Steel Sky (24 page)

For a moment, Orel can only stare in disbelief. Then, when it is clear the man will not be back for a while, he slowly pulls his arm out of the reader. A breathable metal mesh on the interior of the ident has kept the skin beneath it from wrinkling and dying, but Orel’s forearm is nonetheless white as a corpse. He touches it gently with his other hand, but he can feel nothing. The nerves have atrophied completely from lack of stimulation.

The office worker is gone a long time. Twice Orel catches himself glancing at his inner arm, looking for the chronometer that is no longer there. Finally, the man reemerges, with a plastic wrapped package under his arm. Orel’s old ident is nowhere to be seen.

“I’ll need you to sign for this, sir,” the man says, handing him a lightpen.

“Sign for it?”

“You can’t very well authorize it with your ident under the circumstances, can you, sir?” Orel wouldn’t have thought it possible for the word “Sir” to sound like an insult, but there it is. He activates the pen and signs his name on the man’s desk panel, trying to remember the last time he actually wrote something.

The office worker unseals the plastic package and pulls from it an ident unlike any Orel has ever seen. Slightly larger than normal, it is constructed of an iridescent golden alloy that seems to glow of its own accord. The resolution on the display is so fine he cannot see the pixels no matter how closely he looks. And on the back, where most idents are smooth, is a shallow black hemisphere.

“Is that a camera?” Orel asks.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know, sir,” the man says, leaning over his desk again and making notations on the panel. “How does it feel?”

Orel fastens the ident in place, shakes his arm a few times experimentally. “It feels . . . great. Is this part of some universal upgrade? Is everybody going to get one?”

“No, sir. This model is custom made. That’s why it took me so long to find it.”

“Custom made? By whom? Why?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know, sir,” the man says, without looking up. “Will that be all?”

“Well, you must have something in your records. Who authorized the upgrade?”

The man’s eyes twitch toward Orel again, but he draws the pen across the desk and taps it a few times. “That’s odd,” he says. He taps a few more times, his pen bouncing on and off the panel like a pogo stick. “There’s no record of where the order came from. The fields are blank.” “Could it be Kitt Marburg?” Orel asks with a smile. “She likes to buy me things.”

The man looks up, his eyes wide. “You don’t understand. You can’t order an ident without multiple cross-referential authorizations. It’s impossible.”

Orel laughs, a little flustered hiccup of a laugh. “Well, clearly it’s not
impossible
. I mean, it just happened . . .”

“Impossible,” the man repeats. “It’s a sign. A sign of the End Time.”

“Oh, come on,” Orel says, “you can’t seriously . . .” but the look in the man’s eyes makes him stop. Suddenly the room seems darker, more perfectly silent.

“Have you atoned for your sins?” The words ooze from the man’s voice like blood from a wound.

“I’ll be sure to,” Orel says nervously, stepping backward. “Just as soon as I commit some.”

The man leans slowly over his desk toward Orel. “The intellectuals,” he hisses, “the
mockers
like you, will be first.”

NEXUS

Security Officer Horsen touches the receiver inside his helmet and speaks into the microphone, “Any sign of him?”

The voices of his teammates crackle in and out of his ears : “No.” — “Nothing here.” — “All clear.”

The others join in, each in the negative, each with a trace of impatience and resentment creeping into their voices. They think they are on a fool’s errand.

Little pricks
, Horsen thinks.
I’m giving you the greatest opportunity of your lives, and all you can think about is how tired your feet are
. “Keep moving,” he says. “And keep your eyes open.”

Keeping his head low to avoid the underside of a transversing walkway, Horsen runs along the rooftop. He presses a different button. This one superimposes a map of this sector across the inside of his goggles. His team members are eight red blips moving through a tangle of overlapping white and yellow paths. By turning a knob, Horsen can rotate the map in three dimensions, but he prefers not to. It gives him vertigo. Until he was given this assignment — begged for it, actually — Horsen had not realized what a labyrinth the city was. While the space inside the buildings is maximized ruthlessly, lack of central planning has left patchwork spaces between them, and over the years citizens have built their own hiding spaces and bridges there. Combining these byways with the access tunnels, a man could conceivably travel all the way across the Hypogeum without using the causeways at all. Small wonder the Winnower can get around without being seen. The communicator crackles as one of the men comes on line. “There’s nothing here,” one of the men grumbles. “He’s long gone.”

“He only left Comfrey’s place five centichrons ago!” Horsen snaps. “Keep moving!”

Gritting his teeth, Horsen picks up his pace. He can see from the map that the others are moving sluggishly. When they started this assignment the men were full of enthusiasm. Horsen had to reject volunteers. Everybody wanted to catch the clop killer. But since then the Winnower has only targeted criminals, doing the clops’ job for them. There is even a small but vocal group at the station who believe that the Winnower truly is a demon come to wash the Hypogeum clean in a river of blood. They cheer every time they hear he has ripped into another cosh boy. They try to interfere with Horsen’s manhunt. And then there are those people who think Horsen is leading the team only to advance his own career. Some of them have even started a rumor that Horsen never fought the Winnower at all, that the reason he survived is that he ran away.

Horsen wishes he could explain, but he doesn’t dare say a word. He refuses to speak about that day — to even
think
about it — in the hopes that eventually he might be able to forget that he was made to cry like a child, to beg like the lowest, most powerless quaternary.

Horsen sprints across someone’s balcony and kicks his way through a makeshift barrier.
I can still turn it all around
, he thinks, splinters of plastic bouncing off his visor.
When I’ve got that fucker’s head on a stick, then I’ll finally get the respect I deserve
.

“
I see him
!” The shout over the communicator is so loud that it hurts Horsen’s ears. Because of their respirators, the microphones are right in front of the men’s lips. The sound of their excited breathing fills Horsen’s helmet.

“Keep it down,” Horsen admonishes, though his heart, too, is suddenly racing. “Where do you see him?”

“He’s fifty meters in front of me. He’s moving fast,” the man reports. “I’m following him.”

Horsen hears the steady thudding noise of equipment bouncing up and down as the man runs after his prey. Wishing he had visual feed, Horsen can only imagine what the man is seeing: a blurry infrared signature superimposed over a sonar image.

“It’s him all right. I can see the spikes sticking out of him,” the man says breathlessly. “He moves weird . . . like a machine . . .” The man swallows audibly. “Koba’s ghost, he’s scary.”

“Shut up,” Horsen growls.
No sense frightening the others
. He calls up the map and studies the red dots moving across it. “What’s your location?”

“Uhhh . . .” More thumping. A scraping noise. Horsen wants to scream at the man,
Hurry up! We’re losing him!
A click as the button is pressed. Then a pause. “Uh, which one is me?”

“Damn you!” Horsen curses. With tremendous effort, he forces himself to be calm. Opening the line again he says slowly, “Turn off the map.”

“Okay,” the man’s voice says, sounding apologetic and confused. All the blips on the map are unmoving now. Horsen wishes he could just reach through the communicator and wrap his fingers around the man’s neck. He can almost see the Winnower slipping away. A click. “It’s off.”

“Go to normal visual,” Horsen says. “What do you see?”

“Uhhh . . . Industrial area. Conveyor belts. Heat vents. There are two big buildings in front of me, with a narrow space between them.”

It only takes a moment for Horsen to match the description to his earlier reconnoiter. “PK-4.3!” he shouts. “Everyone converge on sector PK-4.3!”

Horsen begins running. He turns the gain on his helmet up to full, not wanting to miss whatever happens. He comes to a stairway and takes the steps four at a time.

“He sees me!” the man shouts over the comm. Between breaths, Horsen can now hear the clanking and rumbling of heavy machinery in the background. “He’s running!”

“Go after him!” Horsen commands. “Try to force him to run into the space between the buildings!” He calls up the map again. With dismay he sees that his own blip is furthest from the action.

“Force him?” the man says. “How?”

Horsen ignores him. “Those of you at the far end of the building, head for the entrance on the other side! We’re going to try to trap him in the middle.”

Horsen leaps from the roof to a public causeway. The heavy equipment on his head threatens to topple him as he lands. Panicked citizens hurry away from him as he stumbles to his feet. “Security priority!” he yells at them. “Get out of the way!”

“What?” says a voice on the comm.

“Not you!” Horsen grumbles, pushing his way through the crowd. An old, fat woman stands in his way, eyes blinking. Horsen knocks her down. “Where is he?” he hisses. “Report!”

“I see him too!” another voice cries on the comm. “He’s going into the alley!”

“We’ve got him!”

Horsen wishes he could feel as confident as they seem to be. “Don’t get too close!” he says. “He’s fast, and he’s deadly! Don’t forget, I’m the only one who’s fought him and lived. Try and corner him, but for Koba’s sake, don’t provoke him!” He comes to a shop entrance. He cycles through the airlock and hurries through the narrow aisle. The shelves are piled high with boxes of BeautySoft 6.1, the holographic image enhancer. Horsen spots the manager. “Security priority!” he shouts. “Where’s your access panel?”

The manager gestures mutely toward the back. Horsen sees the edge of a grate hidden behind a pile of boxes. He tosses the manager aside and begins shoving the boxes out of the way. When one of the boxes falls to the floor with a loud crash, the manager makes his first sound, a small squeak of alarm, and starts grabbing the boxes as Horsen throws them aside.

“We’re stationed at the other end of the alley!” a voice says over the comm. “I think I see him coming this way!”

“Don’t engage!” Horsen shouts, pushing the last box clear. “Try to hold him till I get there!”

Horsen slaps his ident against the locks of the panel. With a click, each comes loose, and Horsen pulls the grate aside. He crawls into the opening.

“He sees us!” the voice says. “He’s stopping!”

“Don’t shoot!” Horsen scrambles through the tiny duct, unable to get good traction on the smooth, hard plastic. “I’m on my way!”

“I’m moving closer,” the voice whispers. “Koba’s teeth, he’s big. He’s turning his head . . . looking back. The guys were right: he
does
move weird, like he’s moving in slow motion . . . No, like
I’m
moving in slow motion . . .”

“Don’t get too close!”

“He’s turning this way! He’s running!” The voice raises in panic. “Shit! He’s heading right for us!”

“Damn it!” Horsen shouts, cursing himself for not moving faster. He is very close to their sector now, but he is still several stories above them. “Shoot, damn you! Shoot to kill!”

He hears the discharge of a soft gun through the comm. It repeats several times, with softer echoes from other guns in the background. The man curses unintelligibly under his breath as he fires.

“We hit him!” someone else shouts. “We . . .”

The voice trails off.

Horsen stops crawling. The line is still open, but only static is coming through. He adjusts the volume on the helmet again. He can hear the men breathing raggedly. “Shit,” one of them says.

“What?” Horsen screams. “What happened?”

“The beams just bounce off him. And he’s climbing right up the wall,” a voice says. “Must be thirty meters up already.”

“Looks like a goddamned cockroach,” someone else mutters.

Horsen curses to himself. The claws! The Winnower’s claws are ripping right into the concrete like pinions. “Shoot!” he shouts, nearly collapsing to the floor of the duct in rage. “Use the special setting!” His voice reverberates in the long narrow space. “Kill him!”

Horsen was given a special dispensation for an armor-piercing setting when he got this assignment. A jumble of noises comes over the comm as the men adjust their weapons.

Horsen consults his map. If the Winnower is heading upward, then Horsen might, just might, be able to intercept him. Horsen may get his rematch after all.