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CHAPTER TEN


Ken Lafarge came out of the water silently, crawling on his belly. It was deep night, moonless, only the starlight for illumination and the distant exterior lights of the house. The breathing film rolled up from his mouth and nose, contracting smoothly into the thin goggles across his eyes. Those turned the darkness into flat silvery light, as bright as daylight; they would diffuse glare with the same efficiency. The softsuit covered his body, a form-hugging armor that blended seamlessly against the background, mimicking light and thermal signatures. He went over the beach and up into rocky ground covered in scrub. Wherever his softsuit touched the ground it formed momentary pads shaped to grip on the outside, a frictionless surface elsewhere. He eeled through the heavy undergrowth with scarcely a rustle to mark his passage, only a slight sagelike smell of bruised herbage.

Break, human-range, mark, he whispered silently, as he cleared the scrub and moved into open country.

The AI showed him schematic indications of human presence. It helpfully filled in the guard dogs some of the men had with them. There were a round dozen, patrolling the perimeter; the dogs could be a problem, but fortunately the wind was from the interior of the island. He could overhear the guards’ periodic check-ins; they were wearing headsets and throat mikes. Ken grinned wryly in the darkness. Advantages of backwardness. No trace of comp-control, just radios. If the equipment had been a little more advanced, his would have been able to take it over. The Samothracian rose and moved forward in a smooth jog, feet nearly soundless on the coarse, sandy soil. Fairly soon he’d be into the gardens.

The guards would be hirelings, and chances were that they’d be completely ignorant of what they served. Kenneth Lafarge didn’t intend to kill any of them if he could help it, but he wasn’t going to let their welfare alter his behavior much one way or another.

The sound warned him: far above human audibility, translated by the earpieces, sonic barrier. directional. Well beyond this world’s technology, and set for barring human-range. A local would just get very apprehensive as they went through the edge of it, and probably go into convulsions if they tried to cross the line itself.

He backed, sweat prickling under his softsuit in the instant before the covering drank it away. Close. He hadn’t expected that. Assume the field’s in a linear arrangement, a line of wands . . . He came to an iron post, as thick as his thigh and two meters high. That was surprising, since the wands for a sonic barrier should be about the thickness and length of a little finger. A scanner thread pulled out of his cuff revealed the reason.

Now that was ingenious. Cobbled together out of indigenous components. Vastly larger than in the prime-line universe, and there was a great big copper cable to carry power rather than a superconducting ring the size of a wedding band to store it. He’d expected the drakensis to be smart—they all were—but it was ingenious as well.

Two can play at that game. There had to be a control system for this, and it would have to be native. Which meant . . .

He reset his earpieces with a mental command and walked quickly up to the post, through the barrier that he felt only as a gentle humming and a tingling through the bones of his skull. A slim tool punched through the cast-iron grillwork that covered it, and a thread of fiber followed. The end of the thread extended filaments the color of ice, growing like crystals in a saturated solution. They worked their way into the circuits of the device and began to trace the connections.

Execute.


# # #


“Our guest—”

Tom Cairstens walked through the door and stopped. The Draka was on the bed, kneeling astride Alice’s waist; her fingers were moving up from navel over stomach and on to breasts, moving with a delicate precision he knew very well. Gwen’s hair moved as an ear cocked toward him. Alice’s head rolled in his direction as well, but her eyes were glassy, mouth open, two red spots high on her cheeks. He moved forward, smiling; the ear had been enough indication of that Gwen wanted him to stay and finish his report; and she expected the Household to learn how to read her wants—to learn quickly and well.

“Our guest Ms. Feinberg is making a call to New York,” he said, halting beside the bed.

Beautiful sight, he thought. Partly that was Gwen’s effect on him, he knew; idly he wondered if it would be possible to resist it. Not that he wanted to. And he’d become much more appreciative of women in general lately, as opposed to only occasionally. It felt rather odd, but not unpleasant, as an additional interest.

Gwen’s face was turned down, watching Alice.

Cairstens was used to the Draka’s ability to focus on several things at once by now.

“To a friend, evidently. The computer says the number is a New York police detective’s, named Henry Carmaggio, but it’s definitely a personal call.”

“What’s she saying?” Gwen asked. Alice whimpered blindly, squirming.

“Just a sort of general uneasiness, but—”

He stopped. Gwen’s head flashed up, her face going from relaxed, amused pleasure to hard alertness; then in the same instant to a Gorgon mask of rage, pupils flaring until the green of her eyes vanished in their blackness, lips curling back in an unhuman snarl that showed all of her strong white teeth.

“Intruder!” she shouted, in an astonishing husky roar. It cut through his sudden shock like a bucket of icewater. “Get to the control station. Now!”


# # #


intruder.

The word flashed into Gwen’s consciousness from her transducer, freighted with overtones of precise meaning. Her head jerked up; her hands continued their motion automatically for an instant, stroking Alice’s breasts.

attempted infiltration of subsystem, the half-living machine in her skullbone went on. very capable system, samothracian compinsets.

“Well, don’t stop,” Alice said in a half-whimper. She grabbed for the hands that had been caressing her.

Gwen’s hand slapped hers aside, just hard enough to sting. “Intruder!” she barked at Cairstens. “Get to the control station. Now!”

She pitched it loud enough to penetrate the dim confusion that seized humans in emergencies.

In her head: crash the system.

She’d engineered in as many blocks as she could, but the native comp systems were pathetically easy to penetrate, even to her multipurpose transducer. They weren’t just primitive, the open architecture of their core memories was an invitation to takeover. A Samothracian specialist would walk through like a man strolling in his parlor.

give me location.

The lights flickered, went out, then came back on and steadied as the failsafe switched on, a mechanical-relay system outside the computer’s loop.

She backflipped from her position astride the Australian girl’s hips, stripped the layer knife and plasma gun out of the weapons belt on the armoire and dove out the second-story window. Not worth the few seconds it would take to change into her blacks; although it would be very nice to have a suit of powered infantry armor right now. Why not wish for an orbital platform, while you’re at it?

She landed in a crouch and leaped again, over the verandah balustrade and down the retaining wall.

Shards of fact appeared in her mind. Oh, a cunning little human, she thought—one of the sonic barrier posts.

alert the guards, give the location. order shoot to kill. The transducer could do that, relaying through the primitive radio system in her voice.

The guards ought to distract him a little, at least. No doubt about what he’d come for: her life. A growl rumbled in her chest. Let him take it if he could.


# # #


Damn. Ken snapped off a shot with the needler.

The tiny crystals stitched across the torso of a guard and his dog. Both went flaccid and hit the ground instantly, the anaesthetic shutting down their conscious nervous systems; it was tailored to be fatal for drakensis, but it would harmlessly trank anything else mammalian. The guard was wearing some sort of heavy goggles, probably a primitive night-sight system. Double damn. He’d shifted east and inland to get around the closing semicircle, and now the dogs had winded him. Their barking was harsh and savage, with a guttural undertone of snarls. The beasts had been kill-trained.

Could be worse, he thought, as the barking rose to a frenzied pitch and the dogs were slipped from their chains. Could be ghouloons.

Snap. Snap. The needler made a tiny pffft sound, like a man hissing quietly between his teeth. Snap. Snap. The noise died as the dogs went unconscious.

Something else, something crunching through the coarse coral soil with a firm tread, too fast to be natural. It was coming. He shuddered as catheters dumped chemicals into his bloodstream, and the synthetic-neurone web overlaid on his nervous system activated. Everything took on a hard, diamond-bright edge. He thought the needler to automatic and lofted an arc of crystal slivers into the darkness on a precise trajectory. Then he dove to the side, landing in a barrel-roll that took him behind an ornamental boulder.

“Come to me, human!” A voice shouting out of the night, like a great mellow trumpet of brass and gold. “Come to me and die!”

The drakensis was definitely a female—very bad news for this world, unless he could kill it quickly, even if it didn’t make contact with the Domination back on Earth/1. He called up range and distance on the voice and risked a snapshot around the boulder.

Crack. Plasma bathed his hand. He tossed the needler aside with a reflexive twitch, before the power coil could rupture. The film across his eyes darkened to protect him as it exploded three meters away, gouging a crater in the ground and spattering him with bits of molten glass. Crack. Half the coral boulder vanished, lime burning in a white sear of radiance.

Ken came erect in a five-meter leap that carried him into a shallow declivity in the earth. He rolled out of the other side of that and charged, jinking from one patch of dead ground to the next. His hand slid another weapon forward as he ran. A guard leaped up, firing on automatic. His fingers twitched, and the man jarred to a stop as if he’d run into a brick wall. The native very nearly had: a slug of expanding gas like the shock-wave from an explosion. There was a dull heavy thud.


# # #


Maybe I should have stopped for my blacks, one corner of Gwen’s mind thought—they wouldn’t block a serious weapon, but they would shed needier crystals. Some of those had come far too close. All the rest of her consciousness was focused forward. The night gleamed with light, stars and diffusion off the sea and heat-pulse in glowing curtains. It rang with sound, and the air was full of scents. It flowed together in her mind . . . there.

A darting shape, moving fast. Very fast. But he checked for an instant as a guard cut loose at him. Gwen fired.

Crack. Blue-white light split the darkness, driving her eyes into a protective squint. Radiant fire outlined the figure of a charging man, burning soil and vegetation around him to lime dust and carbon ash as the fields in the soft armor redirected the plasma. He dropped flat and rolled; the second shot skimmed his back and blew a head-sized hole in the soil behind him. He launched himself at her on its heels, meeting a third bolt in midair. Gwen bounded backward.

Something slapped at her like a huge padded fist, tumbling the smooth grace of her leap into a sprawl. Gas gun. She kept moving as she struck, ignoring sharp edges gouging at her skin, and fired again underneath her own body in mid-roll. The figure of the Samothracian exploded in brilliant white-on-white outline again, then faded into a blurred darkness that almost perfectly matched the background. She’d seen it spin, though; the gas gun must have ruptured in the plasma flare.

He came down out of the night, heels striking for her torso. She whipped aside, tossing the plasma pistol behind her—at this range the backwash from a discharge would crisp half her body. It would probably also kill the Samothracian, but if they both died he won. Instead she cut left-handed with the layer knife.

A forearm blocked it. The surface of the soft armor turned diamond-hard for an instant, shedding the blade with a whining zing of cloven air. The enemy stumbled backward, but his elbow joint hadn’t turned to gravel taking the strain. Biomods, implanted reinforcements to the bone structure—no surprise. A Samothracian cyber-warrior.

He slashed back at her with a blade like a wire outline of a sword that grew out of his gauntlet with avalanche speed; her ears could hear its ultrasonic chitter. Vibration-knife. The wind of its passage was an ugly thing across her eyes; it would carve her flesh like gelatin, and even the reinforced bones wouldn’t give it much trouble.

She danced free, outside the arc of attack, keeping her arm-long knife up. They struck and parried at each other with blurring speed. Metal and monomolecular thread screamed in protest and lit the night with fat white sparks of density-enhanced steel.

A guard rose and emptied the thirty-five-round clip of his submachine-gun into the Samothracian’s back. For an instant the entire surface of the softsuit turned rigid as high-tensile steel as it spread the kinetic energy of the bullets. They spanged off into the night with keening shrieks, their velocity little affected by the ultraslick surface. Two struck the gunman, and he dropped to the ground shouting with pain.

Cat-agile, Gwen leaped in and swung two-handed at her enemy’s gauntlet. The micron-thick wire of the vibration blade was barely rigid as the armor diverted power to its primary, defensive function. The layer knife was single-molecule diamond and steel with its electron shells collapsed to pack atoms closer together than nature would allow. The wire nicked the blade, but it parted and whipped back into the gauntlet. She caught the wrist under her armpit, levered, threw. The Samothracian’s hundred-odd kilos arced through the air headfirst.

She snatched up a boulder twice her weight, to pound him to death in his shell like a lobster. He managed to twist and land on his back, one palm out toward her. Brilliant light flashed; Gwen was blind for an instant. Something struck the rock from the other side, jerking it in her hands three times, tock-tock-tock. Two more submachine-guns opened up, hosing the night with tracer bullets; Gwen leaped backward behind a concrete planter, crouching on all fours, blinking and shaking her head. Her eyes teared and then vision returned.

She could hear his footsteps and the faint metallic smell of his equipment, and beneath that the individual pungency of his body-scent, as unique as a fingerprint. He was retreating, back toward the ocean, as more of the guard force closed in on him. They were professionals, and not about to shoot each other by accident, but the volume of fire was building. There. He’d broken free and started to run.

“Cease firing!” she shouted to the guards, loud enough to shock them into obedience even through their adrenaline-rush.

She scooped the plasma gun off the ground and pursued in a blur of movement, faster than a galloping horse, hurdling planters and benches with headlong grace. The Samothracian stayed ahead of her, just. She braced and fired once as he flung himself into the waves, then again as he entered, hoping against hope that the shockwave through the water would kill. Thunder-crack rolled back from the water, then nothing.

Damn this museum-piece popgun. If she’d been wearing a modern, high-intensity weapon when all this started, it would have punched through the softsuit at least once. She’d been hoping it would overload the defensive field, but no joy. That’ll teach me to carry a four-hundred-year old pistol for sentiment’s sake.

She was panting; she slowed it to deep steady breaths, growling low in her throat with the rage of territorial violation and the need to kill. Her ears sang with the combat hormones coursing through her bloodstream, and she had an urge to throw herself into the sea in pursuit. Heat pulsed from her body.

Don’t be ridiculous. She could swim underwater for fifteen minutes or so, but the softsuit could take oxygen out of the water and feed it to the wearer. He could walk to Nassau if he wanted to, along the bottom.

It was a minute or two before the guards arrived. Gwen dropped the plasma gun to the sand and covered it with a quick sideways motion of her foot; she remembered to hold the knife inconspicuously down by her side.

“The emergency’s over,” she said calmly, her voice pitched to spread conviction. They were staring . . .

Oh, the local nudity taboo, she reminded herself. She wasn’t wearing anything but a slick film of sweat and some blood.

Gwen snapped her fingers at one of the guards. “Pierre, the jacket.”

He handed it over, juggling the sling of his submachine-gun. The Haitian was a hulking figure; the battledress fabric came down nearly to her knees. She belted it on and used the motion to retrieve and drop the pistol into one of the patch pockets; there was a slight smell of scorching cloth.

“Is François being seen to?” she asked. “Who else is hurt?”

“Philippe,” a Dominican said. “Donna, he’s dead. Ribs broke.”

Several of the guards nodded. That would be the gas gun: very effective at close range; a good thing she’d been jumping when the charge hit her. Two more men panted up.

“Tom, Vulk,” Gwen said, then raised her voice: “The rest of you, back to normal rounds. Take the casualties to the clinic. Be alert.”

They walked away, murmuring among themselves. She recorded and sorted the conversations for future attention. Humans were extremely good at editing memories to suit their mental frame-of-reference; there were times when she wished she could do that herself. She heard flare gun whispered, flame-thrower—and more softly, dupiah, and corps-cadavre. It had been very dark, the whole action had only taken a little over five minutes, and most likely the guards would have the whole thing rationalized by morning.

Vulk Dragovic spoke: “What was that?”

She’d hired the Serbian in Santo Domingo, where he’d been vacationing after his previous career went bad. Most of the skills he’d learned in Mostar and Kosovo were relevant to her needs.

“A Samothracian,” she said. “I told you about them, although I didn’t anticipate one showing up here.”

She looked out to sea. Very faintly, an IR heat-smudge marked the western horizon. Probably the boat the enemy infiltrator had swum in from—there were sharks in the water close to shore at night, but that wouldn’t be any problem for her enemy, worse luck.

“Damn!” Tom said. “Everything was going so well up to today.”

Gwen turned her head. “Tom, everything was not going well. Yesterday we had a very dangerous enemy that we didn’t know about. Now we know he’s here, and a good deal about him.”

She examined her layer knife. The nick in the blade was small; she’d grind it out with an industrial-diamond grinding wheel.

“I could have sworn François hit him,” Vulk said.

“He did—a full clip,” Gwen said. “The Samothracian was wearing a softsuit. It’s a single molecule, with field-guides and AI controls on the inner surface. When it’s struck it redistributes the kinetic energy over the maximum possible surface, like a second skin of very strong steel with a frictionless surface. About . . .”

She paused fractionally to find a comparison that would make sense to the humans. “. . . about as resistant as a light armored car. You can broil or smash the body inside, or punch through with enough energy, but short of that he’s invulnerable.”

Vulk swore softly in Serb. Gwen went on: “The men did very well; they distracted him and it was crucial. We’ll have to reequip the guard-force, though. Full-power semiauto battle rifles with hardpoint ammunition, .50-caliber machine-guns, some of those .50-caliber Barrett sniper rifles.

“Tom,” she continued, “I crashed the computer; he was hacking into it. Get rid of it, power up the backup and load from the tapes, but sever all outside connections. We’ll have to use secondaries for those from now on; I’ll give you more details in the morning. Go attend to that, and don’t forget to check on our guests from New York. Reassure them if any of them noticed; it was dry thunder, or a wedding celebration in the village, or whatever.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Vulk licked his lips and reholstered the Walther in the shoulder rig he wore over his tailored safari suit. “That one—” He jerked his head toward the ocean. “Is he . . . like you?”

Gwen shook her head. “No, they have what amounts to a religious taboo against serious gene-engineering on their own stock. But he’ll have a good deal of very capable equipment which about makes up the difference. A lot of it implanted in his body. Luckily, we know what he doesn’t have.”

“What’s that?” Tom asked.

“No help, or they would have come together. And he doesn’t have an antimatter bomb, or he would have used it and this island wouldn’t be here now. They don’t underestimate us, not anymore.” She grinned, and Vulk paled slightly. “We taught them better than that.”

“A nuclear weapon?” the Serb said, rubbing a hand over the sandpaper roughness of his blue chin. “Mother of God, that’s—there are thousands of people living on Andros.” He sounded more respectful than disgusted. Which was not surprising, considering what had happened in Kosovo.

Gwen nodded. “They’re not significantly more squeamish than we Draka,” she said meditatively. “Although they rationalize it differently. Hmmm. This whole thing smells of a stealth priority. Minimum energies.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, concentrating. “Yes. I think I see. The physics . . . he’s afraid that use of noncongruent energies will somehow make it easier for the Technical Directorate to home in on us here. And since his people could insert him deliberately, they know more about the molehole technology, and he’s probably right to fear that.” She smiled again, slow and savage. “That’s an advantage.”

She looked up at Tom. “There is one important point. Before, we weren’t in a hurry. Now we are.”

And I should have the fallback ready, she thought. There were a number of strategies open to the enemy; one of them would be to turn the local governments on her.

The answer to that was disposing of the human population, or most of it. Not very difficult, but wasteful . . . and a little too much like fishing with grenades. Boring.

Still, at seventh and last you did what you had to do to win. A suitable plague and a deadman switch would be easy enough to arrange and hold in readiness.


# # #


“Be careful,” Henry said. “You—”

The line went click, and then it was replaced by the steady hum of a dial tone.

“Shit!”

Carmaggio’s thick finger stabbed for the pad, and then he realized that he hadn’t the remotest idea of the number in the Bahamas. He glanced at the clock: 12:30. He swore, hauled himself into the bathroom—time, tide, and the bladder waited for no man—and then sank down at the kitchen table with the phone there and a pad and paper. Pushing aside a stack of pizza boxes and some fried rice still in the carton, he began.

“Hello, operator? I was in the middle of a long-distance call, from Andros Island in the Bahamas. I was cut off; can you—no, I don’t know the number. Yeah, thank you very much for fucking nothing, too.”

He laid the phone down and ran a hand through his hair, flogging at his mind and feeling the sand in the pipes. A nice juicy one had come up last night, a spousal just-can’t-take-it-anymore ballpeen-hammer divorce, and kept him up; this was two days’ sleep he was missing, and it got harder past forty. Hell, it got harder past thirty, if he remembered right.

Okay, Jenny used my call-in line. One of the few perks of this job at his level was that it made it easier to get two phone lines. That’ll catch it if she calls back.

So . . . area code for Bahamas, no big deal.

“Hello, directory assistance?”

An accent this time. “I’d like the number of IngolfTech Incorporated. No, not the Nassau branch, the headquarters on Andros Island. Thank you.”

He jotted it down. Maybe a bit impolite to call this time of night, but fuck that. Five rings.

“Hello. You have reached IngolfTech Incorporated. Our business hours are—”

“Shit!”

He slammed the handset down into the receiver. “I can’t leave a goddamn message. No fucking way I can let them connect to me. I shouldn’t be calling as it is.

“Directory assistance? I’d like the home number for Ms. Gwendolyn Ingolfsson, Andros Island . . . It’s unlisted. Thank you very much.

“Bitch,” he added.

Except that he had to do something; the knowledge was there in his mind, as definite as his own self. He stabbed more keys.

“Jesus? Yeah, I know what time it is. Listen, you still got that plastic piece?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line, and a sleepy woman’s voice muttering in Spanish somewhere behind his partner. The gun was a curiosity, a little plastic-and-synthetics one-off they’d picked up a while ago. Technically Department property, but nobody was hurt by it going missing. The former owner had lost an argument; the way you did when your head tried to argue with a rifled shotgun slug at close range; and it hadn’t figured in the evidence trail.

The interesting thing about it was that there was no metal except the ammo and the firing pin. It wouldn’t activate an airport security scanner, not unless the scanner was set so it’d go off from the bridgework in your teeth.

“Sí, I’ve got it.”

“I may need to borrow it tomorrow. Sorry about your day off.”

“Can I help, patrón?”

“Yeah, you can cover for me; I may have to take some of that accumulated sick leave. I’ll give you the details tomorrow. I just needed to know about the piece so’s I could make some plans.”

“Go with God.”

“Same here.”

He set the phone down more thoughtfully. Foreign forces got quite sticky about American cops wading into their jurisdictions—understandable; he wouldn’t be entranced himself if some maniac came onto his turf waving a Glock and expecting the local wogs to genuflect. On the other hand, no way he was going to the Bahamas without a piece, if he had to go—he’d have taken an AK, if he could. The memory of what the warehouse and Marley Man’s boys had looked like was unpleasantly vivid.

“I’m probably overreacting,” he muttered, dumping coffee into the filter. “Jenny’s a smart girl.” Water gurgled into the pot and he poured it into the machine.

He was still going to be on that plane tomorrow if he hadn’t heard something definite and couldn’t get through. She was smart, but she didn’t know how to handle this sort of situation.

Carmaggio remembered the heavy smell of blood, red meat turning gray with exposure to air in the terrible gaping wounds and smashed skulls, the stink of cooked brain.

If anyone knew how to handle it.


# # #


The lights flickered and came back on, but the telephone was dead; not even a dial tone.

Jennifer spent a moment jiggling the catch. “What the hell? Henry? Henry?”

She looked around. Nothing seemed different. Calm. Calm down. It was just some sort of power out. This was the Third World, after all.

“It’s also a research facility,” she muttered.

Computers and delicate, ongoing experiments that would be disrupted if the power supply went out. IngolfTech certainly had the funds to afford the best; the proof was all around her. She went out onto the balcony; the night was a little cooler, in the high sixties, perhaps, and she rubbed her arms with her hands. And why didn’t the phones work?

Jennifer walked down the balcony steps into the garden, feeling her way along the balustrade; there were a few low-intensity blue lights up under the eaves, but they were scarcely brighter than starlight on the fountain that chuckled in its basin of Mexican tile. The pathway was checkerboard colored brick, between flowerbeds and young ornamental trees, leading her feet on toward the lawns and the slope to the sea. She bumped her toe in the open-faced sandals and swore at the sudden sharp pain.

Somebody shouted from the main block to her left. She turned and caught a glimpse of a running figure; shrank back into an alcove in a hedge of dog-rose, sinking down on a stone bench. What’s going on? More shouting, down by the sea and left—south—away from the floatplane dock.

Crack. She blinked. A sudden blue-white flare of actinic light threw shadows and brightness across the gardens, a bright glare of color from a sheet of bougainvillea climbing a retaining wall to her right. Lightning? she thought? But it had come from the ground, not the sky—and the sky was clear, a frosted band of stars from horizon to horizon overhead. So clear she had been able to see the colors of the stars, earlier. The noise was like thunder too, only smaller somehow.

Crack. Again the flash of light. And a hammering chatter, flat and undramatic by contrast.

“That was a gun!”

She knelt up on the bench and peeked cautiously over the planter that backed it. More flashes and miniature thunderclaps, and more gunfire—a long burst from an automatic weapon. Then silence.

“My God, that was a gun! A machine-gun!” Breathe slowly. In. Out. “We’ve been caught in a coup or something.” Henry’s words came back to her. “Oh, my God, we’re being attacked by drug runners!”

CNN and the evening news flashed through her mind, wall street financiers taken hostage; the Post would banner-headline the whole thing. Connie Chung would do a special report. Jennifer’s mother would have a seizure.

The pain in her fingers shocked her back into awareness. She had been gripping the coarse coral limestone of the planter hard enough to bruise. In the silence the loudest sound was her own breathing; she forced herself to take slow deep breaths, lowering her head until only her eyes showed over the edge of the planter and the low flowering vine within. From here she could see a corner of the main central block of the house and the darkened approachway and gardens before it. Tensely she waited. Nothing happened, for long enough that the night air cooled the sweat on her skin and brought goosebumps.

I didn’t imagine that, she told herself. Then again, she hadn’t seen anything except lights, either.

She heard the sound of feet on the crushed oyster-shell of the drive. There was a little more light there, enough to tell that a human figure was coming up from the waterfront. It turned and walked toward her; she shrank back. A man, two; black men, in gray uniforms, and each carrying a weapon. Some exotic-looking thing, one slung across the first man’s chest, the other carried at port arms. They passed by ten feet away, heads turning alertly, heavy goggles making their faces insectile in the night.

They looked like soldiers, or policemen. Or rent-a-cops, she thought, relaxing slightly. Yes. There had been security guards around earlier in the day dressed like that—although they hadn’t been carrying machine pistols, or weapons of any sort. The men passed by and moved further from the house, vanishing in the darkness.

More footsteps; lighter this time, and quicker. Another dim figure, this one moving at a quick gliding run. Bare legs flashed in the dim gloaming. Ingolfsson? Jennifer wondered. Impossible to tell for sure at this distance, and she—he, whoever—was turning away, toward the main block and the entrance. A few moments later there was another sound. A screech, like nothing so much as a cat out prowling for battle and fornication . . . except that it was far too loud, and somehow the modulation sounded like a voice.

“Weird,” she muttered, rising.

Nothing cataclysmic seemed to be happening. She rose, feeling a little foolish as she climbed back through the balcony and firmly shut the french doors. There had to be some sort of rational explanation for all this. Henry’s paranoid, it goes with his job. He was a dear, but she had to watch out for that us-against-the-world attitude, it was catching.

“Urk!”

Jennifer squeaked and jumped. The knock at the door repeated. She opened it a crack, to see Tom Cairstens smiling urbanely in the corridor outside. I am not nervous. She opened the door and stood aside, but the IngolfTech executive shook his head.

“Ms. Feinberg?” he said. “I noticed your lights were still on. Sorry about the noise just now. We’ve got a fair number of construction workers down by the new lab extension, and—well, they tend to celebrate a little hard, sometimes. It seems there was a wedding, or a christening, something like that, and the rum flowed a little freely, not to mention the firecrackers. Our security guards have everything under control, no need to call in the local police, even.”

“Oh.” I feel silly. “I thought I heard gunfire. And why did the phones go out?”

“One of the guards let off a few rounds into the air. Bad habits, I’m afraid—they’re Haitians, you see, there isn’t much local labor available for this sort of work. Good people, loyal as Dobermans, but a bit rough sometimes. One of them drove a backhoe through the cable to our satellite uplink; it’s back in order now.”

“Oh. I see. Thanks.”

“See you tomorrow, Ms. Feinberg.”

I feel really silly. Drug runners. Terrorists. Hostage-taking. I watch too much CNN.

Suddenly she felt sleepy, in reaction to the adrenaline perhaps, or just because it was late; after one, by now.

“Thanks, Mr. Cairstens.” As the door closed, she remembered. “Ohmigod. Henry. The poor guy got cut off right in the middle of the call.”

She dashed over to the phone and punched the number; a voice at the back of her mind noted dryly that she had it memorized by now. Jennifer told the voice to shut up; it sounded unpleasantly like her mother.

A voice growled in her ear on the other end of the line. “Jesus? No problem, I can get the ticket and you can tell the captain—”

“Henry, it’s Jenny.”

“Shit. Hell, sorry, I mean . . .”

“You were worried.” She paused, and said softly: “You were coming here, weren’t you?” An emergency flight to the Bahamas was not petty cash on a police lieutenant’s salary.

A long silence. “Hell, I’ve got vacation time coming.”

“You’re a sweet guy, you know that, Henry?”

He snorted. “I’m a worrywort. Look, I don’t want to crowd you, okay? I’m not looking over your shoulder or anything.”

“Nothing wrong with a little of that.” She gave an involuntary yawn. “We did have a little excitement here; it turned out to be some construction workers driving a backhoe around to celebrate something or other.”

“Yeah? You can tell me about it when you get back.”

“See you. I’ve got a working breakfast tomorrow . . .”


# # #


Kenneth Lafarge ignored the scuba gear that lay around the end of the knotted rope. Life was one footstep after another, until the cord was in his hands. Balance changed as the softsuit ejected its water ballast and inflated temporary air-cells to make him buoyant. A touch of the hands, and he floated upward along the rope. Weight caught at him, and he fought down a scream as he hauled himself over the railing of the boat. He fought back another as rough hands helped him.

“I’m . . . fine,” he gasped, waving aside the crewmen. “Get going, now.”

The boatmen were mercenaries; they shrugged and obeyed, leaving him to walk in a straight, slow line to his cabin. The boat’s diesel blatted, then settled down to a steady burbling. He opened the door—anyone else trying that would get an unpleasant surprise—and let the softsuit fall to the floor in a thin puddle as he stumbled to the bunk. It collected itself and slithered to the table and up one leg, pouring itself into a container the size of a pocketbook to recharge and repair.

This time he did groan between clenched teeth as the air rasped at the burns and bruises that covered most of his skin. His right hand was swelling and red as boiled lobster from the two pointblank hits. According to the techs back home, a softsuit probably couldn’t take close-range plasma bolts from a standard Domination hand-weapon. Apparently the United States of Samothrace built its agents better armor than they thought.

Enough better. Just. He staggered to the bunk and fell into it.

The suitcase clicked beneath the bed. He lay panting in the dark, his eyes swimming with the aftermath of the booster chemicals, as tendrils felt their way over and beneath him. They crisscrossed his body in a dense web, creeping into the corners of his eyes, nostrils, mouth. Things pricked his skin, and the pain diminished. Coolness soothed; there was a muted buzzing as dead skin was debrided away and replaced with temporary patches that would speed regrowth. Tentacles thin as wire and stronger than thought manipulated his gun hand.

no serious degradation of function, the AI said with indecent cheerfulness. you will recover full effectiveness within five days, including metabolic stress from the combat drugs.

Which took a little off your lifespan every time you used them—but it was better than being dead. His stomach twisted at the memory of the fight. Neural-link simulators could feed in scenarios of what it was like to fight a drakensis hand to hand, but there was still a difference when it was for real. His gut heaved again at the memory of the raw strength behind the grip that had spun him through the air, hearing again the guttural snarling of a tiger about to kill.

How can anyone mistake it for a human being? he thought. The face had been like a beast’s, too; the sort of expression an antelope would encounter on the very last lion it ever saw.

it was not attempting deception with you, the machine answered pedantically. presumably it takes more care with the local humans.

I failed. Ken sighed. His hand tightened toward a fist until the twinges warned him. I should have killed it!

a scouting operation, the AI replied. there will be other opportunities. After a moment: sleep.

Thirty hours to the drop-off point near Miami. He could sleep the entire time. Darkness closed over him, as welcome as his mother’s touch.


# # #


Gwen wrapped the weapons in Pierre’s jacket and tossed them over the balustrade of her bedroom’s exterior terrace eighteen feet above. Then she took two steps and leapt, hands clamping onto the rough coral rock of the balcony and swinging her over. Quicker than going up the stairs, and less likely to cause commotion. And her body craved movement.

Alice was waiting; she gave a jump and squeak of startlement as Gwen appeared. Then her eyes widened at the Draka’s appearance. Gwen was still running with sweat, and there were bleeding grazes on her flank and one arm; they clotted with inhuman speed. Her chest heaved as lungs pumped oxygen into the bloodstream. Skin twitched as overprimed muscles sought release. She fought down another snarl.

“What happened?” Alice asked, crossing her arms on the breast of her robe in an instinctive gesture of self-protection. The Draka caught an edge of the creamy scent of fear; her mask had slipped a bit under the stress, and the other’s subconscious was reacting to what it perceived.

“Bit of an emergency,” Gwen replied, watching patterns of heat through the Australian’s facial skin. They made her seem to glow from within, like a lantern. “It’s over for now. I’ll explain later.”

“All right,” Alice said, dropping her eyes. Good, she’s learning, the Draka thought. She looked good. Delicious.

Without looking up: “Do you still want to . . . ?”

Gwen nodded.

“That’s fine with me.” An uncertain smile. “You are very good at it.”

“After four-hundred-odd years of practice,” Gwen said, advancing, “I should be.”

She pulled the blond woman’s arms down, then stripped off the robe. Alice shuddered at the musky smell of her sweat, then again as Gwen bent and took a nipple between her lips. She cried out in surprise as the Draka put a hand beneath her buttocks and lifted her smoothly into a fireman’s carry across her shoulder. And again as the fingers probed her openings, halfway between a moan and a protest.

“This will be a little different,” Gwen said, as she strode easily across the terrace and into the bedroom. “More strenuous.”

The scent was intoxicating; she bit at the thigh next to her cheek, just hard enough to draw a squeal.

“I had to go into combat overdrive and didn’t have the chance to expend much energy. I’ll have the jittering judders for days unless I work it off now.”

The squirming within the circle of her arm had no more chance of dislodging itself than it would have from a similar thickness of steel cable; and in any case, it wasn’t an attempt to escape. The soft helpless movement was extremely pleasant, like a kitten’s paws batting at her hands. It helped flip the savage focus of killmode over into an equally directed urge: lust, but with an edge to it, raw and direct.

She tossed the other down on the bed and climbed onto her, straddling Alice’s shoulders and linking hands behind her neck. The Australian’s eyes were wide and her mouth trembled slightly. Her heartbeat hammered in Gwen’s ears, nearly as rapid as her own pulse. The Draka’s thumbs caressed the other’s cheeks and the angle of her jaw, then drew her upward as she sank down.

“So play pony for me, Alice.”

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Framed