Chapter 154: Terms

[Terms... It said terms. Nothing good has ever come after that word in my entire life.]

I finished the coffee anyway, went down three floors, and got everyone up.

The Ghostbird came back from wherever it had parked itself for the night, went out over downtown at first light with its rotor noise, and started flying over the bank’s block east toward the car park the same as it had done on the showroom road.

The six of us walked the three kilometers behind its noise, the streets emptying out ahead of us. Tikki rode my shoulder with his ears flat the whole way, and every few hundred meters a panel flashed up to tell me the lot was filling.

-Ding!

{

Ghostbird: status.

Downtown block clear to the river. Car park at 96% and filling.

Requesting permission to release napalm.

}

"Burn it."

We heard the thump come up through our boots from the east edge while we stood on the street under the tower, and the sky over there went orange along the bottom and stayed that way, and by the time the counter stopped at thirty-eight thousand and change, another five million and a bit had landed in the balance.

[Three burns since yesterday afternoon... and a man with a helicopter and no conscience about shamblers is doing alright. I could do this for a living... Well, I am doing this for a living.]

The Bank of Marlow’s head office had a skylight over its atrium that had come down in pieces onto the marble, and we went in under it in the line-up we’d used yesterday, me at the front with the Mossberg and Nia at the back, and the leftovers got handled like we’d done it before, because we had.

Two of them came around the teller counters at us, slow, faces puffed up with the stuff under the skin. Kara took the first one in the chest with a shot from the Gen-12 before it had even cleared the counter, and it dropped across the marble with one arm still reaching.

Mr. Norton took the second one in the sternum at twelve meters without any hurry at all, and was already walking before it had finished falling.

Neither of them looked at me afterward for a nod, and that had been the whole point of yesterday.

Nora’s drone, the one labeled BACKUP that had somehow left the farm in her bag, hung under the broken skylight calling corners in a voice that had stopped shaking around her tenth kill yesterday. Leo stood exactly where I’d told him to stand, which was next to Kara with the Spear up.

[One afternoon... That’s all it took to turn four civilians into people who clear a bank lobby without asking me how.]

According to the information I bought from the System, the vault level was two floors down behind a barred gate that had been locked when the world ended.

Standing before it, I grinned and put both hands on the bars and pulled and-

-SKREEE-!

The gate came off its hinges with a shriek of metal that went up the stairwell and back down, and I set it against the wall while Nia looked at me, then at the gate, and said nothing.

The door itself didn’t care about any of that. It was a circle of steel two meters across set into a wall a meter thick, hanging on hinges as thick as my thigh, with a dial and a spoked wheel and not a single scratch on any of it. I put my palm flat against it, same as I’d put my palm on eleven rigs and a helicopter and forty-foot trailers, and it stayed exactly where it was.

[Right... Bolted to the building... can’t sprite it away...]

And right on cue-

-Ding!

{

Centralized Resource Exchange and Distribution Interface Terminal (C.R.E.D.I.T.)

Contract Mode: Bank Robbery

Site: Bank of Marlow, Head Office, Vault Level

Service: Non-destructive vault entry

Estimated Duration: 5 minutes

Fee: 10% of all gold recovered from the premises, collected directly from the Inventory upon entry of each item, until satisfied.

Observation: destructive entry may attract the remainder of the city.

Terms non-negotiable.

No warranty implied.

Accept?

}

I read it twice, and then I read the fee line a third time, and then what I hadn’t done in a month of getting robbed by this machine, which was argue with it out loud in front of witnesses.

"Ten percent?!"

The panel stayed exactly where it was.

"I’ve put thirty million through you this week. Thirty." I pointed at the panel, which achieved nothing. "You charged me for certification on a wall you built yourself and I let you! And now you want ten percent of a literal bank vault? Do you have no shame?!"

The System did not respond to arguments, and it never once had in a month of them. It hung in the air in front of my face with its fee line and its no-warranty line and waited, and behind me the silence ran about two seconds too long.

Then Kara laughed, and the sound got out of her before she could stop it.

It was short, straight out through her nose. Then Nora went, properly, with her hand over her mouth. Right after her, Leo. Even Mr. Norton made a sound behind his glasses that might have been a laugh if he’d allowed it to be.

"It’s a locksmith," Kara got out, wiping her eye with the back of her wrist. "Nikki. It’s the locksmith from a heist film, and it wants its cut."

"It’s a thief." I gnashed my teeth.

"Take the deal, big guy." Nia leaned on the wall next to the gate she’d watched me tear off. "I’ve seen you haggle. You’d lose to Nora~"

[Ten percent... If a head office holds what I think it holds, that’s ten percent of a tonne, minimum, to the magic shop in my head, for five minutes’ work... And the alternative’s buying enough C4 to bring the ceiling down, three hours of drilling, and a dinner bell for the whole city.]

"Fine." I looked at the panel. "Confirm. Thief."

The System did not respond to that either.

A blue box the size of a shoebox appeared on the door beside the dial, sitting flush against the steel with no seam where it met the metal, and a panel came up over it with a clock counting down from five minutes.

Four fifty came and went, and then four forty.

Nobody in that corridor said a word. Six people and a cat stood two floors underground and watched a box do nothing, and then, at four minutes and ten seconds, a bolt inside the door moved.

-KLUNK-!

It drew back deep in the steel with a sound like a truck engine turning over, and then a second one went further round, and a third, each one a little louder than the last, and Leo took one step back from the door without seeming to notice he’d done it, while Nia took one step toward it with her rifle already raised.

At zero, the wheel spun on its own.

And the massive steel door swung open.