"I'm going to try to lure the fliers away," the android said. "Wait till the sky is clearing before you move."
He raced into the sky again, firing short bursts of his laser, shouting into the darkening sky. Once more the fliers roared after him. He led them toward Grovers Mills again, seeing the vast crescent of earthbound Swarm advancing at their steady, appalling rate. He doubled back, stranding the fliers well behind him, and accelerated toward Princeton. Below, a few fliers rose after him. It looked as if they had been dining on the corpse of a man wearing complicated battle armor. The same armor Modular Man had seen at Aces High, now stained and blackened with digestive acid.
In Princeton he saw Goldfarb's convoy making its way along Highway 206 in a blaze of infrared light and machinegun fire. Refugees, attracted by the sound of the tanks and APCs, were clinging to the vehicles. The android fired again and again, dropping Swarm creatures as they leaped to the attack, his energies growing low. He followed the convoy until they seemed out of the danger area, when the convoy had to slow in a vast traffic jam of refugees racing north.
The android decided to head for Fort Dix.
Detective-Lieutenant John F X. Black of the Jokertown precinct didn't actually remove the handcuff's from Tachyon's wrists until they were just outside the mayor's office at city hall. The other detectives kept their shotguns ready.
Fear, Tachyon thought. These people are terrified. Why? He rubbed his wrists. "My coat and hat, please." The addition of the pleasantry made it no less a command.
"If you insist," said Black, handing over the feathered cavalier hat and the lavender velvet swallowtail coat that matched Tach's eyes. Black's hatchet face split in a cynical smile. "It'd be hard to find even a detective first grade with your kind of taste," he said.
"I daresay not," Tach said coldly. He fluffed his hair back over the collar.
"Through there," said Black. Tach poised the hat over one eye and pushed through.
It was a large paneled room, with a long table, and it was bedlam. There were police, firemen, men in military uniforms. The mayor was shouting into a radiotelephone and, to judge by his savage expression, not getting through. Tach's glance wandered over to the far side of the room and his eyes narrowed. Senator Hartmann stood in quiet conversation with a number of aces: Peregrine, Pulse, the Howler, the whole SCARE bunch.
Tach always felt uneasy around Hartmann-a New York liberal or not, he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Ace Resources and Endeavors, the SCARE committee that had lived up to its name under Joseph McCarthy. The laws were different now, but Tach wanted nothing to do with an organization that recruited aces to serve the purposes of those in power.
The mayor handed the radiophone to an aide, and before he could rush off somewhere else Tach marched toward him, shooting his cufs and fixing the mayor with a cold glare.
"Your storm troopers brought me," he said. "They broke down my door. I trust the city will replace it, as well as anything that may be stolen while the door is down."
"We've got a problem," the mayor said, and then an aide rushed in, his hands full of filling-station maps of New Jersey. The mayor told him to spread them on the table. Tachyon continued talking through the interruption.
"You might have telephoned. I would have come. Your goons didn't even knock. There are still constitutional protections in this country, even in Jokertown."
"We knocked," said Black. "We knocked real loud." He turned to one of his detectives, a joker with brown, scaled flesh. "You heard me knock, didn't you, Kant?"
Kant grinned, a lizard with teeth. Tachyon shuddered. "Sure did, Lieutenant."
"How about you, Matthias?"
"I heard you knock, too."
Tach clenched his teeth. "They… did… not… knock."
Black shrugged. "The doctor probably didn't hear us. He was busy." He leered. "He had company, if you take my meaning. A nurse. Real peachy." He held up a legal-sized document. "Anyway, our warrant was legal. Signed by Judge Steiner right here just half an hour ago."
The mayor turned to Tachyon. "We just wanted to make sure you didn't have anything to do with this."
Tach removed his hat and waved it languidly before his face as he looked at the room filled full of rushing people, including-Good God, a three-foot-high tyrannosaur who had just turned into a naked preadolescent boy.
"What are you talking about, my man?" he finally asked. The mayor gazed at Tachyon with eyes like chips of ice. "We have reports of what might be a wild card outbreak in Jersey."
Tach's heart lurched. Not again, he thought, remembering those first awful weeks, the deaths, the mutilations that made his blood run cold, the madness, the smell… No, it wasn't possible. He gulped.
"What may I do to help?" he said.
"Forty thousand in one group," the general muttered, fixing the figures in his mind. "Probably in Princeton by now. Twenty thousand fliers. Maybe another twenty thousand scattered over the countryside, moving to rendezvous at Princeton." He looked up at the android. "Any idea where they'll move after Princeton? Philadelphia or New York? South or north?"'
"I can't say."
The lieutenant general gnawed his knuckle. He was a thin, bespectacled man, and his name was Carter. He seemed not at all disturbed by the thought of carnivorous aliens landing in New Jersey. He commanded the U.S. First Army from his headquarters here at Fort Meade, Maryland. Modular Man had been sent here by a sweating major general at Fort Dix, which had turned out to be a training center.
Chaos surrounded Carter's aura of calm. Phones rang, aides bustled, and outside in the corridor men were shouting. "So far I've only got the Eighty-second and the National Guard," Carter said. "It's not enough to defend both New York and Philly against those numbers. If I had the Marine regiments from Lejeune we could do better, but the Marine Commandant doesn't want to release them from the Rapid Deployment Force, which is commanded by a Marine. He wants the RDF to take command here, particularly since the Eighty-second is also under its protocols." He sipped cranberry juice, sighed. "It's all the process of moving a peacetime army onto wartime footing. Our time will come, and then we'll have our innings."
The android gathered that the Swarm had landed in four places in North America: New Jersey; Kentucky south of Louisville; an area centered around McAllen, Texas, but on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border; and an extremely diffused landing that seemed scattered over most of northern Manitoba. The Kentucky landing was also within the boundaries of the First Army, and Carter had ordered the soldiers from Fort Knox and Fort Campbell into action. Fortunately he hadn't had to get the Marines' permission first.
"North or south?" Carter wondered. "Darn it, I wish I knew where they were heading." He rubbed his temples. "Time to shoot crap," he decided. "You saw them moving north. I'll send the airborne to Newark and tell the Guard to concentrate there."
Another aide bustled up and passed Carter a note. "Okay," the general said. "The governor of New York has asked all aces in the New York area to meet at city hall. There's talk of using you people as shock troops." He peered at the android through his glasses. "You are an ace, right?"
"I'm a sixth-generation machine intelligence programmed to defend society."
"You're a machine, then?" Carter looked as if he hadn't quite understood this till now. "Someone built you?"
"That's correct." His contractions were getting better and better, his speech more concise. He was pleased with himself. Carter's reaction was quick. "Are there any more of you? Can we build more of you? We've got a situation, here."
"I can transmit your request to my creator. But I don't think it's likely to be of immediate help."