“Damn it,” Bloat said. “If I can’t catch him, I’ll just ram the bastard.”
Bloat materialized another merman directly in front of Modular Man. The android was moving far too fast to evade. From the Great Hall, they could all see the tremendous midair collision. Modular Man tumbled and fell end over end, slamming into one of the stone walls of the towers in a cascade of granite chips. The android caromed out of sight; it didn’t appear that it was still functioning.
Kafka let out a shout. All around the Great Hall, jokers cheered. The mindvoices of the Rox cried in victory. Bloat grinned.
“We’ve won another skirmish,” he exulted. “You see, Kafka? They can’t touch us. They ain’t ever going to touch us.,,
The android dived down into the inner bailey. The last of the leaflets trailed behind him. He shot across the courtyard, leaving baffled fish-knights in his wake, then climbed again.
One of the fish-men materialized out of thin air right in front of him. Modular Man was going 150 miles per hour and there was no way to avoid a collision.
There was an alloy-twisting crash. Jarred circuits staggered. The knight, the fish, and the android tumbled. The knight’s armor was crushed: the limp body vanished in a puff of brimstone before it hit the pavement.
Modular Man slammed into the castle wall, but managed to avoid sliding to the pavement below. Stunned circuits were bypassed or came back on line. The world swayed, then stabilized. Modular Man took off again, popped over the outer wall, then dropped to wave-top level again.
Three fingers on his right hand were twisted into spiral ruin. It was clearly time to leave.
He had accelerated to over 600 miles per hour by the time he reached Manhattan.
He’d talk to Travnicek again.
If he showed Travnicek that he was damaged, perhaps Travnicek would order him to stay out of trouble.
A slim hope, perhaps, but the only one he had.
“I got a real bad feeling about this,” Molly Bolt said. She was a slender girl, shaggy hair streaked in a half-dozen colors, inverted cross dangling from one ear.
The bodysnatcher leaned against the back wall, sucking absentmindedly on a bloody knuckle. Molly had gathered forty jumpers in the onion dome atop the Red Tower. There were 116 jumpers on the Rox the last time anyone had counted, but these were ones who mattered.
Juggler held up one of the leaflets that Modular Man had been handing out. 1-800-I-GIVE-UP. “Amnesty,” he read. “It says they’ll give us amnesty.” He really could juggle pretty good, at least when he was wearing his own body. Other than that, he was a useless little weasel, as far the bodysnatcher was concerned.
“How do we know it’s true?” Suzy Creamcheese asked nervously. She was a nervous little fifteen-year-old, no more than five feet tall, but the boys loved her. For two good reasons, at least forty inches of them, barely restrained now in a narrow halter top, fat nipples pushing against the fabric.
“We don’t know it’s true,” Molly told her bluntly. “This is the Combine. The Combine will fuck you every time.”
The Combine. That was K. C. Strange talk. She got it out of some book she read. K. C. Strange had been one of the first jumpers. She was dead now. So many dead or gone: David, Blaise, even Prime, who’d created them all. That was Zelda’s fault. Zelda had been Prime’s bodyguard. It had been her job to keep him safe, and she’d fucked it. Zelda had deserved to die.
With Prime dead and buried, there would be no new jumpers. They were the last.
“They won’t dare attack the Rox again,” Porker said. He’d squealed like a pig when Prime had fucked him up the ass. “Not after last time. It’s just a bluff.”
“Maybe,” Molly Bolt said. “Maybe not.”
“So what if it isn’t?” Alvin the Chipmunk said, smiling. “So we’ll do it to them again. Fun and games.” Alvin had killed both his parents, slitting their throats with his father’s straight razor while they slept. Blaise had read about him in the paper and decided Alvin was his kind of guy. They’d sprung him, brought him to the Rox, and Prime had done the rest.
“It’s not like last time,” Juggler insisted. He rattled the paper. “Amnesty… maybe we ought to…”
“Send them home in little pieces,” Alvin said, smiling. "Bloat’s not going anywhere,” Blueboy said. He’d put on some pants and buttoned up the cop shirt. A half-dozen badges were pinned to his chest, polished until they were as shiny as his mirror-shades. A captain’s hat, a size too large, was tilted at a rakish angle across his brow. “So everything’s copacetic.”
“If you trust Bloat,” said Captain Chaos, an anorexic fourteen-year-old with a crazy glint in her eyes.
“We’re on the same side,” Porker said.
“He’s a joker,” the Iceman pointed out.
“Joker poker,” echoed Captain Chaos. “Freak city express.”
Juggler glanced behind him nervously. “Don’t talk like that,” he whispered. “He might be listening.”
“Of course he’s listening,” Molly Bolt said. “He can’t help but listen. He hears what we think, he doesn’t give a flick what we say.” She looked around the room. “Zelda, what do you think?”
The bodysnatcher moved away from the wall. Everyone stopped talking. She knew they were all afraid of her. They thought she’d gone as psycho as Blaise. The bodysnatcher didn’t care.
“Zelda’s dead,” she said loudly. “A lot of you are going to be dead too before this is over.”
Suzy Creamcheese looked like she was going to cry. Juggler started reading his paper again, all about amnesty.
“Maybe not,” a new voice said. “Bloat wants volunteers.”
Patchwork stood in the door to the long hail. She was brown-haired, slender, freckled. Older than most of the jumpers, twenty at least, the same age Zelda had been before the aces had gotten to her. Patchwork wasn’t a jumper, and she wasn’t really a joker either, but both factions on the Rox seemed to trust her.
“Volunteers for what?” Molly Bolt asked her.
Patchwork walked toward her, boots ringing on the stone floor. “To even the odds. He figures, the robot scoped us out, maybe we should do a little recon of our own.”
“I’ll go,” the bodysnatcher said. She’d been itching to get back to Manhattan. And of course it had to be jumpers. Bloat’s freaks were too conspicuous for this kind of work.
“Okay,” Molly Bolt said. “I’m with you.” She looked around the room. “Vanilla, Blueboy, you’ll come too. Four ought to be enough.”
“Here,” Patchwork said, “I’ve got something for you.” She dug her fingers into her eye. There was a soft squelchy sound, a trickle of blood, and the eyeball popped out of the socket. Patchwork handed it to Molly Bolt. Then she popped out the other eye, ripped off her left ear, and handed those across as well. “Better put a move on it,” she said. “Charon is waiting, and you know how surly he gets.”
Friday afternoon
September 21, 1990
Using a few of the specialized tools that Travnicek had used to create him, working slowly and with great care, Modular Man managed to bend his fingers back into a shape that would work. But they didn’t work as well as they had, and the proportions were slightly different — just a little deformed. At least the plastic skin covering them hadn’t torn: the distortion wasn’t as noticeable as it would have been if the structural metal were peeking through.