Strings (5 page)

Nauc, April 7

EVEN AS BAGSHAW’S armored gauntlet slammed the door, shutting out horrors of melted metal and burning carpet, all the percies sprang into motion. Cedric’s leaped back so suddenly that he thought his eyeballs would fall out. Then it spun around and hurled itself across the room rear first, heading for the shower. He felt it flip up onto the pad; he saw the wall in his mirror, and then—
impact!

The shock rang all the way to his teeth. Had he not been pinned like a pit in a plum, he would have been pulped. The wall shuddered and fractured. At once his percy hurtled forward toward the bed, passing one of the others, which had just attacked the wall on the far side of the room. The third had lifted the fourth in its claws and was pounding it into the ceiling. Tiles and dust and debris sprayed everywhere.

Cedric’s percy twisted around so that it was again going backward as it slammed into the weakened wall by the bed. That reversed assault was probably designed to make things a little easier on him, he thought groggily, because he saw the second unit smash into the wall by the shower and it was still going face first. Nice of Bagshaw to be so considerate.

“Glee Club, this is Knuckles.” Bagshaw’s voice sounded close by Cedric’s ear. He was speaking very quietly. Cedric could not see where the man himself had gone, which was hardly surprising in the fog of dust and flying rubble. Again Cedric’s robot and its opposing partner surged forward and flashed by each other. Again that lurch over the shower pad—and this time his percy burst right through the wall in an explosion of debris and broken pipes and jets of water. It tripped, tipping almost horizontal, and then straightened. Cedric’s stomach stayed at floor level, and the percy was accelerating again even before it was upright.

“Knuckles, we read you.” That must be Glee Club.

The room next door—where Cedric now found himself—was dark, but vision enhancement had clicked in for him. It gave false color images, so that the terrified face above the heap of bedclothes was bright pink and the teeth in her mouth were red. He could not hear the woman’s screams as his percy raced across the room toward her and impacted the wall beside the bed. He hoped she would have the sense to get out of the way quickly.

“Glee Club, I have picked up Sprout.”

“Report Sprout’s condition, Knuckles.”

“Okay so far.
Virgo intacta
, I should think. But the natives are restless.”

That was putting it mildly. Cedric’s percy was backing up again, almost as far as his own room. It stopped just short of the aperture rimmed by twisted pipes squirting water and clouds of steam. Why could there not have been hot supplies like that when Cedric was having his shower? If things got much more exciting, he was going to need another shower very shortly. Fortunately, his brain did not seem to be accepting any of this as real.

Then he was being accelerated again for another attack on the wall by the bed.
My Life as the Human Hammer
, or
The School of Hard Knocks
. The pink-faced woman had dived for the floor on the far side and disappeared. How long would it be, Cedric wondered, before the attackers in the corridor came—
impact!
—came in through the doors?

“Angel, this is Glee Club. Do you read?”

“Glee Club, this is Angel. We have a fix on Knuckles. There’s a swarm of hornets around, though.”

Suddenly Cedric recalled Bagshaw’s remark that these percies would survive a fall of twelve stories. No—the equipment would survive more than that. The
occupant
might survive twelve stories. How unfortunate that Cedric’s room was on the sixteenth floor.

Impact!
again…

Bagshaw’s strategy was fairly obvious, although Cedric was having trouble keeping his mind on logic. The enemy was out in the corridor with a fusion cannon, and the good guys did not have the armor to face that. So he had scattered his troops—Cedric going one way, an empty percy in the opposite direction, and a third straight up. It would take the baddies a few minutes to work out which thimble hid the pea.

“Angel, give me an ETA.”

A searing white flame filled the bedroom. Cedric saw the bed sheets turn purple and burst into brown flames even before his video overloaded and the percy was lifted by the blast and rammed bodily into the wall it had been about to strike again. The woman would have been charred instantly, he thought as the wall collapsed, spilling him through into a third room and burying another bed in an avalanche of concrete. He could not see if there had been anyone in it.

Please, God? People are dying here, God.

This was no holo drama. This was real, squalid murder. He was rolling…

The vision enhancement had returned. The ceiling was a very pretty green. He was lying on his back, and half the vids had gone dark.

“Ced—Sprout? You okay?”

“Sprout fine,” Cedric said weakly. He really did not believe that all this was happening, but that had been Bagshaw’s voice, so somehow the bull had survived the explosion, too.

And so had Cedric’s percy. The vids flickered on again—most of them—and it swung up to a vertical position. He discovered a curious salt taste in his mouth. That distracted him for a moment, until the door of the room crashed down before him and he was out in the bright lights again, hurtling along the corridor, swaying mightily and gathering speed all the way. It was a very long corridor. There were men behind him—at least three of them, all wearing much the same sort of armored suit as Bagshaw—and they were crouched over something that Cedric was certain was a fusion cannon. Clearly they had just fired it into his original room. At the moment they were turning it to point at him.

The carpet was still smoldering from the first blast. Burned blotches scarred the walls at regular intervals, as though the plasma had rippled from side to side. Doors were opening, frightened guests coming out to see what was happening. All of them managed to leap back to safety in time, before he ran them down. The noise should have been shattering. There should have been screaming and explosions and sirens, but he could hear nothing at all from outside. Life seemed strangely peaceful around Cedric. Maybe his hearing had failed, or his brain.

The voices on the network were chattering, but he did not register what was being said. He was amazed at how time seemed to have slowed down, or his own thought processes speeded up, because years were going by while his percy raced along that corridor and the enemy did whatever they were doing to ready that gun.

And then the percy swerved, cannoned off a wall, and impacted another door, stumbling through into a stairwell. The corridor flamed white behind him, and half the vids winked off and then came on again. His ears popped. There was a strong smell of sweat, but so far only sweat. There had been people…

Oh, God! There had been people—doors open, people looking out.

He had thought that the percy would head downward; he had not even known that a percy could climb stairs, but this one could, jolting Cedric up and down like a maraca. One floor up it grabbed the doorhandle in its claw. Then it soared out into another bright corridor and headed back in the direction it had come.

A door just ahead of him burst open, erupting smoke and an armored man whose feet did not quite touch the floor. He raced along the corridor—not floating, but running like a skater, and gathering speed rapidly.

“Sprout, that’s me ahead of you.”

“Read you, Knuckles.” Had that been his own voice? So calm? Cedric decided that he must be in shock. Shrieking hysterics would be the correct reaction.

The armored man was still accelerating. Cedric’s percy seemed to be slowing, and he felt a sudden terror that it might have been damaged, that he would be left behind. Where was the enemy? Bagshaw had come up through the ceiling, of course. How had he kept control of so much equipment? How many innocent people had died?

“Sprout, we’ll have to do something unorthodox here. Better keep your eyes closed for a while.”

“Screw you,” Cedric said—but quietly, and surprisingly matter-of-factly.

Bagshaw, far ahead now, reached the end of the corridor without breaking stride and then leaped upward. He threw out arms and legs to strike the window spread-eagled. Frame and glass and drapes and man vanished into darkness, leaving a rectangular black hole where there had not been one previously.

Seventeen floors, or somewhere between fifty and sixty meters—exact measurement did not matter much, did it?—Cedric wanted to scream. He opened his mouth to scream, but all he heard was his own voice dryly ordering his percy to stop. Vaguely he saw that armored figures had appeared in the distance behind him, visible in his mirror, and they had their cannon with them. His percy was losing speed, but he did not think it was obeying his commands, and the black rectangle was pouring itself straight at him, growing larger and larger, but more and more slowly. There was absolutely nothing more he could do. Bagshaw had the con—if Bagshaw was still alive—or else the machine was damaged and out of control. Cedric was immobilized in a traveling coffin, and the black space grew larger and larger, but slower and slower. He could not guess what the final result was going to be.

The pitch fell short. The percy reached the window just as it ran out of velocity and came to a complete stop. Relief! For a moment Cedric stared out at the lights of the city, a forest of towers still bright against a first faint light of morning. He breathed a deep sigh. He wondered how he went about surrendering. Surely the men behind him would see that he was trapped and helpless inside his percy? They would not fire at him now. Bagshaw had hinted at all sorts of horrors if he were to be captured, but those lay in the future. Cedric would much rather wait for them than be instantly fried by a fusion torch—or be jellied by falling seventeen stories out that window.

Then his percy tipped slowly and deliberately forward, and toppled over the sill.

He spent a little over three seconds falling to the street—he had System calculate it for him, much later. He thought that he was very young to die, but then he decided that he had aged many years in those three seconds. He never knew whether it was luck or Bagshaw’s skill that had him flat on his back as he reached the ground, in the position where his fragile protoplasm could best take the stress, pressing back into restraining padding.

Bagshaw caught him.

IMPACT!

He was alive. The gray sky was still above him, there was rain on his viewplate, and he could hear his heart.

“Okay, Sprout?”

Cedric repeated the obscenity he had used earlier that evening and augmented it with every other one he could think of. Not very many, really. Not enough. A real man would know more bad words.

Bagshaw set him upright in the percy and flexed his arms as though they hurt. He bent over to view his feet. “Lookit that!” he said. “Cracked the sidewalk.”

“I’d like to break it with your head.” Cedric, tasting salt again, decided that he had bitten his tongue.

“Angel should be along shortly. Let’s go meet him.”

“And I’ll have you know,” Cedric said bitterly, “that I’m not
virgo intacta
.”

Bagshaw drew in breath with a hiss. “Hot damn!” he said. “Tell me about it sometime.”

Angel turned out to be a rackety Sikorsky of incredible antiquity. It set down right in a public square to pick up Cedric and Bagshaw, then took off again as calm as milk,
woof…woof…woof
into the dawn sky. It was only after they had cleared the tops of the nearby towers that someone opened fire. None of the occupants seemed very worried by that.

The interior was dark and empty and stank of oil. The pilot and his buddy jabbered into mikes and crouched over controls, with vague red lights flickering over their faces as though they were demons from the pit. Cedric’s percy had been laid flat across the floor like a coffin, and Bagshaw helped him out of it. He was soaked, with his clothes clammy on his skin, but it was only sweat—his pants were no wetter than his poncho. He sat on a bench and leaned back against an icy window and tried not to shake. He felt sick.

Something went by at high speed, and the helicopter rocked in its wake. The pilot made a joke, but Cedric thought that the other two did not find it funny. Then other fast things roared by, and those were apparently goodies, and everyone relaxed.

He was still clutching his little bag of coins. It was all he had left. It held sanity. It held his childhood. It held all his memories—of Christmas parties with Victor playing Santa Claus, of camping trips and rafting and hikes, and himself lasering. He had recorded most of the coins himself, with his own camera, but he had traded with the others, too. There were lots of his favorite shows and dramas in there also, but the commercial stuff was not really important. It was the personal stuff, the junk that no one else would care about—that was what mattered. The images might be out of focus, or the world tilted, or everyone unrecognizable under masks and goggles in the outdoor shots. So what? That was life. Now he had been pitched without warning into a madness of death and terror. Sanity and happiness and love had disappeared from the world, and all he had to hang on to—all he had to remember them by—was that little bag of coins.

Then he realized that he was grieving for Meadowdale, and he felt ashamed. He was a man now, out in the world at last. That was what he had wanted, was it not? He was going to be a ranger like his father. He just had not expected the world to get quite so rough quite so soon, that was all.

Bagshaw had stripped off his armor, down to his underwear. He was just as sweaty as Cedric, and he had pulled a blanket over his shoulders. From nowhere that Cedric could see, he produced two cans of beer.

Beer at that time of day? Cedric accepted one and drank greedily. The ranch hands had slipped him beer a few times, but he had never cared for the taste much. Until now. It went down good. How many people had died? The sky was still brightening slowly, and a fine rain was falling, smoking off the rotor edges. Towers and streets rolled by below.