They were after his eyes! He covered his face with his left forearm, in time to block three more shots.
Adestis simulacra — at the maximum size permitted, and hunting him.
Luther swept his right arm across the top of the display, knocking the minisims to the floor. As he completed the movement a hail of shots from behind made him shout with pain and spin around. On the desk at the far side of the room, half-hidden behind a jumble of data cubes, stood another group of tiny figures. At the same moment a rattle of shots came from a new direction, over to his left. Explosive projectiles riddled his left arm and hip with thumbnail-sized craters.
Brachis roared with pain and ran across the room. He had both arms in front of him to shield his eyes — if they blinded him he was finished. Halfway to the door he felt another hail of shots in his groin and belly. The simulacra in ambush by the exit had chosen a different target.
He stopped and spun around again. The attack was obviously well-organized. They had planned for his natural reaction, to run for the door. They would expect him to cover his eyes, and now his genitals. If they knew his habits at all, they had known that he would walk through naked to check the communicator. While he hesitated in the middle of the room, another half dozen projectiles stung his face and neck. They were flaying him, systematically ripping the flesh from his body with a hail of tiny shells.
He needed time to think. Luther dived to the left, rolled across the floor, and came upright close to the wall. He smashed his hand at the lighting panel. With the door to the bedroom closed, the study was plunged at once into darkness. The hiss of shots went on, out the attacking simulacra no longer had a target.
Brachis dropped to the floor again, and went shuffling on hands and knees across the room. He had a brief advantage now. He could track the minisims by the uvarovite-garnet glint of their crystalline green eyes, glowing in the dark. They were moving about in confusion. He knew it could only be a temporary respite. The attackers must have allowed for darkness, too.
He felt his way back to the display and slapped the Emergency switch on the communications panel. That would bring help — but far too late. Another half minute of those explosions on his skin, and the rescuers would find him a sightless, skinless eunuch. He was filled with a new and terrifying thought; Suppose that Godiva came out of the bathroom and wandered through into the study to look for him? A shout to keep her out might have exactly the wrong effect.
He was still standing upright by the emergency switch when an orange light appeared on the other side of the room. It was an aerial flare, ignited near the door. That was where the maximum cross-fire would have hit him if he had tried to escape that way. But the orange flare was enough to illuminate the whole room. He was visible again.
Another crackle and hiss from miniature weapons — another hail of blows and blaze of pain across his body. He couldn’t take much more. He dived, rolled again, and came up near the desk. As the attackers there fired point-blank into his unprotected chest and side, he hit a sunken wall panel with the palm of his left hand.
The Fire Protection System came on in a fraction of a second. High pressure jets of water and emulsifier cross-crossed the room from floor to ceiling, while the loud warning tone of a bell sounded through the apartment and its nearest neighbors. The emergency low-power wall lights filled the study with sickly green.
Spray and foam filled the room. The miniature weapons at once went silent.
Another reprieve — but for how long?
Luther could not wait for help. He had to do this himself. He hurled himself across the study, soaking and bloodied. He ran first for the place where the attackers had been most dense. Water hit him from all sides, stinging his wounds, sluicing down his ripped skin. He welcomed it.
The minisims were trying to regroup, struggling to stand amid the bombardment of water drops and frothy foam. Ignoring the pain in his hands, Brachis smashed them flat and crushed them one by one between thumb and fingers.
The study door slid open and Godiva appeared. She was naked except for a pair of gauzy briefs. “Luther!”
He ignored her and ran back across the room, a scarlet Nemesis that left bloody, puddled footprints behind him in the carpet. The first group who had attacked him were on the floor by the communications unit, trying to point their weapons up at Luther while a quarter-inch flood of water surged and tugged at their legs. He stomped every one of them, wincing as the angular figures cut into his soft flesh.
A final scatter of shots came from his right. He headed that way, smashing and devastating with bare hands and feet anything that moved.
And suddenly it was over.
By the time that help arrived the sprinkler system was off and the study a junkyard of flattened simulacra. Godiva took Luther through to the bedroom and began to apply antiseptics and surrogate skin. He lay faceup on the bed, his face, chest, and belly an eroded mass of raw wounds connected by shreds of loose skin. He swore continuously as Godiva smoothed on the yellow synthetic flesh. He waved away the emergency service staff. They went back into the study and started to clean up the mess, suctioning the room clean and dry. They were still at it when Esro Mondrian arrived.
Godiva had finished Luther’s left side and was telling him to turn more to the right. He was ignoring her, and talking furiously on a handset.
“Useless!” he growled to Mondrian. “They don’t know one damned thing. Adestis Headquarters won’t have regular staff there until tomorrow, and maintenance can t even tell me if simulacra are missing, never mind what sort. Ouch!” He winced as Godiva began to patch skin onto the ball of his right thumb.
“Does it matter how many?” Mondrian picked up one of the flattened simulacra from the heap at the bedside and inspected it. “I didn’t know they made them this big. What are they used for?”
“To hunt the biggest game. Scorpions and crustaceans, mostly. They can operate under water, but luckily for me they were never designed to handle a rainstorm.”
“But the real question isn’t the minisims. It’s who was handling them. Did you ask?”
“Adestis Headquarters can’t tell me that, either.” Brachis touched his finger tenderly to the biggest wound on his face, a one-centimeter crater in the middle of his left cheek. “But I know the answer without being told. It’s that bastard’s Artefacts again, it has to be.”
Mondrian was studying Brachis’s pitted and furrowed skin. “Someday, Luther, you must tell me just what you did to earn such undying enmity from Fujitsu that his heirs would try to give you more craters than the surface of Callisto.”
“Never mind what I did. The worst thing I did was, I underestimated him. For that, I deserve everything I’ve been getting.”
“You told me that you had everything locked up tight here in the apartment, so nobody and nothing could get in. What went wrong, Luther?”
“The oldest mistake in the world. It proves the point that I tell every trainee for Survey basic training: It’s the things you don’t expect that get you. I set up this apartment so that nothing could get in through the door without me knowing. Nothing can burrow through the walls or floors or ceilings. I put in a sniffer system to sound an alarm if anything poisonous or radioactive was blown in as gas or dust through the air supply ducts. What I didn’t expect was that something smart and dangerous could actually walk in along the ducts. The openings are only a couple of centimeters across.”