As he falls, the second line fires as Vienne does a roll across the sidewalk, bullets chasing her. She pops up, shooting, and does a dive roll that lands her square in front of the six troopers still standing. They hesitate a half second before squeezing their triggers, long enough for her to twist out of the line of fire, the shots zipping past as she launches a double roundhouse kick that knocks the line of them down like bowling pins.
“Cowboy,” Mimi says. “Less than five minutes.”
Vienne waits for a few seconds to see if they will get up. When they don’t, she tosses the battle rifle aside and turns to walk away. I leave the shadows, jogging on a course parallel to her. If I can just reach her before—
“Oy!” a Sturmnacht calls as he steps into the clear. “Where’d you think you’re going, woman? Mr. Archibald says you’re to stay with us.”
Vienne plucks a flash bang grenade from one of the downed troopers. She pulls the pin with her teeth and tosses the flash bang over her shoulder. “Go to hell.”
“Aiiiee!” he screams and dives for cover as it explodes. I take off in a straight line toward Vienne, but I don’t get more than ten meters when a mortar blows the ground out from under my feet.
“Cowboy!” Mimi yells.
Through the air I pinwheel, grabbing at nothing in a useless bid to get my balance. I hit the ground hard on my chest, my armor taking most of the collision, then do a shoulder roll. I’m on my feet and drawing my armalite.
“Mimi! Find that rocket launcher!”
“Done,” she says, “but you are not going to like it.”
“Why’s that?”
“On your six, cowboy, and remember, I told you so.”
Perplexed, I turn to face the same person who tried to kill me with a rocket-propelled mortar round. The same person who has already reloaded said launcher and is ready to pull the trigger again.
Vienne’s cheekbones have sharpened. Hollow places are sunken into her face. Eyes are full of wild energy, red like they’re blistered. There’s not an iota of recognition there, just a wild fury and the willingness to kill anything that looks like a target.
“Vienne,” I look dead into her eyes. “Please. Don’t do it.”
“You mean this?” Her voice is high-pitched, tinctured with rage. She fires, and I have less than a blink of an eye to spin sideways, letting the shell zip past. A second later, it hits a storefront and blows its reflective glass to smithereens.
“Damn you!” she bellows, shaking the empty launcher over her head.
“You’re out of ammo.”
“Think again!” She pulls a plasma pistol from a thigh holster, and I dive for her. Both of us start punching and blocking, dancing with the speed of a pulse. Time seems to slow, and the sounds of her screams warp in my ears. Iridescent pulses slip past my face from the plasma pistol and disappear into the sky, spent casings dripping from the pistol’s ejection port and tinkling on the ground like dozens of metal bells.
But then she spins faster than I can and sticks the barrel against my right temple, where I can’t see it. Perspiration is pouring down my face, soaking my shirt, and my back has turned into a geyser. I’m breathing hard, and sweat drips into my eye.
She grins. “Got you.” But the air stinks like burned hair—her plasma pistol is overheated. She pulls the trigger. It doesn’t even click.
“You’re out of ammo.” I aim my armalite at her gut. “Time to call it quits.”
Screaming, she flings the pistol at me. It bounces off my armor.
“Two minutes,” Mimi says. “Even with your limited telemetry functions, I am picking up P-waves. The water is coming fast!”
Get her off the street, I think. Now. “I don’t want to hurt you, Vienne.” I move in slowly, trying to look nonthreatening. “See? Take a deep breath. Calm down and let’s talk.”
Her face contorts with venomous fury and she attacks again, fists and elbows and knees, driving me backward as I throw block after block. Vienne launches a ragged scissor kick, but I sidestep and land a roundhouse to the nerve bundle at the base of her spine. The shock immobilizes for a second. Long enough for me to catch a breath.
“You asshole!” she says, her voice a hoarse whisper, a hand on her back.
Behind us, the sky is lit up with sudden gunfire, followed by shouted commands. The voices are close: The battle is moving our way.
I charge. Slam into her belly. Lift her off her feet. The launcher goes flying as we smash into the concrete together.
I’m first to my feet. I take a defensive pose as she does a backflip and comes up ready to go.
“Vienne. It’s me, Durango. I came to take you back home.”
She turns her head, as if she’s hearing a distant whistle. Listening. Her face calm. Then on her neck, partially hidden by the cowl, a metal ring starts to hum.
“Mimi? What’s that sound?”
“High-frequency sound waves,” she says, “commonly associated with computer guidance systems. Look out!”
Crack! Vienne’s fist connects with my right cheekbone, and I hit the sidewalk. Ears ringing, I lift myself up on all fours.
Vienne punts me in the gut.
My armor hardens, and her foot sticks to the cloth.
Her foot sticks to the cloth? My head is still full of stuffing, and I shake it. Clearly, I’m imagining things.
“No,” Mimi says. “She is stuck to you.”
Vienne tries to yank free, but I strike the back of her knee with my good hand. She lands hard on her butt. Then flips over, plants her hands, and nails my cast with the other leg.
White-hot pain fires from the break, and my whole body spasms. My armor hardens, and she slips free. Back on her feet again. Ready to strike.
“You did this to me,” she says.
I scoot away. Fight for breath. Focus my eye, which has teared up. “Who told you that?”
“Archibald.” She pants. “He said that you did this to me. Made me into this . . . monster.”
“You’re not a monster.”
“Liar! I shot her!” Her shoulders slump, and her chin goes to chest. “I shot that little girl. Only a monster would do that.”
Think. Think. “Remember this?” In an act of desperation, I pull her pendant from the cowl of my armor. “It’s yours, remember? When you were a little girl you loved it, just like Riki-Tiki loved you, and I love you now.”
“LIAR!” She jumps two meters straight up. Raises her fist like a sledgehammer. Roars and brings the hammer fist down at my head.
She’s going to kill me.
I raise an arm in a feeble attempt to stop her.
My hand opens. Hairs spray out of my palm. They fly like a swarm, striking her face. Her mouth. Her eyes. As if she has hit an invisible wall, she arcs in mid-flight and crumples, groping at her stinging eyes, which I know from experience feel like they’ve been injected with acid.
“No!” I shout. “Not now! Mimi, why does this keep happening?”
“I have no data to use to process that question.”
“Which means you’re as clueless as I am.”
“Do not be absurd,” she says. “Hairs simply are not my area of expertise.”
I bend down to help Vienne. But there are hundreds, maybe thousands of hairs in her face, and she’s making it worse by grabbing at them. The tips of the hairs are barbed, and moving them is like wiggling a hook that’s impaling your skin.
“Stop! Don’t touch them!” I yell at her, trying to pry her hands away. It’s useless. She can’t hear me, and if she could, she’d try to kill me.
“Less than one minute before the flood waters reach us,” Mimi says.
The first sign of the apocalypse is a trickle of water running across the pavement. I can hear the water before it hits, a deep, guttural roar with a pounding drumbeat. The pressure pounds my eardrums. Then I see it—a wall of water laced with whitecaps that reaches fifty meters, towering over the Seven Bridges. It hits the causeway and soars another sixty meters, white plu
mes like mushroom clouds that sledgehammer the shoreline.
“I’ve got to get her out of here! Run whatever scan you can! Find me a hole somewhere! And make it fast—before I find myself a smarter AI.”
“How do you feel,” Mimi says, “about crawling into a burning building?”
Chapter 28
Christchurch, Capital City
Zealand Prefecture
ANNOS MARTIS 238. 7. 29. 11:34
It’s a miracle that Archibald is not dead.
The fire starts easily, the way they always do, but he tries something different this time, decides to train fire. Like always, he starts it with a wooden match. Wood matches are the best. They don’t bend when you strike them, and the head ignites like a sparkler when you drag it over the strike line. Then when it drops into the lint kindling, it burns like mad.
Poof! A fire. It’s like magic.
Anything you control, you can train. Fire’s not different. Start a small fire on the floor of the Zealand Corp boardroom. As it grows, you wait. Wait for the fire to get large enough to lick the line of fuel, and then ignite a line of flames. The waiting is the best part.
You spray a stream of ethyl ether in a zigzag, making patterns on the portrait of the CEOs hanging on the wall—take that, Mother! You wait, and when the flames touch the fuel, it becomes an orange-red dancing asp, willing to strike when or what you tell it to. However, like Cleopatra, fire can be fickle and deadly. Sometimes, even when you’ve done everything right, it decides to punish you for not planning every detail. The ethyl ether can evaporate too quickly. The vapors can make your head spin, make you giddy and giggly and make you forget how to run. The fire can ignite before you have a chance to escape the room, and the extra bottle of accelerant you keep on your belt can explode, washing your pants and shirt with flames so quick and hot that even your cloak can’t stop them.
You plunge out of the room like a shooting star falling through the atmosphere. You hit the ground and run for the fire escape, blind to anything but the searing pain and the smell of your own flesh cooking.
The voices you hear shouting your name seem far away, and you think just for a fleeting second, right before consciousness slips away, that you hear Mother’s voice calling to you, saying as she always does, “Archibald. How many times must I tell you not to play with fire?”
Then the pain goes away. You know that the nerve endings are dead—you are hurt badly but just can’t feel it. You call Duke to pick you up in the Noriker. Somehow, you have to keep going, because you still have matches and there’s still a building to watch burn.
Archibald stops to catch his breath and compose himself. Wrapping himself in his cloak to protect the burns on his chest and belly, he stumbles down the spiraling fire escape of Parliament Tower, a toothpick that he’s chewed to bits in his mouth. He sucks on the wood, making a loud slurp his mother used to despise. What would she say about him blowing up the dam? Or burning down her corporate headquarters?
I can’t wait, he thinks, to see her face when Parliament Tower blooms with fire, surrounded by the river’s flood waters, a sign of the coming Armageddon, and living proof of a son’s promise kept.
Chapter 29
Christchurch, Capital City
Zealand Prefecture
ANNOS MARTIS 238. 7. 29. 12:00
Mimi directs me to the back of the building, a familiar area where I find the receiving dock. I kick out the glass security door and slide inside with Vienne over my shoulder. My arm is killing me, and my whole body screams for me to stop moving. Keep screaming, I tell it. I’m not listening.
A few meters down the hallway, I reach the stairwell door and pause to decide which way to go. Then behind me, I hear the sound of running water. A trickle of brown water pours under the broken door, and within seconds, it turns into a stream.
The water is here, and it’s rising by the second.
I scramble up the stairs. I yank open the fire door and stumble into the main lobby, whose two-story-high windows offer a panoramic view of the courtyard and the Circus beyond. Vienne is a deadweight on my shoulder, and my boots are slick with water.
For a few seconds, I pause to decide on the next step. Outside in the courtyard, a platoon of troopers sees me, and they start firing on my location. I spot the door to the gift shop and kick it open.
I drag Vienne inside and hide her behind the counter.
“What is your plan, cowboy?” Mimi asks as I start rummaging through drawers for a lock pick or tool.
“It’s pretty simple,” I say. “Find something to get this choker off Vienne, then try to find a happy medium between drowning and getting roasted. It’s not much of a plan.”
“It is elegant in its simplicity.”
“Not so simple if you can’t find a pick.” I slam a drawer. “Time for Plan B.” I stand up just as Mimi is yelling, “Cowboy!”
Archibald is standing by the door. He shoves a display case over, blocking the exit. A plastic bottle full of clear liquid is in one hand. A lighter is in the other. “Found you,” he says, dousing a display of stuffed animals with the liquid. He strikes the lighter and tosses it into a hippo. A fireball erupts. “If I had known you were coming, I would’ve waited to purge the boardroom.”
“If I’d known you were coming,” I say, “I would’ve brought more ammo.”
Shoulders hunched, he lists to one side. His eyes are sunken in their sockets, his lips blistered and peeling. Like his cloak, he is stained with blood and unraveling at the hem.
I note all of this as I’m sailing over a display of snow globes depicting Christchurch in miniature.
We slam onto the floor, and clouds of ash blow across the room. Archibald is forced back. I roll to my feet and drop into a fighting crouch. Vienne is still out of sight. For now.
“What’s the matter, Archie?” I laugh. “Scared of a little dalit?
Phhtt!
A needle sinks into the cast on my left arm. I spin around, and a second needle sinks into the cast.
Archibald calls, “Who’s scared now, dalit?”
“Careful, cowboy,” Mimi says. “Those needles are tinged with neurotoxins.”
I stagger backward, trying to keep out of his direct line. “What the hell?”
Two more needles whistle across the room, one striking the wall behind me, the other making only a pinging noise as it bounces off my symbiarmor.
“It did not bounce,” Mimi says.
“What didn’t?” I feel a tingling burn in my thigh.
“The needle,” she says. “It did not bounce. It broke. Two cc’es of the neurotoxin entered your bloodstream.”
With my head spinning, I’m forced to one knee to keep my balance. Archie swoops down on me, his cape billowing in the smoke. “You’re not getting her back,” I say, hoping he’ll come closer.
He does, grabbing a handful of my hair, then laughing softly in my ear. “It’s not your girlfriend I want this time.” His breath stinks like rotted cabbage. “According to Mr. Lyme, you, Jacob Stringfellow, are the most valuable jewel on Mars.”
I look into Archibald’s laughing face, right into his dark, empty eyes and see myself reflected there. Drugged. Helpless. No, I think. No.
With a quick twist, I break the grip on my hair, leaving some of it in Archibald’s gloved hand. At the same time, I push hard with my legs, launching my shoulder into his chin.
Archie lands on his back, hands raised to ward me off. “Mercy,” he says.
My heart is not ready for mercy. I drive my knee into his gut. “That’s for Riki, you poxer.” The room spins, and I stagger away. I touch my thigh—my hand comes away coated with blood.
“It doesn’t matter if you kill me. I’ve already beaten you.” On his knees, Archibald snatches a snow globe off the floor and flings it.
It shatters on the wall behind me.
“Up yours, Archie.” I grab two handfuls of grit-covered kewpie dolls and throw them into his face, and the air explodes with a cloud of dirt.<
br />
The smoke grows thick on the ceiling, and the air is getting hotter. I can feel it on my face, and I squat to get a cleaner breath. “Mimi? What’s the water situation?”
“It’s still rising, cowboy.”
Archibald struggles to his feet and steps backward, his eyes blinded with dust. He claws at his burned face, then cackles. “You fight dirty, just like me.”
I move away quickly. “I’m not you.”
“But you are.” He turns his head side to side as if picking up sonar waves. “I am you and you are me. The only difference between us is a suit of armor.”
“Armor only protects your body.” I move again. “You can’t use it to mask your rotten soul.”
“Spare me the platitudes.” He laughs. “You think you know me so well, don’t you? Well, there’s one thing that even you don’t know.”
“What’s that?”
He laughs and flicks aside his cloak. Clutched in his hand is a glass SIP grenade. It contains white phosphorous and will burn anything it touches—cloth, fuel, ammo, and me, even through my symbiarmor.
“Move,” I say, “and I’ll blow your carking head off.”
“You can’t beat me.” There’s a note of regret in Archibald’s voice. It catches me off guard. “I have already lost.”
Archibald grins, showing a line of broken teeth, and unclasps his cloak. The tattered garment drops to the ash-covered floor, and he opens his arms in a macabre gesture of welcome. Under the cloak, Archibald is almost naked. Jaundiced skin hangs on his emaciated arms, loose and covered with sores that ooze pus. His chest is purple-black colored, with the bones showing through.
“My god.”
“I’m a dead man.” He flings the SIP grenade at me. “And so are you!”
I duck and roll past him to the counter as the grenade shatters against the far wall. The SIP explodes, incinerating anything in a three-meter radius. A sudden rush of fresh oxygen engorges the fire, and seconds later, a ball of fire blows out the rest of the display window. I hunker down as fiery chunks of merchandise sail across the floor.
Invisible Sun Page 25
