Firedance

by Steven Barnes

  He would meet this assassin, this whore who wanted his life.

  And kill her, whatever the cost.

  12

  JULY 20

  The Maze was a fifty-square-block area in the heart of what had once been the most valuable real estate in the world, the heart of downtown Los Angeles. With the California Quake, it became an instant disaster area. As the exodus of business and residential tenants began, the social infrastructure crumbled.

  Poverty and crime were rampant. The forces of law and order were completely overwhelmed by the task of preserving order in the midst of utter chaos. Bankrupt and water-poor, the State of California could do little.

  The inner city burned.

  After years, the group called the Scavengers began rebuilding. Today, when Aubry toured the city, with Promise at his side …

  But that phrasing was a lie. The truth was that Promise toured the city, with Aubry at her side.

  Whenever there was a function requiring their participation, wasn’t it true that her presence was far more necessary than his?

  Wasn’t it?

  But the sights and sounds and smells of Mazetown were still music to his senses. A hundred different ethnicities blended together to compose this melting pot. A dozen languages and a hundred dialects filled the streets. Office buildings sported signs in six languages. Dentists, acupuncturists, and certified public shamans shared office space. A thousand savory collations from around the world awaited the adventurous palate. Ten thousand street vendors peddled their wares to shopkeepers, street workers, and construction crews.

  And everywhere they went, Promise and Aubry were offered condolences.

  “Good day, Miz Cotonou,” the men and women of Mazetown said over and over to her as she passed. Aubry hung back, watching as Promise made an inspection of Scavenger facilities.

  “Why make the personal inspection?” he asked. “You can just facephone over, or scan the data vids.”

  “Doesn’t give you a feel for what’s going on,” she replied. “We’ll be back in Ephesus in a couple of days.”

  “I just want you out of here.”

  “We’ve already shipped Leslie back. If that assassin wanted me, he would have killed me. I can’t neglect my duties.”

  Aubry sighed.

  Every face had a sympathetic and concerned smile, and every hand that touched him touched in friendship.

  Promise watched him. “You’re not telling me everything,” she said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  She gathered up a handful of mutant fruit. The mini-malls were serviced by mini-groves, mutant bonsai trees with different fruit on every branch. She hefted a banana-like fruit with an edible peel, then slipped a bunch into her basket.

  “Because I know you.”

  “I have no intention of getting dead.”

  “Which isn’t the same as not putting yourself in the position where it can happen. Don’t play word games with me.” She gripped his arm fiercely. “You say you love me. You promised to be there, for me, and for our child. Now some maniac hurls a challenge at you, and you’re throwing it all away. For what?”

  Aubry hesitated. “For Mira?”

  That stopped her, but only for a moment. “Mira wouldn’t want you to die for nothing. She loved you like a brother.”

  Promise watched his face, masking her own emotions. How do you tell a man, quite possibly the world’s greatest expert in one very specialized area, that he can no longer practice his art? She had always known that, eventually, Aubry would find a challenge, a way to vent his fear and apartness, his frustration. And he would do it in the only way he really understood—through physical combat.

  His eyes roamed the market, searching, and never finding the face he was looking for. The face of a woman he didn’t know. Or a man? She had said we.

  It could be a woman. He had known deadly women before. Jenna. His memory bubbled at him. What was that bitch’s name …

  Chan. He hadn’t thought about her for years.

  Hadn’t thought about killing her.

  Male or female, then. The assassin could be anyone. There—the butcher. The baker. The candlestick maker. Who in the world could know? How could they know?

  After three hours, Aubry turned to Promise and said, “I have to go for a walk.” She laid her fingertips lightly on his shoulders, and strove to memorize his face. Would he be dead and broken the next time she saw him? Or alive, with the smell of blood on his teeth? Could the civilized Aubry, so carefully nurtured, revert to the beast so quickly? Did it take only …

  Only the exploding head of a woman they both loved, only the sight of that ghastly, splintered skull, and the smell of blood and viscera on the morning wind.

  “Yes.” She slid her fingertips up to his cheeks. If his lethal skills had been hers, she would have gone. If she were Jenna, she would go. And suddenly, for just a brief instant, she looked through his eyes and saw what he saw, a shadow world of reds and blacks with just a hint of subtlety beginning to creep into it. It was a dark and dangerous place. It was not a place that she wanted to spend more time in. It was Aubry’s world.

  And was, perhaps, a realer world than hers.

  “Go for your walk,” she whispered. “I’ll be waiting for you.” She kissed him, fiercely, crushing her lips against his, her mouth slightly open to receive the warmth and wetness of his fire. Then she spun, and was gone.

  Aubry watched Promise disappear into the crowd, and sighed hotly. She understood. She might not have been able to tell him, but she understood. Someone had killed Mira, and harmed their child. Slaughtered three police officers. Threatened their lives, and the security they had so carefully established over hard years of labor.

  Someone had challenged him on his home turf. Someone strong, ruthless, lethal.

  Someone who was going to die.

  13

  Promise’s eyes blurred as she moved through the marketplace, striving to immerse herself in the ten thousand small things that constituted her responsibilities in Mazetown. Where now? There were so many things to be done. She flagged a taxi drone and hopped in.

  The Griffith Observatory had perched in its present position, overlooking the Los Angeles basin, for almost a century. Although it had performed no actual research for years, it was still a popular tourist attraction.

  Now its coppered concrete dome was enclosed in scaffolding, and surrounded by cranes, bulldozers, hoists, and trucks. Air compressors hummed and hissed. Oxypropane torches seared metal and eye, and filled the air with acrid smoke.

  The Scavengers were at work.

  The observatory was being deconstructed, sold off by a fund-hungry municipal government. The University of Osaka’s science-fiction club had purchased it, and it would be shipped overseas in just under two months.

  Promise exited the cab and slipped under the restraint lines. The screech of injured metal assaulted her ears, and her nose wrinkled at the stench of sizzling mica.

  The crew chief, a squatly muscular man with a carrot-colored crew cut, waved and climbed down from the roof. He pumped her hand heartily. “Miz Cotonou! Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “How are things progressing, Kregger?”

  Kregger flipped open a pocket projector. A hologram of the complete structure appeared in midair. He cross-referenced with the data, and an animated schematic disassembled the structure piece by piece. In the projection, the work proceeded with perfect fluidity. Reality, of course, was much more brutal.

  “A lot of this concrete should be recast,” he mused.

  “Can’t we negotiate that?”

  “It’ll bring the price down. These guys want the real observatory. Apparently, they shot a shitload of old sci-fi flatfilms around here. What does Osaka U. care if the structure is unsound? They’ve got the biggest movie souvenir in the world!”

  “We need a connection to the board of construction and housing in Osaka? Put in a leak that an unsafe situation exists. If the order comes dow
n from over their heads, then they’ll have to change, and it shouldn’t affect our price.”

  Kregger breathed a sigh of relief. “I like that idea. I don’t want our name attached to a minor disaster.” He looked back over his shoulder at the observatory. Its coppered dome shone brightly, “You know, I’m kind of used to this old girl. I’m not sure what I think about it going down.”

  “If the Brits can sell Windsor, I guess we can do without Griffith Observatory. Too many space-based telescopes,” she said sympathetically. “Ground-based just aren’t as important. Build a receiving station with display facilities and you get images from a dozen different ’scopes for the price of one.” She shrugged. “Time marches on.”

  “So shall we all.”

  A crowd of spectators bowed the barricade lines. Beyond the cordon, wistful Angelenos watched as another link to the past was stripped down, packed, and trundled away. America had made its peace with the Japanese … the world was far too small for any other choice. By the end of the twentieth century, automated translation nodes linked Tokyo and Los Angeles. America wanted Japanese technology, but Japan wanted America’s movies and television and music.

  Japan had conquered America, and America had absorbed her. Perhaps the era of nations, and national enmities, had passed.

  Time moves on.

  She glimpsed a striking figure: female, quite tall, very dark-skinned, and beautiful in a severe way. When Promise caught her eye, there was a moment of blistering contact, heat so intense that she thought her legs would buckle. Then the woman turned—she moved beautifully, Promise noticed—and was gone.

  She was left with the impression of broad shoulders and a narrow waist, a sinewy form that promised power as well as an almost overwhelming sexuality. For a brief instant, Promise felt something unusual—inadequacy.

  She walked a step or two forward. Had this Amazonian been watching her? There was something about the woman that reminded her of … what?

  Ephesus?

  But by the time Promise had reached the edge of the crowd the woman was gone, leaving only a disturbing thrill along Promise’s spine, and a whisper of trouble in her ear.

  14

  The corridors and video walls of Tyson All-Faiths were quiet. Seventy-two hours before, police cordons had sealed off the ground floor, but public curiosity had died down. Now it was yesterday’s news. No one attempted to stop Aubry’s entrance, or even question him.

  He walked slowly through the hall, uncertain of what he was looking for. The mass of the shockrod along his side wasn’t as comforting as he had hoped.

  Was he wrong? Was this to be a straight assassination, one that the killers simply wished to complete in some ritualistic fashion?

  There were no notes, no messages, but suddenly he heard a hop-o’-my-thumb whisper in his ear, in some sort of tight-beamed message: “Come to the attic.”

  This voice was guttural, and male.

  He took the stairs carefully, senses open and alert. Somewhere, there was something that would kill him, or try to.

  The wind sighed through the cracks in the building. Distant street noise filtered through, distorted by the space and building materials into a thin, discomforting chuckle.

  Aubry tested the door at the top of the stairs. It was a two-inch-thick slab of plastic with a reinforced metal lock. He placed the flat of his hand against it, and pushed.

  The assassin was a gigantic mass in the church’s darkness, muscles knotted to an almost simian density. His dark, bare skin was thickly crisscrossed with keloid scars. He crouched in shadow like some great nocturnal predator.

  Lines of white ink were tattooed like webbing across his face. The lines spread across chest and back, and down to the naked groin. Aubry squinted, barely able to make out his enemy’s features. There was something disturbingly familiar about them.

  The slow, deep sound of the man’s breathing filled the attic loft. “Shi,” it grunted.

  Shi? Half a word?

  Aubry slipped the shockrod from under his arm, and aimed it. It hummed in his hands, ready to spit sparks. “Why?”

  There was no answer, just that deep breathing. The creature shuffled toward him, spiderlike, apelike, something not wholly human.

  Use the rod, he told himself.

  And he couldn’t, God help him. Here was a creature that seemed to have descended from one of his own nightmares, and he couldn’t bring himself to simply burn a hole in it. Why? Because that’s not the way the game is supposed to be played. Very simple, really.

  All right, then.

  Aubry disabled the rod, and placed it on the floor. He bent his knees, finding low balance.

  The combat computer in his mind ran a dozen evaluations in a fraction of a second. Wrestler. Strongly grounded. Right-handed. More strength than intelligence, but incredibly strong. Tremendous endurance. Don’t let the hands grasp.

  They circled each other, shuffling on the balls of their feet, testing each other’s awareness and reflex. Not touching, but connected by spider threads of intention. A war dance. For a full minute, the balletic mirror play continued, and then …

  The assassin leapt.

  Aubry snaked to the left, evading a tree trunk of an arm. His right fist hammered home, dead into the center of the solar plexus.

  Tensed only at the moment of impact, Aubry’s strike was less a sledge than a whiplash, but it landed with thunderous impact. It was like striking a skimmer’s shock skirt.

  Aubry spun away without trying to follow up, and just as well. The assassin’s hands were after him with invisible speed. Thick fingers raked, ripping Aubry’s shirt, gouging his shoulders even as he evaded.

  The man was quick—but not quite as fast as Aubry. Stronger, perhaps. As coordinated? He had no interest in finding out. This creature knew him, had studied him at its leisure. He could only assume that it knew his physical potential, and still chose to face him in hand-to-hand combat. It only made sense to grant the assassin superior physical strength.

  But there were things that the assassin couldn’t know. He couldn’t know of Aubry’s sessions with Leslie, where Leslie focused his analytical skills on Aubry’s movements, ergonomically “cleaning” them, making them even more efficient.

  He couldn’t know of the time with Jenna.

  Aubry had never been a classical martial artist—but Jenna was, with high ranking in aikido, pa qua, and a master’s command of durga.

  Aubry had always relied upon native speed and strength, and an uncanny capacity to replicate virtually any movement after seeing it once. Since marriage to Promise he had spent hundreds of hours with Jenna and Leslie—the three most unusual training partners who ever lived. They exchanged ideas, imitated and learned from each other … and improved.

  Promise’s coordination and fitness could have made her great, but she possessed no emotional inclination for combat. And it is a logical truth, denied only by the ignorant, that a great fighter, at least during his formative years, must love to fight, must enjoy seeing fear and pain blossom on his opponent’s face. This Promise could not do. She could watch, however, and marvel.

  Now Aubry would find out if that grueling effort had been in vain.

  The assassin struck a pose, one shoulder higher than the other. He lurched forward and then retreated, rolling his shoulders like an ape. Back and forward, trembling on the edge of attack, and then haring off, almost as if performing some kind of ritual dance.

  Was someone watching? A camera? Of course. We will kill everything that you love.

  The moment of thought almost cost Aubry his life. The assassin was at him as if propelled from a blowgun.

  In an instant, the assassin had one of Aubry’s wrists. To pull back was to invite disaster; instead, Aubry pivoted, dropping his hips and backing into his attacker with perfect timing, in the durga version of the aikido throw known as koshi nage. The assassin tumbled over his head, and Aubry’s steel-shod toe slammed into his solar plexus again. This time there was focus, that
quality of mental and emotional control that brings a touch of magic into the physical realm.

  The assassin was just a hair slow in pivoting. Before he could turn, Aubry was on him.

  Aubry’s arm clamped around his neck in a deadly naked strangle, crushing against the massive neck muscles, the edge of his forearm grating against cartilage.

  The assassin threw himself backward, trying to crush Aubry against the ground. In midair, Aubry’s legs twined around his enemy’s midsection, and his heel crashed into the vulnerable solar plexus a third time. As they thundered to the ground Aubry eeled away, scrambling and making his breakfall at the same time. The assassin, disoriented by the solar plexus strike, fell poorly, grazing his head.

  As the assassin rose again, his grogginess was obvious. Before the man could turn toward him, Aubry struck with his heel. His side kick, structure groomed by Leslie, timing perfected by Jenna, smashed into the muscle shielding the left kidney. It was a hammer blow, retracting faster than it was launched, and it lanced an explosive shock wave into the delicate nerves.

  Ignore the muscles, Jenna had taught him. Strike into the nerves. Strike into the blood vessels. Strike into the breathing cavities. Strike where no one can armor. Time and focus your blows to penetrate the sheath of muscle. For your size, you have the finest combination of speed and agility I have ever even imagined. But you are crude, Aubry. We will train your mind, and your spirit. Awaken your intellect. Fight with both body and your heart, and think with the brain the Goddess gave you. Otherwise you are only an animal.

  The assassin roared with pain, and Aubry leapt on him again. This time both palms slammed against the ears. The assassin’s tympanic membranes ruptured explosively.

  The assassin wrenched his head down, and tore his face away from Aubry’s questing fingers. He shook himself like a huge dog. Aubry’s grip loosened, and he fought against surprise, alarm, and momentary confusion. There was the sensation of being caught in a whirlpool, and suddenly the assassin was behind him, forearm crushing Aubry’s larynx. Aubry curled into a ball, left hand scrabbling back desperately. He found a handful of matted hair, dropped his butt to the ground, and heaved the assassin over his shoulder. At the peak of the arc he twisted savagely.