Drakon (46 page)

"We're parking everyone here," Dolores said, indicating the door of a lounge down the top-floor corridor. "Just until the Mistress gets back, you understand." Excitement sparkled in the dark eyes. "They're actually going to take us through to the Prime Line, while this area gets pacified! I hope we get to see some of it."

"That would be fascinating," Jennifer agreed.
About as fascinating as a tour of Hell, guided by
Beelzebub.
"How long?"

"Oh, not more than a couple of hours, she said." Dolores giggled. "And then it'll all be over. We can relax and never worry about anything again, just swim and feast and make love."

"Yes," Jennifer nodded.
Hours. I will not scream. I will not smack this repulsive little slut.

She was very glad when the lounge door closed; it probably wasn't a very good idea to try and strangle someone with your bare hands when they had an automatic weapon. There were a dozen more in the lounge, and they raised an ironic cheer when she walked in. Jennifer smiled and waved, angling over toward the coffee urn and pastry tray, trying to look natural.

My God, that's Fred Lather!
she thought.
Is
he in
on this?
And his wife.
My God, I've got five
of her exercise tapes.

Janeen Amier walked over. "Nice to see you again," she said, chattering nervously.

Jennifer took her hand. It felt dry against hers, which was damp with nervous sweat. The ex-actress didn't look nervous; more of an exalted expression.

"Did you know," she said, "did you know, the Mistress says Fred and I did so much, we can be made
young
again?"

That shocked Jennifer; enough that she really saw the aging woman for a moment, instead of her eyes skipping over the face in an unconscious search for danger.

"Young?" she said.

"Young, and beautiful. Gwen herself said," Janeen simpered and blushed, "that we'd be pretty when we were rejuvenated. How I envy you
that
experience."

"Yes," said Jennifer. She felt herself blushing. "Where's the powder room?"

"Just down the hall," Janeen said, skittering back to her husband's side. He was looking a little stunned himself, as if he couldn't quite convince himself that this was really happening.

It not only
is
happening,
Jennifer thought grimly,
it's your bloody
fault,
you idiot.

She sipped at the coffee and gave the others a quick look. A few politicians, some heavy-duty financial types, a black police officer . . .
My God, that's Henry's boss!
A Somali model married to a British rock star. An odd assortment . . .

"Souvenirs," she muttered. This was a collection of souvenirs. She remembered Gwen's words:
I
look after my own.
Some weird sense of obligation, the sort you had to a dog. "And I'll look after myself, thank you very much."

She set the coffee cup down; it was Limoges; no plastic here. Nobody was standing out in the hall.

She pushed open the ladies' and went into a stall.

Embarrassing.
But it was the obvious place to hide something internally, and that little bit less likely to be detected, according to the expert. Henry had had the good grace to look embarrassed himself.

"I am going to have a talk with that man, when this is over."

If it got over. The thought heartened her, and she walked out of the room with an air of casual authority. You
belong here. Nobody will suspect you. Just another one of the souvenirs.

Lafarge had given her a probable location, based on his scouting and her descriptions of what went on here. "Drakensis psychology means the ultimate controls will be near its nesting site." That was just wonderful.

She palmed a featureless black rectangle from her purse, about the size of an old-fashioned cigarette case. Up a flight of stairs, and to a heavy steel door; she must be right under the roof in this section of the warehouse. A single guard, a Haitian. She didn't recognize him, but from the way he looked at her he probably did, perhaps from the Bahamas.

"Sorry, miss," he said, the submachine gun in his hands pointed down. "This off limit."

Jennifer raised the black rectangle with the business end pointed out between thumb and forefinger, and
thought.
There was a heavy tug in her hand.
Whump.
Pressure popped her ears in the confined space, two sharp little pains. The Haitian flipped backward as if punched in the face; his head gonged against the thick door, and he slid downward with his eyes rolling back in his head and blood running from his nose and mouth.

"I had to," she muttered to herself, keeping a fixed stare away from the man as she moved towards the door. "I had to do that."

She pressed the black cone against the electronic lock.
Something
pulled it out of her fingers, the last fraction of an inch. Crackling sounds came from beneath it. The door clicked; when she took the cone off the wall it came away easily, leaving the keypad riddled with tiny holes.

Into the inner sanctum.
Lifestyles of the rich and inhuman,
she thought. A series of big rooms, leading into each other open-plan. An office setup; a gym room with equipment like nothing she'd ever seen, and lead-weighted free weights of ridiculous, cartoon size. Bedroom. Huge curtained bed, and beyond it an elaborate . . . bathroom wasn't really the word. Bathing facility. She walked quickly over to a terminal set beside the bed and opened the cover of the CPU. Even a non-tech type could see that someone had been making heavy modifications; cables attached here and there, new circuit boards. Gingerly, she laid the black thimble down on the exposed equipment.

Tendrils the color of clear ice and thinning off to invisibility
grew
out of the instrument. They waved over the circuit board, hesitated a little, then pounced, burrowing.

Jennifer shuddered. There was something unpleasantly alive about the tendrils, in an insect-like way. Now they were a writhing net over the surface of the computer, and the black thimble was melting away, shrinking and disappearing before her eyes.

"Now to try and get out of here," she said, hurrying through the suite of rooms.

A man was waiting at the door. Medium height, broad-shouldered, ugly-handsome Mediterranean face with a heavy blue-black five o-clock shadow. The cross-draw holster showed under his opened jacket.

"Vulk," she said. "I was just—"

"Just what?" the Serb said. The Walther in his hand moved, and her eyes were drawn to the 9mm opening of the muzzle as if it were a cavern into night.

She moved back as he advanced, two Haitians behind him. He looked behind her.

***

attempting to contain.

The knowledge almost froze her in mid-stride, moving through the enemy formation. Reflex carried her through; she slashed at a last figure as she ran, the layer-knife cleaving flesh as if it were jelly, bone with only a slight catch. Out into the night, dodging trees.

containment will fail in fourteen point seven three minutes,
the transducer said.

The non-voice was slower than usual, too much of the quasi-machine's capacity diverted to the link with the human-built computers controlling the fusion plant and gateway.

Self-reproach was bitter as she ran.
Diversion.
One she
had
to respond to, but she shouldn't have stayed once it was plain the Samothracian wasn't there. He'd used the psychology of the Race against her, the tight-focused aggressiveness that had kept her there, killing like a lion in a herd of penned zebra. While the real enemy crept around behind her.

The streets ahead were pitch-black save for the headlights of an occasional car, and there were a fair number of humans abroad. With hormones pouring into her blood at maximum combat-load, she could treat automobiles and pedestrians alike as a series of static encounters. At times she vaulted a moving car, or used a walker as a resilient buffer at a corner, shedding momentum and turning her vector on them the way a billiard ball did on the padded edges of a pool table. Black against black, the passersby saw her only as a glimpse of movement in the night, a flash of light on teeth or the edge of her layer knife, a hurtling weight that left broken bone and torn flesh behind it. The screams were swallowed in the greater turmoil of the nighted city. Once she found a column of armored personnel carriers across an intersection, moving out from some National Guard armory to maintain order in the chaotic streets.

Crock.
A plasma bolt slammed into the side of one vehicle, through the thin armor and into the fuel supply. Vaporized fuel sprayed inside the troop compartment and exploded. The turret with its 25mm autocannon flipped straight up, twirling end-over-end. The machine behind the one she'd shot tried to halt and couldn't, ramming into the rear of the burning wreckage. The smell of scorched metal almost overrode the roast-pork stink of burning flesh. Gwen drove through the gap between the wrecked APC and the one ahead of it.

"That ought to slow them a little," she said, to the pulse of her breathing as she ran. Eighteen surviving plasma guns were entirely too many to leave behind her. Most probably the humans were too terrorized to pursue, but there was no sense in taking chances.

seven minutes.

***

The AI's voice sounded in his mind. Kenneth Lafarge rose from his crouch atop the roof and pointed a hand.

Ptung.
A thread-thin line spun out from the cuff of his softsuit and whipped across the gap, slapping onto the metal of a support on the warehouse root. He took a coil around a stanchion on the building he stood on, pulling until the monomolecular thread came taut and sank half a finger's width into the steel. Then he applied the solvent; the thread cut off from the spool and merged with the glob of ice-clear material that anchored it there.

There were a half-dozen guards on the warehouse roof, equipped with heavy slug-throwers and native night-sight goggles. He recognized the make of weapon: designed for long-range sniping and to penetrate light metal armor. They would probably punch through his softsuit with a square hit, and certainly do him no good inside even if they didn't. With a slight sigh of regret, he raised the plasma rifle.

Crack.
Bits of flesh and metal spattered across the rooftop. The guard's rifle and ammunition exploded with a run of malignant crackles, like heavy firecrackers. Vaporized metal and organic steam blossomed upward. The others went to ground and began firing back.
Brave men,
Lafarge thought.
Not
very smart, but brave.
Heavy bullets whipcracked through the air around him, or hammered into brick.

Through brick, in most cases; the walls of the apartment building he stood on wouldn't stop hard-point rounds traveling at that speed. Others keened off metal closer to him, with each leaving a red-yellow flash of spark behind it.

He traversed the aimpoint of his weapon toward one set of muzzle flashes.
Crack.
This time the plasma released its energy on the thin sheet metal in front of a rifleman. The man reared up screaming, his face and torso ablaze from the finely-divided molten metal. Still burning, he plunged off the edge of the warehouse roof and into the street like a meteor through the night.

The others broke in horror and fled. Lafarge ignored them. Instead he sprang and hooked an arm and a leg over the thread between the buildings. It cut through the street clothing he wore over the softsuit as if the fabric were air, but the smart-armor gripped it in frictionless diamond-hard runnels. He slid down it in a long arching swoop, rolling over the parapet onto the flat roof and coming erect.

Ten meters away, the glass of a skylight shattered as a heavy bullet struck out from within. Reflex and the AI's prompting brought Lafarge around, weapon rising. Not even a cyber-warrior's reflexes could outmove a .50 round already fired, though. It hit him twice, glancing. The first on his forearm, smashing it aside and making the fingers fly open in reflex. The second impact nicked the plasma rifle.

do not fire,
the AI said.

Lafarge looked down. The guide-coil of the barrel was cut. With an angry snarl he cast it aside and signaled for the vibration-knife. That chittered out, a yard of wire outlined in the shape of a sword. He slashed at the tarpaper and sheet metal beneath his feet, sending up gouts of sparks as he savaged the thin galvanized steel.

biobomb subroutine located,
the machine told him with infuriating calm.
data follows.

"Damn, there's a self-destruct sequence!"

Even the
drakensis
wasn't totally insane, then—there was a way to destroy it safely. He levered up a flap of roof and looked down. Fiberboard panels, forming the ceiling of a corridor below, with power lines and ventilation ducts.

"Good."
Initiate biobomb self-destruct sequence.

initiated, three minutes, counting.

He leaped, relying on his weight to punch through into the space below.

***

five minutes,
the transducer said.
following peripheral functions lost to enemy infiltration.

No more than two blocks away. Seconds away. Her lungs stretched, feet hammered. Her human guards were firing from the roof of the warehouse. A plasma bolt arched out from another roof nearby, another, a third. One man plunged down, burning, and the rifle fire stopped. Something large and dark cut the angle between the two buildings in a swooping movement, dropped flat on the roof itself. Gwen's snarl was soundless, but it had the rage of territorial violation behind it.

He
dares!

An object dropped from the roof and clattered at her feet as she reached the front entrance. A flick of the eyes took it in.
Plasma rifle.
Inoperable. She shrugged out of the backpack shield in the same motion; it was scorching-hot anyway, and wouldn't take another hit.