back, idly. He looked again and saw me running him down. I’m sure I looked exactly like my computer’s namesake. His eyes widened until they were comically round, then he grabbed the cloth of his partner’s khani, tugged twice and pointed. With that warning given and his conscience absolved, he tried to prove that being fast wasn’t as important as being faster than the other man.
I was on top of the man in the khani before he had a chance to fully register the fact I was neither dead nor trapped in the building. I pulled my web gloves around his head. I might as well have tried to sing him to sleep: his caste-mark wasn’t metal-based either. He started to sneer and reach under his coat for the maser he kept there, but I never allowed him a chance to perfect the expression. I hooked my arm through his, twisted, and then pulled his arm up behind his back until it dislocated. His maser dropped to the ground with a plastic crash. He followed his weapon a split-second later.
The man with the poncho was still running, but not as fast as he would have liked. I tripped him, elbowed his side on the way down, and finished with a vambrace aimed at his head.
I wasn’t in the mood to waste time on pleasantries. “WHO SENT YOU!?”
The man looked up at me, snarling, and tried to push back away from me. His fear was sharp vinegar, bitter and thin, and it spun away from me, broke, fractured, and ran streaming into my mind as disjointed images. The scenes crashed themselves together in haphazard jigsaw of color and memory.
ggg
The smell of roses in the air, and bees humming through a garden of pale green and violet...Sarcodinay knights in green-colored plate, decorations curling on gauntlets and helms like cresting waves...I have been summoned...she sits on a curoquo couch by a long slim reflecting pool, watching the mirror smoothness...I keep my eyes on the ground...green dress, embroidered, beaded...the fabric shimmers as crystals catch the light...hand on my throat: strong, hard claws...I look up in fear...a new woman, but one of them, with black-bronze skin and copper metal hair...she is so small...so small...shorter than me...a child?...no, not a child, look at the breasts, the hips, the long legs...no, don’t look!...don’t look at her that way...don’t be a fool...I know what the uniform means...black, black, with no decorations, no ornaments...one of THEM...
She sneers at me...“Kill her”...“explosives”...“the address we give you. 1600x2100x22. Make sure she is there”...a vid image of a woman...honey-brown skin and silver-gold hair...freakish ice-cold eyes...the scent of roses is cloying, sweet...
The High Guard woman/child talks ...“black flag”...“dangerous”...“no melee”...the noblewoman in the green dress picks the petals off roses...she does not talk to humans...
Dark thick despair...I’ve failed...not dead...she’s here...she’s here!.My family...my god, they’ll kill my family...
ggg
“Hells,” I said as I stared into the man’s panicked eyes. He wasn’t frightened for his own sake; he knew he was already dead. He reached under his poncho.
I kicked him hard under the chin, put enough spin in it to knock him unconscious without causing him serious injury.
“Deuce, call Merlin and arrange a pick-up. I’m leaving two unconscious men here for him. Tell him to hurry: he has to beat MOJ—”
“Mallory?”
I looked up to see Vanessa Lee standing there on the street. She stared at me with her mouth open. Behind her, near the building intersection, it started to rain.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“What—what—” She pointed up to the building. “It exploded! And you—what—why are you beating up that man?”
“Vanessa, I don’t have time. We’re in danger. We need to go. Now.” I left the men where they had fallen. I felt Vanessa’s fear, her confusion, her horror. She’d stopped by in person because I wasn’t answering my vid, because Medusa wasn’t answering my vid—because Paul wasn’t answering his vid either.
Vanessa was never a striker, never on the frontlines, and she was born and raised in an Urban Megacity, but that didn’t make her a fool. When I grabbed her hand, she followed me under the shelter of an overhead awning without protest. She was well aware of what I did for a living.
“I don’t think they have a sniper,” I said by way of explanation. “But I don’t feel like taking the chance.”
She nodded, still scared, but doing a commendable job of keeping her panic inside. “What do we do now?”
“There’s a people mover the next block over that tunnels underground. Follow me and don’t—” I stopped. A man and a woman stepped around the corner and glanced in my direction, then looked again, harder. They didn’t seem happy.
“That’s them,” Medusa told me.
“I guessed.” I pulled on Vanessa’s arm. “Public places: we need to keep to public places, or they’ll start shooting.”
“It’s not MOJ?” Vanessa asked as we walked away from the “couple.”
“No.”
“Oh, I’m so relieved. Wait—should I be relieved?”
“You’ll know as soon as I do.” I flipped down the data lens for my maser vambraces as we walked towards the large crowd of gathering spectators. I didn’t plan on using my vambrace, but the lens had other uses. “Deuce, will Cerberus give us a patch?”
“Normally, no, but since these people are not MOJ...” The lens window filled with visual information, encircling the people I saw through the crystal with tiny notations. Large red circles indicated men and women whom Cerberus had already tagged as ‘suspicious.’ The couple who had seen us in the alley were uncomfortably close.
“Stay here,” I told Vanessa, and circled through the crowd. I didn’t think they had looked at her for long enough to realize she was important.
The man was on the right, so I came up behind him first. He was still talking on a small vid link, no doubt trying to find out what had happened to the two men on monitor duty. I snaked a hand under the man’s chin, my other hand on his shoulder. With that cushion to ensure I didn’t break his neck, I whipped him around fast, to my right. His skull moved but his brain couldn’t keep up: he was unconscious before he realized he was being attacked.
His partner was in a slightly better position, but she’d kept her maser holstered to avoid detection, and she was right handed which meant she had to twist to fire at me. I slammed her elbow hard against her body. Momentum pushed us both to the road. I kept her arm pinned against her body, preventing her from using the maser. A snap punch into her jaw removed her desire to fight.
“Vitals?” I said as I stood up and walked away. The crowd pulled back, but no one tried to stop me.
“They’ll live. You have two more on the left, but I think they’re trying to regroup.”
“I see them.” I headed right. I didn’t think they’d found me. Medusa was correct: they were regrouping with the others to try to determine how everything had gone wrong. Since they weren’t hooked into the local grid, they were having a hard time sorting meaning from the chaos of their own explosions and screams and running crowds. I found Vanessa, right where I’d left her.
“Did you—” She hesitated. “Are we safe?”
“Not yet. Let’s move.” I turned her shoulder and pushed her forward; she didn’t resist.
By the time they straightened out their act—assuming they ever did—Vanessa and I had dashed down the steps to the Underground and boarded a sled heading back to the FirstCity docks.
ELEVEN.Marduk
I folded a handkerchief into Vanessa’s palm. She accepted it without looking at me or responding in any meaningful way.
“I just got off the vid with my boss,” I told her as I opened the port airlock, mostly to let fresh air into the cabin, and had Medusa set up the holo display to show real trees and plants and a small herd of buffalo who were examining the Aegis with thick, wet stares. “No luck on finding the people who planted that bomb. Not really a surprise.”
She continued to stare out at nothing.
I walked back into the Aegis??
? kitchen, and returned with two plates of food and a pitcher balanced precariously in my arms, all of which I somehow managed to deposit on the sideboard without a minor catastrophe. I unfolded a small table in front of Vanessa, set one of the plates directly in front of her, and poured two glasses from the pitcher.
Vanessa looked down at the plate with blank detachment. “I’m not hungry.”
“Eat something anyway.”
She frowned at the food. “What is this?”
“Leftovers. Red pepper stuffed panquecas with lime onion relish and sweet tomato chutney. I have some goat with green peppercorn sauce, but I think it’s starting to go off.”
“Thank you,” she said, a sign of good manners rather than any real sincerity.
“When you’re ready, I’ll take you back to Liberty or Paradise—even Luna if you want to stay in the Sol System—but you shouldn’t go back to FirstCity until the fallout has settled.”
She picked up her glass; sniffed its contents. “Fruit juice?”
“Sure, it has fruit juice in it.”
Vanessa snorted in a most unladylike manner. “And what else?”
“Honey, ice and a little cachaça to cut the tartness of the fruit.”
She sipped the drink, then gulped it.
I put my hand on hers. “Eat something.”
Vanessa glared at me, before finally relenting. She ate a bite, then paused, her expression skeptical. “Did you make this yourself?”
“Me? Oh no. Merlin’s the closet chef. I swear he’s worse than a Wilder