Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (2 page)

“
Aqui
,” I said, using one-third of my usable Spanish and gesturing at the floor. “
Aqui
.”

He nodded, raising his hands up like an ass. Never do anything you aren’t ordered to, I always told Remy. Don’t give shit away—if someone forgets to tell you to put your hands where they can be seen, keep your fucking hands where they’ll do you some good. He started coming down, muttering something I couldn’t quite catch with each step. Watching him, I cheated my way to his left, and when he was a few steps from the floor I reached out, took hold of his ankle, and spun him crashing to the ground floor.

Remy was suddenly there, one boot on the poor guy’s neck, his massive double-action revolver pointed at the guy’s head. Startled, I dashed forward and gave Remy a shove, knocking him off balance and sending him stumbling into the wall, his heavy gun making him lean. I hooked one hand into our new friend’s collar and dragged him behind me as I stomped after the kid.

“Why the
fuck
do I have to always
remind
you to not just fucking
kill
every-fucking-body?” I hissed. Remy was hunched over, staring up at me from around his own shoulder, his cannon aimed at the floor. It was a ridiculously large gun, heavy and loud, but it would put a fist-sized hole in someone’s chest, and Remy was attached to it despite the fact that bullets for it were rarer than clean water these days. His hair hung in his face and he made no attempt to move, to challenge me. He just stayed hunched over as if expecting a kick, and shrugged awkwardly.

“That’s what we
do
,” he pointed out.

“Fuck,” I said and sighed, looking back up the stairs. “Maybe it would be nice to ask our new friend here what’s behind that door? Howmany men up there?”

He nodded, slowly straightening up. “Sure, okay, Avery.”

I stared at him again, my prisoner just waiting politely for our attention to swing back to him. Remy disdained caution, because Remy thought he knew how he was going to die, and thought the knowledge made him immortal in every other situation. Until his augments popped, he figured he was protected by fate. And no matter how many times I told him he was an asshole for thinking that, he was never convinced.

“Okay,” I finally said, letting my guy drop to the floor and turning to put a boot on his chest and my gun in his face. “
Hola, muchacho
,” I said, gesturing up the stairs. “
¿Cuantos?
”

He grinned, again putting his hands up by his face to signify that he wasn’t a threat. I didn’t need his hand gestures to know
that
; he’d already shown me his belly and asked me to scratch it. “
No mas
,” he said eagerly. “
No mas, señor
.”

I nodded. “
Gracias
,” I said, smiling back. His tan face lit up and he looked like he was going to keep talking, so I leaned down and smacked my Roon into his forehead just hard enough to knock him cold—the rusting augments in my head made such precise adjustments easy enough. I straightened up and gestured at Remy to precede me up the stairs.

“Don’t be an asshole,” I warned him as he slipped past me, all youthful energy and grace, sinews and adrenaline.

“We
are
here to
kill
Garces, right?” he whispered back. “We’re not just going to be rude to him, call him some names, right?”

I started up the stairs behind him. As I’d suspected, they creaked and wiggled under us like it was going to be the last thing we ever did. “Shut up and keep your eyes open,” I suggested. “When you have the urge to be an asshole, ask yourself if I can still beat the shit out of you. If the answer is yes, think twice.”

Teaching the kid was hard work.

He reached the sagging balcony and stepped to the right, pushing himself against the fragile railing and raising his cannon. I stepped to the door and put my hand on the handle, glanced at the kid, and then pulled the door open in a sudden, smooth lunge. Remy tensed and then relaxed, shrugging.

I stepped in front of him and took lead. The hallway was made of warped wood slats on the floor and pockmarked drywall. Two doors on the sides had been boarded over crudely, leaving just the big, heavy wooden door with the shotgun slat at the other end to worry over. It made sense to limit the approaches; Potosí was not exactly a stable little city, and Garces hadn’t become one of a dozen or so tiny chiefs in it through glad-handing and arranged marriages—a direct assault on his offices wasn’t out of the question. If his guards weren’t all local simps who couldn’t be trusted to raise an alarm, the hallway would have been an effective way to bottleneck intruders and poke a gun through the slat, raking them with fire from behind the door, which I expected would be steel-plated on the other side.

We paused just outside, standing with our backs at the opposite walls, and looked at each other. Putting a finger up to my lips to forestall Remy’s traditional approach of Extremely Loud and Shoot Me If You Can, I reached over and gently pressed down on the door handle. It moved easily and unlatched with a soft click that sounded like a shotgun blast to my ears. Wincing, I froze and waited to see if the door was going to explode, but nothing happened. I took a deep breath, my HUD flickering in my vision, all levels green, and pushed the door inward, stepping immediately to the left, gun out but held low.

Feeling Remy step in behind me, I took in the room. It was a nicely appointed office and almost felt civilized; Potosí was the definition of the sticks, but this place was old-school: wood paneling on the walls, a stained but thick and sound-swallowing red carpet on the floor, the opposite wall dominated by two huge floor-to-ceiling windows. The left wall was all shelves, empty, the sunburned outlines of something or many somethings, square and all different heights, still staining the old wood. In front of the empty shelves was a massive wooden desk, dark stain with deep scratches, flat and empty. Two men sat on my side of the desk in old, busted-up, plush leather chairs, the upholstery blistered and bursting. One was a huge blob of a guy, pale white with dark red hair, a face made of freckles and sweat. The other was almost as big, dark tan and with glossy black hair spilling back over his shoulders like a wave of ink, a thin pencil mustache adorning his upper lip.

Behind the desk sat Manuelo Garces, who ran half of Potosí with all the imagination and verve of a drunk pissing on his shoes.

He was about my size, and ten or fifteen years younger. He wore what passed for a nice suit in these shattered times, and his head was close-shaved and sported a few scabs where an unsteady hand had cut him. He was a good-looking kid, his face round and happy, symmetrical and balanced. He didn’t look like a guy who’d come up in the slums of Potosí, slitting throats and stealing anything not nailed down, a guy who’d survived the breaking of the System and the civil war that had left Potosí and everything around it for ten miles or so a scab of destruction. He looked like a kid I would pay a thousand yen to run messages for me.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Remy step in after me, shut the door quietly behind him, and then step forward and right a little, getting out of the door’s way in case someone unexpected came in. When he just stood there with his ridiculous gun held down by his crotch, I relaxed. The kid liked taking chances and sometimes caused trouble.

I looked at Garces. He had his hands under the desk.

“I’m not here to kill you,” I said. “So don’t pull that boomstick out unless you want to piss me off.” Then I glanced at his two guests. “You two aren’t on my list of chores today, so you have a choice here: You can jump out the window, or I can shoot you both in the head. You’ve got five seconds.”

They both stared at me for a beat, then looked at Garces, who shrugged his eyebrows at him in the international gesture for
I don’t give a fuck
. The redhead looked at me.

“We’ll go without a fuss—”

“You’ll go out the window,” I said, affecting boredom, playing my role like I’d done a million times before. “Or you’ll stay here forever.” We weren’t that high up—they might break a leg; they might get messed up, but the drop wouldn’t kill them. If they made
me
kill them I was going to make it hurt, out of sheer irritation.

In some ways, the world was easier, now. The System didn’t exist anymore—except for a hunk of Eastern Europe, where a rump of the old System Security Force hung on. Dick Marin—The King Worm—was gone. At some point the Joint Council’s army had nuked Moscow into a shallow crater, vaporizing his servers. The news had already been a few months old when I’d heard it, and I’d felt nothing—which was curious. On my list of people to hate, Marin had been number three. Knowing he was gone should have felt like something.

The cops were hanging on, though. Everywhere else had just fallen to pieces. City states, small countries, a constantly changing ocean of sovereignties. Most places were run by people like Garces, gangsters who could pay for muscle to keep the peace, or by mercenaries who’d settled down with their troops. A lot of the old army officers had set up tiny kingdoms for themselves after the army had collapsed, with their units as security. It was fucking chaos, and chaos was good for business. There were no System Pigs breathing down your neck, beaming your face across the ocean, hunting you down. There were no Vids pasting your name everywhere and telling people to report seeing you. I could throw these two slobs out the windows and no one was going to investigate, no hovers were going to rip the roof off the place and dump a battalion of Stormers into the room. No one was going to care.

They still didn’t move, so I shrugged and brought the Roon up, cocking the hammer with a dramatic click. That got them both out of their seats, Remy shifting gracefully to his left to keep Garces covered.

For a second we just stared at each other. Then I sighed theatrically. “If you’ve never jumped out of a window before,” I offered, “the best advice I can give you is to take a running jump—it’s easier that way, instead of leaning out in excruciating increments—and protect your head.”

Red still stared at me. “You’re… not serious.”

Remy laughed, a cold, sudden snort. Remy hadn’t known me back in New York, before the Plague. He knew only the new Avery. The new Avery wasn’t as kind and gentle as the old.

I ticked my aim downward and put a shell at Red’s feet, making him jump and yelp. The pair scampered backward toward the windows and I turned toward Garces.

“Remy,” I called out. “Make sure they jump.”

Garces was relaxed, a smile on his face. He stared back at me with his hands folded in his lap. At the sound of one of the windows scraping open his eyes flicked over my shoulder and then immediately back at me. He pushed his grin into overdrive and raised one hand to point at me.

“Avery Cates,” he said.

I shrugged. “You’re Psionic. Read my mind and shit, huh?”

Garces shrugged back as a pair of yowling screams pierced the air behind us, suddenly cut off. “You’re the only
gringo
Gunner with a Bottom working and here.” He ticked his head toward the windows. “You cost me money, there.”

“Fuck your money,” I said, easily, taking a seat in one of the busted leather chairs.

He took that in stride. “I’m guessing I’m down four men, too.”

“Just two. The other two will live, unless they die of shame.”

He nodded. I could see how he’d clawed his way to the bottom ladder of the post-System world. He was smart enough, and he stayed calm under pressure. “All right,” he said, his accent subtle, giving his words a round feel I kind of liked, like every word was linked to the last by a thin line of silk. “Let’s negotiate.”

I shook my head. I had the Roon aimed at his face, my arm resting on the arm of the chair. “We’re not negotiating. I just have a question I have to ask you before I transact my business. Something I ask everyone these days.”

The office was damp, I realized. It smelled moldy. If I looked up at the ceiling, I’d probably find a deep brown water stain, but I didn’t bother looking. Garces was a two-bit neighborhood boss—the world had tens of thousands of assholes at his level, now, shitheads who thought having a dozen big guys sending up tribute to you made you important. I’d known
really
important people. I’d been in the same room with them, made deals. Garces was a nobody, and I was about to remind him of the fact.

“By all means, Mr. Cates,” he said, spreading his hands to indicate compliance. “If I can answer, I will. And then we can discuss who has hired you, and what it will take for you to go and kill
them
instead.”

I didn’t react. Every asshole in the world thought he was brilliant, that no one had ever had such a brilliant idea before. And there were probably Gunners who made deals like that, starting bidding wars, waking people up in the middle of the night to announce the latest bid, and would you like to bid higher or take a bullet to the face? But Gunners like that usually ended up dead sooner rather than later. The one thing people wanted in a Gunner was reliability. You didn’t like to think that hiring me was just opening up a fucking auction.

“My question is, have you ever heard of men named Michaleen Garda, Wallace Belling, or Cainnic Orel?”

Garces squinted at me, cocking his head. “
Orel?
Everyone knows of Cainnic Orel, Mr. Cates. He has been dead for twenty years, I hear.” He smiled. “Or do I hear wrong?”

I nodded. “And the other names?”

He leaned back in his seat. “Never heard either one.”

I nodded again. I never expected any kind of shocking answer, but we’d traveled half the world since Hong Kong and I’d made it a standard thing, just asking. It was surprising what you could find out just by asking. I looked around the office. Chances were I was never going to have my revenge on Michaleen, aka Cainnic Orel, the most famous Gunner in the short, doomed history of the System, or on his lieutenant Belling. Both of them deserved to die, and I deserved to be the one to kill them, but I wasn’t goin to get any closer to that crawling around the wreckage of civilization killing little shits like Garces for pennies.