Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (28 page)

Mara turned her spotlight smile on me, burning me through the rad suit. Mehrak adjusted his grip on his gun as if he expected me to go batshit. I closed my eyes and let myself relax, soaking in my own fucking sweat twelve feet underground, time slipping away. If Remy had lived, I would have told him that you had to pick your moments. That sometimes you had to accept you were temporarily on the floor with Janet Hense’s boot on your wrist and Mehrak’s gun in your face.

“Back in the yard, you told me you knew somebody, Mickey,” I said. “Who was it?”

A second of pure silence, and then Mara’s obscure brogue. “Yer dad, Av’ry. I told you I knew ole Aubrey.”

I nodded. “That’s him,” I said. I opened my eyes and looked at Mehrak. “I’m getting up,” I said. “Okay?”

He hesitated a moment, and then stepped back. “Okay. Behave yourself.”

“Fuck you.”

Hense spun her foot off my wrist and watched me stand up. It was a ridiculously difficult process, like I was enveloped in odd gravity imported from some other planet, and everyone just watched me huff and puff my way through it. When I’d finally gotten to my feet I holstered my gun, and Hense turned back to Orel.

“All right, we have an understanding. I want you—the
real
you. Alive. You can help with that?”

Mara’s cheerful face nodded. “Sure, sure—I put myself in charge of the fucking security around here. I kin walk ya right
in
.”

Hense nodded, all business again. “And in return?”

Orel pushed off from the wall and shot Mara’s cuffs. “In
return
, Madam Director, I want you to shoot that fucking
thing
that used to be me
dead
, and I walk. That’s all. That ain’t me anymore.
I’m
me. You shoot that freak show dead and I walk. That’s it. That’s all I want.”

Hense nodded immediately. “Agreed.”

I made fists with my heavy, gloved hands. I would have told Remy that any deals made that fast were worth the air they were breathed in. I kept my mouth shut.

With a graceful little bow, Hense waved Orel on. “Take point, we’ll follow. Any
hint
that you’re walking us into a trap, I will give the order to open the shredders on you, and I will take your fucking core out and bring it back with me to hook up to virtual storage, where I will set the server for
perpetual fucking torment
before we go off-line, you understand?”

Orel put Mara’s hands up in supplication. “Sure, sure—I told you, Director, I’m in the same boat. I
want
you to get those codes. I
want
to stay alive. Awake. Awake an’ alive.” She took a few steps down the tunnel and then turned, looking down at the floor and scratching the avatar’s nose—I could again picture Mickey doing exactly that. “There is one more stipulation to our agreement, Director.”

Hense paused, cocking her head. “Yes?”

“There’s another avatar of me creepin’ around down here,” Orel said, turning away again. “It gets dead, too. There’s only
one
o’ me. Ever.”

IT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE A
PLEASANT
FORTY MINUTES

“We’re gonna run inta some resistance,” Orel shouted as we followed. “Soft.”

I shouldered my way past Mehrak to get right behind Mara’s avatar. It walked like a girl: sinuous and graceful. Behind me, I heard Grisha speak up.

“Hense, this is a mistake. You trust this? If this
is
Orel, do not trust him. If this is someone
pretending
to be Orel, do not trust him.”

“Duly noted, Grigory,” she snapped back. “Now back off or I order Mehrak to back you off.”

Grisha snorted. “Your monkey boy may
try
, certainly.”

“Fuck you,” Mehrak said, sounding jovial enough.

The tunnel was widening and getting damper, my little visor steaming up and staying one water droplet ahead of the rad suit’s mechanisms. I stayed on Orel’s heels, and after a second or two he turned Mara’s head slightly to look back at me and smiled.

“Uneasy, Av’ry? Sure, sure, you always have been. Uneasy in your soul, in your mind.”

“How many of you are down here?” I asked. “And what do you mean by
soft
resistance?”

“Just the one other o’ me,” he said, turning his head away and holding up one of Mara’s slender fingers. “Same avatar model. Same imprint. Prob’bly also hopin’ to make the same deal with the new director back there.”

“You always knew the fucking angles, huh, Mickey?”

“More than you, sure,” he said cheerfully. “But I’m behind th’ eight ball on this one, pup. I told ya: I went fucking
crazy
. Don’t recognize myself, an’ here I am trapped in this fuckin’ cesspool. First sign I’d gone off the deep ens movin’ inta this fuckin’ ghost ship.”

Speaking with Mara’s light, feminine voice, he sounded like someone in charge, like he was giving us a tour of this narrow tomb. As we walked, the ground shook gently under our feet, a ceaseless, distant thudding from the System Pigs’ assault on Split. Dust sprinkled down from above, making my vision muddy.

I reached out and put a fat glove on her shoulder. “And the
soft
?”

He stopped suddenly and turned to flatten Mara against the wall. “There’s the
soft
, Av’ry.”

I looked past him and saw them, and had an instant flash to Bellevue Hospital, with all the victims of the Plague staggering to their feet. They had the same noodly way of walking.

A few hundred feet away, there were people. About twenty of them, crowding into the tunnel. They looked more or less like regular people, aside from the running sores on their skin, the deep bluish bruising, the thick trail of blood leaking from their eyes and noses. They didn’t look bothered by any of it, though; dressed in regular clothes I’d seen in a million slums and downtowns, without any protective armor at all, they limped toward us, lugging old-fashioned-looking rifles they held diffidently, like they’d never been shown the right way, or been shown and didn’t care.

As I stared, the two in the lead, a broad-shouldered man with a nose that looked to have been broken at least three times and a square-shaped older woman with a bowl haircut, slowly seemed to focus on me, staring as if seeing another human being for the first time. With blood dripping from their noses, they each raised their rifle in a weird, slow motion. I stared back, transfixed. It was like they were miming, pretending to move. It didn’t feel real.

When they fired, I just blinked. The floor of the tunnel in front of me poofed up into a tiny cloud of dust. Then again. It was impossible that people moving so slowly could hurt me—avatars blinking by faster than humans could manage, Monks moving at clock speeds, sure. This kind of slow-motion murder was just playacting.

“Cates!” Hense shouted from behind, blocked by Orel and me. “What’s happening up there?”

Orel, in Mara’s silicone body, snorted. “
He
did this right away. He moved into this fucking graveyard, and people started showin’ up. Pushed. You kin only Push someone you kin
see
, but he figured out a neat trick: He could Travel into someone, someone he’d picked out already, someone he could keep in mind. He could Travel into that poor shit over an’ over again, and Push people hard
through
that person.” He shook Mara’s head almost sadly. “So he’s been poppin’ into some poor bastard’s head in the outlyin’ villages and layin’ the Push on a dozen people at a time, forcin’ ’em to show up here and do ‘service.’ ”

The two in the lead fired again, clips suddenly popping up and out from their rifles and fluttering through the air, and again a spray of dust went up around my feet.

“Cates!”

I kept ignoring Hense.

“That ain’t me,” Orel said through Mara’s mouth as he stared ahead at the shuffling group of bleeding people. “I don’t mind crackin’ a few eggs to get what I want, Av’ry, but this shit is just fuckin’
cruel
. They wear out fast ’round here. A few hours, sometimes a day. They keep doing what they’re told until they can’t do it no more, and they don’t complain. Just bleed out and suddenly fall over. The fucking place is littered with corpses, just people fallin’ over, dead.” He shook his head again. “Ain’t
me
.”

I raised the extra sidearm the cops had given me; I’d lost the Roon when Mehrak had blindsided me. The two people hadn’t made any move to reload; they were sort of standing there, eyes half-mast, mouths open, bloody bubbles forming as they breathed laboriously in and out, as they melted under the invisible sun of Split’s radiation load. I took a bead and fired twice, managing two head shots that sent them down like wet sacks, revealing three more right behind them. The one in front was a skinny young kid, his shirt soaked with sweat and blood and hanging open to reveal a bony, concave chest turned into a swamp of scabby sores.

Just people fallin’ over dead.
I reached out and took hold of Orel’s avatar by the collar of its leathery coat. “It’s fucking
you
, all right,” I hissed, and pushed it in front of me. “Move. Take some bullets for me, cocksucker.”

Orel spun around and started walking backward as I advanced. Two more of the weak popping sounds of those old rifles being fired, but Mara’s face remained calm and I couldn’t tell if he’d taken some rounds for me. I looked over my shoulder. No one had moved to follow me.

“Stay back!” I shouted. “I’ll give the all-clear!”

They couldn’t do any good anyway; the tunnel was too constricted here. I looked back at Mara’s grinning face—she suddenly twitched, taking an unlucky bullet. I hated it. I hated the face, because it had led me all over Europe on a fool’s fucking errand and tried to kill me, in the end. I hated the intelligence animating it because it was Michaleen, Canny Orel, whatever his fucking real name was, and I could lay just about every bad thing that had happened to me in the last ten years at his feet, somehow.

“You’re in charge of security down here,” I said, unclenching my teeth with effort. “What the fuck does that mean, exactly?
That’s
your fucking security?”

Mara twitched again at the crack of a rifle, but kept smiling. “We could keep you inching along at a snail’s pace for
years
in this tunnel, Avery, with just fifty goons with rifles. Did you think we wouldn’t cover the old aqueduct? Hell, boy, of
course
we covered the tunnels. Aside from me and my twin and the incredible melting assholes behind me, we got charges laid to collapse an archway or two, close off the access in case y’get too deep in.” He rolled Mara’s eyes upward. “We’re about twenty feet from one right now.”

He was being fucking chatty, but I didn’t have time to wonder about that. The tunnel was widening out slightly, not enough for a second person to walk alongside me. The stones were getting larger and the ceiling was rising up. Behind Mara’s tall frame I could see an archway, and beyond it a much larger space—the basement of the palace. The rhythmic thunder of the assalt on Split was stronger, making the floor twitch beneath me.

I looked back at Mara’s face. “At the entrance to the basement proper,” I said, and she nodded, looking like she’d just eaten something delicious. Fucking overconfident motherfucker. I wanted to change that expression. For once in my life I wanted to make Canny Orel
blink
, wanted to make him wonder if it had been fucking smart to poke me with a stick over and over again like he had.

“When we get there,” I said carefully, keeping my gun on Mara’s face, “go left and stay out of the way.”

“They’re innocent folks, Av’ry,” she said, still smiling, cocking her head. Fucking with me. “Y’gonna kill ’em just ’cause they’re in yer way?”

“They got about forty minutes left to live, from what I can tell,” I spat back, adjusting my grip on the gun. “And it doesn’t look like a
pleasant
forty minutes. Putting them out of their misery’s a better way to put it.”

We cleared the archway into the basement proper, each of us ducking down to avoid the low transition, and then Orel leaped to the left and pasted Mara’s body against the sandy off-white wall of big, head-sized blocks. I took a half step back and ducked down a little; there was a logjam of about five people, all with the empty eyes and slack mouths of the Pushed. I’d seen it often enough—hell, I’d
been
Pushed often enough—to recognize it.

I hesitated for a second, horrified. They were all bloody messes. Big yellow-blue bruises bloomed on their arms, on their necks and faces, their hands—everywhere. Blood leaked in watery rivulets from their noses, the corners of their mouths, their fucking
eyes
. They didn’t blink, or wipe it away. They aimed their rifles dully and stared, momentarily confused because I’d crouched down below their line of sight. The Pushed didn’t think too well; they only had the instructions they’d been given to work with.

“Go on, Mercy Killer,” Orel said jovially. “Put ’em down.”

My left eye twitched with a sudden wish
I
was Psionic, so I could twist his avatar in pieces, so I could bash it against the walls until it shook apart, until I could make him feel his mind coming apart like the pieces of a machine. Then I duckwalked forward three steps, pushed the lead guy’s rifle aside, and stood up an inch away from him. I put the barrel of my gun against his forehead.

“If you can hear me,” I said in a low voice, surprised at myself, “I’m sorry.”

I squeezed the trigger and the fucking cop-issue handgun jumped more than I liked in my hand, and the guy’s head exploded, splattering me with blood. I had to imagine it was warm.

His body dropped softly to the floor and into a weird kneeling position, the rifle still clutched in his hands, and the other four simultaneously fired into the tunnel behind me. I heard someone shouting curses back in the shadows, and I realized I was on the clock. I stood up and spun around, backing up to put all four of them in front of me, and squeezed off four more rounds, dropping them one after the other. They made no noise; they just slid to the floor like they were finally free to relax a littl in /font>