Cates 04 - The Terminal State (23 page)

EVENS O. REMY, PRIVATE (3), ASSAULT INFANTRY, STF.

Without another word, Anners marched toward the barricades, the squad on guard duty snapping to attention immediately, a wireless signal alerting them to their CO’s approach. As they walked off, Remy turned his cowled head to look back at me for a moment.

After a moment, someone grabbed my arm and I spun, taking hold of Mara’s wrist and twisting it around in an instinctive reaction. She didn’t wince or cry out; she just raised her eyebrows. “You havin’ second thoughts, Cates?”

I let her wrist go and ducked my head, launching myself after the colonel, replaying his words in my head.
Remy
. It was too easy to picture Remy inside that cowl, head stuffed full of augments, staying on Anners’s ass because he didn’t have any other choice.

“Stand down,” Anners bellowed to the guards as we approached. “You’re all off-line for five minutes. Stand down and step back. Have a smoke.”

“Sir,” one of the guard duty shouted back, saluting.

We followed Anners through the gate as it swung open at his approach, and began navigating the switchbacks formed by the battered, chipped stone barricades beyond. When we were standing in front of the yawning entrance to the tunnels, I looked back at the Monk, who was still grinning, still silent.

“All right,” I said. “Break out the goods and pass it out.”

The Monk immediately dropped the green duffel it had been hauling for us since Brussels and pulled it open with a single, vicious tug. The dull metal of the gear I’d gotten straight from the SSF absorbed all of the dim, damp light and tugged at your eyes, as if the duffel was a drain everything was spilling toward. The Monk immediately reached into the bag and produced two gleaming, factory-new shredding rifles with shoulder straps and optional rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

“RPGs? ” Anners suddenly barked, stomping back toward us with an unlit cigarette—well-chewed and damp—crushed between his white teeth. “Aw, now, fuck no. You stow that gear. We ain’t walking y’all through here
armed
.”

The Monk tossed a shredder toward me and I snatched it from the air with augmented reflexes, and then had to work hard to steady myself, a wave of dizziness graying my vision as my heart skipped a few beats, finding its rhythm with a thud. “You gonna . . . you gonna skip the other half of your paycheck, Colonel? We’ll lead
you
if it makes you nervous.” Taking a deep breath, I tossed the shredder at the Poet; it almost sailed past him but he lunged and snatched it, making it look natural. My back lit up as if something in it had just torn like paper, immediately settling into a burning throb, but I turned smoothly and caught the second shredder without wincing, and tossed it on to Mara.

Anners stared at me, chewing his cigar, as the Monk tossed me the last shredder. I caught it with my chest, staggering backward a step and managing to hang on to it through magic or luck. I braced myself and stared back at him; I could almost see the wheels turning, the numbers crunching. Finally, he pointed at me.

“All right,” he said. “All fucking right.”

He turned and marched off, and we gathered around the Monk as it handed up ammunition and grenade clips. While the Poet and Mara checked their weapons, the Monk silently handed up a thumb-sized black box. I put it in my palm and gestured, and a 3-D map of Hong Kong appeared in the air in front of me. I practiced zooming in and out and manipulating the representation for a moment, and then the Monk was holding up a bundle of thick material.

“Body armor,” Mara said. “I thought you were old-school, Cates.”

I tossed their vests at their feet and held mine up, arms trembling with the weight of it. I thought about having that pulling me down as I tried to move fast through tight spaces. “We’re going to be moving through hostile streets under superior fixed positions—people on the goddamn roofs, waiting for us. Old-school don’t mean stupid, Mara.”

Taking another deep breath, I slowly pulled the vest on. Its weight was immediately suffocating, and a light sweat broke out all over my body. I pictured Michaleen, the little rat, his perpetually cheerful face twisted into a grin. The little bastard was
laughing
at me, and I was going to survive Hong Kong just so I could push a blade into his belly and give it a twist.

When the vest was snug around my middle, the Monk looked at me, that eternal smile on its face.

“Shut up,” I muttered. It just kept grinning.

“You okay?” Mara asked, cocking her head and raising one eyebrow. “You look like total shit.”

I stared at her face. Something was tugging at me. I’d
seen
her before. I was sure of it. Something in her manner, in her expression,
something
was tickling my memory. “I’m fine,” I said slowly. “You light up your brain like a power grid and kill sixteen people in two minutes, see how you feel.”

She smirked and turned away, but I kept my eyes on her, her long legs and narrow shoulders. Her perfect skin. She didn’t look like someone who’d spent a lifetime doing this work, someone who had Canny Orel’s trust and proxy. She didn’t look like
anybody
, no one I’d known or ever would know. I forced myself to turn away, full-body shivers making all of my muscles twitch to mysterious music I couldn’t hear.

“Let’s go, assholes,” Anners shouted, fitting his cowl onto his head.

“Any more treats there?” the Poet shouted, grinning, as the Monk pulled the duffel closed and picked it up. “Perhaps a tank or hover? Or midget ninjas?”

“Let’s go.”

I walked toward the colonel and his troops, not looking back. I felt hot but I was shivering. Sweat was pouring down my back and my heart was pounding in my chest. My vision was blurry. As I neared Anners, he turned without another word and started for the tunnel. I followed, and faster than I thought possible, darkness enveloped me.

Immediately, my vision adjusted, bringing up a version of the world that was tinged green and filled with flare like greasy light clinging to everything. The tunnel was wide, the cracked pavement visible for about twenty or thirty feet, then slowly sliding under the rippling black waves of water.

“How deep? ” I called out.

“You won’t drown,” Anners shouted back. “Now shut up.”

We walked. My legs felt rubbery, and when we waded into the water it was so cold my breath was knocked out of me, leaving me gasping as the black water slowly rose up to my belly, encasing my legs in liquid ice. After a minute or two, my legs were numb and I moved forward by magic, by simple mind over matter. The darkness became absolute, and even my night-vision faded to a murky sludge; by the time I realized the Poet was walking next to me, he’d been there for some time.

“You okay, Adrian? ” I asked.

“I have been better,” he said quietly, his voice tinged with strain. “I do not like the darkness. Talk to me, Cates, please.”

I grimaced. I didn’t know what to say. You didn’t admit weakness—people stomped on weakness when they saw it, exploited it, made a note of it and remembered, forever. Years later, you worked a job against someone and they remembered something you said, something they saw, a moment when you let your guard down, and they hit you on the head with it until you bled.

“Uh—all right, where in hell did ‘the Poet’ come from? ”

He didn’t respond right away. I counted six steps before he spoke.

“Did you ever test? I wanted to be IE, to be a damn cop. Can you believe that? But I got FA, fine arts. I wanted a gun. They told me to write stories. So I ran away.”

I shook my head in the darkness. Up ahead, there was a sudden burst of gunfire and a few muttered curses. Both the Poet and I dropped to our knees, crouching with our heads just above the frigid water. The floor of the tunnel under my hand was slick and gritty, and I wished very much to not be touching it.

“Clear!” one of the soldiers shouted, and we straightened up, shaking oily water from our hands and sleeves and pushing forward.

“I never tested,” I said. I knew, dimly, that any citizen of the System of any standing tested at a young age and got assigned a career, but I’d been out of the mainstream for years by the time I came of age and I’d never even seen one of the Testing Dorms.

“You are lucky, then. To be told what you will
be
—it is terrible. I wanted a gun, and so I went underground and got myself one.” I looked at him. His tattoos were monochrome in my enhanced vision, still moving in their silent little scenes, endlessly dying. If I were a superstitious man, I’d think he was making sure they stayed dead, by reminding the universe that he’d killed them. “My father was rich. A big fish in a small pond. I spoke too well, though. My new friends said I was soft, called me the Poet. You can’t always choose. You must own what life gives you.” He jabbed a finger at his neck. “My
friends
stayed with me.”

He did talk pretty. I couldn’t put my finger on it—there were no huge words or fancy flourishes, but when Adrian Panić started chatting, I liked it. I didn’t even pay attention to what he said half the time.

He suddenly stopped. I splashed ahead a few feet before realizing it, and then waded back, finding him standing stiff and rigid in the water.

“Mr. Cates,” he said slowly, his voice cracking, “some fucking
thing
brushed my fucking
leg
.”

I studied his face, nodding at him as I hunched down a bit and stared up at his nose. “You gonna move, Adrian? ”

He shut his eyes and shook his head. “I will...I will head back. I will . . . I cannot . . .” He trailed off and began muttering in his native language again, harsh and growling to my ears. I sighed and straightened up, still shivering, my own legs still feeling treacherous. I took a deep breath and reached up, slapping him hard across the face.

“Get moving,” I said with a sigh, “or I will push you under and hold you there while the rats chew out your eyes.”

I waited. I knew what it was like to freeze up. I knew fear. After a moment, I leaned forward again and whispered, “The only way out is forward, Adrian.”

He nodded as another, longer burst of gunfire ahead of us lit up the tunnel in tiny flashes. “Too bad you’ve seen this,” he whispered, taking a staggering step forward, splashing water everywhere. “Now I will have to kill you. Later. After tunnel.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, concentrating on moving my aching legs. “I’d hate to have to kill you in self-defense. I’m going to need you. You know what this is, right? A smash-and-grab.” I looked around to make sure we were isolated from the others, alone in our miserable pocket of darkness. “This thing Londholm has created, this God Augment—everyone wants it. The little shit Michaleen—
he
wants it. Bet your freak ass he does, Adrian. His creature back there, Mara, she’s here to make sure he gets it, after we get her in and get her close.”

The Poet was still walking like someone was tugging invisible wires embedded in his limbs. “And naturally,” he said, “then we’re no longer needed.” He gestured into the air. “God’s Middle Finger.”

I nodded. “I’m not going out that way. I’ve got shit to do.”
Like murdering that short little bastard
, I thought.

“I am with you, Cates,” he whispered. “First we must get to Londholm. And avoid tunnels.”

I nodded. “We’re with each other, and fuck the rest of them.”

I took two more slow, waterlogged steps and sensed something above me. My HUD lit up with a sudden surge, like it had been dormant and now woke up, and my feeling of heavy pain vanished. I half-ducked, leaning backward in a last momentary flash of energy and speed. Something heavy rolled off me, knocking me down into the thick, greasy water. I was under it for a moment, blind and suffocated, and then a hand was on my neck and someone was pushing at me, holding me under, their skin rough against me, their fingernails long, thick, and sharp.

As my HUD status bars started screaming up and down, I lashed out my arms, grabbing onto a skeletal ankle, slippery and yet rough, like it was covered in scabs. I didn’t think about that too hard; I concentrated on not opening my mouth under any circumstances while underwater, no matter how much my lungs burned. I yanked on the ankle hard and the hand disappeared from my neck, allowing me to surge back up, breaking the surface to the sound of gunshots everywhere, a constant screech. Gasping, at first I thought lights were flashing in my vision, but realized it was the flash of the guns.

I tore my Roon from its holster and began putting bullets into the swirling black water in front of me, ticking the gun forward a few inches each time. When I’d emptied the clip, silence crowded in, and Anners’s mush-mouthed cursing echoed against the walls.

“Holy fucking
shit
, y’all are damned jumpy. Remy, you take point up front there; Ollie, Hem, and Mullay, sweep back a few feet and make sure we’re
clear
—look
up
for fuck’s sake. Y’all gonna get a fucking burn tonight for this kind of weak shit, walking right
under
a fucking CHUD.” He came into view as a dark shape surfaced a few feet in front of me, facedown and skinny, like a greenish skeleton someone had dumped into the water. Anners glanced at the corpse as he joined the Poet and me. “All right, you got your boots wet,” he muttered, giving the body a nudge with his boot. There was a spray of gunfire behind us, and then silence again.

I felt myself deflating, getting heavy again, the all-over ache settling back into my bones. My HUD slowly dimmed. I was in fucking power-save mode.

Anners nodded. “We’re clear now,” he said, throwing a grin around. He pointed forward, and I squinted, spying a dim square of light up ahead. “All right, motherfuckers, you’re in sight o’ Hong Kong, eh?” He fell into an easy march next to us. “We won’t be walking you out of the tunnel, tho’. Be surprised if there were more than four, five thousand System Pigs holdin’ the city, total, but if we poke our noses out there I
ga-run-tee
you all of them will be standing there, grinnin’. You’re clear from here on, tho’. We scrubbed it.”