by user
“Actually, I do know how,” he said slowly. “Or I will, as soon as my computer uploads the information into my brain.”
Jane eyed him. “Well, that’s convenient.”
He grimaced. “If you discount the general discomfort of the process.”
“Discomfort?” She frowned, dubious. “And how does that work, anyway?”
“My comp can use my neural network to implant a skill directly into my brain, the same way you’d program a computer. That’s how I learned English.”
“Yeah, I’d wondered about that. You don’t have any accent at all, and your slang is dead on. You sound like an American network news anchor.”
He snorted. “Probably because TE used news recordings to create the file.”
“So how do they get these files into your head? You don’t have one of those skull-jack things Freika was talking about.” She grinned impishly. “I looked.”
“I don’t need one. Freika’s my database unit. His computer’s a lot more powerful than mine; it has to be, because it provides so much of his intelligence. He keeps data files I don’t use all the time, so he needs a way to access big chunks of information more quickly. Sticking in a crystal’s faster than a download.” Transfer ready, the comp interrupted. “Excuse me a minute.”
He braced himself. He always hated this part.
A wall of information and images slammed into his mind like a tidal wave. It was all he could do not to scream.
Baran’s big body jerked as his eyes widened. His mouth contorted, opened, but all that emerged was a strangled gasp.
“Shit!” Jane tossed the camera on the chair without a thought for its two-thousand dollar price tag and ran to catch him. She knew even as she did that there was no way she could support his greater weight.
She needn’t have bothered; he remained rigidly erect, his body quivering. “Baran!”
He didn’t answer. She put a finger to the big pulse under his jaw. It pounded furiously, but he didn’t react to her touch. “Baran, talk to me!” Hell, was he having some kind of seizure? Was this some weird Druas attack? Should she call 911? “Baran!” It was a wail.
His eyes focused. He blinked at her, registered her panic. His body instantly coiled into a combat crouch as he scanned the room, his eyes hard. “What? Where’s the threat?” he barked.
He was all right! Relief flooded her, followed almost instantly by anger. She thumped him hard in the chest. “You jerk!”
He straightened and looked down at her. “What? What did I do?”
“You scared the daylights out of me! What was that all about? It looked like you were having some kind of attack!”
“I told you, I had to download the skill file.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t mention the flipping epileptic seizure! Next time you have to do some weird future crap, warn me!”
He lifted a brow at her and strolled over to pick up the camera. “You really were worried, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was, you biped rat. By the way, aren’t you the same guy who won’t even let me out of his sight to use the John? But it’s okay to check out for five minutes to jerk around?”
Baran examined the camera, then reached into the bag and pulled out the flash. “My computer was keeping watch. It would have stopped the data transfer if Druas had Jumped into the room.” He slid the flash into its hotshoe, then cradled the camera, pointed it at her, and started clicking off shots with the skill of an experienced photographer.
She glared at him. “I repeat: You could have warned me.”
He sighed and crouched, moving around her to find another angle. “Yes, I should have. I’m sorry I didn’t realize you’d be alarmed. I’ll keep that in mind in the future.”
Jane deflated, drawing a frustrated hand through her dark curls. “You do that. Okay, I’ll bite, let me see what you shot.”
He stood and walked over to hand her the camera. She flicked a switch to display the digital images on the view screen. And whistled soundlessly.
He’d captured her every expression, starting with angry frustration and finishing with the rake of her fingers through her hair. Each shot was expertly, perfectly framed.
“Damn. You’re good. The computer taught you how to do this just now?” Jane looked up and shook her head. “Where can I get one of those things?”
Baran grinned back and pointed at the ceiling. “About three hundred years from now, eighty light-years that way.”
She looked at him. “Don’t think I want to go quite that far. But...”
Just then a feline yowl sounded downstairs, followed closely by a startled canine yip.
“My nose!” Freika bellowed in outrage. “You clawed my nose!”
Something crashed. Paws thudded on the floor, accompanied by vicious snarls and the sound of breakables shattering. “That’s it, cat! I’m chewing you into pate and spreading your ass on a cracker!”
Jane whirled and raced for the stairs. “Stay away from Octopussy, you fuzzy psycho!”
As she hit the steps at a run, she heard the deep rumble of Baran’s laughter. “One thing about this mission,” he called, loping after her, “At least I’m never bored.”
“Can’t you hitch this thing to a horse or pour in another scoop of coal and get it to move faster?” Freika demanded.
“We’re going sixty miles an hour as it is,” Jane gritted out. “Get your head back in the window before a truck comes along and knocks it off.”
“Sixty?” The wolf was leaning out so far from the backseat, his nose almost level with Jane’s as she drove. His tongue whipped in the wind. “I can run faster than that.”
“Yeah, right. Baran, tell your partner he’s shortening his life expectancy.”
“Freika, get back in the ... whatever this thing is.”
“SUV. Do it, Cujo. It’s always fun until somebody loses a head.” She hit the power button for the rear passenger window, rolling it up and forcing the wolf to pull back inside.
“What’s a cujo?” he asked. “My comp doesn’t have a definition for that term.”
“It’s a character in a book by Stephen King,” Jane told him. “I’d lend you my copy, but I’m afraid it would give you ideas.”
The wolf snorted in disdain. “I don’t need some twenty-first century scribbler to ‘give me ideas.’ I’m more than capable of coming up with my own. You—“ He broke off as static blasted from Jane’s dash-mounted police scanner. “Do we have to listen to all that human babble? It’s annoying.”
“Yes, because it’ll tell us if the cops find another body. Or Druas himself, God forbid, since he’d probably eat them.” She slanted a look at Baran, who was belted into the front seat, looking as if he, too, wanted to go faster but was too polite to complain. “Does Fur Boy always whine this much?”
Baran smiled slightly. “Yes.”
“I do not whine,” Freika said in a tone that dripped offended dignity. “I’m simply trying to give you hapless bipeds the benefit of my superior intellect.”
“No, you’re trying to give me a giant, throbbing pain in my—“
‘Ten-fifty with Pis and entrapment. Southbound 1-85 at the ninety-third mile marker,” the scanner interrupted. “Car versus eighteen-wheeler.”
“Shit.” Jane threw a quick look over her shoulder, saw nothing behind her, made sure there was nothing in front, and whipped into a U-turn, bumping onto the grass shoulder to do it.
“Where are we going?” Baran asked as she hit the gas and shot in the opposite direction back down the highway. “And what’s a ten-fifty?”
“A car’s crashed with an eighteen-wheeler—that’s a very big truck. All that dispatcher jargon means somebody’s trapped and hurt. Could be really, really ugly.”
He looked at her so sharply, the beads on his braid tapped his cheek as his head swung. “Jane, we need to search for Druas. We don’t have time to run off investigating random police calls.”
“We can take twenty minutes to cover this.”
“Jane...”
“I’m a newspaper reporter, Baran.” Face grim, she concentrated on the road. “I’m not going to stop doing my job just because Jack the Ripper’s in town.”
They entered the interstate at the northbound on-ramp closest to the scene; Jane had known traffic going southbound would be backed up for miles behind the crash, and she was right. As with every other traffic accident she’d ever covered, the scene was chaos. Fire trucks, law enforcement and ambulances blocked the road with lights flashing, while behind them, a line of cars waited for the mess to be cleared away. She’d learned to judge how bad a crash was by the number of emergency vehicles in attendance.
This one was pretty damn bad.
After parking the SUV on the broad grass median behind two fire trucks, she grabbed the Nikon out of the back and thrust it into Baran’s hands. “You shoot the wreck. I’ll talk to the cops and bystanders, see what I can get.” Usually she had to do it all at one time; it was nice to have help from someone she could depend on.
As they got out of the SUV, Jane noticed Freika hopping between the seats to follow Baran. “Fuzzy, get back in the truck. Nobody’s going to want a dog on the scene.”
He gave her a pale-eyed lupine glare. “For the last time, I am not a dog! And I’m coming with you.”
“Keep your voice down, dammit!” she hissed. “And you’d better be a dog, because people around here would shoot a wolf. Which would be a very bad thing, considering that each and every one of these cops has a gun.”
Freika sniffed. “As if they could even hit me.”
‘Take my word for it, they could hit you. These are Southern boys. They grew up shooting the four-legged and furry ... Oh, hell.” She spotted a big, boxy truck with a huge antenna and a colorful logo. “You’d better not be a talking anything, because I see a TV live truck, and that kind of media we do not need!” Without waiting to see whether Freika obeyed, she started up the median, grumbling under her breath. “Frigging television poachers. How’d they get in my county so fast? They must have been passing by, because it’s for damn sure they couldn’t have beat me here otherwise. Just my luck....”
Baran strode past on his longer legs, his attention focused on the cluster of men and emergency vehicles. Freika trotted at his heels.
Jane sighed and lengthened her stride to catch up. “Well, at least they’re getting into the spirit of the thing.”
Just ahead, Tom Reynolds waved violently at a driver in the northbound lane, who’d slowed down to stare at the mangled car sitting at a right angle to the jack-knifed semi. “Quit rubbernecking and drive before you cause another wreck, you”—he spotted Jane—“citizen.”
“Nice save,” she said, pulling her notebook out of her purse. “What are you doing here? I figured you’d be off trying to catch ... the guy who killed that lady.” Dammit, she’d almost said Druas. Not good. Tom was far too sharp to miss a mistake like that, and she didn’t want to have to answer the questions he’d ask.
“I was on the way to talk to the victim’s relatives when the crash happened right in front of me,” Tom told her, thoroughly disgusted. “Jerk driving the eighteen-wheeler did an illegal lane change and drove right over the lady. Who the hell is that?” He stared at Baran’s profile as the Warlord raised his camera and squeezed off a shot.
“Uh, my new photographer.” Which was the truth. “From Atlanta.” Which wasn’t. She hid a wince of guilt at the lie. “He looks like a fruit.”
Jane choked, remembering what Baran’s massive body had felt like driving into hers in the shower. She grinned. “Well, he’s not.”
Tom eyed her shrewdly, no doubt reading that grin. “You do realize your daddy’s rolling over in his grave right now—you taking up with some guy in a tattoo and beads.” Jane clamped her teeth shut against the impulse to tell Tom just how little right her father had to serve as an arbiter of morality. Bill Colby had been far too good at hiding behind a good old boy pose. At least with other men.
Before she could shatter his illusions, Tom’s eyes widened as he noticed Freika loping along at Jane’s heels like the furry bodyguard he was. “What the fuck is that?” “It’s an ... Irish wolfhound.”
“Hound, my ass. That’s a wolf, period. Get it out of—“ “She’s dying,” Baran interrupted, turning back toward them as he lowered his camera. The muscles in his powerful shoulders visibly knotted under his white T-shirt. “The woman in the wreckage.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Tom snapped. “Get that animal out of—“
“She needs treatment now. What are they waiting for?” Baran glanced over at Jane, who silently cursed and reminded herself to buy him a pair of sunglasses. The red striations had appeared in his eyes again. Fortunately, Tom was too busy glaring at Freika to notice.
Glancing at the car, she winced. The little blue Toyota had been crumpled like a beer can in a redneck’s fist. “They probably can’t get the doors open—the car’s too badly damaged. They’re going to have to cut her out of the wreckage.” Giving him a significant glance, she pretended to scratch beneath her own eye. Baran looked back at the mangled car and quickly raised his camera to hide his glowing irises.
He clicked off a shot as a firefighter climbed gingerly on what was left of the car’s mangled roof. Someone handed a power saw up to him. “She’ll be dead before they can get to her.”
“Probably. And there’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it,” Tom said. “Look, I’m sure you’ve been at this long enough to know dogs—or whatever—do not belong at accident scenes....”
Baran tuned out the rest of the man’s protest. I’ve got to get her out of there, he commed to Freika. Even through the noise of idling firetruck engines, his acute hearing picked up the woman’s thin, hopeless cries of agony, more animal than human.
You don’t know if you’re supposed to save her, the wolf replied. You don’t want to cause a paradox.
TE said anything we do now that we ‘re here is supposed to happen anyway. Which means if she’s not supposed to live, she’ll die. But I can’t just stand around. Everything he was rebelled against doing nothing while any civilian endured such agony.
No, I don’t suppose you can.
I’ve got to get closer. Distract those men for me. To his computer, he gave a silent order: Begin riatt.
Initiating riatt, the comp responded. Baran barely braced himself in time as heat blasted through his veins and his heart began to pound in heavy, frantic lunges. With the fire came a dark, feral joy, a product of riatt neuro-chemicals. He felt his lips stretch into a wild grin.
How a man could kill as many people as you have and still be so softhearted... The wolf commed as he moved off to circle the oblivious firefighters.
I’m not softhearted. Baran laughed, endorphins flooding his brain. I just love doing this.
Oh, yeah, and the metabolic crash afterward is so much fun. Without warning, Freika launched himself at the rescue workers, snarling and growling, his sharp, white teeth snapping together like castanets.
As one, they jumped back away from him. “What the fuck!”
“Somebody shoot that goddamned ...”
His own teeth bared in a grimace of euphoria, Baran shouldered between the startled firefighters, thrust both hands through the shattered car window, clamped down on the door frame, and heaved backward. Steel groaned as something popped with a shower of glass. The door tore free.
He turned to find himself the focus of an astonished ring of eyes. “All you had to do was pull,” Baran said, managing to give his voice a disgusted inflection as he quickly lowered his gaze to the ground. He knew his eyes would be blazing with the effects of riatt.
After thrusting the car door into the hands of the nearest astonished firefighter, he grabbed the camera still hanging around his neck by its strap. He turned around and started snapping away at the moaning victim, knowing instinctively how the rescue workers would react.
“How the hell did you ... ? Hey, you can’t take pi
ctures of that.” Somebody grabbed his shoulder. He let himself be shoved back as the firefighters closed in on the woman and prepared to get her out.
A skinny man dressed in a padded protective jacket glared at him. “Who the hell are you anyway?”
“Photographer,” Baran said, and pointed the camera into his interrogator’s face. The man threw up a hand and backed off.
“Who was that asshole?” one firefighter asked another.
“How’d he do that? I tried that door. It was jammed tight.”
“Must not have tried hard enough. Where’d the dog go?”
“Hey, you,” somebody said behind him. “Clear a path.”
Baran backed up another pace to give the paramedics room to bring the stretcher up to the vehicle. He framed a shot of the firefighters tenderly lifting the woman from her vehicle, the faces under their yellow helmets tight with concentration.
For an instant the woman’s eyes met his, filled with a sort of desperate gratitude even through her pain. He nodded back.
End riatt, the comp said.
Baran winced as the battle neuro-chemicals drained away, taking with them the momentary high. A deep, racking quiver rolled through his muscles, and his stomach twisted with such force, he had to battle the urge to vomit.
The worst thing about going to riatt was the aftermath, as the body reacted to the wild biochemical swings it had endured.
Suddenly he was aware of a hot throbbing in his shaking hands as they cradled the lens of his camera. Blood rolled down his forearms. He wondered when he’d cut himself. How bad is it?
Lacerations to fingers and palms, but no tendon damage, the comp replied. Healing acceleration procedures initiated. Estimated duration five-point-six hours.
Well, it could have been worse. And had been, any number of times.
The heat in his hands intensified as the healing began, pain rolling in behind it. He sighed in disgust. Normally he wore protective battle armor when he went to riatt, since the berserker state multiplied his strength by a factor of ten even as it killed his ability to feel pain. But TE had not allowed him to bring the suit here, and his twenty-first century jeans and T-shirt offered no protection to vulnerable flesh.
