The Eternal Prison (23 page)

 

A smile flinched onto his face. His eyes danced away from me and kept moving from spot to spot. He gestured at his chest. “Great minds think alike.”

 

“This,” I said as I got close, jamming the shredder into his belly, “is a Roon Corporation ten-oh-nine model gas-powered explosive shell rifle, commonly known as a Shredding rifle. It will cut you in half so fast you will be alive for a few seconds to marvel at your legs standing there with nothing on top.” He danced back a little awkwardly, letting out a kittenish yip of terror. “Now, I said, I fucking
know
you.”

 

His hands flew up, palms out, held up near his shoulders. “I’m Guy Rusbridge,” he panted, eyes dancing from the shredder to my face to the floor, over and over again. “Mickey… I met you….”

 

I paused, memory flaring, and raised the shredder a few inches. “Right.” I squinted at him, listening to the approaching noise of combat. I felt a strange lack of urgency, as if I had forever to figure all this out. I brought the shredder back up halfway. “What do you know about that fucking midget?”

 

“Nothing!” he squeaked, shutting his eyes. They continued to move under their lids, jumping around like he could see through them. “He just called me names and made me stand in line for people.” He deflated a little, shrinking before my eyes. “I woke up down here, on a slab. I thought…” He touched the uniform again and opened his eyes again. “Then I didn’t know what to do next.”

 

I stared at him, and his face turned even whiter. “The only thing… once or twice he said something… muttered something about Europe.” He sank down onto the floor without any hesitation or concern about me. I lowered the shredder as he sat down, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. “Mostly he ignored me. When he didn’t ignore me, he insulted me.” He snorted suddenly. “Which pretty much made him my best friend in this terrible place, you know? Because at least he didn’t try to break my ribs every few minutes.”

 

I stared down at him. He was skinny and short and looked even smaller swimming in the oversized Crusher uniform. His fingernails were bloodied and torn, and he hadn’t looked me in the eye once.

 

He looked up at me suddenly, aiming for my chin. “Listen, I still have resources, if I could get out of here. I have access to a lot of yen. And a way off the continent, maybe, if we get that far.” He stopped just as suddenly and looked back down at his feet, the sudden flare of hope and energy fading away before my eyes.

 

“All right,” I said, raising my voice over the steady shriek of shredder fire somewhere nearby. “C’mon, let’s go.”

 

I pushed him behind me. “Stay back, and if I tell you to do something,
do it.
Except not in a suicidal way, okay?”

 

“Should I get a gun?”

 

… I got two crates of factory-fresh Roon two-two-threes, last batch out of the old Minsk factory

 

… fucking hell, the food

 

… she’d had her legs lengthened by that sawbones in Helsinki; she was fucking hot

 

I shook my head, trying to clear it, as a vision of my limbs flying through the air passed before me. “Just stay behind me.”

 

I limped up the hallway. Glancing up I could see the snaking conduit I’d followed before. I didn’t remember where it led, but since there weren’t any other doors it didn’t matter—if we were getting out, this was the way. Creeping forward, I stayed near the wall and listened as intently as I could, trying to form a rough count of guns in front of us.

 

Avery.

 

I stumbled and avoided blowing my own feet off with some difficulty. I recognized the voice—I was sure I did. An elderly voice, a woman’s voice. And she’d said my name.

 

You know me, you silly man. Now, listen. Pay attention: I was conscious when they brought me down, I may be able to help. It’s difficult to get through the crush here, so concentrate on me.

 

I paused just before the hall curved sharply to the right, holding up my hand in the hope Guy wouldn’t crash into me. I closed my eyes, and the voices swelled and pulsed inside me. Taking a deep, painful breath, I concentrated and thought:
Hello, Salgado.

 

 

 

 

XIX

I DON’T HAVE A SCREEN TO REPRESENT PAINFUL DEATH

 

 

 

 

“There it is,” Krasa said, sounding flat and exhausted. “The Star.”

 

We were almost directly above it, the screens showing us a nice, crisp image of the potato-shaped island obscured by a haze of gray-black smoke. The Star was on the fat end, a squat lump of gray stone with a small pyramid on top that ended abruptly in a jagged heap of rubble. Outlined in foam was the immense thing that used to sit on the pyramid, torn off its foundation long before I’d been born. I didn’t know what it had been. Maybe someone did. For as long as I remembered, The Star had been a fortress of sorts—not a particularly hard one to storm, maybe, but effective in its way. Techies had been using it as a data haven for decades now, illicit labs and servers buried deep within it, and while the SSF probably could have taken it down at any time with enough manpower and effort, they’d left it alone. Too much trouble, I guessed. And the Techies always had everything rigged to blank and blow at a second’s notice, sometimes even linked to their own vital signs.

 

And maybe, I thought, someone up on high didn’t mind having an unmonitored data haven, either.

 

Another concussion just a few hundred feet from us sent the hover wobbling again. I was getting used to it, keeping my balance pretty easily, while Krasa went sailing. Krasa looked like she was unraveling, physically and mentally, with one wide, freaked eye and hair everywhere. On the other side of us a sudden roar of high-speed displacement hit our ears a few seconds after three rusty-looking SSF bricks went stuttering past, pushed to their speed limits.

 

No one said anything. We’d run out of amazement. Someone on Ruberto’s side had decided to quit waiting around for the System Cops to finish their program of turning everyone on the force into an untiring avatar, and they were making a real push into New York. The new army had been camped out for months all over the System, outside cities, outside strong points, just sitting there cupping their balls and glaring. I’d expected them to just sit there forever, playing games. Like sending me to try the impossible, assassinating Dick Marin, like I was Canny Orel, some legend who killed world leaders by thinking about it.

 

Marko had wired up one of the unlicensed Vids beaming from the Appalachians, audio only into an earbud.

 

“Moscow, too,” he said abruptly. “Going after SSF Internal Affairs HQ—where the main Prime is. The SSFA has a fucking tank model!”

 

Marko was a true geek. He sounded like he was about to stain his pants from excitement.

 

“Shit, sounds like the snow is fucking them up, though. Fucking trillions in yen, I bet, and they’re all sliding around outside Moscow. Fucked. Wait… Utrecht is down, in army hands—wait, almost. Street-to-street fighting, the tanks are making a difference there. Tanks! I didn’t know they were developing tanks. Model GH-901.”

 

“Eye on the stick, Zeke,” I said. “Remember what I said about crashing.”

 

“Right.”

 

We started descending through a floating minefield, bombs going off in the air around us. Marko called them field contained—the concussion contained in a small area by a powerful, transient force field, concentrating all their power on a small area. The army was pouring them into the air, trying to knock out the SSF hovers, and we’d been lucky so far. Dropping five hundred feet through it didn’t sound like a good idea, but I wasn’t planning to swim out to the island.

 

At least the System Pigs would have more on their plate than Krajian and Marko. If we survived the drop, we might have some breathing room while Amblen’s ghost gave us the grand tour.

 

We started to fall as a volley of bombs detonated around us, the hover shuddering and vibrating. A sickening feeling formed in my stomach like a ball of yellowed ice. Marko didn’t move or react; his hands moved in a slow-motion series of complex gestures, eyes fixed on the screens. He continued to relay reports from his earbud as he worked, the hover shaking so hard the displays sizzled with static, blinking on and off.

 

“The Australian Department’s all clear,” he shouted. “The army doesn’t have much presence there. The Japanese Department’s also pretty much being left alone. The Balkans is going badly for the army; we’re entrenched there and they haven’t gotten any traction. Surprise all around—no one saw this coming. We all figured it was going to be years of stalemate.” He smiled again. “Fucking tanks.”

 

I left Marko alone with his Techie love for gadgets—even big, skull-crushing gadgets with huge guns mounted on them—while he piloted the hover down. I’d been in enough crashed hovers to never want to duplicate the experience. A trio of SSF bricks buzzed us so close I thought they might peel the metal skin off us, but Marko just kept waving his hands dreamily, and we kept sinking slowly down toward the overgrown little island.

 

I glanced at Krasa. She was just staring, hanging onto a safety strap limply. I spent a moment considering ways of snapping her out of it, but gave up on that. I wondered how you went from kicking my ass on the street like a pro to having that empty, hollow look on your face, all because your fucking badge turned red. I would never understand cops. They were aliens.

 

When we dropped under a hundred feet up, everything calmed and stabilized. The noise of explosions and whining displacement was still everywhere, but we weren’t being tossed about like a piece of trash floating on the blackened Hudson River anymore. The last few feet were textbook, smooth and professional. For a second we were all silent, and then Marko glanced around.

 

“Well, according to scans the power’s off,” he said. “Which the Vids are reporting throughout the city. So looks like we’re going to have to bust our way in.”

 

“Uh-huh,” I said absently, leaning forward to study the screens. “Unless you can cocktail up some explosives made from dead bodies, Zeke, I’m not sure how we’ll do that.”

 

He nodded. “Officer Krajian, the SSF has had a Red Code for The Star for years now, hasn’t it?”

 

For a second she didn’t say anything, and then suddenly snapped around. “What? Yes, of course. We have Red Codes for every major building in the city. In the System.” She shook herself and looked at me. “But I don’t have access anymore. Neither do you.”

 

“Sure, sure,” Marko said, nodding, hands moving delicately. “That slows us down, sure.”

 

I raised an eyebrow a precise amount. “Red Code?”

 

She nodded, seeming to come back to herself as she spoke. “An infiltration strategy in case of takeover. We need to get into a building that’s being held against us, maybe even with some serious force—we have a file of plans to do that. It includes architectural drawings, weak point analyses, and any other usable information. Override codes sometimes for the building shells. If nothing else, it would show us the weak spots we might be able to exploit. But it doesn’t matter, as our access has been revoked.”

 

As she said this last she deflated again.

 

“Okay,” Marko said, flipping a hand in the air rapidly. “Call me fucking paranoid, but I’ve had a couple of fake log-ins set up for
years
just in case. Can’t do much, but the SSF thinks in terms of actions, not data preservation, so grabbing a Red Code file is… actually… pretty easy.”

 

With a brisk snapping motion, he nodded and stopped gesturing. Krasa and I both stared at him silently until he looked up at us and blinked.

 

“Uh, give it a minute. That’s a lot of data.”

 

Outside, the bombing went on and on, each individual explosion blurring into the next. I imagined shrapnel raining down on New York, people already half-starved and worn down by siege running for their lives and probably not finding much shelter.

 

“Okay,” Marko said, leaning forward and moving his hands. On one screen in front of him a half-dozen smaller boxes popped up. Before I could make out what any of them were, he was waving his hand elegantly, and the little boxes shimmered, replaced by a new set, which he wiped off the screen just as quickly. He flipped rapidly through dozens of screens, too fast for me to follow, eyes dancing, grunting softly with each transition. I wanted to smack him on the back of his head and make his teeth rattle but held myself back, putting it into an account to pay off later. There’d be time to remind Marko of our proper working relationship when things calmed down. When I didn’t need him anymore.

 

“Sewers,” he said suddenly, jabbing a finger at the screens. One of the smaller boxes expanded to full size—a schematic, blurry and scratched like it had been made from ancient plates. “More specifically, tunnels left over from either constructing the sewers or maintaining them. See—big enough to wriggle up through, most of it dried out. Comes up… here, looks like it used to be a lavatory or something, though it’s fucking huge.”