NOT AS MANY PROBLEMS AS BEING TURNED INSIDE OUT BY RADIATION

When Grisha found me in one of the empty hovers on the beach, he paused f a moment in the hatchway and burst out laughing.

“You look like a piece of spoiled fruit,” he said, stepping into the hover, followed closely by Marko and Mehrak. The three of them were apparently my best friends in the whole world. Everywhere I was, they went.

I was sitting enveloped in the heavy, bulky rad suit Grisha had supplied to me, except for the headgear, which lay on the filthy, muddy floor of the hover next to me. It weighed about the same as a planet, was about five thousand degrees, and smelled like the last guy who wore it had melted and been absorbed into the weird, coarse fabric of the lining where he’d continued to rot on a molecular level. I had a canteen of the terrible German liquor they’d had in Berlin and I’d been drinking from it for two hours. My head pounded in time with my heartbeat, and my mouth was filled with sand.

I raised the canteen up and waggled it at Grisha as he approached. He made a face.

“Fuck, Avery, you stink. What will you do when you have to piss?”

I winked. “The question should be, what did I do when I had to piss.”

He laughed again. “You are a fucking animal, yes?”

I tried to shrug, but the suit was too heavy. It appeared to be a single piece of strange, gray material, seamless and stretchy. There was one slit in the back you stepped into, which mended itself magically when pressed together. When you put on the helmet it sealed itself and somehow generated an air mixture, though I couldn’t see any kind of tanks.

Grisha knelt before me as the other two inspected the bay for seats. This was one of the old drop hovers, used to dump Stormers on our heads. There was no furniture, aside from narrow benches along each side, and the interior was a mess of damp sandy mud. Mehrak was wearing a spiffy, old-fashioned suit, complete with vest and gold links on his huge white cuffs, and he stood there pondering the muck with an expression of total confusion on his synthetic face. Marko was back in Techie scrubs and after a second’s hesitation just sat down. He seemed to have gained an inch of hair overnight.

“How is the weight?” Grisha asked, studying the suit.

“Like I’m carrying you,” I said. He reached out and took the canteen and tilted it back into his mouth. “It’s hot, doesn’t bend well, and the headgear gives me about an inch of peripheral vision.”

He nodded, grimacing as he swallowed and held the canteen over his head. Marko leaned forward and took it. “Yes, about what was expected. You foresee problems?”

“Fuck yes, I foresee problems,” I said thickly. “But not as many problems as being turned inside out by radiation.”

Marko dissolved into a paroxysm of spluttering coughs, holding the canteen out and away from him like it had bitten him. After a moment Mehrak shrugged and plucked the canteen from his hand and just held it, looking, for a moment, incredibly sad. I thought about never drinking again for the rest of fucking eternity and felt sorry for a System Cop for maybe the fist time in my life. For a second I had drunk tears welling up in me, and I swallowed with heavy, bitter effort. I was not some fucking kid plotting his first-ever rat-cart takedown with some other snotnosed orphans still wondering if Mom was coming back to claim them.

Grisha stood, turned, and sat down next to Mehrak without even considering the filth factor. Grisha was fucking practical. If the only seat was filthy, well, you sat in filth. “He will be in Monk chassis. Stronger than us, faster. More precise with aim. Reloads on the weapon will be nearly instant. Then he will have his mental abilities, the God Augment. He will Push us. He will pick us up and fling us about.”

I laboriously raised a heavy arm to waggle a thick gloved finger at him. “He isn’t Pushing me, if that cunt back in Spain is to be believed. Said it took time and planning to keep me under. And if he’s stuck with original Monk issue, those guns jammed like nothing I’ve ever seen. But don’t forget his new fun little thing, Traveling. He’ll pop into Zeke and make him turn on us.”

Marko blinked and straightened up, his hairy face red and damp under his whiskers. “Why me? Fuck, he might do it to you.”

I started to shrug amiably, but Grisha shook his head and spoke first. “No. Avery… Avery’s brain is fucked up.” He threw a smile at me as he fished cigarettes out of his pocket. “No offense, Avery. After Chengara, his brain was fundamentally changed. He should have been erased, like everyone else who went through second-pass version of AV-79 Amblen processing, but he was not. His brain… re-wired itself. Accommodated Salgado and… others, repaired itself.” He reached over and claimed the canteen from Mehrak. “I doubt Orel can ‘travel’ into Avery. If he does, he may not find what he expects.”

I remembered Marin, far away and long ago, telling me, Now you, you’re from imprint one. Imprint one scans out at one hundred and fourteen percent complete. Which is, of course, impossible. I wondered how I always remembered shit like that so perfectly, every word, exactly. He’d been trying to brain fuck me, of course, to convince me I was an avatar unaware of himself, but I wondered if the data he’d been using had been real—rule number one of lying to someone was to use as many facts as possible. It made your lie seem real. If Remy had lived, I would have leaned over and told him that, and he would have opened one eye, then reached out for the canteen and gone back to pretending to be asleep.

I came back to myself and winked at Marko. “See, Zeke? Has to be you. I’ll apologize in advance if I have to shoot you.”

Marko stared at me, then looked down at his muddy shoes. “Fuck,” he whispered, stretching it out into one long noise.

I wondered if I’d be able to stand up on my own with the suit on. I thought I probably should have considered that before getting shitfaced on the floor. My vision seemed to have waves in it, and when I shut my eyes everything started to spin, so I opened them again.

“We go tomorrow, yes?” Grisha suddenly said, looking at Mehrak.

The cop glanced at Grish and then nodded. “Assuming we get a full day’s sun to charge up the panels, yes. The panels only supplement the fuel supply, though, running electric motors alongside the solid-fuel cells—we have only enough overall juice, assuming a full day’s charge, for one long-range trip with full weapon activation. But, yes, tomorrow.” He looked at me, raising a jolly eyebrow. “Unless you think we ought to give princess here—”

“Avery will be fine,” Grisha said decisively. “He drinks professionally. Take the canteen with us and let him hydrate.” He looked at me. “You are ready, yes?”

I nodded and tried to give him a thumbs-up, but my arms were too heavy to lift, so I just nodded as assertively as I could manage.

Mehrak’s expression was bland and unconvinced, but he shrugged. “Bricks in the air before dawn, darlings; the assault hits half an hour later, drawing whatever muscle the old man’s got around the palace. He’s got a surprising number of people working security around the palace. They die off pretty fast, but people keep streaming in.”

“Pushed,” Marko suggested quietly, scratching at his neck beard.

Mehrak waggled his brow. “Maybe. I’ve never seen the Pusher could maintain hundreds of people like that over a period of fucking days, weeks.”

Marko snorted. “That old fuck traveled with his brain to Berlin from Split and took over a series of poor fucks,” he pointed out, sounding admiring. “I think it’s safe to say this is a new kind of thing for you to wonder about.”

I laughed. “Shit, Zeke, you got mouthy.”

I almost said, I’m gonna miss your fucking stupidity, but stopped myself. No reason to state the obvious about Mr. Marko’s chances of surviving me.

“So, we will go at the same time, find our sewer hole, and begin infiltration,” Grisha said. “By the time we attain the main part of the underground complex, our friends the police should be in full swing, drawing Orel’s forces and, hopefully, attention up and out.” He made a fruity little flapping gesture with his hand, and I started to laugh a little. I felt pretty good, despite being sick to my stomach, way too old, friendless, and sitting in a urine-soaked rad suit so heavy it was smothering me by increments. I felt at peace. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I avenged everyone, everything.

“What if he has a reserve of people down there?” Mehrak said, frowning. “We can’t assume he’ll be rattling around down there alone.”

Grisha shrugged. “Regular people, we do not worry about them. We have Avery. We have ourselves.” He paused and glanced over at Marko, who seemed absorbed in his own fingernails. Then Grisha nodded firmly. “Ourselves. Orel should worry about us, not us about his slaves.”

Mehrak raised an eyebrow, seeming amused. “And when we run into the glorious Mr. Orel himself in his golden jumpsuit? When he starts tossing us around and making us see visions?”

Grisha nodded. “I have some surprises for him. SPS has not been idle, and we have done much research into the Psionic active.”

Surprises, I thought murkily, my head swimming. And then, as my vision folded up on itself, I chased that with me too.