American Craftsmen (35 page)

We needed to play our cards. “Yep, it’s
time
.”

Endicott grasped Hutchinson in a clunky embrace. “It’s so good to have you back, Colonel.” Old John Endicott better not have been looking.

“Sorry, honey,” I said, and I shoved Scherie stumbling toward Hutch. “Think Helen Keller!”

Somebody pulled on the marionette’s strings, and Hutch’s body recoiled out of Endicott’s grasp and away from Scherie’s touch. But the puppet’s left hand was of a different mind. It pushed through the sling and reached toward Scherie’s sightless groping fingers.

“fmmmufffa,” said Scherie.

Two of the guards restrained Endicott and me; their senior stood ready to assist. The gray-haired tech stared at Hutch; the woman tech advanced with malice toward all.

“What was that, dear?” I said.

Scherie stared back at me with eerie calm. “I said, ‘
Get the fuck out of her you motherfucking abomination!’
”

Scherie’s craft this time was more like the pop flash of a camera than the blinding light-force of a nuke; she was growing efficient. Hutch screamed, the male tech screamed. The restraining guards looked about for order; the senior guard turned to the technicians. The woman tech laughed, a sardonic stamp on some deadly punch line. I knew for certain this could only be Madeline.

With no sign of life, Hutch folded to the ground next to her fallen cane. The gray-haired tech folded over, panting. Madeline pulled out a sidearm from her large lab coat pocket. Smuggling such things into H-ring was foolishly dangerous and very Madeline. She casually tossed the gun to the senior guard. “
Shoot them
,” she said.

With only time to bend, not break, the compulsion, Endicott said, “
Shoot the guards
.”

And, with no resistance, the senior guard shot his fellow soldiers. And then he shot himself in the head. Twice. His hand kept clicking on the empty weapon long after his brains and body had hit the ground.

“Who did you think I meant?” gasped Madeline in mock horror.

“Welcome to our Reichstag fire,” said the male tech, in the cadence of the Red Death.
Abram.
They had set us up as murderers.

Around the corner, on cue, came the commander of Enhanced Combat and his two lieutenants. From the other direction came the ghastly white H-ring uniforms of SCOF Black Ops. With surprising speed, Madeline and Abram made a sufficient tactical withdrawal to appear as bystanders instead of instigators. Abram still bent a bit as if his solar plexus had been worked over.

He’s weakened. Call us
, said the distant Left Hand.

“Wait for it,” I said. But they still murmured in my head, perhaps trying to distract me.

“You on the phone with someone?” asked Endicott.

Endicott and I fell into a back-to-back crouch, slide-stepping in arcs around Scherie, Hutch, and the corpses. Scherie huddled over Hutch, whispering nonsense. My feet tracked blood.

“It’s not how it looks,” I said.

“I can explain,” said Endicott.

“Stand down, and submit to restraint,” said the ENCOM commander.

The SCOF commander bared his titillated sadism smile and made no offers.

“Where’s everyone else?” asked Endicott.

“Busy, I expect,” I said. “Don’t let them take the blind weapon.” My girlfriend, the nuke.

These men hadn’t seen real combat in a long time. The ENCOMs and SCOFs were smart enough not to try to hit us one at a time, so they tried the next dumbest thing and rushed all at once, hoping sheer strength and weight of numbers would carry the day. Brutally inefficient, it still might work.

Like a Japanese katana charge, they let loose with all their very nasty craft in their first blow. I braced for the initial wave. From one side, the familiar tools of my work:
heart shock
,
air move
. From the other, exquisite pain and a serrated force that attempted to rip spirit from flesh. A practitioner had to enjoy this torture stuff to be good at it. I questioned the encouragement of such personalities as I suffered from their profound malice.

My chest felt cracked; my body felt fractured along molecular fault lines. The Pentagon men were trying to box us in, craftwise and physically, as if we were urban rioters, but crowd control didn’t work for two. Even for craft, willing all these things to happen at once was just too improbable. Like a failure in the Nash equilibrium, they were crowding each other out.

Worse for them, their unnatural assaults on my spirit were all too familiar to me. I crowed, “You’re trying Left-Hand craft on a Morton?”

“Amen to that,” said Endicott.

Craft exhausted, the ENCOMs and SCOFs threw their punches and kicks with a similar lack of coordination. Three fists came at once toward my face; three bodies rushed to tackle me down. We were much more focused:
break
that
arm
,
freeze up
that
leg
.

From under the blind spot of the surveillance cameras, Madeline and Abram watched. More implacable than emperors watching gladiators, they did nothing to help the assailants.

When it came down to the SCOF and ENCOM commanders, Madeline and Abram slipped inside the Office of Technical Management without even hiding their action. Then, with a backwards run, the area commanders retreated.

I dropped the C-bomb. “Cowards!” Then I examined myself. Aware that our actions were being recorded for a dubious posterity, we had managed to avoid killing these attackers, but at the price of damage to ourselves.

Some of my recent patch-ups felt strained: cracked rib, bruised kidney, maybe a finger or two that wasn’t working quite right. I wasn’t sure about my other internal organs or the number of hairline fractures or the arcane damage from black ops. All put on hold to be experienced later with greater intensity or slowly forgotten in the grave.

“How you doing?” I asked Endicott.

“Usual,” he said. His face looked like a smiling, swelling beet patch.

“We’ve been softened up,” I said.

“Tenderized for a bad-guy meal,” agreed Endicott. Drops of blood on the floor seemed to grow paler as the pulsing red craft fed on their energy.
The things people ignore.

“The generals—they’ll be back,” said Endicott.

“So, Major,” I said, “take us to Chimera.”

“No.”

“Endicott!” I felt another impulse to kill this man and be done with it. Instead, I said, “I know what Roderick said, but—”

“No time,” said Endicott. “There’ll be alert guards and a lockdown. We’ve got to get out of this corridor and kill those two walking abominations first.”

“Right,” I said. “I suspect the abominations know that.” I read the sign. “OTM?”

“Seems like they found the perfect way to avoid notice in a craft area,” said Endicott.

“Techies. I would have noticed,” I said.

“I suspect the abominations know that too,” said Endicott.

“Time to go, Scherie,” I said, getting under her arm to pick her up. I pulled her across the corridor and plopped her none too delicately at the threshold. “Hey!” she said. Then Endicott and I dragged Hutch over to the OTM door.

I spoke calmly as I put my hand on the doorknob. “You run into any traps lately?”

“Yep. You?”

“Yep,” I said. I turned the knob, and the door swung open. “Confident fuckers. Any other options?”

Yells of soldiers came from both directions. “None.”

I nodded as I peered into the dark room beyond the door. “I assume they just want to kill us off camera.”

“Good,” said Endicott. “I’m not ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMorton.”

I didn’t want to die hating myself for liking this man, but that seemed my destiny. Endicott said it first. “In another universe, perhaps we could have killed stuff together.”

I chuckled. “In another universe, we’re both already dead.”

I considered the threshold. “We better all go in at the same time. On three. One, two…” I pulled Scherie, and Endicott dragged Hutch into the OTM.

Behind us, the door slammed shut. Another door, very non-Pentagon-standard steel, slid into place in front of it. The sound of locks and bolts ostentatiously slamming home announced that we were exactly where our enemies wanted us. We had entered the ninth circle.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

The general continued to receive his reports from the Chimera feed, and the reports said everything was fine. But that was difficult to believe when he had arrested his own son, the lazy move of an officer or parent who couldn’t be bothered with complications. And how could all be well when he could read only a single screen by emergency lighting?

“Chimera, what’s going on in H-ring?”

“Insufficient data.”

“Take a guess.”

“I’d say you’re fucked, General Endicott.” Instead of the Chimera feed, the voice came direct on his intercom.

“Chimera, tighten control.”

“Yes, I revise,” said Roderick. “It’s your son that’s royally fucked. Madeline and Abram are here. Your son is with them. They have my prophecy: the old Endicott will slay the younger. About one hundred percent probability that your son’s going to be killed in the next five minutes. About one hundred and ten percent probability that it’s your fault.”

“Liar.” But the general heard only a mirthless exaggeration. “You dare threaten my family?” He reached for his family’s sword. But it was gone.

Had Hutch taken it? No one else of interest had been in the room. No time to consider. He ran from his office down the spoke corridor and around the corner to Chimera’s airlock. The chastised and now doubly alert guards saluted him.

“I’m going in,” said the general.

“Sir, we have a breach alarm. We’re in lockdown.”

Damned idiots—always too little or too much. The general had no time for argument, or fools. “
Get out of my way
,” he said.

His Endicott compulsion worked well on their pusillanimous minds. He punched in his override code at the air lock and entered. But he couldn’t leave those bozos alone out there. He called support on the entry’s intercom. “Emergency. This is General Endicott. All available personnel to guard Room Zero.”

The general ignored the clean-room suits—he had more than dirt for Roderick. He ran quickly down the line of servers, his old heart racing to catch up.

“You can’t hurt me,” said the silvered box.

“I can try.” The general looked about for something to disable, but saw nothing but futile complexity.

“Horrible, isn’t it,” continued Roderick, “how the worst conspiracies are right in front of your face? A lifetime of hunting, of obsession, all to end with the sacrifice of Mount Moriah.”

The devil did cite scripture. Very well, the general would deal with the devil. “Please, I need to save my son.”

“I’d prefer you kneel, but we’re short of time. Perhaps I left one possibility out. Just walk to that wall to your left.” The general moved away from Roderick. “Warmer. I know you’re not very good, but even you have enough craft sight…”

The outline of an open door shimmered in front of the general. “I see it.”

“Just go through.”

“Then what?”

“That’s all you need to do to save your son. Good-bye, General Endicott.”

Without concern for more oracles, or consideration of the blur in the corner of his eye that moved toward Roderick, the general strode through the hidden door and into the OTM.

*   *   *

Watching the Left-Hand spirits cover the Pentagon like black leprosy, Eddy considered calling in the destruct order against H-ring. The president had granted that authority to the Peepshow for just such an emergency, though Sphinx hadn’t hinted at using it. But Sphinx played a very close-run game of fine choices. For lesser players, sometimes clearing the board was the best option, or at least the safest.

As if to interrupt these cheery thoughts, Eddy’s phone rang. Eddy’s phone was supposed to buzz, not ring. Also, the phone was turned off for this mission while Eddy used his Peepshow earpiece, so it wasn’t supposed to
do
anything.

Eddy answered his phone. “What took you so long?” said a voice that Eddy recognized as the PRECOG commander. Where Sphinx had been charmingly oracular, this military prophet was autistically efficient. “Pentagon H-ring is compromised.”

“What are you doing about it?” asked Eddy.

“Waiting for you. My staff has left the building without leave.”

“Not exactly a good omen,” said Eddy, nodding at a rain-soaked and nervous young woman holding an automatic weapon pointed at his van’s window. “We’re in the parking lot. The mundanes don’t appear to be welcoming.”

Eddy’s earpiece broadcast a litany of new warnings from Sphinx’s veterans:

“High probability we all die down there.”

“High probability of end of American democracy.”

“High probability of Chimera singularity scenario…”

But PRECOG CCDR said, “Just get down here.”

Then, much to his embarrassment, Eddy had a vision.
Oh, is that all.
“Where’s your infirmary? And your morgue?”

“What the fuck do you have in mind?”

This man called himself a farseer? Eddy gave him a vague answer while he added the numbers. One, two, three, four? He had just enough with him to cover four.

“Order the emergency evacuation of nonessential personnel from all rings,” said Eddy.

“Your authority?”

“No. Presidential authority.” Let him chew on that one for a while. “But tell them something stupid about a gas main.”

The nervous woman and other Pentagon guards stood down, and the Peepshow moved out from their vans, suits fluttering in the tempest like eight indignant black birds. Eddy hummed “Suicide Is Painless.” He’d had enough Wagner, and “Ride of the Valkyrie” was such a cliché.

*   *   *

Unlike the prestige rooms upstairs, the OTM door opened right on a room. I saw the standard detritus of a combination IT department and janitor’s closet, mixed with alchemy. At the back of the room, another door—this one closed.