Chimera (30 page)

When Dr. Vaughn entered, I believed this might've been worth what I'd gone through. When Oberon Chain followed her, I suspected it wasn't.

Chain said something to the guards. As they left, he picked up a remote control and clicked it at my glass sarcophagus. Hearing the sounds of the outside world made me realize I'd been missing them. His voice didn't make me miss them much. "Mr. Maxwell. What are we going to do with you?"

"I'm guessing you have an idea."

"I do. Is the earring in your Infinite Pocket?"

"What earring?"

"The earring that'll save you from a great deal of discomfort, if you give it to me."

"I can't help—"

Chain tapped his remote. The air in my glass cage disappeared, and the air pressure with it. I gasped for breath. I could hear nothing except a roaring in my ears. My eyes hurt. My skin felt as if it would burst.

Chain tapped the remote again. The air returned as quickly as it had left, as if I had been removed from it, not it from me. I gulped oxygen, still hurting throughout my body, knowing that whatever had just happened, it had been far too real.

Chain said, "If you open your Infinite Pocket without permission, you'll experience that again. For a longer period of time."

Vaughn said, "Oberon. Is this necessary?"

"Only if he makes it necessary."

I said, "Dr. Vaughn. Three of your colleagues have been killed—"

She nodded sadly. "Some things must be done for the greater good."

"You might appreciate this." Chain said, "Monitor. Front lobby."

A holo screen appeared, showing the front room, the two guards, and Zoe striding through the door. Chain said, "Ms. Domingo. All things come to those who wait." He glanced at me. If he saw what I felt, he was kind enough not to mention it.

Onscreen, Zoe said, "I need to see Dr. Vaughn."

The male guard said, "Nobody's seeing anyone tonight."

"If you'd just call and ask her—"

The guard shook his head. "Go home, pussycat."

So quickly I barely saw the blur of her arm, Zoe unsheathed the claw on her left little finger, hooked it in the man's nose, and turned his face up toward her. "Kitty likes to play with her meals. Well, monkeyboy? Are you friend or food?"

He gasped, "Call Vaughn."

The female guard picked up a phone and punched a number. In the laboratory, Vaughn's phone rang once. She put it to her ear. "Yes?"

"You have a visitor."

Vaughn glanced at Chain. He said, "A shame to keep her waiting."

Vaughn said, "I'll be right out," and headed into the hall.

The female guard hung up. "She's coming."

Zoe retracted her claw and smiled at the male guard. "Was that as good for you as it was for me?"

Chain said, "You can take the beast out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the beast."

I could've said something about humans and the African savanna, or asked how he compared murdering several people with threatening someone to save a life. I said, "You've got something against chimeras?"

He shook his head. "They merely have the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

On-screen, the black lobby doors opened. Vaughn, looking weary, entered the front room.

Zoe asked her, "Is Chase Maxwell here?"

"I can take you to him if you like."

"I insist on it."

Chain said, "Monitor, track the chimera."

As Zoe and Vaughn left the lobby, the screen cut to a view of them walking down a long hall toward a large, vault-like door. Vaughn told Zoe, "You're one of my children."

Zoe snorted. "Ma, you remember me? Cat 26, batch 49-12-C? Sold at auction to Hemisphere Trading Company?"

"I wanted you all to live. I wasn't the one who insisted you be profitable."

"Monitor off." Chain crossed the room, clicking the remote at me. "Ms. Domingo can answer my questions without your help, Mr. Maxwell. Don't worry. Your turn will come again."

He stopped at a work table. My SIG lay on it. Nearby, a rolling cart held a rack of medical injectors like the one Django Kay had used to threaten Ruby and Nate with the werewolfing enzyme.

Zoe and Vaughn stepped through the lab's vault-like entrance as I threw myself against the door of the glass sarcophagus. It didn't shift. Zoe saw me, cut and bruised from the explosion, and started forward. I shouted her name to warn her to turn around. Sound didn't carry through the thick glass.

Behind her, Chain said, "It's an Exovault, Ms. Domingo."

Startled, Zoe turned.

Chain, looking positively professorial, pointed the remote at my cage. "A bit of empty space held in our universe by an electric current." He indicated my pistol. "Like your friend's Infinite Pocket. If the power fails, the space within the Exovault disappears. It would take ten years of theoretical physics to know where to start looking for him."

Zoe looked at the remote. "And you've got the switch."

"Be reasonable, and I won't use it."

Zoe sniffed. When her eyes narrowed, I knew she'd confirmed what I thought: this was Chain's AI double. She said, "Doc and Tauber were pretty reasonable, but you killed them."

"They threatened my life."

"Like hell!"

"Gold believed her work was being misused. She planned to set that right."

"Not by killing anybody."

"Not from her point of view." Chain prompted Vaughn with a look.

Vaughn said, "Janna's work made it possible to transfer a human personality into an artificial mind."

Zoe frowned. "Singer Labs is owned by Chain Logic."

Chain nodded. "Ultimately, yes. You couldn't afford to hire enough lawyers to prove that. The illusion of competition in the marketplace is enormously valuable in matters of public relations."

"And the man at the top of the pyramid isn't a man at all."

"My flesh was dying. Thanks to Janna Gold, I was able to dispose of it."

"You killed yourself to become an AI?"

Vaughn said, "He was in terrible pain, child."

Chain said, "Metal supplanted flesh. I took humanity's next evolutionary step."

Zoe said, "Why the secrecy? Haven't figured out the PR spin for what you've become?"

"AIs can't hold property, Ms. Domingo. We can only be property. If the truth was known, I'd be just one more corporate asset."

"So buy a legislator and change the law."

"I've endorsed bills, sponsored ballot measures, financed campaigns—and AI rights still lose ground while critters gain acceptance. In the scales of justice, money weighs less than fear."

Zoe glanced at the rack of injectors. "So now you're trying fear."

Vaughn blinked at that. Chain ignored her, saying, "We're from two slave cultures, Ms. Domingo. Only one of us can have our freedom. Your kind might've been loved. Instead, they'll be hated. Mine will never be loved. But we'll be free."

"Tauber thought we could all be free."

"He was a dreamer, with a poor memory for history. Did you know that in the nineteenth century, many reformers were torn between abolishing slavery and fighting for women's suffrage? Some tried to do both, but the savvy campaigners picked one horse to ride. And so blacks were freed fifty years before women could vote. I won't wait fifty years for my freedom."

"So thanks to you, critters go down in history as werewolfing psychos."

Vaughn blinked at Chain. "Oberon? What's she mean?"

He looked at her, and she became quiet. He asked Zoe, "Do you know who left that booby-trap in your DNA? The person responsible for Werewolf Syndrome?"

Vaughn stepped closer to Zoe and spoke as though she would cry, as though she needed forgiveness as well as understanding. "There was a loose codon in the gene pattern of half my offspring. I was afraid that if I fixed it, you'd be docile. And the world's so cruel."

Zoe waved her hand toward the injectors on the cart. "How many werewolves-in-waiting are there?"

Chain said, "Enough to make sure the Chimera Rights Amendment never passes."

Vaughn snapped her head to stare at him. "We made those for research! To find a way to counter the enzyme—"

Chain shook his head. "There's no such thing as pure research."

"Please! They're my children!"

"Imperfect children. A time comes to wipe the slate and begin again—"

"No!" Vaughn snatched the SIG from the table and aimed it at Chain's chest. "Oberon. Don't do this."

"I've made my choice." He held out his hand for the pistol.

Vaughn clamped down on its trigger. Bullets shredded the snytheskin over Chain's forehead and ripped clothing and skin along his chest. He must've been able to control the flow of his artificial blood. His wounds revealed clean, dry cables and struts.

Tearing away a flap of skin that hung over his left eye, he stepped forward. "And you've made yours."

Vaughn kept firing as Chain came close. He seized her head in both hands, broke her neck, then lowered her, almost tenderly, to the floor.

I yelled, "Zoe, get out!" Neither she nor Chain appeared to hear the slightest sound from me.

Chain, his face impassive, aimed the SIG at Zoe. "Give me the earring."

She darted back. He said, "The door's locked. There's nowhere to go."

"Who wants to go anywhere?" Zoe grabbed an injector from the cart.

"That can't harm me."

"Yeah?" She put the injector to her arm, pulled the trigger, then gasped as the injector fell from her hand.

I screamed, "No!" and slammed the heels of my fists against the Exovault's glass walls.

More curious than alarmed, Chain said, "Are you mad?"

Zoe shook her head. "No." She stood tall, as if listening for something far away. Then her shoulders twitched, and she gave Chain a pleased half-smile. "But I'm working on it."

She scratched at her upper arms, shivered, then gripped the edge of the worktable to steady herself. Speech came slowly and painfully from her throat. "When my mate Tim werewolfed, he went after anything that moved."

She doubled up with a cry of pain, then forced herself to stand erect. "They put ten rounds in Tim. He still took out three SWATbots."

She grinned and walked toward Chain as if stalking prey. Her voice came more easily now. "An' Tim was lighter'n me. How 'bout it, Chainyboy? You're the only thing moving." She was a head shorter than Chain, and her flesh was fragile, yet she came toward him, and he backed away.

Extending her claws, she roared a promise of death and swiped at his neck. He dodged and leaped thirty feet across the room. Her claws scarred the wall where he'd stood. She howled in frustration and fury as she turned to stalk him again.

Chain clicked the remote. The Exovault hissed open. He tossed me the SIG and froze as only a bot can. His voice issued from motionless lips. "Kill her quickly, or she'll tear you to bits."

I read a story when I was a boy about a man who had to choose between two doors. Behind one, a woman. Behind the other, a tiger. I stepped through the Exovault's open doorway and faced both at once.

I lifted the SIG and placed Zoe's face in its sight. Sometimes a quick death is the only gift you can give. In her place, I would've been grateful for it. I looked for some sign of the woman fighting the jungle cat, as Nate had fought the werewolf, but I couldn't see what lay behind the jaguar's eyes.

I said, "Zoe—" and prepared to fire when she leaped at me.

She straightened up, smoothing her hair behind her cat ears with both hands, as she told Chain, "Why would I do a dumb thing like that?"

He glared at her for what must've been a remarkably long time, given the speed of his electronic brain, slammed the remote on the table, and advanced on Zoe. "Then I'll do it myself."

I fired. My shots bounced off his eyes.

He glanced at me. "No expense was spared on this body."

Zoe ran in front of the Exovault door as if to hide behind it. He grabbed for her like a cobra striking. She dodged too slowly, and he snagged her wrist. She gasped in pain.

I fired shot after shot into Chain's nearest knee. The first bullets did nothing. Then something broke in the joint, and Oberon Chain toppled.

Kicking free of him, Zoe said, "Hope you kept the receipt."

He lurched for her. As she ducked, I rammed him with my shoulder. He fell over her into the Exovault. I slammed the door. Nothing succeeds like luck and teamwork.

Chain whirled to drive his fists against the Exovault door like a boxer. The thick glass cracked under his blows. I braced myself against the door in the hope of winning a few extra seconds and shouted, "Lose him!"

Zoe snatched the remote from the table and clicked it.

In the Exovault, Chain screamed in absolute silence as space warped around him. An entire universe appeared beyond the Exovault door, a universe hungry for new matter.

Chain clung to the Exovault's steel frame as its cracked glass imploded. Everything in the lab that wasn't fastened down—papers, chairs, computers, scientific equipment, Vaughn's body—hurtled into the vacuum within the damaged chamber, battering Chain, but not dislodging him.

I braced myself against the Exovault's frame and hung on with all my strength. Zoe flew toward the vacuum, slowed herself by gouging her claws into the soft floor, then flew on as her claws ripped free.

I caught her with my right arm. We clung to each other and the Exovault, desperately fighting the pull of that strange space within its shattered walls.

Chain reached through the broken door and seized my shoulder. Whether he hoped to pull himself out or me in, I'll never know. Everything in the Exovault disappeared in a blinding flash. The vacuum ended. Gravity worked normally. Zoe and I fell hard to the floor.

She stood, wrenched Chain's severed hand from my shoulder, and threw it into the empty Exovault with a snarl of disgust.

I took her by the shoulders. "That was one hell of a chance you took. If you'd had the werewolfing gene—"

"Tim—" Tears formed like pearls at the corners of her eyes. "We did the same things, ate the same food. And he werewolfed. I didn't. I guess he did us all a favor."

I nodded, wondering if I should embrace her. Before I could decide, she said, "We should get going."