Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (33 page)

“They are here to
destroy
him,” he said, pacing. “They are here to
prevent
us from gaining the access codes. Not to aid us.
Not
to aid us.”

I nodded, keeping my mind blank. “We use them. We point them at the things we wish to control, and when we have him down, we step in between Orel and them.”

He looked at me, his tight, careful face judging. “You think we can control them? Psionics?”

I shrugged. “You think we can deal with Orel without them?”

He nodded, once, firmly. “Yes. We have a plan.”

“Sure, but they give us a
much
better chance of success, Grish.” I blinked. “Wait: You left Marko up there alone with them?” I laughed. “Shit, they’ll have him dancing and juggling.”

He shook his head and looked down so I wouldn’t catch the slight smile that played across his face. I felt like I was walking a tightrope, trying to keep Grisha hanging on. It was exhausting. I kicked at a spent shredder clip, empty and crushed by some long-gone boot. It skittered across the metallic floor and hit the far wall, making a tinny noise. It was difficult to believe I’d been in here years before, getting my brains scooped out.

I stood up and stretched. “C’mon. Let’s walk the line and make sure we’re ready.”

“You are so sure he will come,” Grisha said, falling in behind me as I squeezed through the broken doorway and out into the hall.

“And soon,” I agreed. “I’ve been in the same room as Orel only a few dozen times, and half the time I was with him I thought he was someone fucking else. But I know him. He’s a fucking spider, and knowing I have a version of him, can poke in there and find out anything I want—it’ll eat at him. He can’t have that. He doesn’t want me finding out what he’s afraid of, what he did when he was a kid, who he fell in love with, the last time he cried like a fucking asshole, whatever state secrets he might have neglected to erase.” I shook my head. “He can’t have it, Grish. Trust me.”

Grisha fell into silence behind me as we moved through the dark, moldy hallway and toward the elevator shaft. A huge number four still caught the dim light, painted onthe wall in the tiny elevator lobby, the opened doors revealing a yawning black rectangle where an elevator had once ferried the SSF staff in and out of their little sausage grinder in the belly of the desert. I was calm. I’d expected to be angry, to get worked up from being back in Chengara, but I didn’t feel much at all. Everything had narrowed down to a point: getting Orel within arm’s length, on my terms for a change. Not me chasing after him, not me being lured along by phantoms and avatars, but him, coming to me, where I could watch him approach and pick my moment. Everything else had fallen away.

We rose slowly up the shaft, one hand over the other, Grisha panting behind me loud and damp. He was more bent over than he had been before, more hunched, his face crisscrossed with new wrinkles. I figured he could feel the end of the line coming, too. The world was petering out, and we were dancing on the final stop.

I gave him a hand up out of the shaft, back into the shallow, sand-filled basement level that had been blown open during the army’s raid on the prison all those years ago. The cold wind hit us immediately, cutting through everything I had on and making me shiver.

“This is our retreat,” I said, loudly, competing with the wind. “If we get into trouble, we head down into the cave. Single point of entry, no way for him to see us or reach for us with his mind unless he comes down. We take potshots at anything that tries coming down.” I pulled out one of the tiny disc grenades Grish had been able to provide; we each had a dozen or so stuffed into our pockets. “Hell, we can toss your grenades into the shaft if he gets that far.”

“If we
get
into trouble?” Grisha said, shaking his head with a smile.

The sand had banked against the western wall of the old guards’ quarters under the main complex, and we were able to scramble up back onto the flat ground on the surface. The moon was huge and white, making everything look colorless and frozen. Half the old cinder-block wall of the dormitory was still standing, sand halfway up one side as it traced a straight line for a few hundred feet and then veered at a right angle to the east, going another fifty feet or so before ending in a jagged jumble of blocks and shiny shrapnel. We stepped around to the sheltered side of the old dorm, littered with the twisted wreckage of the old bunks and other junk that had blown there, spent clips and random equipment the cops and troops had dropped.

“This,” I said breathlessly, my HUD flickering my vision, the status bars pulsing with my heartbeat, “we can use to break line of sight. That motherfucker might be a demigod, but he’s got to
see
us. He can’t toss us into the air or latch onto our minds if he can’t see us.” In the corners were neat piles of ammunition for the shredders as well as our autos, which we’d swapped out so we were all carrying the same caliber. “We reload here, too. We keep
moving
, no matter what. You blow your clip, you keep moving, you duck in here, you reload.”

“Our new
friends
,” Grisha said, out of breath but managing to sound sour anyway. “Where are they?”

I was already walking, angling my way back to the open air of what used to be the yard, still marked off by the ruins of the old wall. One of the corner towers still stood, creaking and shuddering in the wind. I jabbed a finger at it as Grisha struggled to keep up. “Three Tele-Ks and four Pushers,” I said. “None of them Travel—fucking never heard of such a thing. Two of the Tele-Ks in the tower. They’re up there now, half a canteen of water and ten N-tabs between them. They’re the strongest but they’re not certain of the range they can do anything effective at. The rest are on their own. They’re mobile. The Pushers will try to break the three of us out if he gives us a nudge, and the last Tele-K is just basically going to put him in the air as much as possible.” I smiled. “Where are your people?”

Grisha grunted and gestured vaguely. “Sniping. They are out in the sand, in shallow digouts with scoped weapons.” He coughed wetly. “If they receive a signal from me they are also to try and swarm him.”

I nodded. I finally spotted the old ammo locker, now a dull and drab gray. The rattling cage Grisha had brought in pieces from Spain and assembled had been retracted back into the soft ground, hidden from sight and ready to leap up again, fresh batteries attached to the apparatus, the best batteries we had left, which Grisha thought might give us seven or eight minutes of juice with the cage pulling from them.

“We herd him here,” I said, standing in the spot where the cage would be when triggered and throwing out my arms. “They throw his own shit back at him—throw rocks at him, put him in the air, Push him, if they can. Your people shoot at him. We keep him dancing. Marko’s gonna be in the old basement with one of the old rifles. He’s a shit shot, but I just told him to stay low and out of sight and harass the motherfucker, put shots at him as much as he can. You and I, we’re mobile. Take cover, displace often. Throw shots at him as much as you can. Don’t take chances—he’s a Psionic. He sees you, you’re in for suffering.”

Grisha nodded, hands on his hips, studying the ground at my feet. “We herd him.”

“Marko’s got the switch plate. The second Orel’s standing here, he mashes it, and we’re done.”

“He will have one shot,” Grisha said slowly. “If he mistimes it, if Orel manages to skip free before he is trapped, that is it. We will be done.” He nodded to himself. “This worries me.”

I nodded. “Sure. You think you should be in the hole, taking potshots and pressing the button?”

He nodded. “I do. But you are right: I am better with a gun than Marko, and I am better in the field. It is the stronger disposition of resources to have me out here.” He sighed, starting to cough. “We will just rely on Marko’s judgment.”

For a second we both stood there, silent, pondering the horror of that statement.

“I told them all to wait,” I said. “To let him get close. Don’t waste bullets on a distance shot, and don’t try anything fancy when he’s too far to do anything.”

“The Tele-Ks should take a chance if they see one,” he said, spinning around to look at the crumbling old guard tower. “They might pluck him up and land him on this spot before he can do anything.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. He’s a smart old bastard, though. He’s gonna be expecting tricks from us.”

“Yes,” Grisha said flatly. “He is a god now, yes? Does
smart old bastard
cover it?”

I tapped my head. “He’s still got the same old brain.”

Grisha opened his mouth, then paused. Clipped to his belt, the small handheld connected to our motion detectors was buzzing and flashing an angry red that was bright enough to light up his face from below, making him demonic. He glanced down at it, then back up at me.

“It’s a feint, you know,” I said, turning to scan the dark horizon.

“Yes,” Grisha said, and I heard the snap of his auto being racked. “But he is here.”

XXXVI

YOUR PROBLEM IS YOU THINK YOU’RE SPECIAL

We had no lights. Suddenly, after weeks of travel and days of preparation, days of thinking about this moment, days of staring at Mara’s decapitated head and listening to Orel’s ghost crack wise and insult me, I wished to fuck we’d thought of fucking
lights
out here in the fucking desert at night.

Grisha had disappeared instantly, on the move, and I dropped down onto my belly and studied the night around us. My augments tried to brighten up the night and had plenty of moon to do so, but I couldn’t see any movement. He was out there. Thundering around in his heavy, nuke-powered Monk chassis, he was within sniper range. My heart thudded in my chest. All I could hear was the wind.

Somewhere, out in the darkness, I heard the rippling crack of a rifle shot. A moment later, a distant scream, rising and fading—someone being plucked from the ground and sent sailing, about to smash down onto the ground. Grisha’s people were tough as old leather, in general, but they weren’t trained for this shit. No one was.

I stayed on my belly and worked my way back toward the remaining dormitory wall. I had to assume he could see me, unlikely as that seemed. I made pretty rapid progress, scraping along, the sound of the sand beneath me and my labored breathing seeming loud and amplified in the cold night. About halfway there, a stray cloud drifted between us and the moon, and the old prison was suddenly in near-total darkness. My HUD was bright and clear, everything working perfectly for a change, and slowly my vision brightened as my augments soaked up every bit of light left and focused it.

When I reached the wall I pulled myself behind it and sat up. Sheltered in the old dorm space where Marlena and I had sat and smoked and fucked, I checked my auto and carefully pushed myself out around the edge of the wall, inch by inch, trying to be
part
of the fucking wall, unnoticed and unnoticeable. I reached into my pocket carefully and found one of the tiny earbuds we’d shared out and pushed it into place.

“Grisha?” I whispered. “Marko?” I didn’t bother raising any of the Spooks who’d come to fulfill their bullshit religious destiny, or any of Grisha’s people. I hadn’t learned anyone’s name anyway. I igured they would all be dead soon enough, and I didn’t need to put more names on my list of people I’d fucked over by my mere presence. At any rate, they weren’t listening to me, and I wasn’t listening to them.

“I am at foot of tower,” Grisha rasped into my ear. The way the sound bloomed and died in my ear was strange, the complete silence and the crackle and hiss of individual words with so much dark silence between sentences. “I see nothing.”

“I’m where you put me,” Marko hissed, sounding like someone was standing on his balls. “I’m
freezing
.”

I ignored him, keeping my eyes on the move, looking for any clue.

He might circle back behind you
, Marin whispered in my head.

I shook my head and caught myself. I didn’t respond. Orel hadn’t come here to sneak around and do some old-school Gunning, wearing us down until we fucked up and he got one single, perfect shot. He’d come to make me feel the wrath of the new god. There would be fucking taunts, and he’d play with us, make us understand that he would have let us go, he would have let us live out our measly little lives in peace, but we had to go fuck with him.

A single shot, small and wet like a firecracker, plinked in the distance, immediately swallowed by the silence.

“Rafeal is dead,” a man’s voice, calm and monotone, whispered in my ear. I didn’t know who the fuck Rafeal was, or had been, and I wasn’t interested.

“Grisha, you getting any more buzz?”

“Nothing, Avery,” the Russian replied in a hushed voice. “No other motion detectors have been triggered.”

He’s fucking with us
, I thought.
He’s going to have us jumping at shadows.

He’s
got
you jumping at shadows
, Salgado hissed.
What a waste. So much yen poured into this place, so much tech and blood and sweat. And they used it for a brain-suck operation, and we bombed it to hell. And now an arena for you and Orel. A waste.

Dolores
, I thought, keeping my eyes open and moving,
I regret to inform you the one positive I can take away from having Canny Orel’s gun shoved up my ass is that I will never have to hear your thoughts again
.

“Hello, Avery.”

Marko’s voice in my ear. I went still, putting my eyes on the ammo locker marking the location of the cage and tried to be aware of my surroundings, all around me, picturing the layout of the prison, the approaches to my position. “Hello, Mickey,” I said quietly.

“Interestin’ band of morons you’ve assembled here, Avery,” he continued in my ear, in Marko’s voice but with Orel’s patterns.

“C’mon, old man,” I whispered. “Come try me. Quit hiding.”

“Avery?” Marko’s voice again, but once again wit the original-issue accent.