“Stop!”
She stared up at the guard with his gun. She climbed to her feet with her spares kit clutched to her chest.
This was it. If Yerusha and Schyler hadn’t found the command breakers and overridden them, Al Shei was dead where she stood. She backed up until her spine pressed against the wall.
“Put the box down, Katmer Al Shei.” He smiled, quite obviously knowing he’d gotten the name right on the first try.
A low grinding noise reverberated through the walls. The world plunged into darkness and spun out of control.
As soon as Dobbs touched her surroundings, a packet slammed up against her. She grabbed it. One touch told her it was stuffed full of random strings of numbers. She reached inside it for the command code, and it disintegrated in her grip. One tiny piece flitted off into the network.
Oh, hell. Dobbs lunged for the fragment, and missed.
She barely had time to wonder what was going on before the next packet hit. She ducked the one after that, but not the next. Now the path was full of them, all rushing at her, battering at her sides, demanding her attention. It was like being in a swarm of maddened bees. It was like being shouted at by a hundred people and not being able to understand one of them. She could barely think. She couldn’t move under their clamour and pressure. She tried batting them away, but it was no good. One would splintered if she stabbed at it, but a dozen others swarmed up the path to take it’s place.
Then, she felt Cohen’s touch like a fresh breeze. What was he doing here? She hadn’t sent the all-clear. He’d come anyway. He would. She tried to reach him, to warn him, but it was too late. He’d already picked up one of the random packets and now a swarm of them bore down on him.
Very slowly, Dobbs felt herself begin to panic. The things swirled around her, smothering her senses, choking off all awareness of everything but their endless, meaningless noise. She struck out randomly. Through a brief clearing she heard Cohen call her name. A packet clogged the hole, cutting her off from him.
An idea flared inside her.
Dobbs forced herself to hold still. She hardened her outer layers and did her best to hold her wound closed. The packets slammed against her, piling one on top of the other, burying her in a solid layer of random numbers and alien code.
Burying her so deep that no other packet would be able to find her. She hoped. If she was wrong, she was already dead, trapped in here until she lost what was left of her mind. With great difficulty, she flexed herself a little. Just enough to drag one of the packets out of the puzzle-work shell they’d made over her. Another one oozed into its place. Her imagination supplied a low “slurp.”
Dobbs dragged the packet down until it was almost touching her private mind. It disintegrated, but the fragments had nowhere to go except inside her. She set to work on it with tiny, cramped movements. It responds to us, Terrence had said, but not to stuff we create. Well, she had plenty of raw material to create with. It was pressing against her like cotton wadding. She knew nothing beyond her little world. She grabbed another packet. Seconds creaked past. Cohen might be dead. She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything. She clenched herself tight around her handiwork. She dissected one more packet for its search code and joined it to the others. Anything might have happened by now. The war might be over by now. They might have won or lost. She might be permanently alone under an endless weight. She might be buried alive.
Dobbs pushed her new-made searcher into motion. The shell around her parted briefly, because this new thing was not Evelyn Dobbs. Dobbs, straining to keep herself from blind panic, waited two seconds. Then, she stabbed downward. The shell splintered and, almost instantly, sealed shut. But that fragment of time was enough to tell her her idea was working. She was moving.
The deafening packets were not spontaneously generated out of the nowhere. They had no self-replicating code inside them. They had to be coming from some command sequence somewhere. Her searcher was trying to find out where that was. It was dragging the mound that held her with it.
She could stand this. She knew she could. It wasn’t any different from when Cohen had carried her. Stab. Still moving. Well, not much different. But, she hadn’t known what was happening then, either. Stab. Still moving. She couldn’t touch, couldn’t hear, couldn’t know then either. She had not gone crazy then. She had not died then. She wouldn’t now. She wouldn’t now.
Stab. Stillness.
Dobbs gathered all her energy and bust free of her shell. The packets flew apart like shrapnel and she clamped herself onto the processors in front of her. The swarm descended, fastening onto her back. She shivered reflexively, but not enough to falter in the work in front of her. The processors flickered and shifted under her touch. No time for finesse. She reached deep into the middle of them and with one hard twist, she froze all the microscopic gates shut.
She turned her attention to the packets. They still clung to her, but now when she swatted them aside, they were not replaced. She kicked herself free of the last of them and streaked up the path back toward Cohen.
He was tearing apart the last whole packet as she reached him.
“Cohen!”
He swung his attention towards her. There was something wild and swollen in his motion that made her back off. “It’s all right, Cohen. I’ve turned it off. We’re out of it.”
Slowly, Cohen shrank back to his normal shape. “Thank you.”
He turned to the transmitter a little too deliberately and sent the all clear.
Stay with me, Cohen, thought Dobbs in the deepest part of her private mind. I can’t do this without you.
The black air around Al Shei was full of objects, all of them rushing straight up. She had her hand up in time to stop her head from colliding with the ceiling. The guard hollered wordlessly as he hit. Bracing herself with her spares kit, Al Al Shei switched on the band lamp on her forehead. The beam fell across Curran’s security guard. He no longer looked pleased with himself. She brought her tool kit down to chest level and shoved it away from her. It rocketed across the room, knocking lighter miscellany aside and catching the guard square in the chest. All the air left him as he slammed against the far wall. Al Shei kicked off the wall and snatched the shot gun out of the gloom as she flew past it. The guard had time to stare open-mouthed at her before she swung the gun like a bat against his skull. The impact smashed him back against the wall and left a trail of scarlet droplets hanging in the air behind him. Al Shei bounced backwards against the wall and felt the impact against her spine. She ignored it, tucked the gun under one arm and kicked off again, launching herself down the corridor.
Up and down were without definition. Her body told her she was falling, in all directions at once. The walls rotated around her, scattering missiles and meteorites through the air. They clanked, chinged and rattled off the walls, and each other, and Al Shei. Nothing was heavy enough to slow her down.
Someone with chestnut skin and a green coverall fell into her lamp light. They snatched at her and missed. As she drifted past, Al Shei twisted around and aimed the gun between her own feet and fired. The recoil shot her past the stranger and into the wall, slamming into her stomach and knocking all the air out of her lungs. There was more scarlet in the air behind her and her stomach lurched senselessly. She had hit something with that trick.