by Brian Daley
Odd, the thought nudged Zinsser, how a taunting hint of a smirk could hide among her ritual scarifications yet keep him in doubt that it was there at all.
Then he processed what she'd said about people watching, and apprehension kicked him into motion. Perhaps Estelle Ramsumair and her vengeful clan were going to avenge themselves for Toho's suicide right there at the Empyraeum, but Raoul Zinsser wasn't about to be gawked at in the interim.
He got to his feet with a chuckle and a show of teeth, as if the Ext beauty had merely been trying to amuse him. VIPs on all sides were pretending indifference. He didn't offer her his arm because he knew she'd refuse it before the watching world, but he did incline his head to her a few degrees.
"Where are Haven and your kinsmen? Are you lost?"
"No, Lod is. With a woman."
Zinsser gestured broadly to the hall. "There are various romantic alcoves off the mezzanine. Or they might've sought seclusion in the lounges or in the chapel."
The rise he had hoped to get out of her did not surface, and so he marched off down the mezzanine arcade, and she slowly fell in alongside. There were two people with their heads together on a window bench, but neither was Lod. In a curtained recess farther along a pair of men clad in nothing but jeweled piercewear and body makeup were showering kisses on a woman in an evening dress. She was humming with pleasure as one fellow crooned into her ear, "They need your husband's vote in subcommittee, and they'd be so grateful…"
Ghost changed their course a little so that she could scan the upper gallery for Lod as they walked. Zinsser, meanwhile, thought about his own neck. The only way he might be able to avoid the vengeance of Toho Ramsumair's family was to align himself with Dextra Haven. He would have to throw all his support behind her campaign for an Aquamarine mission and make certain that Pitfall became an integral part of it If there was no other way around it, he would just have to go to Aquamarine.
Perhaps a few years of subjective time in a plush billet on an AlphaLAW-scale mission would be just the thing. He would return covered in glory and surely with enough new information to claim a place of distinction, an academic fiefdom of his own. While he was away, the current generation of Ram-sumairs would age and, with luck, lose their political allies. Estelle might well die.
For the time being he would put the Ramsumairs from his mind. With Ghost beside him, it certainly wasn't difficult to pursue other avenues of thought
"This splendid savage look you've given yourself is making you a sensation."
She stopped short in a way that said she was about to part company. "Back to insults already, Doctor? These are death scars, not cosmetic paint."
He snorted a laugh. "How very melodramatic of you! If you'd really wanted to disfigure yourself, why didn't you saw off your lips and nose? You see, my dear, you left your beauty intact for anyone with eyes to see." When she failed to respond, he added, "Your face says, 'I have power—power over myself and power over you who behold me and can't look away.'"
Ghost was about to say something when the Empyraeum seemed to bellow with screams and turmoil. Nearby, someone was shouting about terrorists and toxic attacks. Ghost tapped her plugphone control card while Zinsser glanced about, seeking the closest exit.
With so many outcries and overlapping voices, it took him a moment to realize that the voice growing loud in his left ear was Ghost's. Without warning, she grabbed hold of his sea-green jacket and threw all her shin strength into yanking him forward. Then the back of his head felt as if it had been hit by a mass-driver bucket. The trailing millisecond of shock and pain grew distant and unimportant as everything around him began to fade to unrelieved blackness.
* * * *
The constituents were deep in paramentation—a group brainstoraüng focused on the assembler field module—and a novel smell was issuing from the device, something Piper had never scensed before. She longed to be part of the mysterious group activity, to be enfolded, to once again belong.
She was still the most gifted of them all when it came to speaking cybargot to the voice-interfaced computers, and there were tasks that required her attention. To a forced-air scalpel that had hung up, she spoke a musical run of cyber signals, and the knife obediently withdrew on its powered pintle hike an insect's foreleg being cocked back.
Without actually acknowledging her efforts, Byron amended some of the unit's fundamental operating orders. As simple as that, the safety and monitoring systems the Lyceum security people had diligently checked went inert.
Child's play for the Aggregate.
Byron activated the module and initiated a fabrication run. Chemistry and CAD/CAM began giving shape to substances within the central housing. Offstage, at the same time, several Alone volunteers joked with one another in anticipation of the smart-smell messages they were expecting to exchange during the demonstration, oblivious to the constituents' Othertalk.
The mesh cover of the assembler housing was in place, but Byron had left all the internal ports and biohazard isolation gates open. Driven by an internal fan the constituents had retrofitted, the unusual odors were on the verge of being wafted into the amphitheater.
Then, against any expectation, an Alone on one of the balconies above her began speaking in harsh, insistent alarm. A big broken-nosed man with red hair was directing his warning to the Hierarch Dextra Haven.
Piper supposed that most Alones couldn't even pick up his voicetalk words from a few meters away, much less his Othertalk. She could read his kinesign and corpcode clearly, and somehow he knew that the Empyraeum was in danger.
* * * *
"It's the precursor scent of a biological weapon," Burning grated, shaking Dextra Haven's elbow to get through to her. "NNF binary component—an aerosol binding polymer." His gaze flickered between the Aggregate's assembler and the shorn, big-eyed gamine who was standing to one side of the device.
Haven's black, high-arched brows converged as she peeled his fingers away. "Allgrave—Burning—you're mistaken. Get a grip on yourself instead of on me."
He was not mistaken. He and several other Exts had undergone Skills sensitization against the more common LAW chemical agents, and he knew neuron necrotic factor when he smelled it. Burning understood that he could save himself by running without hesitation or a backward glance, but that would leave Ghost and Lod to die in a stampede or from the NNF. Letting go of Haven, he tried to raise his sister and cousin by plugphone, without success.
He supposed he could denounce the Aggregate aloud, but that would surely ignite a panic that would plug all the exits. Better to get those he knew and cared about out of danger, then tip off security. He owed nothing to the hordes of Periapts.
"We've got to get out of here now" he told Haven in a soft though insistent voice. "If you stay, you die." He stepped away from her. The only course of action open to him was to keep moving until he hit an area of better commo propagation and try the plugphone again.
Dextra Haven caught at the loose fabric of his muttonchop sleeve. "Burning, wait. I… believe you."
He followed her gaze and saw why. Down on the stage Byron Sarz was standing next to the young urchin-faced woman and glaring up at the balcony. Burning wondered fleet-ingly whether the constituent had directed Sarz's attention that way or whether the man was able to out and out read his acolytes like a text display. Whichever, the look on Sarz's face had convinced Haven that something was dangerously amiss.
She tapped her plugphone control card and was speaking on another net, having had better success with her Hierarch communicator. Burning caught bits of her message as he scanned the crowd for his kin and the likeliest escape route.
"… possible toxic event," Haven whispered. "… immediate evacuation… avoid panic at all costs."
Burning happened to glance Cal Lightner's way and saw an eerily devastated expression contort the Preservationist's face. Haven had mentioned in passing that on-line encryption protected her plug commo, but it turned out there was at least one non-Hierarch ille
gally tapped into the security net A man dressed in a structured suit hollered in mortal fright, "Toxic gas! They've set off a biowep! Air poison!" Still raving, he flailed off through the crowd while similar yells erupted from elsewhere in the hall.
Burning reasserted his Flowstate with a brief surge inhalation and a silent Mobius chant, then pivoted back around to Haven, only to hear two sounds that made him delve deep into the Skills for clarity of thought
The first was Haven railing, "No, do not initiate containment measures! There are hundreds of people. Shut up and listen to me!"
The other was landslip vibration as heavy portals began to slide into place in amphitheater doorways and elsewhere in the Empyraeum. Action was being taken to ensure that all the dying would be confined to as small an area as possible. His ears popped as the air was sucked away to filtration reservoirs. Air might seep in from the outside, but no airborne biowep would be escaping.
His plugphone chose that moment to signal contact with both of the other Exts. There was no time for anything but essentials. "Ghost, Lod," he screamed, "get out of the building—"
* * * *
The initiation of the containment doors' emergency closure set off alarms that transshaped the decorous pantheon of the Lyceum ball guests into a terrified, heaving animal mass.
In the din of panic and Klaxons, Burning lost contact with Lod and Ghost. All around him people were colliding and going down, trampling each other, wrestling, coalescing blindly into murderous pileups. The few who called for order and calm were ignored, battered aside, or flattened. The security forces were helpless, and plainclothes officers were overwhelmed. External authorities could stop the biowep only by extracting all atmosphere from the place; that was not a measure Burning favored.
It occurred to him that the mighty and coddled aristocrats of LAW were at last getting some sense of the fog of war.
When he looked around for Haven, thinking she might know an escape route, he saw her making her way along the balcony railing, still watching the Aggregate calmly going about its work. While everybody else was trying to get as far from the biosynthesizer as possible, she was struggling to get to it.
Burning lunged to grab her but had to vault a man who had hit the carpet bleeding from the forehead. Dextra caught the movement from the corner of her eye and shot Burning an expression of dismissal. No resentment; he was inconsequential to her now.
There being no bolt-holes from the situation, he decided he shouldn't let her go it alone. The Exts owed her, and if by some miracle a slaughter was averted, Haven was someone they would need ah" ve and on their side. He used his height, weight, and strength to reach her side, but even more he used the artful avoidances and eye for opportunity of the Flowstate.
"Stay behind me," he told her. "We'll go over the railing at stage left."
She nodded; the drop was far shorter there. They were doing tolerably well until someone yelled from the rotunda, "This door's giving way! Help us get this exit open!"
A wave of howling berserkers rose to engulf Burning and Haven solely because they were in the way. He moved in to shield her, using his hands and feet as the mob was compacted in on him.
Chapter
Thirty-Three
If not for the alarms, maybe she would have bitten him, but not in any manner he had been looking forward to.
"An evac warning?" Cheetah asked, showing those pointy canines. "Is that the ploy Exts use when they can't get it up?"
"First you're cam-shy," Cheetah's cohort, the sizable Polyhymnia chimed in, "and now there's a secret alert. Are you some kind of tease?"
Cheetah was leaning in at him again, Hps drawn back. "Know what we do to teases?"
She never got to show him. The reverberation of heavy doors and the peal of Klaxons shook the caterer's prep room, nearly making Lod jump the rest of the way out of his clothes. A half fibrillation later Cheetah and Polyhymnia hit the floor moving and never looked back, Poly abandoning a wire-sculpture tiara with its phony gemstone cam. Pulling his dress uniform closed as he followed them, Lod had to admire their decisiveness, if not their solidarity.
By the time he got his jacket resealed, they had lost him in the general crush of the hallway. He ducked, squirmed, and slid along the wall. All his adroitness was not enough to keep him from being caught by flying elbows, flailing hands, and butting heads.
Springing up onto a big wall sconce gave him a vantage point from which to see over the heads of the hysterical throng. He saw the closed containment doors and the people squashed against them, trod under and dying. He had never been a particularly apt Skills pupil, but now he willed himself into
Flowstate with autotelic activator phrases energized by a steely determination to survive.
Periapt's plutocrats threw themselves at impervious panels and locked-down emergency exits. Some beat furniture against impact-resistant windows. The way to the amphitheater was open, and that was where Burning had said he was, and so Lod sprinted for the egress, dodging the occasional aimless hysteric.
There was an off chance mat he could find an airtight space in which to hide—a refrigerator or something jury-riggabte—but he doubted he would encounter anything like that in the contained area. Burning had mentioned NNF, but Lod had never been sensitized to the gas. Thus, he could not tell whether the concentration of precursor aerosol was intensifying.
There was a shriek and crash from somewhere, causing him to think, A weapon, yes. Let's by all means get one.
He had no time to waste, and there was nothing particularly promising immediately available until he came upon a man lying unconscious or dead against a pillar. The man wore gray pinstripe vestments with an engraved, bedizened jetpen clipped conspicuously in his breast pocket. Lod helped himself to it. In his small hand it was just about the right size for a kubaton—a littlestick.
He moved into the amphitheater on the first balcony level, where the press of bodies wasn't as suffocating. He had not expected to see his kin, but he spotted Burning stretched out, with Haven rising from where she had been kneeling next to him. She took hold of the railing and gathered herself as if to clamber over it.
She had lost or discarded the gauzewing mantelet. Well engineered as her hair had been, it now suggested a computerized multiwormhole model. She had kicked off her toe-stand shoes and had the black licorice dress hiked up around her thighs. When Lod grabbed her, she tried to fend him off—inexpertly but fiercely—until she recognized him.
"We have to get that machine off-line," she said in a rush, gesturing to a device on the stage below. "Burning was going to do it, but there was a run for a nonexistent exit, and it was all he could do to keep us from getting stomped like grapes. Somebody clouted him, but he's alive."
She explained it while Lod assured himself that the Allgrave did in fact have a pulse. Then she began tugging at his epaulet 'Major, someone has to shut down that contraption!"
If he didn't, she was going to; that much was clear. Peering down, Lod saw a score of young people moving about without regard for the bedlam in the rest of Empyraeum—all except a bearded man and one doe-eyed little nube who struck Lod as being about to lapse into shock.
"Major!"
He turned back to Haven.
"Here's my offer, Lod," she said. "Disable that synthesizer and I'll give you whatever you want that lies within my power—anything"
He might have held out for an even more all-embracing concession if not for the fact that delay could have resulted in the ultimate deal breaker: RIP Lod.
She offered to lower him down to the stage, but he motioned her back, adding a polite kowtow. "I wouldn't imperil you that way, madam." In point of fact, he wasn't sure he could trust her grip or sense of equilibrium. "Please watch over the Allgrave."
He hooked one leg over the railing and began to edge along the outside of the balcony, scouting out the scene below. Then, having selected an LZ, he stepped off into space.
* * * *
The babel in the amphithea
ter was only an inconvenience to the constituents of the Aggregate. Othertalk allowed them adequate communication.
Still exiled from their unity, Piper found to her astonishment that ostracism had an advantage. The Aggregate did not realize that she was thwarting its efforts to continue production of the poison gas.
Moments earlier, when Byron had signaled for a pause in the production run, Piper had thought she'd perceived hints from him that it was all a malign joke, that no real harm was meant despite the panic the assembler's waftings had brought to the
Alones. But then something malevolent had gotten loose in him once more, something not like Byron at all, and he had commanded the assembler to exhale death into the Empyraeum.
Death for the Alones, at any rate. Byron and the rest of the Aggregate, even Piper, were evidently immune to NNF by dint of blocking agents they had been breathing back at Habitat
In her turmoil she could not tell if her sabotage was a result of having been shut out by the Aggregate or her sudden resentment of Byron. Whichever it was, the cybargot she directed to the machine when no one else was paying attention had succeeded in distracting it from what Byron wanted done.
She knew all the cants so well—the very tongues her lover used. It was so much easier than she'd feared once she'd gotten past the concept of not being part of Byron's extended organism. She seized every opportunity to undermine him.
With each failed attempt to conjure death from the assembler, Byron became less coherent; some hidden dynamic seemed to be unraveling him. Divining Piper's intrusion, he closed his hand around her thin arm roughly for the first time ever. His saytalk lashed at her with hatred she had never known him to contain.
An instant later, when her cheek stung and her head jolted, she understood that he had struck her. The blow summoned lacerating shards of memory of the brutalities she had suffered as an Alone child, as a ward of the state. But Piper was too shocked to be intimidated or even much pained by the blow.
More blows rained down on her face while the constituents stood paralyzed. The rage Piper read in Byron's Othertalk hurt worse than did the open-handed slaps. Years of slowly accrued trust, of intimacy that had grown up nanometers at first, were nullified by a few back and forth claps. It was as if there had never been an Aggregate.