The Eternal Prison (24 page)

 

I leaned forward to squint at the screen. “Fucking sewers,” I said. “There’ll be defenses.”

 

The Star wasn’t owned by anyone, but Techies had been using it for years now, and in their own loose way they’d run the place. I didn’t doubt if you lacked the secret handshake or the fucking password, the whole place would collapse around you while some Techie in Singapore watched via remote random-packeted Vid feed, laughing their ass off.

 

Marko nodded, sweeping the schematic off the screen before I could stop him, popping up four more boxes in a neat arrangement. “Sure, but the power’s out. These may not be completely up-to-date, but from what I can see, they have trunk lines, which you can’t cut individually. Good work except you have to add local modulators or else your whole enterprise gets fried. But if the whole grid’s out, they’re out. Major backup generators here, here, and here, but looks like they had to pick and choose what they kept hot in this scenario, so the pipes look clear.”

 

I nodded, taking his word for it. “Okay. What if the power comes back on while we’re in the pipes?”

 

He nodded. “I don’t have a screen to represent painful death.”

 

The urge to smack him returned in force. I suspected it might be something I’d have to live with for the rest of my life. “All right, then. Let’s not wait around for the power to come back online. Let’s get wriggling.” I looked at Krasa as Marko stood up, going through his pockets rapidly. She was staring at the screens again, arms loose at her sides. I knew the expression—exhaustion, ennui, despair. I’d seen it up close plenty of times in my life and every day back at Chengara Penitentiary. With her ten thousand–yen haircut and fancy coat, the expression looked worse, like she’d peeked over your shoulder and seen Death riding up on his pale horse.

 

I turned and moved for the drop cabin to get her out of my sight. If Krasa was going to self-destruct, I wanted her upwind.

 

 

The sewer pipe had been underground, originally, but was now half exposed, a semicircle of rusted pipe big enough for a man to crouch and crawl his way into, then widening until he could stand up straight. I paused for a moment, staring at the inky blackness within the pipe, wondering if I was doomed to spend the rest of my short, unhappy life crawling in and out of narrow, horrible spaces. The tunnel narrowed and split off into dozens of smaller feeds, but Marko had sketched the route for me, and there were no defenses or obstacles to slow us down. The route ended in a small junction, where a rusting ladder embedded in the wall led up to an encrusted grating, dark and foreboding. It popped up easily enough, and I pulled myself up into a dark, damp area filled with broken tile and porcelain fixtures, most of which looked like they’d been torn off the walls and hurled at the floor with force. I smelled mold in the air, and I could hear a thin trickle of water somewhere.

 

Krasa followed, and I helped Marko up one-handed, lifting him into place, not a stitch of his prissy little middle-class suit out of place. I smiled and brushed him off a little with mocking care as he whipped out a razor-thin little handheld that spread open three different ways, tripling in size instantly. He spun around, holding it up.

 

“No power, no signals. I can’t get heat sigs, but it’s pretty quiet.” His little eyes, buried among the thick curls of his hair, swiveled around and finally landed on me. He looked five years old suddenly. “The, uh, only way out is, uh, that way.”

 

He gestured with his handheld over my shoulder, and it suddenly lit up red and started beeping.

 

“Fuck,” he muttered, gesturing at it. “It’s buggy.”

 

“All right,” I said, letting my eyes linger on Marko for a moment as he pretended to be engrossed in making his handheld behave. “Follow me, then.” I pulled my gun and turned. The walls of the room had once been tiled white, but most of the tiles were broken up on the floor like a ruined beach, and the walls were bare concrete and silky webs, dust and cocooned dinners hanging everywhere. The only obvious exit from the room was a darkened archway, square tiles hanging from it at crooked angles.

 

“Take the first junction right,” Marko whispered behind me.

 

“Don’t whisper,” I said. “Assholes whisper when walking into a bunker wired up with who-knows-what. If they can’t hear us whispering, the tech in this shithole isn’t worth our time.”

 

I took the first right and the rough floor began sloping upward. Our environment, while remaining infested with webs and dirt—and suddenly, the dried shells of dead roaches like leaves under our boots—dried out rapidly as we rose upward. Marko guided us through a maze of corridors, all cramped and filthy, and we rose steadily until I stepped warily into a wide, open space of rough-hewn rock and uneven floor, unfamiliar shadows formed by mysterious light. It looked like someone had formed the room out of the rock without the benefit of explosives, maybe with a dull teaspoon chiseled against the stone for centuries. Then the shadows resolved themselves into oblong black boxes, linked by thick, winding cables, and large, dead Vid screens fastened to one wall, a bank of inputs and instruments beneath them. Fragile-looking chairs were tucked neatly under the consoles. The light leaked from weak photocells on the wall behind me, emergency disks that clicked on spilling back artificial moonlight, giving the room a pale, terrible glow.

 

“This is his lab?” I asked, looking around. The shadows formed by the irregular walls were pitch-black, impenetrable. On one wall a square of metal had been bolted. I leaned in, squinting, and saw it was a plaque, the block lettering covering it like squarish bugs. “And what the fuck,” I said, “does
brazen giant of Greek fame
mean?”

 

“Wait,” Krasa said, her voice low and phlegmy, like she hadn’t spoken in years.

 

“We’ll have to ask Amblen,” Marko said, bustling past me and approaching the screen-covered wall. “And for that we need power.”

 

I opened my mouth to ask the little shit where he thought we’d be getting power
from,
when Krasa suddenly stepped forward just as a shotgun blast sucked the atmosphere away and made us all crouch down, the silence sucking all the air out of the room and leaving us panting.

 

“Stay down,” a voice said.

 

My eyelids fluttered, my brain slowing down again, just a twitch in my thoughts, everything getting gooey and stretched out. I snapped back a moment later, everything rushing to catch up, like I was falling toward the present down a narrow tunnel. The voice had been familiar, a man’s deep voice, and the sound of it was like a nail in my brain. I went still.

 

“I see you,” Krasa whispered. I turned my head and we looked at each other, her golden eye glowing softly in the washed-out light.

 

“My Russian friend is behind you,” the voice went on. I heard the scrape of boots to confirm this, and then a second set of feet moving. “He’s honor challenged and will shoot you in the back of the head first and wonder if he should have hesitated later.”

 

From the deep shadows off to the left of the Vid screens, a man stepped forward, shotgun—an old, wood-stock contraption from a previous, golden age—held easily in front of him. He came into the weak light and we looked at each other, staring.

 

“You,” Krasa said slowly to the man, swallowing thickly. “You are Avery Cates.”

 

“The one and only, sister,” the man said. His eyes landed on me—
my
eyes—and his face stiffened. “What the
fuck,
” he whispered. Then he cocked his head a little, eyes shifting to the side.

 

“What?” He looked back at me. It was
me.
It was my face, my body. “A fucking avatar,” he said slowly. “They made a fucking
avatar
out of me.”

 

“Fuck you,” I said slowly, fighting through the weird syrup my mind had fallen into.

 

Marko was looking from the newcomer to me and back again. “Well, fuck, if you both—whatever you are—got out of Chengara at the same time, where the hell have
you
been?”

 

The bastard kept grinning at me. “Took me a while to get off the continent. Then, Venice mostly.” As I struggled for something to say back, his face crumpled, eyes closing tightly as he started to tremble. He brought his free hand up to his face and touched his forehead lightly.

 

“Shut up,” he whispered in the silence. “Shut up, shut up, shut
up.
”

 

 

 

 

PART TWO

 

 

 

 

XX

CRAZY WAS GOING TO HAVE TO WAIT

 

 

 

 

For a second after I spoke to Salgado, the voices faded a little, muting, and I wondered if maybe I’d just gone crazy. Maybe I was in a little room somewhere, screaming and tugging at my bonds, still insisting I could see the ghosts. Then, weak and low at first but gaining in volume, Salgado responded.

 

You’re in a pickle, son.

 

I opened my eyes again. I had Dolores Salgado in my head.

 

Keep talking to me. It’s easier if you concentrate on me.

 

I smiled despite myself.
Am I fucking crazy, Dolores? Even if you’re a fucking figment, I’d appreciate an honest answer.

 

“Mr. Cates?” I heard Guy say behind me. I turned my head a tick or two.

 

“Don’t speak.”

 

The voices swelled up again, swamping her and filling me with a hundred fragments, screams, mutterings, curses. I closed my eyes again and tried to focus my thoughts. I imagined a glass wall between me and the voices, and that helped, for a second.

 

Don’t listen to the old lady, Mr. Cates. She’s playing you. I should know. She’s been playing
me
for years.

 

I shuddered and squeezed my eyes shut tighter. Another voice I recognized. A voice I didn’t want in my head.

 

Curious, this. You must have been partially through the encoding procedure, hooked up to the network and momentarily two way on the data stream—up and down—when you were disconnected prematurely. Fascinating. There was a white paper on this possibility when we were vetting the original research, but I had to suppress it. The researcher sadly had to be liquidated.

 

I opened my eyes. “Guy,” I croaked. “If I asked nicely, would you kill me?”

 

“What?”

 

His tone of alarm was so sharp and panic-stricken I smiled. “Forget it.”

 

… five gets you twenty. Twenty gets you killed….

 

… eu penso I’m inoperante—eu penso I’m inoperante…

 

It might have been my imagination, but the swirl of voices seemed lessened somehow.

 

Are you paying attention, Mr. Cates? Undersecretary Salgado—excuse me,
former
Undersecretary Salgado is a cunning little minx. I wouldn’t follow her lead, I were you.

 

I tried imagining my glass wall again. Had I gone crazy? Was this what crazy was like? I’d always imagined you
knew
you’d gone nuts, somehow, that you marveled constantly at the crazy batshit things you were doing.

 

You’re not crazy, Mr. Cates. I’m here. We’re all here. Though some of us were marginal and are fading. It’s fascinating—I am aware of them fading.

 

Shut up, Marin,
I thought, hard.
Shut the fuck up.

 

Amazingly, they all did, for a second, a blissful beat of silence inside me. And then the crowd rushed back in.

 

I nodded to myself. Crazy was going to have to wait.

 

Taking a deep breath, I leaned forward until I could see around the corner. I moved slowly; people had the urge to snap into view fast in these sorts of situations, but jerky, fast movements attracted nervous eyes. Slow was the key. You edged into view and became just part of the background, something static.

 

Holding my breath and trying to keep the pane of glass up in my head, I edged forward, mouth open.

 

In the hall around the corner, five soldiers in their weird, off-white uniforms were crouched behind four overturned gurneys, already chewed into twisted sculptures by the shredders. They all had shielded face masks on, giving them each one large eye, with two short flexible tubes popping out from the mouth area and snaking to disappear inside the rest of their suit. Except for the three dead soldiers locked in eternal surprise on the floor, they might not have been human in those things. No one was firing, but the noise was still loud, and I figured this was complex-wide, an invasion. Down the hall was another set of swinging doors, one of which was missing a large chunk of itself. Through the gap I could see the dusty blue uniforms of Chengara’s guards.

 

Slowly, sweating in my filthy stolen uniform, I leaned back and turned to look at Guy. He stared at me in terror. Turning away, I stepped out into the hall, oriented myself, and launched myself diagonally across its width, eyes locked on the white uniforms. I squeezed the trigger and the shredder jumped in my hands, sending out an invisible wire that chewed up everything in its path. Half a clip of ammo was ten seconds, tops, but the soldiers on the far end were already twisting around to face me by the time I crashed into the far wall, letting my rubbery legs go out from under me. I’d missed one—through the dust and smoke I saw him rolling away, a white blur.