"spray." The entire room glowed blue for an instant and the attacking Lilliputians disappeared, their atoms disrupted by the neutron stream.
The bed also disappeared, as well as the night table, the drip I.V. stand, the lamp and the entire wall. A cold night wind blew in through the gaping hole where the wall had been. The edges of the hole were as smooth as melted glass. Forrester stood in the corner of the room, with his back against the wall. He lowered the strange looking weapon. It resembled a small flame-thrower, with a knurled pistol grip and an unusually shaped muzzle, only without the attached hose and tanks.
Steiger walked over to the hole in the wall. It was about twelve feet across and eight feet high. Steiger stepped up to the edge and looked down 110 stories. the wind plucked at his hair and clothes, its coolness soothing to the wounds on his face.
"Jesus Christ," he said, softly.
Forrester came up to stand beside him, holding the disruptor in his right hand. It was difficult to believe that something the size of a sawed-off shotgun could have done such damage.
"I think we've got a slight problem here with over penetration," Forrester said, wryly. "Darkness always did overdo things. Sure works, though. If he ever gets all the bugs out, I might actually consider making these standard issue.".
Steiger simply stared at him.
"You look terrible," said Forrester.
"Yeah," said Steiger. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then snapped on his communicator. "This is Steiger. All posts, report."
"Post 1, sir. Lafferty here. All secure down here." "Casualties?"
Four dead, two wounded, sir. Should I send in the fire brigade, sir? We've got alarms going off all over the place."
"Yeah, send 'em in. Make sure we get all the wounded out and stand by to evacuate patients…Get additional personnel in if you have to. Steiger out."
"Post 2, sir. Cpl. Steinberg reporting. Everybody's dead. I'm the only one left. But we're secure, sir. That is, I'm secure. I guess. I mean… hell, I don't know, I-"
"Pull yourself together, Steinberg. You all right?"
"I've been hit, sir, but it's not serious, I don't think. I mean, I'll manage. "
"Good man. Hang in there, we'll get someone to you as soon as we can.
Stand by."
And on it went. Every single post, men dead, men wounded, but the attack had been repulsed. Fortunately, none of the hospital patients had been hurt. The
Lilliputians had known exactly where to go and they had struck directly at the top floor. Now they were all dead. They had given no quarter and asked none. Steiger and Forrester went out into the corridor, filled with smoke and flames, steaming from the sprinklers interacting with the heat, blackened from the plasma blasts, scarred by laser fire, littered with bodies.
"Oh, God damn it to hell," said Forrester. his voice breaking slightly. "All this just because of me."
"Don't do that to yourself, Moses," Steiger said. "This is a war. And the Network has a lot to answer for."
"And they're going to answer for it, believe me," Forrester said grimly. "We were lucky this time, but the entire top part of this building will have to be evacuated.
Christ, how many of them were there?"
“I don't know," said Steiger. "It seemed like hundreds. But we stopped
'em. We stopped 'em cold."
"Yes, for now," Forrester said. "But I can't risk another attack like that. I can't stay here. It's too dangerous to the other patients and the hospital personnel."
"But you haven't been released fur duty-"
"After this, I don't think you'll get any arguments from Dr. Hazen or any of the staff," said Forrester. "Get me out of here, Creed. I'm going back to headquarters. We've got a lot of work to do." Chapter 10
Lucas materialised in the middle of Washington Street. For a moment, he did not know where he was; then a blast from a diesel truck's air horn caused him to leap to one side, narrowly avoiding being run down.
"Get outta the road, asshole!" the trucker yelled out the open window as he rumbled by.
Lucas looked around. The area he stood in resembled a war zone. The street was pockmarked with pot holes. The side-walks were cracked and buckling. The warehouses all around him were shuttered and boarded up and covered with graffiti. An abandoned car was rusting on its wheel hubs, the wheels long since stolen. The rest of the car had been stripped. the windows shattered and an uprooted traffic sign had been hurled through the windshield, like a harpoon transfixing a whale-an eloquent commentary on the mindless fury and frustration of the scuttlefish who crawled these streets at night.
And it was getting dark.
“New York City," Lucas said, realising where he was.
"Damn. I've done it again."
He groaned and brought his hands up to his head, pressing them flat against his temples. His head felt as if it were about to burst. The pain rivalled the worst hangover he'd ever had. It
kept fading in and out, as if someone were flickering a switch on and off.
He cursed Darkness and his damned telempathic chrono-circuitry although without his interference, Lucas knew he wouldn't even be alive. Still, it was a mixed blessing. Each time he thought he had a handle on it, he'd somehow lose control and flip through time and space like some sort of leaf blown on a temporal wind.
And the more often he did it, the greater the strain seemed to be. Obviously, he required a period of recuperation after each translocation. Darkness had warned him about that.
Curiously, the amount of time and space he covered during each translocation seemed to make no difference. Whether he translocated from one side of a room to another or from Darkness's secret laboratory headquarters all the way to Earth, it seemed to feel the same. The sensation upon arrival was not altogether unlike what most people felt upon making transition via the old chronoplates or the warp discs that superseded them, although the vertiginous feeling was minimised some-what with the warp discs. The initial translocation-the departure-took place so fast that it was impossible to notice it happening. It occurred literally with the speed of thought. But immediately upon arrival, there was the unpleasant sensation of vertigo and a curious coldness, as if a chill mountain breeze were blowing through his body, whistling in between the bones and organs, making every single nerve fibre shiver. And he had noticed that the effects seemed to be increasing every time.
He often wondered if Darkness even had a clue to what he was doing. That the man was a genius on a level beyond anything that anyone had ever known was indisputable, but at the same time, and perhaps because of that, he was also utterly incomprehensible. He often agonised over the ethical implications of his work, yet the rights of individuals meant nothing to him. This was not the time to be concerned about such things, Lucas realised. He was in a dangerous neighbourhood and it was getting dark. Somewhere nearby, Andre and Gulliver were being held prisoner by the Network. And Lucas had no weapons.
Where the hell was Darkness?
The shadows lengthened as night fell on the city. This wasn't the kind of darkness that I had in mind, thought Lucas. Why hadn't Darkness followed him? He looked up and down the street.. He had absolutely no idea where Andre and Gulliver were being held. There were warehouses and old factory buildings along both sides of the street. They could be in any one of them.
Then he saw a sleek black Cadillac, a stretch limousine, turning slowly into the street. It was definitely not the sort of vehicle one expected to encounter in this area of town. He quickly translocated behind the abandoned car. The limo pulled up in front of an old brick warehouse building with graffiti all over the door; and two men got out, dragging a third between them. The front door on the other side of the car opened and another man got out. Even at that distance, Lucas recognised the massive figure of Nikolai Drakov.