The Centurion's Empire (46 page)

"No word of Baker yet?" Hall asked the hologram of Roarch, the head of his security node. The holographic face
suspended above his desk looked tired and worried.

"He was last seen entering the scramjet," Roarch replied.

"Someone came out wearing the right mask, our guys confirmed that under deep scan. We got a security monitor record
of the dude with the same mask talking to some roadspike working carpark E. He rode off with him."

"Smells like shit on a shoe. Which spikes was he with?"

"Hellrunners. We got calls out but they're traditionals. They spend a lot of time on civilian turf and they got no comms.
It could be tomorrow before we get real words."

Hall glanced to a wallscreen, where a newscast showed shattered debris being skimmed from choppy gray waves by
Canadian sailors.

"He could have been aboard the scramjet," said Hall as he turned back to face Roarch's hologram.

"Yeah, but airpost security says only three boarded. Anyhow, why go to that sort of trouble to trash a medical? Jinslash
would have done the job for fifty K's."

Hall flung a stylus down on his desk and folded his arms. "Give me a break! Jinslash would have had its ass kicked from
here to low orbit by the Ward Lords. They're stupid but not that stupid."

"So we're left with the big who, and I don't like that." A hand appeared beside the holographic face and Roarch chewed a
thumbnail. "Like you said, Dr. Hall, there's shit to smell but not to see. Get back here, my man, now. Get all the cards
and disks on that Vitellan dude and bring 'em with you. Everything! Do a mask on and take a car—and make sure you
got muscle with automatics."

An armored sedan pulled out of SkyPlaz from the outpatient ramp an hour later. Hall had been wearing a mask and his
head had been swathed in bandages, but Lucel had other

criteria to watch for. Hall's stature, the armed guards, and the fact that a patient in bandages was well enough to carry a
heavy tote bag. She pulled her Sundart convertible out into the light traffic and followed the sedan, keeping quite close
behind.

Within two blocks the sedan's driver realized that some-one was following. He gunned the peroxide engine and engaged
1

the computer-enhanced evasion option to weave through the traffic. Lucel cursed quietly, but her car had all the same
pursuit and evasion options and the gap barely widened. They entered a feeder for S288, going north, weaving through
the traffic in formation. From the sedan's side window a guard fired a laser at the Sundart's windshield, but the bursts
were absorbed by polarity baffles and Lucel was annoyed rather than dazzled. The guard changed to a Ruger GP-100, but
Lucel's own dazzle-laser was locked on to him by now. Shielding his eyes, he aimed Jow, and hit her front right tire.
Lucel's Sundart lurched as she fought for control. Almost at once autoseal polymer repaired the rents and a gas reservoir
began to pump the wheel back to operational pressure, but now the sedan was two hundred yards ahead. UniWard was to
the right of the freeway.

"Bad turf, anything goes," muttered Lucel as she hunched forward slightly.

As if to agree with her the Sundart's onboard radar blazed a warning of an attack vector from the right: airborne and
coming in low. It was a big profile, the size of a tiltfan. An overpass shielded the aircraft's approach as Lucel gained on
the sedan. She reached down for a heavy tube trailing flaccid cables that plugged into her radar. Holding it up over the
windshield she fired blindly at a space beyond the overpass where the tiltfan would have to fly. The Taipan interceptor
swamped the sportscar in exhaust as it streaked to where its target was headed—but someone in the tiltfan had already
fired an identical Taipan at the sedan.

The sedan detonated in a fiery teardrop that smeared along S288's bitumen and dispersed into burning shards. The
tiltfan's passenger shouted "Hit!" triumphantly just as the horrified pilot cried "Incoming!"
Lucel's Taipan struck amidships, and the covalent lattice in the warhead collapsed right between the rear engine bay and
the cabin. The tiltfan sprayed flesh, flames, and composite debris to either side, but it flew on, hanging on the two front
fans and slowly descending before hitting a construction site in Broad Acres and exploding. Lucel paused, standing up in
her Sundart and confirming that everyone in the sedan was dead. She set her dataspex to scan for a suite of profiles, and
within seconds a flashing wireframe centered on a blackened, battered composite case that had been inside Hall's tote
bag. She jumped from the car and snatched up the case in a towel.

Another car had stopped by now, and a man had got out.

"Hey, look at that, she's part of a heist," he called. "Stop—"

Lucel shot him in the leg. He collapsed but held on to the driver's-side door, shouting in surprise and pain. His passenger
scrabbled in the car's door pannier for a gun as Lucel heaved the case into her Sundart and tumbled in after it.

"Evasive!" shouted Lucel, lying across the seats as shots whined past her. The Sundart added the smoke from its tires to
that curling up from the roadway as it steered for the feeder into the matrix of streets that was Eastward.
Twenty minutes later the smoke had dispersed from the Houston sky. Across the city, where the Buffalo Bayou marked
the border of Eastward, a hawk floated on the air, flying in the random, soaring curves of a scavenging pattern. There was
no suggestion of an attack vector until it was right over a walled compound on Waugh Drive, then the wings folded and it
fell like a stone. The explosion was sharp and hollow, showering soil, grass, and shreds of flesh into a nearby swimming
pool.

The attack generated a report that was transmitted to the other side of the Atlantic:

Seeker bion targeted on implants in Luministe agent Lucel Hunter. Successful impact took place at 3.17 pm Houston
time in the Nin-gyo compound, Waugh Drive, Houston. Microcamera images from the seeker indicate that the implant
carrier was an adult Doberman bitch, and subsequent datafarm sifting indicated that it

IMC l.CI\ I UIMUIN J cririrvt
£.n

was part of the compound's security pack, and was designated by the name T-rexette.

Lord Wallace crumpled the hard copy and flung it across the Deep Frigidarium. For a second time the Luministe agent
had cheated death and evaded him.

Within three minutes of leaving the freeway Lucel had exchanged her Sundart for a laundered Toyota Earthway electric
sedan and sealed Hall's case inside Faraday cage mesh to smother any surviving beacons. By the time her former
implants had attracted the seeker bion, she was in a shielded workshop in Eastward, watching a framescreen where a
military surplus bomb disposal unit was drilling into Hall's charred metal case.

"Checkin' the air," said the Creole technician as a probe replaced the drill. "Nitrogen, ninety-nine parts, one part
argon. Someone's paranoid."

"I want the contents, nothing else," said Lucel.

"Hell lady, you'd sure be a kook if you just wanted the case. Sending in the camera."
A silver cable with a surface like fine scales replaced the gas sensor probe, and an image of the inside of the case filled
the framescreen. It was a jumble of paper notes, insulated sample phials and datacards, all stirred together by the
explosion that had killed Hall. The back of the lock came into view. There was a red plastic lozenge bonded to the
surface.

"Now that's a gas-magnetic Shalis. North Ward got a batch in from Switzerland two years ago. A magnetic key shuts it
down, otherwise it flames the goods if someone forces the lock and lets in oxygen. It's not a problem, a coat of polymer
will make it think everything's dandy."

"Or you could cut the case open in a nitrogen atmosphere."

"Sure could, but poly is cheaper . . . hey now, lookey here. Another one on the back hinge. It's white, and, and shit, I
never seen that type."

"Like you said, someone's paranoid," Lucel reminded him. "You'd better hurry."

"Think I'll go for poly
and
the N-two flood before I cut."

"Listen to me!" snapped Lucel. "Just use nitrogen, and work fast." "I'd rather—" "Do it!"
Once the chamber was flooded with nitrogen the tech made a narrow slit in the case and removed the cards and paper
notes with a suction grapple. The phials needed a wider hole, but it took only fourteen minutes from the first drillhole to
empty the insulated case.

"No beacons, no sleepers, it's all yours," he said as he took a tray from the chamber's airlock. "If you—holy shit!"
Flame and fumes belched from the incisions in the top of the case, quickly filling the chamber with yellowish-brown
smoke.

"So the white one was on a timer," said Lucel as she emptied the tray into her Faraday-cage bag.

"Someone's real seriously paranoid," agree the tech, staring into the opaque smoke.
The River Oaks checkpoint on Westheimer Road was all soft-contour white moldings and lattice-weave barrier pickets,
but it had the strength and firepower to stop an old-style tank. To the east of it the suburbs were like a huge, exclusive,
high-security condo and the checkpoint was as much to say
your rates at work
to those within as
keep out
to unauthorized
drivers.

Lucel's ID was for a wealthy British tourist driving a sensibly downmarket car while outside the exclusive Greenpark
independent municipalities. The security guards waved her through with no more than routine facial profile scans. She
drove to the hotel where she was staying, which was part of the Greater Galleria Center. The zone where she parked the
Toyota was legal, but it would vanish within the hour with no questions asked and no alarm raised.
Lucel scanned her hotel room very carefully before opening the Faraday-cage bag. With her dataspex plugged into a
reader she examined the cards in turn. They were mostly scan data on Vitellan, thorough and meticulous scan data.
Some of Hall's notes and impressions were there as well,

under an encryption that took an hour of commercial processor time to break.

Lucel had began to download data from software agents that she had left to monitor certain network lines. While
working for the Luministes in Paris and Durvas, she had also been working for herself, and to an agenda that nobody
could have suspected. The software agents cleared their data buffers and reset their address registers to a number of
industrial espionage agencies once they had downloaded, giving both Durvas and Luministe systems security staff
something to discover and purge before they had supposedly done any damage—and Lucel had plenty of other agents
hidden in positions of trust. Both Durvas and Luministe Security would report an intrusion foiled before any data had
been collected, so it was a win-win situation for all concerned. The encrypted messages that Lucel assembled had been
further disguised by seeming outwardly innocent and unconnected, but once gathered together they interlocked to tell a
very different story. That story was now negotiable currency in certain circles.

Lucel approached the SpanTurf blockhouse the following evening. It was a calm, overcast dusk, and the reek from a
breakdown in the sewage works just over the Buffalo Bayou was heavy and cloying on the cold air. The streets had a thin
sprinkling of cars and pedestrians, about what one might expect for a chilly Houston evening. Stopping before the
blockhouse entrance, she spoke to a comm beneath her wrist, then folded her arms and waited. A cell of five youths
approached in a wide curve, guns out but held casually. They wore no tag-patches, she noted. Ronin-G kids, out to build
reputations, out to get patronage.

"You don't know where you be, slut."

"Yeah, you don't know."

"You got stop here, you stop here a lot."

"You know, stop a lot, you know."

Most of them wanted their say, and they were loud and brash. One had glazed eyes and did not speak at all, he just held
his Mexican copy of a Makarova to Lucel's head. The others pushed and pummeled her, but made no attempt to
force her to go with them. They were posturing for the monitor cameras in front of the headquarters building. The
leader spat in her face. Spittle dripped from the lens of her dataspex.

"I spit you, dirty bitch, but you not worth spittin' on. You owe me a favor, you know? How you gonna pay me back?"
The one with the glazed eyes continued to point the gun at her head.

They know I'm here, they're just watching the show on their screens in there, Lucel decided. They probably even sent
these kids to pump the muscle. Sorry boys, nothing personal.

Her head snapped about, deflecting the gun as her elbow came up into the boy's chin, and she was drawing her own gun
as she spun and lashed the toe of her boot into the leader's teeth. Guns crackled, Lucel staggered as her armor stopped a
bullet high on her chest, then she fired at the neck in an open shirt and the sternum beneath a red T-shirt. Suddenly
everything froze, Lucel and the last youth pointing their guns at each other.

"If you so much as move a muscle I'll kill you where you stand," Lucel said firmly. "You're pointing at my tits but I've
got armor. / have a bead on your
head.
Drop the gun."