“Charlie Nguyen. He’s down here someplace. And Abe Cisco’s supposed to be down soon. Abe’s been a pal, Sasha. Can you maybe cut him a break?”
“What’s the plan?” I asked.
“You know—in and out quick. We head out, sweep the outer two levels first, four guys per level in two-man teams—then move up as quick as we can, leapfrogging levels, so if you run up, we have guys above you. Kolya stays up top in case you run for the spine and try to get to the command module. If the sweep comes up dry, Kolya starts with a bio-sniffer. He got some of the kid’s blood from the crime scene—don’t know how—but the sniffer’s tuned to their family-common DNA.”
So everyone but Kolya was headed this way, sooner or later. I’d already taken out Charlie Nguyen and his teammate, and another team on the elevator—probably headed for the level above this one. Abe Cisco and his teammate would be working that now. That left Kolya and one more unaccounted for.
“Where’s your teammate?” I asked. He shook his head.
“I don’t know. Carlos Li—he’s a fuckup. Son of a bitch should have been backing me up, but after we heard the shooting down this way, he disappeared. Said he was going through the other corridor, but I think he just bugged out.”
Bugged out? It was a possibility, I guess, but I wasn’t going to put a lot of eggs in that basket.
“Okay, now the big question. Where’s the money coming from?”
Bear looked down at the black blood still oozing from his abdomen. He was sweating, was probably already feeling sick—not just injured, but dying. He looked back up. Answer this question, and Kolya would kill him for sure. But now he was sure he was dying anyway—he could feel it.
“Was it someone in the e-Traak family?” I prompted him. He shook his had.
“Simki-Traak management. Not even top management—some mid-level suits with their own silencers, and some secret-identity shit . . . the leather-heads got secret societies in their corporations, did you know that? With handshakes and stuff, I guess. Maybe decoder rings. Fucking whack jobs. It was guys looking to take over down the road, wanted to make sure there was still gonna be something left to take over.”
I looked at him, and I could tell he was telling the truth, at least as he understood it.
“Was it something called Tahk Pashaada-ak?” I asked.
He frowned and shook his head.
“Nah, nothing like that. Something like Future Sunrise . . . I don’t remember exactly. Honest. Anyway, Kolya went kinda nutsy about the whole thing, thinks killing these kids will start some sort of civil war, split us Humans off from the Cottohazz. Something like that. Anymore, he sounds crazy to me.” He shook his head and then looked down at the spreading black stain on his shirt and trousers, and again I thought he was going to start crying, but he still didn’t.
Profit and loss? Was that all there was to it? I doubted it. Why go after the kids, then? Was it one brotherhood sending a message to another? Was it a response to another creepy prophesy-cum-computer projection? Or was it something that made even less sense? Profit and loss was a motive we Humans understood, so that’s what they’d have told Kolya, but who the hell knew?
“Okay, Bear, we’re square.” I held out my hand. For a moment he just looked at it, then he shook it, not sure if I meant it. I stood up and grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out the door, across the corridor, and into the observation lounge. I propped his back up against a chair, so he was looking out the big floor-to-ceiling window, and I put a cushion behind his head.
“Best I can do for you, Bear.”
His chin quivered with emotion, and he didn’t say anything, but he nodded in gratitude. I left him there, staring at the stars.
* * *
“Is that man really dying?” Marr asked when I came back into the conference room. Her skin was pale and clammy looking, and she was perspiring. I picked up a wastebasket from beside the conference table, and handed it to her.
“He is. Puke in that if you have to. I’ve done it plenty of times.”
“No,” she said. I looked at her, and she was okay. Really okay.
“Sasha!” Barraki whispered insistently. Marr and I looked, and he pointed down the corridor he was watching, and made the sign of a man walking with his fingers. I held up one finger, then two, then three, and held my hands out and shrugged as a question. He stuck his head back out, down by the floor, and watched for another two or three seconds. He pulled his head back and held up two fingers. Then he made a gun with his thumb and forefinger.
Two armed men. That would be Abe Cisco and his partner, coming to see why the two teams from down here hadn’t passed through them to leapfrog up to the next level—and maybe wondering what happened to his other two guys, also.
This was everyone except Kolya, who was up in the spine with his bio-sniffer, and Carlos Li—wandering round loose somewhere out of everyone’s traffic pattern. I had about two seconds to make a decision, and I did.
“Marr. I’m going to deal with these two guys. You go out this other door and head down the corridor, away from them. Run, but keep your eyes open for Carlos. If you see him, shoot him. Get to the elevator and get up to Tweezaa. We’ll meet you there when I finish with these guys. But if I don’t show up, bunker up someplace, and use the Hawker. You keep Tweezaa alive.”
She nodded jerkily, her eyes wide with fright but with adrenaline, too.
“Should Barraki come with me?” she whispered. I looked at him and then shook my head.
“I’ll take care of him,” I said. She looked at him, looked at me, and she got it. I was spreading our risks. This way, one bad break wouldn’t kill both of the kids. But it also meant that if . . . something bad happened to either of us, the other one wouldn’t be there. She touched my cheek with her hand, kissed me, and then she was gone, through the door and down the corridor.
I took a breath, steadied myself, and carefully turned over one of the conference tables on its side. Then I found a shadowy spot beside a chair by the wall, as far away from either door as I could get.
“Barraki,” I whispered, and he looked at me and nodded. “When they get close, stick your head out and look at them, so they see you, and then duck back in and run out that other door across the room. Hide in one of the observation lounges, but not the one with blood by the door. Can you do that?”
He nodded, and then I heard gunfire. It was from the other corridor, the one Marr had gone down, and it was from the direction she’d gone. There was a single shot, a pause, and then two more shots. For a second I thought I was going to pass out. I got light-headed, and saw white flashes of light in the dim room, but the voices of Abe Cisco and someone else I didn’t recognize brought me back to reality.
“Hey, what the hell?” I heard.
“Hey! Who’s shooting?” Abe shouted.
Concentrate on the here and now, Sasha. Barraki was still alive.
Barraki was staring at me, unsure what to do. I pointed toward the door and nodded. Barraki stood up, stuck his head out the doorway, looked down the corridor, cried out in alarm, and then streaked across the room and out the other door. The first guy came through the door at a run. I wanted to wait until they were both in the room, but when he saw the overturned table, he smelled a rat. He stopped in the middle of the room and raised his Rampart, and there was no sign of his partner, so I shot him in the head and he fell down. It wasn’t Abe. Tactics 102.
Abe came around the corner and put three rounds right through the conference table. That was the natural move, and it was what I was counting on. I fired, but he was too damned fast for me—gone before my hammer fell, and the round went through the open doorway and into the wall beyond. Now he knew where I was.
I would have rolled to a different firing position, but my right leg was like a sack of wet sand—all weight and no strength. Instead I pushed the chair over against another chair. Abe came around the doorway again, but he came around low this time, and I’d been aiming high, so my shots went over his head. I droppe
d my aim and fired again, but he’d already ducked back. He hadn’t taken a shot, because he’d seen right away that I wasn’t where he’d expected me. A lot of guys would have tried to adjust their aim, set up a second shot—and I probably would have nailed them. Abe was smarter than that.
Well, no, he wasn’t all that smart, when you got right down to it. He’d just been trained by old Harry Slaughter, one of the best gun men I’d ever seen. Great name for a shooter, huh? Abe had learned every trick old Harry had to teach, learned them by rote, by heart, made them a part of his physical reactions. I started to sweat then. Think, Sasha. This guy’s better than you, but he’s not smarter than you. In fact, he’s as dull as last year’s gossip.
Okay. Anything I could do in a gun fight, Abe could do better. Therefore, Abe would win the gun fight. Therefore . . .
I fired three rounds in rapid succession at the doorframe where I knew he was standing—an obvious desperation move. I waited about five seconds and then fired two more rounds at the doorframe, but after the second round the slide on the Rampart locked all the way back, because that was the tenth round in the magazine and it was dry.
“Son of a bitch! Barraki! Run for it!” I yelled, and threw the empty Rampart as hard as I could through the open doorway. It hit the corridor wall and bounced on the floor. Abe sauntered slowly around the doorsill with a huge grin on his face, and I shot him with Bear’s Rampart. I shot him six times, which I don’t normally do, but Abe had me spooked, and I needed to be sure he’d actually fall down. He did.
I could hear Barraki running away down the corridor, so I shouted to him that it was okay, and to come back. I got up and hobbled to the door and met him there.
“You are safe?” he asked.
“You bet. I may need your help walking, though. My leg’s starting to give out on me.” It was awkward, but he helped me, and we made our way down the corridor Marr had taken, trying to hurry but not really wanting to get there.
I got to the elevator foyer, knowing what I’d see, but I was wrong. It wasn’t Marr on the floor, but Carlos Li, the missing eighth guy, and I felt my heart lift, as if someone had been sitting on my chest and then just turned into a bird and flew away. Carlos had been winged in the shoulder and then kneecapped, twice, near the elevator doors, judging from the blood trail he’d left pulling himself over to the wall. His face was twisted with pain, and then fear when he saw me.
“Jesus, Sasha, you gotta help me! I’m bleedin’!”
I punched for an elevator and then turned to Carlos.
“Where’d she go?” I demanded.
“The lift,” he answered, pointing to the elevators.
“Yeah. What floor?”
“I don’t know! How the hell would I know?”
There was a bank of illuminated numbers by the elevators that showed the level they were at. If he’d paid attention, he’d have seen where her elevator stopped. I raised the Rampart and aimed at his forehead.
“What fucking floor?”
“Okay! Five—level five!” he answered.
The elevator car door opened, and I shot Carlos in the head.
“Let’s go,” I said to Barraki, and we got in. I hit the button for level three, dropped the magazine out of the Rampart, and put in a new one. Barraki was just looking at me—confused, afraid, and I guess disappointed.
“Why did I kill that man?” I asked.
He looked down and shrugged.
“Because he wanted to kill us,” he answered listlessly.
“No. He was unarmed and immobilized, and couldn’t kill us. Why did I kill him? Think.”
Barraki looked up. “Because he lied about where Boti-Marr went?”
“No. He told the truth. She went to level five. Think, Barraki. Use your head.”
Then his eyes got wide. “Because he knew what level Tweezaa was on! That’s where Boti-Marr went, and he saw. He would tell Mr. Markov.”
I nodded.
“And that’s why we’re only going to level three,” he went on, excited to have figured it out. “Mr. Markov could be watching the elevator lights.”
I nodded again, and smiled, and he smiled back. Smart little weasel boy. I’d make a crook out of him yet.
I remember thinking that, that I’d make a crook out of him yet. I remember it very distinctly. But I never did.
You can’t hear the bird songs end when your ears are full of thunder.
I’d fallen down. I wasn’t in the elevator anymore, but I don’t remember where I was or how I got there. I was sitting, leaning back against a wall, and I could hardly move. When I breathed in, I made this whistling, sucking sound, and when I breathed out, bloody bubbles oozed out of my chest and ran down my shirt. The cheap little Rampart was still in my hand, but when I started to raise it, Kolya shot me again, in the upper right arm. I felt the bone break, and my fist dropped back to the deck like a limp rag.
There was so much blood! I looked to my left, and Barraki was lying next to me. A lot of the blood was his. Most of the back of his head was missing, and there was bloody bone and gray matter all over. I started crying then. It wasn’t supposed to end like this, not with Barraki dead. Me maybe, but not him. I could feel my life ebbing away as Kolya walked over and stood looking down at me. He had a bio-sniffer on his belt and a smoking Rampart in his hand. His voice came to me faintly, from another world.
“You got lucky, Sasha, taking out Charlie and all the others. But you know what they say? Luck can’t last your whole life unless you die young. Before you go, I want you to know that after I finish off the other leather-head, I’m going to find that blonde piece of ass and take her with me. I got a long coast back to the C-lighter, and I promise I won’t push her out the airlock until I’ve really used her all up. You know what I mean?” And he gave me a big wink.
I couldn’t lift my right hand, could hardly move it from side to side, but he was standing right in front of me. Even trying to pull the trigger made my upper arm feel like the bone was coming right out of the meat, but I pulled anyway. The first bullet shattered his ankle, and he came down, his face twisted with pain and shock and rage. He shot me twice while he was falling, somewhere. I felt myself move with the impact, but I didn’t feel anything else. When he hit the deck, he was at the level of my Rampart, and I shot again, and again, as fast as I could pull the trigger. I saw bullets rip up through his neck and chest. I was slipping away now, but I saw a big arterial spurt rise up in the air from him, and it sort of dissolved into flowers—roses, I think. They were beautiful.
Dying wasn’t really so bad. You know things when you’re dead, things live people don’t. I knew that Marr and Tweezaa were okay, and that they were going to make it to Akaampta just fine, and that made me feel really good. Then it got very bright. I always loved sunlight.
And I got to meet Bony Jones.
THIRTY-TWO
I woke up in heaven. I knew it was heaven, because there was this angel that looked just like Marr. I got to say, though, I was surprised that heaven looked so much like the inside of a hospital room.
“He’s conscious,” I heard someone say, and the angel looked up. Her hair was oily and matted, tied back in a half-assed ponytail, and her eyes were sunken and red.
She looked great. Even when her face got all scrunched up and she started crying, she looked great.
More people came in—all of them Human—and they started looking at readouts and poking me and stuff. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the angel.
“This ain’t heaven, is it?” I asked eventually, and I was surprised how weak and hoarse my voice sounded—more of a croak than anything. Marr started laughing through the tears, and shook her head.
I’d never let on to this, but I was a little disappointed about that. Heaven had been nice, if that’s where I’d been. Wherever I’d been, it had been really nice. But it was pretty great seeing Marr, too. No denying that.
Eventually the head doc got there and chased away some of the others and we talked. He a
sked me how I was—hell, I didn’t know. He was the doctor, right? I’d thought I’d died.
Well . . . it turns out, I had.
The shuttle doctor pronounced me. No cardiovascular activity, no neural activity—dead. But Marr still had my Hawker and—I love this—at gunpoint made them load my corpse into a cold-sleep capsule.
My kind of gal.
So they de-oxygenated and froze me for shipment back here to . . . where was this?
Earth.
No shit! I was actually on Earth.
But what about all that brain-dead stuff?
“It’s true,” the doctor answered, nodding. “When your heart and lungs failed, and the oxygen flow to your brain was cut off, you suffered considerable brain damage. You were, technically, brain dead.”
Now all of a sudden this wasn’t sounding like such a great deal. My mind felt slow and groggy, but I’d figured it was just the drugs.
“You mean I’m gonna be a dummy?” I asked. “I think I’d rather have gone out clean.”
Marr squeezed my hand, and that felt good, but how long was a smart woman like her going to hang around some guy with half a brain? And did I even want that? I wanted a partner, not a nanny. But the doc was shaking his head.
“We’re pushing neurocine as fast as your system can handle it, and it’s re-growing the damaged tissue. If it wasn’t working, you’d never have regained consciousness.”
“So I’m going to be good as new?” I asked.
“For the most part,” he said.
“For the most part? What does that mean?”
“Neurocine is a very powerful nerve regenerative. You’ll regain all of your cognitive skills; you may end up better in some areas than you were before. It’s not uncommon for patients to discover an increased aptitude for mathematics, for example. But the neural damage also took out some of your memories. Your capacity for remembering new material will be unaffected, but growing new nerve tissue doesn’t get back old memories. I’m afraid some of those are gone forever.”
I thought about that for a while. I wondered what it was that I didn’t remember. It’s hard to figure out something like that, you know?
How Dark the World Becomes Page 33
