The Terminal State

Book 4: Avery Cates

by Jeff Somers

Genres: Action & Adventure; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Dystopian

Synopsis

Avery Cates is an army man. Between the army's new dental plan and a set of first class augments, he's been given a second chance -- albeit a quick one. When a corrupt officer decides to make some money on the side by selling new recruits, Cates finds himself in uncharted territory. Sold to the highest bidder, his visions of escape and revenge quickly come to an end when he realizes who's bought him -- and for what. Because the high bidder is Canny Orel himself. And he wants Cates to do one last job as the System slides into chaos. Cates will have one shot at getting back at Canny -- but this time, Canny is holding all the cards.

Release date: August 31, 2010

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 377

Sample

“Evry’ting fallen apart,” Dingane groused, rubbing his dry, cracked hands against his unshaven chin. “T’whole fuckin’ world,
yeah?”


I raised the wooden cup from the wobbly table and held it in the air between us, steeling myself. I’d tasted some terrible
things in my life, but the moonshine Bixon made out back routinely tasted like it had been filtered through corpses and it
felt like it was taking a layer of your throat off as it went down to boot. I was a murderer, Plague survivor, and wanted
man, and I still had to steady myself before each shot.


“Quit your fucking bellyaching,” I advised Dingane, “and tell me if you got my stuff.”

He was right—the System was cracking open—but that was no reason to encourage him. After years of plotting against each other,
the System Police and the civilian government had been in open civil war for a year, piling up bodies and destroyed cities, burning through yen and bodies, building up these sudden fleets of military-grade hovers and
weapons, things that hadn’t existed for decades, since unification had ended war for fucking ever, didn’t you know. The whole
world, bound together for a while, one government, one police force, no armies in sight. And now we didn’t have police anymore,
just armies, and it didn’t matter who won. You just wanted them to get it over with fast, before they killed everyone.


Dingane paused, nasty, and then thought better of it and smiled. I immediately wished he hadn’t, green teeth and black gums,
and I tipped the shot into my mouth to distract myself from his grin. My throat tried to close up in instinctual defense,
but I was ready for that and just worked it on down. I breathed through my mouth.


“Ohkay, ohkay,” Dingane said, affecting a jolly expression. “Av’ry is impatient today, uh? Av’ry’s in the revenge bidness, huh? You lis’n to Dingane, m’friend, an’ be happy. Fo’get these two men made you so fuckin’ angry.”


I gave him a frown, a steady unhappy expression. “There’s a reason you’re crawling the fucking earth trading in junk and reclaimed
ammunition, and I’m sitting here hiring you. When someone sells me out”—Wa Belling, handing me over to Kev Gatz and the Plague—“lies to me and leaves me for dead”—Michaleen,
staring down at me from the hover as it drifted away, leaving me to be bricked in Chengara—“I don’t fucking forget.”


You’re small, a voice whispered in my head. I blinked, ignoring it.


Suddenly he was grinning, happy to oblige. Just like everyone else, if you were polite you got static. If you showed them
your fist, they got polite. “You pay’n the bills heeyah, so ohkay,” he said hurriedly. “I got mos’ de stuff you ask. Not easy t’transport heavy shit, t’big shit.” He spread
his chalky hands. “No ’overs any mo’, Av’ry. From here t’Florida you can’t get no ’overs. An if you could, the fucking armay be shoot’n your ass down, trust. So I can’t get the big items. And bullets is hard. Ammo. Hard. No one makin’ any’ting anymore. Nowhere. Mexico, sheeit,
usesta be, Mexico you get any’ting, now, no. Nothin’ in Mexico ’cept armay and cops, armay and cops, shootin’s at every’ting, bombing t’cities back to fuck.”


It was my fate to listen to Dingane bitch and moan every now and then. I’d pulled his ear a few times to discourage him, but
Dingane was one of those leathery fellows who looked a fucking century old and acted like pain didn’t mean shit to him anymore,
which maybe it didn’t. Easier to let him talk. I wasn’t going anywhere anyway.


That didn’t mean I couldn’t move things along. “Hell, Dingy, can’t you shut up for one fucking minute?”

He gave me the grin again. “Sho’ can, Av’ry, but I thought y’wanted news of your order, huh? You wanted clips, mag’zines,
for what’ver caliber I could get. I got some, I got some, but it ain’t cheap or easy. N’one down south makin’ ’em up an’more.
I gots to go far afield, you dig? And the Geeks—oh, fuck, the fuckin’ Geeks, Av’ry. Dey band t’gether, you know that? SPS? All these fuckin’ Techies,
throwin’ shit down.”


I let Dingane talk. It was good cover. I closed my eyes and pictured the place, Bixon’s uninsulated shack with the long bar
made up of crates in the back, the wobbly tables lashed together, the big ugly metal stove in the middle of the room glowing
red, pulsing with heat, making the whole place smell like my own armpit, and stinging the eyes with soot and smoke. Better than outside, where snow was howling—the weather was fucked up. You never knew what you were
gonna get these days. Rumor was it was all fallout from the war screwing up the climate, but who the fuck knew. I’d never
been in this part of the world before. Neither had most of us.


I thought of Old Pick, long dead now. I thought about everything that fat old bastard had known, the data of lifetimes, the
oral history of every criminal worth remembering in New York since Unification. And who knew what water he’d carried across
the line from pre-Uni times. All of it gone now, like they’d never happened. And there’d never be another Pick, ever. Not
these days.


The tables, six of them, arranged randomly in the tight space beyond the bar, more or less around the stove that stood in
the middle. Me and Dingane, the Mayor and her cronies playing dominoes, Tiny Timlin and some of the other kids looking puffy
and sick on their fourth or fifth dose of Bixon’s poison. Bixon himself, behind the bar, a man who had never washed once since
I’d known him, more beard than human at this point. All of them just flotsam, people fleeing the war and dead cities abandoned
by one side or another, showing up here. For the most part, if you could lend a hand, you were pretty much welcome.


If you couldn’t lend a hand, or didn’t want to, and stuck around anyway, that’s where I came in.

“And this utter t’ing you ask me to look into, I t’ink I got you something.”

I popped open one eye and put it on him. The black bastard was grinning again, pleased with himself. I shut my eyes again.
“Yeah?”


I pictured the place again: one door in the front, a heavy piece of wood on crude but solid hinges, one in the rear of the room that led out to the back where Bixon created his horrible
juice. I didn’t know how he made the stuff, and I didn’t want to know; if I went back there and found him milking some terrible
giant green worm, I wouldn’t be surprised.


Behind me, the band was chicken pickin’ their way through a complex series of chords that managed to sound pretty good even
though they had ten strings between the three of them. They were old guys, fucking ancient, but everyone here did something.
If you couldn’t work the fields or make booze or kick the shit out of people when the Mayor told you to, you played a bass line on a single string and made it sound snappy.


And then, bellied to the bar and examining his cup of booze dubiously, the Badge.

Not a badge anymore, but certainly an old System Pig. I didn’t recognize him.


Me either, the voice whispered faintly and was gone. Not a ghost, since Dick Marin was still—well, alive wasn’t the right word for
it, but still in existence.


But he had the look.

“Yeah,” Dingane said, leaning forward so I could get a real good whiff of him, a courtesy. “Europe, I ’ear. Amsterdam. Both
o’ dem. Solid source, uh?”


I shook my head, opening my eyes again. I didn’t hear from my ghosts much anymore, but they still popped up once in a while,
still there, still complete and whole. Amsterdam. Both of them. I figured Michaleen would be in Europe—I wondered if Belling was working with him again. Knowing a city was a good start.


“Why you lookin’ to leave, eh, Av’ry?” Dingane shifted and spat into the sawdust on the floor. “Y’got a good thing here. Roof, food, friends. Should not walk away from dis, I don’
think.”


I looked past Dingane. “I got unfinished business. Debts to settle.”

The cop—ex-cop—turned to survey the place, sizing us up. He was tall and heavy, a gone-to-fat heaviness encased like a sausage
inside a heavy leather overcoat, which looked battered and salty, and a dark-blue suit that had seen better days. His shoes
were woefully unprepared for the mush outside, with a noticeable hole in one through which I could see his bare toe, pink
and squirming. You didn’t need to see his credit dongle—assuming he still carried one like a totem—to know this ex-cop had
seen better days.


He still had that gloss, though. That cop arrogance. He’d somehow escaped Marin’s avatar purge, and he’d somehow wriggled
away from the civil war to go adventuring, but even without backup or a discretionary budget or fucking shoes he still thought he was going to run the show here. His hair was bright red and thin, a halo around his pink head. His cheeks
hung from his face like they were full of ball bearings and sagged with weight, and his eyes were watery and red.


As I watched, the cop picked up his cup without looking at it and delivered it to his wet mouth. Tipping it back without hesitation,
he swallowed the shot whole and returned the cup to the bar without comment or visible reaction. My respect for the man went
up a half inch. Anyone who could drink Bixon’s poison without wincing or coughing or bursting into flames had something going
on.


Glancing to my right I found, as always, Remy staring at me. Remy had lost his gloss; he was starting to look like a normal human being. I didn’t know how old he was or why I always had squirts running
after me like I was fucking Santa Claus, but Remy was coming along from the spoiled little brat in his shiny shoes screaming
about his daddy. He was firming up, and I even had hope he’d someday stop calling me Mr. Cates. Then we had to work on the staring, but to be honest it came in handy. I nodded my head slightly, and the kid was up off
his crate immediately and out into the storm.


“Listen up!”

The ex-cop’s voice was booming, deep and smooth, the voice of a man used to being obeyed. His eyes, though, roamed the space
nervously, and his hands were curled into fists. The music stopped on a dime.


“My name is Major Benjamin Pikar,” he shouted, turning slowly to make sure we all got the benefit of his jiggling jowls. “And
I am here to protect you!”


Major. I eyed him up and down and decided he’d given himself a promotion. His coat was captain, if that.

Our mayor, who’d been elected by dint of referring to herself as the Mayor until we couldn’t stand it any-more, behaved herself
and kept her eyes off me. Gerry was an amiable old hag who’d been a banker before the Plague. She’d lost her family during
that little fun ride and had been in Chicago when the friendly folks of the System of Federated Nations Army had sent in five
hundred thousand single-use bomb drones armed with F-90s, field-contained armaments. Wandering south out of the wreckage,
she’d found us here in Englewood. She was skinny, with a huge triangle of a nose that bobbed up and down whenever she talked and gray eyes permanently squinted from years peering at holographic data streams. The last time
one of these ex-pig entrepreneurs had shown up to save us from the big bad world, Gerry’d leaped up to announce she was the
mayor and would speak for the town, and I’d been forced to knock her unconscious.


“I have been assigned by order of Richard Marin, Director of Internal Affairs for the System Security Force, to take administrative
charge of this settlement, bring it in line with the laws and customs of the System of Federated Nations, and organize your
defense against both the insurgent forces and… criminal aspects seeking to take advantage of you,” Pikar said with a straight
face. I wondered, briefly, why Marin never just cut the cord and promoted himself to director of the Whole Fucking World or
What Was Left of It After the F-90s.


Can’t, the man’s outdated ghost whispered in my head. Programming limits. They thought by limiting my position they limited me.


Pikar looked around to see how well his shit was floating, and he didn’t look pleased, his red face getting darker, his knuckles
white at his sides.


“Perhaps you have heard,” he managed to say calmly, putting his hands on his hips in a practiced motion that pushed his coat
back to reveal the twin guns under his arms and the battered badge clipped to his belt, “rumors of SFNA Press Gangs in the
region.” He nodded crisply. “I can confirm this.”


I glanced at the two windows, small and cloudy, set into the front wall. Against the snow, I could clearly see dark forms
gathered at each, and I put my eyes back on Pikar to make sure he hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t; he was caught up in the pitch. I knew what was coming next. I could have written the script for him.


“There is no reason to fear, however, as I am here now to organize your defense against these dangerous rebels.” He was all
business now. He’d given us the scare, showed us the cannons, and now came the offer. He turned to signal Bixon for another
drink. Bixon, as wide as he was tall, was all beery muscle without a hint of augments. He just stood there behind his rotting
makeshift bar, hands hidden and caressing, I had no doubt, his prize possession: a personally restored 10-09 shredder, original
SSF issue and held together, literally, by tightly wound strands of silvery wire. It had seven rounds left, and odds were
it was going to explode in his hands if he ever dared fire it, but it still made grown men who knew what it was shit their
pants when they saw it.


“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’ sightlines. 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.


“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. . .