And then the government found a use for him. The head of the Security Forces, an enigmatic bureaucrat named Dick Marin, engaged Cates to terminate the head of a cult—the Electric Church—that threatened to rival the government for control of the populace. Rounding up some of his fellow criminals into a commando squad, Cates penetrated the heart of the Church and succeeded in wiping it out. This action fortuitously left him rich and cleared of his criminal record.
But such peace of mind and high status are too good to remain in effect. As the sequel opens, Cates has been abducted by some anonymous old enemy with a grudge. But he's not immediately killed. Instead, he's simply given a seemingly harmless injection and turned loose. Cates tries to track down his abductor, but he runs immediately into resistance and dead ends. Then, more alarmingly, his closest confederates start dying horrible deaths from a new plague. The victims include the young girl named Glee who has become like a daughter to him. Shortly afterward, an order comes down from the highest echelons of government to pick Cates up and quarantine him.
Cates eludes capture violently, finds a doctor who can unriddle his condition and learns that his unknown enemy has turned Cates into the Typhoid Mary of a nanotech plague. Acquiring new and untrusting temporary allies in the form of Marko, a Techie and cops Hense and Happling, Cates sets out to save his own life and that of the whole planet.
Tough-guy adventure in a wasteland settingWhenever critics look for a mystery novelist who's influenced SF, they always come up with classy guys like Chandler and Hammett and Cain, full of poetry and morals and ideals. But there's a strain of noir SF these days that seems to be the child of Mickey Spillane. That low-rent, no-pretense tough guy (who also happened to write a little SF) and his doppelganger hero Mike Hammer portrayed a back-alley world without sentiment or justice, a place of sheer happenstance where the only goal is brute survival by any means. Transplanted to SF in the work of Richard Morgan and Jeff Somers, this ethos and worldview makes for ultraviolence spectaculars, which was what
The Electric Church surely delivered.
This sequel, not so much.
Somers has good instincts in stripping Cates down to bare-bones desperation again. A baronial Cates sitting in his penthouse swilling champagne is worthless as a protagonist. But in taking the particular tack of making Cates a plague bearer, Somers missteps. First, all of Cates' supporting cast dies off. We lose a good, empathetic posse. The replacements are not as endearing, if that term can be applied. Second, although Cates performs a number of well-composed tough-guy action scenes, he's basically a victim carted around by his unwilling protectors. Also, the moral valence of his inflicting an accidental gruesome death on everyone he meets tends to rob him of our sympathy. Unlike the first book, where the Electric Church was a worthy proactive antagonist, the villain this time is offstage until three-quarters of the way through the book, and Cates is in essence fighting his own contagion. Lastly, I just don't buy Cates' physical derring-do in his ultimate condition: broken ribs, etc. It begins to come off as parodic.
Still, let it never be said that Somers is not a daring writer. He tears down all the societal apparatus he's previously lovingly erected, leaving Cates a purposeless stumblebum in an even harsher world by the book's end. Could this be the middle part of an ultimately redemptive trilogy? (Redemptive for Cates and the series itself?) If so, count me in at the next installment.
