She reformed a few metres away. Looking down at him.
‘I think you would have made the right decision given time, but there isn’t any. I think you’re just too weak.’
Du Bois pushed himself up onto all fours and then to his feet. He looked like he had been scribbled on with a razor.
‘If you’re going to do that,’ he managed, ‘then you can’t complain about me using a gun.’ He started shutting down his pain receivers. It would mean he would not know his limits. He would probably be dead before he was aware of it, but he knew he had to die on his feet fighting.
‘A fair fight?’ she asked. He nodded, though both knew it would never be fair. ‘A good death.’
‘I’ve lived long enough,’ he said quietly. Du Bois knew that she would hack the cloning process and he would not be coming back. He knew he would miss this world and the people in it. He would miss Alexia.
He brought the sword up into a two-handed guard. She came at him with a bewildering number of rapid spear strikes: she swung and stabbed at him, two-handed strikes, one-handed thrusts, the spear moving towards him as if it wanted his flesh. He parried and dodged, moving sinuously, always trying to be where she least expected him to be. Ancient moves taught to him deep in the rock. He moved around the spear and her blows but never gained the upper hand. His sword and her spear cut through or destroyed any part of the pier they touched.
He ducked, dancing sideways under the spearhead, a blow meant for the side of his head just missing him. She reversed the movement of the spear and tried a back swing. Du Bois moved forward, for the first time in the fight on the offensive. He blocked the haft of the spear with his left hand, reaching across his body. The force of the blow broke every bone in his hand, but he did not feel it and the bones quickly started to heal again.
He was close enough now, inside her reach. He spat blood in her face. The nanites in the blood immediately attacked her nano-defences. She cried out, although even momentarily distracted she still had the presence of mind to reverse the spear and hit him in the stomach with the butt. She hit him so hard that the blunt force trauma burst the skin and broke three of his ribs, sending splinters of bone into his internal organs. The force of the blow took him off his feet, and he landed on one knee.
Du Bois swung the sword. It was as near a perfect blow as he had ever landed. He cut easily through the haft of the wooden-bladed spear to slice her open from her hip, up her torso and across her face. Then he stood up, reversed his grip, and with all the strength he could muster brought the sword down straight through her, practically bisecting her head and torso. She staggered back. Somehow she didn’t split in two. In the horrific wound all du Bois could see was blackness. The wound started to seal itself like a zip.
He smiled.
‘I win,’ he told her and then lowered the shimmering, humming sword to his side. His phone told him that he had just received a text.
The bag lady spun the two halves of the spear around and jammed them together. The spear immediately healed itself. Then she stalked towards him and stabbed the spear into his foot. He felt the spear blade branch out and start growing up through his flesh, breaking out of and then back through his skin, climbing inexorably towards his heart, lungs and finally his brain to kill him.
Behind them, the wooden building they had wrecked collapsed.
The five distinct reports rolled across the water like thunder. The bag lady was solid when the bullets hit. The nanites infected her nano-form as powerful defences tried to track down each little machine and consume it.
‘Die, you fucking bitch! Die!’ There was more anger there than fear. Alexia attacked with more frenzy than skill with the two long-bladed Japanese fighting knives du Bois had had custom-made for her a long time ago. The weapons were balanced to contain tiny reservoirs in the hilt, the nanites delivered via grooves down the folded steel blades. The nanite virus that had cost Alexia a small fortune to obtain, helped the bullets to overwhelm the bag lady’s defences. It didn’t look like she died so much as turned to smoke.
As the roots retracted from du Bois’s leg, he collapsed to the ground. Alexia dropped her knives and ran across to him.
‘Thank you,’ he managed through a mouthful of blood, as she burst into tears.
Part of the pier collapsed into the sea. Alexia and du Bois were on that part. Alexia had to pull him out of the water. He found himself lying on the pebbled beach looking at the night sky, his view spoilt by the constant blue strobing from the lights of the multitude of emergency vehicles that had turned up.
There had been a heated discussion with paramedics. Du Bois could not afford to have them examine his body. In the end he’d had to show his special-forces warrant card to some high-ranking police officers and have them threaten to arrest the paramedics if they didn’t leave him alone. All the while, Alexia had fiercely stood guard over her brother.
Du Bois lit a cigarette. He’d managed to get a packet from one of the police officers. He reckoned he’d got the cigarettes because they thought he was about to die. Instead he was lying on the pebbles wondering how long it would take for his internal systems to repair themselves.
He pulled out his phone.
‘You know you can do that internally, with your systems? The phone’s just an external security filter and storage device,’ Alexia told him.
‘I got a text during the fight, but the phone’s systems quarantined it and didn’t pass it on.’
‘Someone was trying to hack you?’ Alexia asked and sat down next to him.
‘It’s from her,’ du Bois said, sounding confused. It had been sent moments before the bag lady had died.
The bag lady’s jamming during the fight had confused du Bois’s blood-screen but even through the jamming he had been aware of Alexia. The bag lady’s systems were more sophisticated than his; she too must have been aware of Alexia sneaking up on her with his gun.
Du Bois ran a security diagnostic on the quarantined message. There was nothing there as far as he could see. More to the point, the file was tiny. He opened the message.
‘I hope a good death is enough,’ Alexia read. ‘I don’t deserve a good death. I am a coward. I am too connected to leave. No, that is a lie. I am too frightened to leave and I do not want to become a ghost frozen in brass. There are so few of us left now. You must do the right thing. I have faith in you.’ Alexia stared at the screen and then at du Bois. The message was signed with an unfamiliar name.
‘Do you suppose that’s her real name?’ he wondered.
‘Couldn’t she just have committed suicide?’
‘She had to die in battle. She was a lot older than us.’
He took another drag on the cigarette. It was a long time since he had been this badly hurt, perhaps even back when he was just a normal human. He noticed one of the pay-as-you go phones he had been checking was switched on and his mobile had automatically called it.
He heard a ringing from behind him. Coincidence, surely. He craned his neck. Every movement hurt. Further up the beach he saw a figure he vaguely recognised. Du Bois magnified his vision, and DC Mossa, the detective who had first told him about Natalie, came into sharp focus. She was frowning as she looked at a ringing mobile. She pressed and held down a button. The ringing stopped and du Bois saw that the phone he had been calling had just been switched off.
‘Have you still got my pistol?’ he asked. Alexia handed him the .45. Water dribbled out of the barrel. He would have to strip it down and clean everything later. He dried it as best he could on the coat a paramedic had lent him and stood up, shrugging off the coat. He limped towards Mossa.