Cates 05 - The Final Evolution

JEFF SOMERS

www.orbitbooks.net

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To my Danette,
whom I regularly try,
and fail, to deserve.

PROLOGUE

HE REALLY ENJOYS THIS PART

“Tell me something,” I said, easing the barrel into the soft spot on the back of his neck just below the skull. “How’s someone as stupid as you get a job like this?”

He tensed for a moment, then slumped a little. “I used to be smarter.”

I smiled, pressing the gun down hard while I hugged him with my free arm, feeling him up for surprises. I was alive and I felt good. “We all used to,” I said. “Me, I used to be a fucking
genius
.”

I found a gun shoved down into his crotch, a battered old alloy auto with the safety chiseled off, ready to blow his balls off if he zipped up wrong. I weighed it in my hand.

“It’ll go easier on you if you tell me what else you’ve got.”

He chewed on this for a second or two. It was dark and cold as hell, the wind whipping up over the ruined outer wall of the old church and smacking into us. I stared over his shoulder at the glowing whitewashed walls, twin bell towers sticking up into the blue-black sky like broken bones. The church proper was ringed by the remnants of the old wall, a tiny, squat cottage connected to my right, the roof a vague memory. The whole world was being worn down, erased, one inch at a time, filled with empty, abandoned buildings like this. In twenty years the cottage would be gone down to the foundation. So would I.

“Nothing,” he said, giving me a little shrug. “I’m just supposed to yell the alarm, give ’em some warning, anybody gets past me.”

“Yell if you want to find out what your brain feels like flying through the air,” I said. “Besides, it doesn’t matter. We’re inside already anyway. Walk me in.”

If he was in the mood to be reasonable, I was in the mood to let him live. I’d killed enough assholes already. Why be greedy.

“All right,” he said after another moment.

I pocketed his gun and let him put an inch or two between us, then followed him toward the church. We scraped along the frozen dirt for a few seconds in silence.

“Listen,” he said quietly. “There’s two guys on the first floor, right inside the doors.”

I nodded. “We know.”

“Let me take the slip,” he said. He didn’t say it pleading. He just asked, like he was asking for a cigarette. “I’ll catch hell if I walk in there with you pushing me along.”

I studied the back of his head. He was younger than me, but so was everyone. His head was shaved and a delicate tattoo of a spiderweb had been penned onto his skull, a blurry blue design done in a shaky hand. It glinted slightly in the cold moonlight. For a moment I considered just letting him run. My gut told me that he would just melt away and never bother me again, but I hadn’t lived this long by taking stupid chances, so I sighed as if thinking about it and then I brought my Roon down on top of his head as hard as I could.

He dropped to the ground silently, and I stepped over him, glancing up at the hill that framed the church against the sky, a dome of green and brown. There was no noise aside from the crunch of my boots on the frost.

I crept forward. When I was a few feet from the big wooden double doors, they swung outward on silent, greased hinges.

“You stupid fuck,” I hissed. “What are you thinking? You check your field, or you’ll get punished.”

“Yes,” Remy said, leaning against the doorway with one of his ersatz brown cigarettes hanging from one lip. “The day you can’t handle one guard who doesn’t know you’re coming, Avery, I’m dead anyway.”

I looked him over. He’d grown like a weed over the last three years, getting broad and tall, every movement taut and powerful. He’d let his black hair grow out, hanging over his face, and he’d started a beard, a thick scum of hair that enveloped his cheeks and neck, making him look even skinnier, strangely. He dressed in black, like an asshole, but I pardoned him; he was still just a kid. And I liked him. It always surprised me how much I
liked
Remy.

“All right,” I said, giving him a little slap on his cheek as I pushed past him. “Then today’s lesson is, don’t rely on someone else doing
their
job to keep you as lou stupid fuck.”

“Stupid fuck” had become my term of endearment for Remy.

Just inside the doors were two bodies, big guys sprawled in the sawdust poured all over the floor, a bloody mess. They were both locals, tall beefy guys, tan skin and long, dark hair tied back into tails, guns in their slack hands. Both had tiny, small-caliber holes in their heads. Remy favored big guns but he could work small if the occasion called for it. I’d taught him that, and I had a moment of weird pride, instantly soured. I stood there studying them for a moment while the kid closed the doors behind us.

“You didn’t have to kill them,” I said, carefully. I didn’t want to prompt another speech about the military augments in his head that might explode at any moment—from decay, or stray microwaves, or an old SFNA officer with a spare remote in his pocket. I’d heard it too often. I had the same augments, forced on me by the Press Squad, but mine had been damaged. The one time someone tried to pop me with a military remote—a blackjack, the old soldiers called it—it hadn’t killed me, though I wished it had, for a while. When Remy didn’t respond, I sighed. “Quiet work, though,” I said, looking back at him. His face was impassive, as always. He hadn’t spoken for the first six months after we got out of Hong Kong, and even now he wasn’t one for speeches.

“I think that was lesson three,” he said, crossing his arms in front of himself. “
Noise gets you killed
.”

The church had been gutted and was just a cold shell of old wooden beams and empty windows. Up front there was a twisting set of stairs, apparently held together with wishes and good intentions, leading up to a sagging balcony that wrapped around three of the walls. I could see a door at the top of the stairs, a gleaming steel number that sported a nifty DNA-swipe magnetic lock. It didn’t work anymore, of course; electricity was hard to come by in Bolivia.
Everything
was hard to come by, everywhere, since the System had fallen into a million little pieces.

“No one at that door?” I wondered aloud, walking forward and turning my head this way and that, trying to see everything, get the place fixed in my head.

“Assholes,” Remy said by way of explanation. “Garces is nobody. A local strongman. I’m amazed he has a steel door instead of some glass beads on string.”

I clucked my tongue. “Don’t be fucking cynical, Remy. Yeah, Garces doesn’t run anything half a mile away from this fucking building, but Morales is paying us a lot of worthless yen to kill him. And my intel says there should be two assholes at the front door and one asshole at the back door.” I gestured up at it. “That bothers me. This lack of assholes.”

“Well, there’s
us
,” he said with his usual flat tone.

I checked my Roon, scorched and battered but still smooth as silk—no one made guns like the old Roon corporation, rest in peace—then I took out the first guard’s iron and looked it over. It was no Roon, but it looked like it wouldn’t blow up in my hand, at least, so I slipped it back into my coat pocket.

“Well, let’s find out what’s up there.”

I walked toward the stairs, thinking. Remy was right—Garces was a local boss, one of a million who’d sprung up when the army and the cops had dissolved, scattering, the System of Federated Nations getting unfederated over the course of a few chaotic months. The fact that the best people he could hire were low-quality wasn’t surprising. It still felt wrong; I’d learned that when unexpected things happened, it usually went badly for you. We’d been working so much lately, I was in practice, and in shape—my augments, my gift from Colonel Malkem Anners and Michaleen Garda, were damaged but still partially functional. I still had a flickering heads-up display in my vision, pain got washed away immediately, and when my heart rate kicked up I got calm and clear. There was no reason to discount my instincts.

I paused at the foot of the stairs and listened. The steps were old wood, bowed in the center and reinforced here and there with metal braces; they would creak like hell. The hallway behind the door was about twenty feet long, and there was another door that led to Garces’s office. I was standing there, judging the physics and the chances I’d be heard when the steel door swung open and a skinny, short man with his long black hair tied into a tight, thick braid stepped out onto the landing.

For a second we stared at each other. “
¿Qué la cogida?
” he said, taking half a step backward.

I put my gun on him, moving fast, my old augments giving me an adrenaline-sick edge of speed.