Hook set course for the city.
If necessary he would use the same method to gain entrance.
As it was, he guessed the Boosted Men would open up the valves to admit him; unlimber guns on him, and seek to take him to find out just what kind of man he was. He hoped they had no idea he was a half Boosted Man. If they didn't and he smashed on through they would have an incredibly harder task clearing up the city.
The Boosted power remained with him for some time and then as the city came in sight it waned. But it did not entirely vanish and then, like the passing away of a trifling spot of vertigo, it returned and he was once more a fully Boosted Man.
A Novaman had set out in a flier to the city to follow him.
Hook gleed.
The black bastards were bringing their own destruction upon themselves! Now he was Boosted he could operate,
He did.
Ryder Hook felt himself to be a man who disliked waste. He abhorred destruction. Senseless baying over an act of vandalism sickened him. He didn't like smashing things up — well, not ordinary things belonging to ordinary people. He'd smash up everything he could belonging to the Novamen. Then, he supposed, being human, he'd take the usual human atavistic and primitive kick from seeing pretty fireworks and hearing big bangs and jump with joy when things fell down. A hundred or so centuries of evolution were not long enough to eradicate all the dark and primordial chasms from the mind of man.
Allied to that would be the typical superficial thinking of the critics who would point to the fact that he became a superman — as they'd phrase it without understanding the agonising gulfs separating him from any sense of superhumanity — only when another superman came near. How convenient, they'd chirrup, how handy to become as superhuman as your enemy when he turned up! Of course, the critics would miss the darker side of it, they usually did. The reality of that situation was far more profound and baffling than a simple equation. The tragedy lay in the fact that Hook ought to have been a Boosted Man and wasn't. He wanted to be. And he knew to what depths of evil that desire might lead him. But temptation could only be resisted by constructing a whole shaky but stabilised life-style around some belief. Hook's beliefs ran deep and dark and, however naive they might appear to the critics, they powered him and made him a man.
Sod the critics, anyway. He was Ryder Hook, one time assassin Jack Kinch, and he had to save a bunch of near-strangers from a ghastly death and he had to get Shaeel and ves baby and Karg out of it, too. That was quite enough to be going on with for now, thank you.
As he had anticipated the airlock valves to the city waited with the outermost opened ready for him.
Cheeses and traps were familiar gambits in the full galactic life.
Hook barreled the flier in and refused to answer the call from the screen. He slowed as the rear end of the armour slid past the open outer valves and they began to close together. He waited until they were three metres apart and then pushed the speed controls to full forward.
The flier kicked and shot ahead. It smashed its armoured snout into the inner valves. They creaked back on their supports, shuddered, and then gave way in a coruscating crash of metalloy and armour-glass and plastic. Tubing and wiring snaked and curled back. At once flames shot up from severed connections, flames which began to hurl themselves towards the outer airlock valves in the wind-rush. As the valves clunked-to the flames gyrated, swirled, and then fastened greedily upon anything combustible within sight. Hook sent the flier belting forward at full throttle. They'd have those flames under control within seconds, and he wanted to be well away into the city before then.
Only three shots reached him this time, and all three flamed off the armour. He ducked the flier into the first intersection past the landing area out of sight of the heavier weapons.
The flier had warmed up from those three blasts. He checked it over a cross street where a warehouse marked 'Off limits' thrust its bulk up at the dome. Hook thumbed the canopy open, held on to the speed controls just long enough to flick them into drive and then, switching to speed time, dropped clear.
The flier arrowed off across the city and as Hook landed lightly on the warehouse roof he saw the flier punch slap-bang into the side of the warehouse across the street. It blew up. Bits and pieces of plastic sheeting shot into the air. Debris fell. The goons might think he'd been killed in the blast. Once a Boosted Man arrived and took over he would make no such assumptions.
In fast time Hook raced down through the warehouse past frozen robots caught in the act of clearing out empty packing cases, darted into the street, tore along. Stark naked as he was — apart from those old boots — the air-friction that would have crisped mere material felt like a warm breeze on his Boosted skin. The worry nagging at him concerned Anthea.
All the passenger survivors, the only people here he could save because everyone else was as good as dead already, would be coming off shift together around now. But Anthea — she'd been transferred. Lord knew when her shift would come off duty.
Still in speed time he caught a goon around a corner out of sight and yanked the fellow's Tonota Forty free. A light tap and the goon lay on the ground. Hook removed his uniform tunic and pants and put them on as he ran, hopping along on one leg. He had to slow a little; but the lake-side restaurant rose ahead and he could count on finding Rafflans and Myza and Denis and the others there.
He walked into the tumbledown rusty old shed and at once saw the survivors sitting on crates and boxes at the crazy tables. Rafflans stood up. Not a one of them was eating or drinking. Rafflans said: 'You Terran son-of-a-bitch! You did come back.' The big Krifman laughed. Other people in the restaurant were eating and drinking and some couples were dancing. 'I told you that Marden-reef trembler was junk.'
'Where's Anthea?'
'She's still on shift,' said Myza. She looked distressingly fragile. 'This is terrible! The filth and squalor — and we thought — let's get out of here!'
'We will, purry, we will,' said Rafflans, patting her shoulder.
'We can't go without Anthea. Rafflans, start 'em towards the flier park; but go cautiously. If I'm not there in — give me twenty minutes — grab a flier and break out. Make for the spaceport. Starpacket Watchling. Guy called Karg.'
'Check. And you?'
Myza said: 'Denis is off with his Leona.'
Hook adjusted to the switch. If Rafflans saw anything in Myza that was his hard luck.
'Find him and bring him. Leona is — Leona's dead.'
'I'll find her,' said Rafflans, 'I owe her. She's a good kid.' He shook his head. 'She told me she really cared for that creep Denis. He'll come. I'll slug him and drag him if necessary.'
'Don't miss the boat, Rafflans.'
'You great Terran heap of rejects! I haven't forgotten what I promised you!'
'You'll be doing yourself a terrible mischief, Krifman.'
'That'll be the day.'
Hook and Rafflans walked out of the restaurant. The other survivors with the de-activated ladybird bugs in their ears watched them go as though they took salvation with them.
Outside Hook said: 'I'll fetch Anthea. Don't be late, Rafflans.'
'Don't you be late, either, you — ' Rafflans's face broke into a broad and beaming smile and he went on in a happy-giggly voice: 'Sure a great meal in there, officer! It's great to be on Locus!'
Hook turned his back and waited as the flier patrolled past. Rafflans could be counted on.
He watched as Rafflans made off and then headed for the Main Building. He switched to speed time. He did not want the Krifman to be presented with the incredible sight of Hook abruptly disappearing from view. Outside the Main Building he saw the usual gaggle of patrol fliers had been heavily re-enforced and heavy-lift fliers were winging up into the air from the loading bays at the side, They hung apparently suspended, barely moving. He went in and raced across the cracked concrete . . . Biomedical was marked up and he sizzled along corridors with their frozen people and came out into a laborator
y which showed all the usual Locus air of decrepitude and disrepair, of neglect and dust which the battered cleaning robots could never clean. Zombies stood in frozen attitudes in stained and ripped lab smocks. They looked exhausted. He looked for Fraulein Anthea Elterich.
He found her painstakingly patching in servo-mechanisms to a powered exoskeleton. Her slender fingers remained unmoving with an electronic probe delicately positioned in the mechanics of the skeleton. However neglected Locus and its buildings and people might be, work still went on and he felt he would have to revise his estimate that the Boosted Men were pulling out. Those heavy-duty fliers indicated a consignment was being shipped out. But the work continued. These exoskeletons, the primitive origins of the work that had culminated in the Boosted Men, would be used to give extra power to ordinary human bodies. The Boosted Men were back at their old tricks again, building up powerful dupes to do their dirty work for them, as they had done on Sterkness and Janitra.
Anthea looked distressingly beautiful, dishevelled, oil-smudged of face, her hair draggling around her shoulders. The filthy old lab smock showed a large area of orange through a rent in the side. Hook's anger, usually inwardly-directed, could flower in violent animosity against the Novamen as he looked at this girl ...
In the cover of a spectrographic unit he could come out of speed time and walk towards her. He felt a dizzy sense of vertigo; but that quickly passed, a mere disjointed thump of his heart.
`Alf!' said Anthea, looking up, her lovely face flushed. 'Whatever are you doing here? And — that's a guard's uniform. Have you joined the guards, then? Why, how wonderful!'
Had he joined the police forces of Locus? He must have, for he was wearing a uniform and carried a gun. Anthea looked gorgeous in her gleaming white lab smock, with her hair perfumed and cloudy about her face. The lab looked clean and bright and wonderful to work in. And this evening he was going to give Anthea a wonderful time on the lake and at the ballet!
Chapter Thirteen
He told her.
`That sounds fabulous, Alf! It's Turko and Solaia and we'll have to be there early to get a good seat. But I can't get over you joining the police.'
'I — ' He felt strange, lumpy and nowhere near as fine and fit as he should be down here on wonderful Locus. He had to pass it off, for nothing was going to interrupt the glorious evening he was going to spend with this glorious girl. He had to lie, and that was a most unusual thing for anyone to do in Locus!
'Oh, I felt like a change. How much longer to — '
He was answered by the knocking-off whistle. Anthea straightened up. She put her slipstick into a pocket of that gleaming white lab smock and took it off and they walked together over to the lobby where she hung the smock on its peg alongside all the other equally gleaming white smocks.
`That's a terrific dress, Anthea. It's new!'
`You like it? You just wait until tonight, Alf. I'm wearing what the vending robot described as an elegantly glamorous evening leisure-gown sculptured to show off the delectable me!'
`I'm hungry already.'
Come to think of it, he was famished.
`Caviar and beefsteak and that very extra-special Woheran-cultivated tomato that does you know what. I'm starving.'
`I'll satisfy you, Alf! You know that.'
He took her arm in a companionable grip and pressed and she laughed and so they ran out and into the waning evening sunlight of Locus. By the Great Salvor! It was good to be alive and have a good job and live on a fine planet like this and all the time be socking money into the account! You couldn't better that in any world of the galaxy!
They crossed tracks until they reached the pedway they wanted and were carried along to their hotel. A hot bath and a change of clothes — he pushed the problem of the policeman's uniform away — and then out to have a gorgeous time on the town. A patrol flier cruised past, circled, came back to hover on its antigrays just ahead of them. Anthea waved, as everyone waved to the police. The two men inside — one a mal, the other a tensor — stepped out and came up to Hook and Anthea.
'Hullo!' said Anthea, brightly. 'Friends of yours, Alf?'
'I — suppose so.'
The mal twisted his tubular ear. 'You're Hook.' His hand brought the Tonota Forty out of its holster. The tensor's high thin shoulders twitched as he unlimbered his own gun.
'You'll have to try elsewhere,' said Anthea, laughing. 'This is Alf. He's just joined the police, so perhaps —'
`Alf. Well, if you'll just step into the flier, Alf. And you'd best come too, tayniss.'
'Oh!' cried Anthea. 'But we're going to the ballet —'
'Later on, that'll be all IQ.'
'Well, I've always wanted to see the inside of a police precinct house, Alf. And we'll meet your new colleagues — '
Hook wondered why they wanted him and why, anyway, he was wearing police uniform. He must have got drunk and played a joke. Well, no harm would come of it, not on Locus!
He put a foot on the armoured sill of the flier. He felt a strange trembling in his muscles, a trilling along his nerve-endings. He turned his head and saw Anthea staring up at him with her laughing face all flushed and lovely, the discreet cosmetics enhancing her natural beauty and not hiding it. Her primrose yellow dress with the subtle curves around breasts and waist — she was wearing a filthy ripped orange coverall, and her face although lovely was exhausted and oil-smeared, and these two goons had called him Hook and were pressing guns into his back!
By all the stars in the galaxy!
Fool! Cretin! Idiot!
He had no ladybird in his ear. And the Boosted Man had taken himself off about some business back to the spaceport, probably, and now he had returned — almost too late. Almost. Hook wasn't going to have Anthea roughed up by these goons.
He switched to fast time as he fell into the flier.
To the guards and to Anthea he would appear to have fallen into the body of the machine. They would see him vanish below their line of sight, obscured by the sill, and would follow him.
In speed time Hook went outside the flier. The two goons stood there, their guns pointing inwardly at empty air. Anthea in her pathetic orange coverall stood, one knee flexed, waiting to board. Hook took the ladybirds out of the ears of the goons, whipped tools from his boot, went to work. Then he shoved one of the ladybirds into his own left ear. He couldn't afford to take that kind of insane chance again.
Just how far the resonances between him and a fully Boosted Man operated depended on a variety of parameters he hadn't as yet been afforded the opportunity of investigating. In space — mega kilometers. Down here — a drastic reduction. And he knew that some Boosted Men channelled more power out than others, so that he could be activated at differing distances. Maybe this bastard of a Boosted Man marshalling the resources of Locus to destroy him had a small radius of power output. It seemed like it.
He vaulted back into the flier, knuckled the two goons as he leant out, and then switched back to real time.
Anthea said: . . . love to — oh! What's the matter with the poor policemen?'
For both goons had collapsed to the sidewalk.
'Get in Anthea.' She stared at him, wide-eyed, and he yelled: 'Get in, woman, and jump!. . . ?'
He yanked her into the flier and slammed the canopy.
'Put this in your left ear. And then don't say a word. Take it all in and if you have hysterics I'll tan your bottom.'
She thought it was all some kind of joke ...
He gunned the flier towards the flier park.
Presently he heard a whispery little rustle of a voice at his side.
'Oh — Hook!'
`Yes, Anthea. We're getting out of here. The others are waiting and we've five seconds to meet up with them.'
The flier slewed across the flier park. Down there Rafflans looked up through a flier canopy and waved. The Krifman had selected a large armoured job and the surviving passengers had been packed in. Hook opened up a direct channel to Rafflans' flier. It could
be monitored, of course; probably it would be, and that could be useful.
'All set?'
'Denis cannot be found. Myza is frantic.'
'If she wants to stay look for him, IQ. We're not.'
Myza's voice, hot and angry:
`You can't leave him! You can't!'
`I can. There is one of him, and a whole lot of us. There's no choice.'
Rafflans must have dragged her away from the mike, for he came on, sounding more excited than angry: 'You'd just take off and leave the guy, Hook?'
`Watch me.'
Deliberately, Hook swung the flier up over the park and headed out.
Rafflans' voice over the speaker said: 'But —'
`Get moving, you Krifman idiot! The goons'll have you pinpointed now. They'll blow you and all to hell and gone.'
Whatever Rafflans was doing down there, if he didn't lift jets soon Hook would leave him cold. No question.
The big armoured flier rose and shot forward. Hook increased velocity. Anthea, looking out the canopy, let out a scream.
Hook's instant and instinctive manoeuvre swept the flier around in a tight curve. The blast sizzled past beneath them. He let the swing carry on and rolled the flier and swooped. Like most of the smaller patrol armoured jobs she carried a pair of Tonota two fifties up front, relatively large and powerful weapons for planetary work. Hook sprayed the blast all across the goons' flier and watched it frizzle. The armouring might protect easily enough from a spray-back reflection or from something below the two hundred mark; against a two-fifty it melted and flowed like toffee in a tureen.
Both fliers streaked for the airlocks.
This was the tricky part. This was the part where sheer blind luck alone could aid him, although he knew that his Boosted senses could keep him out of mischief by his phenomenally quick reflexes, the people in Rafflans' flier had no such protection.
Well — not exactly that, for they had a Boosted Man riding interference for them. Ryder Hook was that Boosted Man. He could feel the neural currents in his body, fully alive, tingling, filled with zest. He could calculate faster than any computer. He could make instant decisions that no computer could even understand. He rolled the flier's nose towards the airlock valves. They'd been hard at work patching and the temporary rolling shutters were in place and presenting a frighteningly solid wall. Hook shot them out.
The Boosted Man Page 11
