by Brian Daley
When Byron finally stopped pummeling her, it was to undo her meddling. He railed at the constituents to resume their labors, and they dazedly obeyed. The seconds he had spent cuffing her, however, had caused a critical delay: All at once the stage thumped as something dropped from the balcony.
Like mirror images, Piper's and Byron's heads swung toward the source.
Conflict erupted in her. The fact that she could feel relief at the arrival of an Alone was unprecedented—and such an odd Alone, at that.
* * * *
One of the Murphy's law corollaries Lod had embraced during the Broken Country War was "Try to look unimportant—they may be low on ammo."
Coming in for a three-point landing on the amphitheater stage just a few meters from the Aggregate constituents could not help but make him look conspicuous. One glance told him that Sarz had been strong-arming and striking the vulnerable-looking gamine, though Lod pretended not to notice. Sticking up for pale damsels wouldn't count for much if it sidetracked him from zeroing the assembler. He could live with dishonor but not with neuron necrotic factor.
He squared his uniform as he rose from a crouch. "Byron Sarz? Due to events beyond the Lyceum's control, I'm obliged to ask you to curtail your clever demonstration. If you'll kindly direct me to the main power source—"
Sarz came at him furiously but ineptly. Instead of backing away to break contact, Lod simply stepped left and straight-armed the jetpen into the notch in Sarz's throat where the clavicle bones met. The pen prodded hard into his windpipe.
Sarz instantly forgot everything except thrashing himself back off the cap head. Skills-clarified peripheral vision told Lod that the nexus of the Aggregate had backpedaled toward the orchestra pit, where he went crashing into darkness among music stands, empty chairs, and abandoned instruments.
With no time for follow-up, Lod eyeballed the amphitheater. One of the rear doors was open, and he could see a knot of people beating uselessly at a floor-to-ceiling sheet of glassy durapane. He decided that a handful of panic-stricken attendees did not enter the present equation one way or another.
The constituents were frozen in place, except for the one Sarz had been abusing. She and Lod were about the same size, but there was something about the girl's orange-yellow-flecked eyes and mournfully heavy lips that set her apart from the rest.
He indicated the assembler. "How do I shut it down?"
She made an effort to communicate with him through facial configurations, then undertook some kind of shift and managed to force out a few words.
"I don't… understand… you." Her gestures were as rigid as a dumbot's, and her voice sounded as if she were trying to contact him in a seance.
He gave the assembler another frowning once-over. Something was wrong. If the device was really meant to pump out enough NNF to fill the Empyraeum, it probably would have done so already. Someone had obviously neutralized production, he thought. Still, he decided, better to be safe than sorry and simply zero the thing as planned.
He looked back to the gamine. "Can you turn back the tide here, my little piecework? Can any of your friends?" When she didn't respond, he added, "No matter, there has to be a power disconnect somewhere."
He snatched a leverage bar from one of the open tool kits, set it into the frame gap of the most centrally located inspection panel he could spot, then grimaced and heaved. Held shut only by tension clips, the panel flew open with a bang, nearly taking flesh from his hands.
Lod grabbed a hand light, plopped to the stage, and eased himself into the assembler on his back. Periapt systemry had always been the sole area of Ext military studies that had not bored him, because technical apps had all sorts of profit-making uses. Spying the power pack, he immediately set to work on the disconnect, the fabrication subassembly sussura-ting a half meter from his head.
The disconnect yielded to the flick of his finger. The soughing of the fabricator died away and with it all his nightmarish anxieties about a protracted bomb-disarming drama. All at once someone's foot bumped his. For a moment he assumed it was the girl's, but when he strained his neck for a peek, he saw the voluminous yellow coverall and soft boots of Byron Sarz as well as the laser cutter in Sarz's hands.
The old man showed no sign of wanting to discuss the issue and easily avoided Lod's hampered kicks. Then Sarz moved in to cleave him from the gonads on up, as high as circumstances might allow.
Chapter
Thirty-Four
If she had plowed into Zinsser shoulder-first, Ghost might have kept the object from striking him at all but probably would have been struck by it herself. Though her forceful yank had succeeded partially, the vase thrown from the gallery above had grazed his head and back before shattering on the floor. Ghost got only a split-second glimpse of the brunette woman who had hurled it
Alarms and the rumble of heavy machinery had put Ghost on notice that worse dangers were pending. Vibration conducted through the floor would have told her of containment doors closing even if common sense hadn't.
Hard-skulled for a Periapt, the oceanographer had slumped limp as wetwash but was already groping to regain his feet. "Wha' zat?" he mumbled.
Near them the mezzanine was empty, though the room was jammed and piling high with people wherever there was an exit holo. When she helped Zinsser upright, he showed a strength of grip that surprised her until she considered how much time he had spent working on and under the sea.
"Containment doors," she said.
"Got to get out."
He was not terrified, merely determined. She doubted they had a chance of reaching safety, but she hoped Burning and Lod had succeeded. Against all expectations, however, she saw a door edging across an unprepossessing doorway mere steps to her right, and in a gamble far riskier than any cut of the deck, she swung herself and the stumbling Zinsser through it.
They found themselves in a modest passageway. Tolling shut, the containment door cut off illumination from the mezzanine level, but there was velvety blue light and low soothing music from up ahead.
"What is this place?" she asked him.
Collecting himself, Zinsser pulled his weight off her and loosed a dour cackle. "The antechamber to the afterlife." He led her around the passageway's curve. "Poetic choice of sanctuaries, Ghost! Here we stay for the duration."
Catching the odor of musky incense, so different from what the Empyraeum's aroma suite had dispersed into the rest of the building, she guessed where they were even before she caught up to him and saw the altar.
The chapel's nave was only three rows of pews long. A luminous plaque stated that the place was nondenominational, but the trappings were predominantly Teleos-related. The apsidal nooks were occupied by holographic images of sweetly smiling floating fetuses, ungenitaled but very pregnant female figures, cherubic newborns, and wise, strong paternal figures, but none of it was relevant to what interested Ghost.
"Which way out?" she wanted to know, shoving back curtains and swinging aside holo-equipment.
Zinsser shuffled over to sit round-shouldered on the altar, above which hung a holo of DNA superimposed on a Terran globe. "There isn't a way out," he answered. "This was a veranda back when the containment system was built. The chapel was installed fifty years ago, and it's a complete dead end."
"You're that much of an expert on the layout here?"
"When you've sneaked into and out of as many Hierarchate wingdings as I have, you learn a few things." He dug out his plugcard and tried to raise a connection. "Anyway, this place is like a vault, so we're safe." He winced as he felt the back of his head. "What hit me back there, a falling chandelier?"
"No, a middle-aged woman in a black dress—with a vase." She kept prying and poking as she spoke. "Brunette with a beauty mark on her cheek. Her aim was good, too. Former lover?"
With so much seafaring experience, Zinsser did not rattle easily, but he froze and unfroze in the space of a second.
Ghost completed a circuit of the place, moving all the way aro
und to the entrance and its impregnable barrier.
"I suppose I owe you my life," Zinsser said at last.
"Twice over if there's really a biowep loose out there," Ghost remarked, working on her plugphone again. "In bygone times in the Broken Country it would mean that I own you, Doctor. If you want to even the score, find us a way out."
"A perfect atmosphere for you," Zinsser observed. "Marching orders from the great beyond to go, attack, subdue. Commandments against erotic joy and pleasure-directed sex."
It was the same sort of talk Torio and the other Preservationists had flung in her face and Burning's. And here she was in their holy place.
Zinsser's smile was so self-assured that it was pure delight to watch it fade as she walked back to the altar step by purposeful step. At first he tried to shift away, but on realizing that he had no easy route of withdrawal, he rallied and raised his hands as if to put them on her shoulders.
Ghost only pushed them aside and cut off whatever he had been about to say by tugging his waistband out and plunging her right hand into his trousers. Zinsser's exclamation held more surprise than bliss.
"'Erotic joy,' Doctor?" she said. "Proof speaks louder than words. Get up your evidence within the next sixty seconds and I'll return one of the lives you owe me. Or else don't ever talk to me about sex again, 'pleasure-directed' or otherwise."
* * * *
Kurt Elide and Tonii were still in the forward compartment of the airlimo when alarms began sounding inside and outside the Empyraeum, making the entire hillside tremble. From the shotgun seat the gynander watched onlookers, waiting transport personnel, media crews, and Peace Warrantors running and colliding with one another.
"Some greenhorn at Empyraeum security tripped an all-systems toxic alarm," someone was yelling into a plugphone as he hurried past the aircar. "… hundred-year-old containment subroutine kicked in. It's so ancient, nobody's got the stand-down password anymore."
Kurt quickly scanned the commo freqs, where everyone claimed to know what was going on inside and what to do about it, though no two voices agreed.
Kurt's money was on the Cybervirus theory, but it did not really matter; he just wanted to know what his move should be: stay put or get out of blast radius.
While he was dithering over his options, Tonii wrenched open the passenger door and stormed around to his side of the car. Leaning past him so 'e was halfway in Kurt's lap, Tonii started tapping swiftly at the commo buttons, saying only, "Not now, Kurt," when he sputtered protests and questions.
The function 'e punched up was standard, locating Dextra Haven's plugphone transceiver in the wire schematic of the Empyraeum. The gynander took it in at a glance, withdrew from the cockpit to stare hard at the building, then leaned down to him again.
"Okay, Kurt, out. I need the limo."
"Sure, ha ha."
"I'm not joking. Hierarch Haven is trapped in a sealed area, and the safeties are busy playing blindfold fire drill. Time to improvise."
He shook his head. "Nothing doing. The Warrantor gunners would probably—"
Tonii grabbed the front of Kurt's uniform in both fists and heaved him into the copilot-passenger seat, handling him as effortlessly as if he were a bolster pillow. In a flash 'e was behind the controls, buckling on the safety harness.
"You synapshit buttpump synthial"
The face Tonii turned on him, with its cold anger, made Kurt shut his trap. The rage flickered past, but not before Kurt had a vivid image of himself wadded up collapsible-umbrella style and shoved out the window behind him.
"I had you pegged for a better person than that, Kurt Now strap in or get out."
He was sorry for the words but damned if he owed Tonii an apology after the way 'e had manhandled him. "I'm signed for this crate," he grumbled, shouldering into his harness. Tonii lifted off with a quick, sure touch.
"For what it's worth, Kurt, stories about gynanders being marauding sex fiends are pure drivel, mostly concocted by wishful-thinking straights. We tend to prefer our own kind."
Kurt was about to ask why Tonii was swinging around downhill, when he got his answer as the airlimo began dumping fuel. "Wait; we won't be able to stay airborne."
"Granted. But this'll reduce the fire hazard when we go in after Dextra."
Kurt's mouth fell open. Now that it was too late to jump, he understood the plan. Snugging his webbing adjustments down as tight as they would go, he concentrated on not dumping his own fuel.
* * * *
Byron had become so aberrant that even as he snatched up the laser cutter, his conventional speech was defective.
"Yatt, Yatt," he muttered.
Byron wasn't part of the Aggregate anymore, Piper told herself. Something had transmogrified him into a new and terrible entity, neither constituent nor Alone. Because what he was about to do would surely bring down retribution upon the Aggregate, Piper had no recourse but to act decisively.
Brute force intervention was beyond her, however, as Byron had warned her away with a flourish of the energy tool, but she could still resort to using cybargot. Leaned in against the assembler's central housing for better purchase, Byron was too crazed to hear her rapid, burbling words and too distracted to notice the lab servo adjunct come alive. He noticed it only when the forced-air scalpel extended and lanced into his back.
Needing to be quick and certain, she had ordered the nozzle to jam flush against him under the scapula and send a needle of super-high-pressure air spiking straight for his heart. As a constituent she was both technician and anatomist enough to do so with absolute precision. Byron's nearly instant reaction arched him away from the nozzle, but it was too late. The bore of air had expanded, emptying the chambers of his heart and rupturing it The blood, bolted back in hydrostatic shock waves, sledgehammered his brain and broke blood vessels. He was dying while still trying to save himself. The laser cutter went dark as soon as it slipped from his fingers to clatter on the floor.
The Alone had to struggle past both Byron's body and the cutter to free himself from the assembler. Glancing from Byron's corpse to Piper, he watched in astonishment as the scalpel retracted docilely and shut itself down.
Before she could move, he picked her up by the waist and planted a quick but metamorphing kiss on her sad clown face. "Young lady, thank you," he said, setting her down. "This just goes to prove that when an attack is going really well, it's probably an ambush. My name's Lod, by the way. What's yours?"
Floating in the emotional upheaval of Byron's death, as if in some endorphin overload, she was unable to make much sense of his words or intent Abruptly she became aware of a groundswell of tentative and foreboding Othertalk, and she turned to find the rest of the Aggregate staring at her, psychologically decapitated and rudderless. Leaderless suddenly, they were poised at the edge of a plunge into self-destructive delirium. The only solution was to provide them with a new nexus, and so Piper did that.
"Start packing up. Now."
She copied the clipped saytalk and corpcode body English Byron used, even mimicked his scentspeech in a way she had learned to do in their most intimate moments together. The Aggregate obeyed her for want of any alternative, sluggishly at first, then with more industry. When Piper ordered Kape, Doogun, and Wire to cover Byron's body, they set to it as if Byron himself had tasked them.
"Mistress constituent," Lod said behind her, "you still haven't told me your name."
"Piper," she answered him, deciding that her saytalk name would suffice. Her scentspeech and bodybraille cognomens would mean little to an Othertalk-deaf Alone. "Please leave."
Before he could press her, a curt "hallo" issued from someone on the balcony, hoarser and coarser than anything she had heard from Lod, serving to point out that Lod obviously had his niceties and Alltalk dexterities.
The big redhead who had scensed Byron's deadly plan stood at the railing. He was groggy but on his feet, and Hierarch Haven was beside him. When Lod stepped over to respond, Piper felt an all-over release like
the unclenching of a jaw.
Haven wanted to get down to the stage. "The public safety SWATs will be here any second," she was saying, "and I don't want them shooting the constituents."
Lod and the redhead urged Haven to use the stairs, but the Hierarch would have none of it. The three began a careful procedure in which the big one, clinging to the railing from the edge of the balcony, lowered Haven and released her to Lod's waiting arms.
It never occurred to Piper to advise or assist. She went back to organizing the striking of the assembler. The constituents were following her directions almost gratefully, finding comfort in having a center on which to bear. In their Othertalk they were already relating to her as their new nexus.
She, by contrast, was already finding the center a lonely place to be.
* * * *
The one called Burning was gazing at Byron's corpse. "Rough way to go."
"Not as bad as being rubbed to death with a cheese grater," Lod remarked. "But then, no demise is kind."
"Ecce! What a mess!" Dextra Haven shook her origamie'd hairdo, then pointed to Piper. "Collect your flock and get them ready to put their hands above their heads when I give you the word. Burning, what's going on out there? Safeties finally find the containment stand-down override?"
Peering back at the huge foyer through the amphitheater doors, Burning shook his head slowly. The people who had been pounding on the floor-to-ceiling window were scattering as something glossy and fast-moving was getting larger fast in the Empyraeum-lit night sky.
"I doubt the Safeties have anything to do with this," he judged, shifting his weight for a sideways dive. "Everybody take cover! Incoming?'
Piper didn't understand the term but saw the dark shape come hurtling into the durapane wall, shattering it into uncountable flecks of crystalline intaglio. She didn't see more because Lod caught her and bore her aside headlong to the shrilling of an aircraft engine and the high-pitched yowl of reversed thrusters.
