Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (11 page)

“A little,” I finally said, reluctant to say anything else. I was an old man, but I was old because I’d learned my lessons well. One of those lessons I’d pushed into the soft spot in Remy’s brain a million times: Never reveal weakness. You hide your limps, you smile through searing pain, you never beg off, because when people smell fear they swarm you.

I squinted around the tiny space and tried my new hobby: ignoring the smell. I remembered standing on the rotting docks in Veracruz and staring at the tanker. The hugest fucking thing I’d ever seen, a slab of metal floating on the water, big enough to carry thousands. No one had seen a hover in the air for months, so I could believe this was how they were getting shit across the oceans these days, but when Javier, the broker Adora made contact with, swept his arm out and announced we were going to be traveling on the biggest fucking boat I’d ever seen in my life, I looked him over, from his old boots with the soles held on by rubber bands and the sleeve of his yellowed shirt held on with a series of rusting pieces of wire, and pointed at him.

“You’re telling me
you
”—I shifted my finger to point at the tanker—“own
that
?”

Javier laughed. I could still hear him laughing. “No, Mr. Cates, I do not own the boat. But I know how to get you
on
the boat.” He smiled, miming us with his hands. “You walk on, you stay hidden, two weeks later, you are in Spain.”

Two weeks. I’d gone from New York in the midst of a riot to London in two fucking hours, once, in a hover.

It was funny, actually. We were in the biggest fucking thing in the known universe, but we were in the smallest possible fucking space in it, trying to be quiet like mice. Javier had come up with a bag of what appeared to be pre-swallowed N-tabs and a box of plastic bottles of water. I thought about asking him if the water would make me spend the two weeks shitting myself, but thought better of it.

“Anything happening?” I asked Adora. I couldn’t see Remy, but there was only one spot in the tiny room where he could be without physically touching me. The kid had been talking even less than usual, which made him mute.

“Nothing,” she sighed. “I heard the crew very close an hour or so ago, but Javier was right: They do not come in here.”

We lapsed into silence. My head was pounding, as usual, and my stomach growled almost painfully—I’d gotten used to actual food, and living on N-tabs was no fun.

“He is sleeping,” Adora suddenly said. “This is all he does, your friend.”

I shrugged even though she couldn’t see me well enough to appreciate it. “He’s been through a lot. He’s a project of mine.”

“A project? What are you trying to do?”

I shrugged again, feeling tight and hot. “Keep him alive.”

She paused. “That is not easy, in your line of work.”

I let that sit for a moment. Adora had told me she was coming along because, first off, I owed her a lot of money and, second, because the System still endured, sort of, in Europe. Headless without Director Marin—good old Dick; it cheered me to think of his buried servers melting under a mushroom cloud in Moscow—and populated mainly by avatar cops who’d had their brains downloaded into bricks, it was still civilization, kind of. A few years ago I would have thought she was crazy, but I understood. The old ways of doing things still counted over there, and Adora was sick of getting hijacked every five minutes and having no one to complain to about it.

“Well—”

I paused, shutting my mouth with a click as Adora sucked in breath. Outside the rusty hatch that sealed us into our hiding place voices boomed, echoing off the steel walls. I pulled the Roon and crouched in the darkness, forcing myself to breathe steadily. My HUD flickered into life for a moment, and then faded, and a spike of eye-melting pain flashed through my skull, making me wince.

his fucking arms get his fucking
arms
under control

The voices grew louder, approaching. I heard Remy stirring behind me, creeping up to kneel next to me, and I hoped he knew enough to stay quiet. We’d never seen the crew; Javier had led us to a rusted, painted-over hatch at the rear of the tanker, had pried it open with a crowbar, and quickly led us down a maze of shafts and ladders until he’d found this little room behind an unmarked hatch. He’d cheerfully admonished us to stay quiet and out of sight, had pointed out the latrine bucket and supplies he’d set up for us, and left us with basic instructions to wait until we heard the tugboat horns that would indicate we were being guided into Cadiz. I’d paid him every yen I had left, leaving me nothing to cover my debt to Adora, but that remained the problem of some future version of myself.

My head cleared, and I crept forward the four or five steps to the hatch, my own breath beating back at me as I crouched there inches from the corroded metal. I made out three, then four separate voices, trading off with one another, getting louder as they approached. The pain in my head, like a worm growing and squirming, gave a violent wrench and I shut my eyes, almost losing my balance as the nauseous agony swept through me, and the voices swirled and got confused.

here’s where I heard it

get the kid in

don’t listen to him, for fuck’s sake, he’s a

you sure? Seems quiet now

As the pain receded, gone as quickly as it had hit me, I heard the voices outside our little hiding place stop. For three heartbeats I waited, staring blindly ahead of me, finger along the side of the Roon.

“Stowaways!” a deep, wet voice shouted. It sounded like he was vomiting as he spoke, spitting up lungs and spleens and mucus as he went. The accent was harsh, German sounding. “My name is Captain Hermann Kaufman! You are not welcome on the
Daniel Krokos!
Step out, or we will come in! And if we come in, you will be dead! We have guns!”

I let the echo of his voice ping around the tiny space a bit, thinking. Somehow we’d given ourselves away. I considered our circumstances: The hatch was small, and if thrust open they’d be faced with pitch-black darkness. Only one normal-sized person could fit through the opening at a time. With a choke point like that, I could hold off an army with nothing more than a bag of stones and patience. They could trap us
in
, but there was no way for them to force us
out
.

I cleared my throat. “My name is Avery Cates,” I croaked out. “And I have a gun, too. And I’ll bet I’ve killed more people with mine than you have with yours.”

THEY SAY SHE IS A FLOATING HELL

“You okay?”

Adora was only a faint outline in the gloom, a foot or two away. I squinted at her through the pounding in my head, in time with my heartbeat, which wasn’t pushing blood through me anymore, just poison. My HUD had started pulsing in time with it, too.

I scrubbed my face with my hands and tried to force myself to concentrate, to get clear. I’d tried summoning my imaginary glass shield that I used when my usual ghostly voices got too intrusive, but the throbbing pain defeated me. I didn’t have time to contemplate a grapefruit in my brain, a mass of black cells gathering around my implant like spiders spinning webs with themselves. We’d been in our little hidey-hole in the
Daniel Krokos
for sixteen days, according to Adora, whose estimate I was prepared to accept. Sixteen days of stewing in my own sweat, alternating between a gnawing hunger that no amount of N-tabs could cure and a sweaty nausea that veined its way through my body like a vine growing inside me.

The crew had kept up a steady guard outside the hatch, presumably armed, but they had, at least, taken me seriously and not tried to open the hatch and rush us. I cleared my throat and tried to take a deep breath, but the crew had done its best to make life hard on us; they’d filled all the ventilation shafts with debris and the air was stuffy and thick with our own exhalations.

“I’m okay,” I said, forcing some energy into my voice. “You?”

I made out Adora’s shrug. “We must escape.”

I remembered a single phrase from a song. I didn’t remember where I’d heard the song—my father, maybe, when I’d been a small kid, before he died and Unification and everything else.
They say she is a floating hell
. That’s all I could remember.
They say she is a floating hell
. It was one of those things I’d forgotten for so long, suddenly remembered; I might have just created it, invented it.

We’d heard the tugboat horns the day before, distant. I’d expected some action after that; we were in port, and the crew was unloading its cargo, whatever it was—no doubt they wanted us off the boat before making the return trip. When nothing had happened, overnight or today, I’d begun to wonder if maybe they’d decided the easiest thing to do was just keep us buttoned up in our little room until we starved to death, skeletal corpses always being easier to debark than pissed-off, armed assholes.

“Shit,” I said. “Next time someone says, here, hide in this tanker for two fucking weeks, we fucking say
no
.”

can y’hear me, Avery? Avery, can you—it’s

I blinked the voice out of my head as she laughed a little, a forced noise that was more of a gurgle. She was right—we weren’t going to last much longer in this fucking disease incubator, our eyes turning white and our watery N-tab shit slowly filling up the place. I shook myself and forced a deep breath, then gave myself a thunderous slap on the face. Nothing hurt as much as my head, but it did snap me up a little, so I did it again, getting on my knees and pulling the Roon. I knew it by feel, and I began to check it over.

“We have some advantages,” I said in a hoarse whisper. I reached out and gave Remy an indiscriminate smack to wake the sleepy fuck up. All the kid did these days was sleep. Another epic wave of pain swept through me, burning off brain cells and nerve endings as it went, then passed.

“What the
fuck
?” Remy hissed, sitting up. “I said don’t fucking
hit
me.”

I paused and squinted through the darkness at him, then smiled and flashed out my hand, giving him a gentle smack on the face like a friendly reminder.

“Stop me, kid,” I said. “Until then, quit complaining about it.”

I braced myself for another convulsion of pain; they came regularly after I lost my temper. Nothing happened though. Remy sat there breathing hard for a moment, and then cleared his throat softly. “What is it?”

“We gotta move,” I said, putting my hand on the Roon again. “They’re obviously not going to come in after us and if they were going to negotiate our exit they would have opened up talks.” I shook my head. “I’m thinking they figure they can leave us to rot. So let’s effect an exfiltration. We have,” I repeated, “some advantages.”

“Sure,” Remy grunted. “We’re dirtier. Smell worse. We’ll be blinded in full light, and we not only havta get out of this fuckin’ hold, we havta get topside inna vessel we don’ have any experience with.” I heard him spit on the floor. “Fuckin’-easy-fuckin’-peasy.”

I squinted at the kid again. Remy had gone through something when Anners had shown up; something had broken in him. I’d known Remy had a black streak in him—fuck, I’d planted the seeds of it—and he’d been a moody fuck ever since Hong Kong, but there’d been a strength in him I’d liked, that I’d been able to count on. Now something was off, and I was worried it was going to fuck us up.

“We get to pick the time,” I said slowly, enunciating carefully. “They don’t know when we’re coming. They won’t have strength out there—based on the sounds out in the corridor I’m guessing there’re one, maybe two, people on guard. Once we kill them, we’re lost in this fucking ship, sure, but we’re three people in a boat the size of fucking old Manhattan Island—they have to find us. And you and me, kid, we’ve killed plenty of people—plenty of people who were trying to kill
us
. I don’t know about Captain Kaufman. I doubt it, though. There’s more money in murder; if he was a killer he wouldn’t be crewing a tanker.”

“I do not have a gun,” Adora whispered. “Only my knife.”

I considered her shadow for a moment. I wondered if she regretted her decision to head off for Europe and the Rump System, if she hated me. Since we’d met she’d been insulted, threatened, nearly robbed, stripped of her vehicle and ripped off of the ten thousand yen I owed her—and now she was heading into a gunfight with a knife.

I counted ammo in my head. I had fifty-seven shells, including the clip in the Roon. I was pretty sure Remy had nineteen rounds for his huge revolver; it was a slow reload but it cleared a room when he fired it. He was wrong about us being blinded by the light; our augments, I was pretty sure, would compensate fast enough.

“Okay,” I said quietly, racking the slide and flicking off the safety. “Speed is the key. The hatch opens outward, and I’ll bet you my thumbs those stupid fucks are standing on either side, dozing off and daydreaming of a world where they don’t have to stand guard outside this hatch.” I swallowed a spasm of coughs. “Adora, you’re going to smash your way out. Unlock that hatch and give it your shoulder,
smash
it open and into whoever’s standing to the side. Can you do that?”

hear me Avery say something if you can

She nodded. “Yes.” She sounded nervous, but I gave her some slack.

“Keep moving, and go low. Smash that door open but don’t wait to see what happens, keep moving and hit the floor, slide and roll. Crawl. Keep
moving
.”

She nodded again and took a deep breath through her nose. “Okay.”

“Kid,” I said, turning to Remy. “You go out right after her. The hatch’ll smash left, so go right with that cannon. Go out and try to hit someone, but fire all six rounds. Just squeeze the trigger, make noise. Just keep firing, whether you hit anything or not.”

Chaos. Confusion. They didn’t know how many of us were crammed in here, or how heavily armed we were. Scaring the shit out of them was the best I could do for an advantage.