Postsingular (25 page)

The girl ran to her mother, then hesitated awkwardly. Jil stood up and embraced her. Momotaro came out as well, leaning against Jil, his arms twined around her and Bixie, Jil's hand smoothing the hair on his head. Craigor took a half step toward the group and stopped. His eyes were wet with tears. He walked over to the gunnel and stared at San Francisco in the distance.

And then Thuy, Jayjay, Jil and Craigor got down to making plans about how to snatch the Ark of the Nants away from Luty, carrying out the conversation via a private message channel, while the kids listened in.

Just as Thuy had hoped, Jil knew a secret way to get into ExaExa; the fab had an emergency basement-door exit. The door exited to a subterranean flight of stairs leading up to a flat cellar door set into the ground, the cellar door camouflaged by a thin layer of mud, sand, and gravel so as to blend in with the Bay's edge. The Bay-side exposure of the campus was secured by high wire fences running along the water's edge and attaching to the fab at one end and the lab at the other end. The fence had a gate near the fab's loading dock.

The plan was to start with Jayjay teleporting the four of them and all their weapons to that hidden cellar door behind the fab. The women would head into the subfab—that is, the basement—armed with grenades and P90 submachine guns. The guys would hang by the cellar door, firing the two rifles to drive back the guards. The women would wend their way through the plant to Luty's lab, and when the time was ripe, Jayjay and Craigor would teleport up to the summit of the lab's domed roof and blast their way in. Communication would be patchy, what with the quantum-mirror varnish covering all the inside surfaces of ExaExa. But they figured Azaroth could act as a go-between.

Meanwhile the ExaExa riot was growing wilder and bloodier. More and more police units kept arriving at the sun-splashed campus, but more and more Luty-controlled sudocokers were turning up as well. According to the news, the National Guard was coming next.

“Why can't you let the police and the soldiers catch Luty?” said Bixie aloud. “Don't go there, Mommy and Daddy.”

“We've gotta do our part,” said Craigor. “We might make the difference. You guys are old enough to remember Nant Day, right?”

“Yes,” said Bixie. “San Francisco came apart. Everything got eaten up.”

“Remember the giant ads in the sky?” said Momotaro, lowering his voice and making a goony face. “Hi, I'm Dick Dibbs! Come live with me on Virtual Earth!”

“The nants ate me,” recalled Bixie. “But then I came back, and I couldn't remember what Virtual Earth was like. But I still remember the nants biting me.” She shuddered.

“Why
haven't
they caught that freak Jeff Luty?” said Momotaro. “Why do they let him stay free so he can do the same thing over and over again?”

“He's rich,” said Craigor with a shrug. “Different rules for those boys. Maybe, I don't know, maybe all this time he's been bribing President Lampton. After all the things we've been saying against Dick Too Dibbs, it's starting to look like Too Dibbs might be better than Lampton at catching Luty. That's why Luty wants to release the nants today.”

“I still don't see why it has to be you and Ma that go fight him,” said Momotaro, still talking out loud.

“Kids, please,” messaged Jayjay. “I promise I'll teleport your parents right back here if things get bad. But remember that Luty might be listening to us.”

More hugs and tears, and then the four grown-ups teleported to the Bay side of the ExaExa labs, landing right where Jil had said they'd find the hidden door. A couple of Luty's cop-costumed security guys appeared, some fifty yards off. Craigor and Jayjay opened fire with their rifles, driving them back.

“Why didn't I bring a shovel,” muttered Jil, frantically kicking at the blank muddy ground. “I'm such an idiot. It was right here—or, no, maybe a little further.”

Thuy skipped back and forth until she felt a hollowness underfoot. “Found it!” she sang. She and Jil dropped to their knees, clawing at the sticky mud, which was wet from yesterday's rain. Sure enough, they uncovered a cellar door. It was hinged on the right-hand side but bolted and locked on the left.

A bullet whizzed past Thuy, making a tearing sound in the air.

“We're gonna have to start aiming,” said Jayjay.

“Us or them,” said Craigor, lying on his stomach, carefully squeezing off a round. Someone screamed.

“How does this thing work?” said Thuy, studying her sleek, futuristic P90 submachine gun. “Oh, this must be the safety. Here we go.” She fired a burst into the flat door's lock, some of the bullets ricocheting past Jil's legs.

“Yow.”

“Sorry. Help me lift it.”

Grunting with the effort, the two women swung the muddy metal door up and over to the side.

“Beautiful,” said Jayjay.

The four of them took shelter in the stairwell. But now they found a fresh obstacle; the fire door in the subfab wall was a smooth sheet of steel with no handle or keyhole.

“Grenade,” said Craigor, pleased at the thought.

Jayjay and Craigor reloaded their rifle magazines, then popped out of the stairwell and unleashed a serious barrage of automatic fire in the direction of the guards. During the resulting lull, the four lay down by the fab wall. And now Craigor pitched a grenade into the stairwell.

A great ball of flame bloomed, accompanied by a satisfying
ker-whump.
As the smoke cleared, the four scurried back into the stairwell. The door to the subfab gaped raggedly open.

“Good luck,” said Craigor. “And, Jil, we had some fine years together. Nothing will ever take that away.” He stepped toward her as if to kiss her.

Jil shook her head and pushed him away. “Not now, Craigor. I'll be fine. We'll talk later.”

“See you,” said Thuy to Jayjay, ducking the jinx of heartfelt last words. “And where the hell is Azaroth?”

Just as she said this, Azaroth appeared, coming down out of the sky over the Bay. He'd tweaked his body image so that he resembled a sure-enough winged seraphim.

“Can you kill people?” Thuy asked Azaroth as he alit by the stairwell.

“I don't have that level of
mana,
” said Azaroth. He'd already let his shape flow back to his usual form, that of a topknotted young Sikh in hippie garb. “Only Aunt Gladax has enough. She has this way of poking Lobraners in their heads and disrupting their brain signals. I told her that the really heavy shit is coming down today, and that she needs to jump here right away, but of course she wants to finish her morning tai chi exercise first. Aunt Gladax is a little set in her ways.”

“She doesn't think this is urgent?” cried Thuy, as a bullet whizzed right through Azaroth, fortunately with no ill effects. “If the nants take over here, I bet they'll find a way to jump to the Hibrane and eat you too!”

“Don't worry, Gladax will come,” said Azaroth. “She hates Luty and the nants. But—like I say, she's set in her ways. She wants to be sure she's totally focused before she does the jump. She's paranoid about the subbies. She'll be here in time. She'll kick butt.”

“What if I'm already dead by then?” said Thuy, not liking the pleading tone she heard in her own voice.

“In a way, death is an illusion,” began Azaroth, but, seeing anger in Thuy's face, he shut up.

The women headed into the subfab, their sleek black P90 submachine guns at the ready. The subfab was an immaculate high-ceilinged concrete basement, its ceiling, walls, and floor quantum-mirrored with thick coatings of square-root-of-NOT varnish. The space was arrayed with blocks of heavy support machinery: electrical generators, vats of chemicals, filtering systems, particle-monitoring equipment, vacuum pumps, and pressurized tanks of gas. The ceiling was festooned with miles of color-coded pipes, tubes, cables, and wires. The subfab was a mad scientist's dream.

Thuy and Jil's beezies didn't work so well in here, and the orphidnet views of the local objects were choppy and uncertain. The huge room's ceiling was so high that even Azaroth fit; he scouted ahead of Jil and Thuy, peering this way and that, checking for ambushes. So far, so good.

Thuy grinned over at Jil as they marched down the subfab's broad central aisle, their reflections like sour-colored shadows on the slick floor. Picking up on Thuy's happy mood, Jil began stretching her legs and walking on tiptoe, miming how stealthy they were. Thuy began playing cartoon-style pizzicato sneaking music in her head, messaging the music to Jil. This was fun.

But now suddenly something heavy dropped across Thuy's shoulders: a blue, snake-shaped shoon that had been disguised as a pipe. It wrapped around Thuy like a boa constrictor. Thuy managed to pump some submachine gun fire into the snake's free end, but the bullets had little effect on the piezoplastic security shoon.

With remarkable presence of mind, Jil ripped loose a hydrogen fuel line, ignited the cloud of gas with a sparking bullet off the floor, and used the flexible tube as a flamethrower to set the snake shoon's tail alight.

The flames guttered up along the shoon. Its grip loosened; it slid to the floor, freeing Thuy. Wonderful—but somehow the writhing snake ended up beneath the hydrogen tank that fed Jil's handmade flamethrower. The heated tank's hydrogen spewed at an accelerated rate; the flame got huge; Jil lost hold of the blazing fuel tube. The uncontrolled fire-bloom licked the side of a great plastic carboy of liquid ether.

“Run!” cried Jil.

The tank blew. Further explosions trailed after them, a whole series of blasts, each one louder and closer than the one before. The subfab filled with smoke. Water poured from the ceiling's sprinkler systems. A girder overhead gave way, spilling down an avalanche of concrete and machinery from the fab. Sparks crackled; more tanks exploded; vats of biochips spilled into the sizzling flames; the fires were reflected in acid colors on every side. The scene was a gorgeous opera of violence, with Tawny Krush's orchestral heavy metal playing in Thuy's head.

Thuy and Jil reached the stairwell and leaned against the wall, coughing and catching their breath, dizzy from the fumes they'd inhaled. As they mounted to ground level, they heard rhythmic thudding sounds from the admin building's extremely thick front door. A battering ram. Screams and the sounds of gunfire filtered in from outdoors; endless sirens wailed.

Azaroth's big bright face peered down the staircase. “Hurry up to the second floor,” he said. “I've found Sonic!”

Once up there, Thuy could hear Sonic yelling. Her friend was locked into a windowless inner office. She shot apart the lock.

“Chica loca!”
said Sonic, embracing her. He was wearing his black wool tights and red T-shirt, the same as usual. “You bring any food? I been penned up in here since yesterday afternoon when I finished programming that pelican.”

“Right after Luty pretended to shoot you?”

“He wasn't pretending, he really
was
gonna shoot me, but Topping happened to pop through the teleportation grill just then, and he talked Jeff out of it. Said it'd be better to kill me in front of you and Jayjay when you got here. Sweet guys, huh? They were so sure you'd come. Hi, Jil. Whoah, you look whipped. Where's Jayjay and Craigor?”

“Guarding the rear,” said Jil, all business. “They'll catch up later. The front door's about to give way. Let's hurry across the lobby to the lab. We have to go down to the first floor and then back up.”

“Can I have one of those bitchin' tubular submachine guns?” asked Sonic. “You got no idea how I'm jonesin' for combat. It's been over two months since I played Doodly Bug.”

“I'm keeping my P90,” said Jil. “It makes me feel safe.”

“Same here,” said Thuy.

“So I'll go medieval on their ass,” said Sonic, picking up a leg he'd already pried off a chair to use as a club.

“I can give you this at least,” said Jil, handing him a grenade she'd clipped to her belt.

“Yum,” said Sonic, stuffing the grenade into the pocket of his intricate leather coat.

As the three reached the ground floor, the building's heavy front door buckled. Thuy, Jil, and Sonic paused in the pastel-mirrored stairwell, peeping out to see what happened. Now that the door hung open, they could pick up the orphidnet. Among those trying to get into the building were: fake cops, real cops, fake real cops, real demonstrators, and fake demonstrators. But before any of them could make it inside, a truck-load of National Guard soldiers opened up with a water cannon, scattering the besiegers like autumn leaves. Uniformed soldiers surged forward, forming a cordon blocking off access to the entrance, the troops standing with their weapons leveled toward the rioting crowd, firing at will. Had Lampton ordered up the National Guard on Luty's behalf?

Whatever. Jil showed them a way to get to the other side of the lobby without exposing themselves to gunfire. She seemed fully into the adventure, enjoying the distraction from the problems of her messed-up personal life. She was even moving with something like her old grace. They crawled behind counters and couches and cut through a back room. It felt like it took forever. Behind them in the fab, fires roared and collapsing structures screeched. Finally they were heading up the lab stairs toward Luty's lair on the third floor.