A MOMENT OF CRAZY

“Light goes green, you bend your fucking knees! You put both hands on the guide clip! You do not fucking hesitate!”

The cop had been a real bruiser in his flesh life—a big, red, round face, a thick neck with cords that stood out and big, buggly eyes, bloodshot and genetically outraged. He’d been yelling since birth, I figured, and had been assigned to drop-ship duty because it was the only place in the world where his congenital volume made any sense.

The wind was fucking intense, tearing at us as the hover moved through the air, everything vibrating, the rhythm of it drilling up through my feet into my body, moving my organ around and making my teeth chatter. I was strapped to a harness made of wires so thin and nearly invisible I could not believe it would hold me on the way down. I was about to find out what it had been like for all those Stormers through the years, waiting for roof charges to pop and blow the top off some dive and then plummeting down on their thin, silver wires, seeming to appear out of fucking nowhere. There was no time for us to make an overland approach—we had to be inside the palace on a schedule, so we had to jump out of a fucking hover. I didn’t care. I hadn’t come this far for the cosmos to kill me this way.

That had been Remy’s line, that certainty about your fate. I’d always thought he was a self-pitying asshole for it, expecting him to one day just wake up and be over it. Maybe he’d just learned it from me.

The cop smacked one of his mitts against the big light bolted to the side of the bay, protected behind a metal grate. “Light goes green—”

“Say it again and I’m pulling you down after me!” I shouted back over the howling wind. “What am I, a fucking recruit? Shut up.”

The cop popped his eyes out at me, and again I was amazed at the artistry involved in the fucking avatars. Then he smirked and clapped his hands together, mimicking washing them, and snapped them apart as he backed away from the open bay. I translated that into Fuck if I care if you catch a crosswind and get broken in half, asshole.

Behind me, Grisha leaned forward to shout in my ear. “Light goes green, you bend your fucking knees!”

I tried to stay pissed off, but I burst out laughing. I was going to miss Grisha.

We were wearing the radiation suits already, of course, and in twenty minutes mine had become intolerably heavy, pushing me down relentlessly, squeezing my lungs. They’d been fitted with hip holsters on each side; in the right I had the Roon, oiled and cleaned. In the left I had some random automatic the cops had handed me, no personality. We each had a shredder slung across our chests in a precise way that would make it awkward as hell to quickly deploy but difficult to shake off accidentally as we hurtled downward through the air. I’d found a small pocket along one thigh of the suit where a large old hunting knife fit nicely; I wasn’t much of a knife fighter, but a lot of times people saw the guns and forgot there was any other kind of weapon in the world, so a knife was sometimes a nice surprise to have. The pockets of the suit bulged with ammo, and if we didn’t have enough between us to kill everything within a mile radius we were fucked to begin with, so it didn’t matter.

“Put on your helmet!” Grisha shouted. “One minute!”

I took a deep breath and raised the heavy helmet up and over my head. It seemed to pull down on my arms as I let it settle onto my shoulders, sealing itself to the suit. There was a moment of suffocation, and then some chemical reaction began sweetening the air and I could breathe normally. My vision was hampered, but I was comfortable enough despite having another twenty pounds to lug around. I was already sweating, and my heart was still doing its weird little fluttering thing.

Fuck it, I thought. Light goes green, bend your fucking knees and quit complaining.

Out in the distance I could see the flashes and smoke of the main assault, drawing attention and letting the cops vent some of their frustrations. It was beautiful—the explosions and streams of Stormers raining down on their silvery lines, silent and distant, like a Vid being played with the sound off.

The light turned green.

For a second I was frozen. The green light meant bend your fucking knees, grab onto the clip, and push yourself into the open air, but fuck the ground was far away. I was sweating like a stuck pig, and I was jumping into airspace that would cook me from the inside out if not for the suit. I stood for a second staring at the green light, mesmerized.

Jump, dummy, Dick Marin whispered at me.

I didn’t bend my fucking knees; I leaned forward and grabbed the guide clip and then kept leaning forward until gravity reached up and plucked me from the bay. There was a moment of crazy when I didn’t have a center of gravity and just whipped this way and that, and then everything settled down and it was exhilarating, just gliding down through the air. I couldn’t hear anything because of the suit, and I couldn’t feel the wind pushing against me; the sensation was like floating with purpose, and for a few seconds I forgot about everything else.

Then I glanced down and thought, Oh shit.

The ground came up so quickly I made a squawking noise of surprise, suddenly remembering, vaguely, something about going into a crouch while still in the air and letting go of the guide clip at a precise moment. Then I smacked down hard, bouncing once, the impact absorbed partially by the thick, almost-armor-like material of the radiation suit. I skidded along the rough ground for a second or two and then crashed into something unyielding and came to a sudden, ringing stop.

Almost directly in front of me, Marko managed a perfect landing, dropping onto the ground and into a shuffling run, the silvery wire snapping back up just like I’d been told to expect. His momentum took him a few feend then he stopped himself and knelt down, like taking a bow. A few moments later, Mehrak, wearing standard Stormer Obfuscation Kit scrubs instead of the rad suit, hit the ground with similar grace, and when Grisha smacked down like a load of wet shit I was fucking happy, and I watched him roll like a rag doll with something approaching satisfaction. Even the perfect landing Hense’s doppelganger—also in standard issue Stormer kit—managed when it landed couldn’t ruin the moment.

Marko stepped over and reached out a gloved hand. My earbud sizzled into life. “You okay?”

I let him haul me up. “Peachy. Hitting the ground at a thousand fucking miles an hour is a tonic, you ask me.”

“We had mandatory training,” Marko said, sounding almost apologetic. “Even the Tech Associates. This was my fifteenth drop.”

“Two hundred forty-nine,” Mehrak buzzed in. “Two hundred thirty-three live in the field.”

“Compare manhood later,” Grisha panted in my ear, “and someone help me up. There is no time.”

I spun around, taking in the scenery and picturing the aerial images. “This way,” I said, breathing hard already in the heavy, hot suit.

It was hard to believe the whole area was dangerous—everything looked normal, natural. It was easy to think that the rad suit was a joke, that Hense was trotting along behind me with her endless fission energy hiding a smile as she imagined me sweating and straining under its weight. I had a crazy urge to just shed it, to peel it off and feel the cool air on my skin.

Hense’s voice buzzed in my ear. “You ready for him, Cates?”

I smiled inside my humid little world. “Tell me something, Janet: Do you hear yourself? Are you just whispering to yourself constantly? Are there, like, forty echoes of your own voice in your head?”

“This unit is off-net, Avery,” she buzzed back, static making her sound thin and distant. “We didn’t want any signals getting noticed. I’m independent.”

I thought about that. Independent. Fuck, I’d thought I was independent for years, but I was on the Rail, being pushed gently into increasingly terrible things. And I didn’t even have circuits where my brain should be, hardwired with who knew what. I didn’t have an automatic shutdown routine if my insane leader somehow got shut up for a few weeks.

We were in the right area, but I couldn’t see the entrance to the sewers. I spun around, feeling constricted without proper peripheral vision, and finally spotted a big clump of rocks too squared off and too precisely piled to be natural. These turned out to be the edge of near-buried ruins, big slabs of worked stone fallen over onto itself, exhausted. I climbed into the midst of it and followed the outline of the stone, finally finding a sloping indentation into the earth, lined with faded, moss-eaten stone, leading down into darkness. What was left of some previous System, I thought. Some other King Worm had built this, then died, and it was still here, being swallowed an inch a century forever.

“Right here, I breathed.

I waited for everyone to catch up, clambering over the stones and swatting low branches out of their faces. Marko and Grisha were like nimble foam men, all bulk and shapeless material but somehow still able to bound from toe to toe, balanced and easy. They all gathered around the hole and paused, staring down into it.

“Fuck the hazard pay,” Mehrak said as melodiously as ever. “This is the worst assignment I’ve ever gotten.”

“Duly noted,” Hense snapped. “Now, in. Mehrak takes point, Avery and me in the middle, our two Tinkers in the rear.”

“Careful,” Grisha said, sounding out of breath but amused. “Parts of avatar can still be broken. You might trip down there in the dark.”

Mehrak shrugged. “If I do,” he said, “don’t recycle my chassis for one of your crunchy geeks, promise?” Without waiting for an answer, he plucked his sidearm from its holster and with a glance around jumped down into the darkness. I gestured on my helmet’s built-in light and jumped in after him before Hense could issue me any more instructions.

It wasn’t a very far drop. I landed easily on a brick floor and immediately stepped aside to let the rest follow Mehrak and me. We were in a tight little tunnel, big enough for us to walk in single file along its damp, slippery stonework. It graded down a few feet but then appeared to level off to a subtle downgrade, pitch-black aside from the trickle of sunlight from the hole and the thin light Mehrak and I were throwing around. I was just thinking that it was going to be a painful procession with Hense at my back barking orders when a shadow moved up ahead.

“Get down!” I shouted, my own voice buzzing in my ears with feedback. Mehrak dropped to a knee instantly, his gun coming up in time with my own. For a moment, we were statues, trembling with the desire to pull the trigger and make some fucking noise.

“Oy, don’t fuckin’ shoot,” a woman’s voice called from the gloom. “I’m comin’ on up to ya. Don’t fuckin’ shoot me.”

The shadow moved again, creeping up toward us, slowly resolving into a tall, thin woman with bright red hair, an unpretty face but a nice body, shown off to good effect in her skintight pants. She wasn’t wearing a lick of protective gear, and as her face resolved in the dim light I instantly knew why.

“Fuck me,” I said, straightening up. “Mara.”

She stopped a foot or so beyond Mehrak’s reach and put her hands on her hips. “Ach, Avery, you know better’n anyone here there’s no-fucking-body named Mara in this world. If you don’t recognize yer old pal Cainnic, or a version o’ him anyway, then t’hell with you.”

“Avatar?” Hense hissed from behind us. “Of Orel?”

Mara’s eyes flashed over my shoulder. “That’s right, sister. An’ I come bearing the fucking flag of truce.”

I licked sweat from my lips and wished fervently I could wipe it from my eyes. “Why’s that, ashole?”

Mara’s face smiled sweetly, transformed, for a second, into a pretty woman. “Because I’ve gone fucking batshit insane.”