They hurried through the dark of the living room, through the kitchen and out into a blaze of light: fifteen sodium-vapor security lights installed in the back yard, also courtesy of Home Hardware.
Beyond the lights, in the high brush and damp ferns at the verge of the forest, he crouched with Joyce—and Doug and Catherine, who had beaten them out of the house.
The alarms ceased abruptly. Cricket calls revived in the dark of the woods. Tom felt the racing of his own pulse.
The house was starkly bright among pine silhouettes and a scatter of stars. A night breeze moved in the treetops. Tom flexed his toes among the loamy, damp pine needles: his feet were bare.
He looked around. “Where’s Ben?”
“Inside,” Archer said. “Listen, we should spread out a little bit … cover more territory.”
Archer playing space soldier. But it wasn’t a game. “This is it, isn’t it?”
Archer flashed him a nervous grin. “The main event.” Tom turned to the house in time to see the windows explode.
Glass showered over the lawn, a glittering arc in the glare of the lights.
He took a step back into the shelter of the woods. He felt Joyce do the same.
But there was no real retreating.
Here was the axis of events, the absolute present, Tom thought, and nothing to do but embrace it.
Twenty-One
Ben stood calmly in the concussion of the grenade. It was an EM pulse grenade, less useful to the marauder than it had been; the cybernetics were hardened against it. The blast traveled up the stairway from the basement and exploded the windows behind him. Ben felt the concussion as a rush of warm air and a pressure in his ears. He stood with his back to the door, braced on his one good leg, watching the stairs.
He didn’t doubt that the marauder could kill him. The marauder had killed him once and was quite capable of doing so again—perhaps irreparably. But he wasn’t afraid of death. He had experienced, at least, its peripheries: a cold place, lonesome, deep, but not especially frightening. He was afraid of leaving his life behind … but even that fear was less profound than he’d expected.
He’d left behind a great many things already. He had left his life in the future. He had buried the woman he had lived with for thirty years, long before he dreamed the existence of fractal, knitted time. He wasn’t a stranger to loss or abandonment.
He had been recruited at the end of a life he’d come to terms with: maybe that was a requirement. The time travelers had seemed to know that about him. Ben recalled their cool, unwavering eyes. They appeared in human form as a courtesy to their custodians; but Ben had sensed the strangeness under the disguise. Our descendants, he had thought, yes, our children, in a very real sense … but removed from us across such an inconceivable ocean of years.
He listened for the sound of footsteps up the stairs. He hoped Catherine Simmons and the others had deployed outside the house … fervently hoped they wouldn’t be needed. He had volunteered to defend this outpost; they had not, except informally and in a condition of awe.
But the nanomechanisms were already doing their work, deep in the body of the marauder: Ben felt them doing it.
Felt them as the marauder came up the carpeted stairs. Ben watched him come. The marauder moved slowly. His eyepiece tracked Ben with oiled precision.
He was an amazing sight. Ben had studied the civil wars of the twenty-first century, had seen this man before, knew what to expect; he was impressed in spite of all that. The hybridization of man and mechanism was mankind’s future, but here was a sterile mutation: a mutual parasitism imposed from without. The armor was not an enhancement but a cruel prosthetic. Infantry doctors had rendered this man incapable of unassisted pleasure, made his daily fife a gray counterfeit, linked every appetite to combat.
The marauder, not tall but quite golden, came to the top of the stairs with small swift movements. Then he did a remarkable thing:
He stumbled.
Dropped to one knee, looked up.
Ben felt the nanomechanisms laboring inside this man. Vital connections severed, relays heating, redundancies overwhelmed … “Tell me your name,” Ben said gently.
“Billy Gargullo,” the marauder said, and fired a beam weapon from his wrist.
But the marauder was slow and Ben, augmented, anticipated the move and ducked away.
He fired his own weapon. The focused pulse, invisible, seemed to pull Billy Gargullo forward and down; his armor clenched around him like a fist. He toppled, convulsed once … then used his momentum as the armor relaxed to swing his arm forward.
This was a gesture Ben had not anticipated. He dodged the beam weapon but not quickly enough; it cut a charred canyon across his abdomen.
Ben dropped and rolled to extinguish his burning clothing, then discovered he couldn’t sit up. He had been cut nearly in half.
Precious moments ticked away. Ben felt his awareness ebb. A wave of cybernetics poured out from the walls, covered the wound, sealed it; severed arteries closed from within. For a brief and unsustainable moment his blood pressure rose to something like normal; his vision cleared.
Ben pushed himself up on his elbows and fumbled for his weapon.
He found it, raised it …
But Billy had left the room.
Twenty-two
By the time he reached the foot of the basement stairs Billy assumed he was dying.
He knew his armor was crumbling away, somehow, inside him. His eyepiece displayed bright red numerals and emergency diagnostics. He felt cut loose from himself, afloat, hovering over his own body like a bird.
This was very sudden, very strange, unmistakably hostile. He didn’t let it slow him down.
He came up the stairs still operational but awash in strange emotions: vivid lightnings of panic; blue threads of guilt. Billy was coherent enough to understand that he’d walked into a trap; that his prey, the time traveler, someone, had interfered with his armor. There was a perpetual high-pitched keening in his ears and the diagnostics in his eyepiece read him a catalogue of major and minor malfunctions. So far, the gland in the elytra was still pumping—though fitfully—and his weapons were functional. But he was vulnerable and he was slow and before long he might be altogether helpless.
None of this affected Billy’s resolve. Sensing his panic, Billy’s armor flushed potent new molecules into his blood. The killing urge, which had seemed so powerful in the past, blossomed into something new and even more intense: an agony of necessity.
At the top of the stairs he faced a man he had killed once before, a time traveler. Billy didn’t question this resurrection, merely resolved to kill the man again, to kill him as often as necessary. Some momentary fluctuation caused him to topple forward; he fell, looked up, and the time traveler asked him his name. Billy answered without thinking, startled by the sound of his own voice.
Then he raised his wrist weapon. But the chaos inside him had made him slow and the time traveler was able to aim and fire his own weapon, a beam device that seemed to lock Billy’s armor into a momentary rictus, so that Billy toppled forward in a parody of movement, like a statue tumbling off a pedestal.
He didn’t waste time regretting his vulnerability; only waited for it to pass. As soon as his arm was mobile he brought it up and forward with all the precision his failing neural augmentation was able to calculate and burned open the time traveler’s belly.
The result was impressive. The walls seemed to crumble. Machine bugs rivered across the carpet. A stab of primitive revulsion made Billy leap to his feet and back away. He detonated another pulse grenade—his last—and it slowed the bugs but didn’t stop them.