Cates 05 - The Final Evolution Read Online Free PDF

upraised arm and spinning me wildly.
    When I stopped spinning, he had raised an arm to point at me.
    “Avery Cates!” he shouted. “You have been judged! You have killed your fellow man! You have fomented chaos and violence everywhere you have dragged yourself! You have killed thirteen members of my order, for which only god can judge you, and it is my duty to make this arrangement!”
    The Angels reminded me of the old Monks, those tortured cyborgs that used to prowl the System when there was a System and try and convince everyone that they had to live forever to get into fucking heaven. The Monks had generally wanted me dead, too.
    Fuck aim, I thought, and shot my arm out in the Angel’s vague direction, squeezing off eight shots as fast as my finger could twitch. Two or three went wide, but two managed to chew up the frozen ground at his feet, making him stumble backward. For a second, the invisible hand tugging me up disappeared as his concentration was broken, and I dropped to the ground, managing to curl up and throw my arms around my head just before I smacked down. My Roon went off on impact, and the air was suddenly filled with screams.
    Head ringing, my HUD flickered, broken status reports sliding past me as the immediate pain from the impact was washed away. I rolled onto my stomach and pushed myself up. The market had turned into chaos, the crowd slurring this way and that. I couldn’t see the Tele-K—he’d been swallowed by the panic—but I did see a body lying near the edge of the market, just a pair of tattered brown pants and two bare, brown feet sticking up. Nothing like an accidental kill to get the crowd stirred up.
    I checked my gun over quickly, opening the chamber and dropping the clip, then slamming both home again. It seemed fine, but I’d have to strip it later. I heard a soft grunt behind me and spun to find Remy, enveloped in the white tent, fighting hiway toward me in the freezing mud.
    “You okay?”
    He made a face. “Embarrassed.”
    I grinned, because I knew it would irritate him. “Move. Get in the crowd, under shelter so he can’t send us into orbit.” We moved to split up and I pulled up short, grabbing Remy’s arm and spinning him back to me. “Try not to kill everyone who gets in your way.”
    He turned without a word and sprinted toward the crowd, and I trotted at an angle to him, dashing around the muddy tents. I didn’t know where the Angel had gone, but I wanted him out of my hair. I didn’t need him popping up with his speeches and freaky powers every time I tried to get some business done. Stepping over the corpse, I merged into the foot traffic with my gun down by my hip, my finger alongside the barrel. Things were already getting back to normal even with the poor guy still lying in the mud a few feet away—there was still a buzz of excitement, but everyone was getting back to their own business. There was no law. No one was going to come and find out what had happened, who did it. No one was coming to process the body. If he had anything on him worth stealing, it was already gone, and with that, so was everyone’s interest until the shooting started again.
    I stepped back onto the main road and stopped to look around. Remy appeared a few dozen feet back from me and did the same, glancing at me and then advancing across the road and into the line of carts. At least in there he’d have something to anchor himself to. Although I’d been smashed against walls over and over again, too, so there was definitely nothing stopping them from kicking your ass anyway.
    There was a tug on my sleeve. I looked down and found half a man staring up at me. He was young, or had been, and had no legs, his midsection just ending on a filthy skid that had been designed to let him slide through mud or snow pretty easily. He held two blocks of wood in his hands for self-propulsion. His face was half normal and half a red mask of cold burns, one eye socket just a rubbery mat of pink