The Terminal State Read online

  “I will require the following items in order to fund and organize my office here,” Pikar boomed, tapping his fingers on the bar. “First—”

  I’d had enough. “First, shut the fuck up,” I said. I didn’t say it loud. Everyone heard me anyway. This was what I got paid for, if you counted a roof over my head and enough tasteless gruel to keep me alive—not to mention a bottomless tab at Bixon’s—as pay. I hadn’t received any better offers, so I’d stayed on, kicking asses and running shitheads along.

  The ex-cop looked at me, and to his credit all his nervous tics were instantly gone, replaced with the careful stillness of someone trained to handle himself. “Excuse me, citizen? ”

  I stood up, wooden cup in one hand as I slid my other one into the oily pocket of my raincoat. Waving the cup around, I pushed my hand through the slit cut into the pocket and put my palm on the butt of my prized Roon—the best handgun ever made—oiled every night and cleaned every other, gleaming and smooth like there was no such thing as rust, decay, or death. I made for the bar, working hard to keep the pain and stiffness in my leg from showing. “I said shut the fuck up. You’re making this place smell worse than it normally does with that bullshit, and that’s saying something.” I placed my cup on the bar. “Sorry, Bix.”

  Bixon nodded, his eyes still locked on Pikar. “No worries, Avery.”

  Pikar turned his head slightly toward Bix, but kept his eyes on me. Logging the bartender as a combatant, marking his position, probably noting for the first time the absence of visible hands. He shifted his weight and angled his hand from his belt to tap the badge.

  “You don’t want to fuck with police, friend,” he said. “This is official business.”

  I nodded, leaning with my back against the bar. The badge had shorted out and didn’t have the cheery gold glow of the holograph anymore. “From what I hear, the System Pigs’ business these days is tripping over themselves retreating from the army. You ain’t the first asshole to wander in here out of the fucking snow with holes in his fucking shoes trying to shake us down. You’re looking for soft touches. Keep walking until you find some.”

  That was his one chance, I decided. Fair was fair. Couldn’t blame a man for trying to score. Only for pushing his luck.

  He kept his flat little eyes on me and his hands perfectly still. His jowls, though, were quivering, rhythmically, bouncing slightly with every thudding heartbeat that kept his face purple. Then he smiled.

  “New York,” he said, jolly now. “The accent. You’re Old Work from the island, right? Spent a few weeks in some Blank Rooms here and there, uh? ”

  I shrugged. “You don’t know me.” He probably knew of me, my name, but it didn’t matter.

  He nodded. “Maybe not. I know your type. Strawman, stuffed with shit. You all think this piece of turd is your hero?” He suddenly asked the room. “You’re betting on the wrong man.”

  My own heart pounded and my stomach was complaining about Bixon’s swill. A cold sweat had popped out on my face too, and I wondered if there was any way to turn puking my guts out into an advantage in a gunfight.

  “Look out the windows, friend,” I advised. “We’ve called out the militia.”

  He squinted at me. I almost felt sorry for him: Every cop in the System had been transformed into an avatar, usually against their will. He hadn’t. That meant he’d been in some backwater post, a fuckup out in the middle of nowhere, or else he’d been running a lot longer than I’d imagined. Desperate. Shot on sight if the army found him, packed into a data brick for leisurely debriefing whenever the immortal Dick Marin felt like it if the cops picked him up—he was screwed. He wanted to look, but he didn’t want to be stupid, didn’t want to look stupid. That was all he had left. The aura of a cop.

  Everything falling apart, sure. Dingane had it right. Even the System Pigs were just ghosts these days.

  The shadows in the windows looked good. Menacing. Remy and his friends had balls, sure. They didn’t have any guns, but you couldn’t tell that through the windows. It didn’t matter if Pikar looked or not, if he saw men with rifles or kids pissing their short pants—it made him think, it fucked him up, and that was all it was meant to do.

  He snorted. “I’m taking control of this settlement,” he said slowly. “I am ordering you to hand over whatever it is you’re fondling in your pocket and take your seat.”

  I had everyone trained by this point, and I was pretty sure I could count on them to stay still and not do anything I’d regret. Except Bixon. I struggled to keep my eyes off the barrel-shaped asshole and contented myself with hoping he didn’t move. The whole place was still and quiet, narrowed down to Pikar and me, my aching leg and stiff back. I wondered, for a second, if Pikar was aching too, how old he was, what he’d been through.

  And then he moved.

  It was good, too. He’d taken the windows seriously and realized that with me and Bix standing across from him we were nailed in crossfire, so he went low, crouching down and yanking his guns out beautifully, both clear and in his hands in a blink as he duckwalked to put his back against the front door, out of the imaginary rifles’ sight-lines. Jerking the Roon up and out of my pocket, I put two bullets an inch or so from his left ear and then threw myself up and back onto the bar, giving myself a million tiny splinters as I pushed myself across, dropping behind it like a sack of wet cement.

  As I righted myself on the floor, I saw Bix heaving the shredder up with a yell, and before I could stop him he depressed the trigger and the familiar headsplitting whine filled the room, the 10-09 barked and jerked up out of Bixon’s hands, spluttering six rounds into the ceiling before it smacked Bix in the nose hard enough to break it.

  I hedgehogged up, poking my head over the bar just long enough to take in the room and then dropping back down, braced for the pop pop pop of a trained shot. There was nothing, no noise at all. I heaved myself back up with a grunt and let the bar support me for a moment, the Roon pointed at Pikar, who was slumped in front of the door, his belly a swamp of blood, one arm still up, holding his gun on me. Everyone else was still sitting, frozen, like this was all just the fucking floor show.

  Pikar grinned blood. As I slowly walked the length of the bar to step around, his gun followed me, inch by inch. Just as I cleared the crates, his finger twitched, sending me to the floor with a choking grunt. Instead of the thudding bark of a shot, there was just a dry click. I pushed myself back up to put the Roon on him. The cop was just laughing, still holding the gun on me. As I got to my feet, he pulled the trigger a dozen more times, getting the same dry click each time.

  “You shot me with a fucking shredding rifle,” he sputtered, flecks of bloody spit spraying from his mouth and landing on the floor, where the dry wood soaked them up forever. “You fucking rats. I don’t even have any fucking bullets.”

  I stood up and kept the shiny Roon on him. My ass burned like someone had stabbed a million tiny pieces of wood into it. “What kind of asshole pulls his piece if he can’t do anything with it? ” I hissed. I was angry. I wanted to slap his face for being a fucking asshole. “Were you going to throw it at me? ”

  “Fuck you.” He sighed, deflating. He was still holding his useless gun on me, even though his arm shook with the effort.

  “Avery,” Gerry suddenly said, her voice a scratchy whisper. “Okay, man, the situation’s calmed. We’ll take care of him from here.”

  I nodded without looking at her. Pikar was still smiling at me. “You were a cop,” I said. “You know how this works. You pull a gun, you take the consequences.” I’d learned a lot about the human race over the years. I’d learned that the dead didn’t stay dead. I’d learned that no good deed ever went unpunished. And I’d learned that trying to have a code of honor got you a lot of people telling you how much respect they had for you while they were beating your head against the floor.

  Ignoring the dull pain in my leg, I took a bead and put a shell in Pikar’s face. Then one more in his chest just to be safe, making him
twitch and flop. I turned and stumped back to the bar, slipping my Roon back into place and then putting my shaking hands flat on the bar. The only cure for Bixon’s rotgut was more, and fast. It only got deadly when you stopped.

  I

  I DIDN’T HAVE TIME FOR IT. I HAD PEOPLE TO KILL

  “What are you smiling at? ”

  I turned away from the darkness and the wind and focused on the trooper. I still hadn’t gotten used to the dark. There wasn’t a light anywhere, and no moon in the sky, and the whole world was just wind and the creaking, shaking truck bed, just a single uniform so white it seemed to glow with its own energy and fourteen other assholes who hadn’t been fast enough. The truck was ancient, a rust bucket being driven by a Droid on a programmed course. Distantly, I could see other trucks streaming across the desert, just bouncing headlights.

  The trooper was a fucking kid, but everyone was a fucking kid these days. His face was dirty, but he sat with the shredder on his knees like a man who wasn’t afraid of fifteen shitkickers who hated him and wished him dead, even if the shredding rifle bucked like a wild hog and took three seconds to warm up from cold metal—a crowd-control weapon only an asshole would use. Three seconds was a long time in my world. Or the world that used to be mine.

  I inched the smile up a notch. “In a couple of minutes I’m going to break both your thumbs, and I’m looking forward to it.”

  He studied me for a moment, his face blank. Then he smiled, ten years dropping from his face just like that. “Talk to me again and I’ll hook you to the back and drag you to the Recruit Center.”

  I laughed, nodding, and looked back at the desert, replaying my favorite memory: me on the ground, watching a hover rise into the air with a sudden jerk, Marlena’s face peering over the edge down at me. Sometimes I saw Michaleen’s face leering down instead of Marlena, cackling. Mocking me.

  I turned back to the interior of the truck bed for a moment. No one was looking our way, afraid to be associated with me, except Remy, who was still staring at me like I might pull Nutrition Tabs out of my ears. We were all just biological resources—the army needed manpower. They weren’t too picky about the quality of it—they had augments to make you stronger, faster, sharper—so they just went around scooping up every asshole who couldn’t run fast enough, pushed them into the grinder, and out came shock troops on the other end. It was a beautiful system.

  At least the army had resources to tap. The System Pigs, under the reins of Director of Internal Affairs Dick Marin—the King Worm, as he used to be known when he was just the top cop in the System—had converted every cop in the world, practically, into avatars. Droid bodies with digital brains. The avatars were expensive and required rarefied materials, and under the strain of a civil war, they’d lost their last avatar factory and were suffering severe manpower shortages as a result.

  The wind was exhiliratingly cold, and I was, against all odds, still alive. Feeling strangely cheerful, I looked back at the trooper. “Fuck you,” I said, still smiling.

  He thought about it, but after a moment he smirked and looked away. It would have been good if I’d gotten him up, off-balance, and pissed-off, but the kid had more on the ball than that. So I took a moment and went over my resources. Since I had a whole moment, I did it twice.

  Our silicon bracelets had been put on sloppy; I’d been out of mine for half an hour. That was one. I looked around the truck as the wind tore my hair—longer than I’d ever had it before—and considered my fellow presses. It was pretty much the entire population of Englewood who had survived the raid. Gerry, our unelected mayor, sat on the opposite side of the truck, up toward the cab, slumped over with her head down. Bixon, bleeding from his scalp and looking pale, stared straight ahead and moved with gelatinous ease every time the truck hit a bump, vacant. Remy, staring at me. Our eyes met and he blinked once, deliberately, and looked down at his lap and then back at me. I moved my eyes down, and he spread his hands slightly, flashing me his bare wrists. When I looked back at the kid’s face, he was smiling at me. I gave him a little smile back. Fucking Remy. He’d been following me around for months, telling the other kids he was my deputy , a word I’d never heard before. I liked the kid.

  So, I had me and a fourteen-year-old kid who’d grown up with a Droid nanny wiping his ass. I looked back at our guard. Soldiers were humans; they weren’t avatars with control chips like the cops, so you could negotiate with them, sometimes. I’d had some success bribing army grunts in the past—escaping from Chengara Penitentiary, I’d paid out millions of yen for a pair of parachutes and the right to jump out of a hover—but I didn’t think my yen was worth enough anymore, and I’d seen the grunt taking his marching orders from his commanding officer right before we’d pushed off. He might not be impressed with me, but he was scared shitless of the tall, skinny colonel with the white hair and perma-tan skin. Both of the colonel’s eyes had glowed softly, the left iris a cold silver and the right a warm orange. He didn’t smile. I had an instant impression that he had never smiled, that he might in fact lack the necessary muscles.

  “Cheer up, citizen,” he’d bellowed. “You gonna remember this day as the happiest day of your life, the day you joined the System of Federated Nations Army, an’ rejoiced.”

  Thinking of Chengara made me think of Michaleen. The Little Man was unfinished business, and here I was being kidnapped into the System of Federated Nations Army. I didn’t have time for it. I had people to kill. If I’d gotten moving three days ago like I’d intended, I wouldn’t have been scooped up with the rest of Englewood’s ridiculous population.

  I looked back at the kid and nodded. We had some pretty reliable sign language; the kid had attached himself to me and followed me everywhere, my fucking valet, and I’d taught him a few things. He nodded back, and I turned to study the guard, still sitting there at the back, shredder across his knees, looking about as fearsome as a daydream. The SFNA soldiers were fast, filled with augments that made them faster and stronger than nature had intended, with a host of extra little abilities like night-vision and such—one-on-one, they probably weren’t a match for the cop avatars they were waging this civil war against, but they still had bad motherfucker as a baseline. Me, I felt pretty good. A few months of eating steadily and taking it easy, with just an occasional head to crack, and I felt better than since before the Plague. My leg still ached and I wasn’t as fast as I’d once been, but I was in decent shape.

  I didn’t think I’d be able to handle the trooper on a level playing field, but I didn’t intend to play fair.

  There was nothing good about getting pressed, from what I’d heard. Aside from the fact that most of the people being pressed were going to be shock troops without much value to throw against entrenched positions or other suicidal missions, rumor had it that a lot of the officers sold people out of the army if someone wanted you badly enough—or sometimes wholesale, in big groups to anyone who had the cash. I could think of a few folks who might not mind getting their hands on me, and I didn’t want to find out if any of them were still interested.

  I signaled the kid, and he nodded again. He let the bracelets drop silently to the floor of the truck, stared at his feet for a few seconds as we bounced along, and then stood up.

  “I want to go home!” he shouted, putting some screech into it.

  The guard was already on his feet, shredder in his hands—fast. But he didn’t toggle the shredder into life. He held it on Remy as he balanced on the balls of his feet, but he didn’t regard the kid as a threat.

  “Sit the fuck down,” he ordered. “You make me say it again and I’ll smack you.”

  “I want to go home!” Remy shouted again. I kept my eyes on the guard, watching, and when his jaw locked and his weight shifted, I leaped up and jumped at him, putting my hands on the shredder and smacking it up into his face, breaking his nose easily. I launched myself into him and let gravity take us down, cracking his back over the tailgate and pinning him there with my weight. I smacked the sh
redder into his face one more time because it felt good, and then I pushed it down onto his throat, hard enough to choke him a little but not hard enough to do any real damage.

  “About those thumbs—”

  He surged beneath me and I was thrown backward—the kid was strong. I kept my grip on the shredder and tore it from his grasp as I staggered back, crashing into the crowd. They shoved me away like they were afraid I might get some balls on them, so I popped back up in time for the grunt to bury his head in my stomach, knocking my breath and what felt like my kidneys out of me and shoving me back into the crowd. There were a couple of high-pitched screams and hands were on us, pushing us away frantically, all of them too terrified to see twenty seconds into the future, which was us scattering into the desert, free. Most of them had come from comfort, from money, some even from power—old power, power that wasn’t there anymore. None of them truly believed they were fucked. They still thought an angel was going to swoop down and collect them, apologize for the inconvenience, and make it all go away. Including me, who’d been keeping them alive for the past six months.

  The grunt put his face in mine, wrapping his arms around me and squeezing with excruciating, surprising force, making my ribs bark and trapping the shredder between us. Blood had spilled out over his mouth and chin, making him look suddenly older, more dangerous.