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CHAPTER TWENTY


Work was piling up at the warehouse. There was no more time, and the outer circle of human servants was beginning to suspect something. She’d had to slap one down with a broken skull to get the others into order, of a sort. Gwen’s lips lifted from her teeth when her transducer pinged an alarm at the back of her consciousness.

plasma gun discharge, the machine said. location follows. The antennas on the roof were big and clumsy, but they worked after a fashion, and the instrument behind her ear could interface with their input.

Gwen snarled, a ripping, guttural sound full of menace. The enemy must have made up a supply of energy weapons—easier for him; he probably had a small faber to do the difficult components. Ah. Central Park. Not too far away, and a good enough place to group for an attack. Why the discharge? It could be a trap; on the other hand, it was also likely that a cobbled-together group of hastily trained humans had poor fire discipline.

how many energy weapons? she asked the machine.

well stealthed, it replied. indeterminate; not less than five, not more than thirty of the same class as the discharge.

“Damn,” she said aloud. detection anomalies?

neural interfacer traces, possible.

She couldn’t take a chance on those plasma guns getting any closer. This building was shielded and ran off the power from the fusion generator, but that didn’t apply to the surrounding neighborhood. A bad fire or brickwork collapsing on the fragile walls could ruin everything. And the Samothracian was with them.

“Listen.”

Her humans looked up; it was safer not to make eye contact with a drakensis in the mood indicated by the sounds she’d made, unless you had direct orders.

“Vulk,” she said briskly. “Get the perimeter out as we planned. The rest of you, Option Orange.”

Tom’s strained face turned to her. “What’s gone wrong?”

“The Samothracian is desperate. He’s armed a number of locals with improvised energy weapons, and we have to assume he’s coming after us here. I can’t allow that; too much danger to the apparatus, even with the shielding. I’ll have to take them out. Hold the fort, and it’ll all be over soon.”

And if not, this planet gets scoured clean by the biobomb, she added to herself. A nuisance; her household were all immunized, of course, but they’d have to evacuate until bacteria took care of the bodies. Seven-million-odd corpses here in New York alone—a severe sanitation problem—not to mention the longer-term damage industrial spills and runaway nuclear power plants would do to the planet.

Needs must. She stripped and began putting on her blacks, while one of Vulk’s men brought the backpack shield generator she’d cobbled together.

“Isn’t that risky?” Alice asked. Dolores whimpered slightly, subvocally.

“Yes,” Gwen said. “But at this stage, the maximum priority is protecting the signaling apparatus. The child comes second, and myself third.”

She shrugged into the backpack; with the metal sheathing to protect it from mechanical damage, it weighed about fifty kilograms. A nuisance, but not enough to slow her down significantly.

“Hold the fort,” she said, and trotted briskly away.


# # #


CRACK.

“Hell,” Carmaggio said.

The oak tree toppled away from him, its trunk blasted into splinters by the bolt from the plasma rifle in his hands. The crash echoed through the park, sinking among the tree trunks. Flames licked up and caught, dancing reddish-gold among splintered wood blasted into kindling-dryness by the energy release. The firelight glittered over bodies and goggled eyes, extra brightness to the enhanced vision equipment from out of time gave him.

The others looked suitably respectful. They’d all practiced in Lafarge’s shielded firing-range, but this was a lot more immediate.

He pushed the goggles up on his forehead, and night returned. Blacker night than any he’d ever seen in New York. You didn’t realize how much ambient glow there was until it was gone; the stars were out over Central Park, a frosted arch across the sky. It was clear enough to see the colors of the stars. Quiet, too. A little traffic noise—not much, with the streetlights dead—and plenty of sirens. A good thing I’m on suspension, he thought dryly. Probably lose my badge if I still had it, for not showing up in an emergency like this. The policeman’s part of his mind was shuddering at the thought of what it was like out there, with power down and communications scrambled.

There were about fifty men and women grouped around him, in the woods just north of the pond and across from Bethesda Fountain. Saunders and his weekend warriors, in camo-patterned Fritz helmets and fatigues, all suited up with Kevlar body armor—much good that would do them. Finch and her boss and some FBI SWAT types. And Jesus Rodriguez and Mary Chen, of course. All with Lafarge’s gadgets, shielding and plasma guns; which would do some good, and the little ECM pod which was supposed to fool the enemy’s instruments into thinking Lafarge was here. He hoped.

Carmaggio took a deep breath of the night air, scented with trees and grass and earth, and now with burning hardwood.

“All right, people,” he said. “You all saw that.”

He jerked his head toward the Lincoln Tunnel, which was near enough where the spike of fire had thrust into the night sky.

“The bad lady is coming, and we have to hold her here. Otherwise it’s all over.”

He remembered a running translation he’d heard of a bad Japanese animated feature once—the Admiral up on the screen had talked to the hero for ten minutes, and this guy who knew some Japanese had said: The fate of the Universe is in your hands, boy. Don’t fuck up.

And Jenny was walking into the tiger’s den, with only this diversion to protect her.

“Keep together, keep alert, and don’t shoot each other.” Another deep breath. “Let’s go.”


# # #


Jennifer felt numb. I’m a financial analyst, not a spy, she told herself as she pushed through a panicked crowd in Lafarge’s wake. Financial analysts don’t do this sort of thing.

Nobody did this sort of thing. She stumbled over something lying on the sidewalk. Somebody. She looked down; there was just enough starlight to see the reflection on open eyes. Jennifer Feinberg had been born and raised in New York, mostly on Manhattan Island, and she’d prided herself on knowing the city in all its shapes. Until now. All at once there were no more people around her; maybe they’d all gotten sensible, and gone home to hide until things returned to normal.

She caught her breath, panting hard against the feeling of being squeezed beneath the diaphragm. If they—if she—didn’t do something, there would be no more normal, not ever again.

“Walpurgisnacht,” she muttered to herself.

Lafarge turned back and put a hand under one arm. She snatched it away. “I’m all right,” she said. “Just keep going.”

Keep going because if I stop I won’t start again.

Financial analysts didn’t—Goddamn it, nobody followed time travelers into deadly peril. That was for the movies. Nobody ended up in bed with genetic superwomen, either. Rage ground her teeth together and made the fluttering in her stomach recede. The fear that that column of fire had brought was still there, like a grace-note under the main theme, less personal but just as menacing.

A police car went by, siren wailing and lights blinking. Up ahead the metal bars on an electronics store had been torn loose and figures in hooded sweatsuits were carrying out equipment, laughing and prancing. The beams of their flashlights danced and jigged with them, sweeping circles of white light over windows dark except for the occasional candle. Shots sounded in the distance, a sudden crackle and then a series of slow deliberate bang . . . bang sounds.

One of the figures in sweatsuits turned towards them. A beam stabbed out and Jennifer threw up a hand to shade her squinting eyes. Voices rang harsh, threatening.

Lafarge moved smoothly in front of her. His right hand twitched, and the man with the flashlight folded over and flew backward. He landed in the broken glass and lay utterly limp. His companions hesitated for a moment and then fled. Suddenly the street was filled with silence, quiet enough to hear a roaring murmur of voices not too far away. A helicopter went by overhead, probing downward with its searchlight, then skittered away sideways over the rooftops. Jennifer stumbled again when it was gone.

Without electricity, these canyon streets were dark. Dark as a closet with the door closed. She turned, fumbling for the wall. Where was she?

“You’ll need this,” Lafarge said.

Jennifer fought not to jump and closed her fingers around the warm metal tube he handed her. A flashlight. She turned it on, and nearly dropped it again. The man Lafarge had . . . shot? Struck down, anyhow . . . he was staring at her. At the whole world, rather, eyes and mouth open wide and unmoving in the dark-brown face. The light glittered on gold at his throat, on his hands, a puddle of operatic brightness against the deep velvet of the night. She could smell a heavy fecal odor that any New Yorker recognized, but it took her an instant to connect it with what she was seeing. Sphincter relaxation . . .

“You killed him,” she said, her voice rising toward a squeak before she controlled it.

“He was armed; there was no time for half-measures,” Lafarge said impatiently. “This way.”

He was off again, head down and shoulders hunched. The posture reminded her hurtfully for a moment of Henry . . . who was God-knew-where in this madhouse of a city. I desperately want to disbelieve all of this. I want it to have not happened, ever.

She kept the flashlight on Lafarge’s heels. That kept her from running into him when he stopped.

“We’re two blocks away, south,” he said softly.

He turned, and Jennifer jerked back slightly. The covering over his face had become a perfect nonreflective black that drank the light like blotting paper with ink, the only sign of features a writhing movement where his mouth should be when she shone the light directly on it.

“I have to go to maximum stealthing,” he said. Somehow it was doubly horrible, that normal, rather pedantic voice coming out of the black mask. “It has left, but there are fixed sensors in place. This is our window of opportunity, and we’ve got to make the most of it.”

“Why you say ‘we’ white man?” she said, and turned on her heel to leave him blinking, baffled, in her wake.

You’re the top of the heap, she told herself. “That’s Ms. Bitch to you, Mister,” she said aloud. Her shoulders braced back, and her sensible mid-heel office shoes beat out a tattoo on the sidewalk.

There was nobody in the block ahead. Nobody she could see, at least. The heavy arched wrought-iron door with IngolfTech Inc. on it stood over the main entrance to the ex-warehouse, just where it had been since the renovations started.

She’d been in a dozen times or more. Now it felt like the lion cage at the zoo. Her imagination insisted it even smelled like the lion cage, a rank predator’s odor.

Jennifer stepped up onto the semicircular staircase and pressed the button. The smooth enigmatic object she’d been given to hide was only the size of a thimble and no thicker, lighter than Styrofoarn . . . but it seemed to weigh like an anchor as she waited for a reply.


# # #


“What was that . . . light thing?” Finch asked.

She was scanning the approaches through the forest with slow, systematic care. Mary Chen was uneasily conscious of the fact that she wasn’t trained for anything like this. Wasn’t trained to hunt superhumans, using plasma guns? she scolded herself. Who is?

“How should I know?” she snapped. “I’m a forensic pathologist, not a physicist!” Then, with a slight feeling of guilt: “Sorry. I think it involved some sort of EMP, from the way it wrecked everything electronic.”

“Like a nuclear explosion,” Finch said thoughtfully.

“I certainly hope not.”

They might all be dead from secondary radiation without knowing it, if it was like a nuclear explosion. She shivered and reached for the thermos tucked into her backpack; it was cold, for a May night. Thank God for camping as a hobby; she was used to being out in the country at night, otherwise she’d be completely lost

Crack.

Blue-white light flashed through the trees, throwing her shape in a momentary cone of shadow over the thermos. She snatched up the weapon instead and fumbled her hand into the grip. The tiny device in her ear spoke, a man’s voice, eager and excited.

“I think I hit—”

The voice cut off. Through her normal hearing she caught the beginning of a shriek, then silence. Then another scream, a long hideous ululation of fear and agony.


# # #


Gwen stopped the head rolling with a foot and held the body pointed away from her. The blood filled the night with its heady, exciting scent; she licked her lips unconsciously as she stripped the covering off the human’s backpack with her hands and layer knife.

What a crazy hybrid, she thought in admiration as she bared the mechanism within.

Lighter and more efficient than the one which had just saved her life. That was already growing warm to the touch after a single bolt; the energy absorption factor was only a little over ninety-eight percent. This was much better, the guide coils and controller unit made by a modern faber rather than hand-assembled from purely local parts. Hers was slaved to her transducer, significantly reducing its capacities. What a pity she couldn’t take one of these and abandon her own—this was still an elephantine pile of junk by fifth-century Draka or Samothracian standards, but vastly preferable to what she had. Not that she could, of course, any more than she could put one of the communications units in her own ear. She grinned in the dark to think of what would happen then. There were more attractive methods of suicide.

Instead she turned to the other human, the one she’d winded—or perhaps she’d broken a few of his ribs; she’d been in a hurry. Without his little goggles the night would be impenetrable murk to him, of course. His eyes were round, starting at every sound as he sat propped against a tree, his legs stretched out before him. He moaned when she whispered in his ear.

“Call for help, man. Call for them to help you.”

Instead he tried to reach for a bayonet on his webbing belt. Impatient, Gwen caught the wrist and squeezed with brutal strength.

The scream went on and on as she worked her fingers into the shattered bone.


# # #


“Christ, that’s Clarens! He’s with Hadelman.”

Carmaggio caught at Saunders’s arm. “By the numbers, El-tee,” he said softly. “We knew she could make a shield if Lafarge could.”

Saunders nodded tightly. The cry trilled up into a squeal and then a gasping “don’t . . . don’t . . .” mixed with sobs.

Henry touched the disk attached to the side of his goggles. A heads-up display projected in front of his eyes, showing vectors and locations.

“This way,” he said, and arrows appeared before the sight of every member of the little force. “Enemy’s here.” Another vector, like a compass needle pointing to the AI’s best guess at location. “Let’s go.”

Spread out in a slight C-shape, they moved forward through the woods. Back in the jungle, Carmaggio thought with sour irony. Back in the bad bush. Big oaks and hickories, grass and shrubbery beneath, paved pathways—not too much like the Parrot’s Beak, really. Except for the feeling in his gut and balls and the back of his neck; and that was different too. He was a lot older, his heart pumping harder in his rib cage.

The humans were moving in a staggered line, half carrying their plasma guns slung and M-16s or H&Ks at the ready, half facing the darkness with the energy weapons. They moved at a slow deliberate walk; from what the equipment showed, Ingolfsson wasn’t moving away from them. Henry paid attention to his feet. The light amplification was perfect, pretty much like a black-and-white image of a cloudy afternoon, but something was playing hell with his depth perception.

“Where the hell is she?” he whispered to himself. By the display, they ought to be right on top of her.

“Looking for this?”

A voice out of the dark, from somewhere above. He pivoted instantly on one heel, his finger squeezing at the trigger as the aimpoint cross from the indicator hung in front of his eyes.

Crack.

A treetop exploded in flame, a fireball in the night. His eyes widened. The beam shouldn’t diffuse like that. She did have some sort of a shield. He caught a glimpse of a shape spreadeagled as it leaped, and then the vector arrow was quivering between trees. The one he’d hit was going up like a torch, every leaf and branch flash-ignited as the energy of the plasma spread around the circumference of the protective field.

Something arched out of the night at him as streams of tracer and plasma bolts raked the next tree into splinters. Dangerous splinters, from the way somebody was yelling. The object landed with a soggy thump and rolled to his feet.

Saunders recognized it before he did. “Clarens’s head.” The ex-officer raised his voice instinctively, despite the AI that would relay his words to every ear.

“Hold your fire until you’ve got a target! Keep moving.”

They did. Goddamn, Carmaggio thought desperately, trying to follow the dots that marked out the schematic of the action. It was too much, too much information, slowing down his reactions—yet without it he’d be helpless. He worked his mouth and spat.

The dot that was Ingolfsson’s probable location was skittering away ahead of them northward, moving at an estimated speed that raised his brows even now. A cross-country motorbike would be lucky to make that miles-per-hour in close terrain like this. And it was moving off to one side . . .

“Flank left,” he said. “Move!”

The ragged C of dots that marked his comrades started to move. Slowly, too slowly; it was like some computer game where you wrenched at the joystick and got reamed because the figures wouldn’t respond in time—


# # #


“There—”

Mary Chen jerked at Finch’s cry, even more at the stream of green-colored tracer from her submachine-gun. She leveled her plasma weapon, trying to bring the red firing dot on the vector her goggles were supplying. Something was coming out of the night, something moving like a coursing cheetah. Her beam smashed an explosion of steam and shattered rock out of the ground, and then the weapon was slapped out of her hands with a force that sent her spinning around like a top, throwing out her hands to try and keep from falling.

The blow turned her around faster than her own muscles could ever have done. In time to see a black-outlined shape running up the trunk of the tree that had been behind her. It had a human outline; she could see that much, and see that it held a weapon shape in its left hand. In its right was something long and slender with an edge of silvered moonlight. Then the run ended in a momentum-driven crouch and the figure leaped out and away from the tree, whirling in midair somersaults with knees drawn up to chest. In a long arch that took it back over their heads.

Help! I’ve fallen into a Ninja movie and I can’t get out! The thought bubbled through her mind as she scrambled to get the plasma gun back.

Finch was snarling and slapping another magazine into her firearm, trying to track the target and jerk back the slide in the same motion.

Chen felt her whirl turn into a stagger that left her groping dizzily for the plasma gun. Something flashed. There was a huge cold impact across her stomach, and her legs dropped out from under her. Her hands felt numb as they groped for the wound, tried to hug the savaged, razor-cut edges of flesh back together and contain the slick wetness that bulged out. Her mouth opened and closed soundlessly.

Finch was off the ground, gripped from behind with an elbow-grip on her neck and an arm about her waist. Her own arms and legs kicked uselessly, the H&K firing off bursts into the night.

A voice hissed, every syllable as distinct as if it were cut from etched glass.

“Where is the Samothracian?”

“Fuck you!” Finch shouted, her fox-sharp features contorted with rage. The hillbilly accent was back, sharp and nasal.

“No time.”

The arms wrenched and cast her aside. There was a single squeal, as fierce and shrill as an animal turning in the owl’s claws, then the body hit the ground with limp finality.

The figure in black took a long stride toward Chen. The dying woman tried to turn away, but all that moved was her head, rolling loosely to face her other shoulder. She remembered the heel marks on the necks.

Impact. Nothing.


# # #


“Move your ass,” Carmaggio shouted. “Face left!”

The vector arrow was pointing back the way they’d come. All the friendly dots turned left and south, scurrying to try and make their formation face the enemy and give mutual support. All except for one dot that kept right on going away, as fast as he or she could move their feet—and Henry couldn’t blame whoever it was one little bit. Saunders was cursing under his breath, voice a little shaky; Jesus did the same on his other side.

Sixty seconds since contact. Jesus fucking Christ.

A voice rang out from behind a statue-fountain set in a pool.

“Where’s your Samothracian?” it mocked. If a battle trumpet could live, it would sound like that. Even at this instant, the beauty of it struck him. “Where’s your strong protector now, humans?”

The sound firmed the attack vector to a brilliant dot. Bullets and a dozen plasma bolts lashed out. Bronze exploded into flying molten gobbets. Several thousand gallons of water also exploded, and the steam burst flung chunks of stone coaming right back in their faces. Something wet spattered Carmaggio over half his body, and a heavy limp weight struck him hard enough to send him staggering. He clutched at it automatically, and found himself holding Jesus Rodriguez—his body, since the top had been clipped off his skull by a knife-edged shard of rock. Bits of the granite still glistened among the pink brain and fragments, and his friends body shuddered and flapped and bucked in his arms.

He thrust it away with an involuntary shout. Images flitted before his eyes and clawed at his attention.

“Regroup,” he called out. The iron calm of his own voice shocked him, at some level far below the clarity that gripped and moved him. “Ten-yard intervals, circle formed on me.”

The AI would show everyone where to go, if they kept their heads and did it. They were doing it. The enemy vector arrow was a blur, moving around his defensive position. Every now and then someone would shoot at it, but Ingolfsson seemed to know they were shielded against her plasma weapon—

She knows how to use these things and we don’t, Carmaggio knew with deadly certainty. And she’s doing a better job of figuring out how to use them against us.

A rock whined by his head and went crack against a tree trunk as it shattered into fragments—not even a superhuman could make an irregular object perfectly accurate. He didn’t intend to stand up and see a trial of strength between this Fritz helmet and Ingolfsson’s arm, though.

“Hit the dirt. And nail the bitch!”

Bolts lanced out through the woods. Trees toppled. Carmaggio felt a sudden something in his mind, a sensation like a mental click. He started to roll still prone, bumped into someone, rolled right over them despite their squawk of protest. As he did so another plasma bolt lanced out of the darkness, right into the mid-section of the tree he’d been under. The three-foot thickness of hardwood vanished in a meter-wide sphere of magenta fire, and the great crown of the copper beech toppled downwards. It crashed into the middle of their position, branches probing like spears.

Return fire lashed back at the firmed-up vector the bolt provided for the AI. Thudding feet warned him that it didn’t stay accurate for long. He was surprised the footfalls were so loud, but you couldn’t move a hundred and ninety-five pounds up to greyhound speeds that quickly on soft little tippytoes, he supposed. Carmaggio went up on one knee, the trigger of the plasma gun sweetly responsive under his finger.

Repeated hits or a point-blank hit will overload the shielding, Lafarge’s remembered voice said. When that happens, the shield’s energy storage coil will fail catastrophically.

“And fry the bitch to hell and gone,” he snarled under his breath. The sights were steady—

—and a stream of tracer snapping right by his ear with flat stretching whackwhackwhack sounds showed somebody had the same idea.

The bolt went wide, snapping out across Central Park—at that angle, it could blast a hole in concrete in one of the apartments over on the Upper West Side. Carmaggio rolled desperately, trying to get a new bead on the running, jinking figure. It was as if they were all standing still, or wading through honey, and she was the only normal person there.

“Shit. Shit, shit.”

The vector bead slid right across their circular position. People on the other side were shooting after her.

“Fuck, the captain’s dead!”

Henry’s head whipped around. Three or four of the National Guardsmen were standing shoulder-deep in the fallen beech tree, looking down. He forced himself to his feet and lumbered over. Saunders was lying on his back, and a stub of wood three inches around was through his chest.

“Oh, man, I’m outta here,” one of the guardsmen said, backing away, his head shaking in an unconscious rejection of the scene before him. “Oh, man, I’m gone.”

“Shut up!”

The AI blared it into everyone’s ear in a shout that stopped them in their tracks.

“You want to be out there alone with that thing?” he went on. “And if you make it home, you want to wait there until it comes for you? Christ, if you’re that anxious to die, eat your gun and do it easy and quick!”

Silence fell. “Get your attention back on the job.” Rollcall, he whispered. Shock made him grunt. Chen, Finch, Jesus, ten more dead. Two run. And all in less than eight minutes.

The men and women faced outward. But the vector arrow had turned to a bead, and the AI drew him a schematic.

“She’s going home,” Carmaggio whispered. “We did it. I hope.” Aloud: “Come on. We’ve got to get to the warehouse.”

He walked toward the waiting vans parked along the edge of Columbus Circle. Past the bodies, past Finch lying like a pretzel, past shattered burning trees. How many—Two of the FBI types were kneeling by Dowding’s body. He’d never really gotten to know Finch’s boss, beyond the depressed-horse expression on his bony face. Now he was lying face-down, with a four-inch-deep cut running diagonally from left shoulderblade to right kidney. That must have happened as she left, running through their position.

The night smelled of death. Eighteen living humans followed him out of the park. None remained but the dead, as they walked toward the killer.

Jenny, he thought.


# # #


“Who’s there?” a voice demanded over her head, after she punched in the code.

She pressed the button again. “Jennifer Feinberg for Ms. Ingolfsson,” she snapped, putting her palm to the plate beside the door. “She told me to report here in an emergency. Now let me in.”

A wait, while whoever was behind the video monitor let the computer confirm who she was and bring up its instructions.

Now she lived, or died. If the door didn’t open, Lafarge attacked it himself—and he said the chances were better than five-to-one he couldn’t defuse the biobomb in time. She closed her eyes and fumbled for a prayer, the first in a very long time.

There was a click. “Come through,” the speaker said

She did, into a lobby now dimly fit. Two tall black men stood by either side of the door, looking out through slits. They had rifles, absurdly huge spindly-looking things. Lafarge had said . . . Barretts. Or something. They ignored her. The one who’d let her in was a young Latina woman, with a wicked-looking machine pistol slung across her body, incongruous against the chic outfit

“Hi, Dolores,” Jennifer said.

“Buenas noches, Jenny,” Dolores Ospina said. “Welcome to the Household. Glad you decided to be sensible.” A flash of a smile. “Welcome to the harem, that is to say . . . Come on.”

Jennifer forced a sickly grin as the other woman led her down a corridor and into an elevator; the sheer normalcy of the closed-down offices was jarring, with plastic covers over the PCs and Post-It notes stuck to desks.

The elevator had glass panels on the other side, and they had a view of the main section of the converted warehouse as they rose. Nothing dramatic, floodlights and a few workers fussing around enigmatic machinery. She recognized Dr. Mueller—his name should be Mengele—and the Sikh in their white coats, bent together over a console. The elevator clicked to a stop at the third floor. Armed men patrolled the walkways, or stood around the outer wall in positions barricaded with curved shapes of heavy metal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” said Jennifer. She felt herself blushing. “Where’s the powder room?”

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

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

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

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

She set the coffee cup down; it was Limoges; no plastic here. Nobody was standing out in the hall. She pushed open the ladies’ and went into a stall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Vulk,” she said. “I was just—”

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

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


# # #


intruder, the transducer whispered in Gwen’s mind. central interface units are compromised. attempting to contain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

seven minutes.


# # #


shield down.

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

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

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

Crack. Bits of flesh and metal spattered across the rooftop. The guard’s rifle and ammunition exploded with a run of malignant crackles, like heavy firecrackers. Vaporized metal and organic steam blossomed upward. The others went to ground and began firing back. Brave men, Lafarge thought. Not very smart, but brave.

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

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

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

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

do not fire, the AI said.

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

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

“Damn, there’s a self-destruct sequence!”

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

“Good.” Initiate biobomb self-destruct sequence.

initiated, three minutes, counting.

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


# # #


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

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

He dares!

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

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 APCs 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-16s and rocket launchers. Searchlights from the APCs 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 Storm troopers.

“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 Albaninan 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 lolling 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 APCs 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-113s, 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 quasivibrated 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 VAsince 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 . . .


# # #


White light shone through every crack and vision block in the Bradley. The armor rang like a cracked gong with heat expansion. It reared up as the wind caught it, teetered, hesitated, dropped back on its tracks with a shattering crackle of broken torsion bars. When he became conscious of anything again, Henry Carmaggio knew he was still clutching Jenny to him, and that her arms were tight around his neck. Her mouth moved, but the words seemed very distant.

“ . . . happened?” she said. “What happened?”

“I think—” he began. Jesus dead. Chen dead. Christ, everyone in that building, and a block around . . . “I think we won,” he said.

“Yeah,” she replied, and laid her head back on his chest. Tears dripped down onto the bloodstained Kevlar of the armor vest. “We won.”

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Framed