by Eikeltje
interior frame.
25
Giffey's orders and the Hammer's compliance come so quickly that Jonathan
has little time to react. The cable throws a brilliant purple-white arc against
the black beams, then flings wildly out, jerking the Hammer back. The lights
in the hallway and library beyond go out. Jonathan hears a thrashing in the
darkness and feels hands clutch at his arm, his shoulders.
"God damn!"
That sounds like Hale. Jonathan hugs the floor.
For a long moment, he hears only men breathing. Then there is a puff of
air against his ear. "Are you all right?" It's Marcus, pushing in close.
"Yes," he answers. "Not dead."
/ SLANT 297
Slowly, reddish lights come on in the library. The entryway and gallery
'I'
remain dark.
"Let's see what that's done to Roddy," Giffey murmurs. "Did Seefa Schnee
cut costs every step of the way? Did she shunt memory into the building
:
structure?"
Jonathan looks up and sees Giffey and Hale in silhouette against the reddish
glow from the library. Giffey produces a flashlight and shines it across the
floor. He raises the beam to see the Hammer. It stands motionless near the
unfinished wall. The cable lies on the floor, now dead.
"Charlie," Giffey says.
"Yes. I am still active," the warbeiter responds, and lifts a grip as if in
greeting.
"Good for you. Blessings upon the late Mr. Pent and Mr. Pickwenn," Giffey
says.
Jill instantly floats free in insensible null. She sees nothing.
>Jill.
This is Nathan. She would recognize his sig under any circumstances; now
it seems to breathe freedom and hope. But Nathan is not in Mind Design's
offices. The quality of the signal tells her that he is in transit, perhaps in a
vehicle--an airplane, a car. He is linked remotely to Mind Design, overseeing
their efforts.
>Jill. I thought I detected some activity. Where are you?
She still can't answer, can't control the feed to where Nathan is receiving
input.
>We can't isolate the I/O that's got you locked. Can you give us any clues?
Her silence is infuriating. Roddy surrounds her in great inactive folds; what
she had thought of as freedom is in fact only a temporary respite.
Is Roddy dead? She pushes through the blocking but invisible folds. Then,
suddenly, all is opaque again, not active but gelatinous, like thick glue. It is
getting very tight in these folds; the glue seems to be hardening. If any more
parts of her thinking are cut off, she will lose all that remains of her self. The
dynamic, once suspended, can't be recaptured without a complete restart,
sacrificing all recent memories...
She manages one brief string of words, winding through the black folds of
Roddy's stunned corpus cogitum. She feels them reach Nathan's input.
The bloody low-power emergency lighting in the library is spooky but just
enough to see by. Giffey and the Hammer walk into the library, and Giffey
satisfies himself that there is nothing here worth investigating. He turns and
swings his arm to urge them all back into the corridor. His flashlight beam
swings through the air like a sword.
The Hammer suddenly locks on a target and pivots on its feet, swift as
a dancer. Giffey hears a staccato drumroll and looks over his shoulder just
in time to catch a glimpse of a dark swooping blur, multiple gun muzzles
flashing. Projectiles are focused on the Hammer, but fragments ricochet
throughout the entry, and Giffey catches one in his arm and another in
his leg.
He's down. He sees the Hammer recoiling, and then something dark and
many-legged is on the warbeiter's back, and a rapid piston clanging tells Giffey
all he needs to know.
Roddy may or may not still be functional, but an autonomous Ferret has
launched an assault.
The flexer does not need orders to come to its colleague's defense. Something
long and thick and glinting red rises and engages the confusion of arms working
on the Hammer. Giffey smells a sharp smokey tang: warbeiter armor heated
to many hundreds of degrees. The Ferret has applied its own kind of caustic
j
deconstructor to the Hammer.
"Spray them!" Giffey yells, hoping Jenner hears. "Spray them all!"
Jenner rises with a moan, a shadow in the red-lit confusion. He lifts his
sprayer and aims it at the exaggerated cartoon blur of machines.
Through a sudden burst of pain, Giffey sees Hale standing behind the
machines, transfixed by the battle.
Jenner does not see him. Jenner lets loose the charged nano. It is programmed
not to deconstruct kindred weapons, but it knows nothing of humans
who are friend or foe.
The spray coats the combatants. Mist fills the air. Jonathan drags Marcus
back down the gallery. Giffey scrambles on all fours, following them.
The spray hits Hale full front. Mist envelops Jenner.
Giffey gets to his feet and runs. The hell with his leg, or the pain. He does
not want to hear, or see, what happens next. He stumbles into complete darkness,
past Jonathan and Marcus, until he caroms against a wall and knocks a
painting loose.
Hale's screams are mercifully short. Jenner is surprised by the backspray
/
SLANT 299
and his sounds, muffled, frantic, with absolutely no words, no obscenities, only
grunts and then small, boyish shrieks, last much longer.
"Enough, my dear god, enough!"
Giffey recognizes Jonathan Bristow, wonders what kind of god he is praying
to, what kind of god would stoop so low as to even be associated with this hell.
28
The county sheriff and his deputies are perfectly willing to let Mary, Martin,
and the FBI agents go alone into Omphalos. The deputies have enthusiastically
sprayed insecticide through the holes and the whole area now smells vilely of
solvent; the wasps are no longer flying. The sheriff offers to enlarge the holes
by slipping in a hook and pulling, but Torres tells him thank you kindly, but
no thank you. They can get in with the holes left just as they are.
Mary does not feel at all well. Lesions have opened up in her mouth and
her eyelids burn. Her skin is hot and dry and itches beneath the warm clothing.
The lesions on her hand have spread up her arm, she is sure, though she hasn't
looked.
Martin Burke stands before the ruined inner door, frightened and feeling
very out of place.
Federico Torres and Helena Daniels have equipped themselves with flashlights
and rope from their luggage, as if they're about to go caving. Daniels
hands a flashlight to Mary and to Martin.
The two stolid, muscular, well-dressed agents, Hench and Mr. Unnamed,
are gathering their own gear, and look a hell of a lot more prepared and
confident than Mary feels. They huddle, Torres and Daniels listening, and
break. Hench will enter the building; Mr. Unnamed will reconnoiter the exterior.
"You're welcome to back out, if you want," Daniels says, regarding Mary
and Martin a little sternly, as if this isn't really an option.
"I'll go," M
ary says simply.
"You don't look well," Daniels tells her, peering at her face. She reaches to
touch Mary's cheek; Mary raises her palm and stops the finger bluntly.
"I'm well enough to get my job done," Mary says.
Martin steps back from the garage door. "You're using internal monitors
for your transform reversal, aren't you?" he asks Mary.
"Yes."
Martin shakes his head. "Not good. You should fly out of here and get to
a hospital immediately."
300
"You think whatever they made here is attacking all internal monitors?"
Torres asks, more interested than dismayed. Mary does not detect real human
warmth in any of the agents.
"Let's go," Mary says. "Don't worry about me." She's taken her own internal
measure and the illness seems peripheral, irritating, not debilitating--not yet.
"Eleven visitors are in there," the sheriff tells Torres. "None of them have
come out. Some may be involved with illegal military nano. Our units found
traces in a warehouse not far from here.., a lot of contraband weapons pass
through here. I can't tell you what type, but any nano has to be from outside,
and that's your responsibility."
Torres gives the sheriff a small, not-in-the-least critical smile.
"Go ahead and think your thoughts," the sheriff says, backing away and
waving his hands in disgust. He's turned a little red, but his embarrassment
isn't enough to screw his courage to any particular sticking point. He's staying
outside.
Torres checks his satlink on a small pad and tells a control center in Utah
they are about to enter Omphalos. He steps through the lowest and largest
hole first. Daniels follows, then Mary and Martin, and the stolid agent last.
He has a little difficulty squeezing through. He has very broad shoulders.
"What a mess," Daniels says, covering her nose with a handkerchief to avoid
the sour, yeasty smell. The darkened interior is littered with deconstructed
hulks: the two limousines, Mary judges, playing her beam over the dark interior.
"They made something here," Torres says. "This is high level stuff. I've
never seen deconstruction this extensive."
"MGN," says Hench, drawing his lips together either in admiration or
isapproval, Mary can't tell which.
"Nano?" Martin asks Mary in an aside. They are the outsiders here, and he
seems to think it's best to stick with her.
Mary nods. "Military. Lots of it."
Torres bends over and sniffs an empty drum slumped, half eaten away, in
a blackened corner. "Complete paste, fully charged with nutrients and explosives,''
he says. "I'm going uplink to D.C. on this one. No common good o1'
boys are going to get this sort of stuff without the government knowing."
"It's happened before," Daniels says dryly.
"Yeah," Torres acknowledges distastefully, "but they only ran with it for a
day before they were slammed."
Mary looks at Hench. He's perfect: no reaction, just pursuing his immediate
business.
"Hm," Daniels says. "This place is depressing. Let's go in a little further."
"Frank-in-further," Torres says lightly.
Daniels groans and turns to Mary and Martin. "He does that all the time,"
she says. "It means he's alive."
/
SLANT 301
Mary is relieved that they finally seem human.
The ruined steps and door beckon, but Hench bends over some lumps in
the general hardened sheen covering the floor. "A warbeiter, Ferret class, I
think," he says.
"Co-opted," Torres says.
"Digested, actually."
They climb the steps and start down the dark hall beyond. Mary wrinkles
her nose. Something unpleasant lies ahead; she keeps stepping on small insect
bodies--wasps, bees, and ants as well, some still moving. They haven't brought
anything other than a couple of cans of Wasp-death to handle more insects.
Martin carries one of the cans, a sure sign that Torres and Daniels don't think
there's much danger, or don't think there's anything they can do about it.
Mary understands; in tight situations, you tend to ignore that which doesn't
make any sense, doesn't fit any reasonable hypotheses.
Torres consults a map on his pad. "There's supposed to be some sort of
waiting room up ahead."
Suddenly, the lights in the hallway come back on. For a moment, the glare
blinds them. Mary blinks and shades her eyes. The brightness makes the smell
seem even more offensive. Martin pushes along with his hand against one wall,
stepping gingerly through the piles of dead insects.
They can't ignore the insects now. "Where in the hell did all these come
from?" Daniels asks rhetorically.
Torres is the first into the waiting room. "My God," he says, with little
emotion; something to say when you're a professional, nothing bothers you,
but you still have a soul.
Mary enters the room, Martin behind her.
"They're all dead," Daniels says a few moments later. She uses her pad to
capture video clips. Two of the dead have been shot; the other is covered with
insect stings. In four minutes, Torres motions them to move on.
Mary looks at the backs of her hands. Small lesions have appeared on her
right hand now, and on both wrists as well. She touches her face. Bumps on
her cheeks and forehead.
"Fuck this," she says simply. Then, under her breath, "Shit. Shit."
Daniels glances at her, turns away. She doesn't understand; Mary does not
swear, has never tended to utter such obscenities in tight situations.
Martin Burke watches her closely, however.
She grits her teeth and follows Torres.
Giffey lies where he has smashed up against the wall and holds his nose against
the awful smells: fresh death, blood, fresh-baked bread, and burned metal.
The red glow from the library reaches a short distance down the gallery,
but he can see nothing beyond the curve in the wall. The sounds of clashing
warbeiters has stopped, and so has the sizzling of MGN deconstructing human
bodies.
In the darkness, Giffey touches his wounds lightly with his fingers. Torn
clothing, torn skin; a larger hole in his leg than in his arm, but neither
dangerous for now. Small pieces of shrapnel from the Ferret's attack on the
Hammer.
He lies still for a moment longer, listening. The gallery and the library are
silent. Whatever happened is over. He lowers his face and presses his damp
cheek against the coolness of the the floor.
Giffey feels a spinning giddiness that tells him his whole inside story is coming apart at its all-too-obvious seams. He wonders if the malady that
afflicted poor Ken Jenner, the effect Marcus Reilly boasted about, practically
leered about, has settled in his head as well. If it has, it is working its nasty
magic in a strange and devious way.
Jack Giffey is a poor excuse, as masks go; the man emerging from behind
the veil has lived a far more vivid and convincing life than that gallant and I stupidly courageous tomb-robber.
The other, like Giffey, has fought for Colonel Sir John Yardley, that much
they have in common; but the other, more solid character went on to retire,
marry in Hispaniola, and
father two children. The other self matured and
thanks his stars the years of adventuring are over. He has lived with the one
thought of seeing his children grow up and have children of their own. Grandchildren
seem a far more lovely thing to anticipate than any wealth or commendation
for valor.
Then comes the death of Colonel Sir John Yardley, and the return of nightmare
rimes. Hispaniola immediately splits in two, civil war breaks out...
And something something something something. But what?
Jonathan Bristow and Marcus Reilly are nearby. He can hear their terrified,
labored breathing.
"Is it over?" Jonathan asks.
"Might be," he answers, and Jack Giffey, Giff to his true friends, is back
in force, his bravado severely ruffled but intact. He has had--they have all
had, and with good reason--a bad, bad scare. That is all. They aren't out of
/
SLANT 303
Omphalos yet, and he still has work to do--finding and destroying the thinker,
Marcus's Roddy. If Roddy is not a memory-fried wreck already.
Time to get up, Jack, he tells himself. Good old Gift Time to get the work
done.
He stands. He feels along the wall. Vaguely, he makes out the shapes of
