’t make my situation any
worse
. “Fuck you, don’t talk. A fucking
brigade
snatches you out from under me and I’m to blame? You assholes begged me to stay. I told you all to get the fuck away, to
run
, but you all stood there with your sad little faces kicking the dirt, fucking useless pricks who can’t handle shit for
themselves
, and suddenly I’m supposed to be your big fucking brother? Fuck that noise. I did what I could for you.”

“You were supposed to take care of
me
,” he said, voice rising and suddenly sounding young, like the little kid I’d known. “You
ran away
.”

He was right behind me. I thought of the mine up ahead, near enough to turn me into a fine mist. I thought of the gun he must have behind me. Would it be the shredder, like an inexperienced asshole, a gun that bucked like a horse, entirely wrong for an up-close attack, or a handgun? Would he just put the barrel against my skull and pull the trigger, or would there be drama, speeches, tears? I didn’t like to think of Remy as an asshole, but I hoped he was.