“Mrs. Candidate?” Leo said to the room. There was no answer. “That’s odd. She’s the free convert who is the receptionist and office manager here,” he said. He walked to the table, and touched it. “Dead,” Leo murmured. “I guess we just go in and . . . uh-oh.” Leo put his hand to the door on the opposite side of the room. “I’m having to override some kind of lockout . . . good thing I bought that lockpick grist instead of paying my rent that time . . . there. Okay.”
The door irised open. Leo stepped inside and Aubry followed close at his heels. She glimpsed red, something sticky on the floor. Then Leo stepped out from in front of her vision.
Bodies. The room was full of bodies. They were carefully lined up against the wall. Each was slumped over, with his or her throat carefully cut. That was where all the blood came from.
Aubry stared at the bodies. Without thinking, she began to count them. Ten. Twelve. Fifteen. Fifteen bodies with cut throats. She couldn’t tell how many males or females and she suddenly couldn’t breathe right. Couldn’t breathe right at all.
Leo scooped her into his arms and ran with her back to the reception area. He set her down, then hurriedly closed the door behind them.
“What?” Aubry stammered. It was her voice, she thought. It sounded like her voice. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Leo said. “Obviously the Department of Immunity has been here.”
“They did that? But they stop things like that from happening! They don’t . . . they don’t . . .” Aubry couldn’t finish her thought, and she didn’t finish her sentence.
“I need . . . kid, I need you to stay here and let me go back in there for a second.”
“No!” Aubry said. “I mean . . . don’t go in there.”
“I’ve got to, kid,” Leo replied grimly. “Got to see if he’s there.”
“The time-tower LAP?”
“That’s the one. Tod. Be right back. Stay here.”
Leo opened the door and Aubry caught another flash of blood. Then he closed it behind him. Within a minute, he stepped back out.
“Can’t find him,” said Leo. “We’d better get out of here.”
“Where will we go?”
Leo frowned, rubbed his forehead. “At the moment, I’m not real sure about that, Aubry,” he said. “Away from here; that’s for sure.” He let out a long sigh. “This was my contact point to pass you along to the ship that was supposed to take you out of the Met.”
“What do we do?” she asked.
At that very moment, as if in answer, the room spoke in a very clear, metallic voice.
“Remain in position. You have violated Department of Immunity Protocol Districting. Remain in position. Any attempt to flee will be added to the charges against you. Remain in position.”
Forty-one
Fragment from the Fall of Titan
General C.C. Haysay used his spare body to dig out the remains of his main aspect from the rubble of the fremden sneak attack. He was mad as hell. He’d had his original body for over a hundred years, and he’d always taken good care of it so it would be good for a hundred more. And now here it was all mangled—and burnt even beyond the ability of the best grist to repair it. One of these days he’d catch whoever was responsible for that dive-bomb attack and slowly disassemble them, molecule by molecule. That is, if the fool hadn’t been killed in the attack itself. These fremden were just about fanatical enough to do it.
Though what they had to be fanatical about, Haysay failed to see. This smog-ball moon was certainly nothing to go dying for. Of course, that was precisely what he had done. Fortunately, however, Haysay was a LAP, and killing one body didn’t amount to much if you wanted to take him out. In fact, it was just about impossible to kill a LAP. He’d never heard of it happening, not once. Hurting a LAP, though, was well within the realm of the imagination—in actuality, as a matter of fact.
“Haysay, front and center!” It was the familiar voice of Haysay’s dreams and nightmares. A deadly calm voice. Of medium pitch. Precise enunciation, as if the words were notes plucked on a harpsichord.
“Here, Director!” Haysay left only a portion of his awareness on Titan to deal with the body detail. He wanted, at least, to give himself a decent burial.
“I’d say you had one hell of a fuck-up on your hands, wouldn’t you?”
There was no use trying to deny anything to Amés. The Director knew. He always, somehow, knew. Everything.
“Yes, Director,” Haysay answered. “One hell of a fuck-up on my part.”
“Now that’s what I like to hear,” Amés said. Haysay felt the virtual equivalent of a hand on his elbow, and he let himself be pulled along. He found himself in a black void—how big it was was impossible to tell.
Standing, as if in space, was Amés. He wore the silver, blue, and red uniform of his office, with the solar burst upon his chest, dangling as a medal. There was firm, though invisible, footing under Haysay’s feet, and he stood before his Director. Haysay was a good eighteen inches taller than Amés. But this size difference gave Haysay absolutely no sense of mastery over the smaller man. On the contrary. Amés seemed lithe and quick, and Haysay felt like a big, gangly moron.
“What are we going to do about that fuck-up?”
“I’ve purged the moon’s defense system, Director,” said Haysay. “We’re obtaining an indentured convert of sufficient sophistication to take over. In the meantime, we’ve manned each rocket with its own soldier-convert crew.”
Amés looked up at his general with contempt in his eyes. He turned his back and strode away a few steps into the black void. No matter how far he went, he stayed evenly lit, with solar burst shining.
“I meant,” Amés said, “ ‘we’ as in ‘me.’ ”
“Oh,” said Haysay.
“I think you have had far too much Glory for the nonce, General Haysay. I think I overindulged you, even.”
Haysay swallowed, found his voice. “That may be so, Director.”
“It is so,” Amés replied. “It is so.”
“Yes, Director.”
“For a LAP,” said Amés, “you are an extraordinarily sloppy thinker. Everything that happened—every mistake you made—was something that you perfectly well should have foreseen.”
“I . . . I did not foresee these things,” said Haysay. “But we took the moon and, in fact, the entire local system of moons.”
“Haysay, take off your shirt.”
“Director?”
“Take off your shirt.”
“My shirt, Director?”
Amés had turned, and now he was approaching Haysay with quick strides. There was something in his hand. What was that in his right hand?
“Off with the shirt, General.”
With a murmur of befuddlement, Haysay did as he was ordered.
“Now turn around.”
“Director, may I ask . . .”
“I’m going to beat you, Haysay. I’m going to give you one lash for every fremden rebel who got away.”
“Beat me? But, Director, that was over five hundred—”
“Five hundred and twelve aspects,” Amés said. “Haysay, this is going to hurt . . .”
Amés lashed out. It was a whip! He was holding a bullwhip. The leather tip caught Haysay across the cheek and tore into his flesh.
“Better turn around, Haysay, or I’m afraid I might tear the face right off of you.”
Haysay spun wildly. A door. He had to find a way out of there! But there wasn’t any door. What kind of place had Amés led him into? There was always a door out of the virtuality!
Pop! Haysay reeled as the whip dug into his back. The welt was barely bloodying up when the second strike came, and then the third.
Haysay turned in sputtering protest, and another lash caught him across the mouth. He tasted blood from where he had bitt
en his tongue. What kind of awful simulation was this?
“Don’t worry, General,” said Amés. “You’re still in the virtuality. None of this is real.”
Another blow, this time across his chest.
“Perhaps you can take comfort in that,” said Amés.
Haysay felt a sudden anger at Amés’s irony. He lunged at the Director like an animal . . . and bounced off an invisible wall of force.
“There’s nowhere to go, you stupid fool,” Amés said. “So why don’t you give me your back and stand still like a man?”
He allowed Haysay a moment of respite. The general, who was not stupid at all, merely bullheaded, realized the position he was in, and calculated his chances for escape.
Zero.
Without another word, he turned his back to Amés, and bent down with his hands on his knees to brace himself for the blows. They were not long in coming.
He would just have to try very hard not to disappoint the Director again. That was the lesson he was being taught.
But what a very long lesson it was.
Forty-two
The Department of Immunity message began to repeat itself.
“Oh shit,” Leo said. “I guess I tripped some sensor that I didn’t notice.”
They rushed toward the exit. The door would not open.
“Shit!” Leo yelled, and banged against it. It didn’t budge. Then he concentrated and put his hands to it. “Damn security lock,” he said.
“Let me try,” said Aubry. “I’m pretty good at that sort of thing.”
“Jesus, I promised your dad . . . shit! Shit! It’s too complicated for my lockpick subroutine.” He backed away from the door and Aubry swarmed her pellicle grist into contact with it. The lock was very complicated. She slid completely into virtuality and had a long look at it. There was no way past the intermeshed barriers facing her. It was like a fence in front of some important building.
But was it really like that? Or was the complex barrier just the picture it presented in the usual virtual view? She fed the data into one of the non-visual paradigms that her mother had taught her how to use. In this way she was able to “feel” the shape of the lock. Feel it and . . . feel around it.
It was a three-dimensional façade of a four-dimensional matrix. That is, this was the presentation in the “touch” paradigm she was employing. What she had really discovered was a back door in the programming. Aubry reached “behind” the lock, as if she could reach behind a door and open it from the other side. There was no way to visualize that in three dimensions, but there was no problem for the daughter of a free convert to see the lock this way.
She clicked the door open. “There we go,” Aubry said.
“Remain in position,” blared the walls. Aubry and Leo did exactly the opposite, and ran out into the halls.
It was too late.
A Department of Immunity sweeper unit, bristling with gas nozzles and needles that gleamed evilly and dispensed something awful that Aubry didn’t even want to guess at, was gliding down the hall. It used its grist to turn the corridor into Velcro ringlets. Its own surface, top and bottom, was covered with tiny hooks, and it latched into the new-formed ringlets, then let go, and so advanced toward them in the hall. The sweeper drew closer with the sound of a constant Velcro ripping.
“Do not move do not move do not move!” the sweeper intoned in a woman’s voice. “Cease flight, cease flight cease flight!”
Again, Aubry and Leo ignored the instructions and turned to run down the corridor the other way. But the sweeper was incredibly fast, and they had no chance of escape.
“When we round that bend,” Leo called to Aubry, “you keep going. I’m going to try to hold that thing up.”
“Hold it up? Leo, you haven’t got a chance.”
“Do what I, say, kid!” he yelled at her. “If I hear any more guff from you, I’m telling your father.”
“Leo—”
“Do it, Aubry!” They came to the corner. “Now!” Aubry flew around the corner—
—right into the arms of a woman.
The woman was barely larger than Aubry, but she stopped Aubry’s motion without seeming to move a muscle. Then she grabbed Aubry by the shoulders, and, before Aubry could say a word (or even think), the woman shoved Aubry behind her. Then she reached around the corner and did exactly the same thing to Leo.
“What the fuck!” Leo exclaimed.
“Keep her out of the way,” the woman said to Leo, and pointed at Aubry. Then the woman unslung something long and pointed from her back. She rounded the corner.
For a moment, Aubry and Leo stood together, amazed. Then they could not help themselves, at least Aubry felt she could not, and Leo joined her. They peered around the corner.
The woman was advancing on the DI sweeper. It was easily five times her size. She did not waver for a moment. The sweeper extended what Aubry supposed was a gas nozzle of some sort. The woman immediately and expertly inserted the tip of the long rod she carried into the nozzle. There was a soft birr, as of grinding machinery, followed by a little puff of smoke somewhere in the sweeper’s innards. Then the woman extracted the rod and ran back to them at breakneck speed.
“It’s going to blow,” she said matter-of-factly, and pulled them around the corner with her.
It blew. Boy, did it blow. A rush of heat and light picked them up and threw all three of them a good ten meters down the hall they were in. A noxious smell filled the air, and Aubry could barely see for all the smoke.
“Are you Friends of Tod?” the woman asked them.
“Yeah,” said Leo.
“He said there were more coming.” She quickly shook his hand, then took Aubry’s and shook it. Aubry withdrew her hand and stared at it for a moment, then looked back at the woman.
She was repositioning the rod on her back. She was still small, but Aubry felt a sudden chill go through her.
This woman could kill me with her little finger, Aubry thought. She could kill me just with a look, probably.
“Pleased to meet you,” Aubry said. Face the things that scare you, her father had told her more than once. It doesn’t make them any less scary, but at least you can see where their claws are when you are looking at them. Aubry had never thought she’d meet the living embodiment of her father’s metaphor. This woman was kind of scary.
“My name is Jill,” the woman said.
PART TWO
NITROGEN RAIN
* * *
One
The Borrasca
A Memoir
by Lebedev, Wing Commander, Left Front
Introduction and Apology
Although a full recounting of my role in the recent hostilities is what I am about here, I would be remiss if I did not fill in a few details as to my own background and some general facts about cloudships. Most people have never met a cloudship, after all, and you cannot communicate with them by the normal channels of the merci. Especially in the period before the war, cloudships, rightly or wrongly, considered themselves a breed apart, and there were those in our number who made arguments to the point that we were a different species than other human beings, and that we were as far above Homo sapiens as Homo sapiens was above Australopithecus. I was not among these who made such an argument, but I must admit to a certain aloof attitude toward anything having to do with the solar system inside of the orbit of Pluto.
You see, I had gotten out of there, and I had no intention of ever going back before the war began. In fact, if you had told me that I would not only return to the solar system, but be part of the attack on the Met, I would have laughed in your face (that is, provided you were not a cloudship without an aspect, in which case you would not have had a face to begin with).
I was born on Earth, in old Russia, in 2376. The less said about my early years, the better. I came from wea
lth—old Moscow Mafia money, now washed by a few generations, it was claimed—and my first thirty years were, as they once said in America, nothing to write home about. In fact, I did not write home for a period of fifteen e-years, except to keep my banker (and so my father; they were the same person) informed of my current whereabouts so that he could send my regular checks. This period of debauchery could not last, and did not. I remember waking up one noontime in a London gutter. (I have since tried to discover which one. I believe it was somewhere on Shaftesbury Avenue in the Central District, but as to the exact drainage slough, my memory, understandably, fails me.) I lay in that gutter, surrounded by rotting city detritus, with the hot sun upon my pate and my head on fire—that is, with a hangover, and not literally—as sometimes happens, I’m told, with the new bioactive drugs. I had on no clothes, and had contracted a most violent case of sunburn. What’s more, I was the object of considerable attention from several of the passersby, who were by no means entirely respectable characters themselves. I got me to a flophouse, but it was a long, excruciatingly painful, and humiliating journey, let me tell you. And I lay there for near two weeks, recuperating, my skin peeling off as if I were a eucalyptus tree.
It was during that time that I made a holy oath with myself to get as far away from the sun as a man could get, and stay there, so that I might never experience its blistering power again.
This was a promise I was destined to break, but more on that anon.
Well, this was Earth in the 2300s, and space travel was still horribly expensive and out of range of even a rich young fellow such as I. No, the only way into space was through merit in those days, or at least the appearance of merit through professional qualification. And the way to qualification, I discovered to my horror, lay through scholarship. I had to start very nearly at the beginning, for I had left school when I was fifteen and very nearly could not read by this point in my career.
Tony Daniel Page 24
