The Sum of Her Parts (15 page)

“I’m hurt! Hideki’s down! I need help!” Professional that he was, Volksmann’s second in command fought through the pain as
he half limped, half dragged himself toward the transport. As he drew near he was relieved to see that a couple of his colleagues had piled out and were hurrying toward him, weapons drawn.

His relief was short-lived. With a mixture of disbelief and horror he watched as the man and woman who were running to his aid went down. Held tight by multiple tiny hands, the wire that tripped them in the darkness and blowing sand was nearly invisible. Like the two chunks of crudely reworked sharpened metal sticking out of Xiau’s left leg, the wire had been salvaged from one of the innumerable wrecks that littered the southern Namib.

Gun in hand, the woman rolled over and got off one shot into the night before she was swarmed by several dozen furry shapes. At the same time, her companion was being assaulted by what appeared to be giant muscular mice. Trying to blink sand away from his eyes, Xiau looked on aghast.

Some of the attackers wielded small knives and spears. Others stood off at a distance and puffed on one end of what looked like wooden straws. Each time one of the spine-darts they fired struck the downed assassin she twitched. Unable to use her pistol at such close quarters, she set it aside and began striking and pulling at the chittering creatures that covered her body. But as fast as she could break a neck or throw one aside, others took their place. Meanwhile a handful of the attacking animals dashed in and, before she could react, picked up her sidearm and carried it off.

Her larger male companion was having better luck. Having managed to struggle to his knees despite the swarm of biting, stabbing assailants clinging to his back and flanks, he was firing his napistol into the night. Packed with highly compressed napalm, each shell produced a geyser of orange flame where it struck. Small flaming shapes raced in all directions while the wind swept the acrid stink of burning fur and flesh through the air.

Sinking their teeth into his right ear and wrenching back, two of the attackers tore it away from his head.

Shrieking in anguish he rose and flailed madly at the side of his skull. Clinging to his wrist, another of the little monsters attacked the hand holding the wildly waving napistol and bit down hard on the trigger finger. Incredibly sharp teeth punched all the way to the bone. Instead of letting go of the gun, the man’s finger contracted reflexively and the weapon fired again. Unfortunately for its pain-crazed owner, the muzzle was pointing up and at him as his body reacted. The shell entered his open mouth and detonated. Opening like the petals of a red flower, a ball of expanding flame replaced his head.

Chenwa appeared in the floater’s doorway firing a pistol with one hand and snapping his maniped whip. The latter cut one meerkat on the ground in half as two others standing atop the dome of the parked transport dropped a third of their number onto the assassin below. Holding a foot-long porcupine quill tightly in its front paws, the plunging meerkat drove it straight through Chenwa’s right eye. His lower jaw dropped along with his gun, the deadly whip-limb went limp, and the contract killer slowly toppled forward onto the sand.

Preparing to follow Chenwa outside, Volksmann had quickly changed his mind. Whatever had possessed these addled animal denizens of the Namib to wage war on his people he did not know. What he was certain of was that he wanted no more of it. All the approbation and monetary reward in the world were useless to someone lying dead in the desert. Making sure that Chenwa’s body was clear of the doorway, he touched a switch and watched as it cycled shut.

“Get us out of here!” Isgard Fleurine, the twenty-something professional executioner with the grandmotherly meld, stood facing
the doorway holding two sidearms aimed in its direction. There was panic as well as determination in her voice.

Volksmann needed no urging. Racing to the front of the transport he threw himself back into the pilot’s chair and ran anxious fingers over multiple controls. The floater’s systems immediately came back online, the light from the various screens and readouts raising his spirits considerably. The absence of the driver’s heads-up didn’t concern him. What mattered now was to get off the ground. Once the compact craft was in the air and hovering a safe three or four meters above the surface the maddened hordes of homicidal rodents, or whatever they were, would be reduced to impotent chattering.

With the floater’s automatic maintenance system having cleared the intakes of the bulk of ingested sand and grit, the transport rose smoothly to its maximum operating altitude of five meters. That was more than high enough for safety. Panting hard but beginning to breathe normally, Fleurine had holstered her weapons and was moving to join him. Safe from attack she leaned forward to peer down through the sweeping transparent front of the craft. Volksmann noted that the sandstorm was finally starting to abate.

“Four dead,” he muttered. “Murdered by indigenous rodents.
That’ll
go down well with the Yeoh.”

She put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and he reminded himself that this was a woman in her twenties who had only chosen to look eighty. A meld like that suggested a damaged personality, he knew. But then, both fit her job description. He was glad for the company.

“Unexpected death comes with the territory. You don’t have to go into detail in your report, Meyer. I’ll back you up.” She wore a lopsided grin, simultaneously sensual and wolfish and greedy. Her
eyes were not eighty. “This way I get to collect payment for six, so don’t expect any tears from me.”

Turning on the floater’s landing beams Volksmann used them to search the ground off to his right. The earth there seemed to be moving, a veritable flowing pavement of brown and white bodies. Many of them were looking upward and throwing things in the direction of the transport. Spines, rocks, bits of metal: anything they could pick up. But their forelegs, while strong for their size, were short. Very little of the thrown material reached the floater’s underside. The few bits of metal that did rise to the transport’s height made tiny pinging noises as they bounced off the tough composite body.

“Excitable little pointy-nosed bastards, aren’t they?” Moving away from the pilot’s seat the female assassin pulled the larger of her two sidearms and opened a port in the canopy. “Not that I’m into revenge or anything—it’s unprofessional—but hang here while I roast a few dozen of them. Wouldn’t want the rats to think they won anything.”

Volksmann licked his lips. “Because of the storm we’ve been stuck here longer than I like. We need to pick up our quarry and start back before SICK security makes the changeover to the more active daylight shift.”

“Sure, sure. I only need a couple minutes,
mon père
.” Leaning slightly out the port, the surviving member of his team started to take aim. “I got a bunch of them huddling together. Just let me take them out and …”

A snapping sound cracked above the dying wind. Volksmann didn’t flinch at the sound of the gun going off. When he finally did turn to have a look he saw that it was not Fleurine’s weapon that had discharged. Turning, she gazed back at him with a blank look on her faux elderly maniped face. Her mouth was open and her
expression one of surprise. When the blood from the hole in her forehead started to trickle into her eyes she blinked. Without speaking a word she fell forward onto the floor of the floater.

A stunned Volksmann gaped at the petite form, then whipped around to peer out the windshield to his left. Light from the underside of the floater illuminated ground that was swarming with still more of the milling, chattering creatures. Many of them were pointing at the transport with tiny black paws. His searching eyes finally located the cluster that had been overlooked by the too-eager Fleurine.

He recognized a pistol that had belonged to Shakovsk, who had tried and failed to help Hideki and Xiau. Propped up on a rock, it was supported by a densely packed knot of the creatures who kept it balanced and steady. Its lethal barrel was aimed upward and straight at the hovering floater. A worn, chewed, but tough strip of old leather had been passed behind the trigger guard and looped over the trigger itself. Six of the creatures clung to each end of the strap, looking for all the world as if they were engaged in a serious tug-of-war.

Standing on its hind legs well behind the gun and gazing up at the floater was a single representative of the species. For an impossible instant Volksmann had the absurd sensation that he was looking into the eyes of another intelligent being. Then he flinched back just as the gun went off again.

The shot smashed through the windshield, missing him by centimeters. As he lurched to one side his right hand dragged across several controls. Responding to the anomalous mixture of inadvertent manual commands, the floater went into a wild slew to starboard. Before Volksmann could recover and countermand the accidental instructions, it had smashed into the ground.

Dazed but conscious, he pulled himself upright in the pilot’s seat and began working the instrument console. The engine
whined and the floater skewed sideways, but would not rise from the ground. Something had been seriously damaged in the crash. Preoccupied with stabbing and pressing at various controls, it took him several minutes before he grew aware of a new sound. It reminded him of the flying sand that had scoured the transport as it battled its way northward through the storm. But the noise that had begun to reverberate through the sides and roof of the floater was not coming from blowing sand.

It arose from the rapid-fire patter of hundreds of tiny feet.

Whirling, he flung himself out of the pilot’s chair just as several dozen armed meerkats began scampering down the windshield in front of him. Utilizing their minuscule instruments of death they started scraping and stabbing at the transparency. To his relief he saw they were unable to so much as scratch the tough polycrylic. The hole that had been made by the second shot from the recovered pistol was not large enough to admit even the smallest of the attackers. He was safe inside the floater. At least, he was until he had to deal with SICK security, which would surely locate the downed craft as soon as the sun was up and the storm had fully subsided. There was water and emergency rations to sustain him. Not to mention his own weapons. He almost smiled. Unless his inexplicably organized assailants could muster enough strength to carry the floater off, he was safe.

His biggest remaining concern, he realized, was how the hell he was going to explain this to SICK’s people and to his superiors in the Triad. Even in times when extraordinarily magified animals were commonplace, what had befallen his expedition made no sense. Magified mammals were harmless. Maniped pets did not attack their masters.

“Bad human,” piped an unmistakably small voice. A chill went down Volksmann’s back, displacing the confidence that had braced him only a moment earlier. He turned.

He had forgotten to close the port Fleurine had opened.

There were at least a hundred of them inside now. Some rested on all fours. Others stood upright on their hind legs in disconcertingly humanlike poses. Dozens of bright black eyes were focused on the transport’s remaining occupant.

Volksmann looked to his left. His personal sidearms lay in a compartment underneath the main instrument console. It would only take a matter of seconds for him to pull them out and start firing. But he did need those few seconds. Proffering a winning smile, he looked down at the furry creature who was standing slightly apart from the others. It was she who had voiced the two astonishingly clear words. He found it unsettling to hear himself talking back to the creature.

“This has all been a mistake. A stupid, regrettable mistake. I’m sorry for what has happened, but somehow I’ll make it right. I know that some of your—people—have been hurt. But all my people are dead. It’s all been a big misunderstanding.” As he spoke he was leaning slowly to his left. His hand extended toward the compartment that contained the guns.

“Not all—your people, dead.” The articulate meerkat spoke with a solemnity that belied her size. “Is one people still alive. You.”

“Well, yes, that’s true. What do you propose to do?” Volksmann’s straining fingers were almost to the handle of the compartment. Pull, grab, and shoot. With so many of them crowded together he would not have to worry about taking aim.

The meerkat’s voice never changed, never varied in volume or tenor.

“Rectify.”

Volksmann’s fingers closed convulsively on the handle of the under-console compartment and yanked. Before the concealed drawer had stopped sliding forward he was already reaching for the
nearest of the pistols inside. Had he been facing others of his own kind he might have had a chance. But no human boasts reaction time as fast as a meerkat. Just as no one was around to hear the screams that issued from within the downed floater.

In any event, they did not last for very long.

One of the nice things about a modern Gatling gun, Het Kruger reflected as he watched the familiar lonely terrain slip by beneath the company floater, was that they could be massaged to accept pretty much any type of projectile that would fit the muzzles. Traditional solid bullets, explosive shells, armor-piercing rounds—just about anything that could be contained within the rotating barrels could be spat at an incredible rate of discharge toward a target.

Take the floater in whose copilot’s seat he was presently sitting, drinking tea with his booted feet propped up on the instrument console. The two electrically powered amidships guns, one facing to port and the other to starboard, could spew explosive shells at thousands of rounds per minute, sufficient to disable or destroy anything short of the most heavily armored military hardware. To an outsider they would surely seem to constitute overkill for simple company security—which was precisely the point. Kruger called them his “bouncers”—a hoary old term still used to refer to individuals charged with keeping order in bars and clubs. Be they Natural or Meld, the best men and women engaged in that ancient
profession never raised a hand in anger. Their mere presence, or the firm delivery of an appropriate word or two, was usually enough to defuse a potentially unruly situation.