city blues 01 - dome city blues (53 page)

I poked my left hand toward Maggie.  “You think that
thing
is Maggie Stalin?”

“She
is
Maggie,” John said.

“Bullshit,” I said.  “Bull-shit.”

I poked my finger in her direction again.  “I don’t know
what
that is: an animated corpse, maybe.  A scientific curiosity, without a doubt.  But it’s
not
a human being.  And it most certainly is
not
Maggie.”

“She isn’t...”

“Not
she
, John. 
It!
”

Maggie yanked the laser around to point at me.  “Shut up, David.”

I looked at her.  This was a dicey game, at best.  The trick was to push far enough to snap John around, without going so far that Maggie would burn me down.

“Or what?” I snapped.  “You’ll shoot me?”

My eyes went back to John.  “Does this sound like Maggie to you?  The real Maggie?  The gentle, sweet Maggie that I fell in love with?  That
you
fell in love with?  Did you ever see the real Maggie raise a hand to anyone, except on the practice-floor, or in self-defense?  I mean sure, she knew her way around guns, but did you ever hear of the real Maggie actually shooting anything besides a target?”

“I
am
Maggie!” she said.  “Don’t listen to him, Baby; he just wants to confuse you.  He’s trying to divide us.”

“How many people has this thing killed now?  Twenty-five?  Thirty?  Jesus, John, how many has it killed that you don’t even
know
about?  That’s why you’ve got to implant Sonja with the puppet chip, isn’t it?  You need another scapegoat because that thing has been killing little girls again.”

“Don’t do this, David,” John said.  “For your own good, stop it now.”

“What are you saying?  If I behave myself, she’s going to let me walk out of here?  Look at yourself, John.  You’re a button-push away from doing the same thing to Sonja that you did to Russell Carlisle and Michael Winter.  That thing, that
maniac
, has turned you into a killer right along side her.  She butchers the little girls, and you create the puppets to take the blame.”

I waved my left hand at the surgical robot.  “You’re so excited about this technological miracle of yours.  When do you start using it to change the world, like you talked about, instead of covering up for that thing’s murders?”

Maggie pulled the trigger.  The laser drilled through my left leg, a molten tunnel of pain through the meat of my thigh.  I screamed as my leg folded.  I collapsed to the floor.

It took me a couple of seconds of breathing through clenched teeth to get enough of a handle on the pain to speak.

“When...” my voice came out in a hiss.  “When it brings... you a heart... that it’s ripped... out of the chest of some little... girl...  What do you do... with it?  Or does she...
eat
it?”

Maggie aimed the laser at my head and pulled the trigger.  John moved at the same instant, grabbing the barrel of the weapon and pushing it to the side.  The deadly beam flashed by my head, close enough that I felt the heat of its passing.

“Stop it, Maggie!” John shouted.  “Stop it, now!”

Maggie screamed, an inarticulate shriek with no words behind it.  John and Maggie grappled over the weapon.  John hung on to the barrel, jerking and twisting it, trying to wrench it out of Maggie’s hands.

My Blackhart lay on the floor where it had fallen.  I started crawling toward it, scrabbling as quickly as my injured limbs would pull me.

I was just about a meter short when I heard John shout “David!  Look out!”

I rolled to my left and the laser fried the patch of floor where I’d just been laying.  I snapped my head around just in time to see Maggie’s left hand whip out and smash into John’s windpipe.  He fell to the floor, gasping and clawing at his throat.

She aimed the laser at my forehead and made a kissing gesture with her lips.  Her finger tightened on the trigger.

“Drop it!”  The voice came from behind me, sharp and mechanical.

Maggie’s eyes darted to the door.

I turned my head too.

Surf stood in the doorway, a strange and vaguely rifle-shaped weapon pointed at Maggie.  The barrel portion of the weapon seemed to consist of five or six brick-sized superconductor modules wrapped in electrical tape and conduit foil.

Five more of Iron Betty’s fledglings surged through the door and fanned out like a SWAT Team.  One woman and four men, all of them about as heavily augmented with cybernetic hardware as Surf.  Their guns looked like Surf’s, and they all pointed at Maggie.  I could see more of them moving out there in the hall.

“Drop it!” Surf yelled again.  “Right fucking now!”

Maggie’s laser flared again, and the man to Surf’s left shrieked and fell to the floor with a smoking hole in his chest.

Surf’s strange weapon squealed like a bank of charging capacitors when he fired it.  At least two of his henchmen fired a millisecond behind him.  The lights flickered.

Maggie spun to her right, dancing away from the unseen energy beams.  The barrel of her laser swept around toward Surf, and she pulled the trigger.  Nothing happened; her battery pack was dry.

Surf and his soldiers fired again.  The squeals of their weapons were nearly simultaneous.  The lights flickered again, and Maggie’s body recoiled, as though she’d been struck full in the chest by a heavy weight.

She staggered a half-step backwards, swaying gently, like a tree in the breeze.  The maniacal tension in her face relaxed slowly, as if the demons that had driven her were exorcised at last.  The laser slipped from her fingers, bounced once off the floor, and snapped back to hover near her right ankle, still tethered to the battery pack on her belt by its coiled power cable.  Her knees buckled and she collapsed.

And suddenly, everything was still.

The silence held for several heartbeats.  And then there was a sound.  It was extremely faint, a plaintive whimper, like the mewling of a kitten.

I struggled to get my legs under me.  The hole in my thigh was a core of pain, pulsing in time to the nauseous throbbing inside my skull.  Somehow, I staggered to my feet and stumbled toward Maggie.

I knew that it must be some sort of trick, one last chance for the thing that Maggie had become to wreak its vengeance on me.  But I couldn’t stop myself.

I was drawn inexorably to the sound of her quiet whimperings.  My knees buckled and I sank to the floor at her side.

Her eyes were closed, but she seemed to sense my presence.  “David?”  Her voice was tremulous.  A bubble of saliva grew on her lips and burst.

“Yes, Maggie?”

Her right hand was cradled against her chest.  She shifted her head slightly, as though looking at something through her closed eyelids.  “I tested myself this morning.  I came out negative again.”

I stared down at her.  What in the hell was she talking about?  Was she hallucinating?  Had Surf’s strange weapon somehow scrambled the chip in her brain?

She coughed, and the mewling started again, deep within her throat.  She swallowed it with an effort, and spoke again.  “The home tests... they aren’t a hundred percent accurate, are they?”

Her voice seemed different.  The hard edge was fading from it, returning some of the quiet serenity that I remembered.  She was beginning to sound like the real Maggie.

“Do you think...”  She coughed again.  Her voice was even weaker when she spoke again.  “Do you think we should go see... a doctor?”

It hit me suddenly.  Surf’s weapon had somehow driven the real Maggie back to the surface, or part of her anyway.  She was reliving an old memory.  And I knew exactly which memory it was.

A lump of steel grew in the back of my throat, making it impossible for me to swallow.  My voice was a hoarse whisper.  “Whatever you say, Magpie.  I’ll have House make us an appointment.”

A smile played across her lips for a second, but was quickly erased by a grimace.  Her eyes remained closed.  “We’re going to make a baby, David.  I promise you we are.”  Her right hand fell back from her chest and lay palm up, fingers twitching slightly.

I took her hand in mine.  Her fingers wrapped around my hand.  I squeezed my eyes shut in a vain effort to dam a flood of tears.  “I know we are, Princess.  I know.”

She drew a sharp breath and released it slowly.  Her grip on my hand relaxed, and she was still.

I squeezed her hand gently.  “Good-bye, Maggie.”

John shrieked, a crazy wordless sound that hung in the air like the cry of a wounded animal.

He slapped the data-shades down over his eyes; his hands began to flail and weave inside the data-gloves.  “Goddamn you!  Goddamn you
ALL
!”

The hideous spider-queen struck.  Two of the big manipulator arms lashed out and snatched one of Surf’s men, lifting him off the ground.  A half-dozen smaller arms darted in to attack, stabbing at the man’s face with syringes and scalpels.

He tried to scream, but one of the scalpels slashed his throat before he got a chance.  Another scalpel plunged into his belly just above the groin, and ripped its way upward until it struck his sternum, gutting him, spilling fat loops of intestine all over the floor.  The air swelled with the wet copper stink of hot blood and visceral feces.

John’s hands were dancing now inside their data-gloves; the queen-spider reached for another victim.  “You bastards!” he screamed.  “You killed her!  You fucking
killed
her!”

Surf and his squad dove for the floor, away from the robot’s grasping arms, but the machine was inhumanly fast.  A three-fingered claw snagged the back of the woman’s jacket before she could get out of range.  One of the radial bone saws veered in, its spinning blade spraying blood and bits of gray matter as it sliced into the back of the woman’s skull.  Her death-cries were nearly drowned out by the sickening dental-drill whine of steel teeth grinding through bone.

A cluster of robot arms shot toward me, blades slashing and fingers grabbing.  My reflexes kicked in, launching me backwards, away from the robot’s attack.  One of the scalpels tagged me in mid-flight, slicing diagonally across my chest, laying open the fabric of my jacket just a millimeter short of my flesh.  My shoulders hit the floor and I skidded across the tile on my back, sliding safely out of range.

The robot’s arms windmilled crazily, searching for new targets, but Surf and what was left of his squad were laying on the floor now, below the reach of the deadly machine.

John disappeared behind one of the equipment consoles.

Both sides jockeyed for some kind of advantage.  Surf’s men tried to shift into positions that would give them an angle-of-fire on John, but the robot’s arms responded instantly, ready to cut down anyone who moved in close enough to get a clean shot.  After about twenty seconds of useless maneuvering, Surf’s men settled down to wait, and the queen-spider went still.

“Looks like we’ve got us a stand-off,” Surf said.

John’s only answer was the sound of rapid breathing from his hiding place behind the console.

“Gypsy, are you out there?” Surf called.

“We’re out here,” said a voice from outside the door.

“Good,” Surf said.  “You and Viper get down to the second-floor and start venting the plasma from the backup power cells.”

“We’re on it,” the voice said.

That seemed to catch John’s attention.  “Huh?  What?  No.  No, wait.  You can’t do that!  Those are phased-plasma units.  You don’t know what will happen!”

“I know exactly what they are,” Surf said.  “Convair L-Series Phased-plasma cadmium tetra-cores, right?  Thirty-two of them, I believe.  When we hit that plasma with a spark, this place goes up like a fucking bomb.”

“You’ll never get out of here,” John said.

“This is the first big battle of the Convergence,” Surf said.  “We’ve been waiting for it for years.  Planning for it.  If death is the price, we’ll pay it.  Every one of us.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?” John asked.  “Who are you people?”

“Who we are doesn’t matter,” Surf said.  “All that matters is what we do.  And tonight, we’re here to make sure that evolution turns right instead of left.”

One of Surf’s men raised his head enough to spit in John’s direction.  “There’s a war on, Asshole.  Man against Machine.  And you’re on the wrong side.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” John said.  “But I want out of here, and I’m taking Maggie with me.”

“You sold out your species,” Surf said.  “No way you’re getting out of here alive.”

John exhaled heavily.  “What do
you
say, Sarge?  Do these lunatics speak for you?  Are you ready to die for their paranoid fantasies?”

“I don’t want to die,” I said.  “But I agree with Surf on one point.  You have to be stopped.  And if dying is what it takes...”

“Is that right?” John asked.  “How about your girlfriend here?  Did she sign on for the long-haul?”

Oh god… 
Sonja
.  She’d been laying there so quiet amidst all the blood and the screaming that I’d almost forgotten about her.

I’d come crashing in here to save her, David the Avenging Angel, complete with everything except a flaming sword.  And now, unless I could do something to stop it, she was going to die anyway.

“Screw... you...” Sonja said.

Damn it!  She was coming around again, and with incredibly bad timing.  Go under, I thought.  Please, don’t fight it.  Just let the drugs take you down.  Or at least keep your mouth shut.

I looked around.  My Blackhart was only about two meters away.  I started to crawl towards it, every movement bringing a new surge of pain from my wrist and leg.

“You... killed... my brother,” Sonja mumbled.

“Ice, Hammerhead, listen up,” Surf said.  “Here’s the game plan: crawl to the door and get the hell out of here.  Stay flat on your stomachs and don’t raise so much as an eyebrow.  That damn thing in the ceiling shouldn’t be able to reach you.”

“Okay,” one of the men said.  “Then what?”

“Tell Gypsy to set the plasma cells to blow in three minutes.  That’ll give you time to get out of the building.”