Drakon (24 page)
The guards would be hirelings, and chances were that they'd be completely ignorant of what they served. Kenneth Lafarge didn't intend to kill any of them if he could help it, but he wasn't going to let their welfare alter his behavior much one way or another.
The sound warned him: far above human audibility, translated by the earpieces,
sonic barrier,
directional.
Well beyond this world's technology, and set for barring human-range. A local would just get very apprehensive as they went through the edge of it, and probably go into convulsions if they tried to cross the line itself.
He backed, sweat prickling under his softsuit in the instant before the covering drank it away.
Close.
He hadn't expected that.
Assume the field's in a linear arrangement, a line of wands . . . .
He came to an iron post, as thick as his thigh and two meters high. That
was
surprising, since the wands for a sonic barrier should be about the thickness and length of a little finger. A scanner thread pulled out of his cuff revealed the reason.
Now that was ingenious.
Cobbled together out of indigenous components. Vastly larger than in the prime-line universe, and there was a great big copper cable to carry power rather than a superconducting ring the size of a wedding band to store it. He'd expected the
drakensis
to be smart—they all were—but it was ingenious as well.
Two can play at that game.
There had to be a control system for this, and it would have to be native. Which meant . . .
He reset his earpieces with a mental command and walked quickly up to the post, through the barrier that he felt only as a gentle humming and a tingling through the bones of his skull. A slim tool punched through the cast-iron grillwork that covered it, and a thread of fiber followed. The end of the thread extended filaments the color of ice, growing like crystals in a saturated solution. They worked their way into the circuits of the device and began to trace the connections.
Execute.
***
Tom Cairstens walked through the door and stopped. The Draka was on the bed, kneeling astride Alice's waist; her fingers were moving up from navel over stomach and on to breasts, moving with a delicate precision he knew very well. Gwen's hair moved as an ear cocked toward him. Alice's head rolled in his direction as well, but her eyes were glassy, mouth open, two red spots high on her cheeks. He moved forward, smiling; the ear had been enough indication of that Gwen wanted him to stay and finish his report; and she expected the Household to learn how to read her wants—to learn quickly and well.
"Our guest Ms. Feinberg is making a call to New York," he said, halting beside the bed.
Beautiful sight,
he thought. Partly that was Gwen's effect on him, he knew; idly he wondered if it would be possible to resist it. Not that he wanted to. And he'd become much more appreciative of women in general lately, as opposed to only occasionally. It felt rather odd, but not unpleasant, as an additional interest.
Gwen's face was turned down, watching Alice. Cairstens was used to the Draka's ability to focus on several things at once by now.
"To a friend, evidently. The computer says the number is a New York police detective's, named Henry Carmaggio, but it's definitely a personal call."
"What's she saying?" Gwen asked. Alice whimpered blindly, squirming.
"Just a sort of general uneasiness, but—"
He stopped. Gwen's head flashed up, her face going from relaxed, amused pleasure to hard alertness; then in the same instant to a Gorgon mask of rage, pupils flaring until the green of her eyes vanished in their blackness, lips curling back in an unhuman snarl that showed all of her strong white teeth.
"Intruder!" she shouted, in an astonishing husky roar. It cut through his sudden shock like a bucket of icewater. "Get to the control station.
Now!
"
***
The word flashed into Gwen's consciousness from her transducer, freighted with overtones of precise meaning. Her head jerked up; her hands continued their motion automatically for an instant, stroking Alice's breasts.
attempted infiltration of subsystem,
the half-living machine in her skullbone went on.
very
capable system, samothracian compinsets.
"Well, don't
stop,
" Alice said in a half-whimper. She grabbed for the hands that had been caressing her.
Gwen's hand slapped hers aside, just hard enough to sting. "Intruder!" she barked at Cairstens. "Get to the control station.
Now!
"
She pitched it loud enough to penetrate the dim confusion that seized humans in emergencies.
In her head:
crash the system.
She'd engineered in as many blocks as she could, but the native comp systems were pathetically easy to penetrate, even to her multipurpose transducer. They weren't just primitive, the open architecture of their core memories was an invitation to takeover. A Samothracian specialist would walk through like a man strolling in his parlor.
give me location.
The lights flickered, went out, then came back on and steadied as the failsafe switched on, a mechanical-relay system outside the computer's loop.
She backflipped from her position astride the Australian girl's hips, stripped the layer knife and plasma gun out of the weapons belt on the armoire and dove out the second-story window. Not worth the few seconds it would take to change into her blacks; although it would be very nice to have a suit of powered infantry armor right now.
Why not wish for an orbital platform, while you're at it?
She landed in a crouch and leaped again, over the verandah balustrade and down the retaining wall.
Shards of fact appeared in her mind.
Oh, a cunning little human,
she thought—one of the sonic barrier posts.
alert the guards, give the location, order shoot to kill.
The transducer could do that, relaying through the primitive radio system in her voice.
The guards ought to distract him a little, at least. No doubt about what he'd come for: her life. A growl rumbled in her chest. Let him take it if he could.
***
Ken snapped off a shot with the needler.
The tiny crystals stitched across the torso of a guard and his dog. Both went flaccid and hit the ground instantly, the anaesthetic shutting down their conscious nervous systems; it was tailored to be fatal for
drakensis,
but it would harmlessly trank anything else mammalian. The guard was wearing some sort of heavy goggles, probably a primitive night-sight system.
Double damn.
He'd shifted east and inland to get around the closing semicircle, and now the dogs had winded him. Their barking was harsh and savage, with a guttural undertone of snarls. The beasts had been kill-trained.
Could be worse,
he thought, as the barking rose to a frenzied pitch and the dogs were slipped from their chains.
Could be ghouloons.
Snap. Snap. The needler made a tiny
pfft
sound, like a man hissing quietly between his teeth.
Snap.
Snap.
The noise died as the dogs went unconscious.
Something else, something crunching through the coarse coral soil with a firm tread, too fast to be natural.
It
was coming. He shuddered as catheters dumped chemicals into his bloodstream, and the synthetic-neurone web overlaid on his nervous system activated. Everything took on a hard, diamond-bright edge. He thought the needler to automatic and lofted an arc of crystal slivers into the darkness on a precise trajectory. Then he dove to the side, landing in a barrel-roll that took him behind an ornamental boulder.
"
Come to me, human!
" A voice shouting out of the night, like a great mellow trumpet of brass and gold. "
Come to me and die!
"
The
drakensis
was definitely a female—very bad news for this world, unless he could kill it quickly, even if it didn't make contact with the Domination back on Earth/1. He called up range and distance on the voice and risked a snapshot around the boulder.
Crack.
Plasma bathed his hand. He tossed the needler aside with a reflexive twitch, before the power coil could rupture. The film across his eyes darkened to protect him as it exploded three meters away, gouging a crater in the ground and spattering him with bits of molten glass.
Crack.
Half the coral boulder vanished, lime burning in a white sear of radiance.
Ken came erect in a five-meter leap that carried him into a shallow declivity in the earth. He rolled out of the other side of that and charged, jinking from one patch of dead ground to the next. His hand slid another weapon forward as he ran. A guard leaped up, firing on automatic. His fingers twitched, and the man jarred to a stop as if he'd run into a brick wall. The native very nearly had: a slug of expanding gas like the shock-wave from an explosion. There was a dull heavy
thud.
***
one corner of Gwen's mind thought—they wouldn't block a serious weapon, but they would shed needler crystals. Some of those had come
far
too close. All the rest of her consciousness was focused forward. The night gleamed with light, stars and diffusion off the sea and heat-pulse in glowing curtains. It rang with sound, and the air was full of scents. It flowed together in her mind . . .
there.
A darting shape, moving fast. Very fast. But he checked for an instant as a guard cut loose at him.
Gwen fired.
Crack.
Blue-white light split the darkness, driving her eyes into a protective squint. Radiant fire outlined the figure of a charging man, burning soil and vegetation around him to lime dust and carbon ash as the fields in the soft armor redirected the plasma. He dropped flat and rolled; the second shot skimmed his back and blew a head-sized hole in the soil behind him. He launched himself at her on its heels, meeting a third bolt in midair. Gwen bounded backward.
Something slapped at her like a huge padded fist, tumbling the smooth grace of her leap into a sprawl.
Gas gun.
She kept moving as she struck, ignoring sharp edges gouging at her skin, and fired again underneath her own body in mid-roll. The figure of the Samothracian exploded in brilliant white-on-white outline again, then faded into a blurred darkness that almost perfectly matched the background. She'd seen it spin, though; the gas gun must have ruptured in the plasma flare.
He came down out of the night, heels striking for her torso. She whipped aside, tossing the plasma pistol behind her—at this range the backwash from a discharge would crisp half her body. It would probably also kill the Samothracian, but if they both died he won. Instead she cut left-handed with the layer knife.
A forearm blocked it. The surface of the soft armor turned diamond-hard for an instant, shedding the blade with a whining zing of cloven air. The enemy stumbled backward, but his elbow joint hadn't turned to gravel taking the strain. Biomods, implanted reinforcements to the bone structure—no surprise. A Samothracian cyber-warrior.
He slashed back at her with a blade like a wire outline of a sword that grew out of his gauntlet with avalanche speed; her ears could hear its ultrasonic chitter. Vibration-knife. The wind of its passage was an ugly thing across her eyes; it would carve her flesh like gelatin, and even the reinforced bones wouldn't give it much trouble.
She danced free, outside the arc of attack, keeping her arm-long knife up. They struck and parried at each other with blurring speed. Metal and monomolecular thread screamed in protest and lit the night with fat white sparks of density-enhanced steel.
A guard rose and emptied the thirty-five-round clip of his submachine gun into the Samothracian's back. For an instant the entire surface of the softsuit turned rigid as high-tensile steel as it spread the kinetic energy of the bullets. They spanged off into the night with keening shrieks, their velocity little affected by the ultraslick surface. Two struck the gunman, and he dropped to the ground shouting with pain.
Cat-agile, Gwen leaped in and swung two-handed at her enemy's gauntlet. The micron-thick wire of the vibration blade was barely rigid as the armor diverted power to its primary, defensive function. The layer knife was single-molecule diamond and steel with its electron shells collapsed to pack atoms closer together than nature would allow. The wire nicked the blade, but it parted and whipped back into the gauntlet. She caught the wrist under her armpit, levered, threw. The Samothracian's hundred-odd kilos arced through the air headfirst.
She snatched up a boulder twice her weight, to pound him to death in his shell like a lobster. He managed to twist and land on his back, one palm out toward her. Brilliant light flashed; Gwen was blind for an instant. Something struck the rock from the other side, jerking it in her hands three times,
tock-tock-tock.
Two more submachine-guns opened up, hosing the night with tracer bullets; Gwen leaped backward behind a concrete planter, crouching on all fours, blinking and shaking her head. Her eyes teared and then vision returned.
She could hear his footsteps and the faint metallic smell of his equipment, and beneath that the individual pungency of his body-scent, as unique as a fingerprint. He was retreating, back toward the ocean, as more of the guard force closed in on him. They were professionals, and not about to shoot each other by accident, but the volume of fire was building.
There.
He'd broken free and started to run.
"
Cease firing!
" she shouted to the guards, loud enough to shock them into obedience even through their adrenaline-rush.
She scooped the plasma gun off the ground and pursued in a blur of movement, faster than a galloping horse, hurdling planters and benches with headlong grace. The Samothracian stayed ahead of her, just. She braced and fired once as he flung himself into the waves, then again as he entered, hoping against hope that the shockwave through the water would kill. Thunder-crack rolled back from the water, then nothing.