"Charming man," she muttered. "Stupid, though. ISC would never buy it. I have augmented strength and reflexes. You would more likely end up dead than me."
"Even with the Promenade breaking?"
That made her think. "It would complicate things," she admitted. She motioned at the plateau. "If he’s the one who turned on the Lions, those drones down there must be his."
"Drones?" Jato swore and started back up the steps.
Soz grabbed his arm. "There’s nowhere to go that way."
He stopped, seeing her point. They couldn’t go up, they couldn’t go down, and the chasm waited beneath them. Now was the time to find out what arsenal, if any, they had at their disposal. "What else can you do besides see in the dark?"
"I’ve a computer node in my spine with a library of combat reflexes." She bent her arm at the elbow. "My skeleton and muscles are augmented by high-pressure hydraulics and powered by a microfusion reactor that delivers a few kilowatts. It gives me reflexes and strength two to three times greater than normal, as much as my body can sustain without overheating."
"Can you stop the globes?"
"Three or four, I could handle. But there are nine there." She looked down the stairs again. "They’re coming."
He saw it now too, the Mandelbrot sparkle of globes revving into active mode. Their lights flowed upward in a fractal curve of luminance.
"Jato," a voice said.
He nearly jumped. The voice came out of empty air: cool, impersonal, commanding.
"Come down here," it said. "Bring the woman."
As Jato’s adrenalin surge calmed, he realized it was only a globe transmitting the voice. "Go to hell, Crankenshaft."
"You have twenty seconds to resume descending," his tormentor said.
"Let her go and I’ll do what you want," Jato said.
"Fifteen seconds."
The globes continued up the stairs, whirring like a swarm of huge bugs. Ten steps away, five, two. A syringe hissed, and Soz feinted with a speed that blurred, kicking up her leg. Her heel smashed into a globe, and it spun out from the cliff in a spiral of glittering lights.
A second globe rolled in to fill the gap, a third came from the side, a fourth whirred behind Soz, and a fifth hung over them, its syringe pointing down like the cannon on a miniature battlecruiser. Jato and Soz kept moving; feint, dodge, feint, Soz using her augmented speed. Two globes collided in midair with the grating racket of ceramoplex crashing together.
It was only a matter of seconds before a syringe shot hit Jato in the chest. The area went numb almost instantly and the sensation spread fast. As his arms dropped like stones to his sides, he lost his balance and tumbled down the stairs, stars and mountains careening past his vision.
He had one final glimpse of Soz lying on her back on the stairs, pinned down by globes, before his head hit stone.
Part IV: Aurora
A high ceiling came into focus. After a while a thought surfaced in Jato’s mind. He was alive.
He sat up, favoring his bruises. He was alone in Crankenshaft’s studio. No, not alone. Soz lay on the other end of the ledge, eyes closed, her torso rising and falling with each breath. Relief rushed over him, followed by a Neanderthal impulse to go over, stake out his territory, and protect her from Crankenshaft. It wasn’t the world’s most logical response given she was an Imperial Messenger, but he had it just the same.
He wondered why she was still unconscious. Even his body contained nanomeds designed to repair and maintain it. An ISC officer probably carried molecule-sized laboratories.
As he got off the ledge, a clink sounded. Turning, he saw a chain with one end attached to a ring in the wall. Its other end fastened to a manacle around his ankle.
He gritted his teeth, wishing he could wrap the chain around Crankenshaft’s neck. At least the tether was long enough to let him reach Soz. That almost made him back off; he trusted nothing Crankenshaft did. But his instincts were still at work, conjuring up protect mate impulses, so he went over to her.
Crankenshaft had no illusions about Soz needing protection. Her wrists were manacled behind her back and also to a ring in the ledge. He had set her boots on the floor and chained her ankles to the ledge. For some inexplicable reason, he also put metal bands around her neck and waist. Jato leaned over to lay his palm on her forehead-
Her hand clamped around his wrist so fast he barely saw her move. He froze, staring as she sat up. It hadn’t been obvious from the way she had been lying, but the chain joining her manacles was broken.
He found his voice. "How did you get free?"
She dropped his hand, her face relaxing as she recognized him. "Nano-chomps. I carry a few hundred species."
"You mean molecular disassemblers?"
"In my sweat."
He stepped back. He had no desire to have voracious bugs in her sweat take him apart atom by atom.
"They can’t hurt you," Soz said. "Each chomper disassembles a specific material. The ones I carry are rigidly particular, even down to factory lot numbers."
He motioned at her manacled feet. "Wrong lot number?"
"Apparently so. Or else flaws in the molecular structure." Leaning over, she rubbed her wrist against the chain attached to his ankle.
"Hey." He jerked away his leg. "What are you doing?"
"They might work on yours."
"You don’t think that’s dangerous, carrying bugs in your body that take things apart?"
"They aren’t bugs. They’re just enzymes. And they’re no more dangerous than being trapped here."
He knew it was probably true, but even so, he was having second thoughts about his amorous impulses. People sweated when they made love. A lot.
"Jato, don’t look like that," she said. "The chompers are produced by nodules in my sweat glands that only activate when I go into combat mode. Besides, they can’t take apart people. Our composition is too heterogeneous."
He sat on the ledge, near her but not too close, and motioned at his still-chained ankle. "Wrong lot, I guess."
"I guess so." She tugged the manacle on her wrist, managing to slide it up about a centimeter. The skin on her wrist was more elastic than normal tissue, not a lot, but enough so she could drag it out from under the manacle. He saw what she was after, a small round socket in her wrist.
"You have a hole," he said.
"Six of them, actually. In my wrists, ankles, lower spine, and neck."
That explained the neck and waist bands. "What do they do?"
"Pick up signals." She held up her arm so the socket faced the console across the room. "If I insert a plug from that node into this socket, it links the computer web inside my body to the console."
That didn’t sound like much help. "The plug is there and you’re here."
"That’s why consoles transmit infrared signals." Her face had a inwardly directed quality, as if she were running a canned routine to answer him while she focused her attention elsewhere. "The sockets act as IR receivers and transmitters. Bio-optic threads in my body carry signals to the computer node in my spine. It processes the data and either responds or contacts my brain. Bio-electrodes in my neurons translate its binary into thought: 1 makes the neuron fire and 0 does nothing. It works in reverse too, so I can ‘talk’ to my spinal node."
He suspected Nightingale was probably flooded with IR signals. "How can you stand so much noise hitting you all the time?"
"It doesn’t. Only if I toggle Receive." Her full attention came back to him. "The signals do get noisy and it isn’t as secure as a physical link. But it’s enough to let me interact with a node as close as the one over there."
"And?"
She made a frustrated noise. "This room ought to be bathed in public signals. But I’m getting nothing at all."
He doubted Crankenshaft would cut himself off from the city. "Maybe he did something to you."
"My diagnostics register no software viruses or tampering." She paused. "But you know, my internal web is engineered in part from my own DNA. Maybe he infected it with a biological virus." Without another word, she lifted her wrist and spit into its socket.