Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (10 page)

“What you calling yourself? Mayor? Duke?” I said, trying to cut him down a little. “I’ve met a few dukes.”

He laughed. “You kidding? I’m the only thing people remember to respect: I’m fucking
Director of Internal Affairs
for Mexico City, Cates. Straight ahead.”

We were heading toward a decent-looking small building, two stories and painted bright white, a little bit of a space around it in the big city. Four of his men lounged against the wall, shredders on display. The guns were all in good condition, but based on the state of the rest of their equipment and uniforms, I figured Anners’s men were low on everything—ammunition, body armor, batteries. The shredders were for show; if Anners’s whole crew lit up at the same time I had no doubt they wouldn’t have a bullet between them after twenty seconds. I was a little impressed that Anners had chosen such a modest house for his headquarters, but then I thought it was probably easier to secure against potential throat-slitters—probably the entire population. Without power for motion sensors and trip wires, keeping people out was problematic, and smaller was better. I decided it was a safe bet that Colonel Anners was not popular.

“You two stay out here,” he said, waving at Adora and Remy. “No one’s gonna bother you ’less I say so. Mister Cates, after you.”

I clenched my fists again. I didn’t have much against Malkem Anners—he was a ripe prick who’d treated me pretty fucking rotten, but after what I’d been through, that actually put him at the high end for manners. I starteto get angry again, a formless unhappy rage that got under my muscles and started tugging at my tendons, making me itch. Every time I started walking, some asshole reached out to grab my ankle, and I was getting sick of it.

Inside, I was surprised to find myself alone with him in a small foyer, just an empty room with bare lathing on the walls and rough plywood for a floor. I followed him through a doorway that felt just slightly too small, crowding me as I shouldered my way in. We were in an old kitchen, the wooden floor bleached and rubbed smooth, the old porcelain sink the single largest of its kind I’d ever seen. Everything else had been torn out, leaving behind outlines on the wall and floor. It was so clean I didn’t want to touch anything.

“I still got a supply of blackjacks,” Anners said, crossing to the other side of the kitchen and holding up three of the small black remote controls for the military implants Remy and I still had in our heads. He turned and leaned against the wall, making a dumb show of examining the remotes. They weren’t specific to any one soldier; any officer with any functioning remote could use it on any of us who’d been augmented by the army—Remy’d spent the last few years obsessed with this exact scenario. My own implants had gone sour back in Hong Kong. Remy’s were still sitting in his head like a spider. “I wonder what happens if I toggle his killswitch.”

My HUD snapped into clarity, my heart lurching into a jerking rhythm as all the anger rose right back up and spilled over. Anners didn’t know it, but he wasn’t going to fuck with Remy. When Remy had walked away from Anners’s unit in Hong Kong, he’d risked summary execution via his implants just to get away from the crazy fucker, and for years I’d watched the kid stewing in terror and nightmares from his stint in the army, getting skull-fucked every ten minutes by this asshole.

No shots
, I thought, my head clear, my vision sharpened by the remnants of army tech in my head.
Shots will bring every one of Anners’s people
. It had been years since I’d had to do any quiet work, but there were some lessons you never forgot.

I took a step forward, keeping my hands obviously at my sides, and stalled.

“Probably nothing,” I said. “I got a set of military augments, too, and I can tell you they didn’t exactly use the best components.”

Anners shrugged, affable. “Maybe, sure. Or maybe I press the button and he falls down dead, blood drippin’ from his ears.”

I wandered slightly away from him, running my eyes over the outline of long-gone cabinets and appliances on the wall opposite Anners. He hadn’t brought any of his people in here with us, which told me that whatever he was about to blackmail me for was something he didn’t trust his own people with.

“Go ahead,” I said, keeping my voice steady and casual. “I don’t fucking like the kid. He just bitches and moans all the time. Follows me around.”

This bought me some seconds. Anners didn’t say anything, grinding the gears. I turned slowly, keeping my eyes on the walls as if I were examining the details, drifting closer to him, and then lunged suddenly, feinting for the remotes in his hand. Surprised, he snatched his hand up into the aid sd them out of my reach, but I’d already changed direction, chopping my hand into his windpipe. Arrogance got you killed. Malkem Anners had been running things for too long.

The remotes scattered to the floor and he staggered backward, crashing into the wall, both hands going up to his throat while his eyes bulged out of his head. Reminding myself that Anners had augments in his head, too—probably better ones, since he’d been an officer—I stepped in close and kneed him hard in the groin, determined to keep him off balance and unable to gather himself. He tried to double over slightly, then caught himself and straightened up, still unable to breathe but trying to protect himself. Anners had gotten sloppy, and I imagined that having years of unquestioned obedience from people had given him some unfortunate ideas about his own invincibility. I always told Remy: Never forget you’re just a shithead yourself. The only thing that separates you from the other shitheads is
knowing
you are a shithead.

I lunged in for his head, intending to slam his skull against the wall until he went out, but he managed to get his arms up between us and knock me aside with surprising force. He was a big guy, and his augments were fully functioning and giving him an added boost of adrenaline and pain suppression, letting him tear muscles and tendons with his own force and not feel a thing. I staggered for a second and recovered, coming right back at him, feinting low and then surging up inside his reach as if I was coming in for an embrace. His face had gone purple, and while his implants were compensating for his lack of oxygen he was going down fast if he couldn’t get his lungs unlocked.

I decided to go old-school and just put my hands around his neck, pressing my thumbs into his windpipe, squeezing for all I was worth.

The near-silence buzzed in my ears. It was just our grunts and my whistling breathing, the scrape of our shoes on the floor, the click of his teeth as he grimaced and writhed. He pounded at me with his fists with decaying strength, and kicked savagely at my legs; then he suddenly remembered his sidearm and tried to scrabble for it, but he was getting dumb from lack of air and my arms were in his way.

His mouth hung open, making a dry sucking sound, and we stared at each other, his eyes bugged out and bloodshot, and suddenly he just let his hands fall onto my shoulders, his eyes going dim and desperate. I thought there was an element of shock in there, too, like Colonel Anners had never imagined this was the way he’d go. Not like
this
.

I let him slide to the floor slowly and released him, stepping back, my chest heaving and my arms shaking. I stumbled backward and sat down hard, panting, and just sat there staring at him. I felt fucking fantastic. All the rage was gone, replaced by a sense of having made things right. Fuck the cosmos, fuck the Rail it always tried to put me on. I made my own decisions. And Anners had it coming.

Still breathing hard, I stood up and stepped to where the blackjacks had fallen. Deliberately, I stomped my boots down onto them and put my weight into it, crushing them as thoroughly as I could. I didn’t want another asshole officer to pick them up and make some other poor shits who’d been pressed back in the war miserable. I made my way slowly to the front of the house, where Adora and Remy were still standing with three or four of Anners’s people. The guards weren’t paying us much mind; they were watching thehot, and ts, confirming my impression that they had more to worry about from the people they ruled than anything else—and they were soldiers and didn’t know you could kill a man without shooting him a million damn times. Adora stared intently at me, biting her lip, vibrating with a desire to speak. Remy, despite his darkest fear come to life in the form of Malkem Anners, was still studying the ground, silent, appearing unconcerned. Looking at him I had a sudden wave of nausea, like there was some sort of lens between us distorting the view, and then it passed.

Shit
, I thought.
This is a fucking bad time for my augments to grow a tumor
. I put it on a list of things to worry about after I was dead.

“Come on,” I said, trying to sound unconcerned. “We got work.”

I started walking, and Adora and Remy fell in behind me. I was glad that Adora at least knew better than to assault me within hearing of Anners’s men. The guards let us go; Anners had told them to wait outside, and as far as they knew I’d taken my orders from the colonel and that was it. We had a couple of minutes. When we were a few dozen yards from the little house, I turned a corner into a narrow alley with cobblestone paving that had been torn up, piece by piece, by people looking for building materials.

“We’ve got about five minutes to disappear,” I said quietly, eyes searching the shadows and the people who hurried out of our way. “And then we’ve got to get the fuck out of Mexico City, fast.”

Adora swore in Spanish. “What is
wrong
with you?”

I liked that. I looked at her and liked her, and gave her a smile. She turned to look at me, defiant, and then frowned and suddenly looked away. The pit of nausea in my belly spread, and my head started to pound.

“You said something about transport?”

She didn’t turn around. “You said something about owing me ten thousand yen?”

PART II

MY NEW HOBBY: IGNORING THE SMELL

Hold him down. Avery, calm—I said down, you fucking desk jockeys!

My eyes snapped open, and as usual I was confused and panicked for a second, everything dark and cold and damp. My augments found some scraps of light leaking in from somewhere and firmed up some edges for me, the snaking lines of the pipes and the square, sharp corners of the humming black cubes. Something small and warm climbed up onto my leg and paused for a moment, as if sniffing the wind, and then moved on. I was getting used to the rats.

For a moment everything was unreal and insubstantial—the rough metal floor felt wrong, like it had gone soft overnight, rotting beneath me. The shadows seeor ong, too, moving—for a second one felt almost like a person leaning over me, arms extended, and then it was gone.

I shook my head. It ached, like always these days.

I sat up slowly, careful of the pipes overhead and the general lack of space. I patted myself for cigarettes and then caught myself—I hadn’t had a pack of cigarettes in years. The smell and heat crowded in on me—I’d been sweating continuously for days, boiling in my own clothes, and I imagined mold growing on my skin, fur trapping even more heat, more damp, tiny threadlike roots sucking the life out of me.

“Avery?”

Adora’s voice, somewhere in the murk. Slowly, my eyes were adjusting again, and things were taking on a ghostly gray coloring, just taped-off edges in the dark.

“Whatever we agreed to pay this bastard,” I said, my voice thick and phlegmy, “it’s too fucking much.”

She laughed. “We did not require too many details when making our deal, remember?”

I nodded to myself. We’d hitched a ride on a wagon being pulled by fucking donkeys out of Mexico City—we’d had plenty of cover; half the city was hitting its heels to get away from Anners’s troops, who were busy tearing the city down around them, free from his boot heel for maybe the first time in five years. Maybe I should have stayed and revealed myself, Avery Cates, the Gweat and Tewwible, their savior. Maybe they would have been glad to see me, the man who finally killed Colonel Malkem Anners.

Donkeys. I couldn’t get over it. I’d sat and stared at the gelatinous sway of their tails as they plodded along, heads down, happy to just keep pulling the fucking wagon forever. We’d have made better time except for Remy, who was suddenly allergic to walking and just complained about being tired all the time.

someone tie his fucking arms

I shook my head again. I was starting to get worried, really worried, about the headaches and the creeping hallucinations. My augments, I figured, finally corroding inside me. When I’d gone after Michaleen’s avatar in Hong Kong he’d pressed my button, tried to use the anti-frag settings wired into my implants to kill me, and I’d had the bright idea of sending my system into overdrive at the same moment, pushing my entire body way past its limits for the second time in a week. It had saved my life, somehow, but I didn’t talk for three months and only got the use of my hand back over time—my augments never worked right after that either, and I figured I’d fried a connection or five. That made my military implants just a little better than a tumor made of metal in my brain.

I got up onto my knees and stretched as best I could, then made sure my Roon was still tucked into my pants, dry and accessible. The constant vibration buzzed up through my knees and into my chest, making my teeth chatter.

“Did you sleep?”

I sat blinking in the darkness. “I’m not sure.” There had been voices and flashes—not voices like my resident ghosts, digitized brains I’d swallowed when they tried to brick me in Chengara. The voices were just in my head, silent except to me, and I’d gotten really good at blocking them out.

Because we let you
, Dolores Salgado suddenly whispered at me. A wave of light-headedness swept through me, making me reach back and touch the wet, gritty metal of the floor to steady myself.

Those voices didn’t bother me—I was used to them.