The Eternal Prison (25 page)

 

As my ass hit the floor, the wall where I’d been a second before exploded into dust and sharp chunks of concrete. I threw myself forward, smacking flat onto the floor and scrabbling to get my legs under me, lumbering blindly forward with my shredder still in one hand. I saw the soldier sitting on the floor, swinging his gun toward me, and with a yell I tossed mine at him, smacking him in the chest as he fired off another burst.

 

I veered, staggering into him hard and falling down on top of him, letting my knee get between us and just letting gravity yank me down.

 

Without pausing, I took hold of the tubes coming out of his cowl and pulled his head up, then smashed it down onto the floor as hard as I could. His whole body twitched beneath me, and I grabbed his shredder, glancing at the glowing ammo count as I pushed myself back to my feet, my leg burning. Panting, I slapped the shredder with my palm and staggered through the gurneys.

 

Down the hall the Crushers, three of them, pushed open the doors and stood there grinning. They looked like human beings, just regular assholes, and I marveled at the fact that they were all avatars, artificial and creepy. These three would have passed for human anywhere—everything about them, from their flop sweat and unshaven faces to their bellies hanging over their belts, screamed
Crusher
, second-rate cop wannabe.

 

The tallest one was ginger haired and looked like his arms were too long for his body, like a fucking monkey, based on some shit kicker whose family had been eating dirt for generations, producing thinned-out genetic material like Bubba here.

 

I concentrated on moving easily. Avatars didn’t feel pain.

 

Actually, they can be programmed to feel anything we want,
Dick Marin thought cheerfully at me.
Pain might be useful under certain scenarios.

 

Pain is a programming error,
a new voice—quiet, annoyingly calm—said above the buzz.
Pain should be commented out.

 

Hell, Cates,
Marin snarled.
You attracted all the fucking quacks to your brain.

 

As if on cue, the crowd of voices rose up in triumph, loud and muddled.
Slimmer than before,
I thought.

 

“That was ass-kick amazing,” Bubba drawled, his vowels all weird. “We didn’t think any of us were still up and runnin’ back there. These cocksuckers came blastin’ in like hotshots and got cut off. One of ’em was wounded, and they kept tellin’ us they had to get him out for MedVac.”

 

“Medical evac,” one of the other Crushers spat. “Fucking weak meat.”

 

“Rules of war or some such shit,” Bubba sighed, shaking his head. “All right, gear up—word is these fucks have broken through and are working their way down. We’re pulling out. Which means we got to claw out of here before we get swamped by these pieces of shit.”

 

“MedVac,” I repeated, and whipped my shredder up, squeezing the trigger. My last few seconds of ammo spun Bubba into two halves, each tumbling in an opposite direction, the blast sawing through him and cutting down the other two as well. The noise of combat was a little further away now, muffled by some walls and doors and lots of the stiff, scrubbed air.

 

I limped back to the soldiers and examined them.

 

You have destroyed these men,
the new voice whispered.
They are now beyond redemption. The others will live on, as it is meant for us to do.

 

He’s a lot of fun, huh?
Marin sneered.
I used to hate taking meetings with him, back when he was corporeal. This kind of prophecy horseshit, all the time. That’s how Squalor
talks.

 

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

 

It might have only been seconds, but stored intelligences operate at incredible speeds, and it wouldn’t take long for you to subconsciously sort us out and grab onto familiar, uh, faces,
Marin added.
This is
fascinating.

 

Prophecy cannot be
—

 

Shut up!
I hammered the thought as hard as I could. For a second, all the voices cleared up again.

 

Kneeling down I pulled one soldier toward me by her boot. Working with stiff fingers, I undid the weird little clasps that seemed to just cling to each other without any visible fitted parts and pulled her uniform off—it was a single piece of the white material. When I had her naked and bloody before me, I kept my eyes off her and examined the uniform; it was shapeless and limp, heavy and damp looking. With something akin to pleasure, I peeled off the rank blue Crusher’s uniform and stepped into the army kit. The white material flowed around me, stretching here and tightening there, until it was the best-fitting set of clothes I’d ever worn. It felt like a million tiny hands were on my skin, sizing me up, tasting me.

 

The cowl hung off my neck behind my head. I had a strange feeling it
wanted
to be lifted into place so it could attach itself, but I was suddenly worried I’d never get it off, that it might seal me off and suffocate me, so I left it hanging.

 

I found one more corpse that hadn’t been chopped up by the shredders and pulled its uniform off as well. The two dead bodies were pale and shriveled, and I stared at them for a moment. The new army wasn’t avatars; it didn’t feel like that made them the good guys. Something glittered on the woman’s face, and I knelt down with a grunt and a wince to get a better look. Her eyes were silvery, almost with a soft glow. Augments. I looked up and stared at the scorched wall for a second. Fucking Augments—did that still make them human? Was there any fucking difference?

 

When I limped around the corner, Guy was right where I’d left him, staring blankly at his hands. I tossed the uniform at him. “Change,” I said.

 

He blinked and picked up the uniform slowly, stared at it for a second, then dropped it and got to his feet with epic, imperial slowness. “How do you do… something like that? Like all those people?”

 

I shrugged, testing my weight on my bad leg and pulling the sidearm that had come with the uniform. I turned it over in my hands: not bad, I decided. I racked a shell into the chamber and was satisfied.

 

“Practice,” I said. “You ever kill anyone? To get in here? To
survive
in here?”

 

He laughed, staring down at himself as the uniform visibly adjusted itself to him. “I was a broker. I made money. I made money for a lot of cops, and one of them decided I belonged here.” He looked up at me. “Hell, I even had a sponsor, trying to get me out. I almost thought he could. He’s got pull, you know? Deep pockets. I had a lot of his investments, and with me in here he lost control of them. He needed me; I don’t have any illusions—but I hoped he would get me out.”

 

I nodded absently. “You actually thought you were getting out?” Smiling, I pushed the gun at him and fired a single shot into the meaty part of his leg. The army uniform, I figured, was engineered to be bullet resistant, but at this range there was no such thing as bullet
proof,
and Guy’s feet flew out from under him as if someone had tugged the floor away. He crashed down, screaming and writhing. I stared at him for a second: he was weeping, big fat tears streaming down his face. I felt sorry for a moment; I didn’t like being the first time this poor son of a bitch got shot.

 

I holstered my gun and stepped around him to gather a handful of his cowl and uniform and started dragging him behind me, slinging my shredder over one shoulder. As we turned the corner, I saw through the swinging doors on the other end, a knot of white uniforms prowling their way carefully toward us, and I steeled myself, pulling the cowl over my face.

 

“Sorry, Guy,” I said, my own voice sounding too close and too desperate. “But in a situation where I have to choose sides, I choose the side that’s got MedVac. You ever survive a hover crash?”

 

He squealed something unintelligible. I was the worst thing that had ever happened to him, I knew. I was used to it.

 

“I have,” I advised him. “It’s not as hard as it seems.”

 

 

 

 

XXI

DESPERATE FOLKS, I FIGURED

 

 

 

 

I kept my grip on the shredder laid across my knees and kept up that posture of relaxed nonchalance that took every vibrating shred of energy I had to make natural. Next to me, Guy had passed out—or died, though I was pretty sure I knew my arteries well enough to not have murdered him—which at least stopped his unsoldierly
screaming.
But I didn’t relax, because I was sitting in a jelly of fucking
wrong.

 

The noise was incredible. The hover was mostly cargo hold with a tiny cockpit and nothing else. It was
fast.
The bay doors were wide open, and the ground far below us was whipping past in a vaguely purple blur, all the air in the world scooped up and hurled inside the bay to buffet us, sucking away sound and oxygen, leaving me choking on wind.

 

But I didn’t dare grab onto the safety straps, because no one else was. I crouched against the rear wall of the no-frills bay, which was just struts and sheet metal, freezing cold, vibrating beneath us like it was coming apart. Bright red packs of fabric were tied to the safety straps, fluttering and jumping manically behind the soldiers. My knees ached and my back burned; my head buzzed with voices and my heart pounded the way it did when I was about to be shot at, but I kept myself stock-still and resisted the urge to look at everything and everyone.

 

They were looking at me, though. Except for the crazy asshole on the big gun, laughing uproariously as he sent hundreds of rounds down at the ground, the
chug-chug
chainsaw of it blending into the noise and giving it some rhythm, some bottom. The gun was mounted just inside the bay and moved with oiled ease in response to the soldier’s movements, swinging up and down and side to side to cover any vector you could put eyes on, including straight up or down. He was just sweeping it back and forth with his fingers mashed on the triggers, laughing in great, breathless spasms. I had an idea that if he could have spun the gun all the way around, he would have cut us all to ribbons, and laughed the whole time.

 

Field-contained armaments—sneak up on you, and then
BAM
you’re not just dead, you’re dissolved.

 

Dumdum shells, turn a building into cheese

 

Mr. Cates, you should have been a poet. You missed your calling.

 

The fact that Dick Marin could hear my thoughts made me feel nervous and exposed, and every time one of the voices broke through and unleashed a stream of words inside my brain, I had to bite down hard to resist twitching, shaking my head violently to dislodge it, like a bug eating its way from one ear to the other.

 

All of the soldiers were wearing their uniforms, the same bizarre, clingy, almost sentient white material. They’d pushed their cowls back and they all stared at me with bright, silvery eyes. Augments, for sure; I’d seen glowing eyes like that in various hues plenty of times. Back in the old days lots of hard cases got Augments done in back rooms and sewer tunnels, burning through monthlong infections and endless complications for some advantage over the System.

 

I didn’t know what their eyes meant, what exactly had been done to them, but I could see it wasn’t the only thing. They each had an identical scar on their temples, like two stylized letter
S
’s next to each other, pink and angry looking. They were sweaty, red-faced human beings, no doubt—not avatars—but each one had a short black cable running from their cowls into the back of their neck, right where their skulls attached.

 

I’d left Guy’s cowl in place, hiding his head, but I’d left mine hanging. I stared back and wondered just how badly I was fucked.

 

There were five men and two women, all kids, fucking children. Hair shaved off completely, sweat glistening everywhere. Each was wounded, red blood staining their uniforms—one girl with an ear that was just a flower of pulp and blood, one guy cradling an arm that looked like it had been completely severed inside the sleeve. None of them complained or winced or looked even close to being in shock. The ones with working limbs still clutched their own shredders, and I was careful to act like my own gun was welded to my knees.

 

They were skinny and bruised looking. Poor, I figured; I’d seen enough of the type. Hadn’t eaten well, sick all the time. Maybe even jumped at the chance to earn five hundred yen a week getting killed. One of them, a man with a starburst of dried blood on his face and a leaking belly wound that had left him pale and shivery, looked at my hands and then back at my face. He had fine, red eyebrows and a sharp, long nose. He glared at me with fierce, burning eyes—made even worse by their silver, glinting color. It was like an alien looking at me, something I’d never dealt with before.

 

“Mr. Cates.”

 

I glanced down at the floor. I could feel the atmosphere around me getting thicker and thicker and had a pretty good idea what was going to happen when we got to our destination. It didn’t involve a conversation.