Then he surprised me with an offer of his knife.
I did nothing but shake my head.
Tazh Khan spat contemptuously. Then he reined away from me and gave his knife to Lucy.
She flashed me a grin that was as fierce as the men’s—then, without hesitation, she helped herself to a quaff of blood from the neck of her own mount.
What a girl.
Chapter 59
A RIPPLE OF cruel laughter broke from the riders, along with a chain of jeering comments, obviously at my expense. It grated worse than the jolting I was receiving from the pony. My patience was wearing as thin as the razor-sharp edge of Tazh Khan’s knife.
“What are they saying?” I asked Lucy, who now rode beside me, possibly to keep an eye on me. “Translate for me, please.”
“Let’s just say—in the kindest way—that you remind them of the scared rabbits they hunt.” She seemed somewhat sympathetic, but mostly amused herself. That set me off even more.
“All right,” I said. “Then I’m the rabbit. Keep your eye on this rabbit!”
I swung my leg over the pony’s back and slid down to the ground. What a relief it was to have solid earth under my feet again.
Lucy’s face turned puzzled, as well as concerned. “What are you doing, Hays? Don’t get yourself trampled now.”
“Tell them to hunt me,” I said. “All of them at once. For real. No holding back. Catch me if they can!”
Her eyes widened and actually showed some fear. “Hays, no. They don’t mean it personally—it’s a cultural thing.”
But I cut her short with an upraised palm. “Cultural thing, my ass—it’s a guy thing. They’re questioning my… you know…”
Reluctantly, she spoke a few rushed sentences to the nomadic band, now watching me curiously. When she finished, their laughter chorused again, this time even louder and harsher. Tazh Khan answered her back in his piggish language.
“He says you must be smarter than he thought,” Lucy translated, “to take refuge in the knowledge that their tribal law forbids them from killing a crazy man.”
I smiled tightly. “Tell him that if any of them can hit me, then I won’t take away their cute little bows and arrows and break them over my knee.”
Lucy raised her eyes heavenward, but she swung back around to them and delivered the challenge.
That really pissed them off.
As their laughter turned to brutish scowls, I bounced around in a few goofy bunny hops, waggling my fingers above my head like ears.
Then I took off—moving extremely fast in long leaps but staying low to the ground.
In the blink of an eye, I had a thundering herd of agile horses and murder-bent wild men hot on my little, cotton bunny tail.
The first several riders came in swiftly and close to the ground, and so did their arrows, registering on my vision as dark particles that instantaneously grew in length as they approached.
I danced about a foot or so above them, letting them whir past under my feet.
The Mongol horsemen slowed to a trot and dropped their bows in utter amazement—but also chagrin.
Bunny Rabbit, one; Mongolians, zip.
The rest of the band tried a different tack, galloping around me in a half circle and firing their arrows all at once in a pattern—a grid several feet high and wide, with the shots spaced carefully inside it. If their plan worked, I would look like a frog that crash-landed into a thornbush.
This time I leaped straight up into a somersault, twisting upside down and plucking a few of the arrows out of the air as they shot underneath me. Coming down, I hurled them back, whistling the darts right past the horsemen’s ears.
With exclamations of despair, they tossed their bows onto the refuse pile already started by their comrades. I’d nearly won them all over.
Now only one rider was left facing me: Tazh Khan himself.
For a few long seconds, we locked gazes. Then, without haste, he nocked an arrow, took careful aim, and unleashed it straight at my throat.
I shifted aside just enough to take it in the hollow of my left shoulder. It punched clear through, protruding out my back.
It also hurt like a sonofabitch. Lord, it stung.
I sagged to my knees as Lucy came running up and put her arm around me. “Oh, Hays, you fool. You complete idiot.”
“I’m fine—just like at the lake, I let them win.”
“Tazh Khan’s right—you’re crazy,” she then whispered angrily.
“Tell them they won,” I said. “And if they’ll get this damn arrow out of me, they can drink as much of my blood as they want.”
Chapter 60
WELL, IT WAS a small price to pay—I heal quickly—but my Hays the Rabbit act won the horse soldiers over, even Tazh Khan, it seemed.
Toward evening, our merry band of Mongolians arrived at a small city, if you could call it that—a couple of square miles of gray streets and squat industrial buildings that rose up starkly out of the tundra. It was named Vlosk; mainly, it was a transport depot to ship ore from nearby mines, probably to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Lucy had already arranged passage for us on one of the cargo rockets that made constant flights to North Sea ports.
Then we’d be taken straightaway to England, where the human leaders we needed to meet were based—though Lucy told me there were also leadership councils in Berlin, Madrid, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Beijing. Of course, these were all cities that—according to Elite history books—no longer existed.
At any rate, Tazh Khan’s men obviously weren’t comfortable with Vlosk, or probably even with buildings; they stopped well short of the outskirts.
Khan rode on alone with Lucy and me to where a classic Russian motorcar was waiting to take us to our transport.
I gave my pony an affectionate pat as I jumped down to the ground. I’d become fond of the little brute. It was tough, loyal, gave everything it had, and asked little in return.
Tazh Khan spoke a quick couple of sentences to Lucy, but his gaze was on me.
“He asks how your shoulder feels,” she told me.
“Already better. I’m good,” I said, rotating it easily. He’d taken the arrow out himself, then washed my wound and dressed it with the soothing balm they used on their horses. My own rapid-healing powers had taken over from there.
Looking rather somber, Tazh Khan spoke again.
“He says he knows you deliberately let his arrow hit you,” Lucy said.
“Tell him I mean no disrespect, but he’s mistaken. His shot was so swift and sure that I barely managed to save my life.”
When she relayed this, his grin appeared, even as he spoke. Lucy kept on translating.
“He says you’re a bad liar but he’d be proud to call you his brother.”
“The honor’s mine,” I said, and I actually meant it.
“After this war is over, you must come visit him again,” Lucy said. “He’ll lend you his fattest wives to keep you warm at night, and take you spear hunting for wolves.”
Now it was my turn to grin. “Sounds like a dream vacation. Tell him—no way.”
Tazh Khan clasped my forearm, leaned down from his horse to embrace Lucy, then rode off to rejoin his band—without a backward glance.
“That is some kind of man,” I said. “They all are.”
Lucy nodded sadly. “Exactly the kind of barbarian the Elites can’t wait to exterminate.”
Chapter 61
IT TURNED OUT that most of the mining labor in Vlosk was robotic; there weren’t many human inhabitants, and though they’d tried to add touches of warmth—brightly painted houses, for one thing; greenhouse gardens; a couple of roughhouse taverns—the place was still as grim as an addict’s funeral.
But our driver, a bristly-mustached young man named Sergei, seemed cheerful enough—maybe because, like the nomads, he wasn’t living with the Elite boot pressed down on his neck.
Our flight was ready to depart, so we said a hasty good-bye to Sergei and drove
with a robot attendant to a bulky transport missile waiting on one of the launchpads.
Trouble was, these ships didn’t have passenger accommodations; there wasn’t much demand for them. The few occasional travelers were sealed into small cargo units that were pressurized, heated, and oxygenated.
Lucy and I climbed into the one that was ready for us. It was about the size of a double coffin and just big enough to get us both in—not all that different from the trunk of her car, only with a little more legroom.
After the jolts and metallic clamor of final loading and the fierce roar and terrific acceleration of blastoff, everything settled down into a deep, dark silence.
Lucy and I lay there side by side, close enough to touch, but not touching.
I could hear her breathing though. And I was surprised that she wore some kind of fragrance. She must have put it on before getting into the cargo space. Was the perfume for me?
“Just in case you’re getting any ideas, don’t,” she said after a minute.
“Farthest thing from my mind. Hadn’t occurred to me.”
“Oh, really? It didn’t look very far from your mind when I found you in your car yesterday, making out with your dream girl.”
I could feel my face redden. “I can’t help what happens when I’m asleep.”
“Asleep!” she said scornfully. “You had the simulator on full blast.”
“I was just trying to relax. So I could get to sleep.”
To my surprise, she giggled. “You didn’t look very relaxed. Or sleepy either. You seemed rather alert.”
I didn’t have any snappy comeback to that, so I decided to go on the offensive.
“You’re the one who started a striptease for those bush pilots. Pardon the pun.”
“It was just business,” she said with the patience of a teacher speaking to a child. “Yuck—I just got your joke about the pilots.”
“That’s all it is for you, just business?” I demanded. “You’re the iron maiden?”
This time she sighed, a sound that might have been troubled, or just bone tired.
“No,” she said. “Not iron, and not a maiden either. Get some sleep, brother.”
“I definitely will,” I said. “By the way, you smell nice. For a human.”
“Thank you,” Lucy said. “Pig.”
“No—skunk.”
Chapter 62
WHEN THE ORE ship finally landed—presumably in England, imagine that— I waited impatiently for the lid of our cargo unit to slide open and let us out. British allies would be there to meet us and take us on to London, a city I’d read about in countless books—books by Dickens, Austen, Amis, Smith, Maugham, Lodge.
I wasn’t expecting to be greeted with tea and crumpets—but I certainly wasn’t expecting what did happen.
The shipping unit was suddenly flipped upside down, dumping us into a mesh net, just as if we were a couple of fish.
Instantly, several threatening rifle barrels held by tight-lipped Brit soldiers were thrust in my face.
“What is this? What’s happening now?” I snapped at Lucy. “More lies?”
“Be calm, Hays. Be patient, please. No one is going to harm us.”
“Don’t even twitch, Baker,” one of the soldiers commanded in a crisp English accent.
Twitch? I was flooded with rage. How dare they treat Lucy and me in such a disrespectful manner!
“They’re just suspicious. They want to question you, but I couldn’t tell you that,” Lucy admitted. “I was afraid you’d—”
“Do something stupid?” I said. “Like maim several of them? Which I could do.”
The rifle barrels poked at my stomach and chest.
“You heard the major,” a sergeant growled. “Shut your mouth.”
“He said not to twitch,” I corrected the insolent soldier.
“Please, just go along,” Lucy urged. “I’m sorry, but there’s no way around it, Hays.” She really did seem apologetic, for what that was worth. Not very much.
“Come along, miss,” the major said to Lucy. “Sir Nigel wants to see you straight off.” He led her away, leaving me alone with my new group of pals.
“They tell us you’re some kind of poofter wonder boy,” the sergeant sneered. “We’ll have to see about that.”
“Let me guess—you have ways of making me talk,” I cracked. “And I’m supposed to come back with ‘Do your worst!’ Right?”
Clearly these lads were not chosen for their keen senses of humor. They stared at me stonily.
“Yeah, that’ll about cover it,” the sergeant said.
Chapter 63
I COULD SEE why the humans would want to be careful with me, but still…
“You expect us to believe that for all those years you could carry on as Mr. Super Elite Agent—without anyone there having an idea there was somethin’ off about you?” the interrogator said with professional menace in his voice.
He’d asked me that same question, one way or another, at least a dozen times in the past hour—which was about how long I’d been hanging from the ceiling of a room in a military jet somewhere over southern England.
To be more precise, I was inside a mesh net, which they’d hoisted up so my feet didn’t quite touch the floor. A thin metal bar had been inserted under my crotch, and I was forced to straddle it with my full weight.
Damned uncomfortable, and not very hospitable of the Brits.
“It’s like being a bit thick,” I said. “You don’t know it until somebody tells you.”
I could see the interrogator bristle at the insult, but he kept concentrating on the monitor of the brain analyzer they had me hooked to—a sophisticated lie-detection device that I knew was close to infallible.
Once again, he shook his head unhappily at what he saw. He turned to a Brit major who was standing by and observing me like I was a ticking bomb, which wasn’t entirely wrong.
“Never come across a reading like this before, sir,” he said. “Not a termite—but not exactly human either.”
Termites, I’d gathered by now, was what European humans called Elites—probably a slam at their unimaginative, orderly minds.
“Could I offer a helpful word, gentlemen?” I said. “I’m very familiar with this kind of equipment—I suspect the problem’s in the machine.”
I wouldn’t have believed it possible for a man’s jaw to get any tighter than the interrogator’s already was, but it did.
“This machine is excellent,” he said. “Top of the line. Nothing but the best for testing the likes of you.”
“Have you ever used it in this aircraft? Or any aircraft at all?”
He hesitated—then, under the major’s steady gaze, said, “And your point would be?”
“The alpha-wave regulators are extremely sensitive to destabilizations of ionic-bombardment levels,” I said. “Even a slight change of environment can knock the whole operation out of sync. Taking it to this altitude and speed is like throwing it into a subatomic waterfall.”
“Well, Sandor? What do you say to that?” the major asked. “The man has a point. Destabilization of ionic-bombardment levels, hmmm?”
“I can prove it,” I said. “Hook yourself up to it. Check your own brain patterns as a reference. They might not be exactly normal, but I assume you know what they look like.”
“Do as he says,” the major commanded. “Do it at once. I want to see this.”
Grimly, the interrogator affixed a wireless headset to his own temples, connecting himself to the apparatus.
And also to me.
I stayed still for thirty seconds, concentrating all mental energy in the atrium of my brain’s implanted computer chip—the mechanism that allowed control over my body’s involuntary functions.
Then I blasted a pulse outward—an electromagnetic shock wave moving literally at the speed of thought.
The monitor’s screen shattered with a crack, and the interrogator’s feet left the floor by a good six inches. His bulging eyebal
ls looked like they were blistering on the inside. The headset smoked against his temples.
In the stunned silence that followed, the room’s door opened and Lucy stepped in, along with a well-dressed older man.
He glanced appraisingly at the half-melted equipment and the lurching, drooling interrogator.
“Point taken, Agent Baker,” he said. “Major, set this man free. He’s an ally. And a friend of Megwin’s.”
Chapter 64
AND STILL, THE carefulness persisted. Or was it just human paranoia at this point? Hard to distinguish between the two sometimes.
“So that wretched psychopath President Jacklin actually told you of a plan to wipe out humankind?” said Sir Nigel Cruikshank—the man who had ordered my release and the chief of Britain’s top intelligence agency, the MI7. He had a deeply lined, world-weary face and a sense of tough integrity. He’d already apologized for his soldiers’ rough treatment of me, but I countered that their suspicion was understandable, and actually prudent.
I respected Sir Nigel instinctively, and I was already starting to like him. Imagine that, me liking a human.
“Jacklin used the phrase ‘making the world a safer, cleaner place,’ but that’s not what he meant,” I said.
“But he gave no indication of how this would happen? Or when, Hays?”
“Actually, no. I assumed he was talking about a military attack. A big one.”
“I see,” he said, pronouncing it somewhat like I say.
He walked to the rim of the ancient stone tower of Old Sarum, which we were standing atop, and leaned his forearms on the wall, gazing out over the wide expanse of Salisbury Plain.
Lucy and I followed him. A team of armed guards followed us everywhere, although now—supposedly—they were here for our protection.
“Are you thinking the plan is something different?” Lucy asked Sir Nigel.
“We’re preparing for a full military attack, of course. Monitoring their troop movements and readying our own forces. But something about it just doesn’t feel right to me.”