by Gregg Taylor
Claire looked up hopefully for a moment. Carter ran his fingers along her cheek tenderly. “Understand what I am offering you. You will have nothing but what you carry. No identity. No existence. No money. You would have one... commodity to sell. But the Guilds do not take non-persons, and you could not accept anything but paper money. What degradations would you need to perform endlessly just to feed yourself? How long would anyone pay? It does make the bolt to the head seem like a mercy, does it not?”
Claire hung her head again and wept quietly.
“You were a fool,” he said. “You crossed me as no one may expect to and live. You sought not merely to block my path to glory, but to supplant me. And in the end, you ran straight to the one place on Earth where you could never go. And now you will thank me for a clean death, or I promise you... you will not get it.”
I’d had enough. I fragged Ponytail with one shot, but I let him have two more as I walked in, just to keep him dancing. Soul Patch ducked behind the Hov. I froze him with a shout.
“Stay down! I see that little beardlet of yours and the Locust dies.”
“Drake!” Claire breathed and almost made the mistake of coming between Carter and the gun. She caught herself at the last instant and pulled back sharply.
Cyrus wasn’t angry. Not yet. He was disgusted though, and it showed.
“Monarch,” he said, shaking his head. “That it should come to this. For a woman. I always thought better of you. You cannot imagine that I can let you live.”
“All I want is the girl, Carter,” I said, the GAT leveled straight at him. Claire snatched the parcel from his grasp and ran behind me.
“It seems... the girl... has other ideas.” The Locust smiled.
“Drake, you must have heard him... what he can do to me, what he can do to us...” I noticed I was Drake again.
“He can’t do anything to me, except kill me,” I said. “And he isn’t going to get the chance to do that.”
I tried. I really did. My hand shook at the effort. Carter laughed. I’d lost count of the number of people I’d killed in the last day, but I couldn’t end it all by throwing a bolt into this fat bastard. From behind the Hov I could hear footsteps and I pumped two fast shots towards the car to keep Soul Patch where he was.
“You know you can’t kill me, Monarch. None of you can. You were given a neural block. I cannot operate if I cannot trust my own guards implicitly.” Carter’s eyebrows knit in confusion. “You know this. It was your idea.”
I used my left arm to guide Claire back into the darkness. “I don’t know why I can’t shoot you. But I can wipe your Empire clean off the Omniframe if you don’t leave Claire alone.” We were retreating further into the darkness. I couldn’t see Soul Patch, but Carter held his ground. “I can make you a dishwasher with a grade four education. Just leave Claire out of this.”
“Claire? She is no more Claire Marsland than you are Drake Finn.” I almost couldn’t see him now, framed only in silhouette. Claire’s arm reached for me, trying to pull me away, as if that could stop me from hearing Carter’s taunting roar.
“There is no Claire Marsland and there never was,” he cried. “She’s a ’Frame Operative gone wrong. She used Marsland’s test copy to make herself into the elder daughter he never had.”
For a moment I almost couldn’t walk. But it had to be true. It was so obvious.
“She made herself Marsland’s heir to try and get the program for herself. She betrayed Omniframe, she crossed Cyrus Carter and everything that has happened since is her fault!” Carter bellowed. He was finally angry and there was no mistake. It wasn’t a pretty thing to see. We both turned and ran into the pitch darkness. I could hear Carter’s furious wail behind me as he set his massive form into pursuit.
“Monarch!” he cried as the valiant Soul Patch stood at last and filled the air with crackling plasma bolts as we ran.
“Monarch!”
TWENTY-THREE
I should have been angry with her. Maybe I would be later when time was convenient. She’d lied to me, and even when she’d confessed, it was barely for a handful of the lies she had told. There was no noble sacrifice here, no plucky girl trying to do what was right one last time for the father she loved. There was only greed.
If Carter was right, and it seemed certain that he was, she must have been on the team that had studied Marsland’s Golem Protocol for ’Frame Internal. She’d realized what E2-476 was capable of, knew as few others could how impossible it would be to trace or defend against if it ever made it out of the lab. And then suddenly her Civil Service paycheque and ’Frame pension didn’t look so hot. So she wrote herself into a tragedy already in motion and stole away the leading role.
I should have been angry with her.
We stumbled on into the pitch blackness of the abandoned building. Soul Patch had fired four bolts before he stopped, probably at Carter’s orders. Carter was slick, and he could see what I could see. The plasma charges threw enough light to give me a sketchy route map for what lay ahead. For those first crucial minutes, while our eyes adjusted to the darkness, I ran full-out, following a route I had learned during flashes like lightning, Claire Marsland hanging on to my hand for dear life.
Claire Marsland was not her real name. I wondered what it could be. Would she go back to it if we got away with the Golem Protocol, or would she become yet another new person, richer and more ruthless than even the giant man hunting us in the shadows?
I pulled her hard to the left, away from staircase I had seen going down. The last thing on Earth I wanted to do was get cornered in a basement. We ran on into the blackness and towards the furthest extent of what I had been able to see by the light of Soul Patch’s GAT. Soon we would reach the part of the map that said, “here be dragons”. I could hear a sharp sound behind us, as if someone had stumbled in the darkness. We pressed on.
She’d been ruthless, in her own way. She’d done everything she could to keep me in the dark and on her side, including giving me her body. But it was hard to fault her too much. She was being hunted by a top-level predator like Carter and a bottom feeder like Felco and who knows who else along the way. Even Drake Finn had been willing, if not eager, to sell her out. The only person she’d even remotely been able to trust should have been her killer, if all had gone as nature intended.
We moved into a narrow passageway. I had no idea where it led, apart from the fact that it moved more or less in the opposite direction from our starting point. This I found good. The narrow walls were a help too... they kept us penned in, it was true, but they let us move more quickly, and my eyes were starting to adjust. The hard concrete of the floor and the deep echoes that carried along the passage as we ran were less good. I tried to strike a balance between quickly and quietly but, as with most compromises, it was probably not enough of either.
I should have been angry with her. For no other reason than dragging me in this far, making me care what happened to her when I was obviously better suited to not giving a good goddamn what happened to anyone. But all I could think of as we ran deeper and deeper into the bowels of the ruin likely to become our grave was somehow winning this race. Taking her from the darkness to the light. It wasn’t a metaphor, I was setting achievable goals. This was no time for questions like who are you really or where will you go now or the ever-popular what about us. See the sun one more time, then worry about what comes next.
Suddenly the passageway came to an abrupt end. I hadn’t seen it coming, racing on into the darkness with my hand stretched out before me. It wasn’t until my arm slammed into what seemed to be a solid metal wall that I realized how badly we were screwed. I listened for motion behind us, but Claire’s breathing had grown heavy with panic and I couldn’t hear a thing. I felt around the end of the passage around waist level, and sure enough, there was a handle. It wasn’t a wall, it was a door. Not a doorknob though, it felt like the door was meant to slide. The handle was on the left, so I pulled hard to the right.
Nothing. Just a metal clunk that left no doubt which direction we might be found in, should anyone happen to be hunting us in the darkness.
“What is it?” Claire hissed.
“Quiet,” I said and felt around the handle. Nothing. I could hear footsteps along the passage behind us now. They were running hard. I moved my hand up the door frame until I came to a hard metal obstruction. It felt like a padlock, and for an instant I thought we were done. But as I ran my fingers along its length I realized the lock was through the metal rings on the door and the frame, but it wasn’t closed. It felt like a flight of angels sang as I slipped the lock free and threw the door open.
There wasn’t much light in the space beyond the door, but it was enough. Claire and I were suddenly in silhouette before the open door. There were shouts from a distance down the passageway, and a rain of plasma bolts began to hit the walls nearby. They were too far away and running too fast to be accurate, but we couldn’t stay here.
I pushed Claire through the doorway and followed her, pulling it shut behind as the first of the charges started to hit it. There were metal gromits to feed a lock through on this side as well. I fumbled with the padlock still in my hand and fed it through. I didn’t close it, since doing so wouldn’t slow them down any more, and I hadn’t determined if there was a way out of here yet.
“What are you doing?” she called, a short distance away.
“A dramatic rescue,” I said. “Haven’t you been paying attention?”
I took her hand and we ran a few steps farther, coming to the end of the narrow passage at last and stepping into the room beyond.
The room was enormous. Sunlight trickled through five or six boarded up windows, enough to get your bearings by, but not much more. The windows were at least forty feet above the floor level.
From behind us, the plasma charges could be heard tearing into the door.
“That’s not going to hold them,” she said.
“Come on.” I pulled her into the space and saw what I hoped for. At the other end of the giant room was a loading dock, with light just sneaking in around the huge metal doors. They seemed to glow like the gates of heaven. We ran for them like hell.
The maze of high shelves that seemed to fill the room had been looted, long ago by the look of them. The deep shadows on every side were filled with misshapen artifacts of a more prosperous time, now lying in the semi-darkness like broken statues of fallen Gods. We took the one clear path through this graveyard of capitalist dreams – straight up the middle.
Behind us I could hear the metal door finally shred beneath the pounding of plasma and heat. They’d be through in a minute, but we’d already be gone. We’d hit the light, and then I’d try and figure out what happened next.
We wouldn’t have to go far, and if we could get far enough ahead to get out of sight, the Locust would never find us in time. If they were right about what this Golem Protocol could do, all we would need to do is find an Omnilink station, and they were everywhere. In every direction. If it took Carter more than twenty minutes to find us, there wouldn’t be a Cyrus Carter any more; there would never have been a Cyrus Carter, and a man bearing a striking resemblance to him would have a dozen warrants out for him. Let the cops take him down.
In the end, I was lucky that I saw what I did at that very moment. Another few seconds and I’d have started constructing happily ever after scenarios with the beautiful blonde I had in tow. I wouldn’t have meant to, but I couldn’t have helped myself. I was sure I wasn’t the first guy to play the sap for her, but I was prepared to lay odds on being the last, one way or another.
But then I saw it. We were only twenty, maybe thirty feet away when I could finally see well enough to be sure. I ground to a halt and stared.
“What is it?” Claire hissed, trying to pull me on towards the loading bay doors.
“The stairs,” I said. “They’re gone.”
“What?” She didn’t seem to understand.
“They’ve been stripped. They were probably metal.”
Claire let my hand go and ran on. I ran after her.
“No,” she whispered as she reached the concrete wall below the loading dock. She rested her hand against the cold cement. “No.”
The wall was smooth, sheer and fifteen feet high. Without those stairs, there was no way we could get to the doors. The fittings were still in place. It looked like they’d been cut away with a blowtorch. How someone had managed to strip a couple of thousand pounds of metal stairs, I couldn’t say. Of course there was heavy equipment in every other building in the Acre, so maybe it wasn’t such a mystery.
Claire began to look around frantically. It wasn’t a bad impulse, but there wasn’t time.
“Claire! Come on!” I hissed. She pulled away from me.
“There’s got to be a way... something we can use... help me!” she barked.
The concrete wall was suddenly ablaze as a plasma bolt struck it not two feet from Claire’s head. She screamed. I threw my arm over her head and ran her into the shadows, into the maze to our left, firing blindly as I did so.
We ran to the end of the first aisle, then turned left again and ran halfway up, turning at the first juncture. The shelves that made up that high wall were built from a wooden frame, not metal, and they’d held up better than most. I started to shimmy up the supports to the second level. Claire’s eyes were panicked, as if I might just leave her down there to take the fall alone. And if I’d been thinking straight, maybe I would have. I pulled her up and rushed her towards the back of the unit. I thought of trying for the third level, but we couldn’t risk the noise. There was something like a lean-to up there, made out of a couple of old pallets. It stunk to hell. At one point it had either been a shelter for some homeless piece of crap or a raccoon with a serious internal disorder. But it was something approaching cover anyway, so I pushed her as far into it as I could and followed her in, to wait in the darkness for the inevitable.
TWENTY-FOUR
“Monarch!” the Locust’s voice boomed through the great open space like he was calling a dog. “Monarch!”
“What is he trying to do?” Claire whispered, too loud. I held my hand up in the semi-darkness as a plea for silence.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Monarch, but no one betrays me and lives.” The echo of his calls were like a far-off peal of thunder. Like a storm rolling in off an open lake.
Beside me, I could feel Claire’s heartbeat racing. We were in the lion’s den and there was no mistake. At the end of the trail, all the truth was on the table... wasn’t someone supposed to break down in a dramatic confession? Wasn’t I supposed to hand someone over to the law and bill someone else twenty-five dollars a day? I hadn’t finished it yet, but I was sure that was how Murder, Sweet Murder was going to end.
“You can’t hide from me,” the great wall of sound came again. “You have been the instrument of my righteous vengeance often enough to know that. My will is a force of nature, Monarch. As inevitable as the tide.”
And this was the problem. I was not a detective. Not really. I hadn’t done that badly, all things considered, but however much I had tried to be Drake Finn, Private Investigator, gathering the suspects in the lobby just didn’t seem to be my thing. I might never be the Monarch again, but I was a predator, not prey, and hiding in the darkness hoping for the best was not playing to my strengths.
“You can’t sell the Protocol yourself,” Locust cried, “you’re a Shade! You have no profile, no existence. Omniframe says you don’t exist and Omniframe is always right!”
I checked the charge meter on the GAT out of habit and gave my neck a stretch to either side. It didn’t crack, which was probably for the best, but I felt loose. Claire must have sensed what I was about to do, because she caught my arm and held it hard. That was nice. Like the sound of a wailing woman over your grave, it was something not to be missed. I pulled my arm free from her grip and kissed her. She kissed back frantically, but did not try a
nd stop me again. She either knew she couldn’t or didn’t want to overplay her hand and actually convince me not to go. It occurred to me that I needed to do something about this cynicism thing.
I moved silently towards the post I had climbed and lowered myself to the ground. That was the worst part – letting myself down slowly, knowing that I was exposing myself, leaving myself helpless in the name of silence. I expected a plasma bolt to cut me in half at any moment but I held my nerve. Rushing would betray our position, which is exactly what he was trying to force me to do.
You had to hand it to Carter, he was a very cool customer. He couldn’t possibly put himself in the line of fire often, why on Earth would he? But he didn’t have his small army of un-persons anymore. It was just him and some plug with a soul-patch, so he was here, taunting me, trying to draw me out. He must have had a hell of a lot of faith in whatever he’d done to me to keep me from turning on him. Of course, since I’d had him dead to rights twice and failed to pull the trigger, he might have a point.
While he was calling out to me, he couldn’t hear me coming. But Soul Patch could. He was out there somewhere, hunting us. Hunting me, if he had any sense of priority. I had one thing going for me – my relative certainty that if he was better than me, he would have been the one in charge. It wasn’t much, but when you have no reason for confidence, bravado wasn’t a bad substitute.
Of course, the speed at which the bolts had been thrown back in the hallway suggested there were two guns at play, which means Carter was armed too. Probably he’d picked up the GAT when I’d taken Ponytail out. If I was lucky, he wouldn’t really know how to use it. I hadn’t been lucky a great deal lately, but I figured I was due.
