Electric Church

XVI THE HAND OF GOD HIMSELF

“Do you not tire of this empty struggle? Do you not long in your secret heart for peace? Does the cycle of suffering not cow you into desperation?”

The Monk was pretty entertaining. It stood on a wooden box, preaching. It had been there three or four hours ago when I’d first emerged from the sewers into Longacre Square, the old unused roads splitting off in all directions. It didn’t move, it just kept preaching. The crowds, angry and as well-armed as they could manage, surged over everything they could, smashing and stealing and burning, but they gave the Monk a wide berth. I leaned back against the old statue of George Cohan (whoever the fuck he’d been) and smoked a found cigarette, my back aching from standing for so long. It was a beautiful day, sunny and clear. A perfect day to burn your city down to the ground.

The SSF was establishing “order” block by block. They had air superiority and squads of Stormers on the ground, so it was only a matter of time. The riot had been going on for about twelve hours, would probably be suppressed in another twelve, and I felt sorry for anyone trapped in the poorer sections of the city once “order” was re-established. SSF punitive sweeps were pretty thorough.

Across the street, the mob was smashing their way into one of the upper-class stores where the wealthy shopped. An SSF hover swooped into position with startling speed and a team of Stormers dropped from it on thin cables. I faded back, edging into shadow. It always upset the System Pigs when some of their own got killed. The accepted wisdom being that you could never let the poor fucks think they could actually kill a System Cop. People had to believe that the hand of God Himself would reach down and squash them if so much as a drop of SSF blood spilled. The hand of God here taking the form of a hover, some Stormers, and a group of hapless Crushers who double-timed into the square to form a ring around the firefight, facing outward to guard the Stormers’ backs.

The Monk had also disappeared, but I ignored that. I wasn’t interested in the Monk. I was tracking Kev Gatz’s old roommate, the Teutonic Fuck. Through him I expected to find his source for genetic augments, Marcel, who Gatz recommended for just about any illegal service.

Kev had given me enough background on the German to start with, and even in the midst of a riot some of my contacts still worked. Pickering’s was on a war footing, but was still selling terrible booze and information. Pick himself had come out from his little office, grunting along on comically skinny legs below his balloon body, to have a belt with me and grouse about the stupid fucks burning down the city.

The Teutonic Fuck made his living and paid for his illegal gene-spliced augments by providing bodyguard services to other, slightly-higher-on-the-food-chain hoods. Like most augment-junkies, he was all flash and no sizzle. The augments that made him a huge, rippling mound of muscle left his bones weakened and his metabolism fatally compromised, meaning he was fragile as a bird and, while strong, easily winded. During moments of crisis like this, however, there was no need for his services because all the smart hoods were holed up in secure hiding places, waiting for the storm of SSF to pass them by. In such situations, the German made up his lost earnings by pulling mule duty for a few drug cookers. Since drug use of all kinds increased during times of severe social unrest, he was working overtime, following fixed routes on predictable schedules.

As I watched, he emerged into the square with two companions, ignoring the slaughter happening a few hundred feet away. The German was easy to spy. He was between six and seven feet tall, unbelievably muscled. His arms stuck out from his sides slightly because he could not lower them any farther. He had no neck at all, just a tree trunk of tendons ending in a red, lumpy face. His hands were shovels. He carried a nasty-looking pump-action shotgun, old but serviceable, and his legs looked like they’d been carved out of stone. Like a lot of other crazy augment-junkies, he wore a skin-tight latex uniform to show it all off. He glanced at the group of exhausted-looking Crushers, and a few nodded back. At least the German’s bills were paid up.

Everything twitched as he walked. There was nothing natural about gene-spliced muscles. One look at this moron and I knew he had about two years, maybe less, before some catastrophic genetic breakdown turned him into a pool of reddish pus. But he looked dangerous, and a lot of times that was all that you needed to get by. Everything was a fucking act. His two companions were oily, dirty women, obviously terrified. I’d be terrified, too, if I had enough drug condoms sewn into me to kill a fucking herd of elephants.

With a glance at the battle raging to my left, I stepped out directly in front of the trio. They stopped about ten feet away, the German leveling the gun at me. That didn’t bother me. I’ve had plenty of guns pointed at me, and recent adventures had forced me to reconsider who really was a threat to my life. If you weren’t a cyborg killing machine or an elite System Security Force officer, you just didn’t get my blood pressure up.

“It not worth it, friend,” the German said. His accent was so thick he seemed to be picking the words from a muddy stream. I flicked my cigarette at his feet and exhaled smoke. The cigarettes used to be better. It was like booze. Sure, you could find them, and if you had the yen you could even buy good ones-but the best were pre-Unification. Maybe that was romantic bullshit, but everyone swore they tasted better despite the age and even the shit cigs were ungodly expensive. For most of us, shit was all we ever saw.

“Listen, you Teutonic fuck, you know me. Kev Gatz was your roommate. We’ve met.”

He squinted at me, his shoulders and arms twitching. It was unappetizing.

“Ya,” he said at last, his flat, red face breaking into an ugly smile. “I see you before. Sure.” The smiled snapped off. “Get the fuck out of way.”

I held up both hands. “I just need to find Marcel.”

The smile came back. “Marcel? Ya, I know Marcel. He hiding. I tell you where he is. Five hundred yen.”

A wave of tired rage rippled through me. I was tired of obstacles. The grinning red potato of a face pushed the wrong button, so I took him down. It was ridiculously easy. Big men-especially big men who have paid dearly and suffered much discomfort for their hugeness-usually overestimate the amount of force required to break them.

It didn’t take any special kung fu. I nodded and glanced down at the street, waited a beat, and then launched myself forward directly at the shotgun. Before the German could react, I slammed into the barrel of the gun, ramming it up into his nose. He went down, his nose shattering into a bloody pulp. I held on to the shotgun as it slipped from his fingers. Since the last thing I needed was some drug lord coming after me in addition to all my other admirers, I whipped the barrel down and held it on the two mules.

“Stay,” I advised. “Our business will be done soon.”

As the German writhed on the ground, an explosion went off near the store, blowing a warm wind past us. The mules glanced over but I kept my eyes on them. I kicked the German lightly and he moaned.

“You’ve got bones like a fucking bird, friend,” I said. “Just give me the skinny on Marcel and you can finish your deliveries. Fuck with me some more and I’ll break every single hollow bone you have. You understand?”

The German moaned. “Ya, ya.”

“Good.” There was a second explosion, a second blast of warm wind. I winked at the two mules. “No worries, then.”

Everything was on fire. Outside the beat-up old hotel, every fifth building was burning, and most had already burned once or twice in previous uprisings.

“Why do they always burn shit down? Every single time things get out of hand, all they want to do is burn shit down. Took us hundreds of thousands of years to get to this point, and they want to fucking piss it all away in an evening.”

I shrugged. “None of it’s theirs. Burning it’s just entertainment.”

Marcel was a plump man of indeterminate nationality; so used to being tracked down and accosted he didn’t bat an eye when I emerged from the sewer drain down the block and walked into the old hotel he was living in. He’d made the ornate lobby his headquarters, and it was like a goddamn oriental court: People just lounged lazily around him looking bored, all of them young, good-looking, and heavily armed. Polite, too, with a few Crushers on the payroll standing uncomfortably here and there. Except for the Crushers, they’d all had a lot of cosmetic augmentation done, men and women, and drifted about in silky threads, not looking dangerous at all. Which made me think they just might be.

His people did nothing to stop me introducing myself, and for five minutes Marcel was happy to shoot the shit with me about the weather, the summary SSF executions he’d witnessed outside his windows, about the fact that no one knew how to riot properly anymore.

I’d heard of Marcel through Gatz and scraps of talk here and there, but there were a thousand operators in New York. They all thought they were the fucking Godfather and usually ended up dead before too long. Marcel had shown up in gossip about a year or so ago. He was heavy, had lazy eyes that remained half-shut, and since I’d arrived he hadn’t moved so much as an inch from the plush chair he was ensconced in.

“Well, Mr. Cates-who is such a good friend of Kev Gatz that Kev never mentioned him-I appreciate the social call under such extreme circumstances, but what can I do for you?”

I nodded. “I’ve come to beg a favor.”

The porcine little eyes widened just a bit and then settled elastically back to half-mast. “A favor, Mr. Cates? Alima, honey, go do a credit check on Mr. Cates while he tells me his tale of woe.”

A Middle Eastern-looking woman sitting on the floor hoisted herself up with animal grace and disappeared into the interior of the hotel.

“I’m not suggesting there’s no payoff for you,” I said quickly, trying to maintain my smile, my calm, and my hardass look all at once. It was exhausting. “But there’s no immediate payoff. Long-term, I’m willing to offer you a fair price. Double a fair price.”

Marcel studied me. “Mr. Cates, your name is out there, so I believe you’ve got a big job on the hook. Okay. Let’s stipulate you got a big payday coming. What do you need from me?”

I shrugged. “I need to get to London.”

Marcel laughed. After Dick Marin’s sudden barks, this sounded decadent and bottomless. His whole body jiggled with amusement. “Oh, Mr. Cates,” he said finally. “That’s rich. Transport’s normally expensive. In these unsettled times, it’s fucking impossible. I don’t care what you’ve got on the hook. You can’t afford it.”

I swallowed. “You’ve heard of me?”

Marcel shrugged, still giggling, wiping his eyes. “By reputation, Mr. Cates. A fair Gunner. Reliable. No Canny Orel, maybe, but competent.”

Canny Orel again-he was becoming my patron saint. Rumored to have killed over a hundred contracts in his time and retired rich. His name had been out of circulation for a while. When they’d been active, Orel’s organization had killed everyone-criminals, cops, politicians-with legen-dary impunity. You never knew with old stories like that, that tended to grow with the telling. But even if you subtracted three-fourths of what you heard as bullshit, they’d still been a bunch of hardasses I wouldn’t want to mess with. Anyone who had any kind of legit link to the Dъnmharъ was instantly promoted to Chief Asskicker in the room. “You know my rep. You know I don’t fuck around.”

Marcel shrugged again, all the good humor draining from him. “A desperate man can forget his rep pretty fast.”

The Middle Eastern woman re-entered the room, crossed to Marcel, and leaned in to whisper to him. Marcel’s piggy eyes widened again. He looked at me for some time before speaking.

“Mr. Cates, your credit is good. I think I can get you on a flight tonight. We will have to arrange a price.”

I blinked. “What the hell did she find out?”

Marcel smiled. “Only that your credit is good, Mr. Cates. Our price?”

Thank God, I thought, for loose lips. Marcel must have heard my payday was huge. And very real. I flipped open a small notebook and tossed it to him. “Write down a number. I’ll pay you when my work is done.”

He paused for a moment, still studying me, and then began to laugh as he laboriously wrote numerals onto paper, with a schoolboy’s care. When he tossed the book back to me, he was laughing full-strength again. “Mr. Cates, are you ready to impersonate someone very rich, someone very powerful, someone authorized to fly to London during a riot?”

I glanced at the number he’d written, struggled to hide my horror, and shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

Marcel kept laughing, and soon his entourage joined him. “Ah, Mr. Cates, what will you do about your clothes?” Marcel finally exploded. “The nobility is not accustomed to traveling through the sewers!”

I looked down at myself. I was caked in filth from head to foot.

I grinned back up at Marcel. “Well, fuck. It’s a riot. I’ll steal some goddamn clothes.”