Cates 04 - The Terminal State (33 page)

“You’re sure we are safe? ” he said. “It’s like
I’m
drawing power. Hairs on arm stand up.”

I shrugged. “Does it look like I read the fucking manual? You’ve got wires in your
brain
. I wouldn’t worry about this shit. The battery’s dead, so the hover won’t have any history in its databanks. Without a history, it will assume a crash or other emergency situation. When we power this up, we should be dropped into an emergency shell, which will accept a small number of generic commands. It won’t be fancy and weapons will be off-line, but it’ll get us into the air. Any last words?”

No one said anything. I glanced back at the exploded console and gestured at the disc again.

Immediately, the cabin’s lights flickered on, and various readout screens mounted on the interior windshield burped into life and started throwing numbers my way. The hover’s climate control kicked into whining overdrive, and a Klaxon, the loudest sound I’d ever heard in my life, immediately began to wail. I had no idea what it meant, but if I were forced to come up with a sound that meant imminent explosion, it would be pretty close.

“Fucking hell! Shut that noise off!”

I shook my head. “I know exactly fifteen standard HOV protocol gestures! Shutting off the alarm ain’t one of them!”

“Then get this fucking brick off the fucking ground!”

I gestured at the console and with a squeal of sudden metal fatigue the hover jerked upward, smashing into the concrete above us. Several ceiling panels fell from above and something sparked inside the console, sending a thin acrid plume of smoke into the crank air. Outside, several large chunks of concrete fell to the floor around us.

The Klaxon continued to wail, now joined by another, subtly different alarm.

“Cates!” Mara screeched. I wanted to reach over and clamp her mouth shut. I gestured at the console again and the hover began to inch forward, slowly, scraping along the ceiling, the dry, high-pitched squeal of metal on rock adding to the noise. I found myself making fists and grinding my teeth as we slowly drifted toward the gap in the wall.

“There is no clearance!” The Poet was suddenly in my ear, his body crouched down between Mara and me, almost on top of the humming disc. “You must adjust vertical! The lip, Mr. Cates!”

The view screen showed the approach interior wall; there was a stone and rebar lip that came down from the ceiling about a foot. From the floor, a taller railing rose up, three or four feet high, leaving just enough room between them for the hover to squeak through. I shook my head.

“I don’t have a fine touch here! It’s either scrape the top or scrape the bottom! Top’s shallower!”

“Well give it some fucking
speed
then, or we’re go—”

I reached over and clamped my thumb and forefinger onto Mara’s lips. They felt real enough: warm and damp, elastic. The avatar business had gone luxe. I looked across the Poet’s body and met Mara’s eyes, then winked and let go.

“Hang on!”

I gestured again, and the hover shot forward, the scraping from above becoming a keening, shuddering noise that even drowned out the alarms. The whole hover began to shake as we tore through the empty space, the gap approaching so fast I didn’t even have time to shut my eyes before we hit the lip.

There was a noise just like an explosion, a bomb going off above us, and we rocketed out of the building on an angle, the hover fishtailing spastically and immediately dropping fifteen feet before recovering some of its vertical thrust. It continued to waggle crazily, yawing this way and that as I frantically gestured at it, running through every command I knew and trying to shake it back into something I could control.

Instantly, a third alarm began squawking, and on the heels of that, a fourth one, this one heralded by the cabin lights turning a light red, bathing us in urgency.

Mara leaned as far over toward me as she could from her chair. “What! The! Fuck! Is! That!”

I smiled. “Defensive scan! We’ve been targeted by the city’s antiaircraft weaponry!” I pointed at one of the smaller Vidscreens. “I don’t know what kind of system those assholes have in place, but we’re gonna find out real soon!”

We only needed thirty seconds in the air. Thirty seconds at good speed would put us right over the hotel, and then we could land the brick and the last human cops in the world could blow the hover to pieces for all I cared. I kept repeating the same gesture to turn on the small stabilizing thrusts on the sides of the tail, and the hover kept ignoring me as we spun in a crazy circle.

“You think about it!” the Poet shouted directly in my ear. “There is a metaphor here!” He yelled something else I didn’t catch, and when I looked at him, he was grinning. I grinned back. I was pretty sure I knew what
metaphor
meant, and he was so fucking right that I almost gave up on the spot and let us crash into the fucking ground, maybe the best idea I’d had in a long time. Just seeing the look of horror on Mara’s face would have made it worth it.

If we stayed hanging in the air, we were going to die.

I closed my eyes and imagined the sphere of glass I’d used to hold the voices at bay while they persisted. I hadn’t heard much from them in recent months, but I still had the knack with the imaginary wall, and put it in place without much effort. Inside, it was quiet and serene.

I combined a couple of gestures and the hover dropped another ten feet in one sudden lurch before stabilizing back into its crazy swinging in place.

I started to think maybe letting the fucking thing crash
was
our best bet. If it dropped to the ground, the city’s antiaircraft system might shut down, and since we were only a few dozen feet up, we’d survive. Unless I was wrong and the AA system pounded the crash site anyway, which would take us right on back to being dead anyway. It looked like the perfect plan, a closed circuit with the cadence being death.

“Cates!” Mara shouted, jabbing a long finger at the bank of screens. “One of the displacers is crapped out! Shut it down!”

I followed her finger and nodded—she was right. I gestured my way through the clunky generic commands and managed to kill it, and the hover immediately steadied. The Klaxons kept ringing away, though, jamming into our ears mercilessly. We were slow and wouldn’t be able to manage much altitude, but I suddenly had some coherent control of the brick. Carefully, I pushed us forward. The Shannara, a thin needle of a building, stood out on the view screen clearly enough, and I steered toward it, the hover swinging around like we were filled with fucking gas and floating our way over on the wind.

“Hell, at least we’re not in a fucking
rush
!” Mara shouted. “I’m gonna take a goddamn nap while you
drift
over there!”

I ran through my slim repertoire of commands but couldn’t find any way of coaxing more power out of the hover. The generator was rated high enough to power a fucking building for an hour—I knew that well enough—but the hover maybe wasn’t pulling enough juice from it, or the displacer was damaged, or the emergency status kept it in a crippled state—whatever the reason, we were drifting at a speed only slightly faster than me running across the empty pavement of Hong Kong below us. Which was better than doing the actual
running
, but I decided not to argue the point with Mara. A hot red light bloomed on the console, and suddenly all of the alarms cut off, leaving us in relative silence, the only sound the familiar, though muted, roar of the displacers.

“Well, fucking
finally
,” Mara snarled.

“Yeah, fucking hurrah for us,” I said back. “We’ve been targeted. Better get back into the bay and wrap up in the netting, ’cause I can’t make this thing fast via sheer will-power, so we’re going down in about twenty seconds.”

She stared at me. “Well, this has turned out to be a huge fuckin’ success for you, eh? ”

I ignored her and tried my best to push the hover as fast as it would go, which remained a stodgy and stubborn twenty miles per hour, putting along. Hong Kong was the biggest collection of huge I’d ever seen—the buildings were packed in tight, of all sizes and shapes, glittering empty tombs in the dim rainy twilight. Steering down the canyons created by them at our gentle speed was easy, and I urged the brick on as the collision detection started to beep. On the view screen, the rear field showed a tiny black dot in the sky behind us.

The alarms cut in again. They made me want to crash the fucking brick just to shut them down.

“Okay!” I yelled. “We’re hooked.”

“Ditch it!” Mara shouted.

I shook my head. “Ten more seconds!” Every moment we were in the air gained us ground we wouldn’t have to run a gauntlet through.

She slapped me lightly on the side of the head. I twisted around in the pilot’s seat to look at her; she held up the tiny black remote. “Ditch it!”

I forced a smile to my face and put my hands up. “All right!” I shouted. I turned back to the controls and gestured the flaps down so nothing would slow us, and with a curt movement of my hand the hover went dead, coasting on inertia for a second. The sudden silence popped into place as if it had always been there, like air. “I hope we don’t get blown to hell on the ground!”

“You’re always inspirin’, Cates!” Mara bellowed, strapping herself into the copilot’s chair. “That’s what I like about—”

Someone was laughing.

Behind it there was another noise, a damp hissing sound that was puzzling for a moment.

I opened my eyes. The ceiling of the hover was sliding away behind a thin haze of smoke. It was rippled and bent but gliding along like a river glimpsed from high altitude. At first I thought my HUD was smoke in my eyes and I blinked furiously trying to dislodge it.

Lifting my head, I stared down at myself. The Poet had my feet and was dragging me from the cockpit into the bay. His sunglasses had lost one arm and one lens was shattered, and they almost fell off his face when he grinned at me and dropped my feet with a thud.

“Good to see you well,” he said. I turned my head and found Mara sitting on a loose pile of safety netting. “You pilot like you’re angry. At the universe.”

“A necessary procedure,” Mara chuckled, standing up. She looked fresh and rested, like she’d been napping through the whole flight. “The only way to fucking kill those goddamn alarms, I think. You up, Cates? You can walk?”

I nodded, wondering if she’d just shoot me in the head if I’d turned up lame. I sat up and got my legs under me, my back complaining and my stiff leg making me wince. I’d managed to hit the street more or less level and we’d skidded a fair ways, plowing up some concrete and asphalt. The hover was never going to rise again, but we hadn’t broken apart and we’d covered a mile in just a few minutes.

“Any guns out there? ”

The Poet shrugged, swinging his shredder around and checking it over.

I pushed up onto my legs and tested them; I didn’t collapse immediately and piss myself, so I figured I still had some fuel left in the engine. I nodded at Adrian and he shrugged back, turning and popping the hatch with the manual lever, letting the damp blue light in. None of us moved. After a few heartbeats, I took a deep breath and stepped forward, trying to rally what was left of my energy to start running if I heard that terrible click and hum of a big gun warming up.

We’d landed pretty much dead center on the big wide boulevard we’d been creeping up earlier. Right in front of me, to the right of the hover, the lobby of a squat, rust-covered building was burning cheerfully, glass and concrete splashed liberally around—whatever had been tracking the hover had smacked into the building instead, and with any luck, that had put the antiaircraft systems on standby again. The building looked like it was going to melt, the way the orange-brown rust had taken over, and I decided that we’d done it a favor by destroying it.

I looked to my left, and there it was: the Shannara. From street level, it looked like every other building we’d passed. Its ground floor was scabbed with the wooden hovels, although these went up to three levels high in a ragged pyramid structure, complete with rusting metal ladders leading upward. Then it was a greenish-blue metal and reflective glass, blind eyes glaring at us. There was no sign of life. It was as if the city had been carved out of something solid, with no interior, no pathways for people to crawl through, just an island of sculptures. I felt like we were alone in the city.

Hense had told me it had been one of the best hotels in Hong Kong. Big shots had paid through the nose to stay there and it had offered the best of everything: real organic food, real human service staff—Droids only in the unseen areas. Exclusive rooftop access and complete security teams assigned to every guest, absolute discretion guaranteed and pretty much the entire local squad of System Pigs on its payroll, back before the civil war, before everything had gone to hell.

I’d been staring for thirty seconds before I came back to myself wearily, pulling my consciousness back with tired spasms of effort. No one had shot me, and I didn’t hear anything aside from the sizzling death throes of the hover, the wind, and the rain.

“Come on out,” I said.

A giddy sort of energy swelled up inside me. I knew it was just exhaustion and unstable augments compensating by opening the floodgates on adrenaline and endorphins, but it swamped me, making me shaky and excited. I grinned at nothing. The fucking city was terrified of us. Of
me
. We were standing in the middle of the street after crash-landing a military hover, and the three of us with two shredders and a couple of handguns had the whole city on the run. It made no fucking sense, but it was the goddamn truth. Avery Cates, the Gweat and Tewwible.

A voice from a long time ago echoed in my head. “Hello, rats,” I whispered to Hong Kong. “Time to run.”

“What?”