Avery Cates

‘The Salted Earth’ Excerpt

The final novel in the latest Avery Cates series, The Machines of War, is coming out on November 15th (pre-order it!). The fourth novella that comprises that novel, The Salted Earth, will also be available then. Here’s the first chapter of that novella for your reading pleasure.

THE SALTED EARTH

Part Four of THE MACHINES OF WAR

a cute little Fuck You roaming the halls

“There,” Marko said, pointing with a spidery metal arm. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

I inhaled cigarette smoke and squinted down at the holographic map of the installation. “A power surge,” I said after a moment.

Marko opened his mouth, then hesitated. “Yes. A power surge we didn’t cause.”

I spent a profitable moment examining my constant urge to smack Marko in the face. He was, at this thinned-out point in my increasingly unlikely existence, my oldest friend, and one of exactly two people left to talk to. And I wanted to strangle him on a regular basis.

You should read his old evaluations, Marin whispered in my head. You’re not alone.

Smoke curled up between us and I marveled. Cochtopa was absolutely packed with cigarettes. They were shitty and System-grade, but I was making my way through them at an unhealthy pace.

“A glitch,” I said. “This place has been collecting dust for years. And we just murdered its AI administrator.”

Me, Marin whispered, sounding affronted. You murdered me.

Marko shook his head. The control center was enormous, clearly designed for dozens of people. It was a circular room with banks of black-box data storage lining the walls. Long desk-like stations with data cube ports and holographic displays filled most of the room, but with just one activated and only one and a half people moving in the space, I imagined I could feel the weight of the mountain above us, pushing down, making the air dense and difficult to breathe.

The fucking System. We were literally inside its corpse.

“Maybe,” Marko said in a tone of voice that both implied doubt and made the urge to hit him rise significantly. “But it’s not just some circuit flicker. It’s significant, and the pattern is the same each time.” He glanced at me as if he suspected I was contemplating violence. “Also, it’s moving.”

“You think it’s a problem.”

Marko hesitated again. I was glad he’d learned to be careful. It was beneficial to our relationship.

“I think we have superficial control over this installation,” he said. “I think the code base is mammoth and there are layers that go back to the earliest days of the System. I think there are technological iterations that came long after I was iced out of things. I think there may be security layers we’re unaware of. I think, in short, that there’s no operating manual for this place, and we should not be ignoring anomalies.”

I nodded, standing up. I drew one of the Roon 87s I’d picked up from the armory and cracked it, peering into the chamber. “Okay. Let’s check it out.”

He blinked. “What, now?”

“If the System has a cute little Fuck You roaming the halls, I’d rather know sooner than later,” I said. “Where is it?”

“Deep. Down in some unfinished chambers, the projects that stopped dead when everything crashed.”

I studied the map for a moment. It was an area I’d never been to before. I was looking forward to a slightly different shade of gloom, a slightly ranker scent of sulfur. I touched the earpiece that had become my constant companion “Moreau?”

Cochtopa was a tomb filled with tech. Covered in dust, wrapped in plastic, stacked high on palettes in underground vaults so large you shuddered to run into the machines that had created them, there was every conceivable toy. Earbuds that worked through thick stone walls underground, with no central server or satellite necessary? The ghost of the System had them. Guns? Every fucking where, and piles of ammunition. Implants, augments, prosthetics? Yes, and grim, buried surgical theaters in which to apply them. Moreau was attempting an audit, digging himself deeper into the guts of the mountain every day, and after years of scrabbling after every bullet and N-tab, I thought the endless supplies were starting to drive him crazy.

After a moment, Moreau’s voice was in my ear, breathless but without a hint of static. “Yeah?”

I tapped the earpiece. “Danni?”

“Boss?”

“Want to go on a bug hunt?”

####

Every new area we invaded yielded an astonishing amount of late-System tech. There was one room filled with electric buggies running off power cells, each one programmed to follow one of several thousand prescribed routes through Cochtopa. All you had to do was punch in the appropriate code and it took off, smoothly steering around obstacles as it raced through the halls and crevices of the mountain.

Moreau, naturally, filled most of the cabin, which had been designed for normal-sized people, or at least their normal-sized avatars. Danni was crushed against me, squeezed every time the buggy took a turn. Moreau, in a mood I’d almost call jubilant, bristled with firepower—every time we cracked open a crate and found something new he added it to his arsenal. As someone else who’d spent a lifetime searching for bullets and piecing together guns from leftover parts, saying quick prayers against explosions every time he squeezed the trigger, I understood the urge. You never knew when the last vestiges of civilization were going to collapse on top of everything that had already collapsed, after all.

Danni carried a single gun: A Roon model 13, an older weapon for a more settled time, designed to be small and more of a discouragement for panicked rich people than a deadly weapon. I was sure you could kill someone with it, with some determination or creativity, but I suspected Danni liked how light and easygoing it was, and I supposed if I had the ability to lift hovers off the ground with my thoughts I wouldn’t worry much about what fucking gun I had strapped to my thigh.

“If this is rats,” she said, sounding tired, “I’m going to kick your Mr. Marko in the balls.”

“He’s not my Mr. Marko anymore,” I said. “He belongs to all of us, now.”

The buggy slowed and came to a stop, jostling us as it rocked on its suspension. The door popped up, and I crawled stiffly out into one of the familiar tunnels that snaked through the installation, the floor polished and smooth, the walls rough, conduits and pipes running along both sides up near the ceiling. I popped up a map of the place on a small vidscreen I’d scrounged from some random supply closet and zoomed in on our location.

“End of the ride,” I said. “Looks like the buggy’s programmed not to go any further because it’s technically off-map—we’re headed into a section of Cochtopa that was never finalized and added to the grid.”

Moreau grunted. “Fuckin’ typical. We find rides, we can’t use ‘em. Universe fuckin’ hates us.”

“We’re still alive,” Danni suggested.

In unison, Moreau and I grunted. I gestured at the little floating map and it zoomed in on the last spot where the power surge had been detected. It glowed softly in a field of unbroken, blank black on the map.

“That’s an unfinished, late-stage expansion area,” Marko buzzed in my ear, sounding like he was right next to me. “Looks like they stopped work on this project abruptly shortly before you, er, pulled the plug on the whole world.”

I hesitated a moment. “Before,” I echoed.

“Yup. Based on the logs I’m able to parse from here, all work on Auxiliary Tech-AV Development Zone 344 was halted about sixteen days before you and Orel went at it.”

I looked up into the darkness stretching out before us.

“No lights,” Moreau rumbled.

“Not connected,” I said, trying to pinpoint the spot where the light failed and the tunnel vanished. “But there’s a power surge.” I looked at Moreau. He nodded and suddenly there was a shredder in his hands, the slight whine of its powerup loud and ominous in the low light, a billion pounds of rock and tech above our heads.

“Fuck us all,” Danni muttered, fishing out a pair of low-light goggles and handing them to me. “We get fucking murdered gaining access to this place, turns out someone else is just living here, in the near-total darkness?”

Slinging the goggles around my neck as she pulled a second pair out of her bag for herself, I shrugged. Spectacular Dan had seen some shit and lived through some rough years with me, but I was the original, and I was used to the never-ending buffet of shit the universe had waiting for us all. For a while I’d thought I’d opted out, rotting away in the wilderness, content with my part in ending the world, but here I was, dancing to the same tune as always. One more job. One more death. One more excruciating torture session, one more week spent eating dust and drinking runoff and seething.

She’d learn.

Within a few dozen feet, the smooth, polished floor gave way to an uneven path of gouged and pulverized rock. The ceiling sloped downward and the walls closed in until we were walking down a corridor just wide enough for the three of us and just tall enough for Moreau to stand up straight. The rest of Cochtopa had been designed for some legendary race of giants, your presence in every room echoing off the walls. This sudden return to human scale was oppressive.

The tunnel advanced for a few hundred feet. We all slipped our goggles on, everything outlined in light, glowy blue, the universe ray traced. After another few hundred feet, the tunnel abruptly ended at a serious-looking metal security door, bolted directly into the rock. There was no keypad, handle, or obvious locking mechanism.

“That,” Danni said cheerfully, “is a door you’re not supposed to open.”

“Mr. Marko? You see our position?”

After a moment, Marko’s voice buzzed in our ears. “Yeah, Avery. There’s no door on the schematics. No wiring, either. If I had to guess, it was put in place to seal off whatever’s behind it.”

There was a moment of silence.

“I think you’ll probably have to blow it.”

Moreau brightened. I held up a hand.

“Zeke, any files in there relating to a seismic study of this place? As in, will blowing shit up bring the fucking mountain down on our heads?”

Moreau looked around. “They built this place to be a fortress, Avery.”

I pointed back the way we’d come. “They built that to be a fortress, you fucking simp. They stopped building whatever this was supposed to be.”

Moreau shrugged off his pack and advanced on the door. “Better grab some cover, then.”

Danni and I exchanged glances. She shrugged. “I’ve been contemplating suicide recently anyway.”

I sighed. “The universe won’t let me go that easy.” Somehow I knew that my death would be excruciating and humiliating, not sudden and simple. It gave me a strange sense of invulnerability. I waved at Moreau, and he gleefully began pulling explosive gel from his pack. He’d been itching to use it ever since we’d discovered crates of it piled up in one of the many, many storage areas they’d built into the mountain.

Danni and I watched as a ghostly, blue-outlined Moreau worked on the door, applying the gel with clinical precision.

“Man loves his work,” Danni murmured.

“You didn’t become a Stormer unless you enjoyed cracking heads and blowing shit up,” I said. “Shit, Little Moreau was probably pulling wings off flies as a kid.”

Moreau turned and trotted back towards us, moving pretty fast and nimble for such a slab of a man. He knelt down. There was no cover to take, so Danni and I crouched behind him.

“You motherfuckers,” he muttered.

“Relax,” Danni said, sounding almost giddy, “I got you, big man.”

It was strange. We’d formed a kind of friendly gang, stuck together in the world’s most impressive, most useless fortress of modern tech. My whole universe had contracted to these three people, and the last remaining ghost in my head, flickering in and out like a long-distance signal you were moving away from.

When the door blew, the goggles turned everything blindingly white. I shut my eyes and turned away with a snarled curse, and a rush of wind pushed past me. There was an incredibly loud sound of the door smacking into the rock walls, and then an eerie silence.

I opened my eyes. The goggles took a moment to flicker back online. Where the door had been was a rectangular opening leading to darkness. Stepping forward, I drew the Roon and held it down by my thigh. A chill breeze pressed against us as we approached. Moreau had the shredder in his hands, pressing himself against the scarred, pitted wall to the left of the ruined doorway, and Danni hung back, hands up, ready to throw some weight around.

Crouching down, I pressed myself against the wall to the right, then leaned over to peer into the space beyond. The goggles outlined the space in fine detail. It was a large cavern, the jagged ceiling way above us. The floor was relatively flat, and covered in what initially appeared to be bundles or sacks. But it only took me a second to realize what they really were.

“Bodies,” I said quietly. “We’ve got bodies.”

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Avery Cates: The Ghost Fleet

Avery Cates: The Ghost Fleet cover

GUESS WHO’S BACK: Well, I suppose it’s not much of a riddle since I put it in the title of this post. but, yes, Avery Cates is back in another novella: THE GHOST FLEET. This is part three of what will eventually be the novel THE MACHINES OF WAR (Part One was THE BLACK WAVE, Part Two was THE LAST MILE). Here’s the summary:

Avery Cates and his shrinking number of allies have made it to Cochtopa, the secret installation crammed with enough high-tech murder to trade blows with the ArchAngel — but Cochtopa’s AI security is a digital imprint of none other than Dick Marin, the King Worm himself.

Now it’s a race against time as Marin seeks to snuff out Avery for good and Cates struggles to claim the prize he’s sacrificed so much for. As Avery claws his way to victory, however, he’s reminded that every win comes with a price — a price usually paid by the people around him.

If that ain’t enough to entice you, here’s a teaser trailer, because I am god of my WordPress:

Out for pre-order, officially out December 15th. Enjoy!

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Avery Cates: The Black Wave

So, a new Avery Cates book is brewing.

I can’t seem to quit this guy. The Black Wave is Part One of the novel The Machines of War, which currently has no ETA. Once again, I’m doing the novella-release thing, where I write a portion of the novel and release itmore or less warm from the oven. When it’s complete, I’ll release the “omnibus” edition which will be the entire novel collected together.

As usual, the novellas are eBook-only. The full novel will be released in both digital and print formats.

I’ve been doing this novella thing since 2014, and on the one hand it’s marketing chaos — there are a ton of Avery stories floating out there. On the other hand, from a creativity POV it’s been fantastic. Not feeling tied to completing an entre novel is very freeing, as I can hang back and wait for inspiration and excitement to happen. For this one, the opening sequence hit me and I liked it so much I started writing. Before I knew it I had 20,000 words.

Here’s the logline:

Avery Cates is heading back to The Iron Island to steal what might be the last operational hover in what was once The System, but his rag-tag army is starting to fray — and there are more System leftovers out there than he knows. And most of them aren’t very friendly.

Available for pre-order at the usual places:

AMZN | BN | KOBO | PLAY

Officially out on November 15, 2021. Enjoy!

Cover Story

One of the best parts about being an adult (i.e., old as heck) is the ability to just create stuff on a whim. As a kid, I always wanted to make stuff, to be creative, but as a kid you lack resources. Also, I grew up a very, very long time ago seemingly before electricity. My brain still gets wrinkled that I can fire up my computer and self-publish books, create music, create text adventure games, and any other strange idea I might have. I mean, seriously, this shit is magic to a kid who had to pretend an old hand-me-down tennis racket was a guitar when he was 12.

It’s just fun to create stuff, even if you’re not an expert. I mean, I’m no professional graphic designer or visual genius, but creating covers for my Avery Cates novella experiments and the resulting novels is just fun. And they’ve been quite a journey.

The Shattered Gears

When I first began writing the new Avery stories, it was solely because I had an idea and I wanted to try a different way of working. Normally when I write a novel I start at the beginning and write til I get to the end, all in one monolithic effort. This time, with zero market pressure, I could just play around with short sections and see what happened.

So, when I designed the first cover for the very first novella, The Shattered Gears, it was a bit of a throwaway effort. I wanted to echo the vastly superior work of Lauren Panepinto with the Orbit covers (and obviously failed miserably, because Lauren’s work is amazing), so I went with a silhouette of a badass and some simple and distressingly obvious gear textures. The rest of the novella covers weren’t much more creative than that, though I think they pop off the screen well enough.

When time came to collect those first novellas into a novel, I got a little more ambitious with the cover design. It’s still a very simple silhouette-based concept, but I added some texture and lighting effects to make a little bit more interesting. I was especially proud of adding in the sci-fi gun to the silhouette. But then, really simple achievements make me outlandishly happy. It’s one reason why I love to make stuff.

Last year I started working on the sequel to The Shattered Gears, a novel titled The Burning City. Once again I wrote it as a series of semi-standalone novellas that I published individually, beginning with The New World. I decided that I wanted to up my game a little for the cover design, because it’s fun. So while I kept the fundamental silhouette aesthetic, I went with a more photo-realistic approach.

I think they turned out pretty good. And I kept the theme going with the cover for the omnibus edition (all four novellas collected into a single novel):

Again, I’m no graphic design genius, and I probably could have done a lot of this much better. But I’m kind of proud of how these turned out, and I remained kind of childishly amazed that I can just … do this. I can literally just create whatever the hell I want.

You can pre-order The Dark Hunt (novella #4) and The Burning City (the novel) right now, if you want. Come on, you know you want to.

Avery Cates: ‘The Long Siege’ and Serial Novel Writin’

The third part of the new Avery Cates novel The Burning City, The Long Siege, is available for pre-order, kids.

How this works is, I’m writing a novel (The Burning City, coming 2020) in big novella-length sections, and publishing each section on its own for 99 cents, just like I did with The Shattered Gears. Thus, you can either buy and read each part as they come, or wait until they’re collected into the novel. Or both! These sections are

  1. The New World
  2. The Devil’s Bargain
  3. The Long Siege
  4. The Dark Hunt

There’s no tight schedule here; I’m planning to have both part four, The Dark Hunt, and the novel, The Burning City, out in 2020, but lord knows when. Just how organized/sober do you think I am?

Here’s the trailer for the novel:

Thanks to everyone who keeps buying all these Avery stories. I’m having a blast writing them, so it’s great to know people are enjoying them! You can pre-order The Long Siege at the following places:

AMAZON | B&N

Avery Cates: The Devil’s Bargain Preorder

The Devil’s Bargain is part two of the new Avery Cates novel, The Burning City, and it’s available to preorder in all the usual places; officially out on 8/15/19.

Like The Shattered Gears before it, I’m writing The Burning City as a series of novellas that I’m releasing as I finish them. It’s a fun, different way to work on a novel, and I’m enjoying the process a lot. As with TSG, once all four parts of the new novel are out in digital format I’ll collect them into a standalone novel that will be available in print and digital formats. So you can either buy these one at a time as they drop, or wait for the full book.

I’m jazzed. Are you jazzed? <jazz hands as he backs away>

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Excerpt From the New Avery Cates Novella, “The New World”

Hey kids; the new Avery Cates novella, The New World, is available for pre-order everywhere. Here’s a short excerpt to whet your appetite.

I sighed. “Burn her mark, upload her face, dump her outside.”

There was a wave of something that might have been frustration, or disappointment. I knew there was a contingent that thought the Angels should all just be set on fire when caught in order to send the right message to the Archangel, and there were my fans who seemed to like the idea of me killing everyone I met. I could only imagine that Renque and the other Idiots told themselves that The Pale had not read Nicoleta’s fortune, and thus it wasn’t in the cards for her to be gloriously slaughtered by Avery Cates.

As I started to turn away, she convulsed again, and all of Dan’s Tele-K’s went into the air. They flew like missiles, smacking into everyone else and instantly plunging the space into chaos.

Nicoleta fell, as Danni’s team released her from their grip in startlement. She hit the packed dirt floor hard, bouncing a little, her bones rattling. As I ducked a body, I saw her climbing to her feet, rattled but conscious and moving. She spun around, then chose a direction and lurched into something resembling a run.

The Roon was in my hand. I was moving before my thoughts caught up, which was good, because my thoughts were centered on how old I was and how fragile my back was these days and how the whole fucking point of being a City Lord was that I had people for this sort of shit. And then I was in the tight brick tunnel, running.

She wasn’t fast. I rounded the first curve and saw her up ahead, limping, arms flailing as she tried to will herself to move faster. We were in a straightaway, so I planted my feet and took aim, squeezing the trigger, the shot sounding incredibly loud in the confined space.

Without even turning around, she sent the bullet back at me, screaming just past my ear. Not fast enough, maybe, to kill me, but disconcerting nonetheless. I grimaced and took two more shots, one high and one low, quick and sloppy.

She spun around, eyes big and round, and I was off my feet and sailing backwards. I smacked into the wall and the breath got knocked out of my lungs. I hit the floor and my teeth clicked, sending a dull throb directly into my brain. Hands were on me, then.

“Why do we fucking bother to provide security when you leave us behind all the damn time?” Moreau complained, as he set me on my feet.

“Come on,” I said, throwing myself into a staggering run.

We didn’t know anything about Nicoleta—what she’d come to do here, what she’d seen, what she’d be able to report—or who she’d pass that information to. And we didn’t know anything about the Archangel and his forces. All we knew was that he didn’t seem keen on non-Tele-Ks walking around breathing.

“Where’s this tunnel exit?” I asked.

“No fucking idea,” he rumbled.

Every step seemed to shake something painfully loose in my back, and whatever it was sifted into my lungs and clogged them up. I ran like gravity was getting stronger with each step. The world wasn’t designed for someone of my vintage. I’d so wildly overshot my life expectancy things were breaking down that I hadn’t known were part of my physiology.

We thundered down the tunnel, and for once I didn’t mind the noise—terror was useful. When we rounded a final curve and found our quarry standing in front of a solid brick wall, I had the presence of mind to duck down and hug the ground just as she spun around. Tele-K’s, like anyone else, tended to deal with things in their eye line first.

I heard two strangled grunts of pain behind me. I rolled onto my belly and brought the Roon up, squeezing off two shots in quick succession. Nicoleta spun back around, smacking into the wall and crumpling to the ground.

For a moment, it was just breathing. I got my feet under me with a grunt and a wince, clinging to the wall as I stood up. Sweat stung my eyes as I holstered the Roon and tried to look like something other than a broken-down old man.

“Burn her mark, upload her face,” I said, breathing hard. “Then dump her outside.”

Avery Cates: The New World

So, I can’t quit Avery Cates, and the last experiment in form — writing a novel as a series of novellas that linked together — was so much fun, and so successful, I’ve decided to do it again.

Like last time, the plan is to write this story in several big chunks which will then be collected into an omnibus like The Shattered Gears. Each separate novella will be released independently so you can either read them as I drop them, or wait for the collected novel, which will be titled The Burning City. The first part is The New World, and it’ll hit online stores on May 15th. This is a direct sequel to The Shattered Gears; there will be one more book after this, as well.

Beyond The New World, I don’t have a clear schedule. These will get written as time permits, so I can’t say when exactly the next part will come, or when the omnibus will turn up. Watch this space and I’ll keep y’all apprised.

In the mean time, you can pre-order The New World for 99 cents at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and (soon) Google Play. Huzzah!