Sparrowhawk

by Thomas A Easton

  He shook his head.

  She sighed. “It doesn’t matter whether you’ve got the hots for her or not. You’re hanging around Neoform too when you hang around your Emily, and you’re making someone over there nervous.”

  She made sense. Of course. Someone wanted him out of there and they must have called the department. He didn’t think it could be Nick Gilman, for though he might be jealous, he was also scared for his wife’s life. Chowdhury? Gelarean? Someone else? He could not say, though he could guess. He had no real evidence, but there was, as he had told the Count, a personality, a history, and rivalry that could, together, lead to violence. Every cop had seen it happen more than once.

  Bernie had come to talk to Emily about the phone call Lieutenant Alexander had received, but when she had ushered him into her lab, she would not let him speak.

  “Look,” she said. “Alan finally got the bugs out of those pouch genes.” Her fingers moved over the keyboard of her workstation. A Bioblimp appeared on the screen. Ghostly fingers, barely visible on the screen, plucked at its flanks to open the folds in which it would tuck its cargo. There were only two, and their openings faced toward what, Bernie supposed, must be the front of the genimal. Ghost fingers poked into the pouches, their depth of penetration communicating internal size.

  “I thought you already had the patent?”

  Her dark hair jerked as she nodded. He caught a whiff of shampoo odor, clean and flowery, but not quite the same as Connie’s. “Sure. But it describes the pouches in very general terms. This is design work, not invention. Details.”

  The next sequence showed the Bioblimp with its cabin in place, slung beneath the gasbag, tentacles dangling around it, except to the rear, where a missing tentacle left room for the propeller that jutted from the back of the cabin to push the Bioblimp through the sky. Bernie did not know whether the tentacle was missing because the creature simply did not grow one there or because it had been—would be, he thought, reminding himself that this was a simulation—cut away. It hovered over a house, anchored itself to a tree with one tentacle, used others to lift the roof from the house, and then plucked furniture from the exposed rooms. The furniture went into its pouches. As they filled, they bulged obscenely.

  “It makes moving look easy,” said Bernie appreciatively.

  “Removable roofs are just the simplest of the changes that will make sense once this thing is on the market. Look here…” She keyed another animated sequence, and a Bioblimp, this time with the Mayflower logo visible on the side of its gasbag, floated through the air toward a high-rise apartment building bedecked with balconies, each one painted with a number. She pointed. “Addresses.”

  One tentacle wrapped around a balcony railing to moor the van. A human figure, so small on the screen that its gender could not be told, stepped out of the apartment, opened a panel in the wall of the building, and pushed a switch. The entire apartment slid out of the building like a drawer from a bureau, and the moving van began to pull furniture from its cargo holds and place it on the apartment floor. When the van was done, the human figure pushed the switch again, and the apartment slid back into the building.

  Bernie laughed. “You could water the houseplants that way too. In the rain.”

  “Our patent lawyers are going nuts.” She grinned at him. “We’re remaking the world, aren’t we?”

  “As long as you don’t redesign people so they don’t need to eat. Lunch?”

  “Where?”

  “You choose.”

  “The Bed and Buggy Motel has a nice luncheon. It’s just a couple of blocks away.”

  There was a moment’s silence while they stared at each other, both of them fully aware that, whatever their purposes in going to a motel, most people went to such places for only one thing. Finally, he said simply, “Why not?” To himself, he saw that now, perhaps, he could tell her about the phone call. They would have a good laugh over lunch, and then they would come back here, to the lab.

  To reach the motel, and its restaurant, they had to walk through a small neighborhood shopping center. There was a grocery, a hardware store, a liquor store, a cleaner, two small boutiques, a barbershop, a drugstore, and more. As Bernie and Emily approached the entrance to a shadowed bar, its door opened partway. A voice, warmly feminine despite its obviously synthesized nature, murmured, “It’s awful warm out there. Why don’t you come inside and be comfortable? The beer is cold.” A free sample of the bar’s conditioned air gushed refreshingly across their ankles.

  They passed on, noticing that most of the stores were busy. The neighborhood was by no means crowded, but there were plenty of people on the sidewalks, and the doors to the stores were bouncing open and shut as electronic voices announced the day’s bargains or wished good days as customers entered and left. A steady stream of Buggies passed down the street, wheels, legs, and occasional engines making their various distinctive noises, while litterbugs waited by the roadside, darting out to retrieve their prey as necessity demanded and opportunity offered. From time to time, the traffic slowed to eddy around a heavy-bodied, squash-nosed, bowlegged Mack truck that had stopped to load or unload cargo. Some, like airliners, wore both their driver’s cab and a cargo pod strapped to their backs. Others wore just a cab, towing their cargo in long trailers.

  As they walked, Bernie found himself talking about his meeting with the Count, the phone call that had prompted it, and what it meant. Seeing a couple on the walk ahead, their hands entwined, he wished he dared to take Emily’s hand or to put an arm around her. To keep himself from doing so automatically, thoughtlessly, he sawed the air with his hands as he talked.

  She moved closer to him as some other pedestrian passed them by. Their thighs brushed. She said, “You hadn’t told me about that rape.”

  He described it as briefly as he could. She made a face. “Do you really think someone at Neoform could have done such a thing?”

  “You can never tell. Chowdhury…”

  “Hates everyone, black or white, I know. But…”

  He shrugged. The motel they wanted, with its restaurant, was in sight a hundred feet away. He pointed, and his stomach rumbled. Emily laughed and touched his arm.

  A blare of horns broke out behind them. They heard crunching noises and screams. Movement on the street and sidewalk abruptly froze. Those people who had been walking toward them stared, eyes wide, toward something behind. Those who had been going in their direction turned, and then they too stared. There were pointing hands, gaping mouths, more screams, and then, only seconds after the opening fanfare of vehicular brass, people and Buggies alike were fleeing in a panic-stricken rout.

  Unlike all the rest, Bernie and Emily did not flee as soon as they had turned to look. Half a block away, a midsize Mack, the equivalent of the previous century’s ten-ton trucks, was accelerating down the street. Ignoring the Buggies already on the pavement, it brought its massive paws down wherever it wished, accounting for the crunching noises and a few, only a few, of the screams they heard. Blood and other fluids ran in the gutters of the street. A litterbug, its stomach burst, made a particularly messy smear on the pavement. The Mack’s bulldog jowls shook and quivered, and great gobs of foamy spittle flew to strike the storefronts beside the road.

  A brightly painted cargo pod was strapped to the Mack’s broad back, its forward end a bubble of clear plastic behind which the genimal’s driver, her face contorted, pounded on a control board. Clearly, the beast was not responding as it should. Emily gasped, “The Sparrow!”

  Even as Bernie and Emily saw it, its broad jaws, full of teeth, gaped. It growled, and then it uttered a deep-throated, rumbling howl, as if a freight train were trying to bay. It changed direction, swerving toward them across the road, pausing only when the cargo pod caught on a lamppost.

  Neither Bernie nor Emily could move, even though adrenaline was surging through their veins. The threat was too great, too immediate, and all their energies were focused on their senses as they sought some route for
their escape. Small details loomed large. Bernie noticed the cracks in the yard-wide collar to which the forward edge of the pod was clipped, and then, beneath the monster’s throat, a dangling ornament, a foot long, a box on wheels, and shiny with polished chrome. In a moment, he recognized it as a model of an old, engine-powered eighteen-wheeler.

  The Mack braced its legs and tried its best to force its pod through the lamppost. It tried again, and it succeeded. But the necessary pause, while the driver’s compartment collapsed and shards of plastic eviscerated her, gave Bernie the chance he needed to unfreeze, draw his magnum from beneath his jacket, and begin to fire.

  The Mack struggled and tore the lamppost through the remainder of the cargo pod. More plastic flew. Cardboard boxes spilled into the roadway. The Mack’s jaws gaped wide again, and Bernie fired between them, trying with all the nerve and skill he could muster to put his slugs through the roof of the monster’s mouth and into its brain, or through the back of the throat and through, severing the spinal cord—whatever would end the onslaught of the berserk juggernaut this genimal had become.

  With a final roar, it collapsed atop a Roachster whose driver had driven onto the sidewalk in his efforts to flee and now cowered in his seat. The pushed-in snout—each nostril larger than Bernie’s head, the whole looming over him and Emily like a whiskery wave—was only feet away. A puddle of drool was already growing on the sidewalk. The smell was precisely what one would expect of something whose not-so-distant ancestors had been dogs.

  The ululating screams of Hawks announced the arrival of Bernie’s colleagues, almost in time. The first two landed on the Mack, their talons furrowing the genimal’s fur, and promptly put their heads under their wings. The hatches of their bubbles popped open, and Connie and Larry Randecker emerged.

  Connie scanned the now-growing crowd, stopping with a look of surprise when she spotted Bernie and Emily. “Look at the Great White Hunter,” she said.

  “Ferchrissake!” said Larry, staring. “Will you put that iron away?”

  Bernie obeyed, but not until he had replaced the gun’s magazine. He was not at all sure he would not need the weapon again before the day was done. “What are you doing here?”

  “Pure coincidence,” said Connie. “We were there when the dispatcher pushed the scramble button.”

  “What happened?” Larry gestured impatiently, and he and Connie switched on their recorders simultaneously.

  As Bernie explained, more Hawks swept out of the sky to land. The crowd gave way, and the new arrivals began to assemble crowd-control barriers, examine the Mack, photograph the scene, and look for the fragments of its control apparatus in the rubble that covered the street. As they found the pieces, they swept up the remaining debris.

  “Where were you going?” asked Larry.

  “Lunch.”

  “But where?”

  When Emily pointed at the motel just ahead, Connie gave Bernie an appraising look and an exaggerated wink.

  He sighed. “Just lunch.”

  However, when they finally got away from the scene of carnage, neither Bernie nor Emily had any appetite. They went into the motel’s restaurant, and they ordered drinks, but then she said, “I’d rather just lie down.”

  Bernie looked at her. Her hair was disordered. Her blouse was sweat-stained. Her face was lined with recent stress, and her eyes showed far more white than usual. There was no trace of seductiveness about her.

  He was not surprised. He felt none himself. “Sounds like a good idea,” he said. He drained his scotch in a gulp. She did the same with her Gibson. He dropped a twenty on the table to cover the drinks, and then he led her to the motel’s front desk.

  When they were in their room, Emily proved as good as her word. She kicked off her shoes, flopped on one of the room’s two beds, and closed her eyes. Bernie went to the window, held back the drape, and found that it overlooked the street where they had stood not long before. The Hawks were still there, Connie, Larry, the other cops, and a tow-Mack pulling a wheeled flatbed trailer. He studied the scene, passing quickly over the pile of mangled Buggies, lingering when he noticed the row of body bags on the curb. He counted them. Seventeen.

  Abruptly he turned away, went into the bathroom, and knelt before the toilet. He vomited.

  The cool hand that stroked his neck and shoulder was comforting. “It gets to you, doesn’t it?” she murmured.

  “I can stand it.” He rose, unwrapped a motel glass, and rinsed his mouth.

  “Your stomach can’t.” When he shrugged, she added, “Maybe you should lie down for a while too.”

  Later, she said, “I can’t tell my husband.”

  Bernie held one breast in his hand and thumbed the nipple. It swelled in response, but not nearly to the extent that it had just a little while before. “Does he get violent?” Nick Gilman hadn’t struck him as the type, but one could never know. That was a day-one lesson for every rookie, every police academy cadet. He had even recited it for her when she had asked if he really thought that someone at Neoform could have killed Jasmine Willison.

  “No.” She patted his belly, making his small roll of flab jiggle. “But he’d be hurt.” She paused. “Or maybe not. He was telling me just a few weeks ago, when I thought I was in too much of a rush to look out the window and see the Assassin bird, that I seemed to have forgotten how to stop and smell the flowers by the side of my path.”

  “Some flower.” He kissed her temple gently.

  She sighed. “Maybe I’m remembering how, again? I used to be able to. Or maybe it’s just shock.”

  “It could be both.”

  “I still won’t tell him. And we shouldn’t do this again.”

  * * *

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE COUNT WAS waiting in the hallway when Bernie Fischer reached the station Tuesday morning. Beside him was a slender fellow whose gray mustache did not match his jet-black hair. He was wearing a white lab coat and carrying in one hand a small case covered in green-dyed leather. In the other hand, he held a cane.

  Bernie had never had much to do with the man, but he recognized Daniel Addering, the vet who took care of the department’s genimals. He needed the cane because a Hawk had once bitten his thigh; the leg had been weak ever since. “Hi, Dan,” he said with a nod. He then looked at Lieutenant Alexander.

  “I’ve asked Dan to look at that Mack truck that nearly got you yesterday,” he said.

  Bernie snorted. “You might as well call in the meat packers,” he said.

  “You don’t think I’ll find anything?” asked the vet. His voice was heavy with the practiced softness of one who was used to gentling animals in distress.

  “Not in the carcass.” Bernie paused while he stared the Count in the eye. Finally, he said, “I’ll bet you my next raise the problem’s in the thing’s controls. And it’s an extra chip, just like the one in that Sparrow.”

  “I heard about that,” said Addering. “I’d like…”

  The Count, ignoring the vet, stared back at Bernie. His red lips were set in a line that said as well as words that he was afraid his underling would win the bet. “It won’t take long to see if you’re right, will it? Though we’ll need a computer jock to find it.”

  Bernie shook his head. “I know where to look. And I have a photo of the other chip.”

  “Then get it.”

  Bernie did, and the three men left the building, passed through the yard in front of the Aerie, and turned down the street. Addering’s limp did not slow them enough to matter. A block away, they stopped before the loading dock of an old, brick-walled warehouse. A smear of something dark led under the dock’s truck-sized main door. Set in that door, to one side, was a smaller personnel door, which Lieutenant Alexander opened with a key from his pocket.

  A few small and filthy windows were set high in the warehouse’s walls. Those that faced the sun admitted narrow beams of light across which drifted swarms of dust motes. The light that escaped absorption by the motes, and that more
diffuse light that entered through those windows that did not face the sun, were just enough to reveal the warehouse’s interior as a gloomy, shabby cavern. The room was still cool from the night, but the heat was already growing noticeably. The odor was of dust and mildew and dead meat.

  Above were girders draped with wires and ancient spider webs. To one side stood three careless tiers of cardboard boxes, wooden crates, and plastic barrels. To the other slumped what had to be the Mack’s carcass. Its back was toward them, one ear cocked absurdly ceilingward. They could not see its lifeless eyes.

  The Count found the light switch, and banks of fluorescent lights slung beneath the distant roof came on. Half the fluorescent tubes were dead, and half the rest flickered dimly. The few remaining improved the cavern’s lighting only enough to let them see that the smear by the door continued, ending in a pool of blood that had congealed around the Mack’s head and neck, where Bernie’s bullets had torn its vessels open.

  Addering stepped closer to the beast. He stood near its shoulder, head bowed, one hand resting on the cold, stiff flesh. In a moment, he reached up with his cane and pushed at the base of the erect ear. It fell away from him, forward and over the genimal’s face, into a more normal configuration. “It’s hard to believe,” he said at last, “that a handgun did this.”

  “I like one with plenty of punch,” said Bernie. He leaned slightly forward as he spoke, belligerent. “And it had already killed enough bystanders.” He was proud of what he had done, of saving Emily, himself, more bystanders. He did not think that any animal-lover, even the official police vet, had any right to criticize.

  “A .357 magnum.” His superior laid one hand on his shoulder. The fingers bit into the flesh, drawing him back to civility.

  “Ah,” said the vet. He still had not looked at Bernie, had not noticed the effect of his words, but the moment passed. He nodded sadly. “Poor thing.”

  Bernie turned away, toward a windrow of more mechanical debris along the wall. Had Addering really meant to criticize? He had certainly taken the man’s first words that way, but perhaps the vet merely felt sympathetic toward the dead genimal. He shrugged mentally. Here were the remnants of the Mack’s cargo compartment. Next to them was a stack of the boxes that had been its cargo. “Where’s the dashboard stuff?”