by Ilsa J. Bick
“No shit,” Noah said, his mouth still clogged with saliva. Noah liked saying shit and said it pretty often when his mom wasn’t around. (But not fuck: that you saved up for when you wanted to make an impression.) He spat and said, “No shit, really?”
“I shit you not. Doc says if I’m not careful, I could end up in a comma.”
Snorting, Joey dropped the smoldering butt and ground it out with the toe of his sneaker. “It’s coma, you dope on a rope.”
“How come your toes might fall off?” Noah asked Troy.
“Doc says it’s because diabetics don’t get good blood flow to their distal extremities on account of capillary constriction,” Troy said, like he’d memorized a textbook.
“Yeah, problem like that, and your dick’s gonna die,” Joey said. “You ain’t never gonna get it up. Everyone knows you got to have capillary constriction to get it up.”
A shadow of worry flitted across Troy’s face. “I know that. But everybody knows that the capillaries in your dick ain’t the same as the capillaries in your toes.”
“Naw, man, the capillaries in your dick . . . they’re really delicate. I bet your dick’s gonna fall off, maybe right in the middle of the cafeteria.”
“Will not!” Troy spluttered, his pale cheeks flaming with sudden color.
“Joey,” Noah said.
“Yessir, there’ll be this little glassy tinkle.” Joey shook his head, mournfully. “Troy’s dick going to ground.”
Troy was the color of a prune. “Whuh . . . whuh . . . !” He lunged for Joey, but Noah planted a hand on Troy’s chest. “Hey, at least I got a dick to fall off, dickweed!” Troy shouted.
“Troy.” Noah shoved again. “Quit it.”
“So sad,” Joey said. “A tragedy.”
“Yeah, yeah?” Troy lunged again and Noah shoved him back. “Well, up yours, Joey.” Troy threw Joey the finger. “Man, you can just sit on it and spin.”
“Can’t do that,” said Joey, calmly. “A finger’s a distal extremity. So I sit on that finger and that finger’s gonna . . .”
Noah cut in. “Joey?”
“Yeah?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
* * *
Twilight turned the air grainy, washing out color until everything was gray. From the west came the low wail of a landtrain.
“Six o’clock,” Joey said. “Silver Star out of Clovis. Gonna get dark as tar in another forty-five minutes, an hour. We got to go.”
“Yeah,” Noah said, but he didn’t want to leave. The tree house—a ramshackle construction fifteen meters up and shoehorned tight against the main stem of a Neurasian maple—felt peaceful. The maple was part of a grove and very old, its trunk scarred by generations of jackknives and mini-lasers.
But Joey was right. So they climbed down: Joey first, then Troy and, finally, Noah making his way down flat, half-meter boards nailed to the trunk. The steps were even more fragile than the house, and Noah took it slow. This summer, they’d better nail up some new boards. Otherwise, someone was liable to slip and break his neck.
At the bottom, the boys fanned out for their bikes. When they were still little kids, they’d taken to hiding their bikes in a stand of high grass about seventy meters right of the grove. Why they started hiding the bikes in the first place, no one remembered and now it was just habit. Noah had reached down for his bike when he straightened again and cocked his head.
“What?” Joey asked.
Noah looked back to the lip of a hill that led down to the graveyard and the road just beyond, and took a few steps in that direction. “You hear something?”
* * *
The killer heard the wail of the Silver Star, splitting the air like a clarion call. He was hunkered out of sight, a gnarled walking stick along his left leg, his back against the broad pedestal of an ancient grave. The grave canted left, top-heavy with an angel carved from veined gray marble. The icy stone leeched through his old man’s rumpled overcoat and dusky blue wool sweater, walking chills up and down the ladder of his spine. The wind didn’t help either: a light westerly breeze that riffled his white hair and made his eyes water.
He’d set the meet for six-thirty: not quite full dark around these parts but close. Nothing to do but wait. And think.
Every assassin had a name like Jackal, Scorpion, Midnight Marauder. Even whack-jobs like that one on Towne, the Little Luthien killer, he had a name. So what sounded good? He needed a real kick-ass name because he was going to be famous.
Thinking, he trailed his fingers absently over the contours of a small caliber handgun. A plinker. Do the job, sure, but it wasn’t BIG. He wanted BIG. He wanted POWER. He wanted a cannon, something blocky and loud, with a blinding muzzle flash and enough recoil to break his wrist. Something like the Northwind Star 720 tucked in a quick-draw holster on his left hip. (So okay, fine, he cheated. The Handler hadn’t said not to bring the cannon. He just wasn’t supposed to use it because of the mess.)
His ears pricked at a far-off rumble, a little like thunder. A car: a ground vehicle, not a hover. He edged his head around. Saw a glint of fading sunlight off chrome, and then heard the crackle, pop, and squeal of rock as the car pulled into the cemetery’s gravel drive. The graveyard drive meandered right and then left before angling right again. He knew he wouldn’t be visible until that final right turn.
Peeling away from the monument, he knelt before the stone angel. The earth nipped his knees through his trousers. He placed his walking stick within reach of his left hand, shoved the handgun into his left coat pocket, and bowed his head: just an old man praying at the forgotten grave of a fallen comrade. He smelled dust kicked up by the car’s tires, and then cool blue-white halogen light from the car’s headlamps broke over his back, throwing his shadow into crisp, bold relief. Then the car’s engine sputtered and died. In the sudden silence, the killer heard nothing but the tick-tick-tick of the car’s muffler. But he didn’t move. His skin prickled as his heart banged in his chest, and his mouth went a little dry. Then he caught the pop of a car door and the crunch of a boot against gravel.
At that moment, for a reason he couldn’t explain, his eyes again drifted to the stone angel. The angel’s left wing was gone and its face tear-streaked with age. The angel clutched a sword in its left hand and the Scales of Justice in its right.
Then, like a revelation, he knew his name, and soon, very soon, this man would know his wrath: that of the Angel of Death, the Avatar of Judgment.
Because he was Gabriel.
* * *
Frederic Limyanovich was mad enough to spit. A time warp, that is what Farway was, and this cell a product of a bygone era. Farway was so strange. No hovers, no ’Mechs; guns instead of lasers. Bicycles! He had landed in some kind of prehistoric backwater, surrounded by the moral and political equivalent of Neanderthals. The problem was there were more of these kinds of cells—quite probably, many more than his superiors suspected—scattered through the Inner Sphere. Oh, the initial principle had been sound. Insert small, cohesive cells to work behind the scenes, root out the enemy. The longer these operatives were in place, the more they infiltrated all levels of local government and social structure.
Only one drawback: When The Republic was born, everyone forgot about the cells. But the cells had not forgotten. Some still thought they were at war.
And another thing bothered him. How had they tracked him down in Slovakia? How could they have known about him? And the coded request they used was so old, he had to look it up. The instructions were quite specific, though, and he had brought the requested . . . materials. But he would not be the first to offer them up.
As it happened, they wanted to talk. Brother to brother, they said. To be brought up to speed, they said. To better understand how we are to finish what we began during the Jihad and so much easier now because the various factions—the Houses and upstarts—were turning on one another, gobbling up territory, consuming themselves like snakes eating their tails.
So he came, they
met, he talked. The Jihad was finished, he said. Make your peace and be done with it, he said. Ah, but he knew which of them was not convinced. That old one, the one who sat and smoked until a cloud of blue veiled the old one like a shawl—but Limyanovich saw unspoken thoughts behind those glittering black eyes.
Well, talking once again would do no good, even if with another representative who, he already knew, would be as intransigent as the old one with the black eyes and blue smoke. And to talk about what? More revolution? Perhaps soon, but not now. This was not yet their time.
Limyanovich was so boiling mad, he nearly missed his turn in the fading light. The turnoff for the cemetery was on his left, and poorly marked. A streaked, dingy verdigris monument plaque, probably bronze in another life, announced its religious affiliation as Old Roman Catholic, and the cemetery’s name: Our Mother of Sorrows. A crumbling stone pieta of the Virgin Mary and the dead Jesus perched above the plaque. Mary’s nose was gone, as was her left arm, broken off at the elbow. Jesus had fared little better and looked as if someone had taken a sledgehammer and smashed the head and amputated both legs at the knees.
As he eased the car onto a pocked gravel drive, he flicked on the car’s halogens against the waning sunlight. Glowing, ash-colored dust clouds boiled in the beams like smoke. The chassis swayed, bouncing as the tires found every single rut and depression. He drove slowly, his eyes ticking over headstones and degraded monuments that canted at bizarre angles like broken teeth. A right, then a left, and then as he eased the car right again, the halogens swung onto the back of a man kneeling before a grave.
Limyanovich rolled the car to within fifty meters then braked but kept the engine running as he weighed the threat. A shock of white hair and a walking stick . . . an old man. Limyanovich’s gaze raked over gravestones then cut right to scrutinize the rise of a drumlin. The hill was covered in a nearly solid carpet of dead leaves but had no convenient depressions in which to hide. Certainly, a sharpshooter could take him from the hill but, somehow, he didn’t think these people were that sophisticated.
But they are stubborn enough to be dangerous. Extermination is the only option. Space the executions far enough apart, and no one will look twice.
He cut the engine. Through the dusty windscreen, he watched as the old man stirred, groped for . . . Was that a cane? No, a gnarled walking stick as knobby as an arthritic finger, and Limyanovich watched as the old man hauled himself up like a winded mountain climber. Another ancient: soft in the mind and stubborn as a Marik goat. Look at him, tottering over with his too-baggy trousers and shabby coat!
Still . . . Reaching over, Limyanovich opened the glove compartment and withdrew a slender needler. These people might be bumpkins, but he was no fool.
Popping the door, he swung his legs around, unfolded his bulk and stood, all his senses alert. He was a big, physically imposing man, with a barrel chest and coarse features, and used his bulk to his advantage. He heard nothing but the sigh of a slight breeze and the hard crack of rock grinding beneath his shoes as he shifted his weight. Colder now that the sun was nearly gone. His breath steamed. He eyed the old man, the way the ancient walked. It had been Limyanovich’s experience that imposters often forgot that it was one thing to put on a disguise, but quite another to inhabit the part. Uneven rock here, and the truly old—well, one that looked as ancient as this fossil, with his hunched back and wild hair and his right hand in his coat pocket, very interesting—frequently lost their footing.
As if on cue, the old man skidded and came down on one knee with a startled yelp. Limyanovich didn’t move. Instead, he watched, coolly, as the ancient clambered upright, swaying like a survivor on a raft lost at sea. But then, yes, that right hand sneaking back to his pocket . . .
Limyanovich waited until the old man was three meters away. Then he said, “Stop where you are, and do exactly as I say, or I will kill you and let the rats eat your eyes.”
“No, no, not rats,” the old man said. His voice quavered with age. “Out here, we got crows.” But he stopped, his oversized coat flapping about his legs like a JumpShip’s sun-sail half-ripped from its moorings. The old man squinted against the harsh halogen glare. “But why so hostile, Comrade?”
“Comrade.” Limyanovich wanted to scream with frustration. “Listen to yourself. You sound like a peasant. You want to talk, eh? Then take your right hand out of your pocket. Slowly, and turn out the pocket at the same time.”
The old man complied, though with a Herculean effort worthy of an Elemental. Limyanovich waited, his eyes flicking between the old man’s face and the hand. Finally, the old man managed and the white liner drooped like a limp tongue. “There,” the ancient said. “You see?”
“I see that your pocket is as empty as your head.” Still, Limyanovich relaxed a fraction. “I have said all I have to say, old man. I should not have to repeat myself. We are done talking.”
“But we would ask you to reconsider.” The old man shuffled a little two-step, moving slightly to his left. “There are those of us more than willing to do the work.”
“Your ideas belong to another century.” Limyanovich’s accent was heavy, guttural with rolling rs and long vowels. “It is time for new thinking and bold plans.”
The old man nodded mournfully. “We thought you might say that. And that is most unfortunate for, you see, we do know.”
That made Limyanovich pause. The old man’s eyes sparkled with intelligence, but surely that was an illusion, a trick of the light. “Know what, old man?”
“That you have certain items.” The old man paused, sidled closer. “We believe that it is best for all concerned if you entrust them to us.”
“Items? What are you talking about?” But now a dark premonition touched Limyanovich. How could the old man know? How could any of them?
A small voice in his head, the one he associated with his first and best Handler: Kill him. Kill the old man and get out now.
Limyanovich listened to that voice. “Bah,” he said, edging back. “We are done talking.” His hand tightened around his needler, and his eyes ticked from side to side, searching for confederates.
His Handler, again, chiding: No, no, there is no one else; they would have killed you already, you fool. Kill him, do it now, do it now!
Now! Limyanovich was already pivoting, readying the needler as he said, “There is nothing to discuss, old man, nothing . . .” And that was as far as he got.
The old man moved, impossibly fast, whipping the walking stick around, the air parting with the whistle of its passage. With a wild battle cry, the old man jammed the stick into Limyanovich’s chest, hard. Then, a loud bang, a flash of orange.
Limyanovich screamed. Pain rocketed into his lungs, roared up his throat. He tried pulling in a breath to scream again, and couldn’t. No air, no air! Clawing now at his chest. Aware that his hands were wet with blood. Couldn’t breathe, no air! Rock bit his knees as he buckled, his lungs pulling, pulling. . . . And then he was drowning as hot, fresh blood boiled in the back of his throat.
From the moment his chest exploded and his lungs shredded, Frederic Limyanovich was already dead in all but a technical sense. He would have died later rather than sooner, though not by much. As it was, he died flat on his back, still clutching the needler, his mouth gawping like a beached fish, and his vision constricting to a single point that he realized, at the very last second, was not a halo, or a ball of white light but the black circle of a gun barrel aiming for the naked space above his nose.
Limyanovich had time for one last thought so finely edged and sharp the letters might have been cut out of black diamonds: NO . . . !
* * *
The scene was like a bad holodrama done in slow motion. First, out of the west and the dying sun, the car rocked down the gravel path, the headlamps of its high beams bouncing off broken headstones and toppled statues—the statues there and gone in an instant, like the briefly illuminated contents of a dark attic. And then as the lights swung right, Noah saw a man, h
aloed in white light, kneeling at the grave. The man was old; his hair was wild, and Noah realized, with a start: I know him.
But then the driver’s side door popped, and then a much larger man emerged. The man was a giant: broad at the shoulders and as tall as an Elemental, with swarthy skin, a coal black mustache and a mane of long hair blacker than obsidian. The men began to argue, the large one shouting now, his accent hard—and then, in the blink of an eye, the old man whipped his walking stick round. So fast! A loud bang and a spray of orange flame, and Noah thought: Shotgun.
And then the big man was down, the white light sheeting over his body like glare ice. It had happened so fast, Noah was stunned. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think. He could only watch as the old man—upright now, not shuffling along but moving—stuck out his left arm, the pistol in his hand as clear as if scissored out of black paper. Another spray of orange, much smaller, arcing to the large man’s forehead—not a laser, or a needler, that’s a gun—and then the report, not sharp like the whip crack of a rifle shot but a flat, broken sound: bap!
Then Troy screamed.
Straightening, the old man spun round, saw them, then started up the hill, moving fast.
So fast, I didn’t know he could run that fast! Noah was up, hauling back on Troy’s arm. “Come on,” Noah shouted. “Come on! We got to run, run!”
They wheeled and ran, Troy stumbling, gasping, “Oh, oh, oh, oh!” The hill was in near-complete darkness now and the boys veered left, heading for the high grass. Joey was further ahead, running flat-out. They had to get to the grass, grab their bikes, get out of there. Run, run, run, run! In the space of less than half a minute, Noah waded into grass that dragged around his chest and legs. He couldn’t see anything, and for the first time, he realized just how dark darkness was. He could still make out gradations of blackness—the grasses were like a filmy gray sea—but the bikes . . .
Suddenly, Troy lurched forward, taking Noah down with him. Yelping in surprise, Noah twisted, smacked earth with his left shoulder, and felt the breath go whooshing out of his lungs in a sudden huh! The darkness spun, and he wanted to vomit. Moaning, he rolled, pushed up on all fours like a dog, and concentrated on dragging in a breath.