Digital Plague

XI Day Five: A Certain Freedom in Being Completely Fucked

Deciding not to make things worse, I stayed still-besides, the doctor’s gun was pointed at me. Jabali and I had more or less unconsciously followed your best practice and kept far apart, and now he took advantage of the gap by yanking out his own piece and covering the good doctor with it.

“Doc,” he said, “don’t pull a fucking rod unless you mean to use it. You don’t mean to use it. That makes you a shithead.”

Jabali glanced at me. I didn’t look at him, but I gave a curt little shake of the head. I didn’t want to kill the Doc; I was killing enough people on a daily basis as it was. The wail of the emergency Vid announcement continued to buzz around us, muffled by concrete and glass, and I put my hands up carefully.

Hesitation wasn’t attractive in a Gunner. Hesitation got you killed, and a feeling of unease filled me like black jelly.

“I’m sorry,” Terries said smoothly, shrugging. He was used to being in charge, you could tell. He thought having the gun in his hand made him in charge again. A moment before he’d been shaken, hesitant, cowed, and now he was grinning at me as if one of us hadn’t killed nearly sixty people, killed them while looking them in the eye. “If you walk out the door, I am on a rapid countdown to a horrible death.”

“You have my blood sample,” I pointed out. “You can work with that. You don’t need me to work on this.”

He nodded. “Perhaps, Mr. Cates. That’s a small sample, though. And we don’t know the behavior of these nanobots. Perhaps they are tuned to your biorhythmic signature and will revert if you are not within close proximity. Perhaps they go inert or self-destruct if they detect they are not in a live biological system.” He shrugged. “Mr. Cates, letting you walk out of here would be akin to suicide.”

“So, you want to just keep me pasted to your side for the foreseeable future?” I smiled. “What’s next, asking me to tie myself up?”

Jabali snorted. Terries smiled, and when he started to move his free hand in a shell gesture all my instincts lit up like bright red alarms: Avery Cates, fucking moron. The lights went out. There were no windows in the lab, and the darkness was absolute. As adrenaline sizzled inside me, I let my legs just collapse under me, going limp, hitting the floor like a sack of shit. Two shots burped, the muzzle flashes bright as a strobe, showing me Jabali and Terries in a still life, all blue-gray.

I started crawling immediately, trying to be quiet. I had the floor plan of the lab in my head, mostly-what I’d seen, anyway. Not measured out, but I could bang against the walls. The floor smelled like disinfectant, and my breath was hot and sour around me as I pulled myself with my elbows, pushing with my knees. This was what I got for being fucking lazy and arrogant, put on the floor by a fucking civilian. This was what I got for hesitating.

“Mr. Cates,” I heard Terries say, and then Jabali’s gun exploded three times, fast, followed by shoes scraping on the floor and something heavy crashing over. Terries was learning fast that he wasn’t really in charge. He was also learning the golden rule of gunfights: things only counted as advantages if they didn’t make the situation worse for you, too.

I glanced up, eyes roving blindly, and saw the tiny glowing spots of the elevator buttons, very close. I fixed my position in my mind and started crawling toward it.

“You should know,” Terries said, his actor’s voice coming from behind me and to my right, where the table and screens were, “that I have a direct link to the SSF, and they are on their way. The alarm was tripped when we entered the lab.”

I believed this. He was director of something or other, after all, someone who’d actually met Undersecretary Ruberto and probably the all-smiling, all-bullshitting avatar of Dick Marin. He’d had the juice to dispatch three psionics to the Library to gather me up; the cops probably did come when he called. At least, I was sure they did when there wasn’t a general emergency demanding their attention.

I’ve killed my share of System Pigs, I wanted to say back. If you mentioned my name I’m sure they’re fighting over who gets to respond. I concentrated on not breathing too loudly and covering ground. When the glowing buttons loomed up directly above me, I put my back against the doors, forcing my burning lungs to work slowly, and reached up, seeking the call button. When I found it I pressed it gently. It lit up softly, and I flinched; against System Cops or anyone with talent, that would have been enough to bring a hail of gunfire my way, and I cursed myself silently for being a rusty asshole.

Nothing happened and I relaxed, pretty sure Terries hadn’t noticed. Behind me, I felt the nearly silent humming operation of the elevator, and I held my gun firmly in my hand, aimed up at the ceiling, moving my eyes this way and that.

In the System-at least the parts of it that I lived in-all that mattered, all you really had, was your reputation. Two men went into a box, and one got killed and one climbed out, it doesn’t matter if you were bloodied and beaten. It doesn’t matter if you begged and bribed, wept and cursed inside that box-all that matters is that you lived and he died. That’s all anyone ever remembered. And it didn’t matter if you staggered home and climbed into a bottle, wept some more, and had the fucking shivers for a week straight-that shit didn’t matter. He was dead and you’d survived, and thus you had a rep.

So far, everyone who’d ever come up against me had died. Sometimes it had been pure luck-a stumble, a distraction, a lucky shot. Sometimes I’d been able to cheat, get some inside information. Usually it was just that I had taken some time to recon my surroundings and knew where the hiding spots were, the geography of the place. None of that mattered to the rep: on the streets I was just Avery Cates, who’d never been taken down, who’d left a long trail of dead bodies in his wake. And over time the space that formed around you on the street got bigger, and people got more spooked when you looked at them, and the number of people who wanted to kill you just to say they did it grew. And none of it meant a fucking thing, really, but it was all you ever had.

Sitting spread-eagled on the floor in the pitch darkness, I felt the crank air being pushed past me as the car descended and thought, Fuck the rep-it’s good to be lucky for a change.

Now it was patience time again; I sat and regulated my breathing and waited for the elevator to arrive. I felt the car settling behind me and braced myself, ready to stay upright when the doors split open, eyes in the general area that Terries’ voice had come from. Painful white light invaded the lab as the elevator doors opened, but I forced my eyes to search the glare for Terries, finding him hiding behind his bank of monitors, his face a ruddy moon, his eyes squinted against the brightness. I noted the form of Jabali, off to my right and crouched down, and ignored him.

My hand came up automatically, training the gun on the good doctor, and immediately there was a movement behind me, fast and efficient, and something cold and metallic was pressed against the back of my head.

“Don’t do it, shithead,” the cop said quietly. “Or I’ll tear off your legs and beat you over the head with them.”

His breath was all around me for a second, warm and sweet, and I imagined thousands, millions of those tiny drones being pulled from me like an invisible wind, burrowing into him, setting his death in motion. Across the room Terries opened his eyes and blinked at me in shock, frozen for a moment. I picked the spot. A gap between two monitors that showed me his belly-a gut shot wasn’t immediately lethal, but it was painful and incapacitating, useful when you wanted to put someone down without making a decision just yet. His head rose above the equipment like a red moon, coiffed and shaved, manicured, and I could kill him with a twitch if I wanted to.

My eyes found Jabali, who stood frozen in place, his gun half lowered. His eyes met mine and he extended two fingers from his grip on the automatic. Two cops behind me. Not much chance of putting them both on their asses with my smooth balletic moves. I put my eyes back on Terries. Everything had gone completely to shit so fast, I was still catching up. I knew I didn’t deserve anything. I knew I was a bad man. But this was getting ridiculous.

There was a certain freedom in being completely fucked, though. I thought, Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds, and squeezed the trigger just as the cop behind me shoved the barrel of his gun viciously into the shallow skin on the back of my head, and my shot went wild. Terries dropped to the floor with a screech. I hadn’t killed him, though, because he proceeded to scream and thrash around.

“You,” the cop said, almost in my ear, “are a stupid little shit, huh?”

I closed my eyes and thought, yep. I heard the rustle of fabric and winced just before the butt of his gun.