Drakon (35 page)

Alongside the motor yacht; the
Andros
wasn't very large, no more than eighty feet at the waterline.

She still bulked more than the submersible. Gwen throttled back, the yacht keeping pace until both vessels were motionless, rocking in the gentle swell. Then she locked the stick, standing with a slight feeling of reluctance.
Interesting,
she thought. Nothing quite like this had ever been built in her history; by the time Alfven-wave drives came along, materials technics had already advanced to the molecular-construction level.

"May I come too?" Dolores asked.

Gwen looked over at her absently, then took her scent.
Why not. I'll need somebody for the
night.
She nodded.

"Can you handle it?" she asked Lowe.

"In my sleep," the young Bahamian said, grinning brashly. "It's no more trouble than ridin' a scooter."

"It will be in New York harbor," she said dryly. "Take her in extremely slow right in the
Adelborn's
wake, and keep an eye on the sonar. Then down on the bottom and stay there, surface once a day to report. I'll send someone to spell you after a week or so, but I want the
Reiver
ready for emergency use at any moment. No monkeyshines. Understood?"

"Understood, ma'am," Lowe said, standing straight and swallowing. He might be brash, but he wasn't stupid.

She disliked punishing subordinates, even the locals. There was no need, back home. Nobody had to inflict pain on a
servus
to instill obedience. Humans were another matter, of course, and you did what you had to do to get results. Luckily they were usually frightened enough without direct action.
I miss the
servus more and more,
she thought. They had a beautiful, supple, yielding quality that even the best-trained humans couldn't approach. As well as being generally more intelligent.

She ducked through into the open room behind the control cabin; it was rigged as a lounge-cum-communications center. The ladder to the deck-hatch was at the rear, where a bulkhead and corridor marked off a section of cabins and storage areas; the engineering spaces were in the stern. A man sprang to his feet as she entered, moving forward to take one of the consoles.

"
Nueva York,
" Dolores murmured. "I always did want to see it."

"We won't be doing much sightseeing," Gwen said. "Too dangerous."

Dolores's darkly pretty face grimaced. "That damned Samothracian! How I wish you'd killed him."

"So do I." With him gone, she wouldn't have to worry or hasten.

Gwen climbed the ladder and pulled the human up after her, standing with her feet braced on the coaming over the hatch. There was no superstructure, nothing to break the curve of the hull except a section of roughened metal to give feet a better grip. The air was chill with the northern spring, cool on her bare arms; cold salt spray touched her lips. The breeze brought a medley of odors: hot metal from the engines of the yacht, human, the distant land—itself tainted with burnt fuel and chemicals, but still green and earth-yeasty beneath. The joyous high-pitched squeaking of dolphins; their visible warmth was like leaping candles against the darker, cooler water. Heat billows plumed up from the
Reiver
and the
Adelborn,
a glowing background to the light-spectrum outlines. Overhead the stars arched in multicolored splendor, like a frosting of colored jewels across the sky.

She took a deep breath and shouted, a long wordless cry of exultation.

***

"A kangaroo," Henry said, grinning back at her. "So help me God, the MPs found 'em halfway back from the Honolulu zoo, hitch-hiking."

"How did they
do
that?"

"We never found out. Both of them were drunk as lords . . . and so was the kangaroo, or so the zoo people claimed."

That had been Gramsci and Dundas. They'd both been killed in that ambush about a week after they got back from the R&R; still, it was a good story, and they wouldn't have grudged him the use of it.

They'd have told him to make his move about now, he thought, as he watched Jennifer's pretty-wholesome face alight with laughter at the other end of the couch.
Christ, this is like being sixteen
again.
He'd been married for fifteen years and divorced for two, and he'd just gotten out of the habit.

Especially with nice girls—which Jennifer Feinberg was, old-fashioned phrase or not.

The silence stretched slightly as the laughter died.

"You know, Henry," Jennifer said from the other end of the sofa, "one of the things I like about you is that you're a gentleman."

"Thanks," Henry said.

Good thing you kept your hands to yourself. Oh, well, it really was a great dinner.
Great dinner, fun time. A relief being with somebody who wasn't a cop but didn't have any hangups about the fact that he was.

He swilled the last of his Chianti around in the bottom of his glass and looked around the room. Not big, no bigger than his, although he shuddered to think what it must cost up here on the Upper West Side.

More open, the bedroom just an angled section of the L-shape layout. Books covered most of the walls; a couple of prints, a good sound system with a stack of movie disks for the new Sony flatscreen. A cat staring at him resentfully from the top of a bookcase, hissing occasionally at the invader of its turf. Not too much in the way of frills and furbelows. It smelled like a woman's place, though; of sachet, under the agreeable scents of food.

"Henry, it's a good thing to be a gentleman, but sometimes you can overdo it."

Henry put the glass down on the table and reached for her.

***

The Serb looked around warily as they walked down the gangplank, his hand inside the pocket of his long overcoat. That was not really necessary, although the New York spring was chilly. The gun within probably wasn't necessary either, but he didn't like taking chances. The darkened wharf was eerily quiet, despite the rumble of noise echoing in from Manhattan's towers. Cranes loomed above them like frozen metallic skeletons.

"Slow, coming in by sea. Why waste days?"

"Boats are harder to trace," Gwen said, coming up beside him. "And airports are easier to watch."

He could see her nostrils flare as she scanned the wharf. All he could smell was the foul water beneath.
She
could probably detect this Samothracian farting two kilometers away.

The green eyes turned toward him slightly.
Fool,
he told himself. Vulk meant
wolf
in his own tongue, but the Draka . . .
Watch what you think, always, always.

She smiled at him, that slight curved turn of the lips. "Let loose the ants of war," she said.

Vulk turned and snapped an order to two of the Haitian servants. They carefully lowered the crate they had been carrying and opened the top with their prybars. A metallic rustling and clicking sounded within. Gwen's face went blank for a second; he recognized the expression, the look she took on when giving an order through her transducer. Dark six-legged shapes the size of a man's thumbnail poured out of the crate. The Serb pulled a foot back in revulsion as one skittered by him, suppressing an impulse to stamp on it like a bug. It
was
a bug, literally and metaphorically. A tiny self-contained android controlled by a vat-grown, gene-engineered version of an ant's nervous system implanted in a mechanical body. With a few simple imperatives: seek out a power outlet to recharge every five hours, proceed to designated locations and record, return to base to drop off the data. No transmissions, and virtually undetectable.

The pseudo-insects gathered into clumps and moved away; some into the night under their own power, others to the waiting cars to be driven nearer to their targets.

"It's a pity they can't breed," Alice said.

Vulk looked away from her. The six-month stomach was starting to show, which was disturbing.

And the way she kept
smiling . . .

"Too dangerous," Gwen said. Her head traced across the dock again, scanning. "We had to sterilize an entire habitat-city on the moon once, when we tried that. No way to stop them mutating. Selective pressure wiped out the implanted commands and they branched out on their own."

Vulk shook his head and concentrated on business. "We'd better get set up."

"You and Tom handle it," Gwen said. "I've got a few errands to run, first."

He opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. It was the humans who were in danger without her, not the other way round. One of the Haitians handed her a knapsack, anonymous black nylon to hide weapons and devices not of this world. She slipped her arms through the loops and walked off into the darkness, feet soundless on the concrete.

There were times when he wished he was back in Sarajevo.

***

Gwen turned. There were four of them, none older than twenty. A
damned nuisance.
Kill them all now? On the other hand, she wasn't in
that
much of a hurry.

"It's 12:58, and far too late for you," she said.

There was a moment of shocked silence from the youths. That was
not
in their script for the incident. She smiled at the bewilderment on their faces. Anger started to spice their scents, mixing with the aggression and rut that had been floating to her for twenty minutes, since they began their stalk. Their leader reacted first.
Naturally. He can't be . . . what's the word?
Dissed, that was it. Dissed out by a female, in front of his followers. Her smile grew broader as he pulled out his gun.

Be careful now.
A bullet in just the right place could kill her as finally as any human. She'd had friends who'd died because living through the centuries fooled their under-mind into thinking itself immortal.

And there
was
no tearing hurry.

She stepped closer to the young man. The street was deserted except for the pack and its chosen prey, streetlights glimmering dimly on wet pavement. He extended the gun, holding it sideways with the butt level with the ground, an odd firing position.

"Crazy bitch!"

Then he screamed. Her fingers closed on the gun and the hand that held it, clamping metal and flesh together as irresistibly as a vise. The leather of his jacket ripped under her other hand as she held him immobile and slowly, slowly tilted the gun up under his chin. The flesh dimpled under the cold metal.

Sometimes humans can be very disagreeable.
This one's urine smelled bad. His free hand beat at her, and he screamed again as he broke his knuckles on the side of her head.

"Goodbye," she said.

Pumpf.
The sound of the shot was muffled. Blood and brain matter spurted from the back of the mugger's head. It spattered into the face of the one behind him, and he clawed at his face, at bone fragments and clots of brain. Gwen reached out and plucked the weapon from his belt, then hit him sharply on the side of the head with the butt. He dropped and sprattled in a final galvanic twitch.

The third was running away into the darkened street, slamming into walls and stumbling in his panic. A plastic garbage can spilled aluminum and trash and a squeaking rat in his wake. Gwen examined the weapon in her hand. It was a Calico, with a helical fifty-round magazine mounted over the barrel and action. Not a bad design, considering the available technology. Nine-millimeter parabellum ammunition. She turned to the last of the pack.

"Better put that down," she said. His pistol dropped from shaking fingers.

"Don't . . . don't hurt me." His voice squeaked a little; he couldn't be much more than sixteen.

"Don't worry," she said. "Now about your friend . . . left knee."

She raised the pistol and fired. Two hundred yards down the roadway, the running man spun to the pavement. It took a moment for his scream to start. The flat elastic crack of the pistol echoed back from the empty brick walls. After a moment he lurched upright, pulling himself along the building.

"Back of the head."

Crack.
Gwen buffed the grip and trigger assembly of the gun with her silk handkerchief. Then she chuckled and tucked the barrel into the dead hand of the mugger whose skull she'd crushed with the butt.

"Let them try to figure
that
out," she said, laughing.

The last mugger was staring at her, eyes enormous in the gloom. She reached up and flicked off the bandanna tied around his head. The hair beneath it was black and straight; he had smooth light-brown features and gold earrings in both lobes.

"What . . . what are you?" he asked.

"Your lucky night," she said.

Gwen pulled up the front of her skirt and tucked it into her belt. Then she skinned out of her panties, folding them neatly and dropping them into the pocket of her jacket.

"What you
doing?
" the teenager stammered, backing away as she rubbed herself. His hands came up, palms out.

"Exactly what you planned on doing to me," she said kindly. Her hands flashed out and clamped on his wrists. "Although the mechanics are a little different. But you're actually going to enjoy it, like it or not.

Be good, now."

Gwen used one arm to hold him to her while the other circled his neck and its hand pinned his jaw, putting her scent next to his nose. He shivered and jerked in the immobilizing grip as she kissed him deeply.

His mouth quivered when she drew back a little and stripped the leather jacket down over his shoulders.

The T-shirt parted like paper under her fingers, and the man's jeans dropped shredded to the ground.

"Oh, you
are
being good," she crooned, taking the stiffening penis in her hand.
Wonderful things,
pheromones.
Not to mention the natural state of an adolescent human male, almost as susceptible as a
servus.
"Pity there's no grass, but this has its merits."

She pushed him back against the brick wall and pinned him with weight and strength, just enough to keep him from catching his breath fully, stroking his flanks and legs. Then she rose up on her toes and sank back, gripping him firmly inside her with a thrust of the pelvis and a rippling tug of her vaginal muscles.
Ah.