CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Not bad,” Henry said, dodging the crowds outside the theater.
Neon shone on the slick wet pavement; their breath showed in white puffs. He felt Jenny’s hand steal into his and squeeze gently. Carmaggio grinned quietly to himself.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Dating again, at my age,” he said.
“At least you got to stop for a while,” she said, leaning against him slightly.
A panhandler approached them, opened his mouth, met Carmaggio’s eyes and stepped back against the wall.
“How do you do that?” she asked.
“They can smell us,” he said. “Eau de cop.”
The line for the 9:45 showing was already around the block. “Lot of these look too young to have seen the first trilogy,” he said.
“Go ahead—make me feel old,” she said with a chuckle. “I saw the first one eleven times. The man’s a magician; how did he ever get Kenneth Branagh to play Obi-Wan?”
“He had to—needed a Brit,” Henry said idly. Relaxed, he thought. I’m actually feeling relaxed. A minor miracle, considering what was coming down.
“Not bad space opera,” he went on. “Despite the whooshing spaceships.”
“I didn’t know you liked sci-fi,” she said, looking up at him out of the corners of her eyes.
“I’ve sort of gotten into it a little, lately,” he said. “Can’t read mysteries, after all.”
She gave a gurgling laugh. Damn, that’s one fine woman, he thought.
“No financial thrillers for me, either,” she said.
They walked in companionable silence for a while. Even well east of Broadway the Upper West Side was fairly active on a Saturday night. Yupper West Side, he thought. More sushi joints than Tokyo. Funny; he’d been a beat cop here back in the seventies, when the area just ahead—Broadway and Amsterdam—had been about as shitty as anywhere on the island. Needle Park, and the name hadn’t been a joke. Then almost overnight the renovators hit, and you were up to your ass in boutiques and expensive studio apartments. They turned left again, out toward Riverside Park.
Times like this you can forget what a toilet this town is, he thought. Behind them the towers reared up and disappeared into low mist, shining outlines of crystal and light. The buildings here were older, grande-dame apartment hotels like the Ansonia, terracotta swirls and mansard roofs.
“Did you know,” Jennifer said, pointing to the Ansonia, “that Caruso lived there? And Stravinsky, and Toscanini?”
“I do now,” Henry said. “Hell, I’ve even heard of them. Want to get something to eat?”
“Well—” Jennifer said. “Well, actually, if you can stand my attempt at Italian cooking, I have something ready at home. It’s not too far.”
* * *
“Dead slow,” Gwen said.
Lowe grunted in reply. The water outside the TV pickups of the Reiver showed dark, ooze from the Hudson estuary welling up below the keel. Billows of gray sediment arched up, barely perceptible against the blackness, falling out of sight like silty snow.
Apart from a low whir from the ventilation system, the Reiver had an eerie quietness. In the control compartment the main light came from below, the glow of the video displays and digital readouts. Three swivel seats met the controls, for pilot and navigator and systems control; a little redundant, but Gwen didn’t completely trust the glorified abacus known locally as a computer.
“Six knots,” young Lowe said. His toast-brown face looked almost sallow in the bluish glow of the controls. “Depth one hundred meters, bearing six degrees north-northwest.”
Gwen turned her chair and looked over to where Dolores was holding the navigator’s position. “Tracking?”
“The yacht’s half a kilometer ahead and dead in line,” the Colombian said.
She closed her eyes and monitored the systems through her transducer. The interface was clumsy—the local equipment was pathetically slow in transferring data—but everything seemed to be going well.
“Turn it over,” she said to Lowe.
“You have the helm, ma’am.”
She slid into the control seat and took the stick. The drive couldn’t thrust omnidirectionally, only over an eighty-degree cone to the rear, but that was sufficient. Power was at ninety-eight percent, good for two years of underwater cruising, or several hundred hours of flight; no sign of problems with the superconducting storage coil. Although I’d hate to have to take this thing out of the atmosphere. She eased back on the stick, and a slight elevator-rising feeling of increased weight followed. A touch on the pistol-grip accelerator on the control stick brought the speed up to twenty knots, and the Reiver broached smoothly through the surface of the Atlantic. Light showed on the pickup screens, the light of stars and moon on the endless waves. A slight pitching disturbed the previous rock-steady motion, sign that the craft was in the grip of powers even greater than the technics she had brought with her from the Domination’s timeline.
“Hailing Andros Adelhorn,” she said.
A rooster-tail of spray fountained backward from the blunt curve of the Reiver’s bow, surging almost to the forward video pickup. Radar showed no other vessels in the area, except for her own yacht dead ahead. The low shape of the surface ship drew closer quickly, yellow glow from the windows and the blinking navigation lights.
“Andros Adelhorn here.” Tom’s voice; yet another Lowe was captain, and the crew were all her own Haitians, men who knew nothing and didn’t want to know. “Ready for rendezvous.”
Alongside the motor yacht; the Andros wasn’t very large, no more than eighty feet at the waterline. She still bulked more than the submersible. Gwen throttled back, the yacht keeping pace until both vessels were motionless, rocking in the gentle swell. Then she locked the stick, standing with a slight feeling of reluctance. Interesting, she thought. Nothing quite like this had ever been built in her history; by the time Alfven-wave drives came along, materials technics had already advanced to the molecular-construction level.
“May I come too?” Dolores asked.
Gwen looked over at her absently, then took her scent. Why not. I’ll need somebody for the night. She nodded.
“Can you handle it?” she asked Lowe.
“In my sleep,” the young Bahamian said, grinning brashly. “It’s no more trouble than ridin’ a scooter.”
“It will be in New York harbor,” she said dryly. “Take her in extremely slow right in the Adelborn’s wake, and keep an eye on the sonar. Then down on the bottom and stay there, surface once a day to report. I’ll send someone to spell you after a week or so, but I want the Reiver ready for emergency use at any moment. No monkeyshines. Understood?”
“Understood, ma’am,” Lowe said, standing straight and swallowing. He might be brash, but he wasn’t stupid.
She disliked punishing subordinates, even the locals. There was no need, back home. Nobody had to inflict pain on a servus to instill obedience. Humans were another matter, of course, and you did what you had to do to get results. Luckily they were usually frightened enough without direct action. I miss the servus more and more, she thought. They had a beautiful, supple, yielding quality that even the best-trained humans couldn’t approach. As well as being generally more intelligent.
She ducked through into the open room behind the control cabin; it was rigged as a lounge-cum-communications center. The ladder to the deck-hatch was at the rear, where a bulkhead and corridor marked off a section of cabins and storage areas; the engineering spaces were in the stern. A man sprang to his feet as she entered, moving forward to take one of the consols.
“Nueva York,” Dolores murmured. “I always did want to see it.”
“We won’t be doing much sightseeing,” Gwen said. “Too dangerous.”
Dolores’s darkly pretty face grimaced. “That damned Samothracian! How I wish you’d killed him.”
“So do I.” With him gone, she wouldn’t have to worry or hasten.
Gwen climbed the ladder and pulled the human up after her, standing with her feet braced on the coaming over the hatch. There was no superstructure, nothing to break the curve of the hull except a section of roughened metal to give feet a better grip. The air was chill with the northern spring, cool on her bare arms; cold salt spray touched her lips. The breeze brought a medley of odors: hot metal from the engines of the yacht, human, the distant land—itself tainted with burnt fuel and chemicals, but still green and earth-yeasty beneath. The joyous high-pitched squeaking of dolphins; their visible warmth was like leaping candles against the darker, cooler water. Heat billows plumed up from the Reiver and the Adelborn, a glowing background to the light-spectrum outlines. Overhead the stars arched in multicolored splendor, like a frosting of colored jewels across the sky.
She took a deep breath and shouted, a long wordless cry of exultation.
# # #
“A what?” Jennifer asked with a crow of laughter.
“A kangaroo,” Henry said, grinning back at her. “So help me God, the MPs found ’em halfway back from the Honolulu zoo, hitch-hiking.”
“How did they do that?”
“We never found out. Both of them were drunk as lords . . . and so was the kangaroo, or so the zoo people claimed.”
That had been Gramsci and Dundas. They’d both been killed in that ambush about a week after they got back from the R&R; still, it was a good story, and they wouldn’t have grudged him the use of it.
They’d have told him to make his move about now, he thought, as he watched Jennifer’s pretty-wholesome face alight with laughter at the other end of the couch. Christ, this is like being sixteen again. He’d been married for fifteen years and divorced for two, and he’d just gotten out of the habit. Especially with nice girls—which Jennifer Feinberg was, old-fashioned phrase or not.
The silence stretched slightly as the laughter died.
“You know, Henry,” Jennifer said from the other end of the sofa, “one of the things I like about you is that you’re a gentleman.”
“Thanks,” Henry said.
Good thing you kept your hands to yourself. Oh, well, it really was a great dinner. Great dinner, fun time. A relief being with somebody who wasn’t a cop but didn’t have any hangups about the fact that he was.
He swilled the last of his Chianti around in the bottom of his glass and looked around the room. Not big, no bigger than his, although he shuddered to think what it must cost up here on the Upper West Side. More open, the bedroom just an angled section of the L-shape layout. Books covered most of the walls; a couple of prints, a good sound system with a stack of movie disks for the new Sony flatscreen. A cat staring at him resentfully from the top of a bookcase, hissing occasionally at the invader of its turf. Not too much in the way of frills and furbelows. It smelled like a woman’s place, though; of sachet, under the agreeable scents of food.
“Henry, it’s a good thing to be a gentleman, but sometimes you can overdo it.”
Henry put the glass down on the table and reached for her.
# # #
“Slow,” Vulk Dragovic said.
The Serb looked around warily as they walked down the gangplank, his hand inside the pocket of his long overcoat. That was not really necessary, although the New York spring was chilly. The gun within probably wasn’t necessary either, but he didn’t like taking chances. The darkened wharf was eerily quiet, despite the rumble of noise echoing in from Manhattan’s towers. Cranes loomed above them like frozen metallic skeletons.
“Slow, coming in by sea. Why waste days?”
“Boats are harder to trace,” Gwen said, coming up beside him. “And airports are easier to watch.”
He could see her nostrils flare as she scanned the wharf. All he could smell was the foul water beneath. She could probably detect this Samothracian farting two kilometers away.
The green eyes turned toward him slightly. Fool, he told himself. Vulk meant wolf in his own tongue, but the Draka . . . Watch what you think, always, always.
She smiled at him, that slight curved turn of the lips. “Let loose the ants of war,” she said.
Vulk turned and snapped an order to two of the Haitian servants. They carefully lowered the crate they had been carrying and opened the top with their prybars. A metallic rustling and clicking sounded within. Gwen’s face went blank for a second; he recognized the expression, the look she took on when giving an order through her transducer. Dark six-legged shapes the size of a man’s thumbnail poured out of the crate. The Serb pulled a foot back in revulsion as one skittered by him, suppressing an impulse to stamp on it like a bug. It was a bug, literally and metaphorically. A tiny self-contained android controlled by a vat-grown, gene-engineered version of an ant’s nervous system implanted in a mechanical body. With a few simple imperatives: seek out a power outlet to recharge every five hours, proceed to designated locations and record, return to base to drop off the data. No transmissions, and virtually undetectable.
The pseudo-insects gathered into clumps and moved away; some into the night under their own power, others to the waiting cars to be driven nearer to their targets.
“It’s a pity they can’t breed,” Alice said.
Vulk looked away from her. The six-month stomach was starting to show, which was disturbing. And the way she kept smiling . . .
“Too dangerous,” Gwen said. Her head traced across the dock again, scanning. “We had to sterilize an entire habitat-city on the moon once, when we tried that. No way to stop them mutating. Selective pressure wiped out the implanted commands and they branched out on their own.”
Vulk shook his head and concentrated on business. “We’d better get set up.”
“You and Tom handle it,” Gwen said. “I’ve got a few errands to run, first.”
He opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. It was the humans who were in danger without her, not the other way round. One of the Haitians handed her a knapsack, anonymous black nylon to hide weapons and devices not of this world. She slipped her arms through the loops and walked off into the darkness, feet soundless on the concrete.
There were times when he wished he was back in Sarajevo.
# # #
“Hey, momma, you got the time?”
Gwen turned. There were four of them, none older than twenty. A damned nuisance. Kill them all now? On the other hand, she wasn’t in that much of a hurry.
“It’s 12:58, and far too late for you,” she said.
There was a moment of shocked silence from the youths. That was not in their script for the incident. She smiled at the bewilderment on their faces. Anger started to spice their scents, mixing with the aggression and rut that had been floating to her for twenty minutes, since they began their stalk. Their leader reacted first. Naturally. He can’t be . . . what’s the word? Dissed, that was it. Dissed out by a female, in front of his followers. Her smile grew broader as he pulled out his gun.
Be careful now. A bullet in just the right place could kill her as finally as any human. She’d had friends who’d died because living through the centuries fooled their undermind into thinking itself immortal. And there was no tearing hurry.
She stepped closer to the young man. The street was deserted except for the pack and its chosen prey, streetlights glimmering dimly on wet pavement. He extended the gun, holding it sideways with the butt level with the ground, an odd firing position.
“Crazy bitch!”
Then he screamed. Her fingers closed on the gun and the hand that held it, clamping metal and flesh together as irresistibly as a vise. The leather of his jacket ripped under her other hand as she held him immobile and slowly, slowly tilted the gun up under his chin. The flesh dimpled under the cold metal. Sometimes humans can be very disagreeable. This one’s urine smelled bad. His free hand beat at her, and he screamed again as he broke his knuckles on the side of her head.
“Goodbye,” she said.
Pumpf. The sound of the shot was muffled. Blood and brain matter spurted from the back of the mugger’s head. It spattered into the face of the one behind him, and he clawed at his face, at bone fragments and clots of brain. Gwen reached out and plucked the weapon from his belt, then hit him sharply on the side of the head with the butt. He dropped and sprattled in a final galvanic twitch.
The third was running away into the darkened street, slamming into walls and stumbling in his panic. A plastic garbage can spilled aluminum and trash and a squeaking rat in his wake. Gwen examined the weapon in her hand. It was a Calico, with a helical fifty-round magazine mounted over the barrel and action. Not a bad design, considering the available technology. Nine-millimeter parabellum ammunition. She turned to the last of the pack.
“Better put that down,” she said. His pistol dropped from shaking fingers.
“Don’t . . . don’t hurt me.” His voice squeaked a little; he couldn’t be much more than sixteen.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Now about your friend . . . left knee.”
She raised the pistol and fired. Two hundred yards down the roadway, the running man spun to the pavement. It took a moment for his scream to start. The flat elastic crack of the pistol echoed back from the empty brick walls. After a moment he lurched upright, pulling himself along the building.
“Back of the head.”
Crack. Gwen buffed the grip and trigger assembly of the gun with her silk handkerchief. Then she chuckled and tucked the barrel into the dead hand of the mugger whose skull she’d crushed with the butt.
“Let them try to figure that out,” she said, laughing.
The last mugger was staring at her, eyes enormous in the gloom. She reached up and flicked off the bandanna tied around his head. The hair beneath it was black and straight; he had smooth light-brown features and gold earrings in both lobes.
“What . . . what are you?” he asked.
“Your lucky night,” she said.
Gwen pulled up the front of her skirt and tucked it into her belt. Then she skinned out of her panties, folding them neatly and dropping them into the pocket of her jacket.
“What you doing?” the teenager stammered, backing away as she rubbed herself. His hands came up, palms out.
“Exactly what you planned on doing to me,” she said kindly. Her hands flashed out and clamped on his wrists. “Although the mechanics are a little different. But you’re actually going to enjoy it, like it or not. Be good, now.”
Gwen used one arm to hold him to her while the other circled his neck and its hand pinned his jaw, putting her scent next to his nose. He shivered and jerked in the immobilizing grip as she kissed him deeply. His mouth quivered when she drew back a little and stripped the leather jacket down over his shoulders. The T-shirt parted like paper under her fingers, and the man’s jeans dropped shredded to the ground.
“Oh, you are being good,” she crooned, taking the stiffening penis in her hand. Wonderful things, pheromones. Not to mention the natural state of an adolescent human male, almost as susceptible as a servus. “Pity there’s no grass, but this has its merits.”
She pushed him back against the brick wall and pinned him with weight and strength, just enough to keep him from catching his breath fully, stroking his flanks and legs. Then she rose up on her toes and sank back, gripping him firmly inside her with a thrust of the pelvis and a rippling tug of her vaginal muscles. Ah. Rough and hasty, but pleasant. Very pleasant, she thought, growling contentedly into his ear as she rocked. His scent was heavy with fear and arousal, his sweat tasting of it; the sound of his heartbeat speeded to a frenzy. The gold earring dangled before her eyes; she lipped it and then bit the gold circlet through, spitting out the severed half. Her tongue explored his ear, and his whole body shuddered. His eyes were rolled half up into their sockets.
“Put your hands on my hips,” she said. He obeyed, fumbling and then gripping with a strength that would have bruised a human. “Move to me. That’s a good pony, rhythm now, rhythm.”
Ah. It was a pity she had to hurry. A long time since I took it this way. Not since the killsweeps right after the War. Now.
Gwen quickened her movements. The boy’s buttocks slapped against the brick wall behind him. Then she froze for a long instant, her only movement the heavy internal tug of orgasm. Clenched between her legs and body and the wall, the youth squealed like a dying rabbit and bucked in her grasp. Then he stilled too, gasping harshly, limp.
Gwen sighed, a throaty sound, and stepped back. The boy slid down the wall and lay half-fainting. She crouched beside him, tugging the remnants of his T-shirt free and wiping herself with it. Then she stroked his hair, turning his face around to meet hers. Conscious thought was returning to him, like something floating up through dark water. Thought, and fear.
“Sweet but brief, our little encounter,” she said. “I’d like to spend more time riding you, but duty calls. The police will be here soon, and you’d better go. Understand?”
She stood and stepped into her underwear, smoothing down her skirt. The young mugger slid along the wall away from her in a crablike scuttle, then rose. The remains of his jeans pooled around his ankles and nearly tripped him; he kicked free and ran, throwing his shredded leather jacket behind him. Gwen smiled at the winking buttocks and flashing legs, then turned and walked quickly northward.
# # #
“Mmmmrn.” Henry Carmaggio muttered in his sleep, turning.
Jennifer woke and stretched, sliding out from under his arm. The bedroom was dim, but there was enough of the usual New York night glow from the window to see the pleasantly craggy contours of his face. She sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, smiling down at him.
“You really are a nice guy,” she said very softly, before getting up and padding out to the bathroom.
It had been so long she’d forgotten about some of the messier details. I feel good, though, she thought. Reassured to start with. The Bahamas just hadn’t been like her. It was nice to know her wiring hadn’t somehow gotten crossed up at this late date. Not to mention how nice it was just to be with someone again; and to know that he was just as happy about it. Gwen didn’t count. Put it down to happenstance.
She turned off the bathroom light and eased back into the bedroom, her feet moving in an experienced scuffle—when you owned a black cat that liked to lie in the middle of the way, you learned that. Despite her care, Henry woke when she eased back into the bed.
“Hey, cold feet,” he said as they snuggled close. She wrapped them around his. “Hey!”
“Warmth is a good thing,” she said into the angle of his neck. “So share some.”
“Damn, I find the woman of my dreams and she wants to use me as a heating pad,” he grumbled, stroking her back.
After a moment she giggled. “Oh, so it’s true what they say about Italians! Or are you just happy to see me again?”
“Damn,” he said mildly, sounding surprised himself. “Must be something about having a beautiful naked woman in my arms. Even at four in the morning it—”
“Shut up and . . . oh, yeah.”
# # #
Ten minutes later, the pager in his pants pocket went off. Carmaggio muttered a curse into Jennifer’s hair. “Ignore it,” she said. Damned right, he thought muzzily. He tried, although after a moment he noticed that they were moving in rhythm to the neep . . . neep. That ended in a moment of gasping that collapsed into laughter.
“Now you know why so many cops get divorced,” he said, kissing her and disentangling himself.
He rooted through the clothes scattered on the floor until he found the instrument, then stumbled to the phone. “This had better be important.”
“Yeah, Jesus?” He listened for a moment. “You sure?” A resigned sigh. “Yeah, that sounds like it.”
He turned to the bed. “Gotta go.”
Jennifer wormed her way down farther under the covers, then threw them off and reached for her bathrobe. “Tell me about it tomorrow.”
Not if it’s like the usual, Henry thought. There were some details nobody was really interested in.
“I’ll give you a call.”
# # #
There were none of the exterior iron stairways so common here at the rear of Jennifer Feinberg’s apartment. That was a minor inconvenience; Gwen reached up and clamped her gloved fingers onto the gaps between the bricks, pulled herself up and took a second handhold, and climbed straight up the wall. The ancient, dirty brick was a little tricky, since she had to be careful not to crumble it beneath her grip. It took her a full two minutes to reach the level of the bathroom window. She bent her ear nearer the window, and sucked air in through nostrils and open mouth.
Ah, probably not a good moment to drop by. Panting, creaking from the bed, and then a series of cries—interrupted by a shrill beeping sound.
“Ignore it.” Jennifer’s voice, sounding understandably aggrieved. Gwen grinned in the darkness as the sounds began again, to the counterpoint of the electronic signal.
The male eventually got up and turned the instrument off, then moved to the phone. This time Gwen’s ears pricked forward in unconscious reflex.
Fast work, Gwen thought, as she listened to the telephone conversation; half with her ears, half with the transponders electronic eavesdropping. They must have found the bodies already.
She shifted her fingers’ grip on the wet brick outside the bathroom window of the human woman’s apartment and hooked the edge of one foot onto the windowsill, still invisible to anyone who didn’t put a head outside and look to the right. A trickle of command through her transducer, and a bug walked out of her sleeve onto her palm. Another, and it marched into the sill and began burrowing through a joint. She cocked her ears forward and checked the sound: not really audible to human-range hearing, but she commanded it to go more slowly anyway.
Why was this policeman concerned about Jennifer’s business with IngolfTech? He couldn’t know anything, or if he did he’d been very careful about saying it where anything electronic was listening. He had a reason to be concerned with Jennifer herself, of course: mating instinct. She rather approved of that—a healthy, eugenically sound emotion. Which left the essential question of whether anyone but the government agencies had any notion she was connected with the warehouse killings. The government itself was no great problem, since the dribble of miracles she was feeding them kept them far too greedy to risk killing the golden goose—at least, not for long enough that she could finish the Project.
Still, it was best to be sure. The Samothracian might be interfering.
surveillance, she commanded. following parameters.
Also best to be discreet. Public attention was something she did not need, or anything that might scare off the investment community. She needed more of their resources to complete the beacon; several hundred million, and about four to six months of time.
The bug had its way with the ancient dried wood of the frame. Gwen closed her eyes for a moment, linking with its rudimentary senses; organic compound eyes for sight, a rudimentary tympanum for sensing air vibrations. Vision scuttled across walls and floors; a protesting hiss sounded as she passed a cat. The animal leaped back, and her 270 degrees of vision surged up a wall and settled on the top of a doorframe. She watched the two humans saying farewell at the doorway with amusement. Such a sentimental species, particularly this culture-group. Although—she inhaled to check the scent—they’d evidently been having a very good time.
The bug settled in. Jennifer stood by her bed, then hugged herself and did a little dance of pleasure; she picked up a large stuffed animal which had been turned face to the wall, kissed it and set it down looking out over her bedroom. Then she yawned. Gwen waited until her breathing and heartbeat settled to regularity before she leapt. Two stories’ fall, with her jacket billowing out behind her; she landed on outstretched hands and feet, cushioning the blow until her chin rapped on the pavement, not too hard. The smack echoed slightly from the surrounding walls, but a moment’s frozen alertness showed nobody had noticed.
She rose and began to trot south.