HERE WE ARE, AND WE ARE SO SPECIAL

I’d forgotten the nauseating whine hovers made when they were in the air, the feel of violent humming under your feet, the freezing cold inside one when you were high up and moving fast. For a second I could imagine the past few years hadn’t happened: I hadn’t assassinated Dennis Squalor, setting off the Monk Riots and indirectly causing the Plague; I hadn’t been arrested and put in the same yard as Cainnic Orel; there hadn’t been a civil war that destroyed everything. For a second I could imagine we were all back in the System. I’d been arrested again, and I was about to take a beating over something in a Blank Room in New York, and Kev Gatz would buy me a few glasses of gin at Pickering’s when I was tossed out again.

It was oddly pleasant, imagining that fucking hellhole of a world again.

I’d come up in the world. I was sitting next to a tiny window in a fairly luxurious hover—it had nice seats and some effort at climate control, although the seat fabric was torn and the stuffing was spilling out of them, the walls were scorched, and ugly metal plates had been bolted over damage in several areas. The windows were thick and cloudy, but afforded you a vertigo-inducing view of the world below, looking so peaceful for a fucked-over globe filled with people like me, roaming around free. My only friends in the world were three avatar System Pigs—one of whom was Director of Fucking Internal Affairs, the new Queen Worm, or at least a copy of her—the founder and leader of SPS, an ex-cop who’d once been the second-in-command of the entire SSF back before they decided to go forcibly digital, and a Techie who’d once been a midlevel success in the SSF. Aside from Grisha, it was all-cop, all the time.

There wasn’t much conversation. We’d spent a few days more in Berlin’s wrd, ultraclean bubble, gathering whatever intelligence we could muster—which wasn’t much, and mostly supplied by Grisha and SPS, since the System Cops were pretty fucking useless, as a rule, outside their own narrow borders these days—and figuring out details. Rad suits for the extraction team, weapons and ammo for the assault, hovers to get everyone in position, electromagnetic pulse trips for me for use against… well, Orel officially, but Mr. Marko had been nice enough to amp them up beyond specs for me. If the cops I was suddenly surrounded by became troublesome, the EMPs would knock them out temporarily.

I’d used the EMP trick once before on a Monk, back in Newark, prepping for the Squalor job. They had a wonky range and their effectiveness depended on a lot of factors. If it worked on Orel in his modified Monk body, I still wouldn’t be out of the woods; the EMP might take down his circuitry, but I didn’t know if that would knock his organic brain unconscious. Still, taking his guns away from him seemed like a good start.

A voice, all treble and static, screeched into life around us.

“We’re currently ten minutes out from designated landing zone. Please follow safety protocols.”

No one paid any attention. No one buckled their seat belts or took hold of the safety netting. No one double-checked the door seals or made sure all the crap we were lugging with us was secured. There was no point.

I looked out my tiny window and squinted down. After a moment my old augments kicked in and my vision zoomed down a little, bringing the strip of land we were approaching into sharper focus. After another second, though, my vision swam a little and my extra focus disappeared, leaving me just an old fuck squinting out a window. Croatia looked exactly like every other spot in the world. It had once been a country, I’d been told, before Unification. Maybe it was a country again, now. No one knew. I assumed the scab of red-roofed buildings on the coast was Split, and I tried to pick out the palace, but it had been subsumed into the city itself and I couldn’t spot it, even though I’d seen plenty of renderings over the last few days.

It looked like a model of a city, mountains rising behind it, blue ocean stretching out in front of it. It was hard to believe it was deadly to step into, hard to believe Canny Orel had buried himself there, like a spider, waiting for everyone else to die so he could pick through the graveyard.

Grisha, who’d been sitting next to Marko having what appeared to be a friendly conversation about molecular shred constants, whatever that was, stood up as if he’d never been in a damaged, crashing hover in his life and strolled over to sit with me. Hense glanced up from a huddled conversation with her bodyguard/attaché, who looked like a young-looking girl named Digby, all tight blond hair and rosy eyes—but since she was an avatar, who knew what she really was, inside. Maybe she’d been an old man before being tinned, or a black woman.

“This is the last of it,” Grisha said. “Amazing, that we are here.”

I frowned. “The last?”

“The last of our combined strength. The last strength anywhere, I think. The last time we will see hovers in the air. The last time anything like authority,” he saidreached out his arm in front of us, making a claw with his hand, “stretches out its power to try and order up the world.”

I stared at him. “Are you fucking drunk?”

He smiled at me. “Avery, don’t you realize how many people in history have thought themselves so special that the universe had chosen them to witness the end? Of the world, of civilization—call it what you will. And they are all wrong. Yet here we are, and we are so special. The world ends; we are here to watch.”

I smiled again. “You are drunk.”

He laughed, an easygoing roll of laughter that was shockingly relaxed and normal. Grisha sounded like a man who’d spent the last few years growing vegetables in his garden. “Avery, based on my own intelligence sources, the SSF has committed all of their remaining strength to this operation. They very rightly believe the recovery of Marin’s override code—and thus recovery of their own autonomy—is worth applying every bit of their last strength. Every avatar unit, every hover, every bullet has been committed.” He shrugged. “If they fail here, if they are smashed against the rock that is Canny Orel, there will be nothing left in the world that resembles order.”

I thought about Blank Rooms. I thought about Chengara, and Dick Marin’s flash grins when he was telling you that this particular unit didn’t have the authority to prevent your execution. I thought about snuff gangs and cops in beautiful silk suits kicking the shit out of you in the street.

“That,” I finally said, “is a fucking shame, isn’t it?”

Grisha laughed again. After a moment, I couldn’t stop myself from joining him. This was what it was like, I thought, to have narrowed everything down to the essentials: revenge, survival, whatever. No one in the hover with me had any ulterior motives. We were all fucking pure, for once.

The tinny voice crackled through the crank air again. “Uh, Director Hense, to the cockpit.”

Everyone glanced over at Hense, who looked up, hesitated a moment, and then stood, smoothing down the utilitarian black coat she wore over the SSF field uniform, which resembled the old Stormer kit except it was black, her five silver pips shining in the dull hover interior lights. Without a word she stepped through the hatch and disappeared up front.

“Not good,” Grisha said in a tone so serious I immediately laughed. After a moment, Marko joined in, and the three of us hooted deliriously for a minute while Mehrak and Digby stared in robotic confusion.

We were still catching our breath when Hense re-entered the cabin.

“Emergency protocols,” she said tersely. “Pack everything up tight and check weapons. Prepare for evasive maneuvers. Digs, priority message the rest of the convoy.”

Digby nodded, her pink-and-white skin too perfect to be believed, and then did absolutely nothing, sitting there staring while she worked her internal circuits.

“Whatht="0em up, boss?” Gall said, suddenly shaking himself out of a doze. “We hit Croatia yet?”

Hense nodded, consulting a tiny handheld that lit her face up in a purplish light. “We are. We’re being prevented from landing, though.”

We all sat forward in a moment of comical synchronicity. “Prevented?” Gall asked, bunching up his puckered face into a frown. “What crazy shithead is left out there who thinks they can trade body blows with you?”

Hense didn’t look up. “A crazy shithead named Dai Takahashi,” she said.