Metal Fatigue (39 page)

When the fields were collapsed, the ball arrangement made it far more manoeuvrable than any human. This led to the conclusion that the Mole had indeed gained entrance to the KCU library via the sewers. Pursuing that thought, Roads called up a scale plan of the KCU grounds from his onboard memory. The nearest drain to the library opened in the small clump of trees where the timber wolf had vanished on the night of Blindeye. That made the wolf a mobile shape the Mole could assume when a less human appearance was more appropriate, and the intermediate stage, the werewolf form that had startled Roads in the library, a possible self-defence mechanism, designed to frighten people away rather than draw them into a confrontation.

So the Mole
was
, in a sense, a werewolf. And it belonged to the RUSAMC.

But what was it
for
?

Several possibilities sprang to mind — covert surveillance being the most obvious — but Roads could come to no firm conclusions without more data. All he could do was speculate about the Mole's motives — and those of the RUSA. He found himself in the unfortunate situation of now knowing
what
the Mole was and
who
had built it, but not knowing
why
it did what it did.

And until he knew the
why
, exactly, he was unable to decide what he should do in response.

He turned off the southern arterial freeway and headed into the older suburbs. Fifteen minutes had passed since the attack on General Stedman. Even allowing for Cati's superhuman pace and his own relatively slow progress, Roads felt safe that he would arrive in time.

Old North Street was darker than the rest of the city: no parties here, no lingering merriment. The whirring of the car's electric engine echoed from forbidding stone facades as he pulled to a halt outside 116. The familiar building stared mutely back at him.

Climbing out of the car, he jogged across the road and up the stairs. The building was silent, ominously so. Even with his artificial cochleae at their maximum sensitivity, he could hear no-one. Only the sighing of the breeze disturbed the stillness.

He nudged the door and it swung easily open. The lock had been broken. Moving swiftly, he crossed the narrow hallway to the stairwell. The only footprints on the dusty steps were his and Katiya's — yet he couldn't shake the feeling that somebody else had been here, and recently. All of his modified senses itched. His right hand ached for a pistol, anything.

At the entrance to the apartment Katiya and Cati shared, he stopped. The door was slightly ajar. Taking a deep breath, he pushed it open.

The room was dark. Furniture lay in ruins, torn to splinters. The sofa had been hurled against the wall. Roads could see a blotch of fading warmth where someone had recently sat, and a deeper patch in another corner. Stepping gingerly over the rubble, he bent to examine the latter, and found a pool of blood.

Moving rapidly from room to room, he found destruction everywhere. Someone had turned the apartment into a junk-heap. Every item in the small cupboards had been tossed to the floor; clothes lay torn beneath broken boxes. In the hallway, Roads almost slipped on a pile of scattered paper: Cati's wordless 'diary', strewn at random.

In the bedroom, the mattress had been torn in half. Foam and ripped sheets covered every flat surface, most thickly in the corners. Scrabbling through one such pile, he finally came across something warm: a bare, human arm.

Grabbing it with both hands, he pulled Katiya's body out of the wreckage and examined her. A deep bruise blackened her right temple. Roads bent lower over her face to check her eyes. She was alive, but concussed. The blood trickling from her left ear was still wet.

He grimaced, both with distaste and the ramifications of that observation. Katiya must have been knocked out only minutes ago. There was a fair chance that the responsible party was still nearby.

"Katiya?" he whispered. "Can you hear me?"

The woman didn't respond at first, and he tried again, a little louder: "Katiya!"

She stirred, scrabbled weakly at the air. He sat her up and swung her into the moonlight coming through the window.

"Can you hear me?"

She opened her eyes and stared wildly, her gaze blank and unfocused.

"It's okay, you're safe." He brushed her hair back from her face, trying to soothe her by touch. "Can you tell me what happened?"

When her eyes finally met his, her entire body stiffened and she opened her mouth to scream.

He smothered the cry with one hand while making desperate shushing sounds. "Hey — it's okay, it's okay. Whoever did this, they've gone!"

"No!" she hissed through his fingers, writhing under his touch. With one hand flat on his chest, she pushed herself away and crawled back into the corner. "Leave me alone! Go away!"

"Katiya, it's me. Officer Roads from RSD, remember?" He tried to smile reassuringly, and held out his hands, empty. "I'm trying to
help
you."

"Liar!" Her eyes regarded him from the corner. One was pinching shut as the bruise on her temple spread. "And I already told you: I don't know where Cati is!"

"But I do. He's on his way here."

"He is?" Katiya regarded him suspiciously.

"He was heading this way last time I saw him. He's wounded and in a lot of trouble. He needs your help."

Her eyes flashed. "When he sees what you've done, he's not going to be happy."

"What
I've
done ... ?" Roads stared around him, realisation suddenly dawning.

The Mole had beaten him there
.

Before he could protest his innocence, the window burst inward. Shards of glass showered through the room, and Roads flinched away, bringing up one arm to protect his eyes. The heavy crunch of feet on the fragments coincided with Katiya's gasp:

"Cati!"

Roads rolled away to the far side of the room. Through the glittering starlight he saw the killer silhouetted against the broken window. He was even larger in real life than Roads had guessed, topping his modest height by at least forty centimetres. Despite his wounded arm, roughly bandaged with scraps of cloth, and his otherwise naked body, Cati looked like every soldier's nightmare brought to life: a demon made flesh, unstoppable and indefatigable. Just the sight of him made Roads feel defenceless.

Katiya still crouched in the corner, only slowly coming to her feet. As Cati looked around at the ruined bedroom and his wide, grey-black eyes took in the damage, his expression changed to one of intense fury.

"Cati, listen," Roads began, "she's safe, we're all safe —
don't
— !"

The killer crossed the room in a single, leaping step, his arms outstretched. Roads lunged aside and tried to scramble away. Before he had travelled a metre, two mighty hands grabbed his neck and belt and lifted him off the floor. With an incredible surge of strength, Cati threw him bodily through the bedroom doorway.

Roads struck the ground, skidded across the hallway and thudded heavily into a wall. His newly-healed ribs sang; his skull rang like a bell. He might have blacked out then, had it not been for the sight of Cati approaching.

Roads rolled aside, managing to gain his footing at the entrance to the lounge room. He ducked a whistling blow aimed for his neck, struck Cati in the stomach, and ducked again as the killer drove both fists down, aiming for his spine. A kick to Cati's left knee had no effect except to send Roads himself off-balance. Before he could recover, a glancing blow to his right cheek sent him spinning back to the floor.

Cati loomed over him. One massive, bare foot descended to stamp on Roads' face, but he slid away in time, blinking blood from his eyes. His hands found a plank of wood that had once been part of the lounge. He swung it at the killer's head. Cati used one hand to knock it aside, giving Roads a brief opening. A solid kick to the chest made the killer stumble back a step. Then Cati's guard was up again, and Roads backed away.

The trickle of blood from Roads' cheek met his lips, and he tasted copper. Fighting the urge to gag, he circled the room, looking for another weapon before the killer resumed his attack. Or for a chance to escape ...

Cati noted his glance at the doorway, and lunged. Roads sidestepped, grabbed Cati's massive forearm and twisted with all his strength. On an ordinary man the move would have dislocated a shoulder, but all it did to Cati was make him stumble. Flexing his biceps, he tossed Roads aside, sending him into the ruins of the sofa. Roads slid a metre down the wall before recovering. A fist smashed into the plaster beside his head. He twisted away and pushed backward with both feet.

Even with all his weight behind the thrust, he only just managed to overbalance the killer. They fell to the floor among the fragments of furniture. For the first time, Roads heard Cati grunt with surprise. It wasn't much, but it was encouraging.

Then — so suddenly he cried aloud — his head exploded with light and sound. The reactivated icons and screens of PolNet filled his mind, blinding him to reality for a bare instant. Data scrolled down his vision; remote inputs booted up his implanted processor, checked its status and opened the channels he had tried to access on the way to Old North Street. And on top of all of that, Barney's voice urgently called his name.

Cati's fingers found his throat while he was distracted. The killer lifted, began to squeeze. Roads dangled like a rag doll. The muscles in his throat and the strengthened bone of his spinal column prevented Cati from actually snapping his neck, but there was little he could do to stop the closure of his windpipe. He pulled at the clenched fists with all of his fading strength and shifted them less than a centimetre. His modified autonomic systems slowed his heart and diverted as much blood as possible to his brain, yet still he could feel consciousness gradually ebbing.

Gritting his teeth, he stared into the killer's alien eyes. The babble of voices intensified as darkness filled his vision and the fire in his lungs began to go out.

Then the hands suddenly eased, allowing him a brief gasp of air. He struggled, kicking more by reflex than anything else. His body still fought desperately for life, despite its slim chance of survival. Whether any of his blows struck home, he couldn't tell. His eyes hadn't recovered from the lack of oxygen in his blood, and his limbs were little more than vague nerve-endings a long, long way away.

Then he was in the air, flying across the room in slow motion. His eyes cleared enough for him to see the wall coming for him. There was little he could do to stop it. The pain was like a bomb going off in his head as he hit.

He slumped face-forward onto the bare floorboards, retching for breath. Outrage burned everywhere in his battered body, and the taste of blood was stronger than ever: like failure, sharp and bitter. But he had to move. His life depended on it.

With an effort so draining that he thought it might burst his heart, he managed to roll over and look up.

Frustration cut deep the lines of Cati's face; despair lay in the bottomless black pools of his eyes. But he wasn't coming for Roads. He stood exactly where he had been moments ago, frozen in place as though by some terrible internal struggle.

As Roads watched, the killer shook his head once, raised his clenched fists to the ceiling. His mouth formed an O, and he screamed silently. Every muscle in his body quivered in rebellion.

Barely had Roads registered this impression than Cati sagged. Every muscle went limp, and the killer looked down at the floor. Any thoughts Roads might have entertained of taking advantage of Cati's distraction vanished. The killer already looked beaten, doomed.

Then Cati moved. So quickly that Roads could barely follow, the killer ran from the lounge and into the bedroom. The crunch of footsteps traced his path to the window and beyond.

Roads twitched, wanting desperately to set off in pursuit: Cati was slipping through his fingers for the second time that night, and unlike before he had no idea where the killer might be going. But there was nothing he could do in time; he could hardly even keep his head up to listen.

A gentle thump from the roof above followed, then a thud on the building across the lane. Footsteps led into the distance, gradually fading even to Roads' sensitive ears. Finally, only Katiya's voice remained, calling the killer back, sobbing helplessly for him to return.

Cati was gone. Apart from the voices calling both inside and outside Roads' head, the night was silent again ...

"Phil? Will you
talk
to me, for God's sake?"

"Take it easy, Barney." Martin O'Dell leaned over the seat she occupied. "He's probably busy, and you're annoying the hell out of him."

"For ten minutes? He can't be
that
busy."

O'Dell shrugged and moved away. In the dim light glowing from the screens and control panels of the RUSAMC control van, his face looked different. More serious; in a strange way, more at home.

Barney wasn't sure she liked the change, even if he was helping her. For the first time,
she
felt like an Outsider.

"Phil, this is an emergency. I need to talk to you
now
!"

Nothing.

She closed her eyes and rested her head in her hands. The last sighting of Roads had occurred almost three-quarters of an hour ago, when he had stolen a patrol car from the back of Mayor's House. Nothing had been seen or heard of him since. She was beginning to suspect the worst.

Behind her, O'Dell oversaw the rest of the operation. RUSAMC technicians had isolated the frequency of Roads' cyberlink, and were using the control van's transmitters to boost Barney's signal. Also, the information from the old CATI files retrieved from her laptop had enabled them to search for any illicit transmissions through the radio-silence still blanketing the city's official airwaves. They had already detected one such transmission, and were working hard to decode it.

Barney sighed. If the cipher proved to be impenetrable they were wasting valuable time.

Outside the control van, chaos reigned. Visible through a monitor was the ring of MSA officers surrounding Mayor's House, each armed with a rifle and under strict orders to keep everyone out — RSD and RUSAMC included. Search parties had found no sign of Cati, and the city's communication network was still effectively down, despite the mysterious substitute that had appeared to take PolNet's place. Communication was limited to the few intercoms the RUSAMC had loaned to the RSD squads during their retreat from the area.