Drakon (41 page)

"My little cuckoo," she said. She sighed and glanced up at Gwen. "That didn't hurt as much as I expected. It was sort of . . . exciting."

"Give us some credit for improving the process," Gwen said.

The brooder would be full of endorphins, to start with. And being smaller, a
drakensis
infant did less damage coming out; the hominid pelvis hadn't adapted to the size of head an intelligent being needed, so the genetic engineers had done it the other way round and given the child a longer growth spurt programmed for immediately after birth.

"God, she's hungry."

"Well, she needs more nutrients than a human baby. Remember to take the diet supplements."

Gwen stroked a finger along toe velvety cheek of her daughter, feeling the tiny muscles working against the brooder's nipple.
Take what you need, little one,
she thought.
It's a good start on life.

"She'll sleep more than a human baby too, at first. You'll be up and around in a day or two, and we'll have a couple of house servants to help you with the details."

"I want to look after her," Alice said softly, a dreamy smile of pleasure turning her lips up. "More than anything."

Good old maternal instinct,
Gwen thought, bending down to kiss the human's forehead as her eyes fluttered into sleep. The baby gave a small belch and slept as well with limp infant finality, head cradled on the brooder's chest. Newborns of her race triggered that inborn drive even more powerfully than human babies did, most strongly in the brooder but acting on anyone in close contact over time.

Gwen remembered her own brooder with nostalgia. She had never been quite as close to any other living thing.

"No more games," she said quietly to herself, rising and looking down at the pair. There was too much to protect now. She strode out into the feral world, a cold ferocity running through her with a taste like iron and salt.

***

Carmaggio turned away from the phone and back down the corridor, dodging people and sipping at the lukewarm, oily-bitter coffee in the Styrofoam cup. It tasted about as bad as his mouth, badly in need of a morning toothbrush. For that matter, he could use a shave.
Have to take care of that.
He had the stuff in his locker, the precautions you learned after twenty years of irregular hours.

The interrogation room was plain and simple—one shaded overhead light, a deal table, some recording equipment carefully switched off, and chairs; it smelled of disinfectant, sweat and old cigarettes.

Laureano was in orange overalls now, sitting sullen and resentful across the scarred deal surface, still in the hospital wheelchair. The bullet hadn't done more than chip the bone, fortunately. It would be a good while before the gangbanger was doing any sprints, but he could talk.

Luckily he hadn't asked for a lawyer, yet. Jesus was chatting, doing the good cop, offering coffee and cigarettes. Carmaggio came into the room with a carefully brutal expression on his face, and tossed his jacket over the back of a chair. That let Laureano have a good look at the piece that'd shot him.

"Laureano, you little motherfucker, you are in deep, deep shit," he said, turning the chair around and sitting down with his arms braced on the back. "We've got you on trafficking, we've got you on possession of stolen goods—you really ought to've filed the serials on those guns—assault, attempted homicide, on two police officers yet and in front of multiple witnesses. Incidentally, your fat friend Cesar is singing like he was on MTV. He don't like you so much anymore. According to him, he's an angel and you're the turd of turds."

"Hey, Lieutenant," Jesus said. "You don't have to come down hard on Laureano that way. He's not a bad guy."

"Not a bad guy for a pimping, crack-selling little shit who tries to blow cops away," Carmaggio said, enjoying himself. It wasn't often you got the opportunity to be completely truthful, and in a good cause.

Laureano recoiled slightly in his wheelchair, then flinched as it sent a stab of pain through his wounded leg. He was good-looking in a raffish sort of way, but there was a haunted look in his eyes that Carmaggio suspected had little to do with his wound or being in a police station, neither of which were new experiences for him.

"I want my lawyer," he said. "You gonna charge me, you got to give me a lawyer."

Both the policemen smiled.
Yup
, Carmaggio thought.
We would.
Good thing this was the late nineties; a decade or so before, they'd have had to use the juvenile system on little Laureano. Occasionally, legal changes did make things easier on the cops. Not often, but occasionally.

"Hey," Jesus said. "Did we say we were going to charge you?" He turned to Carmaggio.

"Lieutenant, we don't really want to charge this guy, do we?"

"Oh, I don't know," Henry said. "Cute young chicken like this, he'll be real popular in stir once they put him in with the general population. He'll be the belle of the ball. Wouldn't want to deprive him of the experience of being sought-after."

That brought a reaction; more of one than Henry had expected. The young Puerto Rican was grimacing, clutching the arms of his wheelchair, sweating until Henry could smell the rank whiff of it.
Not
normal.
Hardcases like this were in and out of juvie and then stir all their lives. Laureano had probably done his first killing around the time he lost his cherry. Prison wasn't more than a minor threat.

Jesus brought a cup of water from the cooler. "Here,
chico,
take this. C'mon, you'll feel better."

"I'm no sissy," Laureano said. "Don't you call me no sissy."

"Sure," Henry said. "You're a real man,
muy macho.
That's why you and your friends let a woman kick your ass up by Riverside last month."

Carmaggio tossed a glossy of Gwendolyn Ingolfsson across the table, a take from the prospectus Primary Belway Securities was putting out. The picture spun and settled before the gangbanger's eyes.

That'll probably get a reaction.

Henry jerked back in surprise as Laureano screamed and tried to leap out of the wheelchair and across the table. The attempt failed as the wounded leg buckled beneath him; he caught at the edge of the table and screamed again as his weight fell against it, this time with pain.

"What the hell's going on in here?"

Captain McLeish broke through the door, watching as Henry and his partner levered the gray-faced suspect back into his wheelchair. His eyes narrowed.

"Carmaggio, that rubber-hose crap doesn't hold up in court, or hadn't you noticed."

Henry rose and dusted off his hands. "Laureano here just got a little excited," he said soothingly.

"Neither of us laid a finger on him."

"He bleeding?"

"Nope, just jarred the wound a bit when he tried to get out of the wheelchair. No problem."

Carmaggio let the false smile slide off his face as the door closed behind his superior.

"All right, enough dicking around," he said. Laureano was hunched in the chair, eyes squeezed shut.

"Talk, you little shit."

As McLeish had pointed out, beating confessions out of suspects was an exercise in futility, besides being a bad thing in itself. Any halfway decent lawyer could rip your balls off in court if you did anything remotely resembling the old third degree. On the other hand, they weren't trying to get Laureano to confess to a crime himself . . . and even the most modern practice didn't say they had to make him feel good.

"That wasn't a woman," Laureano said in a controlled hiss. "You believe me, it wasn't no woman. It just
looked
like a woman, maybe it was a
bruja,
I don't know, some sort of robot thing. Jose, he . . . She grabbed his gun and
killed
him with it, man, she just turned it around in his hand and blew his brains out.

And she killed all the others, and she . . ."

Laureano put his face in his hands and began to sob. "I couldn't
stop
it, man, I couldn't do
anything, I
couldn't
stop
it, she just kept
doing
it and every time afterwards I touch a woman I see
her
and—"

Carmaggio looked away, embarrassed. Nobody should be stripped like that, not even a noxious little vermin like Laureano. Jesus was patting him on the shoulder, lighting his cigarette; he tossed his head toward the door.

Time for the Bad Cop to take a powder,
Carmaggio thought, tripping the
record
switch and quietly slipping out of the room. The last thing you wanted to do was distract a talker once the dam had broken. He strongly suspected that this was the first time Laureano had said a word about his little out-of-this-world encounter on the mean streets.
And speaking of taking a powder . . .
Certain things reminded you of your age, and one of them was the bladder. He grinned at his reflection as he dried his hands. A signed, witnessed statement from Little Laureano the Alien's Pet, and they'd have a murder rap to pin on Ms. Ingolfsson. They might not be able to make it stick, of course; they might not even be able to hold her long. Riker's wasn't designed for superhuman time-travelers.

But long enough would do. He remembered the solid heft of the plasma rifle that Lafarge had made. In, out, job done. Time enough to worry about the consequences afterward. Henry Carmaggio had always paced himself by the task at hand, anyway.

He was just outside the door to the interrogation room when the first scream began. Not a long one, just a sharp agonized grunt. Henry flipped the door open and slammed it behind himself.

"What the fuck—"

Jesus had been sitting on the edge of the table, leaning forward sympathetically. He put a hand on Laureano's shoulder when the prisoner doubled over with a squeal of pain.

The second scream was louder, and much longer. Laureano reared up out of his chair, clutching at his stomach. His eyes bulged, whites showing around the rims. Henry started forward, and met an arching spray of blood from the open mouth. Together the two policemen caught the slumping, thrashing figure and lowered it to the floor. The shriek coming out of the gaping mouth was continuous and as nerve-shredding as a nail across a blackboard. Blood spattered, in their faces, on the walls, drops arching as high as the ceiling in slaughterhouse profusion.

Henry grabbed for the young man's chin, trying to stabilize the mouth so he could see where the hemorrhage was coming from. It jerked in his blood-slippery hand as the whole body arched and flailed. A hand caught him alongside the head, stunning him. The chin slid out of his hand, and Laureano bent until only his heels and head were touching the ground. The detective bored back in, shaking off the ringing in his head, but before he could touch the prisoner the whole body went limp with a boneless finality and fecal smell that were all too familiar.

"Dead," he said. "Son of a
bitch.
What—"

The dead man's head lolled. Something moved on the tongue, something that walked on six dainty legs and lifted a metallic head into the light. The dead mouth yawned wide, and a stream of them poured out over lips and teeth in a final gout of blood. One skittered forward, and Henry threw himself back with a shout of loathing, landing on his buttocks halfway across the room. His gun was in his hand, but there was nothing he could shoot at, nothing at all—and Jesus batted at one of the little monstrosities with an equally unthinking reflex.

"
Cristo!
" the younger man shouted.

Something glittering clung to his palm. He shouted again, pain in his tone, and slammed the hand down on the table. The shout turned into a scream when he lifted it again; the head of the
thing
that had killed Laureano was burrowing into his flesh. The legs waved, gripped, pushed.

Carmaggio felt his mind go cool and detached. He scrambled sideways towards the chair with his jacket, only taking time to come to his feet when another slick-black shape scuttled across the worn boards of the floor. His left hand dove into the inner pocket of the jacket, took out the button-sized black thimble and jammed it into his ear.

"Lafarge! Christ, we're under attack,
get moving.
Little things like bugs, they killed Laureano—"

"Coming."

Henry danced sideways like a bear on a hotplate as a metallic bug skittered toward his foot. He came down with all the weight of his two hundred pounds on his heel, and there was a
crunch
sound and a fat blue spark. He yelled himself as he tottered back; even through the thick leather he could feel the heat, and there was a circular scorchmark on the floor the size of a demitasse.

"Stop that, you're just driving it in like a nail," he shouted at Jesus.

He caught the younger man's hand and shoved the edge of his pistol-barrel against the thing chewing its way into his partner's flesh. Something snagged at the weapon. Tiny legs, clawing for a hold.

He twisted hand and gun towards the wall and pulled the trigger.

Crack.
The discharge was much louder in a closed room than outdoors. Chunks of plaster flew from the outside wall; there was brick behind that, thank God, and no ricochet either. Tiny bits of metal spattered the wall behind the bullet. Jesus snatched his injured hand away and hugged it to his stomach, cursing. He staggered and nearly fell. Carmaggio grabbed him under the armpit.

"Christ, watch it, there are more of them!"

"
Coming fast. Hold on.
"

"Hold on my
ass,
" Carmaggio barked.

The camcorder mounted on the table went up in a shower of sparks and smoke. Tiny shapes climbed out on the ruined casing, waving their feelers in triumph. More scuttled across the floor. The two detectives went back-to-back, kicking frantically.

***

. .