Streetlethal

by Steven Barnes

  Promise wore her nudity like armor, knowing that no one who saw her, male or female, could sink their mind past the perfect muscles in her legs and stomach, the fluid swivel of her hips.

  She danced as she walked, every step a touch more lyrical than the last, until she was a swirl of movement, seemingly stoned out of her mind, slowly weaving through the sprouting forest of groping hands and beckoning voices.

  Then she stopped, vibrating in one place, and the dance truly began, totally arhythmic, or perhaps following a tune that she alone could hear. The revelry stopped. Lovers parted in midstroke as every eye in the room was drawn to Promise. Slowly, she let the light play through her body in time with the movements. She strobed, she isolated patches of color and intensity. She moved her legs to one beat and her arms to another, her hips to a third in an impossible counterpoint that defied logic. She worked up a sweat, churning until her scent penetrated even the haze of blue smoke hanging in the air.

  Slowly, the clapping began. Automatic, compulsive, men and women alike fascinated by this glowing, writhing wraith who seemed to balance on some uneasy edge between humanity and illusion. The clapping grew until it rocked the room, was complemented by simultaneous exhalations and footstamping.

  Promise was gone, lost in a world of her own where no fear or plotting existed. No Casa Ortega, no Aubry Knight, no time or space. Lost in feeling, just raw feeling, and the glory of riding the rhythm in her mind.

  Then she saw him, moving through the crowd like a king brushing aside his subjects. He was tall and beautiful, his olive body a Renaissance sculpture come to life. His eyes radiated heat, swirled with golden flecks among the brown. His full, sensuous lips were moist, his nostrils flared.

  His hair was long and straight, his face thin but not angular. Every movement spoke of perfect control, and Promise was startled to notice how naturally her body responded to him, how quickly her dance became something for him and him alone.

  Luis.

  He did not clap, but his hands clenched rhythmically as he watched her. She knew from his breathing, from the fixation of his eyes and the size of his erection that he was fascinated.

  A woman had followed him over to the crowd, and in her eyes there was loathing. Her skin was tawny gold, except for her breasts and stomach, which were flushed red. She was naked except for a silver necklace which spelled out "Nadine." Even in the midst of her dance, Promise took mental note, recognizing one of the most perfect meldings of face and form she had ever seen. Luis's woman.

  A chant started, a sound somewhere between a forceful exhalation and a hushed yes carried on every tongue, eyes still transfixed by her, even though nearly blinded by the light. The left side of her body turned nearly transparent, her bones seeming to show through the glare. Mouths were hanging open with naked lust.

  She felt a grip on her arm, and with startling swiftness, she stopped. Just stopped, her body bent into an arc, as if she were a doe suddenly afraid and ready to flee.

  Luis took a step closer to her, and drew her the rest of the way. She trembled in his hands, melted for an instant, coming near enough to brush his lips with hers—then turned, wrenching herself away, and ran up the steps out of the Grotto.

  The revelers cheered shatteringly as Luis pursued her.

  He followed her out into the hall, and she was there, smiling.

  He stared at her body, overwhelmed by an urge to touch and knead, to make her scream for mercy like a thousand women before her.

  Her face was turned half away from him, and she leaned against the wall, watching. He saw her light reflecting on the wall and took a step toward her, another step, reached out. She moved away with a dancer's grace, slipped away from his hand as if he had tried to grasp a handful of mercury, and disappeared into his study.

  He followed her into the darkness, into the quiet, groping for the lights. A soft, cool hand touched his. "We don't need that," she said, her voice a current of warmth that slid down his spine, going straight for the groin.

  "Who are you?" he asked. Her light twinkling, wavering with soft color, pierced the darkness and washed over him. He followed her farther into the room, reaching for her hand. He caught it and lost it, caught and lost, all the while her smile and laugh leading him on and on. "Who are you?" he asked again, feeling the tension building up and up, becoming something that tore at his head, made his tongue thick and his feet blocks of lead.

  The light came up in the room, the single block of plastic hanging from the nine-foot ceiling glowed white. Luis looked up at it, confused. There was a strange smell in the air, something musty and sour that he didn't recognize. A voice behind him said quietly: "She's Death, you crawling shit."

  He turned, eyes wide and puzzled by the huge, dark figure by the door. He heard the slight, scuffling footsteps of the woman circling behind him to join the man.

  Luis licked his lips, confused for a moment. "What—7" The shape moved out of the shadow into the light, and the intoxication sloughed off Luis Ortega like an ill-fitting cloak. In his eyes was a disorienting mixture of fear and awe and outrage. "You?" The anger began to boil up. "How... ? How in the hell did you get in here?"

  "Never mind, Luis." Aubry stepped towards him, and with that step he seemed like a barely checked avalanche, a terrible force of nature held on the slightest of tethers.

  "You..." He moved away from Aubry, toward the raised dais in the center of the room, and he began to search desperately for a way out. "You know you can't get out of here alive."

  "Doesn't matter," Aubry said calmly, slowly closing the distance between them. "It doesn't matter at all. You've already killed me. There's nothing left to my life, and you know it. The only thing that matters is taking you with me."

  Aubry stepped up on the platform, and the two men stared at each other. Promise held her breath, seeing the anger in Aubry's stance, waiting for the spasms that had racked him before. She wiped at her nose. That smell? Where was it?

  Luis tried to cover his nakedness, paralyzed in the most dreadfully vulnerable moment of his life. "Wait... we can deal."

  Aubry nodded. "Yes. Yes, we can. The deal is this: You always thought that you could take me. I know it. So come on, Luis, take your shot. That's your deal, and it's the only one you get." He clenched his teeth, and his dark eyes opened wide, and fixed unblinkingly on Luis. "Come on, big man." Luis looked frantically around the room, saw Promise, saw the cold expression on her face as she weighed him and found him wanting, discarding him along with the other garbage she had known. And somehow that disdain did what Aubry's challenge could not, and made his mind calm, his muscles taut.

  He faced Aubry on the dais. Promise moved to the control chair and looked through the collection of cartridges until she found one that interested her. It was labeled "Aubry Knight: Beach." She slipped it into the projector.

  All around them swirled color as Aubry Knight faced Walker on the beach. Promise watched, and watched Aubry watch. Knight was a little younger then, a little slimmer, but it was the same deadly man, the same unearthly quick movement, and the same brutal techniques that spiraled to the same inevitable conclusion.

  Walker's pain superimposed itself on Luis's face.

  "You taped it?" Aubry's voice was staggered under a load of hatred and disbelief. "You set me up and taped it?" There were two Aubrys there—one moving swiftly, only a synchronized camera keeping him in range and in focus; the other a man who looked about him in amazement, an eye of calm in the center of a cyclone.

  "Listen—" Luis said, then kicked, as hard and as fast as he could, at Aubry's groin. Aubry didn't seem to move, but somehow the kick missed its target, hit the inside of his thigh with a crack that resounded in the room. The big dark man didn't flinch. Aghast, Luis followed with a punch. Aubry caught the fist with his right elbow. Promise flinched away from the sound of splintering bone.

  Luis sagged to his knees on the dais, looking up at his executioner with eyes glazed with pain and shock. Aubry's fingers spread as he st
epped foreward, twitching with the hunger of a junkie for his grubs. "And now—"

  Promise looked away, squinted her eyes shut.

  After a while, the screams died away, the cracking thumps stopped, and she heard Aubry walk away from the dais. She looked up, saw the shapeless dead thing that had once been Luis Ortega, and shuddered. In the back of her mind, she registered a tinny whirring sound, and the sour smell dissipated.

  Aubry turned and looked back at the huddled shape, and right in front of her eyes, something went out of him. The strength and power just evaporated, replaced by a fear and a gnawing weakness. He collapsed on the floor.

  She rushed to him. "Aubry! My God are you—" She turned her head as another spasm ripped through him, but she held onto his shoulders until it passed.

  "All right," she said slowly, gulping air. "How do we—"

  The door exploded open. "Don't move!" a man screamed, his voice almost hysterically high. The sounds of partying beyond the door were still audible, but dying slowly. Promise froze. Behind her, the holo projector clicked off.

  Aubry got unsteadily to his feet. Two guards had guns on him; a third went to check the body on the dais. Tomaso walked past Promise, stopped five meters away from Aubry. "Aubry Knight," he said venomously.

  "Hello, Tomaso." Aubry's eyes darted side to side, saw nothing that would be any use or help, and became resigned.

  "He's dead, sir."

  "Are you sure?" Tomaso's gun never wavered from Aubry's head.

  There was a choking sound from the guard. "Neck, spine, arm—God only knows what else. I'm sorry, sir."

  Tomaso faced his brother's killer, a nervous tic pulling at die corner of his mouth. Aubry filled the silence. "What are you waiting for?"

  Tomaso jerked his head at Promise. "Bring her over," he said. One of the guards grabbed her by the arm, dragging her. He didn't notice that her breathing had become fast and shallow, that as he released her she sucked in a huge lungful and held it down, that when she exhaled she pulled down another, even deeper, and followed it with sharp, short hiccuping inhalations.

  "Marty," Tomaso said to the guard behind him. "Get the guests out of here."

  There was no time for any of them, including Aubry, to shield his eyes. The glow started as a slow wash of color and became pure white, then grew in intensity like the burst of a flare-grenade. In three quarters of a second Promise's plastiskin went from dormant to full-output. Every eye turned away as she broke through the pain barrier and pumped more and more mental effort into the light burst. Then she fainted.

  But in the instant that the light filled the room, Aubry Knight moved. His body tensed like a coiling spring, and he leaped into the air with a savage scream of triumph, his foot lashing out and up and through the light fixture above their heads. The sound of die shattering glass and plastic seemed to snap Tomaso out of his momentary paralysis. "Kill him!"

  The words were unnecessary, the guns of the three bodyguards already swinging up, firing at Aubry's last position. In the darkness they could not see him, but they heard a thump and a scream of pain. There was a rolling, scuffling sound, then more shots, and suddenly there were a hundred screams in the air, panic and confusion, and Tomaso was brushed aside by something that felt like a tumbling tree trunk.

  There was the sound of shattering glass from the hallway and more screams and shots, and still no lights at all. Damn! Tomaso swore silently, the bastard must have crippled the lights on the way in!

  "Lights!" he screamed. He was buffeted by guests streaming for the door. He fired his pistol into the ceiling. "Wait, dammit! Get control of yourselves, or—"

  It was no use, no damned use at all. An oval of light floated down the hall towards him, and he grabbed the light band off of the guard's wrist, flashing it back into the rec room. There were two men getting up from the floor, neither of them Aubry. "Damn!" he snarled. "Get through to the perimeter guards. Don't let anyone out!" He saw blood spots on the floor, trailing towards the doorway. He followed their trail to the bottom of the stairs, then cursed again. "The roof! Luis's aircar. Hurry!" There were guards at the door, trying to organize an orderly exit, and more of them clustering around Tomaso, awaiting instructions. He gestured to six of them and started up to the roof. It brought fierce satisfaction to his heart to see the blood stains wetting the rug. "—got one of you, at least."

  He remembered the brief image of Aubry's kick, of the enormous body virtually levitating, for Christ's sake, just straight up like a freaking bird! And hoped fervently that it was the nullboxer who had been hit. Preferably somewhere vital.

  They hadn't gotten more than halfway up the stairs when he heard the howl from the roof and knew that they were too late. "Mark!" he screamed. "Fernando! Get to the garage. There's a class-one scooter there-^-get after them. Get on to the police department; tell them what happened and have them get their butts in gear!"

  He charged up the rest of the way, grateful beyond words to find the lights at the top level functioning, the blood droplets more clearly visible.

  He followed them to the third story, the roof. The wind whipped at his hair as he strode angrily over to the circular launch pad, its surface still warm from the backwash of the takeoff. On the horizon, skimming away to the south, was the two-seater aircar, brother Luis's pride and joy, carrying his killers to safety.

  "The hell it is," Tomaso snarled. He ran back down the stairs to the communications complex. He could trace them, by damn, and would. Both of them. Aubry Knight and the woman Promise would be dead by morning.

  8. Deep Maze

  When the aircar reached Santa Monica it took the eastern flight path, curving away from the ocean, speeding through the ovals and spirals of southern California's wealthiest business district, heading inland to the Maze.

  Promise was almost unconscious, and for the first time Aubry saw the little girl in her face, the weakness she hid so well, and he set his teeth grimly. She had done her part, damn it, and he had just about fallen to pieces. Why? Why so suddenly? For a few moments everything had been perfect, everything had been like the old days, and then...

  But now he was a helpless passenger, ferried by the brain of a machine that knew its way better than he did.

  He found himself touching the controls, imagining that he was guiding the car, just to have something to do. It was almost peaceful up here, above the city. It was almost possible to forget the violence ahead and behind, the violence all around, the churning red carpet which crept into every crack and crevice of his life.

  He was so deeply immersed in his thoughts that he didn't even realize when the first ship began to follow him.

  It was a police glider, larger and faster than his own craft, a more sophisticated version of the hovercraft that had captured him on the beach. His communicator bleeped red, but he didn't bother to turn it on: It was too easy to imagine what they might have to say to him.

  The glider was joined by a second, and then by an older craft, a helicopter.

  Aubry put the little two-man craft on manual, trying to feel his way into the controls. Maybe he could handle it. The right-hand toggle controlled vertical movement, the left horizontal?

  Ahead of them, the twisted skeletons of the Maze arose.

  Perhaps there was refuge—for a time.

  Aubry pulled his aircar around the edge of one of the burnt-out skyscrapers, taking it in a tight spiral. The ground whizzed by at insane speed, now only ten meters below. He dipped down into a street—at least must have been a street, once. It was hard to tell, with the accumulated layer of trash and debris, shattered fragments of buildings, and the gut-punched wreckage of a bus, stripped of rubber and glass and most of its metal, only a framework of rust remaining.

  He looked up behind him and saw the helicopter coming in. Slower than aircars, the old prop-driven craft were still more maneuverable. Where were the aircars, if they were sending the helicopter in along the street?

  It was a narrow corridor Aubry traversed, and he loo
ked desperately to either side to find a place to hide. The wreckage was incredible, as if an orgy of wholesale looting and vandalism had destroyed what little was left by the natural disasters of earthquake and fire.

  The other aircar appeared behind him. It was more of a one-man sled, really, barely room for the weapons bristling from its nose. He clapped the headphones over one ear and tried to find their hailing frequency. Nothing. "Guess they don't want to talk anymore," he muttered. There was a crack and a sharp whistle, and Aubry banked sharply as something screamed by his right flank, exploding in the rubble of a building beyond.

  Now the headphone spoke. "We have you in our sights now —" A long-lost memory, the memory of a dreadful night on the beach when betrayal had stolen away dreams and love, came boiling up out of his past with shocking clarity. "No," he said, deadly calm. "I'm not going back." He waited until the last second and made a ninety-degree turn, staying inside the cleared zone, as low to the ground as he dared. The police airsled made the turn effortlessly, the helicopter just as easily.

  Aubry banked right, then left, and made another turn, into an alley. The sled was still on his tail, the helicopter rising above the buildings to track.

  The scarred and pockmarked walls of the alley became a blur as Aubry went for the far end. It was still dark, dawn at least an hour away, and it took all of his alertness to insure that he didn't smash into one of the walls. If he could just find one maneuver his car could do that the sled couldn't...

  Then there was a whistle. Aubry looked in the rearview mirror to see a streak of light and smoke gaining on him. There was no room to swing sideways, and he was already too low. The sled fired a third shot, a line of smoke that crossed the only exit Aubry had, and in that instant he thought he was dead.