Drakon (25 page)

Damn this museum-piece popgun.
If she'd been wearing a modern, high-intensity weapon when all this started, it would have punched through the softsuit at least once. She'd been hoping it would overload the defensive field, but no joy.
That'll teach me to carry a four-hundred-year old pistol for sentiment's
sake.

She was panting; she slowed it to deep steady breaths, growling low in her throat with the rage of territorial violation and the need to kill. Her ears sang with the combat hormones coursing through her bloodstream, and she had an urge to throw herself into the sea in pursuit. Heat pulsed from her body.

Don't be ridiculous.
She could swim underwater for fifteen minutes or so, but the softsuit could take oxygen out of the water and feed it to the wearer. He could
walk
to Nassau if he wanted to, along the bottom.

It was a minute or two before the guards arrived. Gwen dropped the plasma gun to the sand and covered it with a quick sideways motion of her foot; she remembered to hold the knife inconspicuously down by her side.

"The emergency's over," she said calmly, her voice pitched to spread conviction. They were staring

. . .

Oh, the local nudity taboo,
she reminded herself. She wasn't wearing anything but a slick film of sweat and some blood.

Gwen snapped her fingers at one of the guards. "Pierre, the jacket."

He handed it over, juggling the sling of his submachine gun. The Haitian was a hulking figure; the battledress fabric came down nearly to her knees. She belted it on and used the motion to retrieve and drop the pistol into one of the patch pockets; there was a slight smell of scorching cloth.

"Is Francois being seen to?" she asked. "Who else is hurt?"

"Philippe," a Dominican said. "Donna, he's dead. Ribs broke."

Several of the guards nodded. That would be the gas gun: very effective at close range; a good thing she'd been jumping when the charge hit her. Two more men panted up.

"Tom, Vulk," Gwen said, then raised her voice: "The rest of you, back to normal rounds. Take the casualties to the clinic. Be alert."

They walked away, murmuring among themselves. She recorded and sorted the conversations for future attention. Humans were extremely good at editing memories to suit their mental frame-of-reference; there were times when she wished she could do that herself. She heard
flare gun
whispered,
flame-thrower
—and more softly,
dupiah,
and
corps-cadavre.
It had been very dark, the whole action had only taken a little over five minutes, and most likely the guards would have the whole thing rationalized by morning.

Vulk Dragovic spoke: "What
was
that?"

She'd hired the Serbian in Santo Domingo, where he'd been vacationing after his previous career went bad. Most of the skills he'd learned in Mostar and Kosovo were relevant to her needs.

"A Samothracian," she said. "I told you about them, although I didn't anticipate one showing up here."

She looked out to sea. Very faintly, an IR heat-smudge marked the western horizon. Probably the boat the enemy infiltrator had swum in from—there were sharks in the water close to shore at night, but that wouldn't be any problem for her enemy, worse luck.

"Damn!" Tom said. "Everything was going so well up to today."

Gwen turned her head. "Tom, everything was
not
going well. Yesterday we had a very dangerous enemy that we didn't know about. Now we know he's here, and a good deal about him."

She examined her layer knife. The nick in the blade was small; she'd grind it out with an industrial-diamond grinding wheel.

"I could have sworn Francois hit him," Vulk said.

"He did—a full clip," Gwen said. "The Samothracian was wearing a softsuit. It's a single molecule, with field-guides and AI controls on the inner surface. When it's struck it redistributes the kinetic energy over the maximum possible surface, like a second skin of very strong steel with a frictionless surface.

About . . ."

She paused fractionally to find a comparison that would make sense to the humans. ". . . about as resistant as a light armored car. You can broil or smash the body inside, or punch through with enough energy, but short of that he's invulnerable."

Vulk swore softly in Serb. Gwen went on: "The men did very well; they distracted him and it was crucial. We'll have to reequip the guard-force, though. Full-power semiauto battle rifles with hardpoint ammunition, .50-caliber machine guns, some of those .50-caliber Barrett sniper rifles.

"Tom," she continued, "I crashed the computer; he was hacking into it. Get rid of it, power up the backup and load from the tapes, but sever
all
outside connections. We'll have to use secondaries for those from now on; I'll give you more details in the morning. Go attend to that, and don't forget to check on our guests from New York. Reassure them if any of them noticed; it was dry thunder, or a wedding celebration in the village, or whatever."

"Yes ma'am."

Vulk licked his lips and reholstered the Walther in the shoulder rig he wore over his tailored safari suit. "That one—" He jerked his head toward the ocean. "Is he . . . like you?"

Gwen shook her head. "No, they have what amounts to a religious taboo against serious gene-engineering on their own stock. But he'll have a good deal of very capable equipment which about makes up the difference. A lot of it implanted in his body. Luckily, we know what he doesn't have."

"What's that?" Tom asked.

"No help, or they would have come together. And he doesn't have an antimatter bomb, or he would have used it and this island wouldn't be here now. They don't underestimate us, not anymore." She grinned, and Vulk paled slightly. "We taught them better than that."

"A nuclear weapon?" the Serb said, rubbing a hand over the sandpaper roughness of his blue chin.

"Mother of God, that's—there are thousands of people living on Andros." He sounded more respectful than disgusted. Which was not surprising, considering what had happened in Kosovo.

Gwen nodded. "They're not significantly more squeamish than we Draka," she said meditatively.

"Although they rationalize it differently. Hmmm. This whole thing smells of a stealth priority. Minimum energies."

She closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating. "Yes. I think I see. The physics . . . he's afraid that use of noncongruent energies will somehow make it easier for the Technical Directorate to home in on us here. And since his people could insert him deliberately, they know more about the molehole technology, and he's probably right to fear that." She smiled again, slow and savage. "That's an advantage."

She looked up at Tom. "There is one important point. Before, we weren't in a hurry. Now we are."

And I should have the fallback ready,
she thought. There were a number of strategies open to the enemy; one of them would be to turn the local governments on her.

The answer to that was disposing of the human population, or most of it. Not very difficult, but wasteful . . . and a little too much like fishing with grenades. Boring.

Still, at seventh and last you did what you had to do to win. A suitable plague and a deadman switch would be easy enough to arrange and hold in readiness.

***

The line went
click,
and then it was replaced by the steady hum of a dial tone.

"Shit!"

Carmaggio's thick finger stabbed for the pad, and then he realized that he hadn't the remotest idea of the number in the Bahamas. He glanced at the clock: 12:30. He swore, hauled himself into the bathroom—time, tide, and the bladder waited for no man—and then sank down at the kitchen table with the phone there and a pad and paper. Pushing aside a stack of pizza boxes and some fried rice still in the carton, he began.

"Hello, operator? I was in the middle of a long-distance call, from Andros Island in the Bahamas. I was cut off; can you—no, I
don't
know the number. Yeah, thank
you
very much for fucking nothing, too."

He laid the phone down and ran a hand through his hair, flogging at his mind and feeling the sand in the pipes. A nice juicy one had come up last night, a spousal just-can't-take-it-anymore ballpeen-hammer divorce, and kept him up; this was two days' sleep he was missing, and it got harder past forty. Hell, it got harder past thirty, if he remembered right.

Okay, Jenny used my call-in line.
One of the few perks of this job at his level was that it made it easier to get two phone lines.
That'll catch it if she calls back.

So . . . area code for Bahamas, no big deal.

"Hello, directory assistance?"

An accent this time. "I'd like the number of IngolfTech Incorporated. No, not the Nassau branch, the headquarters on Andros Island. Thank you."

He jotted it down. Maybe a bit impolite to call this time of night, but fuck that. Five rings.

"
Hello. You have reached IngolfTech Incorporated. Our business hours are
—"

"Shit!"

He slammed the handset down into the receiver. "I can't leave a goddamn message. No fucking way I can let them connect to me. I shouldn't be calling as it is.

"Directory assistance? I'd like the home number for Ms. Gwendolyn Ingolfsson, Andros Island . . .

. It's unlisted.
Thank
you very much.

"Bitch," he added.

Except that he had to do something; the knowledge was there in his mind, as definite as his own self. He stabbed more keys.

"Jesus? Yeah, I know what time it is. Listen, you still got that plastic piece?"

There was a silence on the other end of the line, and a sleepy woman's voice muttering in Spanish somewhere behind his partner. The gun was a curiosity, a little plastic-and-synthetics one-off they'd picked up a while ago. Technically Department property, but nobody was hurt by it going missing. The former owner had lost an argument; the way you did when your head tried to argue with a rifled shotgun slug at close range; and it hadn't figured in the evidence trail.

The interesting thing about it was that there was no metal except the ammo and the firing pin. It wouldn't activate an airport security scanner, not unless the scanner was set so it'd go off from the bridgework in your teeth.

"
Si,
I've got it."

"I may need to borrow it tomorrow. Sorry about your day off."

"Can I help,
patron?
"

"Yeah, you can cover for me; I may have to take some of that accumulated sick leave. I'll give you the details tomorrow. I just needed to know about the piece so's I could make some plans."

"Go with God."

"Same here."

He set the phone down more thoughtfully. Foreign forces got quite sticky about American cops wading into their jurisdictions—understandable; he wouldn't be entranced himself if some maniac came onto his turf waving a Glock and expecting the local wogs to genuflect. On the other hand, no way he was going to the Bahamas without a piece, if he had to go—he'd have taken an AK, if he could. The memory of what the warehouse and Marley Man's boys had looked like was unpleasantly vivid.

"I'm probably overreacting," he muttered, dumping coffee into the filter. "Jenny's a smart girl."

Water gurgled into the pot and he poured it into the machine.

He was still going to be on that plane tomorrow if he hadn't heard something definite and couldn't get through. She was smart, but she didn't know how to handle this sort of situation.

Carmaggio remembered the heavy smell of blood, red meat turning gray with exposure to air in the terrible gaping wounds and smashed skulls, the stink of cooked brain.

If anyone knew how to handle it.

***

Jennifer spent a moment jiggling the catch. "What the hell? Henry? Henry?"

She looked around. Nothing seemed different.
Calm. Calm down. It was just some sort of power
out.
This was the Third World, after all.

"It's also a research facility," she muttered.

Computers and delicate, ongoing experiments that would be disrupted if the power supply went out.

IngolfTech certainly had the funds to afford the best; the proof was all around her. She went out onto the balcony; the night was a little cooler, in the high sixties, perhaps, and she rubbed her arms with her hands.

And why didn't the phones work?

Jennifer walked down the balcony steps into the garden, feeling her way along the balustrade; there were a few low-intensity blue lights up under the eaves, but they were scarcely brighter than starlight on the fountain that chuckled in its basin of Mexican tile. The pathway was checkerboard colored brick, between flowerbeds and young ornamental trees, leading her feet on toward the lawns and the slope to the sea. She bumped her toe in the openfaced sandals and swore at the sudden sharp pain.

Somebody shouted from the main block to her left. She turned and caught a glimpse of a running figure; shrank back into an alcove in a hedge of dog-rose, sinking down on a stone bench.
What's going
on?
More shouting, down by the sea and left—south—away from the floatplane dock.

Crack.
She blinked. A sudden blue-white flare of actinic light threw shadows and brightness across the gardens, a bright glare of color from a sheet of bougainvillea climbing a retaining wall to her right.

Lightning?
she thought? But it had come from the
ground,
not the sky—and the sky was clear, a frosted and of stars from horizon to horizon overhead. So clear she had been able to see the colors of the stars, earlier. The noise was like thunder too, only smaller somehow.

Crack.
Again the flash of light. And a hammering chatter, flat and undramatic by contrast. "That was a gun!"

She knelt up on the bench and peeked cautiously over the planter that backed it. More flashes and miniature thunderclaps, and more gunfire—a long burst from an automatic weapon. Then silence.