Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (22 page)

“All right,” I said. “Want to see your work firsthand, huh?”

“I want to get the fuck away from fucking cops.”

I remembered him, plump in his nice suit, staring down at his holographic ID in the Rock, horrified that it had gone an angry red. I wondered if I’d destroyed Ezekiel Marko too. “Hell, Zeke,” I said quietly. “What happened to you?”

He shrugged. “I got arrested.”

“He’s unstable. He’ll be a liability.”

Hense was so angry she almost had an expression on her face. I sat next to Mehrak, who appeared to have been instructed to stare at me with one hand on the grip of his gun tucked into his shoulder. I thought about showing him a little trick that ended with his trigger finger broken, but wondered if you could
break
an avatar’s finger.

Grisha scowled. “Yes? You have Gunners on your payroll? People experienced in finding targets and eliminating them, analyzing security fields, allocating resources, being able to pull the trigger when the time comes? You have resources to
burn
?” He shook his head savagely. “He killed a worker. A worker who, under influence, had just
attacked
him. So fucking what, Director Hense.” He tapped a finger on the table. “I will repeat it since you have suddenly become a champion for human life:
So fucking what
. I do not have resources to burn. Avery is our lead on this.”

We were seated around the most civilized conference table I’d ever seen. It was made of stainless steel, gleaming and scratch-free, apparently made out of a single sheet of metal that had been beaten into shape. The room was too small for it, though, a windowless square of drywall that had us all crowded against the walls. It was the sort of room that kept the peace, because there wasn’t enough elbow room to swing a good punch.

She pointed one tiny hand at me. “He—”

“Given the System Security Force’s well-documented stance of valuing all human life,” I said, spreading my hands, “I officially apologize for killing one poor bastard in your fucking
kingdom
of poor bastards up here.” I put a smile on my face, hard and plastic but the best I could do. “Especially since I know you, Janet, have never lined a bunch of skells up against a wall and shot them all in the head just because you had an appointment to get to, or any shit like that.”

I gave her a wink. For a moment I thought she was going to dive across the table and try to twist my head off.

Grisha smiled at her. “This is your opportunity to go your own way on this project, Director Hense.”

I loved Grisha. This was why we had held back Orel’s location. If Hense already had that, she’d have cut us all loose without a moment’s hesitation and gone her own way. Now she’d burned off even more valuable days working with us, and was in even worse shape regarding her looming deadline. We had her under our thumb, and Grisha, as horrified as he’d been with me in private, was putting the screws to her like a pro, following the first rule of a criminal partnership: You never throw your partner overboard unless it was an absolute necessity.

Hense looked down at the table and folded her hands in front of her. For a few seconds she just sat there; I guessed she was conferring with the rest of her, all the other avatars of her in the field, as well as her primary; within Berlin they still had power and signals in the air. When she looked up at us, she was suddenly all calm and happiness again. “Very well.” She swept a hand in my direction. “The floor is yours, Avery.”

I looked at Grisha. He’d told me that Hense by virtue of her promotion was now bound by some of the same programming limitations as Marin had been, and thus was bound to honor deals made in her official capacity as director. We were about to find out if he was right. His glasses caught a glare from the lights and looked like two white circles on his face. He nodded once at me, and for a second I felt a sudden, powerful affection for Grisha, tinged with regret for putting him in a position where he had to defend my competence. Then I took a deep breath and pushed everything else aside. I was Avery Cates, and Avery Cates did not get all blubbery even when he’d fucked everything up, even when people died for his mistakes. And everyone in the room was watching me for signs of weakness, for any evidence that killing poor fucking Murray had been crazy instead of brutal, that I was unhinged instead of cold-hearted.

I had to sell cold-hearted. Luckily, I had experience with that.

I stood up and opened my hands; Grisha tossed the tiny remote at me and I snatched it from the air with augmented dexterity. I held it in my palm and gestured, and a holographic image, a flickering, faint blue, appeared in the air over the table. It was a ruin, a faint square outline with a few surviving structures. Newer buildings, some also ruined, had been built inside and outside the old walls.

“Diocletian’s palace,” I said. “Split, Croatia. Yeah, I never heard of it either until a few weeks ago. Big old place, turning to dust, and the city around it was turned into a big cloud of radiation during the war—half an hour, tops, I’m told, without a level-four rad suit and you’re puking your kidneys up.”

“Orel is protected in a standard Monk chassis,” Grisha said. “They were designed to withstand such conditions.” He smirked. “Dennis Squalor was a genius, yes, but a paranoid man as well.”

I gestured and the hologram telescoped down, piercing the earth. “The basement is where he’ll be. The topside is ruins and cheap structures that don’t give much protection. Underground is thick stone, more or less preserved. Easy to defend entrances, hard to get anywhere bombing it—he’s pretty safe down there.” I shrugged, and gestured again, and the hologram zoomed wildly out again and swerved south and east, showing another set of ruins like a long, narrow bridge disappearing into the ground. “This was the water supply back in the land before fucking time. What it is right now is a small way into caverns that lead to the basement of the palace, big enough for a small party to worm its way in.”

“He may have set up security perimeters out that far,” Grisha said. “We cannot know.”

I shrugged. “He may have dragons and unicorns guarding the way, too. What the fuck difference does it make? This is where we go in. You land a shitload of System Pigs on the shore, rain ’em down from hovers since you got a fleet still operational, you make him feel your presence. I take a small party in and try to sneak up on the old fuck.”

“And take him alive,” Grisha said immediately. “Yes?”

I nodded, scanning the room, my plastic smile in place. “That’s the plan. You get creative and get the code from him, and then I get him
back
.”

There was a second of silence. Hense had taken her seat and now sat like she was a real human being, hands steepled under her chin. Mehrak, who I realized I’d never heard speak a word, still sat with his hand on the butt of his gun, making no attempt to conceal the fact that he was ready to shoot me in the head at a moment’s notice. Marko was staring down at the tabletop, frowning, his hands limp in his lap, and Gall appeared to be asleep, mouth open, head back.

“Cainnic Orel is guilty of treason,” Hense said slowly. “Whatever arrangement he had with Marin or—or the fucking Joint Council—is null now. We will arrest him, interrogate him, and he will be in our custody.”

I shook my head. “Think of me as an execution, Janet,” I said. “You can write a memo and make it legal if you want, but part of the deal is, I get him
back
.”

She smiled, leaning back. The smile was instant and so insincere it hurt to look at her. “There are more
parts
to this deal than I could have imagined, Avery.” She gestured at the hologram. “We know where he is. So why do I need
you
?”

I looked at Grisha. He looked down at his hands as if vaguely embarrassed. “This is a calculated risk, Director,” he said quietly. Hense’s eyes shifted to him. “We suspect that, as a first-generation avatar, you are programmatically precluded from negotiating in bad faith.”

I smiled again. “In other words, you’re fucking bluffing, and wasting my time. We have a
deal
.”

Another long moment of stuffy silence. Hense dragged her eyes from Grisha to me, and then she sat forward. “You have requested Mr. E. Marko as part of your team. Mr. Marko, do you have any objections?”

He didn’t look up, but his face took on a comical expression of exaggerated surprise. “
Now
she asks if I have fucking objections. No. I’m a volunteer.”

Hense nodded, no hint that she’d just lost a ploy or was irritated in any way. The weird thing was, avatars were designed to be human, and several had fooled the hell out of me. This
was
who Janet Hense was, or had been—cold, controlled, and no fucking fun whatsoever.

“Mehrak will continue to liaison on this, so he is also part of your team,” she said, standing up. “I assume you wish to keep the numbers small, but I insist one more representative of SSF interests be included.”

I shrugged. I’d expected her to hand me a dozen System Pigs to deal with. Just one more felt like a gift.

The door opened and a well-dressed, short, compact woman with long black hair pulled back into a severe bun entered. Her suit was a deep, velvety blue, and it looked like it would have been expensive back when you could still buy suits and didn’t have to make them yourself from old leaves and bits of wire.

She was Hense’s exact double, and as I watched, they both cocked their head at me, in perfect sync.

“You can’t be trusted, Avery,” they said together. “So I’ll be there to
supervise
you.”

PART IV

HERE WE ARE, AND
WE
ARE SO SPECIAL

I’d forgotten the nauseating whine hovers made when they were in the air, the feel of violent humming under your feet, the freezing cold inside one when you were high up and moving fast. For a second I could imagine the past few years hadn’t happened: I hadn’t assassinated Dennis Squalor, setting off the Monk Riots and indirectly causing the Plague; I hadn’t been arrested and put in the same yard as Cainnic Orel; there hadn’t been a civil war that destroyed everything. For a second I could imagine we were all back in the System. I’d been arrested again, and I was about to take a beating over something in a Blank Room in New York, and Kev Gatz would buy me a few glasses of gin at Pickering’s when I was tossed out again.

It was oddly pleasant, imagining that fucking hellhole of a world again.

I’d come up in the world. I was sitting next to a tiny window in a fairly luxurious hover—it had nice seats and some effort at climate control, although the seat fabric was torn and the stuffing was spilling out of them, the walls were scorched, and ugly metal plates had been bolted over damage in several areas. The windows were thick and cloudy, but afforded you a vertigo-inducing view of the world below, looking so peaceful for a fucked-over globe filled with people like me, roaming around free. My only friends in the world were three avatar System Pigs—one of whom was Director of Fucking Internal Affairs, the new Queen Worm, or at least a copy of her—the founder and leader of SPS, an ex-cop who’d once been the second-in-command of the entire SSF back before they decided to go forcibly digital, and a Techie who’d once been a midlevel success in the SSF. Aside from Grisha, it was all-cop, all the time.

There wasn’t much conversation. We’d spent a few days more in Berlin’s wrd, ultraclean bubble, gathering whatever intelligence we could muster—which wasn’t much, and mostly supplied by Grisha and SPS, since the System Cops were pretty fucking useless, as a rule, outside their own narrow borders these days—and figuring out details. Rad suits for the extraction team, weapons and ammo for the assault, hovers to get everyone in position, electromagnetic pulse trips for me for use against… well, Orel officially, but Mr. Marko had been nice enough to amp them up beyond specs for me. If the cops I was suddenly surrounded by became troublesome, the EMPs would knock them out temporarily.

I’d used the EMP trick once before on a Monk, back in Newark, prepping for the Squalor job. They had a wonky range and their effectiveness depended on a lot of factors. If it worked on Orel in his modified Monk body, I still wouldn’t be out of the woods; the EMP might take down his circuitry, but I didn’t know if that would knock his organic brain unconscious. Still, taking his guns away from him seemed like a good start.

A voice, all treble and static, screeched into life around us.

“We’re currently ten minutes out from designated landing zone. Please follow safety protocols.”

No one paid any attention. No one buckled their seat belts or took hold of the safety netting. No one double-checked the door seals or made sure all the crap we were lugging with us was secured. There was no point.

I looked out my tiny window and squinted down. After a moment my old augments kicked in and my vision zoomed down a little, bringing the strip of land we were approaching into sharper focus. After another second, though, my vision swam a little and my extra focus disappeared, leaving me just an old fuck squinting out a window. Croatia looked exactly like every other spot in the world. It had once been a country, I’d been told, before Unification. Maybe it was a country again, now. No one knew. I assumed the scab of red-roofed buildings on the coast was Split, and I tried to pick out the palace, but it had been subsumed into the city itself and I couldn’t spot it, even though I’d seen plenty of renderings over the last few days.

It looked like a model of a city, mountains rising behind it, blue ocean stretching out in front of it. It was hard to believe it was deadly to step into, hard to believe Canny Orel had buried himself there, like a spider, waiting for everyone else to die so he could pick through the graveyard.

Grisha, who’d been sitting next to Marko having what appeared to be a friendly conversation about molecular shred constants, whatever that was, stood up as if he’d never been in a damaged, crashing hover in his life and strolled over to sit with me. Hense glanced up from a huddled conversation with her bodyguard/attaché, who looked like a young-looking girl named Digby, all tight blond hair and rosy eyes—but since she was an avatar, who knew what she really was, inside. Maybe she’d been an old man before being tinned, or a black woman.