Drakon (44 page)
"Damn," she said aloud.
detection anomalies?
neural interfacer traces, possible.
She couldn't take a chance on those plasma guns getting any closer. This building was shielded and ran off the power from the fusion generator, but that didn't apply to the surrounding neighborhood. A bad fire or brickwork collapsing on the fragile walls could ruin everything. And the Samothracian was with them.
"Listen."
Her humans looked up; it was safer not to make eye contact with a
drakensis
in the mood indicated by the sounds she'd made, unless you had direct orders.
"Vulk," she said briskly. "Get the perimeter out as we planned. The rest of you, Option Orange."
Tom's strained face turned to her. "What's gone wrong?"
"The Samothracian is desperate. He's armed a number of locals with improvised energy weapons, and we have to assume he's coming after us here. I can't allow that; too much danger to the apparatus, even with the shielding. I'll have to take them out. Hold the fort, and it'll all be over soon."
And if not, this planet gets scoured clean by the biobomb,
she added to herself. A nuisance; her household were all immunized, of course, but they'd have to evacuate until bacteria took care of the bodies.
Seven-million-odd corpses here in New York alone—a severe sanitation problem—not to mention the longer-term damage industrial spills and runaway nuclear power plants would do to the planet.
Needs must. She stripped and began putting on her blacks, while one of Vulk's men brought the backpack shield generator she'd cobbled together.
"Isn't that risky?" Alice asked. Dolores whimpered slightly, subvocally.
"Yes," Gwen said. "But at this stage, the maximum priority is protecting the signaling apparatus.
The child comes second, and myself third."
She shrugged into the backpack; with the metal sheathing to protect it from mechanical damage, it weighed about fifty kilograms. A nuisance, but not enough to slow her down significantly.
"Hold the fort," she said, and trotted briskly away.
***
"Hell," Carmaggio said.
The oak tree toppled away from him, its trunk blasted into splinters by the bolt from the plasma rifle in his hands. The crash echoed through the park, sinking among the treetrunks. Flames licked up and caught, dancing reddish-gold among splintered wood blasted into kindling-dryness by the energy release.
The firelight glittered over bodies and goggled eyes, extra brightness to the enhanced vision equipment from out of time gave him.
The others looked suitably respectful. They'd all practiced in Lafarge's shielded firing-range, but this was a lot more immediate.
He pushed the goggles up on his forehead, and night returned. Blacker night than any he'd ever seen in New York. You didn't realize how much ambient glow there was until it was gone; the stars were out over Central Park, a frosted arch across the sky. It was clear enough to see the
colors
of the stars.
Quiet, too. A little traffic noise—not much, with the streetlights dead—and plenty of sirens. A
good thing
I'm on suspension,
he thought dryly.
Probably lose my badge if I still had it, for not showing up in an
emergency like this.
The policeman's part of his mind was shuddering at the thought of what it was like out there, with power down and communications scrambled.
There were about fifty men and women grouped around him, in the woods just north of the pond and across from Bethesda Fountain. Saunders and his weekend warriors, in camo-patterned Fritz helmets and fatigues, all suited up with Kevlar body armor—much good that would do them. Finch and her boss and some FBI SWAT types. And Jesus Rodriguez and Mary Chen, of course. All with Lafarge's gadgets, shielding and plasma guns; which
would
do some good, and the little ECM pod which was supposed to fool the enemy's instruments into thinking Lafarge was here. He hoped.
Carmaggio took a deep breath of the night air, scented with trees and grass and earth, and now with burning hardwood.
"All right, people," he said. "You all saw that."
He jerked his head toward the Lincoln Tunnel, which was near enough where the spike of fire had thrust into the night sky.
"The bad lady is coming, and we have to hold her here. Otherwise it's all over."
He remembered a running translation he'd heard of a bad Japanese animated feature once—the Admiral up on the screen had talked to the hero for ten minutes, and this guy who knew some Japanese had said:
The fate of the Universe is in your hands, boy. Don't fuck up.
And Jenny was walking into the tiger's den, with only this diversion to protect her.
"Keep together, keep alert, and don't shoot each other." Another deep breath. "Let's go."
***
I'm a financial analyst, not a spy,
she told herself as she pushed through a panicked crowd in Lafarge's wake.
Financial analysts don't do this sort of thing.
Nobody did this sort of thing. She stumbled over something lying on the sidewalk. Somebody. She looked down; there was just enough starlight to see the reflection on open eyes. Jennifer Feinberg had been born and raised in New York, mostly on Manhattan Island, and she'd prided herself on knowing the city in all its shapes. Until now. All at once there were no more people around her; maybe they'd all gotten sensible, and gone home to hide until things returned to normal.
She caught her breath, panting hard against the feeling of being squeezed beneath the diaphragm. If they—if
she
—didn't do something, there would be no more normal, not ever again.
"
Walpurgisnacht,
" she muttered to herself.
Lafarge turned back and put a hand under one arm. She snatched it away. "I'm all right," she said.
"Just keep going."
Keep going because if I stop I won't start again.
Financial analysts didn't—God damn it, nobody followed time travelers into deadly peril. That was for the movies. Nobody ended up in bed with genetic super-women, either. Rage ground her teeth together and made the fluttering in her stomach recede. The fear that that column of fire had brought was still there, like a grace-note under the main theme, less personal but just as menacing.
A police car went by, siren wailing and lights blinking. Up ahead the metal bars on an electronics store had been torn loose and figures in hooded sweatsuits were carrying out equipment, laughing and prancing. The beams of their flashlights danced and jigged with them, sweeping circles of white light over windows dark except for the occasional candle. Shots sounded in the distance, a sudden crackle and then a series of slow deliberate
bang . . . bang
sounds.
One of the figures in sweatsuits turned towards them. A beam stabbed out and Jennifer threw up a hand to shade her squinting eyes. Voices rang harsh, threatening.
Lafarge moved smoothly in front of her. His right hand twitched, and the man with the flashlight folded over and flew backward. He landed in the broken glass and lay utterly limp. His companions hesitated for a moment and then fled. Suddenly the street was filled with silence, quiet enough to hear a roaring murmur of voices not too far away. A helicopter went by overhead, probing downward with its searchlight, then skittered away sideways over the rooftops. Jennifer stumbled again when it was gone.
Without electricity, these canyon streets were
dark.
Dark as a closet with the door closed. She turned, fumbling for the wall. Where was she?
"You'll need this," Lafarge said.
Jennifer fought not to jump and closed her fingers around the warm metal tube he handed her. A flashlight. She turned it on, and nearly dropped it again. The man Lafarge had . . .
shot?
Struck down, anyhow . . . he was staring at her. At the whole world, rather, eyes and mouth open wide and unmoving in the dark-brown face. The light glittered on gold at his throat, on his hands, a puddle of operatic brightness against the deep velvet of the night. She could smell a heavy fecal odor that any New Yorker recognized, but it took her an instant to connect it with what she was seeing. Sphincter relaxation . . .
"You
killed
him," she said, her voice rising toward a squeak before she controlled it.
"He was armed; there was no time for half-measures," Lafarge said impatiently. "This way."
He was off again, head down and shoulders hunched. The posture reminded her hurtfully for a moment of Henry . . . who was God-knew-where in this madhouse of a city.
I desperately want to
disbelieve all of this. I want it to have
not happened,
ever.
She kept the flashlight on Lafarge's heels. That kept her from running into him when he stopped.
"We're two blocks away, south," he said softly.
He turned, and Jennifer jerked back slightly. The covering over his face had become a perfect nonreflective black that drank the light like blotting paper with ink, the only sign of features a writhing movement where his mouth should be when she shone the light directly on it.
"I have to go to maximum stealthing," he said. Somehow it was doubly horrible, that normal, rather pedantic voice coming out of the black mask. "
It
has left, but there are fixed sensors in place. This is our window of opportunity, and we've got to make the most of it."
"Why you say 'we,' white man?" she said, and turned on her heel to leave him blinking, baffled, in her wake.
You're
the top of the heap,
she told herself. "That's Ms. Bitch to you, Mister," she said aloud. Her shoulders braced back, and her sensible mid-heel office shoes beat out a tattoo on the sidewalk.
There was nobody in the block ahead. Nobody she could see, at least. The heavy arched wrought-iron door with
IngolfTech Inc.
on it stood over the main entrance to the ex-warehouse, just where it had been since the renovations started.
She'd been in a dozen times or more. Now it felt like the lion cage at the zoo. Her imagination insisted it even
smelled
like the lion cage, a rank predator's odor.
Jennifer stepped up onto the semicircular staircase and pressed the button. The smooth enigmatic object she'd been given to hide was only the size of a thimble and no thicker, lighter than Styrofoam . . . but it seemed to weigh like an anchor as she waited for a reply.
***
was
that . . . light thing?" Finch asked.
She was scanning the approaches through the forest with slow, systematic care. Mary Chen was uneasily conscious of the fact that she wasn't trained for anything like this.
Wasn't trained to hunt
superhumans, using plasma guns?
she scolded herself.
Who is?
"How should I know?" she snapped. "I'm a forensic pathologist, not a physicist!" Then, with a slight feeling of guilt: "Sorry. I think it involved some sort of EMP, from the way it wrecked everything electronic."
"Like a nuclear explosion," Finch said thoughtfully.
"I certainly hope not."
They might all be dead from secondary radiation without knowing it, if it
was
like a nuclear explosion. She shivered and reached for the thermos tucked into her backpack; it was cold, for a May night.
Thank God for camping as a hobby; she was used to being out in the country at night, otherwise she'd be completely lost.
Crack.
Blue-white light flashed through the trees, throwing her shape in a momentary cone of shadow over the thermos. She snatched up the weapon instead and fumbled her hand into the grip. The tiny device in her ear spoke, a man's voice, eager and excited.
"
I think I hit—
"
The voice cut off. Through her normal hearing she caught the beginning of a shriek, then silence.
Then another scream, a long hideous ululation of fear and agony.
***
What a crazy hybrid,
she thought in admiration as she bared the mechanism within.
Lighter and more efficient than the one which had just saved her life.
That
was already growing warm to the touch after a single bolt; the energy absorption factor was only a little over ninety-eight percent. This was much better, the guide coils and controller unit made by a modern faber rather than hand-assembled from purely local parts. Hers was slaved to her transducer, significantly reducing its capacities. What a pity she couldn't take one of these and abandon her own—this was still an elephantine pile of junk by fifth-century Draka or Samothracian standards, but vastly preferable to what she had. Not that she could, of course, any more than she could put one of the communications units in her own ear. She grinned in the dark to think of what would happen
then.
There were more attractive methods of suicide.
Instead she turned to the other human, the one she'd winged—or perhaps she'd broken a few of his ribs; she'd been in a hurry. Without his little goggles the night would be impenetrable murk to him, of course.
His eyes were round, starting at every sound as he sat propped against a tree, his legs stretched out before him. He moaned when she whispered in his ear.
"Call for help, man. Call for them to help you."
Instead he tried to reach for a bayonet on his webbing belt. Impatient, Gwen caught the wrist and squeezed with brutal strength.
The scream went on and on as she worked her fingers into the shattered bone.
***
Carmaggio caught at Saunders's arm. "By the numbers, El-tee," he said softly. "We knew she could make a shield if Lafarge could."
Saunders nodded tightly. The cry trilled up into a squeal and then a gasping "
don't . . . don't
. . ."
mixed with sobs.
Henry touched the disk attached to the side of his goggles. A heads-up display projected in front of his eyes, showing vectors and locations.