Cates 04 - The Terminal State (8 page)

I struggled to my knees. I felt about as quick as a corpse, but I was going to be within arm’s reach of Michaleen for the first time since escaping from Chengara, and I was going to make it count.

“Come on,” Belling said, smoothing down his white, short-cut hair. “We’re landing. Time to meet your coworkers.” He paused and looked at me, grinning with barely contained humor. “Avery, I can tell you still hold some sort of grudge against me.”

I pushed myself onto my feet and stood for a moment with clenched fists. “Wa, you’ve got me all wrong. All I ever needed to know, I learned from you.”

He laughed, pushing his hands into his pockets and rocking on his heels. “Avery, I know you too well. Never could let things go in favor of good business decisions, could you? ” He leaned forward. “I’ll make you a fair offer at penance, Avery. When Michaleen approaches you in a few minutes, you’re likely to have one of those Cates-brand lapses of judgment, yes? I’ll be a little slow with the remote. Give you a few seconds.” He nodded. “If you can do something with a few seconds—and any Gunner worth his rate could—consider it a gift.”

I concentrated on breathing, trying to figure out Belling’s play here. There was no risk here for him—if I somehow killed Michaleen, he had my remote and could disable me immediately, and Cainnic Orel would no longer be around to give him orders. If I failed, he would just shrug and apologize for being unfamiliar with the remote. Michaleen no doubt would know better, but if Belling’s lack of loyalty surprised him I’d eat my shoes.

I swallowed bile. I felt like I
had
eaten my shoe already. I had no weapon. My eyes roamed the cabin for a few seconds and finally lit on the glass tumbler I’d dropped when Belling’d zapped me. I crouched down and snatched it up, slipping it up into my sleeve and holding my hand bent at the wrist to keep it in place. Then I stepped behind Belling, fighting my inner ears as they tried to tip me sideways into the seats again, and followed him to the hatchway just as the hover touched the ground with a thump. I twisted my neck around until I got a satisfying pop.

I knew him, a little
. I remembered Michaleen telling me, about my father.
Not long and not deep
.

I didn’t like being lied to.

As the hatch opened, a set of tiny stairs automatically lowered, and Belling stepped down easily, throwing back his coat as a blast of cold wind hit us, lighting me up and making my damp clothes burn unhappily. I ignored the fresh coat of shivering that descended on me and concentrated on stepping off the hover without checking my footing, my eyes open and sweeping the scene.

It was a large airfield, old, ancient. The open space reminded me of the wilderness at first, just grass and weeds and the occasional skinny young tree trunk. A second glance showed the broken concrete and asphalt, the buildings in the near distance, the accumulated trash and collapsed fencing of a long-abandoned complex being slowly swallowed by the world. I felt instantly exposed.

As I stepped around Belling, I saw Michaleen immediately. He was wearing a suit badly, everything cut wrong, his tie undone, a ridiculous wide-brimmed hat set on an angle on his head. He was at least two feet shorter than each of his companions, both young. One, a leggy girl, with bright, unnaturally red hair done up in a complex set of braids and sweeps, wore a pair of skintight pants of tough-looking material that shimmered slightly in the pale sunlight and a tightly zipped leather jacket. The other was a boy, dark skinned and hollow cheeked, with a shaved head that was like half an egg set on top of his artificially thick neck. His legs were skinny, trembling little sticks popping out from under a thick, leather long-coat that looked hot and uncomfortable, but his neck and chest and arms were huge, heavy hunks of meat, almost throbbing with their own alien intelligence.

He wasn’t the type for stupid augment-junkie security assholes. Therefore the kid wasn’t security. I ignored him. The girl, maybe. She looked fast and mean, her face all angles and shadows, her eyes set too deeply into her face for beauty. Both of the kids looked too clean and scarless, which was either an expensive surgery habit or they were two jumbo softies who’d never scraped a knuckle.

I was careful: I contained my body language and followed Belling slowly, nonthreateningly. The weight of the glass was comforting in my sleeve. I asked myself what Michaleen would expect from me; he’d expect anger, so I stared at him and ground my teeth—that was easy. He’d expect something reckless and immediate, so I had to stutter the timing, try to throw him off. This was the man known as Cainnic Orel, I reminded myself. He’d had weeks to case me, and he’d done it well enough to play me like a fucking child back in Chengara—I had to go random, try to shock the fuck out of him, and count on Belling to be the unlovably selfish piece of shit he’d always been in the past.

Physically, Michaleen hadn’t changed at all. He was the same short, powerful-looking fellow, old as sin with a craggy, leathery face that was always screwed up into a fantastic expression that resembled either incredible pain or incredible amusement. His nose was long and rounded, his eyes bright and young in that tanned face, framed by thin, ghostly threads of white hair. He looked prosperous, like
he
hadn’t spent the last six months drinking paint and eating wild rabbit, shivering with the fumes over Bixon’s. Like he hadn’t even thought of me once since leaving me to be
processed
into an avatar in Chengara.

As Belling and I approached, unbelievably the little man smiled and threw his arms wide.

“Avery Fucking Cates as I live and breathe,” he shouted. “I told these pups here that a great hero from the past was comin’ to lend a hand to our li’l enterprise. Pups, you’re lookin’ at the genuine article, a man who has
done
things.”

Belling stopped a foot or two away, and I stopped too. “Hello, Mickey,” I said. “Got a cigarette? ”

His eyes were merry, on me at an angle. His tiny hands, his plump middle—it was immediately unbelievable that this man was the most dangerous Gunner in the world.

He roared laughter, a good, natural sound pouring out of him. “Cigarettes! You fucking ballbuster. Sure, I got—”

A split second of peace settled on me. I’d been thinking of Michaleen for months, kicking ass on spec in Englewood, plotting, sending out my feeble feelers. Here he was, the cosmos rewarding me for a change, for years of steady service. I unkinked my hand and the tumbler dropped into it like gravity had been designed for that express purpose. I swung my arm up and leaned forward, and when the glass actually shattered against Mickey’s tiny head I was fucking
shocked
.

He staggered to his right, absorbing the impact, and as blood splattered everywhere he ducked under my arm and drove his bleeding skull into my stomach, knocking the breath out of me. I hung onto the broken glass desperately, the edges digging into my skin and peeling the flesh away from my fingers, but it was the only weapon I had and I wasn’t going to fucking drop it.

Michaleen was heavier than he looked, and he put me off my feet and we fell as a unit to the broken asphalt beneath us. My head smacked into the ground and I heard Gupta for a second, distant, telling me how many fucking concussions I’d had. Then I dug my elbow into the ground and pushed off, rolling us until Michaleen was under me. I raised the lump of raw meat and shattered glass that had once been my hand into the air, and Michaleen squirmed under me, suddenly yanking his arm free, swinging his hand up between us. In his hand was the world’s smallest gun. It was an old Roon model 56—a peashooter, small caliber. At a distance, it was like setting off a firecracker—the best you could hope for was to annoy your target. Two inches from your face, it would do the job.

For a second, we were frozen like that, panting, dripping blood, my hand in the air, his tiny gun aimed at my eye.

Then my whole body lit up again, white fire snapping everything rigid and making rigidity a torture. This time I bit down on my tongue hard, blood flowing into my mouth as I tried to scream. Michaleen pushed me off of him like I was an inconvenient piece of scenery and I just rolled away, the shattered glass dropping away, forgotten.

As my consciousness narrowed down to a dot, I heard the little man laughing breathlessly. “I told you, pups,” I heard him say, fading fast. “You been working wit’ me six
months
, you take whatever the fuck I hand you. He’s here two goddamn
seconds
, he’s trying to kill me. The man’s a
hero
.”

Turned to cinder by Belling’s remote, I disappeared into darkness, and was glad for it.

Hot, stiff, and awake. I opened my eyes and had a distorted view of a well-used tabletop, pitted and scratched, covered in endless layers of varnish. A glass of something brown and transparent loomed directly in front of me, a giant’s glass, everything receding from there. A heavily tattooed pair of hands were folded far away, impossibly tiny. Stamped on top of everything was the tiny text and graphics of my heads-up display, which was going fucking
insane
. Text was streaming from bottom to top at a furious pace in the left of my vision, and status bars were jigging and jiving in my right, going from red to green, one after the other. My HUD distilled everything about my physical state into a stream of numbers, code words, and unexplained graphics that didn’t mean much to me beyond a few basics.

“Better be careful. The Middle Finger of God. Give you brain damage.”

I lifted my head from the table and squinted at the freak who’d been with Michaleen at the old airport. He’d taken off his jacket to reveal a sleeveless black shirt, his arms lying on the table in front of him like heavy burdens he’d just dropped, lifeless and ridiculously humongous. His right arm was heavily inked starting at the elbow, bright, animated tats that moved constantly, a flickering horrorshow of colors and movement that I didn’t want to see. I shifted my eyes to his face, trying to wet my lips, but my tongue had turned into a swollen toad living in the dark cave of my mouth and didn’t want to do anything except make breathing difficult. I managed a grunt.

I was seated at a dark wooden table next to a huge plate-glass window that had been starred pretty badly and was held together now by a complex system of gray tape. It was dark inside and raining outside, a muddy river creeping up a crumbling bank. Evidence of an old paved road and a concrete sidewalk could still be seen, slowly being sucked into the brown water, an inch a year. Across the river was another strip of crumbling pavement and a row of narrow, neat-looking buildings, rough stone, and peaked roofs. A line of trees adorned each bank, twisted, overgrown roots bursting from the ground, undermining the bank further, everything working together to destroy everything else.

I glanced down at the table and found a glass of whiskey. I picked it up, staring at it. The weight felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. Gravity was pushing me up, and my tongue was a toad lodged in my mouth. The whole place smelled, a sweet, heavy scent that was pleasant at first but became sickening pretty fast. We were the only people in it aside from a terrified-looking blond girl behind the bar, hugging herself on the far end, as far away from us as she could get without leaving her post, her eyes fixed in our direction.

“Old man is out back,” my minder said with a grin. “Taking Belling’s confession. This is Amsterdam.”

“I know where I fucking am,” I said, leaning back. The bars in my vision suddenly stabilized and turned green, and I realized that I didn’t feel bad at all. I even felt
good
. I raised the glass and paused with it awkwardly in the air, and nodded in his direction. “Nice work. Expensive? ”

He nodded. “Very expensive.” He jabbed a finger at his neck. “One for each person I’ve killed. They still live on me.”

I raised an eyebrow. As I squinted at the freak, my vision suddenly zoomed and the tiny, animated tattoos came into sharp focus. They were very detailed, the faces contorted into masks of horror as they were murdered over and over again: a fat black man in a suit was garroted, his eyes bulging, his tongue popping out of his mouth; a slim woman with graying hair was shot in the forehead, the wound appearing suddenly, her eyes popping wide and staying that way; a dozen others endlessly replaying their deaths.

This was amateur hour. Maybe the cops weren’t interested in arresting anyone these days, sure, so wearing your own evidence wasn’t so terrible, but bragging and giving your enemies information for free, this shit was worth punishing. I swirled whiskey around in the glass, looking over the rim at him. His arms were...I wasn’t sure if I knew of a bigger word than
fucking humongous
and looked like good augment work, the muscles not twitchy or taut, but slow as fuck. He was sitting at Michaleen’s table, though; that meant something.

Michaleen. I knew I was going to have to table that bastard for the time being, and the thought of waiting another year to make him pay for playing me made my stomach sour.

“You proud of yourself? ” I asked, swallowing the whiskey. It tasted like shit, paint thinner burning all the way down, which was a huge improvement over Bixon’s slush back in Free Failed State of Englewood. The thought that the
good stuff
out there in the world was now shit was depressing, and all these kids who’d never had a pre-Unification cigarette or a decent glass of gin, they thought everything was fine. The standards had slipped, and people like me who knew better weren’t long for the world.

He nodded. “I am quality. I do work needs to be done. They call me the Poet.”

I raised an eyebrow theatrically. “Bullshit. I’ll bet you anything you like not one person has
ever
called you the Poet unless you had a knife up their ass.” I pointed a finger at him. “I will call you Nancy.”

He flushed, color coming in black on his cheeks. I felt good; I was running this meeting.