A shadow moved away from the periphery and toward the front gate.
The guards in the outer towers were dead. Now it was time. Moving toward the front gate was a curious figure, blocky and yet somehow lithe. He was an essential contradiction, simultaneously almost comical and immensely dignified.
He leveled his arm at the gate.
45
3:07 a.m.
The men inside didn’t have time to think, no time to lower their weapons, no time to do anything but die.
The front doors exploded inward, and before the flame had ceased spewing, or the roar of the metal and wood and plastic peeling away under the assault of the rocket had died to echoes, the armored figure walked through.
The first three men died almost instantly, taking eight to twelve rounds each from some kind of fast-loading machine pistol that spewed twelve hundred rounds a minute, delicately tapped to give a microburst per man.
The alarm went up.
On the second floor, a mass of guards were heading down to the ground level. Monitors showed some kind of armored enemy, and a primitive computer hookup gave them the information that it was a Mitsubishi armor suit, pointed out possible weaknesses, and warned them that it had been reinforced.
The guards were ready to repel tanks and armored vehicles. They had enough weaponry. What they needed was the time to get it into use.
On the ground floor, men were dying. They had poured over three hundred rounds into the advancing monstrosity, and some of the rounds were explosive, and some of them armor-piercing, and nothing seemed to slow it.
It rounded a corner, and then paused, as if checking some kind of internal sensor, attempting to determine its direction and intent.
It turned the corner.
“What is it?” Danessh screamed.
“We are being invaded, Captain. I don’t know how many.”
“What do they want?”
“They want to kill us all!”
The first of the rocket men had arrived on the site, and they locked on to their target quickly.
Inside the suit, Go read his infrared readouts and knew almost instantly that lock-on had been achieved. He spun, and took out the first rocket man before he had time to depress the trigger, blowing him back into the wall in bleeding bits, two hundred rounds slamming through the protective barrier, ripping his body into shreds.
The second rocket man managed to get his off.
The rocket slammed into the back of the armored suit, blowing it off its feet, slamming it back into the wall with a roar like a dying titan.
Go gasped. He had never felt an impact like that, despite the cushioning in the suit. He switched to manual, unable to be certain that the suit’s servos would be worth a damn after such an impact, firing as he did. A stream of rounds tore into the second rocket man, by which time some of the suit systems were back up, and he found a third man, who was behind a wall, trembling as he tried to bring his unit into play.
He was dead an instant later.
There was nothing but mopping up to do now, as the man in the suit fought to his knees and made his way into the maximum-security block.
Three more guards died, and the general alarm had been out for four minutes. It would take another ten before any reinforcements could arrive. He knew the direction from which they would have to come. There would be confusion, and uncertainty: the prison’s power had already been dampened, a communications buffer thrown over the entire installation.
Go was limping. Bone and muscle had been torn. The medical units inside the suit struggled to repair the damage, but there simply wasn’t enough power to keep the suit moving and the medical units working simultaneously.
He reached maximum security.
He grasped the bars of the door. There was no time to search for keys. Distantly, he heard screams and moans. Ignore them. He heard a hiss of pain emerge from his own mouth.
Ignore it.
He ripped the door from its hinges, aware that his hydraulics were rupturing with the strain.
Inside the cell, the limp figure of a man lay on a cold floor. He looked near death. The armored figure moved in carefully, with great tenderness, and scooped Aubry Knight into his arms.
That these animals had done this to a brave man.
He spun, and blew another guard back out of the door.
Then, carrying the wounded, unconscious man gently in his arms, he stalked toward the front door, killing everything in his way.
Go’s biological monitors were edging into the red. He had to stop and allow himself to repair. He knew that he should. The man with him was an enemy, and yet …
Bleeding badly, Go carried Aubry Knight out into the desert.
46
The first two reinforcements arrived at the prison five minutes later.
The wind blew sand and dust through the corridors, and set up a low, sighing moaning sound that echoed and filled the entire building with a kind of slow moan.
“What happened here?” the first man asked. He attached scans to the external monitors, sent in auxiliary power, and got the monitors running. They scanned the halls. They heard sobbing, and screaming.
“A force moved in. Maybe a dozen men, a light assault tank—”
They were getting the image now. They saw a single armored figure wading through a sea of blood, flame washing from that damned gun. They saw their men die. And then they saw no more, the cameras themselves canceled out by some sort of disruption field.
The dead sprawled twisted and broken, everywhere.
“What did he want?”
“Guess.”
“The assassin?”
“Yes. And that battle suit was NipTech. That means PanAfrica.”
“Can we prove that?”
The first man laughed bitterly. “Of course not. But we know. We know. Damn those bastards.”
“What do they want him for, that they would do this?”
“I don’t know,” he said, putting away his weapon. “But the poor bastard was better off here, with us.”
47
Aubry came slowly to consciousness. He lay in the sand, and it blew over him, a thin curtain of dust dancing across the horizon like a line of ethereal imps. It moaned, low.
He struggled to an upright position. Where? His limbs didn’t want to work. They had been severely traumatized, and there seemed no end to the small aches and pains that there remained for him to discover.
It was early morning. He could tell by the slight sweaty moistness in the sand beneath his cheek, and the cool of the air. Soon it would be blazing hot.
He might have lain there, unmoving, except that from the corner of his eye he saw the aircar. It lay in the sand at an angle, as if it had crashed.
What? He had the vaguest of memories. The sounds of struggle. The sound of screams, and explosions. He had been in darkness, but even in the cell, his cheek frozen to the floor, a single tear gelid on his torn cheek, there had been sound. And screams. And then the blissful release of darkness.
He turned onto his side, struggling as if heaving off boulders. And saw the kneeling, armored figure. The armored man had knelt there, waiting for Aubry to awaken for… how long?
They stared at each other, and for a long time Aubry thought that the man wouldn’t, or couldn’t, speak.
Then he heard the words. They were foreign, accented, and labored. As if it took an unbelievable effort to speak them at all.
“Greetings, my brother,” Go said.
“Who…?”
“Do not speak. I …do not have much time.” A sound very like a laugh came from the armor.
“I was to rescue you. And then I was to kill you.”
“Kill … me?” Aubry was dazed.
“Yes. But neither of us is prepared for that. I am afraid that I am dying. You are badly hurt. But the Ibandi will help you.”
“Ibandi?”
“Wait. You will learn. I should have given you to the others, but … you deserve a chance to he
al.”
Go began to fiddle with the faceplate.
“You are … a man. When you have healed, seek out the others. Finish what has begun. Promise me.”
“Promise you what?”
There was another time of silence, and the man finished fumbling with the face mask.
It hung on a hinge, obscuring the face. Aubry looked at the rest of him. The shoulders must have been unusually broad: the armor was built for a giant.
And then he saw the blood, seeping out of a gaping hole in the side of the armor, and heard the wheezing. It was true: the man was dying.
“Promise me … there is struggle. You must find the others.”
“What do I have to do with this?”
The man laughed. “You will see,” he said. The mask fell free, and Aubry found himself looking into his own face.
Once again, as in Tyson’s All-Faiths, the face was not exactly Aubry—it had eaten different foods, grown beneath a different sky, perhaps. There were keloid scars across it, and a front tooth was missing. But it was Aubry’s face, the unaltered Aubry, before the plastic surgery.
“What is this?”
“We have all asked that question,” Go mused. “And only one of us can answer it. Oh, it hurts …” He pulled himself back from some far place, and faced Aubry. “Take this.” He fumbled, managed to pull a slender cylinder of metal and plastic from his belt. It was slicked with blood. “A tracer. When you are ready, trigger it. You will find the others. Listen. I called to the Ibandi, and they will come to you. Trust them. They are your people.”
“My …” Aubry looked at the man, and didn’t understand.
“Look at your skin. You speak the white man’s language, and you think his thoughts, except that your body doesn’t belong to his family. Do you not feel that there is something more?”
Aubry faced him and said, “I was born in the city of Los Angeles. It was all I knew. My father died when I was eight. I know the streets. That’s all.”
God, it hurt even to talk, but it felt like the words were being dragged out of him one at a time, with fishhooks.
“Aubry Knight,” Go said. “With no past, and no future. With no one to love you, or help you find yourself. Wallowing in corruption, and plagued by violence and anger. How did you survive?”
Aubry felt a terrible weight hanging over his head, almost but not quite something that he hadn’t seen there before. “I don’t know …”
“You will learn.”
And Aubry felt a sudden jolt of unreasoning fear. “What do you want from me?”
“You,” the man said. And then his head sagged.
Aubry dragged himself over to the armored man and touched him. There was no movement. The sand blew across the desert, a low call that powdered the kinky hair. But there were no more words.
“Who am I?” Aubry whispered in a drugged voice. But there was no answer, and could be none, ever again, from those lips.
The sand danced across the desert like a curtain in the wind, and the sun touched the edge of the horizon. The light changed with fearsome speed, and became a shadow play of oranges and deep purples.
Aubry tried to drag himself to the crashed vehicle. It was easy to find it, he thought. Just follow the trail of blood. So much blood.
And it was junk, wrecked. And the radio. Oh, yes, he could use the radio. And call what down upon himself?
He was terribly far from home, and surrounded by enemies. There were, he reminded himself, things worse than death.
So suppose he just settled back, him and the other Aubry, and they looked at each other, one whose eyes were sightless, and another whose sight grew duller by the moment.
There came a shadowy figure. It came from out of the wind, and he thought, for a moment, that he knew it. Was it himself, again? He essayed a laugh, but it came from somewhere too deep in his chest, and blood bubbled with it.
There were more than one figure, more than one man. They walked with staffs, and they walked with a curious dignity, as if these sands, this patch of ground, were theirs, and no one else’s, and their bodies knew it in a manner that went beyond and beneath all logic or calculation.
There were six of them, and Aubry watched them approach, and as they did, the leader bent down to him.
For a long time the examination continued. Or it seemed like a long time. The truth was that there was no way that Aubry could be certain how long it actually was, because by that time he had slipped off the ends of the earth, into a cold, infinite darkness.
4TH SONG
DEATHDANCE
Those who fear death cannot win.
Those who love both life
and death cannot be defeated.
—Ibandi proverb
1
SEPTEMBER 16. DAGLIA, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC.
Jenna pulled her coat up around her face, so that the wind—a hot wind, blowing off the desert—didn’t sear her face. There was a moment of desperation, in which she felt lost and fragile. Then she put it away. There was no time for that. There was no place for feelings like that. She had to control herself, to find the strength to go on, although she wasn’t certain which way to turn.
Separation from both Aubry and Bloodeagle left her in limbo. Were they alive? Her heart sank at the thought of Aubry’s death.
Her side ached. With every step, she felt her makeshift bandages pull.
Daglia’s streets were crowded with vendors, people shuttling this way and that, on their way to a thousand marketplaces. It was a very alive city, and she felt a stab of guilt. How much of that life was due to trade with PanAfrica, due to the man that they had killed? She had to assume that by now Swarna was dead, and that the alarms ringing around Daglia were the result of that death. She had heard no official announcement, but …
A jeep loaded with soldiers rumbled down the street. Oh, Goddess—did they have a description…?
A very dark-skinned man in a full-length leather cloak smiled at her. Keloid scars crisscrossed his face. Jenna instantly assumed a facade and took a hipshot position, a display of her “wares.”
Even bundled up as she was, there was nothing visible to give any man a cause for complaint. Her legs, concealed by her garments, nonetheless met at flips that tantalizingly swelled the enfolding material. Her waist was muscularly narrow. Her eyes glittered with mischief, with challenge. She knew how to focus her ki through her eyes, and warrior ki, a blend of sexuality and physical mastery, could be focused by a mistress of durga to emphasize the former.
A twentieth-century master of yogic sciences, Swami Satyanananda Sawaswati, defined it precisely: “When Kundalini has just awakened and you are not able to handle it,” he said, “it is called Kali. When you can handle it and are able to use it for beneficial purposes and you become powerful on account of it, it is called durga.”
The would-be customer was actually rocked back on his heels as if struck in the face with the force of her sensuality. He recovered swiftly and began chattering at her, holding up a handful of fingers, bargaining. Jenna used sign language to argue back at him, laughing. The soldiers passed, barely giving them a second glance.
As soon as the jeep disappeared around the corner, Jenna laughed, waved the scarred man off, and hurried away. He called after her, probably raising his offer, his voice musical with disappointment.
She turned down a side street, trying to think. She had no money, and no friends. She didn’t speak the tongue, and had no way of communicating beyond the simplest sign language. She was hunted. Goddess.
Another squad of soldiers passed along a perpendicular street, and she shrank against the wall, breath rasping in her throat. A gray tide of hopelessness rose within her.
There was a sharp wrench on her elbow, and she turned. The scarred man held her, painfully tight, and his eyes were bright with lust. He motioned toward a nearby alley with sharp, urgent flicks of his head.
She tried to tug her arm away, and he only tightened his grip and said something ugly. O
ne hand brushed his coat back, exposing the hilt of a knife.
Something inside her both tautened and relaxed in the same moment.
This was his game? All right then, he had called it. She allowed herself to be dragged back into the alley, feigning fear. He dumped her against the wall, behind a stack of trash, and reached for his belt, grinning now with a mouthful of huge bright teeth. He was talking quickly, excitedly.
He was still talking excitedly when she kicked him dead in the balls.
There was a shocked expression in his face, and something behind the shock—anger. And suddenly she knew that she had made a mistake. Her foot struck something solid—a groin protector? Her mind blanked for a moment. A soldier. Plainclothes? Some kind of security? Oh—
His eyes glittered, and he whipped the knife out of its sheath. Before he could clear it, she had already dropped to her hands and knees, and mule-kicked up into the side of his left knee.
It is true that it takes an average of twenty-seven pounds of pressure per square inch to rip off the patella. It is also true that an adult human being with decent reflexes can bend with a blow so as to minimize that damage. He was clumsy, but not stupid. And she remembered the strength of his grip.
So when he rolled with it, she followed in, staying down like a crab. She struck at the knees once, twice, again and again—never letting him catch his breath, keeping him on the recoil until he almost forgot that he had a knife in his hand, so that he was reeling in a nightmare of defense, until he stumbled and fell. He slashed at her. Both of them were on their knees now. Jenna blocked with her forearm—a jarring sensation—and grasped his wrist, twisting massively and torquing so that his body arced as he tried to flip. But when you are already on your knees, there is no room to somersault out of such a wristlock. He went forehead-first into the pavement, smashing his nose and most of his upper teeth. Still, Jenna didn’t release the arm. She wrenched the knife from his hand, flipped it smoothly to get the correct grip, and struck him in the temple with its pommel. Hard.
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