Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (35 page)

And then, without warning, the mental bubble just shattered, and I was in control again, my legs picking up their useless flopping without missing a beat.

Orel screamed, a metallic warbly screech that hurt my ears, and he sailed up off me as if some huge being had reached down from the sky and plucked him up. I sat up, panting, and watched him stagger backward into the old basement, beating at his own head with his hands.

“Ah,
fuck
you and your mutant fucking
brain
,” he bellowed.

I scrambled along the low wall until I found a shallow indentation in the loose ground that provided a little shelter. I fumbled with the Roon, trying to check it over with shaking hands, my head pounding. I felt like I’d been chewed. I risked a quick pop up to make sure Orel wasn’t moving. He was still standing there, cursing and shaking his head.

Your fucked-up brain gave him the fits
, Marin whispered, sounding amused.

That is an unauthorized jailbroken Mark I chassis. It should be deactivated immediately.

I blinked, shaking my head. I didn’t hear from Dennis Squalor often, and I didn’t enjoy it when I did.
Good luck with that
, I thought back at him. Usually when I communicated with him he fled like a frightened bug.

This is unacceptable. This unit is operating outside my network.

I stole another glance at Orel and snapped the Roon shut.
Shut up
, I thought.
I’m fucking working here
.

Squalor ignored me. If he could even
hear
me.

We must apply the shutdown code set.

Anger flared up in me as I tried to ignore the suddenly chatty voices in my head and listen for Orel’s approach. He couldn’t see me where I was hunkered down, so he couldn’t put me in the air. If I timed it right, I might put a shell or two in him when he came for me.

We don’t
have
the shutdown codes, shithead
, I thought.
Orel’s got them.

Not the antimutiny codes Richard created for his own network
, Squalor said slowly, calmly.
My codes. I cannot tolerate someone operating one of my units outside the faith. It must be deactivated.

Suddenly, Marin was there too. Marin was still talking.
Will it still work?

I shut my eyes and clenched my teeth. Years now I’d had these ghosts in my head, and
now
they decided to start chatting. I was fucking cursed.

Yes. These codes are part of the Bootstrap subsystems. It is unlikely in the extreme that any hacker trying to subvert a unit would be capable of even discovering their existence.

“This doesn’t fucking matter,” I hissed, unable to stop myself from vocalizing. “Unless you think I’m going to stand up and shout fucking hex code at him while he
shoots me to death
.”

For two seconds, there was blessed silence in my head. Then, Marin was back.

Dolores, your people designed these augments poor Avery’s got rotting in his head. They transmit, yes?

For a second I thought Salgado wasn’t going to answer. I’d never had all three acknowledging each other before—never had them having a three-way conversation without me. Having them all talking to each other was maddening, like tiny people living in my head, eating my brain one tiny bite at a time, tunneling.

Yes. Short range, but they had to ping back to their CO’s implant.

Any way we can use Avery’s augments to transmit Dennis’s shutdown codes?

I went still. Years. I’d had these assholes in my head for years, and the thought that they might actually be
m>Aul
was fucking astonishing. It made me think, for a moment, that the cosmos did have a fucking plan for me after all.

Ye-es
, Dolores whispered, sounding hesitant.
I doubt Avery received the level of training required to customize his beacon.
There was silence.
Avery… perhaps I could take direct control over your augment interface in order to accomplish this.

I opened my eyes. I could still hear Orel muttering; only a few seconds had passed. “You can
do
that?” I hadn’t meant to speak out loud, and froze up instantly, horrified.

We’re
you,
Avery
, she responded. Immediately, my HUD began flickering and a stream of text prompts began scrolling by in a tiny corner of my vision, too fast for me to pay attention to.

I chose to ignore “we’re you.” If I started thinking about things like that, my list of people I needed revenge against would get so fucking long I’d have to Monk-up myself to get to them all, end of the fucking world or not.

You’ll need to buy us some time
, Marin added.

“I’ve bought you all
years
, dammit,” I hissed before I could catch myself. “You’re all
dead
.” In the silence that answered me, I realized Orel had stopped his crazy whispering to himself.

I launched myself to my left a second before the heavy Monk body landed right where I’d been huddled. I threw myself down and rolled, letting gravity pull me down toward the dark pit of the collapsed basement and the elevator shaft, hoping it took me out of view fast enough to prevent Mickey from snatching me up in his little invisible hands; when I was in shadow again I scissored my legs manically and turned myself around without rising up, putting the Roon on the upward slope I’d just traversed.

A second later, Orel landed almost perfectly between where I’d been and where I was and paused for an angelic moment, looking for me, and I could pick my shot. You could penetrate the armoring around a Monk’s abdomen but it wasn’t easy, and anything but a head shot was usually just an inconvenience for them. I’d had plenty of experience gunning with Monks, and I was aiming to slow the motherfucker down, make him less mobile. If I could stop him from leaping and running, it was a start.

I aimed for his feet, filled with delicate hydraulics and servos, tiny parts giving him balance and speed. Trying to stop my hands from shaking, I squeezed off four rapid shots, kicking up dust around him and then finally, in one perfect moment, shattering the hard outer casing of his right ankle. He made a strangely subdued, almost calm noise as he lost balance and fell over.

I struggled up, trying to race. When I finally got my legs under me and looked up, the bastard was gone again. I stood for just a second, looking around, and found him again by the easiest method possible: He landed on me, cackling, the Monk’s fake voice box struggling hard to approximate the braying laughter of Canny Orel. The impact pushed me down a few inches into the ground, suffocating me, but before I could ponder where I’d place “strangling on sand at Chengara while Canny Orel stood on your back” on my list of worst ways to die his cold, dead hands took hold of my arms, bending them back behine and lifting me easily out of the shallow trench we’d created. Blood, warm and gritty, ran down my chin, and I poked my tongue through the new gap in my mouth where my front teeth had once been.

Handsome as ever, Avery
, Dolores whispered.
We’re almost there
.

Orel lifted me up, holding me in front of him like I weighed nothing. His bright white face was cocked in a blank, soulless smile, his eyes just pools of shadow. Monks in the moonlight were fucking terrifying—they
glowed
.

“This was too fucking easy,” he said, making it sound like
aisy
and cocking his head the other way and smoothly putting his auto against my temple. “Avery, I had higher hopes for ya. Maybe Wallace was right about you.”

I managed to jam the Roon into his belly, but his gun flashed down instantly, knocking it away as I fired, the shot going wild, my hand going numb as the gun fell away. Just as quickly, his gun was back against my head.

“G’bye, Avery.”

I shut my eyes, my mind racing, and suddenly my HUD filled with angry red text, scrolling along so fast it was a blur, and Dennis Squalor, long dead but still a tiny god in his own way, spoke silently inside me.

You are cast out.

Still grinning, Orel went still, and then collapsed, dragging me down with him.

XXXXIX

HAD MET ME BEFORE
AND HAD A GRUDGE

I pushed myself up and stared down at Orel. His face was still frozen in a grin, the gun was still clutched in his hand. But he was absolutely still.

Looks like you’re a genius, Dennis
, Marin whispered cheerfully.

I am implacable and absolute. I am the guardian of that which I have created.

“You are boring as fucking hell,” I said hoarsely, my throat filled with sand. I broke into shuddering coughs and dragged myself over to Orel. Numbness had spread up my arm and I dragged it behind me, useless. I tried to breathe deeply, but my chest kept clenching up and twisting me into fits of dry, joyless coughing, my HUD—back to normal now—flickering with each blast.

I pulled myself up onto the Monk chassis and straddled it, staring down at its head. Still glowing, still smiling. I had a sudden moment of panic, certain that Orel was playing with me, that this was yet another extended joke—I half expected Belling, not really dead, not really maimed, maybe younger and even more improved than ever to step out from behind a rock, or rise up out of the elevator shaft just a few feet away from us.

Nothing happened.

Awkwardly, I reached across myself and pulled my second gun with my left hand. It felt strange and heavthere as I slipped off the safety.

Nothing happened.

Dreamily, my own breathing loud and harsh in my ears, I pushed the auto down at Orel’s face, pushing the barrel into one of its eye sockets, pushing and pushing until I was leaning on it, supporting myself on the gun. Still, nothing happened. The wind scattered sand around us. I wondered if I was the last of us left alive. I stared down at my hand, the gun, Orel’s inert face, feeling empty.

“If you can hear me, Mickey,” I whispered hoarsely, feeling like I’d never catch my breath again, “and I fucking hope you can, I hope, for the first time in forever, you’re fucking
terrified.
”

I spent a second or so trying to jam the gun’s barrel even farther into the socket, concentrating too hard, forgetting my own basic rules of survival. I heard the steps a second before I got hit, and then I was on my ass and Grisha was on top of me, pinning my arms with his.

“No!” he hissed, his rasp echoed in my earbud. “It is too dangerous. We need him alive.”

I opened my mouth to shout at him, but as I did so he was torn from me and sailed up and over the old dorm wall, completely silent, his face just a pale expression of shock. Then he was gone, like he’d never been there.

Orel was moving.

I take it back
, Marin hissed.
You’re a hack and a fruitcake, Dennis.

The unit remains off-line
, Squalor whispered back serenely.
He is manipulating himself using his ersatz mental abilities.

The monk jerked, first this way, then that, twitching itself into an upright position. I watched, mesmerized, as he puppeted himself erect, swaying and jerking, overbalancing and then overcorrecting. When he suddenly steadied and raised one arm in a familiar, in-control gesture, I decided I’d seen enough of the magic act. I put the gun on him, couldn’t think of anything clever to say, and squeezed the trigger. And got a dry click as my reward.

He turned his head and looked at me. After a second, the smile on his face broadened by thick degrees, and I tried to imagine the level of telekinetic control required to tug every tiny fake tendon, every microscopic bit of that face into the exact expression he wanted. I wondered if he was running the whole unit, pumping the coolant and greasing the gears. I wondered how long his brain would survive in there with the juice cut off.

Too long, I figured, was just about my luck.

I started backing away as I dropped the spent clip and tucked the gun under my armpit, my right hand still hanging limp at my side. It was prickling with pins and needles, pain bleeding back into it, and I could move the fingers a little—coming back to unfortunate life bit by bit. Reaching back across myself, I felt in my coat pocket for a fresh clip just as Orel leaped toward me in a sudden, viciously fast move—landing a foot short and falling over onto his side. He didn’t say anything, or grunt, or make any noise at all, and was back up on his knees immediately, and then back on his feet, wobbling a littled toathered himself for another spring. He was off kilter and rough, though, and I timed him pretty easily—he was so fucking fast he almost clipped me anyway, but I managed to duck down and roll under him as he sailed through the air. I rolled to a crouching position and slapped the clip home. Orel popped up just in front of the elevator shaft and I realized I’d put him between me and my final retreat. Before I could do more than blink at this dumbly, the invisible fist I was so fond of mushroomed out of thin air and slammed into me, knocking me back on my ass.

I forced myself to sit up, gun ready, but Orel was sprawled on the ground again. As I watched, he jerked upright, startling me, and I wasted two shots that came nowhere near him.

“What’s the matter, Canny,” I muttered to myself. The silence was creeping me out—he wasn’t giving me the needle like Mickey always did, and he wasn’t making
any
noise at all. “Can’t puppet yourself and smack me around at the same time?”

I steadied myself and took careful aim at his head. He shot toward me, crashing into me like a cannonball—the motherfucker had
thrown
himself at me. For a second he was on me, pushing me back down into the sand, and then he rocketed away before I could pull out the gun on him again. I’d managed to push myself halfway up onto my elbows when he smacked into me again, just hurling himself like a fucking boulder, taking me square in the chest and knocking the breath out of me, then zooming off. I stared up at the dark sky above, thinking that this was never how I thought I’d go, pummeled to death by Canny Orel using himself as a battering ram.