The last hour of the Rox had come.
The android timed the falling shells, waited for a lull, and dropped into Travnicek’s tower. As he flew over the inner bailey he saw that craters of various sizes had shattered the symmetry of the stone flags. The smell of high explosive hung in a noxious cloud. There were dead people, and parts of people, scattered in the rubble.
Modular Man dropped down the long tube of the tower. At the bottom he found Travnicek’s door still sealed. He knocked, received no response.
He put a hand to the door. It was hot to the touch.
He took the tarp off his weapon and aimed it at the door.
The gun’s official designation was XM-214, but was better known as a Six-Pack. It was a six-barreled Gatling gun developed for the military, a little over two feet long and capable of firing 4000 rounds per minute. Modular Man had stolen it, along with most of his other conventional weaponry, from a military arsenal.
He couldn’t mount it normally because the Turtle had seriously wrenched his shoulder mounts, but he’d lightened the weapon by removing the power pack and run a cable through the torn shoulder to his own generators. He set it for the lower rate of fire — a mere 400 rpm — stood so as to minimize the chance of ricochet, and aimed the weapon at the door.
He had to know. He had to know officially. Otherwise he’d just have to obey the last set of orders, defending the Rox till there was nothing left.
The barrels spun too fast for the eye to follow. The weapon was very loud in the closed space. The Six-Pack tore ragged chunks out of the door. Gas and smoke boiled out. The android reached through the door, spun the wheel from the inside, and opened it.
A cruise missile dropped dozens of cluster bombs somewhere on the Rox, the rolling boom going on forever, the light so bright it flashed through the semitransparent tower shaft and cast weird, flickering shadows on the dense, swirling smoke.
Travnicek was lying dead on his smoldering carpet in a sprawl of extended, flaccid neck organs and torn cilia. Modular Man bent by the body, turned it over, touched the neck, and sought a pulse. He couldn’t find one.
Modular Man stood up on his single leg. He paused a moment to see if anything would happen, if there was some hardwired circuit he didn’t know about telling him what he’d have to do next.
Nothing.
He was free.
He wondered what kind of moral universe he’d just entered. Probably, he thought, the same one Travnicek had lived in all along.
Somehow, though, he’d gotten away with it. That’s what seemed to be going on here, people getting away with things. The jumpers had got away with an appalling amount of carnage, so much the military had to be called in to suppress them, and Bloat had got away with an immense amount so far, and whoever was in Pulse was probably still getting away with it, with killing thousands in what seemed to be a personal war against all.
There was a huge explosion and the Rox seemed to jump six inches to the left.
Time to get himself and Patchwork out of here.
Modular Man bent to wrap his weapon in the tarp again. Something on the floor caught his attention.
Patchwork’s brown-gold-flecked eye, gazing blankly from a mass of rubble.
The young Aborigine walked along the beach toward the besieged castle. He glanced out across the water at the topless towers of Manhattan. There seemed a respite in the fighting. Could there be a truce?
Something whistled low and fast across the bay. As it neared the Rox, it simply blinked out of sight. There was a small clap of thunder as air filled the void where the cruise missile had been. Air displacement made the end of the smoke trail suddenly all ragged.
Wyungare smiled, but not happily. No truce.
Certainly there had not been for the past two hours since Wyungare had packed the motley convoy of Jack the Gator, Bagabond’s old black cat, the bruised Detroit Steel, an exhausted Reflector, and a nearly comatose Mistral back across the dangerous waters of the lower bay toward safety.
Wyungare had then spent nearly an hour hunkered on a canted slab of broken concrete, staring at the war-torn skies, but not truly seeing them. He was inside, down in the lower world, talking with the guardian warreen, the spirit of Wyungare’s companion beast. He had not reacted to or even noticed when debris from the increasing number of shells and ground-based missiles had sliced the air around him. There were priorities, and now it was more important to gather strength and resolve for the trial the man guessed he would be faced with soon.
The warreen had bid him farewell and good fortune with both affection and weariness. It was, Wyungare knew, not at all a goodbye.
In his second hour after escaping from the collapsed dungeon, Wyungare felt the fine engines of his muscles and bones beginning to function in harmony again as he wandered the tattered beaches of the Rox. Occasionally he found injured survivors he could help. For some he stanched the bleeding with bits of multicolored wire as tourniquets. He found ragged bushes, the leaves of which reminded him of mallee scrub. He made rudely blended poultices. He taught one woman to press the point on her torn artery that would keep her from bleeding to death for now. He tried to give her the courage to stay patiently in place — and alive — until aid might arrive.
Another man, he realized, was too close to death and in too much pain. Wyungare gave him release as quickly and mercifully as he could. He used his hands.
After that, Wyungare knew it was time to face that which he had discussed with the warreen. He walked upright and deliberately along the margin of raw sand toward the castle.
What looked like three cruise missiles came in low across the water from three different directions. The scream filled the skies and Wyungare’s hearing. Two of the blunt torpedo shapes flickered out of existence at the last possible moment before detonation. The third slammed squarely into the golden dome.
The explosion lifted Wyungare off his feet and hurled him back along the sand. Shards of castle flipped lazily end over end, then started spiking the packed sand like the knives of little boys playing mumblety-peg. The Aborigine lay dazed for a few moments, and saw a ton chunk of masonry bury itself a few meters from his feet. The ground coughed in pain and then was still.
He heard a few desultory splashes as the last of the sky-born debris plunged into the water.
Wyungare shook his head, sat up, then levered himself to his feet. Bloat’s refuge had been in bad shape before; now it looked like a sandcastle kicked to wreckage by a tribe of feral children.
Could there be anyone left alive inside?
Wyungare concentrated. Yes. Some of the life within the destroyed complex was agonized, but it was still vital.
He would go inside and find Bloat.
There were echoes of a scream and then the sound of an explosion. Somewhere in that reverberation, Bloat heard bodysnatcher and Kafka arguing.
“You can’t disturb the governor!” Kafka shrieked. “He’s sleeping. He needs to rest.”
“Fuck that, roach!” bodysnatcher shouted back. “He hasn’t got time to rest. None of us have any time left.”
Bloat’s eyelids seemed to have the weight of manhole sewer lids, but he forced them open. “Shut up, both of you,” he managed to grate out.
Kafka whirled around stiffly, craning his roach-head back to look up at Bloat. “Governor, I —”
That was all he got out. In that second, Bloat heard the alarm from one of the remaining radar units — far, far too late. In an instant that seemed to last a year, Kafka stood there, his mouth open, the shell-like body bowed backward. Pulse — bodysnatcher — stood behind him with hands on hips. His joker guards were arrayed before him like a shield, their weapons at ready and trained on bodysnatcher. The Great Hall glittered around him, glistening in the dark from a thousand lamps.