Flight of the Vajra (10 page)

“Mimu, Wani,” Angharad said to her retinue of two,
“where are the others?”

“We do not know.” The one I believed was Mimu—the
slightly shorter, more haunted-looking of the two—shook her head. “They should
have been here five minutes ago.”

“Then you can probably assume they’re dead,” I
said. I followed Angharad, as she in turn followed her two aides backstage as
per Asekhar’s instructions. I allowed myself the luxury of one look over my
shoulder to make sure Enid was also keeping pace. Still there, although her
footfalls were growing louder and heavier. I saw now that her normally
thin-soled footwear had become thick-soled and rigid, and her sleeves had grown
to cover her hands in padded gauntlets. The reservoir of protomic substrate
hidden in the small of her back on her outfit was being put to good use.

The
Vajra
fed me back some news. It had
cleared its dock and headed straight into the adjoining bay without even so
much as a shout from the control tower or a shot from a security station. I
wanted to believe that meant the planetside security had their hands full with
an insurrection, but I knew better: it most likely meant all the automated
defenses and lines of communication were being shut down.

I shrugged off my jacket, tore out the lining, and
started rolling that into a ball as we hustled down the stairs in question and
down a wide hallway. Said stairs were wide and not very steep, and from the
look of them could be converted into an escalator or a loading ramp. All of it
had the slightly too-clean, too-new look that all protomic architecture has—yes,
even the stuff that’s been programmed at the factory to have a weathered,
lived-in texture. The only thing worse than synthetic youth is fake age.

We didn’t get halfway down the stairs before they
flattened out and became a ramp. The only thing that saved us from tumbling
into each other like rocks falling off a truck was the grab bars on the walls.
Someone had probably plugged into the building’s configuration grid; if they
were able to get far enough in to do that, they might be messing with the—

—the
fire doors
, which just then were
wrenched open from the outside. Four men in domestic security forces armor, same
as the fellows who’d been standing guard over Angharad in the Summit Lodge, charged
us with guns drawn.

Well, I thought, at least the fire doors still
work. That gives me an excuse to strike back the same way.

“You!” the one targeting me shouted. “Disengage
any protomics on your person and lie down on the ground!”

Gunjita
, I commanded,
strut your stuff
for this crowd
.

Gunjita came from behind through the still-open
doors and buzzed figure-eights around all four guards—literally buzzed them,
disabling her stealth mode to make a noise like a king-sized bluebottle banging
against a windowpane. And just for jolly, she also sprayed the two in the rear with
a faceful of protomic pixie dust that congealed on their visors, clogged the
barrels of their weapons and crystallized in the joints in their armor. The cops
had gear two to three generations behind what the actual criminals (or me) were
throwing around, especially on a backwater like this. A guard managed to still
draw a bead on Gunjita and blast her to pieces, but she’d done her job: she’d
bought Angharad’s two aides enough time to pick remaining targets and attack.

It helped that Mimu and Wani had never stopped
moving in the first place. One snapped out a pronged blade and jammed it
sideways into a guard’s armor joint. I heard a loud electric
paf!
,
smelled ozone; the guard sagged against her, but he somehow still managed to
pull the trigger of his weapon as it pressed up against her side.

Don’t look at it, I told myself.
Especially
don’t think about it.

The jacket lining I’d been wadding into a ball was
now the consistency of pizza dough, and would never become anything else after
that. I ducked around Angharad—who had wisely pressed herself to one side of
the corridor, out of everyone’s way—and flung what had been the jacket at the
second guard’s gun. It mushroomed in flight and flattened out slightly, knocked
the weapon back against his chest and glued it there, and splattered over most
of the rest of his torso for good measure. The mess flowed into every crack,
jammed up every moving part, weakened every joint, trashed every transceiver
and processor it oozed across.

Something thumped hard against my shoulder. It was
Enid’s left heel. She’d jumped up and used me as a springboard, and with both
feet dropped a flying kick across the top of the second guard’s shoulder. I
heard something break, and it wasn’t her now-heavily-shod foot. The guard spun
halfway to one side and toppled over like a felled tree. His armor and weapon were
all fused into a single useless lump of brittle crystalline slag, along with what
was left of my jacket lining.

“Mimu! Wani!—”

Angharad had turned from the wall to see what had
happened to her aides, gasping out their names. I reached down to heave Wani
(the one who’d been shot first) across my shoulders. She was too limp to be
anything but dead. Mimu had a dazed look, and when she lifted her hands away
from her side they were painted red-black from the hole that had been gouged
there. The gunshots must have blown through and hit her too, I thought.

“Your Grace,” she whispered, “you mustn’t stay.”

Nobody sounds that calm unless they know they’re
gone, I thought. Wani suddenly felt twice as heavy as before.

Mimu had not even finished the sentence before
Angharad held up two fingers and swept them up and down twice in the air
between them, eyes closed. The thread between the living and the dead was now severed.

“Henré, you must leave them too,” she said. “They all
swore they would die if they must. You know this.”

I thought about it for all of one second, then put
Wani down. Mimu received her into her own arms, and the two of them sank to the
floor.

“You
can’t
!” Enid shouted, but she still kept
pace with us as we charged for the doors.

Behind us, in the moments before we burst through
and out into the garage ramp, I heard the first notes of the “Ode to
Impermanence”, in what could have only been Mimu’s keening voice:

O swiftly rushing blood

When in time you beat no more—

I led the way to the top of the ramp, but I could
feel my own lips moving to fill in the rest of the verse:

It rushes not for me, but thee

Ye whom I have come before . . .

Protomics:
a palette of substances
which are machinery built on a molecular scale. With commands from a CL or some
other source, they can not only change shape but gain or lose different
properties, according to which of the five different grades of product they
belong to. Some can carry electrical signals, or act as transceivers—at least
until they’re switched off and become insulators. Some can vary their density:
solid to liquid, liquid to gas . . . although, as you can imagine,
they typically do that only once before they’re spent. Some can vary in
hardness, from cloth that’s luxurious enough to wear to sleep, to a shiv hard
enough to put a hole in God’s forehead.

Not only can you build just about anything out of
them, you can get things to build themselves out of them.

There’s no class of protomics, from clothing to
children’s toys to ship’s hulls, that’s not made in accordance with strict
behavioral parameters. In ages past you couldn’t sell baby’s sleepwear without
ensuring it wouldn’t touch off like kindling if it was draped over a radiator.
Today, protomics come with internal lockdowns on their programming to restrict
their behavior and keep them from being unduly “repurposed” (read: weaponized).

And if you believe those restrictions do a damned
thing to curb their illegal use, I have hectares of waterfront property to sell
you.

Who here is honestly surprised that the
galaxy-wide protomic black market commands tens of trillions in currency each
month alone? Or that one of the hobbies of those engaged in promoting such a
market is staying two steps ahead of the police, inventing new self-concealing
protomic programs that let you walk around armed to the teeth in nothing but
your pajamas without the sensors (or censors, ha ha) so much as sniffing
sideways at you?

I’d had my own little cache of unlocked protomics
for a while now, courtesy of an old friend. I could reshape my clothes as
needed, vary hardness or density within certain ranges, do all kinds of fun
things. The
Vajra
was the same way. Ditto Gunjita; ditto Kanthaka.

For the most part I kept all talk of that arsenal
to myself, as the last thing I needed was to advertise I was a walking
reservoir of contraband. I’d been holding off for a moment when there were guns
at my head. Now there were guns—and while they were pointed at someone else,
that was more than enough of an excuse.

The glob I’d made from my jacket lining was one of
the many ways I could weaponize what I had on my person. Most of those
weaponizations were defensive: shockproofing my clothes, creating a missile
shield, covering the floor with frictionless confetti that made stepping on it
like surfing on banana peels. Enid’s clothes had a few of their own, from the
look of it: the gauntlets, the shoes. All legal in most places, as long as you
didn’t flash them around in public too much.

At least until the day your life—and maybe the life
of someone nearby—depended on you doing exactly that.

Right before we’d exited stage left
I
had Gunjita shoot me a grid of the building—layout, emergency zones, wet wall,
floor plan, everything—and so it now took me only a few seconds to figure out where
we were in relation to everyone else flooding out of the building. The
loading-dock exit we’d been directed towards was indeed closed to ground
traffic, but only for full-blown vehicles, and so Kanthaka had managed to sneak
through one of the adjoining alleys by nosing between a pair of traffic-control
pylons.

I’d programmed Kanthaka to be cheeky. She was more
than living up to it.

The garage ramp, and the street beyond, were
empty, but behind walls and around corners I could hear the susurrus of what could
only have been crowds in motion.

I put two fingers in my mouth and gave a soft
little whistle, just to be flashy. Kanthaka roared into view at the far end of
the loading bay where it met an alley’s mouth. At my whistle, End and Angharad
looked like they had been expecting a horse to gallop up.

I jammed myself into the driver’s seat; Enid
jumped in behind me, and Angharad fit—just barely—in the rearmost spot. I’d
subdivided the passenger seat into two, which added a bit to the overall length
of the ride but didn’t seem to have compromised its structural integrity.

I sent us tearing down the alley even before I had
the canopy closed all the way and opaqued. Too bad about Gunjita biting it, I
thought: I’ll have to get the rest of the telemetry I needed on my own. Still,
this trip was bound to be a short one, and it wasn’t like I couldn’t dope out another
Gunjita if I really needed it—but right now I was concentrating on getting us
out, out, out.

By the time we emerged from the mouth of the alley,
Kanthaka had already grown a little camouflage. Police markings—the Port Cytheria
Public Safety Section shield—along with matching colors for the lights, a siren,
and an ID code cloned from another already-wrecked car it had passed along the
way. Nothing like the presence of authority to compel crowds to step out of
your way. Odds are there was no vehicle of this configuration used by the
police on Cytheria, but by the time anyone twigged to that we’d already be around
the corner and gone.

The crowding wasn’t as bad as I’d thought, but all
of the traffic was moving in one direction: away from the Pavilion. All of the
event posters had gone blank. One of them was big enough to cover an entire
intersection; I drove over it, leaving a tire-print double chevron pattern of
dead pixels.

“Where are we going?” Enid shouted (and right into
my ear, too). “They’re going to lock everything down if they haven’t done it
already!”

“Easy, easy,” I cooed back at her. “They can’t
keep a ship from leaving if it’s already out of dock unless they shoot at it,
and I’m not planning on hanging around long enough to be shot at. —Your Grace,
are you okay back there?”

“ . . . Yes,” Her Grace said after a
long moment. I couldn’t see her—my eyes and attention were on the interlacing
streets in front of me and on the feeds coming in through my CL—but from the
sound of her, she was just as bewildered as when guns were being pointed in her
face.

“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “I wasn’t counting
on getting this much exercise either when I woke up. Also, while I hate to
leave anything of yours behind, Your Grace, right now I’d rather be in my own
ship than someone else’s. I have the feeling it’s the safest place around right
now.”

“There is no ship of mine worth getting killed
over, Mr. Sim,” she said, and tightened her grip on my shoulders..

Kanthaka shot between pairs of traffic-control
pylons and churned up sand as we sliced across the beach. I didn’t bother
switching the tires to off-road mode; I just scythed through the surf and let
Kanthaka take us to where the
Vajra
was pacing the shore, spewing up
surf both fore and aft from where her repulsor field scythed into the water. On
my command, she dropped the field just long enough for me to augur head-first
into the silvery white womb of her internal loading dock. The dock was barely
wide enough to hold Kanthaka; the three of us had to each turn sideways to step
into the main cabin.