Now he runs lightly down the service stairs from Oceanus’s airport into the heart of the great ship. Yanzon touches the frame of his I-shades: a sunset-colored schematic is projected onto his retina. He can see through bulkheads, into sealed rooms, beyond walls and ceilings. Extraordinary technology; a world where everyone and everything may be located with a thought. A world with no room in which sin may hide. And music too; TV, movies everything. Not for the first time he wonders what his Brazyl might have achieved, but for the seven plagues.
His right hands hold the bow. It is an appallingly beautiful piece of killing gear. The compound limb is printed molecule by molecule from carbon nanofiber and molds to his grip like a prayer to a pain; the tip pivots are spun diamond. Pure titanium wheels give a hundred kilos of pull for an effortless, whip-fast draw. Gyros in the airspaces of the limb ensure exceptional stability and freedom from vibration; Yanzon can sight, aim, and have three arrows in the air and one on the nock before the first has punched home. Seeing it, you would say, That is one beautiful evil bow , but the words would not even leave your lips before Yanzon put an arrow clean through you. The real evil is not the bow, but the arrows.
Yanzon, last archer of the Iguapá, first hunter of the Order, arrives on Avenida Corporacão. The main business thoroughfare is cool, air-conditioned, cypress scented. A touch to the frame of Yanzon’s I-shades blinds the security eyes, but the baroque double doors of EMBRAÇA resist his code. This is what comes from leaving things to a hereditary aristocracy. Amateurs. The Buenos Aires Sesmarias could have handled this, but they are scared the Zemba will appear again as she did at the church when she destroyed the São Paulo family. Let her come. Yanzon has long anticipated matching her fighting art against his Q-bow. Kill the researchers, destroy the Q-cores, and the helicopter will return him to the DOI quantum computer and the crossing back to his Florianopolis beachfront apartment. He should try and pick up something in Brasilia for Rosemeri’s sixth birthday. A pair of these shades would be good, but they’re probably incompatible. It is never clean eliminating someone as prominent as this man of business, but Yanzon has seen every great man as a beggar elsewhere.
The door is quantum coded. Amen. What quantum seals, quantum shall undo. He draws the Q-blade and with one economic gesture cuts the door free from its frames. The two halves hang a moment, then fall backward onto the woven grass carpet of the reception area. As Yanzon’s boot soles crush the faces of carved baroque angels and demons, silent alarms detonate across his expanded vision.
Edson hammers on the elevator call button. Every street-sense, every gene of malandragem says never trust the elevator when your soul and love depends on it. But he’s seen what’s down the stairs. It’s here: bing. Stupid stupid stupid elevator AI: I don’t care about safety instruction. My girlfriend’s down there with an admonitory of the Order and a Q-bow. We can take care of a bunch of old queen fidalgos , Alcides Teixeira had said. No you can’t. They don’t care for your money, they don’t care for your empire, they don’t care for your polittical patronage and your power. They are beyond mere economics.
The elevator bid Edson a good night. The door opened on chaos. The great baroque doors of the EMBRAÇA headquarters, appropriated from a church in Olinda, lie on the ground. Twenty alarm lights flash; a panicked sprinkler system douses the hardwood front desk. No one on that desk. Does he spy fingertips on the carpet? Running feet, voices cracking over com channnels. Teixeira’s seguranças will shoot whatever they see. Move out, Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas. But he takes a grain of reassurance from his eyeblink reconnaissance. The admonitory is working through the corporate levels first. He has still time to make the apartment.
Yanzon sees the running guards through two corridors. He will take one and the other will run away. His weapons are expensive, even for the Order, and should be reserved for the mandatory targets. His mission on this level is complete, all targets accounted for. His I-shades track the two figures through the walclass="underline" in one breathtaking, killing move he draws an arrow from the magnetic quiver, nocks, pulls. The bow’s complex pulleys and levers slide with molecular precision. Fires. The Q-blade-tipped arrow cuts through wall, room, wall, running guard, out through the closed-down spaces of EMBRAôA’s corporate headquarters, out through the glass wall of Oceanus. A flash of blue light and a man is down, dead, pooling blood across the pimpled black rubber. Yanzon steps around the corner, a new arrow strung. The terrified survivor throws his hands up, his gun down and, as predicted, flees. Yanzon mouths a brief consignatory prayer for the dead man. The Lord will receive his own. If he does not know the Lord Jesus, then he must prepare for the Lake of Fire. Yanzon has yet to visit a universe that does not know the saving power of Christ. He has seen the true, the unimaginably true, extent of God’s might. The glowing icons of Teixeira security move erratically: panicked, afraid. Slipping through their indecision, Yanzon takes the emergency stairs two at a time down to the residential levels.
Fia mutters in chemical sleep; soft babyish utterings.
“Theory of Computational Equivalence. If anything can be a computer everything can be a computer. Ah!”
Edson shakes her again. “Get up!”
Her face creased into the pillow, she mutters, “What is go away let me sleep.”
“The Order is here.”
She sits up, eyes wide, electrified, a thousand percent awake.
“What?”
Edson claps his hand over Fia’s mouth. The sound the smell the state of the air the prickle of electricity: all his favela-senses tell him death is here. He grabs I-shades; his, hers, and throws them on to the bed as he rolls Fia on to the floor. The oldest, best malandro trick: they trust too much in their arfids and their Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. As he claps his hand over Fia’s mouth two flashes of ionized blue pierce the bed and it explodes in twin gouts of feathers and foam. Edson pushes his cidade senses to their most attenuated fringes to pick out nanoshifts of pressure, rustles on the edge of audibility, a quantum’s difference in the slit of light under the door.
“He’s gone. Now, with me. Don’t say a word.”
Hand in hand, he scuttles with Fia to the balcony. Stupid stupid stupid rich man’s apartments with only one door. Edson peers over the balcony. Up: the black helicopter hovers, waiting to rendezvous with the admonitory. Down is a long long drop to an iron sea. Edson jerks a thumb toward the neighboring apartment.
“That way.” High-waist flares and a ruffle-front shirt are not the best things in which to monkey across the face of a twelve-million-ton kilometer-and-a-half-long cruise ship. Edson springs up on the balcony rail, seizes the stanchion, and with a prayer to Exu swings round to the neighboring railing. “Piece of piss. Just don’t look down.”
Fia boggles at the drop, then in one ungainly movement makes the crossing.
“Hey! Look at me!”
Edson touches finger to lips. Apartments light up around them. Edson hears distant alarms, vehicles rushing overhead and far below. The great ship swarms like an ants’ nest spiked with battery acid. The hunter is still in there.