by John Zakour
This time around, he was the cobra and I was the mouse, because when he stepped aside I saw Sexy’s face fill my interface screen. And she was livid.
“What did you say about my voice?”
Sexy’s diatribe went on for roughly ten minutes. At one point I turned the sound off and just nodded occasionally to let her know that I was still there. But even without the audio, her intent was clear. My services as bodyguard were no longer required, which was fine with me. Sexy had brought nothing but grief to my life from the nano I met her and the sooner she was out of my life, the better off I’d be. Tony and his men could protect her now.
Of course that still left Carol. Smiles said that he had put her directly onto Sexy’s payroll as an additional bodyguard and backup dancer. I knew having her around would help keep Sexy safe but the idea of Smiles getting his hooks into Carol made my stomach turn. I realized I had to get her out of there and do it quickly.
But I had a couple of other things to do first.
37
Even in the bright morning sun, the joyless shadows of the alley hid the squalid storefront entrance. The air was fetid and smelled of old trash. I hated leaving the Kaiser in the open in this kind of neighborhood, but I had little choice and even less time.
The thick polymer of the door was greasy to the touch, caked with dirt and slime from Gates only knew where. I popped my gun into my hand and used the barrel to knock. There was no answer. I knocked again, louder but again to no avail. I knocked once more, so hard I thought I’d dent the door. This time, I got an answer.
“Go away.” The voice was deep, thick with an Arabic accent, and emanated from a small speaker hidden within the door itself.
“I need to see Bushy,” I said.
“There is no Bushy here,” the voice responded.
I knocked again, this time rattling the door on its hinges.
“Last warning,” the voice responded. “Go away.”
“Bushy, it’s Zach,” I said. “Open the door.”
A metal panel above the door slid open and a large blaster on a wall-mounted swivel emerged from the building and pointed itself directly at me.
“How do I know that it is really Zach?”
“Who else would come to this dump pretending to be me?”
The blaster twitched on its swivel in response. I heard the high pitched whine of the weapon charging.
“You come here, pretending to be Zach, just to insult me?”
“I am Zach, you senile old goat. And I came here to pick up my package. Insulting you is a secondary bonus.”
“Why do you want the package?”
“Because the time has come,” I replied.
Silence. Then: “Really?”
“Yes, really, Bushy. Now open the DOSsing door before I blast you and your fake gun to smithereens.”
The blaster retracted into the wall and I heard the sound of several dozen locks on the door being undone. The door opened a crack and I saw a weary dark eye peek through.
“It is really you, Zach?”
“It’s me,” I replied.
“You’ve put on some weight.”
“Yeah, and I’ve lost a little hair. I’m guessing you’ve aged as well and you weren’t any prize to begin with.”
The door opened another half a meter and Bushy stood fully in the opening. He was a short, dark-skinned man; rail thin with eyes as black as onyx and a huge, well-coiffed head of (obviously fake) silver hair.
“I was wrong,” I said, looking at him. “You look pretty good after all.”
He smiled and unconsciously ran his hand through his hair (it shifted a little on his head but I didn’t say anything).
“You really need the package?” he asked. “This is not a drill?”
I shook my head no. “It’s the real deal.”
He swallowed out of nervousness and nodded grimly as he ushered me inside.
“It’s in the vault,” he said.
Bushy’s vault was six stories underground (I’m not sure what, if anything was on the other five stories). He ushered me down the stairs, activated the DNA encoded lock, and opened the big metal door.
The vault was brightly lit and made entirely of metal that shone coldly under the halogen lights above.
“Your package is in drawer C, I think,” he said, leading me across the room. “C for Zach.”
The drawer was protected by another DNA encoded lock. This one had two activation pads; one for me and one for Bushy.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.
I nodded and, in unison, we touched our fingers to the pads. The indicator light turned green and I pulled the small drawer from its housing. It was as I remembered it, about half a meter square, and lined with lead. Inside it was the small black box.
“How long has it been?” Bushy asked.
“Twenty-two years, I think.”
“That’s a lot of rent you owe me.”
“I’ll send you a check.”
I lifted the black box from the drawer. It fit nicely into my hand and I gripped it tightly for a long nano, hefting its weight, both physical and metaphorical. Then I stuck it into my pants pocket and turned away.
“Thanks, Bushy.”
He stopped me with a hand on my wrist. His grip was surprisingly strong. When I turned to him, his face was serious. Then he hugged me tightly and kissed me once on each cheek.
“Gates speed, my friend. You go first into the great unknown.”
I nodded and smiled ever so slightly.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll send you a postcard.”
38
It took me three hours to find Electra. That’s another downside to not having HARV around to do the legwork. She called in sick for work at the clinic (sick of me, I guess). She wasn’t at her place and she wasn’t at any of her favorite tapas bars. I figured that the only place left for her to be at the nano, ironically, was my house. A quick check of the house computer confirmed that someone had entered the house using Electra’s code and that the new couch had been broken into small pieces. That pretty much confirmed it.
I pulled up to the house in the late afternoon. A few dark clouds had rolled in and the once sunny day had turned cool. I parked the Kaiser in the driveway and entered the house sheepishly, flowers in one hand, takeout food in the other.
“Hi.”
She was packing her things into boxes, taking knickknacks and photos off the shelves and walls. I’d become used to seeing her breaking things. But the sight of her actually packing things up underscored for me how serious the situation had become.
“I thought you were working,” she said.
“I quit the job today,” I replied. “Actually, I was fired. It turns out that Sexy doesn’t like criticism.”
“I’ll go then,” she said. “I just came by to pack up my things and break a few of yours.”
“Please, don’t go.”
“I’d rather not pack up my things with you here, Zach.”
“No, I mean, don’t go.”
“It’s too late for that, Chico,” she said, staring first at the flowers and then turning away.
I heard the soft rumble of thunder outside and hoped that maybe the rain would keep her here, if only for a while.
“It’s only too late if we allow it to be,” I said. “My watch says that there’s still time.”
“Your watch is slow.”
“You’re probably right,” I replied. “I just wanted to let you know that I understand. It might be too late now, like you said, but I understand how all my stuff, the cases, the clients, the news stories, I know how that made you feel. And I’m sorry.”
The thunder outside rumbled again, louder this time, signaling the coming storm.
“Por favor, Chico,” she said. “I’m not strong enough to have this conversation now. Let me just take the stuff I’ve packed and go. I’ll get the rest another time.”
She grabbed a box and took a step toward the door.
Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed her arm, dropping the flowers and spilling the takeout on the floor.
“Electra, please.”
My grip on her arm was a little too tight and she shot me a look that could have melted steel. Then she twisted her arm and broke my grip and continued toward the door.
“At least wait until after the rain stops,” I said.
“What rain?” she said, as she walked. “It’s supposed to be sunny all week.”
The sky rumbled again. But it didn’t sound like thunder any more. The air in the house suddenly felt charged. Just breathing it left a bitter, acidic taste in my mouth. Electra was across the room now, nearing the front door. I could see the sparks of static electricity jumping toward her as her feet moved across the carpet. She was reaching for the doorknob, her hand just inches from the metal.
“Electra, don’t!”
I ran toward her, sparks flying from my feet as I moved. I leaped as she turned and hit her broadside as the door opened. We fell to the floor together, me spinning us as we fell to ensure that she’d land on the bottom, with my body shielding hers.
Then a bolt of electric white heat flashed in the sky and blew the doorway to pieces. The lights in the house flared ultra bright from the energy surge and burst as the bulbs overloaded. The security alarms in the house went off in a deafening roar. Shrapnel from the destroyed entryway flew around us. I felt it bounce off my armor in a dozen places and I felt Electra shake beneath me from the shock of the explosion.
We were under attack.
39
“What was that?” Electra asked, as we quickly got to our feet.
“Ion cannon blast,” I said. “Very bad.”
I looked outside through the gaping hole in the wall where the front door had once been and saw a milky-white wall of energy pulsing just outside the house. It was undulating like a wall of clear gelatin but I knew that it was a lot stronger.
“A forcefield cage,” I said with a sigh.
“You’re kidding,” Electra said.
“We’re trapped in here.”
We ran quickly to the central computer console. I reset the alarms and tried to bring up a status report on the house systems.
“Most of the security system is down.”
“Can HARA reboot it?”
“I don’t have HARA anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind. Get to the weapons closet and grab some heavy ordnance,” I said. “We might be in a little trouble here.”
“Great. This is exactly the way I wanted to end our relationship, Chico,” she said. “With a firefight.”
“It will give you a chance to break more of my stuff.”
She scrambled across the hall to the weapons closet and punched in the security code. The door slid open and she pulled two laser rifles and two hand blasters off the rack. She tossed one rifle to me, stuck both blasters in her belt, then grabbed the second rifle for herself. That’s when the second alarm went off. It was a high-pitched wail, like a police siren stuck on a single note.
“What’s that?” Electra yelled, trying to be heard above the din.
“Perimeter alarm,” I said. “We’re under attack.”
“No DOS, Sherlock. From where?”
“I don’t know. I never heard this alarm before.”
“You don’t know your own alarms?”
“HARV set the system up,” I said. “He usually keeps track of these things.”
“Check the console.”
I checked the security screen on the house computer and didn’t like what I saw.
“We have an intruder.”
“In the house?”
“No,” I said. “In our airspace.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we better duck.”
A high-pitched squeal, like something out of an old World War Two movie, filled the air, growing louder by the nano. Electra and I turned our eyes skyward then looked at one another from across the room and dove for cover as the sound reached its crescendo and a large chunk of the roof exploded inward in a horror-filled nano.
The house shook to its foundations as the debris settled but there was no explosion. I hit the alarm override to turn off the alert. Everything was silent. Electra and I peered at one another from our hiding places (she was in the weapons closet, I was under the com) and scanned the damage.
There was a perfectly square crater in the living room floor. It seemed odd at first but it made sense when we looked up because it matched the perfectly square holes in the rooftop, the second floor ceiling, and the ground floor ceiling. Whatever had fallen from above had gone straight through the house, settled in the basement, and was now hidden beneath a couple layers of rubble that had once been part of my house.
“I have a bad feeling about this.”
“You’re sharp as ever, Chico.”
We heard the whir of a hydraulic motor from below and the debris began to shift. Then the sound of metal against metal filled the air as the debris began to rise. We powered up our weapons and trained them on the crater as the movement continued. Whatever was down there was lifting itself out.
The debris slid away as the thing rose, revealing a slate gray metal cube, four meters tall, wide and deep, rising toward us on thick, hydraulically powered legs. Two nanos later, it was on the first floor, standing rock solid on the foundation of its own legs.
“What is it?” Electra asked.
As if on cue, a tiny hatch in the top of the box slid open and a thin pole emerged, extending a meter and a half high. There was a puff of smoke that made us jump, then a rigid, multicolored banner sprang from the pole and mechanically waved a flag at us. Three words were printed large on the surface in glowing red letters.
Let’s Kill Zach.
Something lurched in my stomach and I felt my face redden from pure, unfiltered anger.
“Roundtree.”
The box split open suddenly, like the display case of a pushy traveling salesman, and two dozen gray figures leaped out. They were humanlike in form but thin, long of limb, with no fingers or toes and completely featureless of face. Half came at me and half went for Electra. We didn’t wait to see what they wanted, choosing instead to say hello with our guns.
Electra hit the one closest to her with a blast from the laser rifle, cutting it neatly in half. I shattered the one nearest me into pieces with a blast to the chest. Two nanos into the fight and we’d already taken out two attackers. I was starting to feel good about our chances.
Which is of course when things turned very, very bad.
The torso half of the attacker that Electra had destroyed started to shake. A nano later two legs popped out of the bottom end and it was as good as new. Likewise, the bottom half grew a torso.
“What the …”
Mine was even worse. Each piece of the thing that I’d blown apart was shaking and growing itself a new body. We were now four nanos into the battle and we’d increased the number of attackers by nearly half.
“What are these things?”
“Grey-Goo,” I replied.
“What?”
“A new weapon. Randy told me about it once. It’s intelligent inorganic matter, a single organism with sort of a hive mentality and composed of self-replicating circuitry. Like a giant computerized amoeba programmed to attack a specific target.”
“I’m guessing that we’re the targets,” Electra shouted as the Goo attackers, moving slowly now, began to surround her. “What do we do?”
“Hit ‘em,” I yelled.
I flipped my laser rifle over and hit the nearest Goo in the head with the butt end. It tumbled over into the figures behind it and their long legs and arms got tangled up with one another. I doubt it hurt them, but it slowed them down, and gave me some time to hit a few more.
“That’s your answer for everything,” Electra replied.
She knocked one Goo off its feet with her rifle and then leg swept three
more to the ground. It was clear that our rifles wouldn’t be of much use in this case. As hand-to-hand weapons, they were a little clumsy, especially for Electra, who was having trouble with their bulk. So I decided to give her something a little more suitable for the fight.
I fought my way over to the wall by computer console and pulled a hard polymer softball bat from behind the coat rack.
“Electra, catch!”
I tossed the bat over the wall of Goo attackers. Electra caught it on the fly and began whacking away at the gray-shelled foot solders with a new fury and effectiveness.
And although the laser rifles weren’t effective against the Goo, my personal gun certainly was.
“Sticky stuff.”
The first glue-shot pinned one Goo attacker to the wall. The second bound two so tightly together that they fell over and began waving their legs like upturned ladybugs. It didn’t stop them from functioning but it took them out of the fight.
We held our own for a while. The Goo attackers weren’t all that strong, but they were relentless, like a bunch of really persistent and annoying toddlers. Their limbs didn’t break easily (which was just as well because any piece that broke off would just grow an entirely new body, as we had already found out) but they hit hard and we weren’t as indestructible as they were. Worse still, they were constantly trying to wrap their arms or legs around us and pull us down to the floor. I knew that if they ever pulled us down they’d crush us through sheer weight of numbers. I had my armor to protect me to a certain degree but Electra had nothing and that’s what scared me the most.
When I ran out of glue-shots, I switched to the hogtie command and wrapped a bunch of them up in polymer cables. And when I ran out of hogties, I grabbed a bat and started slugging away along with Electra. The Goo kept coming at us and before long Electra and I were standing back to back atop the coffee table, protecting one another as the Goo surged around us.
“This is your fault, you know,” she yelled at me between swings.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I just came by to pick up my things. Now I’m fighting Goo!”
