She ducked. The last word was a shout, broadcast to the drones through her throat mike. A simultaneous crackle told her the shaped-charge cutters had blown. She yanked the transparent breather hood over her face and choked it shut, then powered up her cellular IFF.
The drones swarmed in through holes in the ceiling. Spiders and crabs and scorpions, all made of carbon polymers— recycled sewage, actually — they sprayed sticky antipersonnel foam everywhere, releasing anesthetic trichloromethane vapor wherever anyone struggled. A rating made a move toward her, and her combat implants took over; he went down like a sack of potatoes before she consciously noted his existence, rabbit-punched alongside the head by an inhumanly fast fist. Everything narrowed into the gap between herself and Martin, standing wide-eyed behind a table, his arms half-raised toward her and a rating already beginning to steer him toward the door.
Rachel went to combat speed, cutting her merely human nervous system out of the control loop.
Time slowed and light dimmed; the chains of gravity weakened, but the air grew thick and viscous around her. Marionettes twirled in slow motion all around as she jumped over a table and ran at Martin. His guard began to turn toward her and throw up an arm. She grabbed it and twisted, feeling it pop out of its socket. She threw a brisk left-handed punch at the other guard; ribs snapped like brittle cardboard, and a couple of the fine bones in the back of her hand fractured with the impact. It was hard to remember — hard to think — but her own body was her worst enemy, more fragile than her reflexes would admit.
She grabbed Martin with one arm, handling him delicately as bone china; the beginning of an oof of air from his lungs told her she’d winded him. The door wasn’t locked, so she kicked it open and dragged Martin through before it had time to rebound closed. She dropped him and spun in place, slammed it shut, then grabbed in a vest pocket for a lump of something like putty. “Omaha,” she shouted into her throat mike. Strobing patterns of red-and-yellow light raced over the surface of the putty — visible in her mechanized vision — and she jammed it into the doorframe and spat on it. It turned blue and began to spread rapidly, a wave of sticky liquid rushing around the gap between door and wall, setting hard as diamond.
Between the glued door, the severed intercom cables, and the chloroform and antipersonnel foam, it might be a minute or two before anyone in the room managed to raise the alarm.
Martin was trying to double over and gasp. She picked him up and ran down the corridor. It was like wading through water; she rapidly discovered it was easier to kick off with one foot, then the other, like low-gee locomotion.
A red haze at the edge of her vision told her she was close to burnout. Her peripheral nervous system might have been boosted, but for this sort of speed, it relied on anaerobic respiration, and she was exhausting her reserves frighteningly fast. At the next intersection, a lift car stood open: she lurched into it, dragging Martin behind, and tapped the button for the accommodation level in officer country. Then she dropped back to normal speed.
The doors slid shut as the lift began to rise, and Martin began to gasp. Rachel slumped against the far wall, black spots hazing her vision as she tried to draw air into straining lungs. Martin was first to speak.
“Where — did you learn—”
She blinked. A clock spiraled in the left upper quadrant of her vision. Eight seconds since she’d yelled Utah — eight seconds? Minutes, maybe. She drew a deep breath that turned into a yawn, flushing the carbon dioxide from her lungs. All her muscles ached, burning as if there were hot wires running down her bones. She felt sick, and her left hand was beginning to throb violently. “Special. Implants.”
“Think you nearly broke a — rib, back there. Where are we going?”
“Life. Boat.” Gasp. “Like I said.”
A light blinked above them. They’d crawled up one floor. One more to go.
The door opened on the right level. Rachel staggered upright. Nobody there, which was a blessing; in her present state, she didn’t know if she could put a hamster in its place, much less a soldier. She stepped out of the lift, Martin following. “My room,” she said quietly. ‘Try to look at ease.“ He raised his wrists. “Wearing these?”
Shit. Should have ripped them apart before running out of boost. She shook her head and hunted in her hip pocket, pulled out a compact gray tube. “Stun gun.” They ran out of luck halfway down the last corridor. A door opened and a petty officer stepped out; he moved to give them room to pass, then his jaw dropped as he realized what he was seeing. “Hey!” Rachel shot him. “Hurry,” she hissed over her shoulder, and stumbled ahead. Martin followed her. Her door was ahead, just around a curve in the corridor. “Gold” she called to the waiting lifeboat.
Red lights flashed overhead: the PA system piped up, a warbling alert noise. “Security Alert! Green deck accommodation sector B, two armed insurgents on the loose. Armed and dangerous. Security to Green deck accommodation B. Alert!”
“Shit,” Martin mumbled. A pressure door began to rumble shut ten meters ahead of them.
Rachel went to combat speed again, her vision greying almost immediately. She threw herself forward: stood directly beneath the door and thrust straight up at the descending pressure barrier. Martin moved forward with glacial slowness as she felt the motors bear down on her, trying to crush her in half. He ducked and swam under the barrier. She followed him, letting go, and stayed fast, even though her hands and feet were becoming numb and a deadly warning pincushion sensation pricked at her face. The door to her cabin was two meters away. “Juno!” she yelled at it through her throat mike, the word coming out in a high-pitched gabble that sounded like the croaking of an aged dinosaur to her ears.
The door swung open. Martin ran through inside, but it was too late for Racheclass="underline" she couldn’t see, and her knees were beginning to give way. The combat acceleration stopped, and she felt herself floating, a bruised impact along one side.
Someone was dragging her over gravel and it hurt like hell. Her heart sounded as if it was about to explode. She couldn’t get enough air.
Sound of a door slamming.
Darkness.
Circus Of Death
The committee for the Revolution had taken over the onion-domed orthodox cathedral in Plotsk, making it the headquarters of the Commissariat for Extropian Ideology. All those who rejected the doctrine of revolutionary optimization and refused to flee the town were dragged before the tribunal and instructed boringly and at length about the nature of their misdemeanor; then they were shot, minds mapped and uploaded into the Festival, and sentenced to corrective labor— usually all at once. There weren’t many of them; for the most part, the population had fled into the wilderness, transcended, or happily adopted the revolutionary cause.
Sister Seventh’s hut, spun from local memories of myth and legend uploaded into the noosphere of the Festival, squatted in the courtyard outside the Revolutionary Commissariat and defecated massively.
Presently, the house stood and ambled in the direction of the cherry trees that fringed the square: it was hungry, and the Bishop’s liking for cherry blossom wouldn’t stop it eating.
Sister Seventh wrinkled her snout with displeasure and ambled indoors. The floor of the church was full of plaintiffs, queuing to demand this or appeal that. They stood before a kitchen table parked in the middle of the nave, behind which sat half a dozen bored-looking revolutionary functionaries. The small, frenetic human called Rubenstein waved his arms and exhorted their chairman, who was so heavily augmented with mechanical add-ons that he clanked when he walked. The subject of the exhortation seemed to be something to do with the need to reverse the previous policy of destroying the artistically illiterate. True, that priority rated low in the estimates of the Critics — after all, you can’t win an argument over esthetics with a corpse — but Rubenstein’s willingness to change his mind after only a day or two in her company didn’t commend his artistic integrity to her. These curious, lumpen humans were so impossibly gnomic in their utterances, so lacking in consistency, that sometimes she despaired of understanding their underlying esthetic.