Cates 04 - The Terminal State (11 page)

Her eyes leaped to me instantly. “Wallace is working another angle.”

I held her eyes for a moment. A first-name basis. A strange feeling stole over me, like I’d met her before, held this gaze before. For a second my HUD tightened up again, everything getting suddenly and perceptively clearer, status bars quickly flaring into life and spiking, like I was about to scrap with this kid. I couldn’t know her.

Then it flicked off, everything settling down. “Okay,” I said, and the door to our cabin banged inward, old varnished wood splintering into our laps. The narrow doorway was crowded with dingy white uniforms, with Little Mother I’d seen through the window in front.

“Thumbs, or we cut them off,” she screeched, her whole little body vibrating with the volume. Her accent was pure New York; I’d heard it a million times, in better days. “On your fucking
feet
and thumbs out or we shove ’em up your asses.”

We all hesitated, of course. We knew how this was going to play out: We were going to stand up, present our thumbs like obedient citizens, and eat the shit sandwich. But we didn’t have to be
enthusiastic
about it. It was like being in Pickering’s during a raid, the good old days, except I wasn’t drunk and Kev Gatz wasn’t snickering next to me, making ridiculous stoned jokes. As I stared at her, the little box bloomed in my vision again.

ANGELINA R. ROCCAFORTE, LIEUTENANT (2), SECURITY INFANTRY.

Little Mother Roccaforte’s eyes were bugged out and watery, and they jumped around the cabin in jerky, outraged leaps. I figured the army wasn’t assigning its top rank to train inspections. I thought of myself and all the rest of Englewood being prepped for fucking urban assault; how fucking terrible did you have to be to get
train
duty?

She suddenly stared hard at me, and I pictured one of those little boxes blooming in her own HUD:
Avery Cates, Shitkicker, Deserter
.

“I said
on your feet!
” she screeched, and this time we all stood up, slowly, slouchingly. One by one we held out our hands, and with a curt nod Little Mother sent one of her grunts, a tall black kid whose knees were too high up on his legs, into the cabin with a small DNA scanner. At the same time, one of the other uniforms began working a larger handheld. The skinny guy waved the scanner at each of us in turn like he was afraid we’d snatch it from him. I came up green. The Poet and Mara got a yellow.

“Not in d-d-database,” the skinny one said like the word had been taught to him recently, and at great cost.

Little Mother nodded, still staring at me. “And
you
are—”

“I have a safe passage from General Icahn,” Mara said immediately. “If I may reach for it? ”

I blinked. I’d never heard of Icahn, but if Michaleen was drawing that kind of water, I wondered again why in the fuck my card had been pulled for this.

Little Mother had transformed at the name Icahn, suddenly getting quiet. After a moment, she nodded, and Mara reached into her jacket and produced a data cube, which she tossed at the short officer, who caught it with a lightning move that reminded me that even the shitheel of the SFNA had some serious tech stuffed inside their skins. She didn’t even glance at it, just held it in her hand for a moment and then nodded, tossing it back. Mara snatched it from the air with equal ferocity, dropping it into her cleavage with flair.

“They’re clear. Weapons? ”

The soldier in the corridor looked up from his handheld. “Clear.”

Little Mother nodded, and the whole lot of them walked off without another word, leaving us alone in the suddenly spacious-seeming cabin, the door swinging weakly from one hinge. In the hall outside, a crowd of people three deep was crushed up against the far wall, miserable and sweaty. I stared back at them for a second or two, feeling that static electricity that preceded mob action, but just as I was convinced we were about to be rushed, the Poet stepped into the doorway, leaned against the broken hinges, and studied his nails.

“Anyone enters,” he said, “I will be irritated. You will all be dead.”

He waited a beat, still making a show of looking at his own hand, the tats dancing and spinning on his neck, and then he turned and sat down again. I found myself looking at a filthy little kid, his eyes the only white part of him, clutched to the legs of a woman not much taller than him and looking dirtier, which didn’t seem possible. After a moment, I stepped forward, causing a sudden rustle to sweep through the crowd, and pushed the door back into place, trusting to friction to hold it shut. I glanced at my feet. It didn’t take much to threaten fucking civilians. It didn’t take much to push around people who’d never held a gun or killed for survival. That was easy. And cheap.

I didn’t look at the Poet as I took my own seat. Time wasn’t right, but I was keeping an invoice for him, and I planned to collect on it someday.

More shrill shouting from Little Mother down the corridor. I looked at Mara again. “Why Brussels?” I asked. I felt good. I’d
been
feeling good. Aside from the new suit, my second in two days—this one blessedly free of piss smell—I looked like the same broken-down bastard, my hairline a little higher, my nose a little more crooked. Inside, I felt fucking fifteen again. My leg still ached, but it was a distant, impersonal thing that I could easily ignore. I felt light and sharp, relaxed but energetic, like I could go to sleep in an instant or stick to the walls, whatever the next moment required.

She had closed her eyes and feigned sleep. “The eternals, Mr. Cates,” she said without opening her eyes. “Weapons and information. You can’t just hit the nets and ask questions—either the army or the cops are gonna pick up your feed and backtrace you. Keyword recognition—I hear they even have a box that analyzes keystroke patterns and gives ’em a good shot at guessin’ who you
are
just based on what you type into a terminal.” She shrugged. “So, we go to a friend of mine.”

I grinned. “You’re pretty useful, for a Taker.”

“It’s a job requirin’ multiple talents, Mr. Avery.” She opened one eye. “I wouldn’a be expectin’ a fucking gunmonkey to understand the complexities.” She sighed and shut her eye. “You can’t shoot information.”

“We need less talking,” the Poet suddenly said, “and a lot more listening. Tell me what you hear.”

Mara’s eyes opened again, and we looked at each other for a long moment.

“I hear nothing,” Mara said.

The silence was perfect. My HUD snapped into bright clarity and I was on my feet. The Poet was smiling, nodding at me.

“Yes,” he said.

For a second, the silence vibrated inside me, coming up from the floor and burring into my legs. Five hundred desperate bastards squeezed in like cargo, two dozen pissed-off soldiers doing fucking humiliating train duty, and none of them making a noise. I looked at Mara and heard Michaleen’s voice in my head:
everyone
.

“Someone crashing the party? ” I whispered.

She shrugged her whole body and her eyebrows and then nodded her head a little. She looked like she would close her eyes and take a nap. Movement behind me made me spin, but it was just the Poet, jacket off, flexing his huge arms, twisting his torso this way and that.

“Anyone outside? ” I asked, staring in wonder at the Poet, muscles rippling under taut, oily-looking flesh. It was fascinating, like snakes living inside him, maggots squirming to get out—like the cells were eager to start throttling people. I imagined myself in a fistfight with the Poet, and augments or not, it wasn’t pretty for me.

“Clear,” Mara said. “Why—”

I spun back and stepped to the window, throwing it open as far as it would go, which wasn’t too far. I studied it for a second, cocking my head, and then turned halfway, bent my arm, and smashed the window out with my elbow. I felt wonderful. My augments were smoothly managing my adrenaline, endorphins, blood oxygen—everything. It felt good to be able to do the work again I’d always done.

“Give me some room to work,” I said to Mara as I levered myself backward out through the opening. I leaned out and held onto the rough corrugated exterior of the train. The wind tore at me as I looked around; the grassy embankment was empty. To my right was a rusty metal ladder attached to the car. Taking hold of a rung, I pulled myself up and out easily, bracing for the ancient metal to give way and send me sprawling to the ground.

All the bars in my HUD were bright green, pulsing with my heartbeat, which remained slow and steady, unconcerned.

I took a deep breath and pulled myself up, crawling on top of the car while my blood oxygen levels scrolled past in an unobtrusive gray font. I hoped someone got an award for that font; it was a work of fucking genius. Thinking about the millions of little details that went into shit like my hand-me-down augments, I flopped over onto my back and stared up at the sky, blue and white and gray, and then rolled onto my knees and pushed myself up onto my feet, facing back toward the rear of the car where the soldiers had been headed. Whatever had shut the train down had come from that direction, and the best tactic I could come up with was to get behind it.

I stepped carefully, taking it slow—which was hard. I wanted to run. I wanted to sprint through everything and just kick everything’s ass. When I reached the back end of the car, I got down on my belly and slipped my head over the edge and quickly scanned the link between us and the last car of the train. No one in sight, and no sound except the wind, the whole world just dead and empty. I paused; you had to know your space, where people would come at you, where your exits were. I pushed back up onto my feet and leaped over the gap between the cars, a sudden feeling of exhilaration shooting through me and making my status bars flash.

I landed softly on the next car and trotted down to the butt end of the train, dropping back onto my belly for a quick peek over the edge. I waited a few heartbeats and then swung myself over the edge, letting myself down slowly until I was a few inches from the small platform just outside the door of the car. Dropping the last few inches, I crouched down and peered in, my eyes adjusting instantly to the light difference.

The car was crowded with people. Most of them were in narrow, cramped bunks nailed up against the walls of the car, but some were seated in the aisle, on top of each other, bundles and boxes piled up between them, on top of themselves, everywhere.

They were all perfectly still, staring. I counted to ten, watching, and when no one had so much as blinked, I twisted the latch on the door slowly, grimacing, and eased it open, the metal-on-metal grinding sounding loud and disastrous to my ears as it eased into its pocket. I kept low, duckwalking into the car, but no one even glanced at me, their eyes fixed on some distant invisible object, their lips slack.
Pusher
, I thought to myself. Fucking Psionic freaks, making you dance from across the room just by thinking hard at you. I’d known way too many of them, and a knot of sour anxiety bloomed in my belly.

As I slowly crabbed my way forward, I cast my eyes around, looking for anything that could be a weapon. Spotting a decent-sized walking cane clutched in the slack hand of one of the passengers, I pulled it from his grasp and weighed it briefly in my hands. The balance sucked, but it had decent weight to it and felt like good, solid, synthetic wood. It would cave in a skull as well as anything.

At the forward door, I crouched down and peered through the cloudy glass, ducking down in sudden shock; the five soldiers, including Little Mother, were all standing just outside the next car. I counted three and eased up again, getting a better look: They were frozen as well, locked in postures that looked surprised and awkward, their weight on their back feet. I eased the door open just enough to slip past, easing it back into place while staying as low as possible, my legs starting to burn a little with the effort. The soldiers remained perfectly still. I turned my head and found Little Mother’s sidearm an inch from my nose, snug in its white holster. Instead of the standard-issue military sidearms that were linked to the soldier’s augments, refusing to fire for anyone else, this was a skinny-looking monster I’d never encountered before, superficially resembling the Roon 87 but obviously cheaper, with a longer barrel. I reached up and lifted it carefully from the holster, brought it down into my own gravity, and checked the chamber. I dropped the clip into my hand and glanced at it: full and plump, thirty-two shots.

“You’re a naughty one,” I whispered as I pushed the clip back in until it clicked home. “Swapping for a non-regulation piece, you little minx.” I ran my eyes over Little Mother one last time, wondering where she might hide extra clips. I didn’t see anything obvious and I didn’t have time to do a proper search. I pushed through the soldiers and inched myself up onto the balls of my feet, squinting into our car.

There were no cots in this one, purely semiprivate berths with the corridor running between the tiny rooms, the crowd packed tightly against the wall across from the berths. Three women were grouped outside our door, each wearing a long black coat, their uniformly dark hair tied up in tight buns sitting on their heads like crabs. Cocking the hammer with my palm, slowly, I reached up and unlatched the door. Sliding it open just far enough, I carefully shouldered my way through it. Once inside the car, I raised the gun and paused, taking a deep breath, steadying myself. I needed surprise; the moment the Pusher became aware of me, it was over.

I started the duckwalk again.

They were listening at the door, whispering. The whispers were formless, wordless, just a hissing noise drifting back toward me, a buzzing in the air. I moved the gun as I walked, ticking it from one to the other, getting a feel for the distances and the speed. Halfway to them, I stopped, steadied myself, and took a bead on them. They were standing in a close group—one with her ear almost comically pressed against our broken door, one off slightly to her side, and one behind them, leaning in toward them. I settled on the one in the rear; when she dropped, she’d fall into the other two, slowing them down.