Drakon (45 page)

"This way," he said, and arrows appeared before the sight of every member of the little force.

"Enemy's here." Another vector, like a compass needle pointing to the AI's best guess at location. "Lets go."

Spread out in a slight C-shape, they moved forward through the woods.
Back in the jungle,
Carmaggio thought with sour irony.
Back in the bad bush.
Big oaks and hickories, grass and shrubbery beneath, paved pathways—not too much like the Parrot's Beak, really. Except for the feeling in his gut and balls and the back of his neck; and that was different too. He was a lot older, his heart pumping harder in his rib cage.

The humans were moving in a staggered line, half carrying their plasma guns slung and M-16's or H&K's at the ready, half facing the darkness with the energy weapons. They moved at a slow deliberate walk; from what the equipment showed, Ingolfsson wasn't moving away from them. Henry paid attention to his feet. The light amplification was perfect, pretty much like a black-and-white image of a cloudy afternoon, but something was playing hell with his depth perception.

"Where the hell is she?" he whispered to himself. By the display, they ought to be right on top of her.

"
Looking for this?
"

A voice out of the dark, from somewhere above. He pivoted instantly on one heel, his finger squeezing at the trigger as the aimpoint cross from the indicator hung in front of his eyes.

Crack.

A treetop exploded in flame, a fireball in the night. His eyes widened. The beam shouldn't diffuse like that. She
did
have some sort of a shield. He caught a glimpse of a shape spreadeagled as it leaped, and then the vector arrow was quivering between trees. The one he'd hit was going up like a torch, every leaf and branch flash-ignited as the energy of the plasma spread around the circumference of the protective field.

Something arched out of the night at him as streams of tracer and plasma bolts raked the next tree into splinters. Dangerous splinters, from the way somebody was yelling. The object landed with a soggy thump and rolled to his feet.

Saunders recognized it before he did. "Clarens's head." The ex-officer raised his voice instinctively, despite the AI that would relay his words to every ear.

"Hold your fire until you've got a target! Keep moving."

They did.
Goddamn,
Carmaggio thought desperately, trying to follow the dots that marked out the schematic of the action. It was too
much,
too much information, slowing down his reactions—yet without it he'd be helpless. He worked his mouth and spat.

The dot that was Ingolfsson's
probable
location was skittering away ahead of them northward, moving at an estimated speed that raised his brows even now. A cross-country motorbike would be lucky to make that miles-per-hour in close terrain like this. And it was moving off to one side . . . .

"Flank left," he said. "Move!"

The ragged C of dots that marked his comrades started to move. Slowly, too slowly; it was like some computer game where you wrenched at the joystick and got reamed because the figures wouldn't
respond
in time—

***

Mary Chen jerked at Finch's cry, even more at the stream of green-colored tracer from her submachine-gun. She leveled her plasma weapon, trying to bring the red firing dot on the vector her goggles were supplying. Something was coming out of the night, something moving like a coursing cheetah. Her beam smashed an explosion of steam and shattered rock out of the ground, and then the weapon was slapped out of her hands with a force that sent her spinning around like a top, throwing out her hands to try and keep from falling.

The blow turned her around faster than her own muscles could ever have done. In time to see a black-outlined shape running
up
the trunk of the tree that had been behind her. It had a human outline; she could see that much, and see that it held a weapon shape in its left hand. In its right was something long and slender with an edge of silvered moonlight. Then the run ended in a momentum-driven crouch and the figure leaped out and away from the tree, whirling in midair somersaults with knees drawn up to chest. In a long arch that took it back over their heads.

Help! I've fallen into a Ninja movie and I can't get out!
The thought bubbled through her mind as she scrambled to get the plasma gun back.

Finch was snarling and slapping another magazine into her firearm, trying to track the target and jerk back the slide in the same motion.

Chen felt her whirl turn into a stagger that left her groping dizzily for the plasma gun. Something flashed. There was a huge cold impact across her stomach, and her legs dropped out from under her. Her hands felt numb as they groped for the wound, tried to hug the savaged, razor-cut edges of flesh back together and contain the slick wetness that bulged out. Her mouth opened and closed soundlessly.

Finch was off the ground, gripped from behind with an elbow-grip on her neck and an arm about her waist. Her own arms and legs kicked uselessly, the H&K firing off bursts into the night.

A voice hissed, every syllable as distinct as if it were cut from etched glass.

"Where is the Samothracian?"

"
Fuck
you!" Finch shouted, her fox-sharp features contorted with rage. The hillbilly accent was back, sharp and nasal.

"No time."

The arms wrenched and cast her aside. There was a single squeal, as fierce and shrill as an animal turning in the owl's claws, then the body hit the ground with limp finality.

The figure in black took a long stride toward Chen. The dying woman tried to turn away, but all that moved was her head, rolling loosely to face her other shoulder. She remembered the heel marks on the necks.

Impact. Nothing.

***

The vector arrow was pointing back the way they'd come. All the friendly dots turned left and south, scurrying to try and make their formation face the enemy and give mutual support. All except for one dot that kept right on going away, as fast as he or she could move their feet—and Henry couldn't blame whoever it was one little bit. Saunders was cursing under his breath, voice a little shaky; Jesus did the same on his other side.

Sixty seconds since contact. Jesus
fucking
Christ.

A voice rang out from behind a statue-fountain set in a pool.

"
Where's your Samothracian?
" it mocked. If a battle trumpet could live, it would sound like that.

Even at this instant, the beauty of it struck him. "
Where's your strong protector now, humans?
"

The sound firmed the attack vector to a brilliant dot. Bullets and a dozen plasma bolts lashed out.

Bronze exploded into flying molten gobbets. Several thousand gallons of water also exploded, and the steam burst flung chunks of stone coaming right back in their faces. Something wet spattered Carmaggio over half his body, and a heavy limp weight struck him hard enough to send him staggering. He clutched at it automatically, arid found himself holding Jesus Rodriguez—his body, since the top had been clipped off his skull by a knife-edged shard of rock. Bits of the granite still glistened among the pink brain and fragments, and his friend's body shuddered and flapped and bucked in his arms.

He thrust it away with an involuntary shout. Images flitted before his eyes and clawed at his attention.

"Regroup," he called out. The iron calm of his own voice shocked him, at some level far below the clarity that gripped and moved him. "Ten-yard intervals, circle formed on me."

The AI would show everyone where to go, if they kept their heads and did it. They
were
doing it.

The enemy vector arrow was a blur, moving around his defensive position. Every now and then someone would shoot at it, but Ingolfsson seemed to know they were shielded against her plasma weapon—

She knows how to use these things and we don't,
Carmaggio knew with deadly certainty.
And
she's doing a better job of figuring out how to use them against us.

A rock whined by his head and went
crack
against a treetrunk as it shattered into fragments—not even a superhuman could make an irregular object perfectly accurate. He didn't intend to stand up and see a trial of strength between this Fritz helmet and Ingolfsson's arm, though.

"Hit the dirt. And nail the bitch!"

Bolts lanced out through the woods. Trees toppled. Carmaggio felt a sudden something in his mind, a sensation like a mental
click.
He started to roll still prone, bumped into someone, rolled right over them despite their squawk of protest. As he did so another plasma bolt lanced out of the darkness, right into the mid-section of the tree he'd been under. The three-foot thickness of hardwood vanished in a meter-wide sphere of magenta fire, and the great crown of the copper beech toppled downwards. It crashed into the middle of their position, branches probing like spears.

Return fire lashed back at the firmed-up vector the bolt provided for the AI. Thudding feet warned him that it didn't stay accurate for long. He was surprised the footfalls were so loud, but you couldn't move a hundred and ninety-five pounds up to greyhound speeds that quickly on soft little tippytoes, he supposed.

Carmaggio went up on one knee, the trigger of the plasma gun sweetly responsive under his finger.

Repeated hits or a point-blank hit will overload the shielding,
Lafarge's remembered voice said.
When that happens, the shield's energy storage coil will fail catastrophically.

"And fry the bitch to hell and gone," he snarled under his breath. The sights were steady—

—and a stream of tracer snapping right by his ear with flat stretching
whackwhackwhack
sounds showed somebody had the same idea.

The bolt went wide, snapping out across Central Park—at that angle, it could blast a hole in concrete in one of the apartments over on the Upper West Side. Carmaggio rolled desperately, trying to get a new bead on the running, jinking figure. It was as if they were all standing still, or wading through honey, and she was the only normal person there.

"Shit. Shit,
shit.
"

The vector bead slid right across their circular position. People on the
other
side were shooting after her.

"Fuck, the captain's dead!"

Henry's head whipped around. Three or four of the National Guardsmen were standing shoulder-deep in the fallen beech tree, looking down. He forced himself to his feet and lumbered over.

Saunders was lying on his back, and a stub of wood three inches around was through his chest.

"Oh, man, I'm outta here," one of the guardsmen said, backing away, his head shaking in an unconscious rejection of the scene before him. "Oh, man, I'm gone."

"
Shut up!
"

The AI blared it into everyone's ear in a shout that stopped them in their tracks.

"You want to be out there
alone
with that thing?" he went on. "And if you make it home, you want to wait there until it comes for you? Christ, if you're that anxious to die, eat your gun and do it easy and quick!"

Silence fell. "Get your attention back on the job."
Rollcall,
he whispered. Shock made him grunt.

Chen, Finch, Jesus, ten more dead. Two run. And all in less than eight minutes.

The men and women faced outward. But the vector arrow had turned to a bead, and the AI drew him a schematic.

"She's going home," Carmaggio whispered. "We did it. I hope." Aloud: "Come on. We've got to get to the warehouse."

He walked toward the waiting vans parked along the edge of Columbus Circle. Past the bodies, past Finch lying like a pretzel, past shattered burning trees.
How many
—Two of the FBI types were kneeling by Dowding's body. He'd never really gotten to know Finch's boss, beyond the depressed-horse expression on his bony face. Now he was lying face-down, with a four-inch-deep cut running diagonally from left shoulderblade to right kidney. That must have happened as she left, running through their position.

The night smelled of death. Eighteen living humans followed him out of the park. None remained but the dead, as they walked toward the killer.

Jenny,
he thought.

***

She pressed the button again. "Jennifer Feinberg for Ms. Ingolfsson," she snapped, putting her palm to the plate beside the door. "She told me to report here in an emergency. Now let me
in.
"

A wait, while whoever was behind the video monitor let the computer confirm who she was and bring up its instructions.

Now she lived, or died. If the door didn't open, Lafarge attacked it himself—and he said the chances were better than five-to-one he couldn't defuse the biobomb in time. She closed her eyes and rumbled for a prayer, the first in a very long time.

There was a click "Come through," the speaker said.

She did, into a lobby now dimly lit. Two tall black men stood by either side of the door, looking out through slits. They had rifles, absurdly huge spindly-looking things. Lafarge had said . . .
Barretts. Or
something.
They ignored her. The one who'd let her in was a young Latina woman, with a wicked-looking machine pistol slung across her body, incongruous against the chic outfit.

"Hi, Dolores," Jennifer said.

"Buenas noches, Jenny," Dolores Ospina said. "Welcome to the Household. Glad you decided to be sensible." A flash of a smile. "Welcome to the harem, that is to say . . . . Come on."

Jennifer forced a sickly grin as the other woman led her down a corridor and into an elevator; the sheer
normalcy
of the closed-down offices was jarring, with plastic covers over the PCs and Post-it notes stuck to desks.

The elevator had glass panels on the other side, and they had a view of the main section of the converted warehouse as they rose. Nothing dramatic, floodlights and a few workers fussing around enigmatic machinery. She recognized Dr. Mueller—
his name should be Mengele
—and the Sikh in their white coats, bent together over a console. The elevator clicked to a stop at the third floor. Armed men patrolled the walkways, or stood around the outer wall in positions barricaded with curved shapes of heavy metal.