Drakon (47 page)

The ozone smell of the fusion reactor and the lingering, crinkling scent of the gateway's byproducts overrode all else in the building. The two guards cried out in relief as she charged through the door.

"Vulk!" she snapped, silencing them.

One pointed. Both followed as best they could.

***

"Get
out
of my way!" Carmaggio snarled.

The National Guard officer, under his helmet, looked much younger than the policeman. And much more frightened. The Bradley APC's of his company were still laagered around the wreckage of two burned-out models, with bodybagged shapes lying on the sidewalk. Nervous soldiers crouched in their shadows, fingering M-16's and rocket launchers. Searchlights from the APC's and Humvees played across the tall buildings on either side, probing through the darkness.

Disaster,
Henry thought. That was obvious at first glance; you could smell it, too. There was something unique and unmistakable about the stink of human fat cooked out of bodies and pooling under a burned-out armored vehicle. It took him back, in ways he had no desire to remember.

"We're after terrorists," he went on.
Time-traveling extra-dimensional ones,
he added to himself.

No sense in stressing this guy out, and no time to explain.

The officer looked at the two National Guard trucks. Carmaggio, in civilian clothes but Army body armor, well spattered with blood. He
might
have enough experience to know what brains looked like flecked out across cloth. The survivors of the FBI SWAT team. Saunders's guardsmen, carrying not only their own assault rifles but odd-looking weapons that would have been more appropriate in the hands of Obi-Wan or the Imperial Stormtroopers.

"Who the hell—"

"FBI," he said. One of the agents was still alert enough to flash ID. "We're after the ones responsible for all this."

"Yes
sir,
" the Guardsman said. "We . . . some sort of rocket attack. I lost . . . and we've got no communications, everything's out . . ."

"I know. We're in hot pursuit."

"Need any help?"

Carmaggio's brows went up. That
was
initiative, considering the circumstances. A lot of men would simply wait here until someone official came along and told them what to do.

"Hell yes, Captain." He gave the warehouse address. "Follow me and coordinate."

***

Jennifer screamed. Vulk Dragovic smiled as he ripped open her blouse and held up two alligator clips, then licked the metal to improve the connection. Thin wires ran back from them to a small portable transformer set.

"Soon you will sing, Jew bitch," he said quietly. "Sing like a diva."

His face was sweating, but his hands moved with an expert's emotionless skill as he stripped insulation from the wires and connected them to screw clamps on the transformer.

"This produced much good singing in Bosnia," he said conversationally; his Serbian accent was noticeably thicker. "And in Kosovo. All you needed to do to get those Turk-kissing Albanian swine telling you everything you wanted to know was to take their sows and—"

The door slammed open. Jennifer bit back another scream. Gwen was there, but almost unrecognizable. Dressed in loose black, with her short red hair
bristling.
Her teeth showed, and the whites of her eyes in rims all around the iris. The wide eyes flicked to the gas-gun resting on a table in the cluttered storeroom.

"Computer?" she said. Vulk nodded. "Emergency. Samothracian. Upstairs.
Now.
"

Jennifer blinked, and Gwen was gone. The Serb and his two Haitian assistants snatched up their weapons and headed for the door after her. Vulk was last, and he hesitated for a second. The fingers of his right hand were moving, and with a sudden chill that made her stomach feel cold and loose she realized that he was considering killing her right then and there.

"Later," he said.

The door slammed, and she heard his footsteps pounding away down the corridor. The beat of her own blood in her ears sounded louder. She strained against the cord binding her arms behind her and through the lattice of the metal chair; all it did was scrape the skin raw. It took a moment of that before she realized what Ingolfsson had said. Lafarge was loose inside the warehouse.

"Please," she whispered and prayed. "Please."

***

Gwen swarmed up the rungs set into the elevator shaft. Below her the twin circles gleamed with their internal heat, almost brighter than the reflected light in the visible spectrum.

three minutes,
the transducer said.
all spare capacity diverted to holding reactor and gate
functions.

The lights died. Human voices yelled in panic; guards, Vulk, the roomful of pets on the third floor.

The view changed only marginally to her eyes, but it took a few seconds for her followers to remember their night-sight equipment, and that was of primitive local make. The muzzle-flashes of the Barrett sniper rifles firing from behind desks and consoles and pieces of equipment all over the floor of the open section died down. A dark figure rose and darted forward toward the central catwalk. As he went he turned and slashed with his hand. Metal sparked and sang as it parted under the vibration-sword. The whole long weight of the catwalk lurched and shivered as one end of it came unanchored from the walkway that circled the building's interior at this height.

He means to drop it over the reactor and gateway,
Gwen knew. To run down its length, snapping through the members that supported it from above.

That much weight of metal crashing down on the equipment would wreck it. And probably wreck any chance of a breakthrough from the Domination's timeline.

Gwen turned, holding her weight up by her renewed grip on the rung, and braced her feet against the wall of the elevator shaft in a horizontal crouch. With a long feline scream of rage she leapt, out across the empty space of the warehouse.
Impact.
Her hands gripped rough metal—
full circle
—and a whiplike surge of the long supple length of her body brought her up onto the shivering, moving surface of the walkway. She was alone on it except for the Samothracian and what scent told her was a cooling human body, cut open to the body cavity. Dolores's body, still clutching her machine pistol.

"
Come to me and die, human!
" she shouted, and charged.

Lafarge turned to meet her. The plasma gun in her hand flashed,
crack-crack-crack,
outlining him in white fire and burning the concealing native clothes to calcined ash. Then she was upon him. Layer knife met vibration-sword. There was no room for footwork on the swaying iron, and they grappled chest to chest.

CRACK

Below and behind them the sky-spearing beam of light appeared again. This time the noise was loud enough to shatter glass. The light seemed to wash through her tissues, turning the conductive fabric of her blacks searing hot; the slippery surface of the softsuit under her hands went mirrored to reflect the energy. A lance of fire the thickness of a man's thigh speared upward. Below it the great circle of the gateway turned bright at a central point, then expanded outward to the rim. The brightness was like a pool of liquid mercury, rippling, distorting, and reflecting.

"You lose!" Gwen cried.

Her arms closed around the Samothracian. The softsuit had little protection against low-velocity impact, crushing force. His were about her with nearly equal strength. They fell to the walkway, rolling.

"You lose, human!"

Something was forcing its way through the silvery distortion that spanned the gateways circle, the metallic-looking field giving way like water under surface tension. A domed machine was coming through, sleek and black, adjusting its adamantine bulk to fit the ten-meter opening between worlds.

***

"Cover us!" Carmaggio shouted.

Fifty-caliber bullets spanged and whinged off the glacis plates and turrets of the APC's as they faced in toward the warehouse. Their 25mm chain-guns and coaxial machine-guns answered, bottle-shaped muzzle-flashes of orange and white fire through the night. Something must be backing the warehouse walls at that point, heavy reinforcement, because the return fire continued. Someone was firing a grenade-launcher back at the National Guard vehicles, a heavy
chooonk . . . chooonk
sound, followed by the cracking detonation of the 40mm grenades. None of the armored fighting vehicles had been damaged, but both the trucks with Saunders's men and the FBI agents were burning. The survivors were around him, crouching in the lee of the armor.

The Bradleys felt huge and solid to him; he'd campaigned with the old M-113's, aluminum boxes.

But he remembered what a single plasma bolt from a hand-weapon had done to one: ripped it like a C-rat can under a tread.

There was just no time.

Henry rose over the back deck of the APC and fired three times into the ground floor of the warehouse.

Crack. Crack. Crack.
Metal and brick belled outward and upward as heat flashed steel into vapor and shattered the more resistant ceramic of brick into dust. Lime burned as the mortar ignited; lime, and human flesh beyond it.

"
Follow me!
" Carmaggio roared, and ran for the holes his weapon had punched. The fire from the warehouse slackened, stunned, but rounds still kicked up sparks around his feet. A wave of heat from glowing metal and he was through.

"Jenny!" he called.

It was the AI that answered, laying a green strip at his feet. He followed it.

***

Jennifer screamed again, half fear and half rage, and lashed out with her feet, the only part of her she could move. The dark figure grunted and staggered back.

"Christ, woman, what'd you do that for?"

She stared.
Henry?
"Henry?"

"Sure. Lemme—"

Hands found hers, and a blade sawed at the cords. "C'mon. Can you walk."

"Watch me
run,
" she snapped. "Let's get out of this nightmare."

"I've got nightsight goggles. Here, take my hand."

They ran out into the corridor. That was growing lighter, bright blue-white reflections bouncing around corners and leaving knife-edged shadows. At the corner Henry's grip on her wrist turned to a heavy tug.

"Down."

She fell to the floor, shielding her eyes with her hand against the intolerable white light that came down the long stretch of hall leading to the centrum of the converted warehouse. That left her looking at Henry's face, contorted in a snarl as he aimed. The light didn't seem to be bothering him, through the goggles that covered his eyes like the two halves of a golf ball. He fired, and her hair crinkled from the nearness of the plasma bolts. Again and again, but the sound and light were lost in what was happening a few hundred feet away. "That's all we can do." His hand squeezed hers. "Let's go."

***

"
Not . . . this . . . time . . . you . . . don't,
" Lafarge gasped in her ear.

The loosened walkway shivered and bucked under them as they lay straining to snap each other's spines. Gwen locked her hand over her wrist and increased the pressure, ignoring the tightness in her own chest. The Samothracian was moving, scrabbling. She tried to lock his leg with hers, but there was no purchase on the slick surface, not without losing her leverage for the crushing hold.

The man's leg went straight. They rolled, toppled. Toward the roaring beam cutting into the night.

"
Not this time!
"

Gwen felt a last snarling howl of frustration escape her as they fell free. Her arms tightened, and reinforced bone cracked and splintered.

A moment of white light. Nothing.

***

"Get us the fuck out of here," Carmaggio shouted to the driver, half-throwing Jennifer up the ramp of the APC ahead of him. "Don't argue, just do it!"

The other Bradleys had already gone. Henry didn't know how many of the people who'd followed him into the warehouse had come out again; he'd sent the message to bug out through Lafarge's little earphones, and that was all he could do.

He crashed to the crowded floor of the Bradley's fighting compartment himself, half-landing on Jenny, gouging his bruised torso on the edges of seats and what felt like half a dozen metal projections. The officer in charge of the APC didn't give him any grief, at least. The diesel grunted and the tracks clattered on pavement even as the winch began cranking the ramp-door at the rear shut. The vehicle ran straight backward, lurching up enough to throw them all to the side as it ran up over the trunk of a parked car and ground it flat. It lurched again as the driver made a reverse turn, then accelerated backward away from the inferno.

Henry and Jennifer clung together. And—

—the interior flux of the fusion generator washed across coils severed by the policeman's plasma bolts. The system might have been able to compensate, but too much computer capacity had been compromised. Failure propagated in a feedback cycle—

—energy released, not into its own spacetime but into the molehole drawing greedily where its mouth protruded into Earth/2's—

—fluxing back through the entropy differential between the timelines—

—and into the vastly more powerful machines anchoring the paramatter that kept the molehole open. Boundaries blurred as it quasi-vibrated through the infinite event waves—

***

And
another Carmaggio pushed the remote button, staring at the TV. Nothing else to do but
work, and nothing had happened to break the routine in more years than he liked to remember . . .

And
another Carmaggio rolled the little cart down the alleyway, the stumps of his legs
aching with the damp. They'd ached that way every year since he'd gotten out of the VA
—
since the
claymore had smashed every bone below mid-thigh into gravel. He looked down in the cup. Thirty,
maybe forty bucks. Enough for a couple of bottles . . .

And a thousand thousand Carmaggios blurred back
into the singular
one
that was all reality
could contain, the one he would have to live as if it were the singular reality of creation . . .