The Digital Plague (26 page)

“How does Ty know you won’t kill him?”

I swallowed. “Ty, you have my word. You know me, Mr. Kieth. I keep my promises. You have my word. We will find another solution.”

“Your word, Mr. Cates,” Ty said.

“You have my word, Ty,” I repeated, and stepped quickly into the main cabin. I kept my eyes on the floor and didn’t look at anyone. Because I was lying.

Day Nine:
The Rest of the World
was a Bonus

Eyes down, I dropped my extra clips into my coat and hobbled into the cabin. The Stormers were all assembled, back in their full ObFu kit, in standard formation for a drop. The drop in this case was just a few feet, since the hover was sitting dead on the ground. The big drop-bay doors were shut tight, leaving the cabin gloomy and claustrophobic. The whole place smelled of soured sweat and oiled metal, and I knew I was pumping self-loathing and a good bit of fear into the atmosphere, too.

If Kieth could get the hover into the air, we didn’t have much to worry about: the hover’s bottom-mounted turrets would chew even Monks into small, digestible pieces in short order, and Monks still couldn’t fly, as far as I knew. Until that magical moment when the displacers roared into life, however, we were basically sitting in a shiny metal box that had never been designed to repel boarders.

The closed Vid screens above the drop bay lit up suddenly, showing the dead city around us. “Ah! Found the visuals,” Kieth chirped, sounding pleased with himself.

Onscreen, I could see the Monks outside, dozens of them surrounding the hover, more emerging from the scummy water of the river. I watched them arrange themselves and tried to imagine what they were planning to do. They didn’t know the hover was incapacitated, and if it took off with them underfoot it wouldn’t be pretty. The sight of them in grainy, pixilated color—white faces, dark coats, some still wearing their standard-issue sunglasses—made my whole body tighten up in dread.

Ooh, Avery’s afraid of Monks,
I heard Glee say.
Avery’s got a
phobia.

Happling appeared at my elbow, two autos slung into crisscrossed holsters under each arm, his huge humming shredder in both hands. His red hair was standing up in bizarre, dirt-crusted directions, and he was smiling. I kept my eyes on him without moving my head, resolving not to speak to him because I didn’t want to hear what he was thinking. Happling looked like the sort of berserker who got you killed. He was enjoying himself.

Hense produced her flask from some hidden pocket but didn’t bother with her dainty little cup. She unscrewed the cap and took a blast, then walked over and handed the flask silently to Happling, who took a superhuman gulp, liquor dribbling down his chin. Smacking his lips, he handed it back to the colonel.

“All right,” he said, and I braced myself for crazy. “We dealt with these freaks once,” he said loudly, to the whole cabin. “Some of you were with the force, I know, when we had to clean up these Tin Men during the Monk Riots. They’re fast. They have digital filters on their visual and can switch between visible spectrum, heat sig, or motion sensing. They don’t like bullets any more than you and me, but they can shut down individual systems if damaged and don’t exactly feel pain. They’re fucking murder. But a shot to the head puts them down, and inside that freak show is a stupid shithead brain.”

I stared at the multiplying Monks on the screen and felt Happling next to me. I couldn’t decide where I’d rather be. All the cop testosterone in the air was suffocating. On the other hand, I had this weird feeling that I was watching civilization in action here—the line between order and chaos—and it was manned by the Nathan Happlings of the world.

“Order it up, Captain,” Hense said in a low, controlled voice.

“Listen up!” Happling shouted immediately, as if her command had been a coincidence. “This is a Scenario B4 situation. Rumor has it you faggots have had some training, so I’m expecting a clean execution. Watch your crossfire! Hey, fat girl,” he snapped, jabbing one huge hand in the direction of the round-faced, slow-talking Stormer. “You’re on Intrusion Detection. I want you humping it up and down this fucking hover and anything you see, feel, hear, or fucking
smell
that seems unusual, you make a fucking ruckus, right?”

I had this weird urge to defend her. She managed to make her salute simultaneously crisp and mocking with just the slightest curve of her lips, and I thought I might be falling in love with her. “On it like a duck on a june bug,
sir.
”

Happling stared for just a second, then obviously decided he didn’t have time for ass-kicking and nodded, sweeping his gaze back around the cabin. “This group here,” he said, dividing about a dozen of the Stormers with a knifing motion of his hand, “you are on the hatch. That’s our weakest point. Watch your fucking
crossfire,
but when they rip that shit off—and they will—you pour murder into it and you don’t let a single one in here. Do
not
deploy your shredding rifles in this enclosed space. If I see any of you unslinging a shredder, be sure the next sensation you feel will be me shoving that hunk of metal up your ass.”

“You,” he said, turning to look at another Stormer, this one a big, square-headed guy apparently made out of a single slab of beef. Beefy looked at Happling as if he wished he’d remembered his suicide pills that morning. “You’re on the drop-bay door panel. See it? Do I have to go piss on it so you can find it, trooper? We don’t have time for this, Nancy—okay, open that up. If it looks like they’re going to force those bay doors, trooper, cut those wires. The fail-safes will kick in and snap that motherfucker shut tighter than your asshole right now. This is your discretion, trooper, don’t make me fucking dig you up later to reprimand you.”

“The rest of you,” he continued after a moment, in a lower voice, “you just wait for people to die. Someone goes down, you get in there and take their place. Do
not
fire from a rear position, you’ll just fucking kill your own people.”

From above came three or four dull thuds, but I was the only one to glance up.

“Here they come!” Happling shouted, pulling his guns from their holsters and grinning. I thought to myself,
Every cop in the fucking System is batshit insane.
And then, with a shivery feeling as if someone had dumped cold water directly into my bloodstream, I thought,
Where the fuck is Ty?
If the Techies had found a way into the hover, it stood to reason the Monks would manage it too, eventually.

I looked around, but a bell-like metallic clang and the groaning noise of metal fatigue sounded as the hatch door was grasped by something outside and pulled outward. With a rattle of metal all the cops leaned forward. I ran my eyes over the whole cabin and stepped back, suddenly sure that we’d just fucked up in a massive way but completely unsure how to rectify the situation. I didn’t have plans for the hover and couldn’t even begin to guess where two Techies might be spending some quality time breathing each other’s farts and whispering about security protocols.

The hatch popped off the hover with a loud cracking noise, and immediately three Monks were climbing into the cabin. The Stormers opened fire as one, and for a second or two the cabin was solid sound, the noise almost a wall that squeezed the breath out of me.

I stepped quickly toward the cockpit. “Ty!” I shouted. “Ty, can you hear me?”

In the cockpit I could barely make out his voice. “Ty is a little goddamn busy, Mr. Cates!”

“Ty, where are you?”

There was no response. In the cabin, the roar of gunfire grew impossibly louder, and then added to it was more hollow pounding from above as Monks worked their way in from the top. I made fists. “Ty, goddammit, we’re being
invaded,
and you’re sitting in a spot that took you about fifteen seconds to get into! Where the fuck are you?”

I waited another moment. “Mr. Cates … we have an understanding, yes?”

I struggled to stay still, to keep my face blank. “Ty, you have my word.”

After another moment of listening to the Monks hammering at the hover, Happling’s gleeful voice roaring above it all, a panel in the floor almost at my feet slid away in a smooth, mechanical motion, and Ty’s bald, gleaming head appeared, nose twitching nonstop. We stared at each other.

“Redundant manual repair module,” he said with a shrug. “Almost no one knows these exist, since most of the work is done digitally or by Droids.”

I kept staring at him. Here he was, the living kill switch to the little devils eating up the human race, floating around inside me and biding their time. I had a gun in my hand and every other living and not-living thing in the area distracted. My arm wouldn’t move, though. I’d made a promise; I’d given my word. As I stared at Kieth I thought,
Fuck my word.
This wasn’t about honor. This was about
living,
and not just me.

I checked that, tightening my grip on my gun. Why lie to myself? It was about
me
living. The rest of the world was a bonus.

My arm twitched and started to bring the gun up but then I paused, a blurry feeling of calm, pleasant buzzing seeping over me. A much better idea, I thought, was to investigate the entry point, see if it posed a threat of infiltrating Monks. A grin, crooked and loose, formed on my face. “Shove over,” I suggested, stepping forward and jamming the gun into my coat. “Show me how you got in.”

Kieth blinked in surprise but did what he always did when you moved toward him—backed away. I followed down into a cramped space where we had to almost embrace, crouching over the prone shape of Mr. Marko, who stared up at me as sweat streamed down his face from every pore, and Kieth gestured at a dark crawl space behind me barely wide enough for someone my size to fit into. I dreaded it on sight. Once inside I would barely be able to breathe, much less move myself along.

Still, the curious feeling of cheerful laziness filled me, an oily, viscous sensation that coated every thought I had. Should I report this to the Pigs? The feeling said no, too much trouble. Should I squeeze myself into the crawl space and hump to the entry point, make sure of it? The feeling said emphatically yes, that was an excellent idea. I gave Kieth the same crooked smile.

“Stay here,” I suggested. “I’m going to check it out.”

Kieth jumped as if he’d been stabbed with a pin. The banging noises, carried by the hull, were just as loud in the hole as they’d been up above, but with extra echo, as if they were happening deep below the earth. “Mr. Cates! I can assure you—”

I didn’t stop to listen. Without hesitation I pushed myself into the pitch-black tube and began wriggling forward. I felt fine. I was calm, almost happy, and perfectly sure of my actions. It was a familiar feeling, and as I wriggled through the greasy ductwork toward a slowly growing pin of watery light, I wondered idly why it seemed familiar. It wasn’t an urgent worry, just a mild curiosity I was confident would resolve itself eventually.

Sweating and gasping, I managed to slide the last few feet down to a thin wire grating that separated me from the outside world. Peering through it, I had a good view of the muddy ground beneath the hover and could tell the grating was hidden inside a surrounding well of metal not easily seen from anywhere but directly below. I could see the mechanism that snapped a protective plate over the grating when the hover was pressurized. The Monks would likely not discover it for some time yet.

I watched, bemused, as my arms reached out and smacked against the grating, easily knocking it out of its clips. It fluttered to the ground and didn’t even make any noise I could pick out amid the din. As I let myself slide forward, I realized I was still smiling, the expression stuck on my face. I decided I would worry about it later.

The ground jumped up at me and I landed awkwardly, tumbling out onto the wet earth. I lay there for a moment, staring up at the scorched, riveted underbelly of the hover, its landing gear looking monolithic, like trees made of metal and cable. The noise around me had swollen back up to full size, but I wasn’t concerned. Sitting up, I stared around for a few moments before struggling awkwardly to my feet, hanging on to the bottom of the hover for balance, my head ducked uncomfortably. I stumped out from beneath the hover and found myself in the middle of a battlefield.

The Monks were everywhere, clinging to the hover like barnacles. I staggered forward, smiling around, feeling at peace as I watched the Tin Men pounding their alloyed hands—some without any skin covering the chromelike fingers—into the hover’s hull while a constant stream of them assaulted the narrow hatchway, getting chewed up by the Stormers within for their troubles. None took any notice of me as I limped toward the river, where their leader stood with its arms folded across its chest, looking like a new penny. Wa Belling stood next to it, and for once didn’t look particularly pleased with himself. It was such a new expression for the old man that I was momentarily startled, the whole world seeming to rush back into me for a heartbeat, and I remembered when I’d felt this way before: years ago, in New York, before everything.

I studied the Monk as I approached. It still seemed like a good idea, and I didn’t worry about it because I knew I didn’t have much choice. My decisions were being made for me.

When I was right in front of the Monk I stopped and gave it the benefit of my loopy smile, cocking my head to one side. After another heartbeat all the calm burst inside me, bitterness and fear rushing in to take its place, my whole body shuddering with suddenly remembered pain and anxiety. I kept the smile in place, though. I was Avery Cates. I smiled at everything. Even ghosts.