"Okay, now." But she was not. She was shaking violently. It was a common reaction to stunner shock. She would be feeling as cold as he.
"Why were those men shooting at you?" he asked, trying to gain some stability by concentrating on business. "What're you doing here?"
"It was a girl, Thomas. With your hair and eyes."
"Shut her up!"
It began to twist and burn. Down deep inside, the dikes began to give. The demons howled and laughed. That insane image of the gun thing superimposed itself over Alyce's face. "Mike!" he gasped. "Take two men outside and keep an eye out for McGraws."
His second desperate attempt to achieve stability failed. The dikes were bulging inward. "Why're you here?" he squeaked.
"I thought it was all dead," she said. "I thought I'd forgotten it. But I can't, Thomas. Go away. Leave me alone."
Leave her alone? Yes. Fine. But how did he get her to leave him alone?
"Lady, the Chief asked a question," his man Nicolas growled. "Answer up."
"Easy, Nick. No rough stuff. This's personal, not business."
He spoke too late.
"Not business?" Snake-swift, the Seiner laid a hand alongside the woman's face. The blow hurled her to the floor. He caught her hair as she fell, yanked. She screamed, but her cry did not register with Moyshe.
What did was her hair, face, and throat coming away in Nicolas's hand. The Seiner raised his trophy like the shrunken, wrinkled head of a Cyclops. The unmasked woman seemed vaguely familiar, but she was not benRabi's old haunt.
"Moyshe, you done been set up."
BenRabi could not stifle a squeaky little laugh. "I done been, Nick."
Nicolas wheeled on the woman. "You start talking. What kind of game are you playing?"
"Don't bother, Nick. We won't get anything. We don't have the equipment." There were no tears in the woman's eyes now. She showed nothing but apprehension. Moyshe added, "I don't know if it would be worth the trouble anyway."
He did not need equipment. Despite the chaotic state of his mind, a strong suspicion blossomed. Someone was working on him. He had a good idea who, and why.
"Hey, Moyshe," another of the men called. "Mike says we got trouble. McGraws. A dozen or so. Out by the carrier."
He was regaining his composure. "It was a trap. But it didn't go according to plan." He turned to the woman. "The pirates weren't in the script, were they?"
To his surprise, she responded. She shook her head.
"You tell the Old Man to get him a better makeup crew. Nick, we've got to get out of here. See if you can get Kindervoort on Tac Two. Tell him I need a pickup squad. We'll let the Corps worry about their carrier."
He had cobbled together a false peace within him. He knew it would not last. He had to finish fast. He would begin crumbling again soon. The one straw too many had been thrown into the camel's back. From here on in each period of tranquility would be just one more frantic holding action doomed to eventual failure. The decay would accelerate whenever the survival pressure slackened.
He had seen it all before, in fellow agents. He was entering the initial stages of a spontaneous, uncontrolled, unsupervised personality program debriefing. It could get rough. There were so many identities in his background that he could lose his anchor to any of them.
"What about the woman?" Nicolas asked.
"Leave her. She's not the enemy."
"Moyshe," said another, "Jarl says to meet him by Jellyroll Jones. You know what he means?"
"Yeah. It's a statue in the old park. Pass the word to Mike. He knows the place. Nick, lead off. Keep close, guys." He turned to the woman. "Good-bye." He could not think of anything else to say.
She shrugged, but seemed relieved.
They slid out the back way, ran through a block of shadows. BenRabi began to worry about the time. He had been away from his job too long. How much longer? But it looked easy...
There was a shot and a shout.
A second slug ricocheted off brick near benRabi. Cobblestones became arrowheads piercing his chest as he tried to get closer to the soil.
Shades of his last visit to The Broken Wings, he thought.
His men returned the fire, their lasebeams scoring the brick of the walls of the buildings flanking the alley where the ambusher crouched.
"Come on!" benRabi snarled. "Shoot at him, dammit!" A fourth slug kicked chips of alley and lead into his face. He wiped at tiny pearls of blood, wondered why the assassin was concentrating on him. Was he Marya's man?
Where was Jarl? Where were Mike and his men?
"Dammit, you guys, don't you know this ain't a goddamned game?"
And where was Mouse, who had started this mess by disappearing? Emotion began to rage through him again, undirected and confused. He tried to control it, failed. His personality program resumed its dissolution. The only anchor left him was a hard, red hot anger.
A foot scraped cobblestone somewhere behind him. He rolled, shot, hit a leg. A man yelped, scrambled for cover.
The gunman with the antique firearm kept booming away. McClennon... benRabi took a second shot at his victim before he got out of sight.
Another shadow drifted into the shelter of a doorway.
Moyshe's program ceased its disintegration.
His perceptions reached a high usually stimulated only by drugs. He felt every point and angle of the cobblestones beneath him, seemed to become one with the dampness left by the programed rain. He saw the grey and brownness of stone, the expanding sparks and yellows of another muzzle flash, heard the thud as a bullet smacked brick behind him. He smelled damp and sulfurousness of swamp the atmosphere systems could never completely overcome. He could even taste, it seemed, something salty.
Whoa! That was blood from a chip wound, dribbling into the corner of his mouth.
He edged sideways. Four meters and he would be in a position where the would-be assassin would have to expose himself to fire. He made it. The man shot. Moyshe shot back, heard a yelp. His men pursued him in his rush into that alley.
Moyshe kicked the revolver away from the would-be assassin. "This clown is as incompetent as you guys. Come on. Get your butts moving before I heat them up myself." He waved his stunner angrily.
There were shouts from the alley they had abandoned. He spun, dropped, fired quickly, followed his men. The sting of his flesh wounds drove him like a hunted beast.
Who am I now? he wondered. This isn't like me. I'm not a fighter. Gundaker Niven? Niven was supposed to be a hardcase.
The adrenalin had him on the verge of another case of the shakes. He had been through this kind of thing before, for the Bureau, but never had been able to achieve Mouse's calmness under fire. He always got scared, shaky, and constantly had to battle the impulse to flee.
Maybe that was why he had outlived several Mouselike partners.
But they, too, had been programed to their roles.
He was doing well this time, he thought. He was showing flashes of case-hardened calm, and shooting when it was time to shoot. He had not thought himself capable of that.
Where the hell was that idiot Mouse?
After a dozen twists and turns along his journey he slowed, started trying to look like a tourist headed for the Jones monument. His men stalked along behind him.
The monument had not changed. It was the same tall bronze statue surrounded by the same small park, its boundary stockaded by imported pines and bushes. Between the trees and the statue there were a dozen lighted fountains where sea nymphs bathed in endlessly falling waters.
The park was the heart of an oasis in the desert of Old Town. Lining the streets facing it were several museums, the Opera, a library, and smart little shops which catered to the wealthy. Among them were homes belonging to some of Angel City's oldest families. The square was a tenacious place. It refused to admit that Old Town's glories had faded. Most decaying cities contained a few such pearls.