Authors: Steve Perry
"More, plural?"
"Yeah. Fifty of 'em so far. The calls are still coming in."
"Jesu Damn."
"Yeah, well, it's worse. One of 'em is already past tense. And your friend has stopped messing around with swords."
"What does that mean?"
"It means somebody tucked a military-grade implosion bomb into the victim's cube. He's inside a supercompacted ball along with his mistress, two dogs and some expensive artwork and bedding, all squashed flatter than a wirehead's dick. The labbos are running around like ants on a hot plate."
"Oh, fuck!"
"You better get your butt in Bender and shift to hyper, Chief. The media are pounding on the doors and screaming for blood and the Supe will have to throw them somebody to keep it from being his."
Before the WC had faded from the air, another incoming call lit the com. "Who the fuck is it?"
"Ruul Oro," the computer informed her.
Ah, shit. Not now. She didn't need this now!
Taz swallowed. "Put it through."
Ruul's golden visage shined from the proj.
"Hello, Taz."
"Ruul, look, I know I owe you an apology and an explanation, I really shouldn't have done what I did, I'm sorry, but I'm really jammed here now-"
"This is professional, Taz, not personal."
"Huh?"
"You know that assassin thing you're working on?"
"I'm up to my eyebrows in it," she said.
"Well, I must have offended somebody."
Her heart froze; her body felt as if it had been shoved into a deep pool of liquid oxy. No. Don't say it, please let it be something else! "Ruul-?"
"Yep, it seems I've made it onto the killer's short list, Tazzi."
For a wild moment, she thought she could hear whichever god she'd offended laughing maniacally in the distance.
When Taz came into the room, she was pale and shaking. Bork came up from the couch. "Taz?"
"The killer has made more threats," she said. Her voice was calm, almost matter-of-fact. "He's gotten expansive. More than fifty people threatened so far. And one of them has already been murdered-with an implosion bomb."
"And-?"
"And one of the new would-be victims is Ruul Oro."
"You better sit down and tell me about it," he said.
She nodded. Moved to the couch. Sat.
"I told you we were lovers," she said. "But it was-is-more than that. There's is a . . . depth there, Saval. I think about him all the time. I want to be with him, to make love to him, to run around and cook and clean for him, to make sure he's dressed right, his hair is styled, to hear him laugh, just to sit and watch him sleep."
Bork shrugged. "You love him."
"Yes."
"And he doesn't love you?"
"Worse. He does. "
He frowned. "I'm missing something here. You love him, he loves you. What's the problem?"
"He wants to marry me. Lifetime contract. Oh, he's not like Da, I can work if I want, we can have children or not, I won't have to sit at his house while he's out in the world with nothing to do, he wants me to do whatever I want."
"But you don't want to marry him."
"I can't. You know how it was with Ma. I won't be enslaved like she was, trapped in something she couldn't leave! I saw what happened to Ma. She lived and breathed on Da's whim. Half her life was spent waiting for him to come home. When he died, she died. She still breathes, but she's gone. He was everything to her."
"Taz, it's not the same. You're not our mother. You have a job, you already have a life."
"You don't understand, Saval. I do now. But if I were around Ruul, I would do whatever he asked me to do. Quit my job, stay home, anything. I can feel it in myself. I want to please him so bad it feels like a knife in my belly when I do anything to disappoint him. If he frowns I feel physical pain. It scares me, it scares the piss out of me. The only way I can manage it at all is to stay away from him. The last time we were together I knew he wanted me. But he has refused to have sex with me unless I marry him. He is like our parents, he believes in old-style mate contracts. But I knew he wanted me, so I seduced him.
Then I felt guilty for making him feel guilty!"
Bork slid over and put his arm around his sister.
"And now this. The killer wants him. If Ruul dies, then my problem is solved, right? I'll be free.
"But if he dies, I won't be able to stand it!"
"Have you discussed this with him?"
"A few thousand times. I've told him I can't marry him but he won't listen to it. With him it's all or nothing."
"Sounds like a problem, all right."
"Yeah, well, it's worse. He's coming here."
"Here?"
"Yeah. I can't stop what I'm doing to go and guard him. But I don't trust anybody else to take care of him, either." She looked at him.
"I'll watch him, kid."
"Thank you, Saval."
"Might get uncomfortable for you."
"I don't want anything to happen to him. After this all gets sorted out, then I'll worry about what happens between us."
"No problem."
She looked at him. "No problem? Damn, Saval, it seems like everything is a problem. Why can't things be simple? There are days when I just want to stay in bed and hide under the covers."
"Welcome to the club, kid."
"Come on."
"You think you're the only person to ever get overwhelmed by life? We all feel like that. Everybody else seems to be smiling and happy and in control and you look in the mirror and see the failure of the century. It's the ten thousand all at once."
"Huh?"
"Old quote, mythical swordsman on Earth, eight hundred or a thousand years back. When faced with ten thousand opponents, fight one at a time. First one, then the second, the third and so on until you get through 'em. Don't try to fight 'em all at once, you'll be defeated by the odds before you start. One at a time makes it a lot easier."
"Even so, you'll have to move like you have a Bender drive in your ass or you'll get chopped into soypro," she said.
"Well, yeah, there's that. But you know what I mean."
She nodded. "Yeah. I think so. The journey of a thousand klicks begins with one step. I lose sight of that sometimes."
"We all do, kid. So you take a deep breath and start over again. No big deal."
She grinned. "You'd really bite him for me?"
"You know it."
"Thanks, Saval."
"No problem."
Chapter EIGHTEEN
RUUL ARRIVED IN a police traffic flitter and was tendered by his escorts to Taz and Bork.
Bork watched the meeting between his sister and her lover. The space between them was so full of energy you could almost hear it crackle. They both tried to pretend it wasn't there, but to walk between them would be to risk being knocked flat by the flow. Whatever else was going on, this was going to be interesting.
"Come on," Taz said. "We've got to get moving. Two more bombs have gone off. We have people gearing up for a full-blown panic."
Bork admired his sister's attempt at professionalism. He didn't think it was fooling anybody, but she got points for trying.
The three of them left in her flitter.
Taz found she was breathing too fast and forced herself to slow her respiration. Damn, she didn't need this. Whoever was responsible for this shit was really in trouble now, forcing her into this situation. No, she didn't have to watch over Ruul personally. Then again, if anything happened to him and she hadn't done everything she could to keep it from happening, she wouldn't be able to look at herself in a mirror ever again. Dammit!
"Where," Saval said, "are we going?"
"Next guy on the list is only a few klicks from here. We want to get there before the killer does."
Saval glanced at Ruul, then back at her.
"Yeah, yeah, I know," she said. "Still, better with us than not."
Ruul grinned. Taz knew he understood the semi-fugue she and Saval had just played. They were taking him into the jaws of the beast. And Saval's lips twitched with a little grin of his own as he saw Ruul get it.
God, she hated this!
As they approached the neighborhood where one of the would-be victims lived, they were overtaken and nearly run off the road by a hovertruck.
"Man in a big hurry," Ruul observed.
Taz watched the truck speed away ahead of them. Thing was pumping a lot of air through its fans and, even so, was still riding awful low. Must be hauling something real heavy.
Yeah, so? That's what trucks do, haul things. Big deal.
There wasn't anything she could put a precise name to, but the truck bothered her. Her car wore a PO designation, flasher and glowbars. For a driver to go whipping around a cool's flitter like that was not real bright. Why was the guy willing to risk a traffic infraction that way? What was so important?
She reached for her com space, double-waved it on. "This is Assistant Chief Bork," she said. "I had a roegg just blast past in an MT van that's dusting the surface with its skirts. He's heading north on Silhouette Lane, cross street Sheen. Somebody pull him over and find out where the fire is."
A TC unit three blocks ahead acknowledged her call. "Copy, Chief. I got 'im."
"People getting blown in and you're worried about a speeding truck?" Ruul said. "Ah, you cools."
"I don't tell you how to deliver jokes, you don't tell me how to deliver the peace." There was a sharp edge in her voice.
"Ouch," Ruul said. "Excuse the blood here."
Don't do this, Ruul
"We got a runner here," came a bored and cynical voice over the com. "The Chief's truck is ignoring my flashers and blowing faster." Then the voice changed: "Fuck! He's shooting at me! This is TC nine-three, I'm calling a code four-one-six. I got me a shooter here, looks like an automatic shotgun, shit-!"
Taz didn't believe in coincidences when they involved guns. This truck was connected to the assassinations. "Nine-three, stay with him. I'm right behind you."
Two other TC units added their voices to the com, then cleared the opchan. Nine-three started a running monologue.
"-there is a passenger, he's doing the gunwork. Looks like two of 'em, don't see any more. We're turning onto Bracken Avenue, moving west. I'm casting police override now . . . Nope, no good, he'd not slowing, must be running with an illegal coil-damn! My windshield just took a load of shot, looks like number four buck. Low-powered, bet it's air, didn't penetrate more than a millimeter or so. Look out!
Stupid son-of-a-shit just wiped out a parked flitter, man, just ate the goddamned side right off it . . ."
Taz rounded the corner, saw the TC unit's glowbar and flashers a block ahead. She opened the throttle and her flitter sped up.
"On your tail, Nine-three."
"We got a block set up here," somebody said. "Corner of Bracken and La Kuhara. We've laid goo, Po'children, watch your fans."
Ruul said, "Goo?"
"Anything using ground effect will be pulling in air for the fans," Taz said. "Goo is a memory-slick plastic fiber. Looks like baby powder when you lay it down. It gets sucked up by the GE intakes, buckyballs right through the particle filters. When the fans chew it, it clumps and reverts to its original casting, which is basically string."
"There he is," somebody said over the com. "Come to daddy, dickhole."
Saval picked it up. "The fans will shut down automatically as the goo jams them. Takes about ten seconds. Even if the guy's got full-flight repellors, he's in a forced-landing situation, and even if he could override the safeties, his fans won't give him enough push to maneuver or drive his rollers. End of chase."
"Nice stuff to leave lying on the road for the citizens to fly over," Ruul said.
"That's the beauty of it," Saval said. "Goo biodegrades about twenty minutes after you expose it to the air. Turns into harmless dust."
"Gotcha!" somebody yelled.
Taz throttled her own fans down, dropped the flitter on its rollers, then killed the engine. Her vehicle slowed immediately but still had enough momentum to coast a considerable way. She saw the traffic units ahead of her, saw the hovertruck skid as it fell onto its rollers. The truck slewed, smashed into one of the traffic flitters, eliciting a "Fuck!" from her com. The driver straightened the larger vehicle and continued on for another two hundred meters, slowing to a stop.
Taz rolled through the block and since she wasn't under power, had no problem. The remains of the powdered goo blew up around her flitter in a haze of psychedelic-orange dust. Then they were through and coasting toward the stopped truck. Half a dozen uniforms ran along the road, guns drawn.
The two men in the truck-no, the passenger was a woman-came out shooting. The driver had some kind of carbine, the passenger a shotgun. The driver snapped the carbine up and fired a burst on full auto. The solid slugs hit Taz's windshield, stitched a half dozen dark splotches across it in a descending line from left to right.
"Shit!" Ruul lunged forward and put an arm in front of her.
The windshield was centimeter-thick clear carbonex and it flattened the jacketed metal bullets and stopped them easily.
Taz thought that the weight of Ruul's arm across her chest was quite the nicest thing she had ever felt.
He didn't know that her windshield was proof against ordinary gunfire. His first reaction was not to flinch away from the bullets, but to try and protect her. It made her want to cry. Why couldn't he have some goddamn flaws? She made a joke of it: "Damn, I just had the scratches polished out last week."
Ruul apparently realized his arm wasn't going to do her much good and pulled it away. He clamped his hands onto the back of her headrest.
"They don't want us to get the truck," Bork said. "They aren't trying to get away."
Taz braked the still-moving flitter to a stop twenty meters from the shooters. Bullets spanged off her flitter's front armor. "I'll give 'em something else to worry about," she said. With that, she dialed the warblers and flashers up to full. The noise dampers in the flitter cut the roar of sound, but the vibrations of it still came through, thrumming deep in her chest. The flashing lights strobed the two gunplayers with eye-smiting beams. They apparently weren't wearing polarizing droptacs, for both tried to block the flashing lights with upraised hands.