Electric Church

VI CALM, DEFEATED HAPPINESS

The streets of New York were always crowded, because no one had anywhere to go. Hovers zoomed by overhead, rich-kid’s toys. Nothing commercial went by hover-all the shipping was automated, on specialized underground routes, though garbage was sometimes hauled in the air. The fucking robots had all the jobs; they were self-healing, intelligent, learning machines that never tired, never showed up late or hung over.

The street was wide, banked by tall, sagging old brownstones that looked moments from collapse. We followed the Pushed cops at a short distance, Gatz stumbling as he struggled to maintain a constant hold on them through his exhaustion. Trash swirled around our ankles, and every step was a push past shoulders and glares, everyone trying to out-tough each other until they saw the cops and suddenly got polite. I scanned the streets until I found what I was looking for: two Monks moving easily through the crowd with heavy tread, all the nervous humans making a small corridor for them to pass through, afraid to even touch their smooth, pale skins.

I nudged Gatz and the four of us started to follow the Monks. The Monks turned to glance back at the cops and then resumed their steady pace.

After a few moments, Dawson started to slow down, the tall blond looking up and back at me as if he’d never seen me before. His eyes sharpened.

“I’m going to eat your fucking kidneys, asshole,” he growled. “I’m gonna-”

“Kev,” I whispered.

Gatz nodded wearily and Dawson suddenly snapped forward again and picked up his pace. “Sorry,” Gatz muttered, “It’s… pretty fucking hard.”

I ignored him, waiting. I knew how his Push worked, the mechanics of it: He needed eye contact to establish his hold on you, but after that initial lock he maintained control just by concentrating, and the effects lingered for a few minutes even after he let it go, which was ideal for my purposes here, as we wanted to put some distance between us and these Pigs. When I thought it looked like the right moment, I nodded at Gatz, and he stared fixedly at the backs of our captured cops, Pushing them to act out the little script I’d hastily written. Dawson and Hallier suddenly animated, reaching into their coats and pulling out their guns. The crowd scrambled. Shouts of “Cop!” went up, and we were standing in a swirling mass of confused humanity.

“Police!” Hallier croaked in a voice that sounded like it wasn’t really meant to be used. The Monks didn’t hesitate. They moved, fast. I was surprised that they didn’t draw their own weapons, but rather ducked and ran as Dawson and Hallier pumped shells after them in precise, hypnotized sequence, Pushed. It was perfect. The Monks wouldn’t take this lying down. Once away from the public eye, they’d draw their own weapons, and my two pet cops, under Kev’s watery eyes, wouldn’t be any match for their digital reflexes. The cops would be eliminated, and I wouldn’t be implicated. The end result: two System Cops taking shots at legally recognized reps of a sanctioned religion, and poof! Dawson and Hallier out of my hair for good.

As the cops ran after the fleeing Monks, I grabbed Gatz by the collar and pulled him after me. I didn’t wait to find out what happened. We ran like hell, Kev wheezing like an old man, me snarling behind him. We melted into the city and I thought I’d be on a plane out of the continental area, under a new name, within hours.

Two hours later, Gatz and I were crashing in a borrowed apartment for a few hours until it was safe to venture out and try to contact Gatz’s Splicer friend, Marcel.

“Jesus fucked, Ave, isn’t that one of the Pigs we got rid of today?”

I looked wearily up at the Vid. It was an older model, with no advanced features and just a sixty-inch screen, but that also meant it didn’t have any of the tracking features the newer Vids had. On the screen, crisp and clear, was the oddly unhandsome face of Barnaby Dawson, blond and blue-eyed. He was staring straight ahead like he was pissed off at the camera.

I moaned, and gestured the sound back on.

“… dead. Representatives of the Electric Church issued a statement from London condemning the actions of the SSF captain, and demanding that he be immediately suspended from duty and tried for murder. No explanation for the illegally modified firearms found on the Monks’ bodies was included in the statement. The Electric Church is now listed as the sixth-largest religion on Earth, with about nine hundred million registered members. Brother Kitlar Muan, spokesman for the Church, refused all requests for an interview… In Minsk this afternoon another food riot was forcibly…”

I waved the sound off again as Dawson’s face was replaced by a video of a riot, people shouting and bleeding and generally getting their asses kicked by SSF, which was how all the riots ended. I looked down at the floor.

Dawson was alive, and I was fucked. We were fucked, but my interest in Gatz’s well-being ended well short of including him in my own worries. I liked Kev a lot, which meant I’d try my best not to kill him. It didn’t mean I’d lose sleep over it if I did, accidentally or otherwise, as useful as he was. Dawson was alive, Hallier was dead. They were both supposed to be dead. The fucking Monks were supposed to have pulled the same sort of cyborg voodoo on them that I’d seen, and Dawson was supposed to have gone down a Burned Badge who flipped out on the Monks and got fed some bullets as a reward. Having the motherfucker still alive-and being tortured in a fucking DIA Blank Room, a room that survelliance could not penetrate and that didn’t exist in any official building plan or document-had not been the plan. I began rocking gently back and forth.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I moaned.

Gatz was up, rubbing his bare arms in agitation. “Avery, we ought to get moving. Now. Find Marcel before your name gets on the street connected to this. Marcel hears you’re fucking marked with this shit, he won’t touch you.” Gatz shook his head, glassy-eyed. “No one will.”

He was right. It was one thing to get hassled by the System Pigs; everyone did. It was one thing to even get charged with something-everyone did, eventually. But to really piss off a cop, to maybe get your name thrown around a DIA Blank Room, to maybe have the whole fucking SSF on your ass for revenge-shit, I wouldn’t want to be seen talking to me either. Even the Crushers would stop taking your bribes.

I looked up and rubbed my stubble. “Okay, let’s move.”

It was good to move when you’d decided the time had come, because people who hesitate tend to get popped. I grabbed my coat and started walking, and Gatz was right behind me. Down the escalator, shrugging our coats on, and then into the street, still a mess of humanity pushing against the walls around them and looking for a way out. The whole fucking world was like this. There was no place left to go.

We’d only made it about six blocks against the tide when Gatz stumbled and put a hand to his head, just fingertips on his forehead, and winced. “Oh, shit, I feel like shit.”

I was debating whether I wanted to go check on him or just leave him be, whether I really needed an introduction to Marcel after all, fuck, he’d know me, everyone in New York knew Avery Cates. But then I heard it: hover displacement. And then everyone in the street was moving and shouting.

“Police!”

“Cops!”

“Policia!”

“Pigs!”

“SSF!”

A second before the searchlight hit me, I closed my eyes and knew I was fucked.

The light made everyone scatter, and within seconds Gatz and I were standing in a bright pool of light, and the rest of the fuckers were crawling along the edges of the light, staying clear of it. Figuring, fuck, if the Pigs weren’t interested in them, why make them interested? Fucking roaches, running from light.

I adjusted my sunglasses and considered. The hover was about ten seconds from close enough to drop Stormers-but they could always shoot you down in the street, too. The fucking cops could do whatever the fuck they wanted. If they hadn’t shot me yet, I reasoned that they weren’t going to, so I stood there, and kept my hands in the open.

The fucking hover landed.

I’d never seen an SSF hover land in the street. People went diving in all directions as it settled heavily on the asphalt, just a few feet away from me. Displacement kicked up. It was like standing in the path of a hurricane for a moment, wind whipping mercilessly, my face trying to peel off my skull. The street was just barely wide enough. The fucking bastards kept the searchlight on me and Gatz, trying to blind us. I’d had my glasses made specially for that, though, and I could see fine.

Little things made you feel good, when it came to the System Pigs.

The hatch popped open and two Stormers were out, darker than shadows in their black Obfuscation Kit, the uniforms taking on the color and texture of whatever they were standing in front of as they moved, giving me an instant headache. In ObFu, the bastards could stand against a wall and blend in like goddamn chameleons, and you’d never see them until they moved for you.

These two just knelt and covered me and Gatz with their KL-101s, automatic rifles with built-in grenade launchers. I made a mental note not to move. I knew I should be terrified, but I just felt empty. And tired.

“Weapons!” one of the Stormers shouted. “We want to see weapons!”

I nodded and slowly pulled my gun from its shoulder holster, my backup from the small of my back, and a razor from my boot, leaving them on the ground in front of me. Gatz just shook his head.

“Weapons, fuckface!” the other Stormer shouted.

“I don’t have any!” Gatz shouted back, bless his soul.

The Stormers looked at each other, apparently having never heard of such a thing. Gatz relied on the Push to get him by. After a moment, however, the decision was made, because a couple of hapless Crushers in their loose, generic uniforms were dispatched to give us both an old-fashioned frisk, rough and thorough. Satisfied, they signaled and a System Cop emerged from the hover and stepped forward, looking dapper in a perfectly tailored suit and a mind-blowingly expensive overcoat. He glowed with health.

I hated him, hated them all, strutting around wearing more than I fucking earned in a year, and me earning it with blood everywhere, staining me forever. Motherfucker.

“Avery Cates, Kev Gatz,” the motherfucker drawled. “Elias Moje, colonel, SSF.” He nodded curtly. “Come on, then.” He was about my size, but broader and heavier, carrying himself like a man used to throwing his weight around and getting the desired response. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut close, and a neat beard pointed downward from his chin. He grinned, but his eyes didn’t. His suit was tailored, the material expensive, but what really drew the eye was his walking stick: black and shellacked and covered in thorns, its pommel a thick, heavy knot.

Outside the bright circle of light, I could see the gray mass of people moving like water, roiling, scrabbling, looking over their shoulders at us. I smiled at Moje, enjoying the curiously numb feeling that smothered all the fear, all the anger. “Nervous?”

He blinked, and then laughed. He threw his head back, and a rich, easy laugh emerged from him, spilling out in bubbling waves. “Mr. Cates, that’s hilarious. Now, move it. You’re late for an appointment with DIA Chief Marin.”

I had already started to head for the hover-when the SSF sends a fucking hover to pick you up, you’re already in deep shit and struggling will just make you sink faster-but the name Marin made me stumble a little.

All I knew about Dick Marin was what everyone else knew. He was the director of the SSF Department of Internal Affairs.

It was likely that Marin was the most powerful man on the planet, aside from twenty-five old bastards from around the world who called all the shots, the Joint Council (theoretically elected, but I couldn’t recall an election). The DIA had been formed as a check on the System Cops, who were otherwise almost totally autonomous. The SSF had authority over everyone-the entire System. The DIA was the only body with authority over the cops. And at the top of that pyramid was Director Richard Marin. The facts on Marin were scarce: He’d been a real shitheel cop, a total bust, incompetent, lacking the usual cruelty and arrogance, his career saved only when he got shot about six million times in some remote hellhole in the Pacific. After years of physical rehab, he’d emerged as the newly minted director of the SSFDIA, the King Worm, newly molted. That was it for sure-thing facts.

Walking slowly toward the hover, knowing that I would be on all the Vids in a few minutes, I closed my eyes. I thought, with calm, defeated happiness: I’m fucked.