Crankenshaft unhooked a cord from his belt and threw it at them. It landed at Jato’s feet, a leather thong with ceramoplex balls on each end that could have been anything from decorations to superconducting webs.
"Tie her hands behind her back," Crankenshaft said.
Jato crossed his arms. "No."
Crankenshaft touched a panel on the console. A giant globe crept through a slit in the thermoplastic wall and floated to the center of the studio.
"Non-linear dynamics and metapsychology," he commented. "Do you know that with detailed enough initial conditions, you can model procreation? The correlation between the calculated results and an actual act that proceeded from those conditions is quite high."
Jato scowled. "What are you talking about?"
"Sex," he said. "Establish the initial scene well enough and you can model the rest with amazing accuracy."
"Go to hell," Jato said.
"Tie her hands."
"No."
"Commence protocol," he said.
Three syringe guns slid out of the globe. Jato didn’t duck fast enough, but it didn’t matter: none of the shots were aimed at him. Soz moved in a blur, but she couldn’t go anywhere with her ankles chained to the ledge. One shot missed her, but judged from her reaction, the other two hit home. She jerked as if she had been struck and her entire body tensed.
"What are you doing?" Jato shouted at Crankenshaft.
"Jato, it’s all right," Soz said. "I’m fine."
"It’s a clockwork venom," Crankenshaft told her. "Even your meds can’t adapt enough to deal with it."
She said nothing, just focused her attention on him with an unsettling intensity.
"What’s a clockwork venom?" Jato asked.
Soz glanced at him. "The name comes from clock reactions." Although she sounded cool, sweat was beading at her temple. "Combine certain chemicals under proper conditions and they cycle through a series of reactions. In human blood, clockwork venoms undergo a cycle, each step producing a different
poison."
"Can your nanomeds fight it?" Jato asked.
Crankenshaft answered. "Even sophisticated meds have trouble with complicated cycles. This one has hundreds of steps, all with varying duration lengths and side reactions that change from cycle to cycle. It’s a brilliant work of chemistry." He gave Jato an appraising look. "You’ve felt one poison in the cycle. Last time you were here. Perhaps you recall?"
Jato remembered all right. It had burned like hell.
"The others have different effects," Crankenshaft observed, as if Soz were a lab experiment. "Nausea, muscle stiffness, dizziness, pain. She’ll start vomiting soon. Eventually she will die."
Soz remained calm, but sweat was running down her temples. When she wiped at it, the motion looked mechanical, as if she had let the hydraulics in her body take over.
"As soon as her hands are bound," Crankenshaft said, "I’ll give her the antidote."
"Jato." She spoke quietly. "Do what he says. Please."
There was no mistaking the strain in her voice. Jato grabbed the thong off the floor and wrapped it around her wrists. The broken lock mechanism on her manacles felt warm, probably from the energy released when her chompers ate it. He tied the thong loosely around her wrists, making no attempt to knot it. But the ceramoplex balls activated and yanked the cords tight, binding her wrists and then locking into each other.
"Leather," Crankenshaft said.
Jato straightened up. "What?"
"In molecular terms, it’s complex," he said. "More heterogeneous than, say, manacles. Not as strong, but a logical backup when dealing with disassemblers."
Jato gritted his teeth. How did Soz stay so cool? She just watched Crankenshaft, intent and quiet. Crankenshaft took a ring with two mag-keys off his belt and threw it to them. As the keys hit the floor near Jato’s foot, a syringe on the globe hissed. Soz moved like an automaton, trying to duck, but the shot hit her anyway.
"That had better be the antidotes," Jato said.
"The red key unlocks your ankles," Crankenshaft said. "Gold unlocks hers."
After Jato freed their ankles, Soz moved stiffly, swinging her legs off the ledge.
"Go to the pool," Crankenshaft said. "Both of you."
"No," Jato said.
"Don’t make it harder on her than necessary," Crankenshaft said. "I can calculate a lot of what I need, but I’ll achieve better results with genuine images of the two of you to work from."
Jato stayed put. "I won’t rape her and I won’t kill her. You can doctor holos to make me look like a Trader, but nothing can make me act like one."
Crankenshaft’s voice hardened. "Go to the pool. Otherwise, I’ll pump her so full of clockwork venom she’ll beg you to kill her."
With no warning, Soz moved. Fast. Dropping to one knee by her boots, she whipped out her hands, shreds of leather flying away from her wrists. She yanked the "decorative" tubes off her boots and brought them up, one in each hand, liquid shooting out from both. One stream splattered over the drone, creating clouds of gas. The other hit Crankenshaft’s carbine and splashed into his face. He shouted, dropping the laser as he covered his face with his hands. When the gun hit the ground, it shattered like porcelain.
The Mandelbrot globe hissed and a shot from its air-syringe hit Jato in the neck. In a bizarre blur of motion, Soz threw her boots. They hurtled through the air and smashed into the globe, shattering its outer shell where the liquid from her cylinder had doused it. The whole assembly crashed to the floor, its innards breaking apart on the stone. Blinking and humming, the debris moved in twitches as it began to reassemble itself.
"Smash the components!" Soz yelled, sprinting across the studio. She moved like a puppet, her body under control of hydraulics rather than muscles and bones.
As Jato strode over to crush the remains of the drone, he saw Crankenshaft lower his hands, revealing a face covered with burns. In the same instant that he grabbed for a gun on his belt, Soz reached him. She brought her hands up with eerie speed and hit him under the chin, snapping back his head. He flew over backward, crashing to the ground. His head hit the floor and he lay still, breathing but unconscious.
"Soz, no!" Jato raced forward when she jerked up her leg. He collided with her as her foot came down, and they staggered to the side, enough to make her miss Crankenshaft. Her foot hit the floor with a teeth-jarring impact that would have crushed the Dreamer’s chest.
Jato gulped in a breath. "No killing."
She turned to him like a machine, no emotion on her face. It was hard to believe this was the same woman he had kissed on the Promenade.
Then her expression became human again, as if she had reset herself. She exhaled. "He’ll live." Grimly she added, "We might not. Are you all right?"
A familiar burning was spreading in his neck and torso. "I took a shot of venom. Did he give you an antidote?"
"No. More venom." She went to retrieve her boots and their tubes. "My meds are trying to synthesize an antidote, but it’s hard to do when their target keeps changing."
"We better hurry." He grabbed his bird off the console. "His node must have alerted the city and his other drones."
She pulled on her boots. "I put locks on his system. It will take a few minutes for it to break them." Her voice sounded strained. Labored.
As Jato turned toward the door across the room, his gaze raked the pool-and he froze.
The holosculpture was still evolving. It had spawned more and yet more Jatos, until they blended into a design of feathered motion. A superimage had formed, a fractal, its pattern repeating on a finer and finer scale. Superimposed on the fractal, a face was coming clear. A giant Trader face.
His face.
"No." He spun back to the console.