The Digital Plague (18 page)

I took her hand, Marko panting in impatience behind us. Her skin was warm and dry, soft, the tendons beneath the skin taut and powerful. I liked touching her. You didn’t touch anyone in the System, not unless you were trying to choke the life out of them or something, or at least not unless you were going to
try
and choke the life out of them. I was reluctant to pull away but let her extract her hand without protest.

“Yes, Mr. Marko?” she said, still looking at me.

“A signal, Colonel,” he said, touching the brick. “It’s SSF, encrypted, and there’s a lot of traffic.”

She frowned. “And your analysis?”

“I think—”

The hover shuddered, seemed to jump under us as if hitting an invisible bump in the air, and then went dark and dead, all the vibration gone, the three of us plunged into opaque, total darkness for a second. For one heartbeat it was like floating in a void, and Marko’s voice drifted to me through the perfect silence, the perfect dark.

“—we’re fucked.”

Day Seven:
Littered The Space Around
Us Like Sullen Monuments

You never get the easy way,
I thought as the emergency lights flickered on, bathing us in a weak green glow. Everything tilted wildly. Hense, too small for the restraints, flew up and around and saved herself from smashing into the ceiling by grabbing my arm, her grip a painful vise on my wrist as her weight yanked me against the chair’s restraints, almost choking me. Marko grunted as he slapped against his own restraints, but his chain of black boxes flew up and dashed against the roof, making dull, heavy noises. From somewhere outside the cabin a tearing sound replaced the muffled humming that had embraced us. As Hense flapped above me like some sort of human kite, I could see flashes of her gold badge.

Happling’s voice, tinny and small, buzzed from somewhere above me.

“Boss? You all strapped in back there? I don’t know what the fuck is going on. The stick’s dead, I have no control. Repeat, no control.”

“You’re busted,” Marko gritted out through clenched teeth, his hands white-knuckled on the armrests. “They remote-disabled the brick. Standard operating procedure when an SSF vehicle is stolen.”

“Fucking hell,” Hense said with zero emotion, her voice strained, her eyes on mine. “You hear that, Happ?”

“Copy. Tell Mr. Fucking Wizard that would have been fucking useful fucking
hours
ago, then send the stupid little fuck up here to see what he can do.”

“Ever hot-wire a brick, Marko?” Hense said, her voice sounding calm and unconcerned, as if she experienced fucking free fall once a day to stay sharp.

The kid looked like he was smiling. “I can take this piece of shit apart and rebuild it,” he spat, one hand working at the chair restraints. “How much time do I have?”

“Happ?”

There was a delay, during which Marko freed himself and almost went shooting off to a broken neck before catching himself. He began doggedly climbing upward to the cockpit, hand over hand, using the seatbacks. Then Happling’s voice buzzed above me again. “Four minutes forty-six until we’ll be too low and too fast to recover.”

I heard Marko curse. “Tight ship you’re running here, Colonel,” I said.

“Shut the fuck up,” she said, her dead mass making me feel like my arm was being pulled from its socket. “Do you have anything useful to offer?”

“My job description with this endeavor doesn’t include flying the fucking hover, Colonel,” I said. “Got any emergency packs on this tub?”

Happling’s voice buzzed from her coat again. “We’re over the fucking Atlantic Ocean, jackass,” he hissed. “If you want to kill yourself and all of us with you, please find a quicker way.”

The tearing noise was getting louder, and the vibration made everything jump and sizzle in front of me. I looked up at Hense. I’d never met anyone in the System who was that calm when death was all around—except Monks. I was terrified, holding my shit together by some thin miracle, panic like a bubble inside me expanding and pushing against my control. But Hense, she just hung on to me and looked down at me, her face serene. Suddenly I wanted to be that sure of myself.

The lights flickered and went out. I thought,
Fuck, not in the dark.

The lights came back on, and then Happling’s voice was barking again. “Hang on, Mr. Wizard here thinks he can get the displacers back online but I’ll have to dead-stick, so it’s going to be rough.”

“It’s
going to be
rough?” I muttered. I looked up at Hense. “You got a good grip?”

She didn’t answer immediately, as if seriously considering the question, and then nodded once.

The tearing sound now became a scream that hurt my ears, and the sensation of being sucked up out of my seat was replaced by one of being pushed down into it by a huge invisible hand. Hense came crashing down, half on top of me and half in the aisle, letting a soft grunt escape. As if by magic, the normal gravity of the hover was restored. I celebrated by leaning forward, putting my head down between my knees, and puking up a thin gruel of stringy phlegm.

The vibration snapped back twice as bad, jittering me up and down in my seat and shaking loose anything not welded in place. Marko’s bag of tricks started burping up its contents, which jumped around the cabin like living things. Hense pulled herself into her seat and strapped herself in again more tightly. Before I could say anything to her, the hover flipped over and I was being sucked out of my seat again, the straps cruelly digging into my shoulders, whatever rancid blood I had left inside me rushing to my head.

“Hang on!” Happling’s tiny voice shouted. “This ain’t gonna be pretty!”

Turning my head wasn’t easy; the invisible hand didn’t like it and pushed back, hard and smothering. Hense was being pulled out of the seat slowly but irresistibly, her body just too damn small for the restraints to be of much assistance. Slowly, fighting for each inch, I got my arm extended toward her and took hold of her lapel, digging my bony fingers into the material and trying to exert some downward force on her.

The noise became a wall of sound, impossible to discern individual parts, like god tearing the universe apart. My stomach started doing flips and I realized we were in a spin, gravity jumping from top to bottom over and over again. Something heavy and solid thunked into my head and I barely noticed, the new pain swept away on the river of my other discomforts.

Then everything went quiet and still. The cabin stopped shivering and resolved into a solid room again, Hense and I dropped snugly back into the seats, and aside from a tinny screeching noise, it was peaceful. I blinked, staring at Hense, who stared back at me with something close to amazement on her face.

I realized the screeching noise was Happling screaming in the cockpit a second or two before we smacked down into the earth.

It was common knowledge that the SSF had only one factory still building hovers. It was automated and dated to sometime just after Unification, located somewhere in fucking Indiana or some shit like that, the middle of nowhere, not a city left for hundreds of miles in any direction. Droids churned out hovers from raw materials, and the hovers were perfect—not a single seam, not a single loose bolt, 100 percent operational upon delivery and built to fucking last. Which was good, because the SSF had been hot-fixing that single plant for twenty fucking years, making repairs as needed but unable, or for some reason unwilling, to build a new goddamn plant. You had to admit, Droids took away every damn job there was, but they built some high-quality hovers.

We must have hit the ground going about three or four hundred miles an hour, the shock of it swirling up through me, shoving my organs into new configurations and smoothing my hair briskly, and then we bounced, everything going still and silent again for about five seconds, when we hit again. The shuddering resumed, along with a completely new noise that sounded like we were stuck in some giant’s throat and he was trying to clear us, an almost wet-sounding roar in time with the brain-swelling shaking. But the goddamn hover held together. It went on and on, longer than I thought possible, longer than I could stand, until I realized I was screaming, too, just pushing my voice out so it could be swept away in that maelstrom as if I hadn’t made any noise at all.

Slowly, things scaled back. The noise became merely unbearably loud, the shaking became just turbulence, my own scream became audible and I let it die, my throat burning. I could feel the momentum of the brick, a coherent force again. We were spinning lazily, grinding against the earth but slowing down steadily. My hand was still clinging to Hense’s coat so tightly my knuckles hurt, and I looked at her. To my amazement she smiled, her teeth white and perfect, the product of decent medical care.

“Mr. Cates,” she said, her voice for the first time a little unsteady, “you were fucking
useless
during that.”

There was a crash and then Marko rolled into the cabin covered in dust and sporting a deep gash on his forehead that spat blood at an alarming rate. He stumbled to his knees and managed to stop himself more or less upright.

“Anyone alive back here? That man,” he continued without waiting for an answer, “is a fucking maniac. He
laughed
the whole way down, like this was
fun.
”

“Fucking pussy,” Happling’s tinny voice chortled from Hense’s coat. “Fucking pussy was
praying
in here. To
god
or something.”

With a loud groan and final shudder, the hover ground to a stop.

“Thank fucking
god,
” Marko muttered.

Hense was up in a flash, striding forward. “Happ? You all right?”

“Fine,” Happling shouted back. “I think the pilot’s the only one
supposed
to survive a crash in this tub.”

Paris. Like Newark a ghost town, except bigger, I thought. “I’m fine, too,” I said, forcing myself to unstrap and stand up, my legs shaking and my head swimming. “Thanks for fucking asking.”

“Mr. Marko,” Hense said, “good work. Get a fix on our position, if you please, and scan outside and let me know what’s waiting for us.”

Happling appeared in the hatchway, arms hanging on the lintel. He looked fresh and unharmed, the bastard. “We’re within half a mile of Paris, I’ll tell you that,” he said, satisfied. “I caught a visual before we ditched.”

Marko remained kneeling on the floor. “Sure, sure. Give me a minute. I’m trying to swallow my lungs back into my chest.” He took a deep, quivering breath and reached for his bag. I was happy to see his arms shaking as he moved. At least the goddamn Techie was as exhausted as I was.

I was content to watch the kid pull some of his equipment together and start waving weakly at it, his face once again bathed in the sick green light of his tiny screen. “I don’t see any signs of life out there,” he said. “Looks like we’re within a mile of the city, like the captain said. I can get a fix on the beacon signal that ought to lead us straight to its source, which I presume will be Mr. Kieth.” He let his arm drop limply to his side. He looked around. “I’m guessing we’re walking there.”

Happling leaned forward and clapped him on the back. “You can ride on my shoulder, like a fucking parrot.”

Hense was all business, checking her weapon with a few quick, efficient moves and looking around. “We’re all alive and uninjured. Let’s move. We don’t exactly have
time.
”

Happling straightened up. “Right. Gather your gear, Marko.” The big man looked at me but said nothing, storming into the cabin to retrieve his bag of guns, ripping it open and pulling one of the shredders out. He tore the huge clip from it, inspected it jauntily, and slammed it back into place. There was the almost inaudible whine of the rounds being counted, and then the readout on top of the rifle flashed green, and Happling grinned.

“Here come the boom stick,” he said, slinging the rifle and bag over his shoulder and marching to the hatch. He looked back at Hense and waited for her nod before smashing the release with his hand. The hatch popped open with a hiss, and weak light filtered in. Happling crouched down with the rifle against his shoulder and did a fast turn, eyes wide and alert. Without putting the gun down or taking his eyes off the scene, he said “Clear” over his shoulder and then jumped out and down.

From outside I heard him shout back, “But very fucking weird.”

Hense was out the hatch after him. I glanced at Marko, who was still slumped on the floor, and then I brushed past him, trying to force my body to move steadily. I still almost fell out of the goddamn hover, recovering sloppily in the damp grass. Hense and Happling hadn’t gone more than a few feet away before freezing. I stopped immediately.

We were surrounded by Monks.

I hadn’t seen so many of the Tin Men in years. Now and then a beggar or a crazy one wandered around bothering people, but after the Monk Riots most had been destroyed by the System Pigs in one of their rare useful moments, and aside from the small bands of them in the wilderness they weren’t common, or much of a problem. Now there were at least fifty in the clearing, and they all appeared to be dead and posed in a variety of positions.

The hover had flattened some trees and emerged from a small wooded area bordered by a broad band of grassy land that maybe had once been a road. A circular clearing spread out around us, enclosed by a concentric ring of trees. The Monks were all mutilated—missing limbs, wires and boards spilling out of holes torn in their chassis, some burned or melted or plagued by rust, some bodies without heads and other heads without bodies. They littered the space around us like sullen monuments grouped in little tableaux, bent and fixed into position. Some had obviously fallen over, and a few appeared to have bird nests in their abdomens.