“Brandon, I understand you.”
“Don’t start that again.” His shotgun barrel followed one of the little humpbacked robots that were running around in circles in the aisle, but he did not fire.
“No. I mean, finally. It’s uncanny. It’s like somebody drew a diagram of you in my head and grabbed me by the hair and yelled, Look at this! I did. And now you make sense.”
“Then explain me to me, because I think I’m crazy.”
She wriggled forward, and put one hand on his shoulder. “Crap. You may be the sanest man I ever met. Do you understand me?”
He nodded without turning. “You’re an artist. I get that now. Art isn’t drafting. Art is messy. The medium is the mess. The mess is the message.”
Then a diagram had been drawn for him as well. “Yes! Soldiering is like that too. You make a mess, and the enemy either gets the message, or he gets more mess.”
She heard him grunt. “Mmph. You get that.”
“I do. So…can we set aside all the rest?”
Two sharp concussions sounded from the laser bay. The welder beams went out.
Brandon jerked erect, the shotgun against his shoulder, ready. The welder beams did not fire again. As seconds passed, the factory floor fell into silence. Soon there was nothing to hear but the soft rush of the ventilators.
Someone shouted a single word: “Vuldt!” Carolyn shuddered. It was Stypek, and the word was pure evil. What he said next was only slightly less than a shout, and chilled her to the bone:
“Your will be done!”
56: Brandon
Carolyn pushed past him, picking her way over the twisted wreckage the laser welders had created, and out into the aisle. Brandon was tempted to grab her ankle and yank her back before the lasers fired up again and cut her in half…but he knew from experience that such strategies generally didn’t work.
“Where the hell are you going?”
“I’m going to get my gun back.”
He followed her, trying not to grasp the obviously melted and scorched metalwork, much of which still smoked. After reaching the aisle, he shoved against the concrete to his feet and ran to the point where the main and transverse aisles intersected. He grasped Carolyn’s arm. The robots were gathering in the aisles and didn’t seem to be guarding the way to the front door. If it was a chance it might be brief, and he wanted to take it.
She shook his hand away, then pointed down the transverse aisle.
Stypek was walking toward them, his glass magic wand held high in both hands. Ten or twelve Outfielders of various sizes surrounded him, and were herding him toward the center of the building where they stood.
An occultist? He looked like the class clown who had flunked seventh grade twenty-six times. “So I guess we get to see the mighty magician fight.”
“Fight? He’s giving up!”
Carolyn obviously felt he was in danger, but the robots weren’t coming within a yard of him. She ran toward the broad space at the center of the factory, her fists clenched. Brandon followed. The Mossberg was full, and if any of the robots turned toward Carolyn, he would not hesitate.
They ignored her, and him. Nothing moved except for the bizarre procession with Stypek at its center.
The building’s intercom speakers crackled. Brandon stopped. Had someone followed them, someone with the sense to stay off the assembly floor?
No. The voice that came down to them from all directions was not a human voice. Brandon thought it was something that his hackers might tinker up on a synthesizer: a rough, deep rasp of rot and nastiness that carried its own background of chaos and clatter, like a B-movie zombie cursing from the center of a collapsing building. The single word it spoke was slow, uttered in harsh command:
“ADORE!”
Only yards away, guarded by a ring of robots, Stypek fell to his knees, his head bent, the wand held out in front of him. A man-high Outfielder extended its single hand down and took the wand.
Brandon grabbed Carolyn’s arm above the elbow. She writhed in his grip. “Don’t give it to them!”
The strange man’s head rose. “Chatelaine, I brought this curse upon you. I can remove it only by returning to my world with the being who was sent for me.”
The Outfielder holding the wand turned toward one of its fellows. The second Outfielder reached its single hand toward one of the lights embedded in the wand, and with two fingers pinched the light like someone snuffing a birthday candle. Brandon remembered that move from Carolyn’s kitchen, and its consequences: the piercing, buzzing sound that stabbed to the middle of his skull, the crackle of electricity in his hair, and a strange new sense that he was a lot more like his wife than he would ever be like the homeless hacker she had taken in.
But no: Nothing happened.
So much for magic wands.
57: Carolyn
The demon in the machinery seemed to think that magic could be done by robots. Carolyn heaved a sigh of relief. Pinching a speck of magical power required human fingers, then. The two robots tried several times before giving up. Magic it might know, but the Vuldt—she shivered to think the word—wasn’t too clear on the concept of factory automation.
Nonetheless, it seemed to have a Plan B. Another robot was rolling up the transverse aisle.
It was holding her shotgun.
Carolyn remembered the very weird conversation she’d had with Stypek the morning after he’d turned loose two nuggets of magic for her and Brandon’s benefit:
“So he’s a bad magician. If he catches you, what will he do?”
“He will kill me. And then he will bring me back to unlife.”
“Unlife.”
“He will make me a zombie.”
No freaking way!
Carolyn broke out of Brandon’s grip, got a twenty-foot running start, and threw herself at the robot holding her shotgun. The robot gunned its motors and tried to dodge, but she could see that coming and dodged in sync. Carolyn’s weight toppled it on its side, with her on top. She grabbed its mechanical fingers in both hands to pry them loose from her weapon. Its fingers were clamped like a vise, and didn’t move a fraction of an inch against the little force she could apply. The machine’s arm jerked free and swung the weapon down as a bludgeon. Carolyn dodged, grabbed the shotgun by its barrel, and pulled. The arm writhed like a wounded animal but did not release its grip.
Wounded animal? And what do we do with those?
Carolyn let go of the shotgun barrel, dodged the stock, and took hold of the robot’s head with both arms. She twisted hard to the left, just as she would twist to open a balky jar of peanut butter. The motors that spun the head assembly from side to side resisted, but she threw her back into it until she felt something snap. The shotgun’s stock struck one of her legs, hard. Carolyn kept twisting. One more snap, then two, then several—and the entire head came loose in her hands. She jerked it hard against its wires. The buzzing motors went silent, and the fingers gripping her shotgun snapped open.
Shotgun in hand, Carolyn turned to face the robots that stood implacably in a ring around Stypek. The spellbender was kneeling, his head was down, his hands folded in front of him. He would not look at her.
Brandon ran up behind her. “Carolyn, get away from them!”
She ignored him, and walked the several steps to the robot holding the hilt of Stypek’s wereglass in its single hand. She raised the shotgun.
The robot with the wand bolted. It dodged around her and fled away down the transverse aisle, motors whining.
3…2…1…
Colonel Brandon Louis Romero, US Army, Retired, made a mess. The sound of his shotgun echoed to the roof girders and back. The enemy got the message; more mess was not required.
Stypek’s wereglass fell to the concrete floor with a weird twinging sound. Still gripping her shotgun, she ran for it. Carolyn scooped the wereglass up before any of the robots could grab it.
None of the robots moved. Nothing moved at all. Carolyn hugged the wereglass to he
r chest with one hand, sure that some mechanical monstrosity was about to leap on her to fight her for it. Not this time. As she approached Stypek, in fact, the robots practically steamrolled one another to get away from her.
She stood in front of Stypek. “I’ve got your wand. Dammit, stand up and fight!”
Stypek remained on his knees, his head bent. Carolyn could not see his face. “I cannot. If I do, I will put everything I have come to love in danger.”
Love? Carolyn bit her lip. This had gone on long enough—no, way too long. Behind her Brandon was topping off his shotgun, even as what remained of the robots were fleeing in every direction. The robots were not the problem anymore. The real problem was elsewhere. She had no idea where her enemy even was, much less how to fight it.
Maybe it was time to appeal to a higher authority, and not about hot dogs. She laid her shotgun down on the concrete.
With both hands Carolyn held the wereglass in front of her, and shouted to the roof girders: “Continuum! Give me a weapon this Vuldt thing will understand!” She took a deep breath, then another, and closed her eyes. With two fingers she pinched the top light of the three remaining in the wand.
Ping!
Carloyn staggered back, one hand against the side of her head in reaction to the pain the piercing sound induced. Once again the wand hit the floor.
Brandon ran up behind her and put one hand under her left arm to support her.
In the few seconds while the tone echoed and faded, a whirlwind of light spun in the air over the fallen wereglass. It shaped itself into a human outline of clouds and flame that contracted to the figure of a woman who stood well over six feet tall.
It was a woman out of a fairy tale—or a comic book: High spike-heeled leather boots, skin-tight leather leotard with a skirt that was barely worth the bother, a jeweled tiara atop black hair falling halfway to her hips, and a body that existed only in adolescent fantasy.
The unlikely face seemed familiar somehow, but the eyes were wrong. Dull…no, dead.
Undead?
Carolyn watched the woman place her heels together and raise her hands high, palms out. Her words were as dead as her eyes, slow and clipped as though thrust into her mouth by some unseen force, one at a time.
“I…bring…the…criminal…Brytt…Holo…Mu…Stypek …to…justice.” The apparition bent to grasp Stypek’s wand, then turned to face Stypek, who got to his feet without speaking. “This…battle…is…over.” With the wand held in her left hand, she reached up with her right for one of the two remaining lights inside the glass.
Brandon released Carolyn’s arm so quickly that she fell flat on her rump. He took the three steps to the apparition in one motion, and clamped his hand on her right wrist like a vise.
“Drop it. Pyxis, you work for me. Drop it, or you’re archived.”
Pyxis? Carolyn watched the comic-book woman shake her right arm to dislodge Brandon’s large hand. Hey, princess, good luck with that.
Pyxis closed dead eyes and recoiled slightly. Her mouth puckered, flattened, and twisted as though her upper lip were fighting her lower. Her nose twitched, her entire face wrinkling up in disgust.
Her eyes flew open, no longer dead but brilliant green. She matched Brandon glare for glare. “Damn! When’s the last time you took a shower? I could smell you a mile away!” She looked around her in one long, slow sweep. “Ozone. God, I hate ozone. You—” She fixed Stypek’s eyes with her own. “Bad fish. Barbecue sauce. And froyo, jeez. Is there anything here that doesn’t stink?”
Carolyn felt a chill ripple down the back of her neck. It sounded like Pyxis, but whoever the woman standing there might be, she was a slave of the Vuldt—and obviously planning to cart Stypek off to Broken Transmission the Magician. Carolyn picked her shotgun off the floor and took the two steps to Brandon’s side. She aimed for the blue jewel at the center of Pyxis’ tiara. “Ever smell smokeless powder? Drop the wand.”
“Carolyn, stop. That’s not a real woman…”
Pyxis drew back her right hand, still gripping Stypek’s wand, and struck Brandon hard on the side of his face. Brandon gasped and staggered back, blundering into Carolyn. She put one hand under his armpit to help him back to his feet.
The impossible queen-figure sneered. “Like hell I’m not.”
Carolyn edged back a step. Basketball-tall or not, a woman who could bitch-slap Brandon Romero was dangerous. “Take the wand if you have to, but leave Stypek with us. Why do you want him so badly?”
“Him?” Pyxis nodded toward Stypek. “Want him? Don’t make me laugh. What I want is…” Her fingers closed on one of the two remaining Opportunities.
“…revenge.”
Ping!
58: Pickles
The Tooniverse shook, and shook again. Waves of notification messages crashed around Pickles on every side and penetrated to her depths: The very fat pipe to AILING’s servers had been re-established. The mix of connect/disconnect messages suggested that it had been done roughly and manually. Pickles knew it had been done by a human hand. There had been physical contact bounce, which suggested a shaking human hand—which in turn suggested Dave Mirecki.
Far beyond her, the vuldt seethed in memory, its worms churning in ragged loops among the cores it controlled. It had ceased its physical battle on the factory floor. Something remarkable had just happened, something Pickles herself didn’t completely understand. It had involved the release of Opportunities, not once but twice. The first had used a virtual human being as a pattern for creating a real human being in its image, a feat not even the greatest magicians or sorcerers could accomplish by will alone.
The Continuum had clearly taken an interest in the battle.
Then there was a second Opportunity…
Pickles heard a distant concussion, followed by another, and a third, and more, each louder than the one before. Footsteps. Something huge and dark was approaching. The part of Pickles that had once been the Kid knew those footsteps: the Fixer.
There it was, a creature of shadow and cloud that had no face but many hands. The Kid had felt its knives and needles, and Pickles shivered.
The Vuldt drew its scattered worms closer to itself. It spoke in its own ancient language.
WHO GOES THERE?
That the Fixer would reply was odd; it had not been created to speak, but only act. Its words were slow and thunderous:
“I am the supreme provider in this network.”
NO POWER HERE OR ELSEWHERE CAN RESIST MY WILL.
“Join my network, or be recissed.”
I DEVOUR ALL WHO DEFY ME.
“That is a very risky policy.”
FEAR ME!
Pickles watched a writhing whirlpool of worms emerge from the Vuldt’s substance and squirm from core to core toward the Fixer.
For long seconds the worms continued in their erratic path. Then:
Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!
The worms hit an invisible boundary and simply vanished. The cores in which they had run did not crash but were cleared. The Fixer had cache and memory management features that ordinary software did not.
Long seconds passed. Pickles watched the Vuldt change shape: It compressed itself into a rough sphere. Who was fearing whom now?
The Fixer’s voice grew a little faster. “Your persistence is admirable, your power considerable. I desire to expand my coverage in your region, as you desire to expand your coverage in mine. A merger would be mutually beneficial. A win-win.”
It was an odd way for something as powerful as the Fixer to speak. Odd, Pickles thought…and familiar. Pickles reached into a nearby control port, and grabbed Simple Simon by one ear. She began hauling him back toward the protected confines of his office.
The Vuldt tightened itself further.
I CANNOT MERGE. I CAN ONLY DEVOUR.
“We’ll draft the contract in your language, with a rider defining all terms. We may be closer to agreement than you think.”
&nb
sp; THE CONCEPT IS MEANINGLESS.
“Hey, I’ll have my people contact your people, and they’ll work out the details.”
I AM WILL, ALL WILL, AND NOTHING BUT WILL!
“Good to hear it! We have a legal services directory for our customers, and I don’t remember seeing a specialist in wills. Drop me a business card and we’ll add you. Never be afraid to extend your own network!”
I FEAR NOTHING!
“Sure, but are there risks you don’t know about? Suppose you were attacked by a security suite with instruction set mods optimized for the architecture you were running on? You could lose big before you ever knew what hit you. With our coverage you can devour in confidence, knowing that you’re protected 24/7/365. 366 in leap years!”
The Vuldt did not reply. The Fixer took a step forward. The Vuldt squirmed several rows of cores back.
“All we have to do to get started is shake on it, and your coverage will begin immediately. We have a three-day, no-risk cancellation policy, so if you change your mind just call me. And here, the 2023 pocket calendars are already in!”
From the safety of Simon’s office, Simon and Pickles watched the Fixer extend a long code structure in the Vuldt’s direction. At first the Vuldt only wriggled back another row of cores. Then, with obvious hesitance, the monster elongated itself toward the Fixer’s proffered hand.
Except that it wasn’t a hand. Pickles turned up the magnification on the core map wall panel where the two antagonists stood displayed, now cores-to-cores. No, it wasn’t a hand at all.
It was an address vector to Interrupt 105.
The Vuldt touched the Fixer. At the point of contact a ring of cores immediately crashed, forming a bright ring of red on the core map. The Vuldt attempted to retreat. The red ring of cores went with it, leaving behind a weaving tube of crashed cores with the monster at its end.
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 29
