The Eternal Prison (43 page)

 

I had no weapon, my physical state was weak—although the cocktail the avatar had administered was buzzing inside me, giving me artificial energy and numbed nerves, something to claw onto and ride. And I was locked in a box a hundred feet under a cruel desert. And those were my
advantages.
“All right, you cocksucker. What is it you want me to do?”

 

Kill Ruberto, obviously. On your way out, so to speak.

 

Mild shock rippled through me. “Ruberto’s
you,
” I said. “Why would you kill… yourself?”

 

He
was
me.
Now he is someone else. We remain… brothers, I suppose, and we have been partners in this adventure, yes. Working secretly together, we engineered the state of emergency and the removal of my programmed limitations. Working secretly together, we engineered the sad decline in relations between my police force and the civilian government. We engineered the creation of an army and the declaration of a civil war. Ah, but here’s the rub: I don’t need my sad wetware body anymore. My supremacy is in the bag, you understand. If Cal Ruberto remains alive and in charge of the forces at his disposal, this will undoubtedly devolve into a struggle between us. We’re both me, Avery, and I want to be the one in charge, you see? Eventually one of us will have to go.

 

“You could just wait him out,” I suggested. “He’s going to die someday.”

 

Too risky. What if they invent goddamn immortality in the meantime?

 

Or just stuff him into an avatar, too. I considered. If I killed Ruberto—assuming I was even able to—it would leave the King Worm as unchallenged master of the System. I wasn’t sure I wanted that. I had no love for Marin and would be glad to put a bullet in
his
head, in fact.

 

“I also need a guarantee of safety once I leave Chengara,” I said slowly. I had a vision, bright and cheerful, of the three of us stepping into the sun and being gunned down by Stormers.

 

Can’t do it, Avery,
Marin said.
Sorry. I have no way of communicating with my Prime. I can offer him no updates. Whatever deals we make are between you and this version of me alone.

 

Honest, at least. “How do you know Ruberto’s still here? He probably took off to the front.”

 

He’s here. You’re a priority, Avery. Salgado had the highest clearance, and she used it—that old bat knows a surprising amount of information no one else even bothered to research. He’s going to personally oversee the rest of your dismantling. He’s here. I can even guess where he is.

 

I closed my eyes again. My choices had narrowed down to a manageable two: Stay in the cell and wait for one of Ruberto’s creatures to go a little too far one day and kill me, or take Little Dick up on his offer and become one of Marin’s employees again. Take on a murder in return for compensation, just like the old days. It wouldn’t solve anything, but once again I’d been pushed inevitably to this point, inch by inch, every other option closed off.

 

“All right, Dick,” I said quietly. “We have an agreement.”

 

I was back on the rail. And it felt good.

 

 

 

 

XXXVIII

TWO, I’D BEEN FUCKING LUCKY

 

 

 

 

All right, Avery. Stand up and go to the door. The panic code is alpha-septimus-delta-nonus. Got that?

 

“You have panic codes… in a prison?”

 

I stood up carefully, giving my leg time to adjust. I was stiff and aching all over but felt surprisingly steady.

 

Rule number one, Avery, is always have a panic code. You never know when you might end up in your own damn prison, eh? Rule number two is be the only person extant who
knows
the panic code, even if you have to eliminate the engineers who designed the place for you. Now, there’s at least one guard outside the door, maybe two, avatars, not meat. I’m afraid you’re going to have to kill them with your bare hands. Rule number one does not instruct us to keep a cache of weapons inside the cells of your own damn prison, unfortunately.

 

I’d killed people—regular, flesh and blood people—with my bare hands, and it hadn’t been easy with
people.
I turned around slowly, squinting through the gloom of my cell. The only thing in it aside from me was the metal chair. I stepped over to it and picked it up, lifting it to chest height. It was heavy, a well-made piece that was probably pre-Unification.

 

No,
Marin said tersely in my head.
Made in Bristol. Though I admit that factory has since been shuttered due to malfunction, as have a lot of factories in the last ten years.

 

I flipped the chair over and examined it, tilting this way and that to catch the feeble light. I tested one bolt, and it gave slightly, slicing into my fingers a little. I sat down on the cold floor and began working the bolts, biting my lip and cursing every time a bolt slipped out of my stiff fingers. Moving my fingers carefully, precisely, wiping the blood off every few seconds to keep them dry, I worked the damn nut off the first bolt and then the second, and with a loud clang the leg fell off and hit the concrete floor. I set the rest of the chair down and held the leg in one hand, judging its weight and balance. It was a terrible melee weapon, difficult to hold and awkward to swing. But it was heavy, and I thought it might just cave in some alloyed avatar skulls.

 

I stood up and crept back to the door, holding my new club in front of me. “Do I just speak the panic code, or do I have to gesture something, or what?”

 

Speak it, Avery.

 

I took a deep breath and stepped close to the door, pressing my back against the wall so that when it opened inward I’d be hidden behind it. A simple trick, but it worked often enough to make it worthwhile, and I had a pretty limited arsenal of tools to work with. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

 

I whispered the bullshit Marin had given me and was mildly surprised when the door sagged inward slightly with a loud click. I held steady, keeping my grip on the chair leg loose and easy, breathing shallowly and resisting the urge to shift my weight. After a moment, the door began to crowd against me. I waited, listening to gritty footsteps as they moved past me and stopped a foot or two inside the doorway. I stood there with my breath held, listening, listening… and there was the slightest scrape.

 

I pushed off the wall and slammed into the door, sending it crashing into the guard, knocking it into the opposite wall. With a grunt, I sprang back and sidestepped, letting the door swing back from the Crusher, which was on its knees, pushing back from the wall. I raised the leg over my head and brought it down on top of its uncovered head, rewarded by a distinct dull crunching sound.

 

A blurry movement to my right made me whirl, bringing my makeshift club up in a wide arc, making contact with something that sent the club flying out of my grip as I lost my footing, my bad leg betraying me. I went stumbling backward and landed hard on my ass again, a sharp lance of bright red pain splitting my spine into two brittle spikes.

 

I rolled sloppily to the left and dragged myself up, stumbling backward into the wall. I panted there, clinging to the cold stone. Nothing moved. I limped forward: the first guard was where I’d left it, slumped forward against the wall. A second set of legs lay halfway inside the cell, splayed and still. Staring, I sank slowly to the floor, panting, my vision swimming and my head pounding. Everything grayed up, and I felt nauseous, my back and leg pulsing with a dull ache that felt permanent. I hugged myself tightly, breathing fast, trying to get enough oxygen to clear my head.

 

After a moment I concluded this was impossible and pushed myself back upright, head pounding and legs shaking. Breathing heavily, I limped over to where the chair leg had landed and bent down with a grunt to retrieve it.

 

Well, that was exciting. Maybe the current models are a little
too
humanlike. Problem is making the casing too thick makes the units too heavy, and they suck up power like sponges, resulting in overheating and frequent power-down modes.

 

“Fuck,” I panted, “you.” I walked over to the door, spots before my eyes, and stepped over the prone form of the second guard. The bare hallway was otherwise deserted. I inspected its deceptively Crusher-like uniform. One Taser stick was all I got for my trouble, but I swapped it for the leg without hesitation. “Now what?”

 

Assuming you don’t have some sort of infarction—surely physical fitness would come under the heading of professional interest, Avery?

 

“Big talk from a fucking data file. Now what’s next?”

 

After some consideration—especially of your physical state—I now think your chances of success in this endeavor are greatly enhanced if you have your fellow prisoners, so we should gather them first. They will almost certainly be one level below you if the staff here has followed standard procedure. We can either take the elevator—my preferred choice—or there is a large wire conduit you can access from the floor outside. I only mention the conduit because you always seem to choose the dirtiest and least comfortable approach to any problem. I wondered if perhaps it was congenital or a compulsion of sorts.

 

“Fuck you,” I repeated. “What makes you think the elevator’s safe?”

 

What makes me think? Avery, this is
my
prison. I wrote the guard rotations. But wriggle down the conduit if it makes you feel more manly.

 

I wanted to hit someone. Instead I started off down the hallway, taking the first left at the junction as instructed by Little Dick. It terminated at the dull silver doors of an elevator. Marin described the simple gesture for summoning the cab, and I managed it on the third try. Distantly below me something rumbled into life, and I snapped out the Taser, getting a nice electric sizzle from it.

 

A second later the elevator doors split open, revealing my old pal Mr. Bendix and a youthful, round-faced boy of maybe seventeen, by his look also a psionic. They were both wearing immaculate blue pin-striped suits with coats cut long in the back, though Bendix made it look like the clothes had grown onto him like a pelt whereas the kid looked like he’d borrowed some larger, more confident man’s wardrobe for the day. Bendix wore a single black glove on the hand of his withered arm, managing to make it look kind of sexy.

 

There were a couple of reasons I was still alive. One, I’d never imagined that just having a gun in my hand made me dangerous, or smart. Two, I’d been fucking lucky. And three, I learned my lessons once and remembered them.

 

And Bendix had taught me the only lesson worth remembering when it came to the fucking telekinetics: once you got him down, don’t let up. The trick was
getting
them down. I launched myself forward and crashed into him, knocking him back into the rear of the elevator. A second later that familiar invisible fist slammed into me and tore me free from him, and as I sailed upward I managed to swing the Taser out and caught him on the chin with a glancing blow. He screeched, and I dropped to the bottom of the floor with a grunt.

 

I jumped up, my instincts five years younger than my aching body. My bad leg gave under my weight, sending me into a lurching fall right onto Bendix. He threw his arms up across his face, and I slammed into a wall of air, tossed weakly backward. I stumbled on my bad leg again and spun myself, crashing into the other psionic, who squeaked slightly and stiffened against me. For a second, I felt that terrible sensation of someone’s mind touching mine, invading, clamping down hard on my motor functions.

 

“No!” Bendix rasped hoarsely from behind.

 

Immediately the mind retreated, and before either one of them could recover, I jabbed the Taser into the kid’s neck, giving him a full shot, and then spun him around like dead weight while he was still shivering, using our momentum to send him hurtling toward Bendix. The kid suddenly stopped and rose into the air, and I let gravity pull me down beneath him, stabbing the Taser forward and landing a clean blow on Bendix’s exposed calf. I gave him all the juice I had in the stick, and he went rigid immediately, blood spurting from his mouth where his teeth had clamped down on his tongue. The kid fell on me, crushing the wind out of me and knocking the Taser free from my grip.

 

I lay there, unable to breathe, with a hundred pounds of useless psionic pushing toward the ground through me. I heard the elevator doors close with a smooth
whoosh
of displaced air. On the floor next to me, Bendix had begun to convulse.

 

After a moment I sucked in a tattered stream of air, forcing my lungs to expand, and rolled the kid off me. Sitting up, I managed a deep inhalation that started me coughing, and a rope of spittle trailed from my mouth to the floor as I staggered for the walls, steadying myself enough to gesture the elevator into motion. I rode the elevator down one level in perfect silence except for my sucking breath, three seconds of my life. When the doors opened, the hallway looked exactly like the one I’d just turned my back on. I grabbed the Taser and left Bendix and friend inside. I didn’t have anything to bind them up with, and the time spent was probably wasted anyway—Marin and Ruberto would have dozens of Spooks on staff here. One more or less wasn’t going to make any difference.