“They say it’s gonna end with red bolts!” he shouted above another wave of thunder. “They’re the wickedest and loudest of all!”
Wonderful. It was going to get worse.
A light came on in Bob Max’s house and Paula saw the old man’s scrawny form briefly silhouetted through the large front porch window. He must have just gotten home—there had been no sign of activity throughout the day.
She felt that it was important to tell Max about the two men as soon as possible. She debated a wet dash across the now muddy lot. It was a short debate. Max did not even have a public phone—doubtlessly, only smugglers and Costeaus had access to his private line. And Jerem would become impossible if Paula left the porch while he was not permitted to.
Lightning flashed and another movement caught her eye. A gray shadow danced through the dealer’s yard, froze momentarily against a large fridge unit, then disappeared. She squinted, searching the clutter of antiques for the source of the shadow.
The rain picked up, became a wind-whipped downpour, cascading in torrents across the porch. Their jackets were waterproof but Paula’s thin summer slacks were not—they now clung to her like a second skin. She shivered. Jerem looked completely drenched, oblivious to all but the ravished sky.
And then they appeared—two men, dressed in dark clothing. They came out of Max’s yard and crept along the edge of the old man’s front porch. Dull red lightning sparkled in the air immediately surrounding their bodies—they were wearing active crescent webs. The defensive energy shields were usually invisible, but the rain was playing tricks, outlining the protective barriers.
Even though the men had their backs to her, Paula knew she was looking at the same pair who had come to her gallery this morning. Smiler and Sad-eyes. It was not just a logical guess. There was something instantly identifiable about them—a quality in their movements, as if they had been born in tandem.
She had no time to consider the ramifications of her thoughts. The two men stood up. The taller one—Smiler—leaped catlike over the porch railing. Sad-eyes slithered between the legs of the obscene model propped on Max’s accelerator couch. In one swift motion, he lashed out and tore the head from the nude torso. It sailed over the railing and splattered into the mud.
Paula dropped to her knees beside Jerem. “Come on,” she hissed, “I want you to move!” She clamped a hand across his shoulder and dragged him behind the railing.
“Mom!”
“Hush! There’s something going on over at Max’s. I want us to be absolutely quiet and still. We can watch through the slits in the railing.”
Her urgency got through to him. They crouched behind the railing like scared rabbits. For a while, nothing happened. The men had become statues on Max’s porch—bold outlines, shimmering with each new stroke of lightning, but as still as if they had been de-energized by a switch. Paula began to feel silly.
And then with a swiftness that took her breath away, the two men leaped into the air and crashed through Max’s plate-glass front window.
“Wow! Did ya see that!”
Paula nodded. For another eternity, there was no movement from inside the dealer’s home. The light remained on, illuminating Max’s living room. A table and some cushioned chairs were visible through the shattered window. Purple lightning splashed across the sky, casting a brief eerie glow across the landscape behind his house.
I should call the police. Her hair whipped across her face. She tucked it behind her ears and reached a decision.
“Jerem, I want you to stay right here. I don’t want you to move. I’m going to run in the house and call—”
Bob Max jumped—or was pushed—through his broken window. He landed feet-first on his porch, stumbling forward. He slammed into the railing and flipped over into the mud. He struggled to his knees and tried to stand up.
Thunder blasted. Smiler appeared suddenly on Max’s porch. Sad-eyes came around the side of the house—he must have exited through the dealer’s back door.
Paula dared not risk calling the police—not now. Smiler was looking in their direction. He would certainly spot her if she stood up.
Max made it to his feet just as Sad-eyes came up behind him. Max must have sensed the man’s presence. He started to turn around. Sad-eyes kicked Max’s legs out from under him. Max hit the mud like a felled tree.
A beam of twisting black light erupted from Smiler’s hand. The dark luminous beam streaked in a circle around Max’s prone form. Smiler snapped his wrist. The light stopped circling and plunged downward, burying itself in the dealer’s spine. Max jerked once and then lay still.
Paula clutched her son—a grip of maternal protectiveness mixed with sheer terror. She knew Max was dead and she knew what had killed him.
Data streamed through awareness—facts about the two men that had nagged at her since this morning. Sad-eyes and Smiler. Contrasting speech styles—a voice too inflective and a voice without emotion. Oddly coordinated movements. AV scramblers. And the final clue—the black light of the Cohe wand, a hand weapon so deadly that its mere possession would subject the owner to E-Tech’s harshest penalties.
The two men who were not really two men would have little concern over such laws. They were not human. They were a creature born out of the dark years before the Apocalypse, over two hundred years ago.
A Paratwa.
She clutched Jerem even tighter. Smiler seemed to be staring straight at them. It saw us earlier. It knows we’re hiding here. It’s going to kill us.
“Mom,” Jerem began anxiously.
“Shhh!” We could make a run for the front door, lock it—no, it would come through the windows! The woods! We’ll make a run for the woods, keep running until we find help! We might make it ...
“Mom, they’re leaving.”
Smiler and Sad-eyes stepped past Max’s body and headed for the road. Moments later, they disappeared behind the swaying trees.
O}o{O
Irrya’s morning sunlight, tinted ocher by a spectral shift within the cylinder’s outside mirrors, stained the office walls, discoloring the pale ivory and, in some spots, transforming it to rust. Potted juniper shrubs cast slim shadows, their upswept branches forming pencils of darkness against the bright light. The massive uncluttered desk was authentic oak and easily dominated the room’s sparse furniture—three stout chairs, a corner table, a small glass-enclosed shelf maintaining four books in a sealed environment. A darkened comconsole rose from the back edge of the desk like a miniature mountain. A portly man occupied the leather chair opposite the console.
Despite his two decades as master of this office, the man still considered himself a temporary fixture. It was a proper enough attitude for the director of E-Tech.
Does consistency have a source?
Rome Franco searched his feelings for the origin of that particular musing.
Minor spat with Angela this morning. He had worn his dreamtube to bed last night. In her sleep, she had rolled over and knocked the headboard sensor out of alignment. A good dream interrupted. He had awakened, thoughtlessly yelled at her.
No, that was not the source. The emotion was strong enough to be the first recalled—only natural, since Angela had been his wife for thirty-nine years. It was a full sharecare relationship; in tandem most of the time, at worst, communicating. Any pulsations within such a marriage demanded preeminence.
The children? Lydia and Antony lived in the distant L4 colonies and each managed to open a channel several times a month. Lydia was pregnant again—grandchild three would be a boy. Antony’s engineering group had offered him a surface assignment and he was still debating the merits of acceptance. His salary would almost double but the job risk factor would climb into a higher percentile as well. He was wise to ponder such a choice.
Rome shook his head. Not the children and not Angela. What then? Today’s upcoming Council meeting?
His stomach tightened—he had pinpointed the turmoil. Does consistency have a source? Perhaps the Coun
cil of Irrya, governing body of the Colonies, was that source. The Council had certainly always been a wellspring of consistency.
It had ruled, uninterrupted, for over two hundred years, ever since those dark days following Earth’s abandonment. Today, five people sat on the Council and it was their collective wisdom that determined the progress and direction of the Colonies. Rome and four others represented the hopes and fears of over a billion people. The five of them supplied the orbiting cylinders with a gestalt leadership that in two centuries had never floundered.
Yes, consistency appeared to have a source. But some of the current councilors sought to disrupt that harmony of understanding that had guided the survivors of Earth to a new beginning. Those councilors seemed to have lost the great considerations of the past.
The globe of the Earth spins below us and it is dead. Rome wanted to shake those councilors and point to the home world and say: Look at it! See what was done to it! The same madness that destroyed the world is festering again within this Council! Can’t you see it?
They could not. All that they seemed capable of perceiving was E-Tech, omnipotently powerful for two centuries. And Rome Franco, director of the organization, was seen as their enemy.
He sighed. If consistency had a source, it also had a terminus. And when that point was reached, the cycle could begin again. History would be free to repeat itself.
I am afraid.
The underlying feeling was clear. I, Rome Franco, fear that the past will repeat itself.
The Irryan Council was slowly eroding the power of E-Tech. The march toward madness was beginning all over again. Limits were being ignored. Science and technology were poised to run rampant throughout the Colonies. People again seemed willing to denigrate themselves before the machines. The twin gods of profit and progress had risen and the voices of reason and balance were about to be drowned beneath the apocalyptic waves.
It must not be.
He recognized the crisis just as his forefathers had recognized it over two hundred years ago. Only their conception had come too late to save the Earth. E-Tech had sprouted from the madness of those final days: a diverse band of politicians, scientists, industrialists, engineers, and scholars who had united in order to limit the unchecked growth of technological advancement.
The Ecostatic Technospheric Alliance had struggled for acceptance in those early years; its goal of limiting humanity’s knowledge ran counter to a long tradition of science without boundaries. Not until the genetic and nuclear horrors had fully manifested themselves, had E-Tech grown to its full stature.
We must remain powerful.
Today, more than ever, E-Tech’s guidance was needed. Voices of unreason seemed to be everywhere—their cries had infested the Irryan Senate and, lately, the Irryan Council itself. Rome had been E-Tech’s representative to the Council for close to twenty years and, until recently, his organization could count on strong support. But the tide had changed.
A steel guitar twanged softly. He suppressed his worries and leaned back in the soft leather of the chair. A brush across the light sensor of the intercom opened a channel to his execsec, whose office was two stories below.
“Yes?”
His secretary’s formal baritone filled the room. “Sir, Pasha Haddad is calling. He requests an immediate secure conversation. Should I seal the lines?”
Rome sighed. E-Tech’s Chief of Security would request a sealed line to discuss rose gardening. “Put him through when you’re ready.”
It took only a few seconds for Rome’s desk screen to coalesce into the familiar lean dark face and shaved skull.
Pasha Haddad wasted no time. “We have a problem.” His voice was deep, poised. “A murder took place in the colony of Lamalan early last night. A smuggler—a man named Bob Max—was killed by a Cohe wand. Two neighbors witnessed the execution. They claim that the killers visited their antique gallery earlier in the day, inquiring about the victim. The witnesses are convinced—and so am I—that the killer was a Paratwa assassin.”
If Haddad’s hand had reached from the screen and slapped him, Rome could not have felt more stunned. “A Paratwa ... in the Colonies?” He found himself gripping the leather armrests.
Haddad’s face wrinkled, betraying his age. The Pasha, too, had spent a good deal of his life in the service of E-Tech.
“The witnesses are a woman and her twelve-year-old son. Fortunately, the woman had the good sense to call E-Tech rather than the local police or the Guardians. Mother and son are now in our protective custody and the entire incident is still under wraps.”
Rome found himself unwilling to believe. “A Paratwa? Are you certain?”
The Pasha gave a curt nod. “I’ve not spoken personally to the witnesses as yet, but my people are convinced of their sincerity. The woman was terrified. If the killers were not a Paratwa, they were certainly trying to imitate one. And there is no doubt about the murder weapon—it was a Cohe wand.”
That in itself should be proof of identity. In his sixty-two years, Rome had only once seen the weapon. E-Tech had confiscated a wand from a private collector during a high-tech raid some twenty-five years ago. The collector had traced the weapon’s ancestry clear back to his great-great-grandparents, who had retrieved it from a dead Paratwa outside their urban Texas home. The outlawed wand had been smuggled to the Colonies and treasured for two centuries as a family heirloom.
Rome recalled an E-Tech specialist demonstrating the captured weapon down in the Irryan vaults. Such a tiny device, the size and shape of an egg—a pale sliver of metal projecting from one end. How could such a simple-looking thing possess such a perilous reputation?
In his naivety, Rome had assumed that the weapon’s association with the Paratwa killers had exaggerated its deadliness. The E-Tech specialist, naturally inexperienced with such a device, had gently squeezed its smooth surface. The twisting black light had lanced across the vault, slicing through the torsos of four practice dummies like a fin through water. Rome remembered being astonished at the speed of the incinerating beam and the way it seemed to whip from the specialist’s hand as if it were some unbound power from within his very body. At that moment, Rome understood why the people of pre-Apocalyptic Earth had feared such weapons and why E-Tech had totally outlawed them.
Paratwa assassins had spent their entire lives training with the wands. It was said that the deadlier assassins became so skilled that they could whip a beam up a spiral staircase and still pierce or slice their target.
A Paratwa in the Colonies. He did not want to accept it.
Pasha Haddad seemed to read Rome’s feelings. “It was a shock. We’ve always known that many of the assassins were unaccounted for at the time of the Apocalypse. There was always the possibility that some of them went into stasis during the final days, hoping to be awakened into some future era. But after two centuries ... I truly believed that we had seen the last of them.”
Rome nodded, found that his thoughts were suddenly on Angela and the children. Irrational worries. There were more than a billion people in the Colonies—his own family was certainly statistically safe.
“We suspect,” Haddad continued, “that Costeaus were involved in this creature’s revival. Four days ago, an illegal shuttle expedition retrieved a pair of stasis capsules from a sealed subway tunnel in the Philadelphia area. There was some concern that it could be a Paratwa, although that information did not reach my desk until a few hours ago.” Haddad looked angry over that fact. “Last night’s victim—Bob Max—was known to have Costeau contacts. And the witnesses claim that one of the killers specifically mentioned Philadelphia.”
Rome twisted uncomfortably in his chair. The leather seemed to be resisting his movement, preventing an easy uncrossing of his legs. “What about the Wake-up facility?”
The Pasha shrugged. “Naturally, we’ll check all the registered stasis centers, but I am not optimistic. The Costeaus are known to have their own Wake-ups—illegal, of course. I doubt if we’ll have muc
h luck learning where this creature was revived.”
Rome stared past the viewscreen to the velvet leaves of a potted calimer plant in the far corner. A Paratwa assassin. Of all the technological excesses of the twenty-first century, none had inspired the growth of E-Tech more than the Paratwa. The interlink killers had ravaged the world for some thirty years before the Apocalypse, carving a niche in the history texts that surpassed even the Nazi monstrosities of the previous century.
If a Paratwa assassin had indeed arisen, the political ramifications could be extraordinary. Rome felt a touch of guilt, but he was far too experienced to ignore the possible advantages for E-Tech. A Paratwa, threatening the Colonies, could provide certain gains to his organization. Within the Council, the erosion of E-Tech’s power base might be halted, at least temporarily. No councilor would dare weaken E-Tech’s scientific and social controls with an assassin on the loose. In the public mind, the eradication of the Paratwa was still linked with the rise of E-Tech. Even La Gloria de la Ciencia could not fail to recognize that fact.
Rome smiled to himself. Dear Angela often said that he could never become a great councilor, since he cared too much about other people. Then the sweet brown eyes would sparkle and she would crush him under a proper Sicilian hug.
In a way, though, she was right. There were councilors who, if they were in Rome’s position, would secretly impede the assassin’s capture in order to strengthen their political base.
He faced the screen again. “You say that the Guardians have not yet been notified. I believe that places E-Tech in the position of violating the Irryan charter.”
It was rare to see Haddad smiling. “I took the liberty of withholding the incident from you until this morning. This is a proper—and legal—position for an underling to take. Since you, as director of E-Tech, are officially responsible for informing the Guardians, no laws have yet been broken.”
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