city blues 01 - dome city blues (54 page)

One of the men started crawling for the exit.  Several of the robot’s arms swiped at him, but he stayed just out of their reach.

“What about you?” the other man asked.

“I’m staying here,” Surf said.  “To make sure that Dr. Maniac doesn’t slip out the back way.”

“Then I’m not leaving either,” the man said.

“Goddamn it, Hammerhead, there’s no sense in both of us dying,” Surf said.  “I’m a casualty of war.”

“That’s fine,” Hammerhead said.  “Then we’re both casualties.”

“You’re a stubborn bastard,” Surf said.

“Yeah, well, you’ll forgive me for it in a couple of minutes.”

I was a half-meter away from the Blackhart. 
Just a little farther.

John must have realized from my silence that he’d scored a hit.  “How about it, Sarge?  Is pretty Ms. Redhead expendable?”

Movement at the corner of my eye caught my attention.  A trio of robotic arms were descending to hover above Sonja’s chest and I realized that the queen-spider was about to feed again.

“Shall we see if Maggie was right?” John asked.  “Would you like for me to open this one up and find out if we can see her soul?”

“Go ahead...” Sonja said.  “Bastard...”

The fingers of my left hand touched the butt of the Blackhart.  I walked my fingers across the top of it and dragged it into my palm.  “That doesn’t sound like the John I know,” I said.

“It frankly isn’t my first choice.  But I’m in a corner here, and I’ll do what I have to.”

I hauled my right hand up and wrapped it around the grip of the Blackhart, gritting my teeth to stifle the whimper that climbed my throat.

The man called Ice yelled from across the room, “I’m at the door.”

“Good,” Surf said.  “Now get the fuck out.  You go too, Hammerhead.  There’s still time.”

“Zero chance,” Hammerhead said.

“Okay, Sarge, I’m tired of fucking around,” John said.  “You’ve got about five seconds to call off your dogs, or Ms. Redhead gets turned into bite-sized chunks.”

“You’ve seen what they’re like,” I said.  “You think they’re going to listen to me?”

“You’d damn well better hope they do,” John said.  “
Four
seconds.”

“Screw... you...” Sonja added.

“These guys don’t work for me,” I said.

“
Three
seconds.”

I took a deep breath and shoved myself sideways as hard as I could, rolling over and over across the floor.  Each revolution drove jagged bolts of pain through me like fresh shots from the laser.

“
Two
.”

I took a last tumble and slid to a stop face down, a few meters across from John’s hiding place.  Suddenly I was staring at him down the sights of my Blackhart.

“
One
.”

I pulled the trigger.  The recoil hit my injured wrist like a sledgehammer.  I screamed.

The steel-jacketed round slammed into the wrap-around data-shades just above the bridge of his nose.  The impact knocked him to the floor in a shower of gore and shattered plastic.  He twitched once and then lay still at the center of a spreading pool of blood.  The robot’s spider-arms quivered in response, and then hung limp.

Surf stood up and wiped his hands together.  “Game over.”  He looked around.  “Hammerhead, get off your ass and go untie the woman.”

Hammerhead climbed to his feet and did as he was told, ducking and darting as he moved under the arms of the surgical robot.  It was a job that he obviously didn’t want, but he couldn’t figure out how to refuse after having broadcasted his instant willingness to die for the
cause
.

“Get a move on,” Surf said.  “The clock is ticking.”  He reached down and offered me a hand.

With his help, I managed to struggle to my feet.

Ten seconds later, when the last of Sonja’s straps had been released, Hammerhead looked up.  “This one’s not walking,” he said loudly.  “She’s pretty tranked.”

“I can... walk,” said Sonja.

“Carry her,” Surf said.  The lenses of his electroptic eyes spun and whirred as he gave the room a last sweeping glance.  “Let’s go.”

The stairs nearly killed me; Surf practically had to drag me down them.  Each step brought a fresh wave of pain.

I tried to take my mind off it.  “What kind... of gun is that?”

“It’s an EMP rifle,” Surf said.

“Imp?  Little... demons?  Or magical men?”

“EMP,” Surf said.  “E. M. P.  Electromagnetic Pulse.”

“How does it work?”

“A strong enough electromagnetic pulse will slick a microchip.  We actually brought them in case the AI was still kicking.  They just happened to come in handy for Zombie Woman.”

One of Surf’s soldiers met us at the second-floor landing.  “Fifty seconds,” he said.

“All right!” Surf said.  “You heard him.  We’ve gotta move!”

The man fell into step on my right side and shouldered part of my weight.  We started to move a little faster.

“So your EMP rifle wouldn’t hurt a normal person?” I asked.

“Nope,” Surf said.  “Unless it slicked your digital watch, you’d never even know you’d been pulsed.”

“Then how did you know it would work on Maggie?”

We made the last turn before the first-floor landing.

“We knew about the chip in her head,” Surf said.  “And about the one in your friend John’s head.”

“You’ve been tracking John all along?” I asked.  “You already had him figured into your Convergence predictions?”

“Uh-uh,” Surf said.  “We found out about him the easy way.  We bugged you.”

“You bugged me?”

“Yeah,” Surf said.  “We slipped a micro-bug into the collar of your jacket.  No offense, but we weren’t going to come charging in just because you had a hard-on.  So we listened for a while.  When we knew for sure that this was the real deal, we grabbed our torches and pitchforks, and marched on the castle.”

We were half-way across the parking lot and still moving when the first explosion hit.  It sounded more like a gunshot than anything, but the secondary that followed about three seconds later had a bass rumble to it that nearly deafened me.

The windows were bulletproof polycarbon.  They didn’t shatter; instead, they bulged and split like overripe fruit, belching streamers of fire and gouts of black smoke.  The shock wave blew us off our feet and sent us skidding across the pavement.  A fireball boiled out of the front door and climbed the face of the building.

A second later, we were on our feet again and doing our best imitation of a run.

Surf’s Focke-Wulf hover-sedan swerved to a halt at the far side of the parking lot.  The driver was an Iron Betty Disciple that I’d never met.

Surf and his soldier were easing me into the back seat when someone screamed, “Look!  Up there!  On the roof!”

All eyes turned to the top of the burning Neuro-Tech Building.

Up there, silhouetted against the rising flames, stood Maggie.  She shouldn’t have been alive, but somehow she was.  Maybe Surf’s EMP-gun had only damaged her chips instead of slicking them completely.

She had something slung across her shoulder.  It took me a half-second to realize that it was a body.  John’s body.

Maggie looked around frantically, and then spotted the fire escape on the north face of the building.  She took off towards it at the closest thing to a full run she could manage.

In their last seconds, the plasma power cores must have sent a final surge of energy coursing through the building’s wiring grid.  The holo-projectors flickered to life, and for the space of perhaps two seconds, Maggie ran with her burden along the battlements at the top of a haunted castle wall.  Then, the last of the power died, and the illusion faded from existence.

“She’s going to make it!” I whispered.

I didn’t know which personality had the upper hand: the psycho-killer, or the old Maggie that had reappeared for those few seconds on the floor of John’s lab.  And suddenly, despite everything that had happened, despite everything that she had done, I found myself praying that she would make it.

Tears welled up to blur my vision.  “Come on, Magpie!” I whispered.  “Come on!”

She was just a few meters short of the fire escape when she stumbled.  John’s body slipped from her arms and fell to the roof.  She paused for a second, torn between her reluctance to leave John and the beckoning safety of the fire escape.

“Go!” I whispered.  “Leave him.  Save yourself!”

Maggie bent over and grabbed John’s lifeless body.  She struggled back to her feet and started toward the fire escape.  Just before she reached it, the roof erupted in flame.  For the tiniest fraction of a second, Maggie and John’s silhouettes flared like magnesium and they were painted in liquid fire.

A millisecond later, the entire top of the building was vaporized by another explosion, and Maggie and John’s atoms climbed toward the dome on a column of burning plasma.  A hundred brilliant reflections blossomed in the faceted polycarbon panels overhead, repeating the fiery images of Maggie and John a hundred times across the dome.

The flash of heat across my face dried my tears.  Anger, sorrow, and regret lay crystallized in the salty residue on my skin.

I slid into the back seat of the car and let them close the door behind me.

EPILOGUE

Rico filled my glass and limped away without attempting to start a conversation.  He could see that I had things to think about.

Out of long habit, I reached for the glass with my right hand, until I caught sight of the blue gel-pack bandages that swaddled my wrist and hand like a mitten.  I lowered the healing hand to the table top.  The skin grafts were coming along nicely.

I picked up the glass with my left hand and silently toasted Sonja.  She had disappeared shortly after I’d loaned her the money to pay off her indenture.  I took a swallow of scotch and shrugged.  I guess a part of me had always known that it wasn’t real.

The loan, if you could call it that, had taken me from comfortably independent to as near broke as I had ever been.  I still had a few thousand stashed away, but it was time to start looking for work.  Or, it would have been, had I not been living in the shadow of the proverbial sword.

The cops had to know about Rieger’s murder by now.  From their perspective, I had method, motive, and opportunity.  I’d undoubtedly left fingerprints, DNA, and hair and fiber evidence all over the crime scene.  Not to mention that the murder weapon was registered to me.

Today, tomorrow, the next day at the latest, Dancer and Delaney—or others cut from the same piece of cloth—were going to walk in the door and drag me away.  They were going to take me for a little ride on the Inquisitor.

By itself, that didn’t seem too bad.  The Inquisitor would ferret out the truth, that I was innocent of the murder of Kurt Rieger.  And, who knew, maybe all the rumors about the Inquisitor, the whispers of brain damage, were exaggerated, or even outright bullshit.

My real problem ran deeper.  I couldn’t afford to let them put me on the Inquisitor at all, because—if they did—they were going to find out the truth.  All of it, including the part about the puppet chip.  I wasn’t sure that I could let that happen.

If the police got their hands on that chip, it might just end up in an evidence locker.  Then again, they might think it was weird enough, or dangerous enough, to buck it upstairs.  Sooner or later, it would pass across the wrong person’s desk.  There are always factions in the Government that can find uses for something like that.  Puppet-soldiers, puppet-assassins.  As Jackal’s skull-mechanic, Lance, had put it: ‘
technological slavery on a scale that even Orwell never dreamed of.
’

There were undoubtedly copies of the puppet-chip laying around, but without John or the AI to help, it would be difficult or impossible to figure out what the chips were for, or how they had to be implanted and programmed.

The R&D team at Neuro-Tech knew about it, but they’d built the chip as a neural shunt, to help John walk again.  My instincts told me that John would have kept the unexpected side effect, the personality transfer aspect, to himself.  So there was a decent chance that the secret of the puppet-chip had gone up in smoke, right along with the Neuro-Tech Building.