Tetsami was lucky. She saw the sniper as he was thrown through the side of the building and tumbled toward the ground. She wouldn’t have to swing the crane again.
Blondie began to scream.
It was a hideous slow-motion bellow that Tetsami first thought belonged to the carnage she was wreaking. Her nose, now stranded in realtime, told her otherwise. There was the smell of burning synthetics, overloaded circuitry, and burning flesh.
Sniper three wasn’t a dope. He’d seen his friends get wasted and was trying to frag the control trailer. She was smelling a near miss. In a moment or two the geek was going to waste her.
So much for tactical genius. You should have wasted him first.
Tetsami got a fix on a camera with a view of the goof. He was in full armor, sort of half leaning and half clamped on the edge of floor ten. He was pointing his carbine down—toward her no doubt. As she watched, there was the stroboscopic flare from below—Zanzibar and the plasma rifle.
She expected to be blinded, but the cameras on the robot she was looking through adjusted to the light level without so much as a twitch. She looked for the ID of the robot. It was a plasma welder.
She took control of the thing and realized that she couldn’t move it any nearer to the sniper without alerting him. The specs on this beast had it going no more than a klick an hour, max, and it was as big as he was with sinister looking manipulators and jets everywhere. With the plasma tanks on it, it looked like a bomb....
Hell, it is a bomb.
Her connection fuzzed, and the trailer filled with the smell of another near miss. She didn’t allow it to screw up her programming. The safety locks on the welder were a little tougher than the safety locks on the cranes, but she broke it in three seconds.
Even as her control died, she shot the improv program to the core of the welding robot.
Three simple commands: Close the welding aperture to zero, power up the plasma generators to max, and—after waiting a second—lose the magnetic containment.
The trailer rocked again, in the wake of a giant explosion. Tetsami jacked out the cable and fell into the real world. Blondie quivered in the corner. No laser sliced the trailer.
Her shot had been right on target.
* * * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Foreign Relations
“The difference between us and the alien is the belief that we know ourselves that much better. The similarity lies in the fact that we are ignorant of both.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.”
—Muhammad
(570-632)
Sergeant Mariah Zanzibar, for the first time in seven years, found herself questioning Mr. Magnus’ judgment. Those doubts were perhaps the most painful thoughts to cross her mind in those seven years. She had given her loyalty to Dominic Magnus, and personal disloyalty was one of the worst crimes she could think of—up there with incest and fratricide.
She had tried to convince him, preach caution, warn him about the people he was using. However, she’d known she was preaching to deaf ears even before his interview with Shane.
She should have resigned then.
Instead, she had accepted his decision to go on with the bizarre plan. He was right about her knowledge of GA&A security. They needed her.
She should still have resigned in protest. It might have made him reconsider, though Zanzibar knew him well enough to know that would have been unlikely.
So, after having her protests brushed aside, she had gone along ...
To end up shot full of holes in the middle of Godwin with the two people in Magnus’ new organization that she trusted the least.
Even as she approached the intersection of Sacco and West Lenin, she still found it incredible that they had escaped from the ambush with their lives. Worse, she kept feeling unprofessional irritation at the fact that it was Tetsami who had saved them. Mr. Magnus had placed Tetsami in command of the trio, and she’d performed well—
That made Zanzibar mad.
Neither Tetsami nor Shane deserved his trust. Tetsami was a freelance software jock with no loyalty except to herself. Shane was a traitor; she had sold out every trust she had ever earned.
Zanzibar spat into the middle of the intersection. She checked the chronometer on her wrist—fifteen minutes late for the meeting. Not bad, considering she was on foot. Tetsami had stolen a truck from the construction site to evac Shane and get her to a medic, leaving Zanzibar to meet with their bookish contact, Levy, and the Paralian ship expert named “Flower.”
What a name.
Zanzibar scanned the surrounding buildings for an ambush, and saw nothing. She tracked with the nearly discharged plasma rifle anyway. There might only be a half-second burst left on the thing, but its deterrence value helped keep the casual Bakunin night crawlers at a distance.
After one last survey of the night-emptied landscape, she slung her weapon and walked up to the entrance of Bolshevik Books. The windows were opaqued, and the store was obviously closed. She paused before she pressed the call button.
Could she have been followed?
It was a paranoid thought but one worth reviewing. There was the possibility of a ground team of marines out there. She had avoided further ambush by going underground at the construction site. The Godwin sewer system was hideously complex. No one knew it all, but Zanzibar was aware of the best subterranean highways. She’d surfaced nearly ten klicks away from the construction site.
Was that good enough?
She never got a chance to answer her own question. The intercom came alive, a laser began scanning her, and a small holo of a nervous-looking gentleman asked, “Who’s there?”
The man was balding, middle-aged, and had an accent that Zanzibar thought belonged to either Paschal or Thubohu. It was probably Levy. She gave the password, “I’m a patriot.”
“There are no patriots on Bakunin.”
“Then perhaps I’m a partisan.”
“Enter, comrade.” The “comrade” part was laced with audible sarcasm. Zanzibar shrugged. The exchange had gone as she expected. Now all she had to do was meet this Flower, and see if the “expert” was what the plan needed.
What the plan needs is a miracle.
The door opened, and Johann Levy ushered her into his bookstore. She followed him through the stacks of paper-bound books. Levy led her into a windowless office awash in clutter. The only concession to order was a clear spot on the metallic green desk upon which sat a counter-surveillance generator, a wide-band signal detector, and a secure holo communicator unit. Everything was off except for the countersurveillance box, since you couldn’t transmit in or out of an RF-damping field.
Flower was sitting behind the desk.
Zanzibar suppressed a gasp when she crossed the threshold, and she had to summon a reserve of composure to continue striding over to Levy’s offered seat without showing her surprise.
She hadn’t expected Flower to be nonhuman.