Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (19 page)

I was doing something. I was going to do plenty.

Rough avenues had been carved in the camp, forming muddy pathways, and we picked our way through the throngs. People sat outside their crappy tents and stared at us, people jumped up to run in front of us, begging, people looked at our clothes and our boots and scowled, hating us on sight. I knew exactly how they felt, but it was strange to be on the receiving end. The world had turned and suddenly I was rich, I was powerful—and they hated me. And with good reason.

My HUD sharpened in my vision as my heart rate kicked up. I felt that acidic boiling in my belly, the sense that violence was on the horizon. Gall walked with the rolling, stick-up-the-ass gait of the seasoned cop, certain he would not be touched simply because he didn’t
wish
to be touched. Grisha strolled with his hands in his pockets, chin on his chest, oblivious, his team mimicking him like they thought his posture was going to save them. I fought the urge to turn and look behind us, certain that a huge crowd of angry people was gathering at our backs.

And I thought,
Shit, this
is
just like the System!

Nothing happened, though. We slogged our way through the camp and came to a wide, central path, just as muddy, but someone had taken the time to line each side with stones. It led directly to the barricades, and the System Pigs doing border duty watched us with their fake, plastic eyes as we approached. They were all officers, dressed in nice suits that looked a little worn, a little tattered on the edges. They were all men—if you could consider avatar bodies made of silicon and circuits to have a sex—and each wore a broad-rimmed hat, a hip holster under their jacket, and a battered-looking Roon 1009, a shredding rifle slung over their shoulders. As we approached I looked up at the big swivel guns mounted on the overpass, and then back down at the cops staring at us. The entry was only wide enough for one person, and no one was going to move those hovers easily, even for a Tele-K. Forcing your way into Copland wasn’t easy.

Feeling their eyes on me, probably uploading my face and running an optical facial recog scan through their servers, I wondered why anyone would
want
to force their way in. Then I thought about the mud I’d just skated through, all that piss and sweat and shit and blood pumped into the earth by people living under blue tarps, and it almost made sense.

The cops didn’t speak, or pull weapons, or anything. They just watched us until Gall turned and gestured for the rest of us to stop a few feet away. He spun around and continued forward, holding up his hands and saying something that made the cops laugh. Then he leaned in and had a whispered conversation with one of them, who I assumed was the station chief. Watching them, I was amazed all over again at the avatar tech. These were robots, with quantum-state hard-drive brains on whith stonucking program that had been
them
was operating at clock speeds. They looked human. Their skin moved right, their eyes shone right, and they had all the nervous tics and weird tells of a person. But they were fucking androids, connected to a network in the air, constrained by programming and destined, according to Grisha, to shut down in a few weeks, just go dormant and sit there for eternity, rusting.

Gall nodded and turned back to us. The cop he’d been speaking to straightened up and resumed practicing to be a statue of a System Pig.

“He’s sending in my message. Shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”

“Sure,” I said. “She’s probably got about twenty-five of herself running around in there, doing her chores.”

It took twenty minutes, and when Janet Hense emerged from the shadows behind the barricades, she looked exactly like I’d last seen her, fighting the civil war in Brussels, snapping out orders and handing me a bomb disguised as an old Monk. And back then she’d looked exactly like she had the day she’d left me for dead in Bellevue back in Old New York. And I suspected she’d look exactly the same fifty years on, and maybe forever.

The cops manning the barricades straightened up when she emerged. I noted the five pips on her collar, and had no fucking clue what that meant. Last I’d seen her she’d been a major, four pips and everyone had run away from her like she could order executions without filling out the paperwork. Now she’d been promoted past that, and I didn’t know what rank that was. She was a short, tiny woman with skin the color of light coffee, her dark, straight hair pulled back with a minimum of style. She paused and ran her eyes over us, not pausing or reacting in any way when she saw me. Then she stepped forward, and I noted with professional detachment the way the cops on the line stiffened up, put hands on their rifles, and looked in different directions. I guessed it wasn’t often a ranking officer stepped outside their green zone, this close to the shitkickers.

“Horatio,” she said, almost smiling. “It’s good to see you. You look fucking terrible.”

“Janet,” Gall said with a nod. “I wasn’t sure you’d be so happy to see me.”

She nodded. “We need everyone we can get, Rache. There was an amnesty issued a few months ago, asking every officer to come on back, no questions asked.”

Gall cocked his head and grinned. “Funny how that happened after you couldn’t build any more units, huh?”

For a second, they stood there in perfect silence, perfect stillness. Then Hense turned to look at me. “Fucking hell, Cates, you’re a fucking weed: You can’t be killed.”

I winked. “Someday, Janet. You just got to keep faith. Although I hear I might actually outlive
you
, in a sense.”

She didn’t like that. She stared at me for another few seconds, chewing something sour, and then spun away, walking toward the barricades.

“These people are with me,” she announced to the cops guarding the entrance to what was left of the Stem of Federated Nations. “They are at liberty and anyone who fucks with them will be
erased
from not just his unit but the fucking
server
itself. Pass the word.”

The cops said nothing and stared anywhere but at her as we approached. I kicked up a little and caught up with her.

“Every time I see you,” I said, grinning, “you’ve moved up in the world, Janet. What are you now? God?”

She stared straight ahead. “What do think?” she said, and then turned to look at me. “I’m Director of Internal Affairs.”

XVIII

WE JUST FIND PEOPLE TO PAY US FOR WHAT WE WERE GONNA DO ANYWAY

Berlin was the cleanest city I’d ever seen.

It was so clean my skin itched as we rode along its wide, empty streets in a huge version of the four-wheel vehicles Grisha seemed to have an endless supply of. These were cleaner, slightly larger, and clearly marked with the stars and globe of the SSF, and appeared to be Droids, driving along without anyone at the controls. We all sat in rigid silence, packed into the back, driving along at a stately pace so slow I would have considered it impossible according to my understanding of the physical laws of the fucking universe—we might, I thought, be going backward.

Jammed between Grisha and Gall, I was suddenly conscious of how bad I smelled.

“What are you waiting for?” Hense suddenly snapped at Gall. “This
is
the fucking meeting. I don’t have time for anything formal.”

Gall grinned, his rubbery face demonic. “Don’t look at
me
, Janet. I got paid to set up a meet. This is
their
gig.”

He pointed at Grisha. Hense looked at him for a withering second and then turned her dead eyes on me. I did my best to stare back, circuitry for circuitry. Hense always made me feel like I was beneath her.

“You’re working for
Techies
now, Avery?” She made the word an insult. I forced myself to grin at her, my tongue poking into the gaps in my teeth.

“Gunners always work for ourselves,” I said. “We just find people to pay us for what we were gonna do anyway.”

She squinted a little at me. “Last reports we had on you, you had an apprentice.”

Cold water splashed through me. I went still, and I forced myself to keep staring back at her despite the urge to look away. Remy flashed through my mind—he’d been an asshole. Complaining, morbid, disobedient. He’d refused to learn a fucking thing and he got in the way every time I planned something out, and I’d let him get clipped right under my nose.

“He’s dead,” I said, my voice flat. I swallowed and stayed silent, and after a moment she looked at Grisha.

“Grigory Baklanov, born Arkhangelsk, interred Chengara Penitentiary presumed dead on site. Obviously not dead, as you are the founder and current leader of
Superstes per Scientia
, aka SPS. SPS is listed in SSF servers as an Opposition Group.”

Grisha nodded, affecting a tiny little bow in the cramped quarters. “And you: Janet Mitchen Hense, ostensible age forty-three, currently occupying what looks like Gen-Four Squalor Series Two nonbiological individually controlled deployment unit, also known as
avatar
. You are Director, Internal Affairs, System of Federated Nations Security Force. You have thirteen avatars with your imprint in the field, and you have not long to live.” He shrugged. “So to speak.”

Another second of thick, oppressive silence, and then she nodded. “Why am I talking to you, Mr. Baklanov?”

He nodded back. “We have mutual problem, mutual solution.” He smiled. “We are both mortal.”

Her nostrils flared, and I distracted myself from my pounding heart and clenched fists to ponder the fucking programming and resources that went into getting an avatar to do that. Why? What the fuck was the point that Janet Hense be able to flare her fucking nostrils?

“And the solution?”

“Former Director Marin’s override codes. We know where they can be found. We need SSF’s help to get to them.”

She cocked her head slightly. “Why?”

Grisha paused, gauging, I figured, how much it was safe to give away. I leaned forward. I knew Janet Hense, her type. She was going to get more out of us somehow, and she knew more than she was letting on.

“You know exactly
why
, babe,” I said, and her visible clench at being called
babe
made me happier than I’d been in a long time. “Orel—Michaleen Garda, whatever his real name is—has the code. He’s holed up in a uranium museum you assholes created during the civil war, so any carbon-based life forms get within ten miles of it, they start to melt.” I shrugged. “We need an assault force that can withstand radiation levels like that.” Belling had told me Mickey was in Split, Croatia. If the System Pigs didn’t know that, I wasn’t going to tell them.

“We estimate dose of approximately seven Gy,” Grisha added without looking at me.

Outside, somehow we were back in the wilderness: trees zoomed past us, green and brown and red blurs. We were still on a wide, paved road, but it was as if the big, empty city we’d been in had melted away. A hazy feeling of confusion infused me; for a second I almost panicked, my heart lurching in my chest. Then my old augments kicked in and a sense of calm filtered through me.

“Garda,” Hense said, looking out the window. “Fucking
Garda
. That makes sense.” She continued to stare out the window for a moment, and then turned back to us. “I don’t have access to Garda’s SSF file. It was single-copy-only on Marin’s local server and it got turned into mulch along with him. But I know he wasn’t just some random Gunner.”

In my head, Dolores Salgado suddenly spoke up.
Random? Michaleen was there from the beginning. The Dúnmharú didn’t take jobs. They took assignments—all designed to push Unification. That man
made
Unification happen, by the simple expedient of murdering anyone in a position to oppose it
.

I blinked her away. “He’s fortified,” I said quickly.

“Wired up in modified Squalor Series One,” Grisha inserted. “And the Londholm Augment. Which he uses to Psionically compel a security staff that dies off at an alarming rate.”

Hense was unreadable. She settled back into her seat as we emerged from the trees and into a cleared circular driveway in front of a big, domed building. The dome was just a skeleton of bare metal, but the rest of the building looked to be in great shape. Several other four-wheelers had been parked in front of it, and the open space crawled with System Cops in their fraying suits and heavy overcoats and other people, all wearing gray uniforms, all engaged in manual labor of some sort. A group of men tugged an ancient cart along the road, sweating and straining to haul whatever was under the heavy canvas sheets. Half of the four-wheelers we passed had two or three people working on the engines and the solar panels, faces blackened from grease.

“No Droids, huh?” I said to the window.

“And not enough vehicles or power,” Hense snapped, sounding irritated. Her irritation lifted my spirits. I felt like if I could irritate Hense, I could do anything. “Where is he, then?”

“No,” I snapped back, turning to look at her. “Not until you commit.” Garda’s location was our last chip. I wanted to be there, to be put within reach of that short bastard or whatever he was now. And Grisha didn’t want the System Pigs to get the override codes without him there to supervise.

I exchanged a quick glance with the Techie, and he winked at me. I had to admit, I
liked
the crazy fuck, and I was glad we were working the same angle for the moment.

“Avery will be acting as Taker on this,” Grisha said. “We take him, and we extract the information from him and share it with you. We need SSF to breach outer defenses, help get our team inside.”

The vehicle rolled to a stop, but Hense sat there for another moment, her eyes swiveling from me to Grisha. “Taker. Avery Cates has never
taken
anyone he could kill. He’s a fucking savage. His type is one of the reasons I tested into the SSF, Mr. Baklanov. He hates Garda, has a personal vendetta against him. And you wish me to believe he will
take
Garda instead of shooting him?” She cocked her head. “Assuming you can even get him next to Garda without he himself dying of radiation exposure. Seven Gy will take about twenty minutes before he’s on his knees puking blood.”