In a single stroke, Warne moved forward and touched the portfire to the fuse.
There was a brief white light as the fuse caught, and then the flame traveled up the line of the quickmatch with surprising rapidity, sparking and spitting. At the last moment, Warne remembered to avert his eyes. There was a strange noise, like compressed air being released underwater. And then, with a ferocious hiss, the shell shot from the tube. Warne looked back to watch it coruscating down the corridor at unbelievable speed, a comet of light with an intense smoking tail that caromed from wall to wall until it hurled itself into the ceiling above the armored car.
For a millisecond, there was nothing. And then the world turned white.
With a terrifying, shattering report, the remainder of the lift charge exploded. A hundred tongues of golden composition jetted down the corridor, hissing and snaking along the walls and ceiling, curling around the armored car in a fiery caress. There was an incredible fusillade of sound, like countless grenades exploding in rapid sequence. The white light became obscured by a strange smoky corona of gold, awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time. Warne ducked as fiery tendrils shot over his head, growing brighter and brighter before at last fading into nothing.
As the echoes died away, Warne could hear another sound: the distant clamor of warning sirens. Now the ragged curtain of smoke began to drift away, and Warne struggled to see past it.
The front end of the armored car had been knocked to one side by the blast. As he watched, Warne could see the tires rolling, the driver working desperately to get the truck back on course.
His aim had been far too high, and the shell had exploded over the truck.
Warne glanced over his shoulder. Smythe, the pyrotechnist, was lying on the floor behind him, curled up in a ball, arms wrapped protectively over his head. Peccam crouched nearby, frozen disbelief on his face.
Warne turned back. The spent mortar lay beside him, smoking. Wingnut still stood a few yards down the corridor, the fuse growing alarmingly short. He saw its big head pivot back toward him, as if in inquiry. At the end of the corridor, the truck was still trying to align itself, the diesel roaring as the driver rocked the big vehicle back and forth. Another moment and it would disappear down the corridor.
He dropped his eyes to the remaining mortars. The support tube had been knocked away by the ferocity of the launch, and the cylinders lay at angles across the floor. He would not be able to prepare another in time for a second shot. Even if he could, aiming with any accuracy had proved almost impossible. He glanced ahead at Wingnut. If only there was some way to reach him, to alter his programming. But there was no time. And so the robot sat there, the charge they needed to disable the armored car about to explode on his back, with no directives to follow…
Ahead, at the intersection, the snout of a rifle poked through one of the gunports of the armored car.
Warne ducked down. A sudden thought had occurred to him. Maybe there was a directive Wingnut could follow. It was no command he had ever been given before; in fact, it went against everything he had been taught. And yet maybe…
“Wingnut!” he barked, pointing at the armored car. “Chase!”
Wingnut remained motionless.
“Chase!” Warne cried again. “Chase!”
Still the robot hesitated, as if trying to process this unfamiliar command. Then it began to move forward, slowly at first, but quickly gaining speed. Warne sat up, speechless. The fuse glowed and sparked between the robot’s knobby rear wheels. As Warne watched, Wingnut seemed to gain purpose as well as speed, moving faster and faster as it approached the huge truck.
Warne shut his eyes, turned away.
There was a blinding light that scorched his eyeballs even through the closed lids, followed by a violent thunderclap that seemed to shake Utopia to its very footings. Warne felt a wave of overpressure boil past him. He gasped, tried to raise himself up. For a moment, his muscles refused to obey. And then, with an effort, he staggered back onto his hands and knees.
He could see that the armored car had been thrown onto its side, the radiator grille guard irreversibly wedged into one wall of the corridor. The uppermost wheels were turning lazily, runflat inserts going round like drunken tops, the composite of the side panels blackened and steaming. He could see that the heavy armor that covered the truck’s underside had been torn and petaled, peeled away in one section like aluminum foil. The sprinklers at the end of the corridor had gone off, and curtains of water rained down through the rolling palls of gunpowder.
Warne crouched, staring, his breath coming in sharp gasps. For a long moment, there was only the labored sound of his breath, the distant patter of the sprinklers on metal and concrete, the drone of the fire alarms.
And then the door of the armored car shifted.
Warne stared, wondering if he’d been mistaken; if the sheets of water, the roiling streamers of smoke, were playing tricks with his eyes. But then the door moved again, as if pushed up from below.
Someone was trying to get out.
Warne’s breath came even faster. He looked at the mortars lying before him, their contents scattered and askew, quickmatch fuses trailing away like tails. He tried to force his brain into action. He made out the double chrysanthemum, the heavy, cakelike lifting charges. What had Smythe said about them? The equivalent of several sticks of dynamite.
The door of the armored car flew upward, banging against the rear wall of the corridor. Warne saw a man’s head emerge, then the upper part of a torso, clad in a tight leather jacket. The man was forcing himself up, struggling against the crazy tilt of the vehicle. In his hands was a stout, ugly-looking submachine gun.
Warne fell back, looking around desperately. The portfire lay to one side, still sparking and sputtering, flaring crimson against the concrete floor.
There was no time to think, no other options to consider. He grabbed it, then reached wildly for the nearest mortar, dropped in a lifting charge, then another, frantically tugging their quickmatch fuses into position. The man raised the gun, steadying himself against the frame of the door. A gout of flame erupted from the muzzle; something whined past Warne’s head.
Gasping, he dropped the huge chrysanthemum shell into the mortar, then angled it away and held the portfire to the end of the fuses, his fingers stupid, refusing to work. Another stuttering flash from the gun, another whine of bullets, concrete chips flying across his face and stinging Warne’s eyes, but the fuses were lit now, and—holding the mortar as far in front of him as possible—he aimed it directly toward the shooter.
There was another angry hiss, and then smoke boiled back from the mortar tube and a brutal recoil knocked him to the floor. Another comet of light, brighter than the first, arrowed down the hallway, swerving first up, then down, a searing shaft of brilliance that sped directly toward the open door of the armored car. Warne fell to the floor, covering his ears, shielding his head with his arms.
For a millisecond, silence. And then there came a terrific double report; a concussive blast of incendiary color; a sudden flowering of fire—one within another—that stretched out into brilliant pinpoints of light, incandescent red and yellow and turquoise, a hundred tiny suns too bright and terrible to look upon. Warne felt almost violated by light. He tried to rise, but the brutal shock wave forced him back to the floor, where he lay a moment, stunned. Next he felt—or thought he felt—confetti landing around him, falling gently to earth. He lay still, trembling, eyes tight shut, afraid to move.
For a moment, he could hear nothing but a harsh buzzing in his ears. As that faded, other sounds came slowly back: the rolling thunder of the salute as it echoed and reechoed deeper through the halls of C Level; the distant sound of a hundred car alarms blaring out in the employee parking lot. “I can’t see!” Peccam was crying behind him. “I can’t see!”
More sprinklers came on now, water running through Warne’s hair, down his neck, into the hollow between his shoulder blades. And then, at last, Warne pulled
himself up the side of the wall, opened his eyes, and looked ahead.
The truck lay as it had before, wheels slowly spinning, water trickling down its flanks in spidery streams. The stench of gunpowder and phosphorus hung heavy in the air. Shreds of money lay everywhere, covering the sides of the truck, the floors and the walls, darkening as water soaked it. The man with the submachine gun had vanished. The truck’s open door was now awash in blood and matter, and a curtain of blood ran up the wall behind it, fan-shaped and huge. Warne watched as the sprinklers traced clear lines of water through the crimson.
He sank back against the wall, too numb to feel anything: no relief, no fear, only an uncomfortable sensation in his hands. He looked down and noticed with a kind of detached surprise that his hands were raw, the skin burned away by the heat of the shell. He let them fall to his sides, then looked back down the corridor, his motions slow and dreamlike. There was Peccam, sitting against the wall of the corridor, hands clasped over his eyes. Smythe was nowhere to be seen.
Warne exhaled slowly, letting his head come to rest against the cool wall of the corridor. The portfire lay in his lap, soaked through, spent. The pain in his palms was becoming more intense, but he felt very tired. The bleating of the alarms, the trickle of water down his face, seemed very far away. Maybe, if he closed his eyes, he could sleep.
He let his gaze fall once again on the armored car. And abruptly, as if galvanized by an electric current, he sat up, portfire rolling from his lap and across the floor.
John Doe was clambering out over the hood of the armored car. His face was blackened, his hair burned. Steam rose from the shoulders of his linen suit. Blood was running freely from his nose and ears. He seemed not to notice Warne, or the scatterings of currency, or anything else. His gaze remained locked on the tunnel exit.
Warne stumbled to his feet, staring at John Doe’s hands. One held a pistol; the other, the black oblong of the long-distance transmitter.
Warne looked around wildly. His hands were too burned to light another fuse. Even if he could, there was too much water; nothing would light. He had nothing, could do nothing.
He looked back toward the truck in desperation. But John Doe had already slid off the front grille and vanished out of sight down the tunnel.
JOHN DOE WALKED down the corridor, away from the smoke and water and confusion and the indescribable horror that lay within the armored car. His gait was unsteady, but his grip on the transmitter remained firm. Fire, smoke, and emergency alarms were going off but he did not hear them: both eardrums had burst in the third shell’s explosion. Blood and gore covered the front of his suit, but most of it was not his and he paid no attention.
A guard was running down the corridor toward him, his face a mask of shock and concern. He was mouthing something—What the hell just happened? Are you all right?—and John Doe raised the gun and shot him. His eyes were bleeding and powder-burned, but he was still able to make out the semicircle of sunlight that lay at the end of the access corridor. Not much farther now.
Another guard came down the hall and John Doe raised his arm, fired again, and moved on. He passed the security checkpoint—deserted—just a few more steps—and then he was out on the tarmac, the vast rear wall of Utopia rising above and behind him. The shadow of the dome lay across the lot, but even so, the light was almost too much for his damaged eyes. He staggered forward, feeling the blood trickling from his ears. Some crew members, who’d raced from the loading docks at the sound of the explosions, stopped and stared at him. He walked on, not bothering to glance at them. One or two vehicles were moving across the tarmac, vague indistinct shapes, but he was interested in only one: the escort car that would take him away from this place, from the deadly confusion he was about to rain down upon the Park. What was that line of Vishnu’s quoted in the Bhagavad Gita? I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. At least, that’s how he believed it went: his mind was not as clear as it should have been.
There was no hard cash, of course, but he had the discs; that was more than compensation enough. Ahead now he could make out the vast, curved line that marked the edge of the dome’s shadow. He gripped the transmitter more tightly. When he reached that point, he’d turn around. He’d have all the angle he needed from there.
Not much farther now.
—
BALLING HIS SEARED palms, Andrew Warne clambered painfully over the hood of the armored car and began staggering down the hallway. He did not know what he planned to do: he knew merely that he had to stop John Doe any way he could.
The portable holographic projector he and Peccam had placed to stop the truck lay on its side in the passage, knocked over by the explosions. It was still projecting a hologram of himself: feet apart, arms crossed, sprawled drunkenly against the ceiling. He passed beneath it quickly. Ahead, there was a guard lying motionless in the passageway, shot; and then another. To the rear he heard a confusion of shouts, the sound of running feet. He moved on, past the checkpoint, past the roaring fans of the air purification system, and out into Cast Parking.
He stopped for a moment, looking around, trying to spot John Doe. And then to his horror he saw him directly ahead, perhaps a hundred yards away, his narrow form bisected by the shadow line of Utopia’s dome as it fell across the tarmac. How had he moved so fast?
He saw the blood-drenched arm swing up slowly, deliberately.
“No!” Warne cried, taking off at a dead run. But even as he ran, he saw the transmitter aim toward the sky, saw the empty, glassy smile on John Doe’s face, and he knew he was too late.
And then, quite abruptly, John Doe’s head disintegrated in a cloud of blood and brain matter.
The body fell backward, transmitter clattering across the asphalt. Only then did the crack of the shot reach Warne. It echoed across the lot, rolling and rumbling above the blare of car alarms, tossed back and forth like a ball between the opposing canyon walls.
He ran up to the transmitter, stamped it into fragments with his heel. Then he turned back, his gaze traveling up the broad concrete posterior of Utopia. Far above at the roofline, silhouetted against the shadow of the dome, a figure in a tweed cap and corduroy jacket leaned against a long-barreled rifle. He waved once, weakly, down at Warne. And then he sat down very abruptly, the rifle falling away out of sight.
Warne, too, sat down, the tarmac in shadow now but still hot from the day’s exposure to the sun. A few yards away lay John Doe’s body, ruined, motionless.
Warne glanced around, arms across his knees, blinking stupidly. Not far away, a late-model sedan with a flashing amber light was peeling rapidly away, heading for the interstate. Warne ignored it. His gaze was fixed on a more distant point: the scribbled red line of the horizon, where a row of squat shadows was approaching above a thin ribbon of cloud. If he listened closely, he thought he could hear a throbbing murmur, like the beating of giant wings against the air. The cavalry had arrived.
WARM SUNLIGHT SPLASHED over the canyon walls, dappling the sandstone with a profusion of reds, yellows, and ochers. Warne sat alone in a window seat, enjoying the reflected warmth on his face. This time, he’d remembered the dark glasses. The gentle rocking of the car was comforting, almost familiar somehow, like cradle memories of early childhood. The canned speech coming over the speakers was the same mellow, sophisticated voice, only now a pitch had been added for the Callisto Skyport, reopened with new rides just two weeks before.
Somebody was speaking over his shoulder, and he roused himself from the enshrouding fog of memories and looked around. It was a man in his mid-forties, with thinning hair and a florid complexion.
“I’m sorry?” Warne asked.
“I said, is this your first trip here?”
Warne shook his head, recalling the last time he’d viewed these red walls: from within a medevac chopper tearing back toward Vegas, his hands packed in ice, a uniformed man shouting questions at him. For a moment, the rocking of the car grew less comforting.
“It’s mine. My firs
t trip, I mean. And I still can’t believe I’m actually here.” The man’s words seemed to tumble out in a breathless rush. “And it’s all because of that article I wrote.”
The feeling passed, and Warne forced the memories aside. “Really?”
“For the Epicurean Quarterly Review. On medieval cuisine. I’m a food historian, you know?”
“Food historian.”
But the man needed no encouragement. “Yes. And so last week I get this call from Lee Dunwich, head of Food Services Utopia—can you believe it, Lee Dunwich himself, gave up that three-star Paris restaurant and everything to come to the Park? Anyway, he wanted me to come and review some of the Camelot menus, you know, they’re opening those two new restaurants, and apparently guest sampling showed people weren’t happy with some of the dishes, you know, medieval food tends to be a little…Oh, my God, there it is!”
The monorail had swung around a narrow curve in the canyon, and up ahead lay the vast copper-colored facade of Utopia, winking and shimmering in the sunshine like some monumental mirage. The flow of words halted abruptly, and the man stared at the spectacle before him.
Watching that look, Warne smiled despite himself. “Have yourself a good time,” he said.
—
INSIDE THE NEXUS, all the clocks read 0:50. The long, echoing galleries seemed to be waiting, as if holding their breath against the sudden influx of guests. Warne stood on the off-loading ramp, gazing around at the vast conflation of brushed metal and blond wood, the empty restaurants and boutiques, the graceful blue band of the dome arching far overhead. He took a slow breath, then another. The food historian—Warne had already forgotten his name—was hurrying down the ramp toward the line of white-blazered hosts, all standing as if for a military review. The line began to break up as the external specialists and assorted VIPs approached, and Warne watched a young woman step toward the historian. He thought he recognized her as Amanda Freeman, the woman who had processed his own entry nine months before.