His knees folded and he sank back to the ruined mattress. Billy said reproachfully, “You know the man I mean.”
“Yes,” Millstein gasped.
“Tell me about him,” Billy said.
All this reminded Billy of that time long ago, in the future, in Florida, and of the woman who had died there.
Those memories welled up in him while he extracted Lawrence Millstein s confession.
Billy remembered the shard of glass and the woman’s name, Ann Heath, and the way she had repeated it to herself, Ann Heath Ann Heath, with the blood on her face and throat and soaking the front of her shirt like a bright red bib.
He had come northwest from the ruins of Miami with his comrades Hallo well and Piper, a fierce storm on their heels. Cut out of their platoon in an ambush, they had retreated in the face of superior fire through a maze of suburban plexes and windowless pillbox dwellings whipped by a torrent of wild ocean air, the barometer low and falling. The night was illuminated by arcs of lightning along the eastern horizon, where a wall of cloud rotated around the fierce vacuum of its core. They ran and didn’t much speak. They had given up hope of finding friendly territory—they wanted only some space between themselves and the insurgency before they were driven to shelter.
Billy had grown used to the wind like a fist at his back by the time they saw the house.
It was a house much like all the other houses on this littered empty street, a low bunker of the type advertised as “weatherproof” after the first disasters in the Zone. Of course, it wasn’t. But its roof was intact and the walls seemed secure and defensible and it must have survived a great many storms relatively intact. It was whole; that was what drew Billy’s attention.
Most of these buildings were empty, but there was always the possibility of squatters; so Brother Hallowell, a tall man and thick-chested under his armor, vaulted a chain fence and circled to the back while Billy and Brother Piper launched a concussion weapon through the narrow watch slot next to the door. Billy grinned as the door whooshed open and white smoke billowed out into the rain. He stepped inside and felt his eyepiece adjust to the darkness; he pulled a pocket extinguisher from his belt and doused the burning carpet. Brother Piper said, “I’ll do the back door for Brother Hallowell,” and started for the rear of the house while Billy sealed the front against the gusting rain, thinking how good it would be to be dry for a night … but then things turned strange very quickly. Brother Piper began shouting something incomprehensible, Brother Hallowell thumped at the rear door, while machine bugs came pouring out of the walls, out of hiding places in the plasterboard, from crates and boxes Billy had mistaken for squatters’ refuse—thousands of glistening jewel-like creatures Billy could only dimly identity as mechanical. Brother Piper screamed as they swarmed up his legs. Billy had heard of Brazilian weapons imported by the insurgents, tiny poisonous robots the size of centipedes, and he reached by instinct for the machine-killer on his belt: a pulse bomb the size of a walnut, which he triggered and tossed against the far wall; it exploded without much concussion but with a burst of electromagnetic radiation strong enough to overload anything close. Even Billy’s armor, which was hardened against such pulses, seemed to hesitate and grow heavy; his eyepiece dimmed and read him nonsense numbers for a long second. When his vision cleared the machine bugs were silent and motionless. Brother Piper was shaking them off his leg in a wild dance. Then Brother Hallowell, who was their CO, came through a doorway from the back and said, “What the fuck? I had to dump two pulses just to get in here and I put a third downstairs—this place has a big cellar. Brother Billy, do you know what these little bugs are?”
Billy was the youngest but he read a lot; Piper and Hallowell always asked him questions like that. This time he was stumped. “Sir, I don’t,” Billy said.
Brother Hallowell shrugged and said, “Well, we walked into something peculiar for sure. You know there’s a lady in the next room?”
Billy was reluctant to take a step forward; he didn’t relish the sound of the machine bugs crunching under his feet. “A lady?”
“That’s right,” Brother Hallowell said, “but your concussion grenade just about took her out, Brother Billy. She has a wedge of plate glass in her head. She’s not dead, and her eyes are open, but—well, come look.”
Billy was dazed but his armor kept him functioning. Even Brother Piper was beginning to calm down. The elytra came back up to full function and Billy felt as if his blood had cooled by two or three degrees. Maybe this place was a weapons dump; maybe they’d get a commendation for discovering it. This was a pleasant idea but Billy disbelieved it even as he thought it—the machine bugs were too strange a product even for the Brazilian ordinance makers.
He followed Brother Hallowell to the next room, where the woman lay slumped in a corner between two boxes. The concussion grenade had slivered a glass dividing wall and driven one long green-tinted wedge into the woman’s head between her right ear and her right eye. There was blood, but not as much as Billy had expected. The sight of this young woman with the shank of plate glass projecting from her cranium like a ghastly party hat took Billy strangely; he reached down to touch the glass—a gesture of awe—and as he touched it the woman blinked and gasped … not in pain, Billy thought, but as if the tremor of his touch had ignited some pleasant memory, long forgotten. She looked up at Billy with one eye, the left. The right eye, bloodshot, gazed indifferently at some vision not physically present.
“What’s your name?” Billy asked.
“Ann Heath,” the woman said plainly.
“Back off now.” Billy stepped away as Brother Hallowell took a medical package out of his pack and selected a cardiovascular unit. He tore away the woman’s shirt, then clamped the wound unit between her breasts. When he switched it on Billy heard the hemotropic tubes crunch into Ann Heath’s body, a terrible sound. “Oh,” she said calmly, as the wound unit began to regulate her breathing. Now she wouldn’t die even if her heart and lungs gave out, though she still might become comatose. Billy understood the purpose of this maneuver: to keep her interrogatable for a little while longer.
Brother Hallowell gave the machine a moment to stabilize, then bent down over Ann Heath. “Ma’am,” he said, “can you tell me exactly what this place is?”
Ann Heath responded obediently, as if the shard of glass had severed the part of her brain governing caution and left only obedience:
“A time machine,” she said.
Brother Hallowell looked almost comically perplexed. “A what?”
“A time machine,” Ann Heath said. The cardiovascular machine put a tremor in her voice, as if she had a bad case of the hiccups.
Brother Hallowell sighed. “She’s scrambled,” he said.
“She’s brain dead.” He straightened and flexed his back.
“Brother Billy, will you interrogate the prisoner? See if you can get anything coherent out of her. Meanwhile Brother Piper and I will reconnoiter and try to get some power going.
Wind rocked the building. Billy sat down next to the injured woman and pretended not to see the wedge of green glass in her head. He waited until Brother Hallowell and Brother Piper had left the room.
Ann Heath didn’t look like a liar to him. In her condition, Billy thought, it might not be possible to tell a lie.