Chapter 6
Patty Firkin: ALARUMS AND DIVERSIONS
“All right, Firkin. Let’s go.”
Bertingas walked out of his assistant’s cube and waved at Patty in his offhand way. He was like an overgrown boy: by turns helpless and tyrannical. It was becoming tiresome.
She went with him.
“Where are we going?”
“Back to my apartment.”
Now that was a problem. If this young potato was still as hot as Patty figured, going to his published place of residence was not a bright idea. The people who had botched the out-of-control aircar would probably have thought of something else by this time.
“May I suggest, Sir, that . . .”
“Later. It’s been a long day and I’m still wearing this stinking uniform. I want to change, get a hot bath, maybe a massage—you don’t give massages, do you?”
“No, Sir.
“Then a drink or three and dinner. Do you eat dinner, Firkin?”
“When it’s offered, Sir.” She couldn’t resist a small smile.
At the tube, he started to step into the levitator. Patty put a hand on his arm. “Up, Sir?”
“Of course. I’ve signaled for my car.”
And given someone the notice and lead time to set all sorts of surprises . . .
“Wouldn’t it be safer to use the streets?”
“All the way out to the Satellite Villas?”
“Well, it’s just, ah, not as far to fall.”
“I see. Then you lead, Firkin.”
She walked into the drop tube and pointed her toes: it made the trip marginally faster. She felt the pillow-plump sound of him entering the tube above her. They dropped amid the whisper-crackle of energy discharge.
At the ground floor, she had to show him where the street doors were. Was it possible he had never entered the building this way? No, his dossier said he’d started in the basement on the archival system. Perhaps this floor was recently remodeled. Were the tatsu-wardens still in place, then?
Out on the avenue, they bucked the flow of walkers, gawkers, and street hawkers that mingled and moved around the maglev stop. When a car came through going west, Bertingas looked both ways, shrugged, and waved her aboard. The car glided off on its suspensors along the ceramic beam twelve feet above the street’s median strip.
Bertingas hooked his elbow into the strap like he was used to riding the ’rail. They were pressed by the crowd between two Humans in half-piped General Services uniforms and a Clotilden with a metal snake grafted to its cervical collar. The snake looked like business.
“Do you work for Halan?” Bertingas asked.
Now, how much did he know about Follard? The Kona Tatsu Inspector General had suggested they were casual friends. Could she fool this petty bureaucrat? For how long?
“Not directly,” she answered evasively.
“Are you a freelance, then?”
“Free—? You mean a mercenary? It’s something like that.”
“How good are you?”
“How do you mean?”
“Got any references?”
There was more than boyish challenge in his eyes. Patty remembered that this was the dude who had brought down a stalled aircar from seven klicks over the Palace and avoided killing anyone. Not even himself . . . Except for the driver. With her chin she worked back the jumper’s wide sleeve on her strap arm. Far enough to show him the red line.
“So, you have a regraft,” he said, after a hard look. “What’s that supposed to mean? Other than you were clumsy—and lucky enough to lose it on the doorstep of a full med-ops. Where did it happen?”
“Battle of Carmel-Chi.”
“Oh . . . You were—outside?”
“With First Drop, II Corps.”
She could read the thoughts behind his depthless stare. II Corps Marines was the unit that had lasted through all ninety-six hours of the siege at Carmel Base. Toward the end, they were valving off their suits and vacuum-freezing pieces of themselves to ration the remaining pressure. Her squad had accepted the citadel’s surrender on their knees and elbows. The only good thing you could say was, the defenders were in worse shape.
“I see, unh—Sergeant?”
“Colonel.”
The monorail car floated out through the Embassy District to what, in Meyerbeer, on Palaccio, passed for suburbs. Each of the Satellite Villas was a discrete structure, although it was clearly meant to look more like the cluster-hutch of a Neapolitan hill neighborhood. Terraces, tiled roofs, airpads, window walls, and garden patches lay atop and beside one another like scales patterned on a snakeskin. The trick, architecturally, was that the building seemed to have more outsides than insides. Any student of solid geometry will tell you that, as an object grows in size, its volume expands faster than its surface area. The genius who designed the Villas found a way to reverse that.
The building, Patty knew, was hollow. Its interior grotto was faced with a reverse array of terraces and windows. Water was the theme: a fountain at the center fed a pumped stream, livening the space with dancing reflections and brook sounds. Sunlight came down from that mirror array near the ridgeline. Yes, the inside was nicer, in a controlled way, than the outside.
As the car neared S.V. IV, Bertingas started to tell her this was his stop, but Patty was already moving toward the door. She led him in through the Villa’s main lobby, beside the recovery pool for the inside stream. They took the lift tube up to Concenter Three, which was Bertingas’ level. By that time, he was no longer trying to lead her, just following. As she had planned.
They were on the outside now, moving along a twisting garden path above one householder’s windows and below another’s terrace. Patty took out her AID and queried it subvocally.
“Trouble, Colonel,” it told her through the bone implant.
“How big?”
“Fifty-point-nine kilos.”
“Body temperature?”
“Thirty-seven-point-two Celsius.”
“Is that estimated or actual reading?”
“Would I lie to you? She’s been there an hour, so her temp’s adjusted to the room. Tell your boyfriend he keeps his ’cycler too low. It’s freezing in there. The lady’s got her coat on, and he’ll soon be wishing she’d taken it off.”
“How do you know she’s female?”
“Men don’t walk on five-centimeter stilettos, do they? Makes a real clatter on the parquet.”
“All right. Is she armed?”
“Yeah, two of them.”
“Weapons, you wiseguy.”
“Got a chunk of ferrous-something in her pocket that masses close to a kilo. Maybe she collects meteorites. But if it throws beads, look out for big ones.”
“Thanks.”
“You want her stunned or stone cold?”
“Neither, right away. Will she startle badly if we walk in?”
“Yeah. Pulse and respiration say she’s on the edge of something pretty crude.”
“Okay, we’ll tippy-toe.”
“Are you talking to Halan?” Bertingas asked over Patty’s shoulder.
“No,” she said. “Just doing some reconn.”
“Of my apartment?”
“Sure. You’ve got a visitor.”
“Unh—that’s not possible. This is very expensive living quarters. The security system alone costs—”
“More than it’s worth. Big puppydog. When I went through this morning, it rolled over on its back and begged to be scratched. With the right fingers, that is.”
“You were in my apartment this morning?”
She watched him work the timing out in his head. “Since that crash at the Palace?” he asked.
“Yes,” she lied.
“Oh, well then . . .” Lie accepted. Advantage Kona Tatsu.
“Do you have any girlfriends?”
“That’s a little direct. Are you suggesting—?”
“The body in there displays female. Anybody you’d be expecting?”
“Human female?”
So that was his deep and dirty secret, hey? “Yes, Human or masked to pass for one.”
“Then no.”
“All right. We’ll go in casual. Like we own the place.”
“I do—remember?”
“Just let me lead. Unless you’re wearing body armor.”
He shook his head. “By all means, lead.” She could feel his eyes reappraising her singlesuit and the shape of her flesh beneath it.
She might use the expensive sound system—twoofers, bleeters, floor amps, thousand-watt dazzlers, and a neural synthesizer—which she’d found in the apartment that morning and linked to her AID, for communicating with the woman inside. Patty decided against it. If the quarry was a friend of Bertingas’s, then a sudden order issued by the walls for her to walk out with hands locked on top of her head would only confuse and frighten her. And if she was a professional, it would just tip her off. A dose of subsonics, however . . .
“Listen,” she growled to the AID.
“Always, my sweet.”
“Switch on the audio system in there—real quietly, and no twinkle lights, if you can. Give me a sine wave at ninety Hertz on those big subwoofers. Start it below forty deeBee and raise it, gradually, over about thirty seconds to 110. Then pulse the loudness, real fast, over that range.”
“May I point out that the Human ear does not hear clearly at that range.”
“No, but sphincters and bowels do.”
She caught a gleam in Bertingas’ eyes.
“Beginning procedure,” the AID said dutifully.
They crouched on the doorstep, huddled out of the greeter system’s line of sight. Patty drew her repulsor, checked the charge and the load. After forty-five seconds, she told him: “Key the door.”
He hit the latch.
She struck the heavy oak panel with her shoulder and ricocheted diagonally across the foyer, flying horizontally about a foot above the simulated flagstones. Landing on her hip, one knee, and an elbow, partly concealed by the foot of the archway into the lounge room, she swept a sixty-degree field of fire.
At the center of which was a blonde. She was trying to stand erect, but one hand was clawed into her flat belly. The other held a Schlicter rail gun, similar in design to Patty’s repulsor—but a single-shot. It would accelerate a 100-gram pellet of uranium, jacketed in glass and suspended in teflon, at 3,500 meters per second. Tear a hole in a girl about two feet across. Through body armor.
Patty had a clear shot at the weapon. She could take it right out of the woman’s hand, and the hand off right up to the neck. Not a neat solution.
“Friends-no-fire,” Patty called. She clacked her own gun flat down on the flagstones—but kept a hand on it. That left her face, spine, and shooting hand exposed.
The woman spent ten seconds trying to raise the Schlicter above the level of her own hips, then gave up. The weapon thudded on the carpeting. She sagged onto the cue-form sofa and hugged her knees.
“Turn it off . . . off,” she cried.
The subsonics were even beginning to get to Patty, and she wasn’t at the sound system’s focal point. She told her AID to shut it down. It was like a fog lifting in the room. The blonde intruder relaxed, stopped rocking and moaning, but didn’t uncurl.
Patty walked over, toed the gun away, and waved Bertingas in from the front door.
“Know her?”
“Never had the pleasure,” he said. “She does look familiar.”
Patty studied the face: high and pointed cheekbones; straight nose with fully arched nostrils; a mouth more carefully painted than a Noh actor’s; big gray eyes with the clearest whites she had ever seen—agate and alabaster; brows curved and shaped like the mud fenders on an antique Rolls; high forehead with not a line on it; hair layered and puffed and tinted in the fashionable semolina-and-sequoia shades.
It was a perfectly forgettable face. A thousand of them looked at Patty every day from the Freevid screens and holozines.
“That gun is Central Fleet issue,” Patty observed. “The AID she’s toting looks like it could open up and run Gemini Base. But she’s not any kind of trained agent, not by my guess.”
“Do you always talk about people in the third person while in their presence?” the woman asked. The voice was low, cultured, and had a slight hesitation, a catch, that Patty knew any man would find irresistible.
“Only when they’ve been shooting at me.”
“I have never—”
“You were tryin’.”
“Now, now, Firkin,” Bertingas said, just about waving a finger in her face. “There may be extenuating circumstances. We can’t know all the details.”
“Exactly,” the woman said. “Dire circumstances.” She straightened herself on the sofa, but not enough to flatten the curves of her body, from Bertingas’ perspective. The room curved around her, as that damned cue-sense furniture always seemed to do with the most beautiful woman in sight.
“I came to Counselor Bertingas,” she said, “because I have reason to suspect the Haiken Maru are looking for him, too.”
“You’re a little late,” Patty said dryly.
“Yes, the air crash, I heard about that. Terrible thing. The H.M. tried something a little less spectacular on me this morning. When I landed at the City Port, they rigged a bagbot to throw a restraining web and snatch me right off the exit ramp.”
“Oh, my dear!” from Bertingas. “How ever did you manage to avoid that?”
The blonde’s cool eyes tore themselves off the man and flicked over to her discarded Schlicter. “I had to damage the machine.”
“Why, exactly, were they snatching you?” Patty asked. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“I’m Mora Koskiusko.”
At last! Something ugly about the woman.
“I’m the daughter of Admiral Johan Koskiusko, of Gemini Base. The Haiken Maru were trying to kidnap me in order to have a hold on him.”
“Now, why would they want—?” Bertingas started to ask.
“The H.M. corporate organization is moving for the Secretariat, of course,” Koskiusko answered him. “Throughout the clusters they are aligning military support—by negotiation or force. And my father is loyal to the Pact.”
“After the kidnapping, why didn’t you go to the Central Fleet office in Meyerbeer?” Patty asked.
“I don’t trust Malcolm Thwaite. Not completely.”
“Huh! So you came here, right off?”
“Yes, I knew that at least one other person on this planet was on the same—”
“How did you manage to get in?” Bertingas asked.
“Well, your home system, it wasn’t—”
“That AID of hers,” Patty observed, “could convince your security system it was talking to the main net at Government Block, sell it twenty thousand shares of Pinkney Bendo, and then open it like—Jesus!”
The shock went up her right side like a bad muscle cramp.
“Sorry for the tase, Boss,” her own AID said calmly, “but we have visitors in the garden, and you do tend to ramble on.”
“How many?”
“Platoon strength from the tramp of little feet. Tell the homeowner he’s not going to like what they’re doing to his Pachysandra nipponica.”
“All right. Everybody down on the floor.”
Bertingas and Koskiusko slid down on the carpet. Patty saw the woman reach sideways and pick up her Schlicter. Patty let her. Bertingas had his hands over the back of his neck—not a very useful position—but his head was up and his eyes watchful.
“Open up the place,” she told her AID.
The carpeting in front of the window wall flipped back along the lines Patty had cut that morning. The Manjack she’d concealed there erected itself and swiveled its 240-millimeter repulsor coil toward the glass. From deep in the couch cushions, two HV directors popped up and pointed at the window. Two more of the little demons lifted from behind other furniture and aimed their discharge antennae at the other entrances to the room. At the AID’s command, the window opaquing dilated.
“Just like Custer,” Patty said under her breath, seeing the massed shapes in the garden. It was the splintering of wood, from behind her, that ignited the battle. She took aim with her own gun, told the AID to open fire, and shot at the window. Her service pistol accelerated a stream of aluminum-skirted glass beads in a repulsion coil. An energy pulse vaporized the metal into a slick of plasma, and the coil accelerated the beads to supersonic speeds. The window disappeared in a shower of sharp fragments.
Her shot was answered by a flurry of return fire, the whip-whip-whap of supersonic beads and the crackle of blue lightning from the creepers in the garden. She threw herself on the floor behind the couch and counted three.
Pfeet! Pfeet! Pfeet! The Manjack picked its targets and eliminated them. Its weapon was not particularly fast, but who needed to hosepipe a thousand projectiles a minute when one, cybernetically placed, would do the job? The Manjack could afford to ignore the incoming beads that caromed off or splintered upon its titanite tripod and spindle.
Mora Koskiusko, flat on her belly, was using the Schlicter two-handed, feet splayed behind her to take up the recoil. That was going to rip hell out of her nylons, especially at the knees. Still, she was doing a nice professional job on the intruders: single shots there, no blind firing.
The little HVs were laying down a high-voltage suppression field. Anything one-point-five meters above the floor got fried. It wasn’t doing the apartment’s plush decor any good, but the baddies were hanging back in the foyer and in the kitchen hallway. Bertingas finally had his head down.
Patty figured they could hold the room for, oh, another thirty seconds or so. Then what?
The what was a dragon. The heavily armored aircar came screaming down into the terrace garden. Titanium slats feathered its ducts. Quartz glass ten centimeters thick shielded the driver. Everywhere else it was angles and planes of cold-rolled steel, layered with ceramics and resins—except for its turret, where the business end of a plasma exciter poked through.
The weapon was a standard of space warfare. Deep in its reaction chamber, an enfilade of lasers would excite a deuterium pellet to fusion heat; electromagnets would channel the expanding ball of plasma out through the discharge port. It was, in effect, a unidirectional fusion bomb. Aimed into the room.
Patty didn’t think, not on any conscious level. Pulling a sonic grenade from her sleeve sheath, and keeping her ass below the level of the HVs’ continuing discharge, she crawled forward. Crossing the line of broken shards where the window used to be, she emerged from the dark cave of Bertingas’ lounge into bright sunlight and straightened.
Step, step, step, and she had one foot on the forward lip of the aircar’s metal-mesh skirting. Her knees slipped on the flat steel of the forward deflector. Her hand found a grip somewhere on the exposed ductwork. She climbed. The turret depressed, its horrible mouth trying to get an angle on her, but Patty was too close and too low. With her free hand she pushed the grenade into the locking ring around the ball joint. No time—nor clear space—to jump free. She flattened herself against the dragon’s warm steel skin, almost tasting the metal through her cheek.
The turret made a violent jerk, as if trying to dislodge her packet. The car rose with a howling cry, as if trying to withdraw. Then her shaped charge went off, destroying the turret mechanism, fanning the air above her with pieces of metal. Patty knew the interior of the car would reflect and amplify the shock of the explosion and all its harmonics. It tended to shred Human tissues.
Set on some land of delay, the ruptured plasma gun went off. Its plume of ionized gas lashed out above Patty’s head, tearing out part of the apartment wall and an old apple tree planted in the garden.
The car was still rising—and moving backward under the combined force of her grenade and its own plasma discharge. It was falling away from the garden and sliding, sloppily airborne, faster and faster, down the terraced face of Satellite Villas IV.
Patty hung onto its steel flank and prayed.