Drakon (43 page)

Henry felt sweat trickling down into his collar. "You're going to be stopped."

"Everyone's the hero in their own story, Lieutenant," Gwen said, smiling and shaking her head.

"Think. This might be
my
story—in which case, I'll win, and you are a minor character." She paused, considering. "I
will
win. I've lived nearly half a thousand years, human, and I always
do
win. Don't sacrifice the few years you have smashing your glass against my iron."

He stayed silent. She nodded. "Yes, I can understand what Jennifer sees in you. Pity if she were hurt, wouldn't it?"

Carmaggio flushed. Then a movement caught his eye.
By God,
he thought.
That's
Captain McLeish,
by God!

"Yes, a number of you have seen the . . . wisdom of cooperating with me. I could use someone like you in my . . . organization."

He looked into the clear green eyes. "I've done some, ah, questionable things, in my time," he said with quiet finality. "But I've never been on the pad."

She shrugged and turned. "Your choice."

Shaking, Carmaggio emptied his drink.
One more,
he thought.
Then we're out of here. Enough
secrecy. Jenny has a right to know what she's facing.

Even if it scared her shitless and risked her life.

***

Carmaggio's apartment was new territory to Jennifer. She'd assumed that was for the usual bachelor reasons; terrible housekeeping, for starters. Instead it was extremely tidy, in a ruled-off way, probably the result of weeks of intensive effort. The smell of wax and cleaner certainly hinted at that.

Larger than hers too, although of course it was on Mulberry north of Canal, not the Upper West Side. She looked around as Henry struggled with their coats in an overstuffed closet. A couple of pictures, mostly photos. Family shots, and Henry as a young man stiff and self-conscious in uniform. Quite a few books, looking well-thumbed. A good computer off in a nook by the living room, with a rack of CD-ROMs beside it. A peek into the bedroom showed a folded exercise machine in one corner.

"Henry, there's something I should tell
you,
" she began slowly, coming back toward the hallway.
I
hate confessions.
How did Catholics do them all the time?

Henry smiled. "Not quite yet, I think.
Activate.
"

On the kitchen table lay a black rectangle the size of a business card. When he spoke, a twisting column of light appeared above it—a three-dimensional image, looking like an impossible moving sculpture of liquid.

"I—what
is
that?"

"I don't really know myself," Henry said. She looked over at him, feeling her eyes go wide. "But it's got some interesting qualities."

He spoke to it again. An image of Gwendolyn Ingolfsson appeared over the table: life-size, nude, and utterly indistinguishable from reality, except that it neither breathed nor moved.

"
Shit!
" Jennifer shouted, and scrambled backward.

She lurched into a chair and tottered, arms wind-milling. Carmaggio leaped forward and caught her.

An urge to push him away fought with an equally strong desire to cling, until all she could do was stand and shiver. After a while the blackness receded from her eyes.

"Wha . . . what is that?"

"Jenny." She turned and looked into his face. "Until you went to the Bahamas, I didn't have any proof—just some suspicions. And then I couldn't tell you because it'd put you in danger. You've got to understand that first. Understand?"

Jennifer shook herself.
Think, you cow,
she told herself. "I . . . I think so. What does it
mean?
"

Carmaggio took a deep breath. "Okay," he began.

***

"Pheromones?"

Jennifer stared at the skeleton the impossible machine was showing, rotating slowly to give an all-around view. She remembered more than enough of her premed studies to know that the
skeleton
was impossible, too. The flanged bones, the high-leverage double-acting joints, the too-large nasal and ear cavities . . .

That isn't a human being. That isn't a
human
being.

"Yeah, pheromones, supercharged variety. Lafarge says they can play games with your head."

"Oh, my
God,
" Jennifer said. She put a hand to her mouth. "Oh, my God, I went to
bed
with—"

Suddenly she was up and running, struggling to hold back the bitter-tasting bile. Remembering fever-hot skin tasting of cinnamon and salt, weight that crushed out her breath, a growling chuckle in her ear. Vomit splashed into the bowl as she knelt, heaving and retching uncontrollably; the raw physical misery was a relief, crowding thought away. When she was finally conscious of something else, it was Carmaggio standing beside her with a towel and damp facecloth.

"Here," he said, helping her clean up. "C'mon, sit, get your head down a little, try this."

She washed her mouth out with water and then took a sip of the brandy, sitting on the edge of the bathtub and shivering. A hand rubbed her back and she leaned into it gratefully.

"Don't sweat it," he said gently. "You're not to blame."

"That's just
it,
" she said roughly and took another swallow of the brandy. "I thought I was seduced, and I was
drugged,
I was
raped
—and I didn't even know it. I was an accomplice!" She set the glass down carefully. Remembered words fell into place with little mental
click
sounds. "The bitch, the bitch, she was
laughing
at me all along. Laughing. I want her
dead.
"

"Well," said Carmaggio, and put his arm around her shoulders. "Yeah, that's the option we've been looking at, actually."

***

"I think we have something!" Mueller exclaimed. The words echoed through the huge empty spaces of the warehouse.

It was brightly lit now, with banks of overhead fluorescent lights; the interior was painted white, including the surfaces of the windows. Armed guards stood at intervals on catwalks around the upper interior walls, and another spanned the arch of the building. Below was the great circular ring of the fusion generator, man-high and twenty meters in circumference. Lying within that was another ring almost as large, smooth enigmatic metal with heavy fiber-optic cable junctions at its four corners. The air held a heavy electrical smell, overlain with new paint and hot metal.

The German scientist was standing at a console on the warehouse floor. Above in the glassed-in control chamber Gwen twitched her ears forward to pick up his voice, then glanced over at the display monitors.

"I think you're right," she said. "Get—"

CRACK.

The noise was deafening even here in the control chamber. The tragus clamped automatically across the opening of her ears to protect the sensitive inner mechanisms. Humans screamed down on the floor, clutching their hands to either side of their heads.

From within the center of the inner ring a thread of light too intense to see speared upward, cutting through the roof with hardly even a spark as the steel flashed into its constituent atoms and the atoms were stripped to ions. It was
thinner
than a thread, Gwen realized as she flung up a hand and glanced away, blinking at the line of darkness scored across her sight. She opened the door and stepped out onto the new metal of the catwalk, past a Haitian bawling in panic and fumbling with his heavy Barrett .50 sniper rifle.

Thinner than a thread and utterly rigid. The source was—her mind and transducer did quick calculations—a spot 7.32 meters above the exact center of the inner ring. Head height for her, now that she was out on the catwalk that spanned the transposition circle.

Her breath was fast and heavy; she controlled it, and throttled back the beating of her heart.

Below the thread of energy a spot opened. It swelled outward into a perfect circle a meter wide, and then flashed from silver to transparent.

"Well met," she breathed to the one who stood there. "Glory to the Race."

"Service to the State," Alexis Renston replied. "Sorry for the side effect," he went on, pointing upward to the beam. "Energetic particle byproduct."

The Archon was in a suit of powered infantry armor; it mimicked his form a few millimeters out, flexible as liquid and as strong as anything in the universe, set to a shiny jet-black at the moment. Molded lumps and protrusions told of engines concealed within, and weapons deadly enough to savage whole cities.

It slid from face and hands as he tilted his head back slightly to take in Gwen, then glanced around at the interior of the warehouse. Behind him she could see others, and the hulking hyena-ape forms of ghouloons.

The background was Reichart Station, but the forest beyond it had been cleared and the surface smoothed.

Machines rested on it, waiting, and more hovered in the sky. The heavy iron was ready.

"I see you haven't been idle," the Archon said.

"Nor have you," she said.

There was a
servus
off to one side, operating some equipment.
Ah, Tolya.
The
servus
physicist looked . . .
younger.
Well, she deserved the ultimate reward.

datadump,
she commanded her transducer. There was a barely subliminal hum along her nerves as it sent/received data at a rate far too high for conscious reflection. But it would be there, and here, when needed.

"Timeframe?" she went on, while the machines spoke to each other.

"This molehole is barely at the atomic scale," Renston said. "Proof-of-concept. Scaleup is proceeding rapidly and shouldn't present any problems, provided you keep the beacon in operation.

Planetary Archon Ingolfsson," he added. They both wolf-grinned at the essential clarification of status.

"News?"

"The Samothracians attacked, with moleholes in place. We stopped them, but only just. We're making excellent progress on our own moleholes for interstellar travel."

"Gravitational effects . . . slipslide?"

"Exactly. Deeper into the solar gravity well than the Oort, and you go sideways. Very high energy costs, too."

"Acknowledged. I suggest we break off until you can establish full contact. The situation here's a little delicate; the enemy sent an operative through. He'll detect the spike . . . even the
natives
will detect it, and that could be awkward."

"Confirmed," Renston replied. His eyes had a slightly detached look, that of someone reviewing transducer-linked data. "Ahhh, good hunting there, grandmother."

"Very good. See you soon."

CRACK

The thread of intolerable light disappeared, leaving nothing but the ringing in her ears and the memory of heat and light. With it went the holographic window. The humans were babbling and rushing about, some screaming or weeping, others exultant. Gwen stood rock-still; she'd have to see to them, but not in this instant of purest joy.

"I'll see you all, my brothers, my sisters," she whispered. "And we shall hunt together, forever."

***

Across New York, static seared radio and television. Instruments jumped and computers stuttered, data scrambled on electromagnetic disks. And nearly a million eyes saw a spike of intolerable fire slamming into the sky above Manhattan, like a line of blue-white light reaching into space and scoring the face of the moon. For six seconds it hung above the city.

When it ended, darkness fell as overloaded transformers shattered and exploded in fountains of sparks.

***

"What the
hell?
"

Carmaggio jumped up from the sofa. Jennifer stayed, but turned her red-rimmed eyes around while her handful of Kleenex fell unnoticed to her lap. The apartment lights flickered wildly, and the telephone rang—a single long note that went on and on. The computer in the corner of the living room switched itself on, flashed
system error,
and died. Then the lights followed with an abrupt finality; but the blackness that followed was only partial. An actinic blue-white light lit it, reflected off buildings and through windows.

Thunder boomed in the distance.

Jennifer came to her feet. The two humans clutched at each other. For five long seconds the unnatural lightning-light lasted, until true darkness fell.

"What was that?" she asked.

"The end of the world, unless we're very lucky," Carmaggio said.

He fumbled in his pocket and pushed the tiny button into his ear.

". . . working," Lafarge's voice—or his machine's—sounded. "The enemy has made a breakthrough. It's not a full-scale molehole but we can expect that soon. I'm coming to—"

The door burst open. A man-shape walked through, then lit to cast a background luminescence.

"There's no more time," it said. Glowing material ran like water down its face, revealing Lafarge.

"No more time at all."

CHAPTER TWENTY

Work was piling up at the warehouse. There was no more time, and the outer circle of human servants was beginning to suspect something. She'd had to slap one down with a broken skull to get the others into order, of a sort. Gwen's lips lifted from her teeth when her transducer pinged an alarm at the back of her consciousness.

plasma gun discharge,
the machine said,
location follows.
The antennas on the roof were big and clumsy, but they worked after a fashion, and the instrument behind her ear could interface with their input.

Gwen snarled, a ripping, guttural sound full of menace. The enemy must have made up a supply of energy weapons—easier for him; he probably had a small faber to do the difficult components.
Ah. Central
Park.
Not too far away, and a good enough place to group for an attack. Why the discharge? It could be a trap; on the other hand, it was also likely that a cobbled-together group of hastily trained humans had poor fire discipline.

how many energy weapons?
she asked the machine.

well stealthed,
it replied.
indeterminate; not less
than five; not more than thirty of the
same class as the discharge.