The Eternal Prison (18 page)

 

 

 

 

Everything was fucked.

 

I stared down through smoke and sweat at the body of the Christian—shit, I’d never even learned her name. We were in the yard next to the fence around the arrival area, down in a hastily dug pit that gave some cover from the snipers on the towers. Not enough cover; the Christian’s head had popped in a silent explosion, as if someone had planted a bomb inside her brain when she’d been born and waited, patiently, until the right moment to press the button.

 

Reaching up, I wiped her warm blood from my face. It was gritty with the sandy dirt we’d been excavating. I blinked my burning eyes and sat back for a moment. The Christian stared at me, one eye red and blown. I still didn’t mind dying. Michaleen’s plan was a good one, and I’d been entertained to take my part in it, but if it all ended with my own skull exploding in a sudden burst of bone and blood—well, I figured I wouldn’t even know it. And no one would deserve it more.

 

It was a strange, quiet spot—I could hear the roar in the distance, but it was a mile away, distant in space and time, something that was going to happen in five minutes. Shouts and screams and gunshots and a disturbing booming sound I couldn’t figure. Michaleen had been right: starting a riot in Chengara had been about as hard as starting a fire in a gas can. The trick was keeping it going long enough, and the little man had assured me he had his end covered.

 

I looked around. The yard was blanketed with thick, gray haze pouring from a few dozen smoke grenades. I wasn’t sure how, but the Crushers—avatars with whatever gadgetry came standard—were able to see right through the smoke and nail anyone scampering along the ground. I figured if I stayed low in my little ditch I’d be okay, and a thick, insistent urge to do just that weighed me down. I wasn’t afraid, but the effort of moving just seemed incredible, impossible.

 

I looked back at the Christian. Her ruined eye glared at me. I’d never spent so much time right next to a corpse—usually I needed to get away as quickly as possible, and most times I’d been dodging bullets and trying to remember floor plans, desperate. Her absolute stillness was fucking annoying. I wanted to stretch out a leg and jostle her a little.

 

Thinking of my leg made it ache. I looked away from the girl. Michaleen wouldn’t know my end had gotten sticky—he’d be proceeding with the plan, stoking the fire until the walls blistered and peeled, until the Crushers started boiling into gas around us. Until it got so bad they sent in the fucking cavalry. Until the hovers, stuffed full of Stormers or avatars or whatever the fuck Marin sent in the hovers these days, floated down from the sky, death and terror. Our ticket out.

 

“Never the easy way,” I muttered.

 

The easy way would be to just lie back and let it wash over me—or, better, to stand up and wave my arms until suddenly—lights out.

 

I looked over her body at the edge of the chain-link fence separating the yard from the arrival area. We’d feverishly dug out underneath it, bullets and smoke grenades flying, until the fence could be lifted up a few inches, enough for the skinny little girl to wriggle under, our Snake earning her way. The plan had been for us to duck under the fence and wait for the hover that Michaleen guaranteed would land, apart from the others, in the arrivals area. “Standard fucking procedure,” he’d said. Didn’t matter that no one much cared if we all scattered into the desert to die; the SSF had a standard response to prison upsets, and part of it was securing the arrivals area.

 

“They maybe have shiny chrome brains,” Michaleen had said, “but they’re still the same fucking assholes as ever, and they will follow standard operating procedure.”

 

The rest had been pretty simple: let the bulk of the crew disperse to their postings, and when the skeleton crew was alone, I kill everyone. The genius details of how that was accomplished were left to me. The hover pilot would lock down his brick, and then our Snake would crawl in through the obscure, vulnerable maintenance hatch under the hover’s belly, release the drop-bay hatch, and I’d finish the job. Then we’d wait for everyone else to crawl in and be on our way.

 

Simple. Stupid simple. But I’d had nothing better to do.

 

I eyed the fence. I thought I’d be able to pull myself under it in return for some of the skin on my back and arms. As far as dealing with the hover, that would require just one slight adjustment to the plan: I’d have to kill the pilot first.

 

Behind me, there was an explosion.

 

I whirled as the fireball shot upward, swelling and fading, heat and wind pushing against me. I didn’t know what had gone up—if it was one of Michaleen’s little surprises or just a fluke—but it was a sign. No one was looking at my dark little square of the world for the next few moments, and I thought, fuck, I didn’t want to die sitting in a dark hole, unnoticed. I was Avery Fucking Cates. If I was going to die, I wanted at least to tug a bit on Marin’s tail, let him know how I’d gone. Maybe drag him down with me.

 

I pushed at the dead feeling in my limbs, poking it, testing it. I knew I was just a piece of the machinery, a ball bearing in a machined trench, rolling exactly where the universe wanted me to go. I’d been on a rail, my whole life. I figured, what the hell: if the universe had me on a rail, then it didn’t matter what I did or didn’t do; I’d either die or live or burst into flames or grow wings—whatever the universe had waiting for me was going to happen, probably. So I was either immortal—if it wasn’t my time, nothing was going to kill me—or I was fucked. Might as well cause a little damage while I skittered down the trench, rolling along to some inevitable disaster. Either way I was never going to be free.

 

The thought got my heart pumping.
Why not?
I thought, and took a deep breath, diving for the fence, getting my fingers under its bottom edge. It was thick, stiff wire, and getting it up just a few inches was hard, arm-trembling work. I twisted around and pulled my torso through, suddenly desperate to get moving, to start doing something. Months spent drifting fell away, and I was frantic to get some momentum going. The sharp ends of the fence tearing up my stomach and legs, I pulled and wriggled under it and lay on the other side in cool, deep shadows. I lay for a moment, panting, looking up into the smoke-filled sky. I could see lights, the gem of a hover floating above us, and then there were several in the sky, and the distant hurricane of displacement made the cooling ground tremble beneath me. They were beautiful.

 

As I lay there, they spread apart, five or six of them heading for the yard and, sure enough, one right above me. Fucking Michaleen—whoever, whatever he was, he had good intel. He’d said he could prod the prison into a storm, and so he had. He’d said one hover would put down in the arrivals area, and so it was. Except for not foreseeing the Christian’s head exploding from a sniper’s bullet, he’d been spot-on so far.

 

For some reason the Christian made me feel better about Michaleen. It was good to know the fucking dwarf could make a mistake.

 

The hovers dropped like graceless rocks, making me brace for an impact, but then touched down as soft as dust, one after the other, weightless bricks. Mine hit the ground just a foot or two away from me, filling most of the fenced-in space. The drop bay was on the opposite side; I lay very still and listened to the familiar sound of Stormers being screamed out of their hovers. I waited for the universe to tilt the board and send me rolling again. The Stormers poured out of my hover in a brisk, orderly formation, so close they could have smelled me if they’d paid any attention. I watched the majority of them double-time it into the prison area proper, leaving three behind to guard the hover, plus the pilot, unseen inside his shell.

 

I wondered if these were humans or avatars.

 

I didn’t know how to kill an avatar. My hands curled up into fists, tight against my bleeding belly. I knew how to kill people, how to make it fast or slow, with their breath in my ear or from across a dark room. It was—had been—my profession. I even knew how to kill Monks —

 

I remembered someone saying the avatar tech was based on the Monks, a new generation. A refinement, not a new technology. I knew enough about tech to figure they wouldn’t reroute every bus, wouldn’t be able to overhaul the whole design. They’d simply replace the one thing in the Monk design they no longer needed: the brain. A headshot would probably be enough. Do enough damage to anything and it stopped working.

 

I was no Techie, but I didn’t have time to investigate. Taking a deep breath, I counted to five and slowly rolled out of my shadow.

 

Noise wasn’t a problem—another explosion made the ground vibrate beneath me as I rolled, and everything else was a formless swirl of noise, displacement and gunfire and shouts. I put myself under the hover in a fast, continuous roll. Stopping and starting was what drew eyes to you; with everything else moving around, the Stormers, even if they were avatars, would be more likely to ignore more motion than they would something that kept jerking to a halt and then moving again.
Keep moving
—the fucking story of my life. Under the hover, at the bottom of a pool of shadows, I stopped and closed my eyes, listening for any sign that the Stormers had noticed me.

 

Three, four heartbeats—nothing.

 

The pilot had to be first. Without our Snake to wriggle in through the redundant maintenance hatch, if the pilot sealed the hover, the big turrets mounted under its nose would pretty much spell the end of our little escape plan. I’d wriggled
out
of a hover not so long ago, during the Plague, but Ty Kieth had cleared out the hatch by then and gravity had done the rest. Forcing my way up, bum leg and all, sounded like the perfect way to get stuck like a cork and then shot in the ass. Even if it was what the universe wanted, I wasn’t going to shuffle off that way, shot in the fucking ass.

 

I opened my eyes and counted feet. Six in view, two sets in front with their backs to the hover, one by the drop-bay hatch. I considered human psychology as I knew it—and even if these were walking quantum hard drives they were based on human brains—and figured the Stormer by the drop bay would be a little less on edge, a little less worried; after all, they thought we were all shitheads. We’d all been rounded up and taken here in the first place, right? Soft. No guns. And even if we did manage to make a run on the hover, we’d be coming from
inside
the prison. He’d assume plenty of lead time.

 

I rolled as softly as I could to the side of the hover. The Stormer’s boots, shiny and pristine, were an inch or two from my face.

 

I palmed one of my blades and then lay there, motionless. No tendons to cut, if it was an avatar. For a moment I hesitated, and then I thought:
What the hell. I’m on the rail.
If my card got pulled, it got pulled, and there was probably no way to stop it. Sucking in a painful, chest-burning breath, I rolled out from under the hover into the open air, pushing myself to my feet just as a third explosion sent another fireball into the air.
God bless the dwarf,
I thought, and launched myself at the Stormer, knocking him backward into the drop bay and pushing my knife into his face as hard as I could.

 

There was a little blood—cool and fake, but convincing enough for a second, and then white coolant bubbled up, turning the whole mess pink. It shivered once beneath me and went still, and I lay on top of it, panting, leg aching, vaguely disappointed. I wanted gore. I wanted blood. Fucking avatars.

 

I held my breath, chest twitching, and listened.

 

Rolling off the Stormer, I stood up and palmed another of my blades and crept forward toward the cockpit as my eyes adjusted to the gloom of the drop bay. The pilot was still seated, busy working over a digital tablet, her small hands dancing through a series of complex gestures. I didn’t pause to contemplate or admire; I stepped steadily behind her and grabbed her helmet with one hand, jerking her head upward and stabbing up through her chin, hard, something brittle and completely inhuman snapping as I yanked upward with all my strength.

 

Then silence broken by the thin sound of me breathing through my clogged nose.

 

I turned and stepped back to the drop-bay hatch, hunching down to sit, with my legs dangling over the edge and the dead—if
dead
was the right term for an avatar—Stormer next to me. I relieved it of its sidearm—a piece-of-shit generic that felt too light and insubstantial in my hand, like it would peel open and take my hand with it if I ever dared fire it. Not long ago the System Pigs had had the best of everything, and that meant Roon automatics. If this was the shit they were issued now, it was no wonder they were fighting a sudden civil war.

 

I dropped to my feet awkwardly, my bad leg buckling a little under me, making me wave my arms around to get my balance. The noise rushed back around me, screaming and shouting, gunfire, a rhythmic, steady booming noise I couldn’t identify. The rhythm of it took over and I moved toward the two remaining Stormers using it, feeling ridiculous but not caring—it was the universe, the cosmos pulling my strings, and I was just a fucking puppet flopping my way toward two more murders, although I hadn’t decided if avatars counted as murder. Marin would just pump out four more bodies to replace these, built from spare parts or poured into molds or whatever. I crept forward until I was a foot or two away, the muzzle of my new gun just half an inch away from the back of one Stormer’s head. My hand, I noted without emotion, shook slightly.

 

Fast. I squeezed the trigger, felt the surprisingly light kick of the gun, swiveled precisely, and squeezed the trigger again, and both Stormers dropped one after the other.

 

It felt good to be back in the cut, rolling along. I turned and pocketed my gun, heading back for the hover. As I climbed up into it, I pushed the dead Stormer off onto the ground, then headed back for the cockpit. I just shifted the pilot to the other seat, sweat popping out on my brow, the air of the hover getting closer and hotter as I worked. Then I sat in the pilot’s seat and squinted through the windshield, listening as carefully as I could.