"The flight-control computer is working out well." They'd used a surplus fighter-jet autopilot that the USAF wouldn't miss.
"Good," she said, satisfied. A bit of an improvisation, but it'll come in handy. "Lowe, I'll go through the simulator run with you after dinner. Everyone else, get busy."
She stayed, leaning on the railing of the scaffolding. Tom Cairstens lingered a moment. "You seem to be enjoying this," he said.
Gwen nodded. "It's nostalgic," she said. "As well as useful. It's been a long time since I worked with machinery this . . . discrete. Individual metal shapes, separate systems, that sort of thing,"
"A bit like building a raft when you're a kid and playing pirate."
She looked at him in slight surprise. Really quite perceptive, at times, she thought.
"Exactly."
"How long will it be before Earth's . . . modernized?" he asked.
"That depends on how difficult it is to get things through from the other side," she said thoughtfully. "From what I've been working out on the physics, it'll be quite drastically expensive, even by our standards. Certainly we'll have to ship information and small knocked-down faber—fabricators—through first. And this planet is short of energy and raw materials until space is accessible. Several generations, probably, a long transition period."
"And in the meantime, you get to play with wonderful toys like this," he said, nudging the hull plates.
"What's life but play?" She looked at the metal oblong. "I think I'll call it . . . Reiver."
Gwen smiled. "I'll play with this. And with everything."
Chapter Fifteen
"Not bad," Henry said, dodging the crowds outside the theater.
Neon shone on the slick wet pavement; their breath showed in white puffs. He felt Jenny's hand steal into his and squeeze gently. Carmaggio grinned quietly to himself.
"What's so funny?" she asked.
"Dating again, at my age," he said.
"At least you got to stop for a while," she said, leaning against him slightly.
A panhandler approached them, opened his mouth, met Carmaggio's eyes and stepped back against the wall.
"How do you do that?" she asked.
"They can smell us," he said. "Eau de cop."
The line for the 9:45 showing was already around the block. "Lot of these look too young to have seen the first trilogy," he said.
"Go ahead—make me feel old," she said with a chuckle. "I saw the first one eleven times. The man's a magician; how did he ever get Kenneth Branagh to play Obi-Wan?"
"He had to—needed a Brit," Henry said idly.
Relaxed, he thought. I'm actually feeling relaxed. A minor miracle, considering what was coming down.
"Not bad space opera," he went on. "Despite the whooshing spaceships."
"I didn't know you liked sci-fi," she said, looking up at him out of the corners of her eyes.
"I've sort of gotten into it a little, lately," he said. "Can't read mysteries, after all."
She gave a gurgling laugh. Damn, that's one fine woman, he thought.
"No financial thrillers for me, either," she said.
They walked in companionable silence for a while. Even well east of Broadway the Upper West Side was fairly active on a Saturday night. Yupper West Side, he thought. More sushi joints than Tokyo. Funny; he'd been a beat cop here back in the seventies, when the area just ahead—Broadway and Amsterdam—had been about as shitty as anywhere on the island. Needle Park, and the name hadn't been a joke. Then almost overnight the renovators hit, and you were up to your ass in boutiques and expensive studio apartments. They turned left again, out toward Riverside Park.
Times like this you can forget what a toilet this town is, he thought. Behind them the towers reared up and disappeared into low mist, shining outlines of crystal and light. The buildings here were older, grande-dame apartment hotels like the Ansonia, terracotta swirls and mansard roofs.
"Did you know," Jennifer said, pointing to the Ansonia, "that Caruso lived there? And Stravinsky, and Toscanini?"
"I do now," Henry said. "Hell, I've even heard of them. Want to get something to eat?"
"Well—" Jennifer said. "Well, actually, if you can stand my attempt at Italian cooking, I have something ready at home. It's not too far."
***
"Dead slow," Gwen said.
Lowe grunted in reply. The water outside the TV pickups of the Reiver showed dark, ooze from the Hudson estuary welling up below the keel. Billows of gray sediment arched up, barely perceptible against the blackness, falling out of sight like silty snow.
Apart from a low whir from the ventilation system, the Reiver had an eerie quietness. In the control compartment the main light came from below, the glow of the video displays and digital readouts. Three swivel seats met the controls, for pilot and navigator and systems control; a little redundant, but Gwen didn't completely trust the glorified abacus known locally as a computer.
"Six knots," young Lowe said. His toast-brown face looked almost sallow in the bluish glow of the controls. "Depth one hundred meters, bearing six degrees north-northwest."
Gwen turned her chair and looked over to where Dolores was holding the navigators position. "Tracking?"
"The yacht's half a kilometer ahead and dead in line," the Colombian said.
She closed her eyes and monitored the systems through her transducer. The interface was clumsy—the local equipment was pathetically slow in transferring data—but everything seemed to be going well.
"Turn it over," she said to Lowe.
"You have the helm, ma'am."
She slid into the control seat and took the stick. The drive couldn't thrust omnidirectionally, only over an eighty-degree cone to the rear, but that was sufficient. Power was at ninety-eight percent, good for two years of underwater cruising, or several hundred hours of flight; no sign of problems with the superconducting storage coil. Although I'd hate to have to take this thing out of the atmosphere. She eased back on the stick, and a slight elevator-rising feeling of increased weight followed. A touch on the pistol-grip accelerator on the control stick brought the speed up to twenty knots, and the Reiver broached smoothly through the surface of the Atlantic. Light showed on the pickup screens, the light of stars and moon on the endless waves. A slight pitching disturbed the previous rock-steady motion, sign that the craft was in the grip of powers even greater than the technics she had brought with her from the Domination's timeline.
"Hailing Andros Adelborn," she said.
A rooster-tail of spray fountained backward from the blunt curve of the Reiver's bow, surging almost to the forward video pickup. Radar showed no other vessels in the area, except for her own yacht dead ahead. The low shape of the surface ship drew closer quickly, yellow glow from the windows and the blinking navigation lights.
"Andros Adelborn here." Tom's voice; yet another Lowe was captain, and the crew were all her own Haitains, men who knew nothing and didn't want to know. "Ready for rendezvous."
Alongside the motor yacht; the Andros wasn't very large, no more than eighty feet at the waterline. She still bulked more than the submersible. Gwen throttled back, the yacht keeping pace until both vessels were motionless, rocking in the gentle swell. Then she locked the stick, standing with a slight feeling of reluctance. Interesting, she thought. Nothing quite like this had ever been built in her history; by the time Alfven-wave drives came along, materials technics had already advanced to the molecular-construction level.
"May I come too?" Dolores asked.
Gwen looked over at her absently, then took her scent. Why not. I'll need somebody for the night. She nodded.
"Can you handle it?" she asked Lowe.
"In my sleep," the young Bahamian said, grinning brashly. "It's no more trouble than ridin' a scooter."
"It will be in New York harbor," she said dryly. "Take her in extremely slow right in the Adelborn's wake, and keep an eye on the sonar. Then down on the bottom and stay there, surface once a day to report.
I'll send someone to spell you after a week or so, but I want the Reiver ready for emergency use at any moment. No monkeyshines. Understood?"
"Understood, ma'am," Lowe said, standing straight and swallowing. He might be brash, but he wasn't stupid.
She disliked punishing subordinates, even the locals. There was no need, back home. Nobody had to inflict pain on a servus to instill obedience. Humans were another matter, of course, and you did what you had to do to get results. Luckily they were usually frightened enough without direct action. I miss the servus more and more, she thought. They had a beautiful, supple, yielding quality that even the best-trained humans couldn't approach. As well as being generally more intelligent.
She ducked through into the open room behind the control cabin; it was rigged as a lounge-cum-communications center. The ladder to the deck-hatch was at the rear, where a bulkhead and corridor marked off a section of cabins and storage areas; the engineering spaces were in the stern. A man sprang to his feet as she entered, moving forward to take one of the consoles.
"Nueva York," Dolores murmured. "I always did want to see it."
"We won't be doing much sightseeing," Gwen said. "Too dangerous."
Dolores's darkly pretty face grimaced. "That damned Samothracian! How I wish you'd killed him."
"So do I." With him gone, she wouldn't have to worry or hasten.
Gwen climbed the ladder and pulled the human up after her, standing with her feet braced on the coaming over the hatch. There was no superstructure, nothing to break the curve of the hull except a section of roughened metal to give feet a better grip. The air was chill with the northern spring, cool on her bare arms; cold salt spray touched her lips. The breeze brought a medley of odors: hot metal from the engines of the yacht, human, the distant land—itself tainted with burnt fuel and chemicals, but still green and earth-yeasty beneath. The joyous high-pitched squeaking of dolphins; their visible warmth was like leaping candles against the darker, cooler water. Heat billows plumed up from the Reiver and the Adelborn, a glowing background to the light-spectrum outlines. Overhead the stars arched in multicolored splendor, like a frosting of colored jewels across the sky.
She took a deep breath and shouted, a long wordless cry of exultation.
***
"A what?" Jennifer asked with a crow of laughter.
"A kangaroo," Henry said, grinning back at her. "So help me God, the MPs found 'em halfway back from the Honolulu zoo, hitch-hiking."
"How did they do that?"
"We never found out. Both of them were drunk as lords . . . and so was the kangaroo, or so the zoo people claimed."
That had been Gramsci and Dundas. They'd both been killed in that ambush about a week after they got back from the R&R; still, it was a good story, and they wouldn't have grudged him the use of it.
They'd have told him to make his move about now, he thought, as he watched Jennifer's pretty-wholesome face alight with laughter at the other end of the couch. Christ, this is like being sixteen again. He'd been married for fifteen years and divorced for two, and he'd just gotten out of the habit. Especially with nice girls—which Jennifer Feinberg was, old-fashioned phrase or not.
The silence stretched slightly as the laughter died.
"You know, Henry," Jennifer said from the other end of the sofa, "one of the things I like about you is that you're a gentleman."
"Thanks," Henry said.
Good thing you kept your hands to yourself. Oh, well, it really was a great dinner. Great dinner, fun time. A relief being with somebody who wasn't a cop but didn't have any hangups about the fact that he was.
He swilled the last of his Chianti around in the bottom of his glass and looked around the room. Not big, no bigger than his, although he shuddered to think what it must cost up here on the Upper West Side. More open, the bedroom just an angled section of the L-shape layout. Books covered most of the walls; a couple of prints, a good sound system with a stack of movie disks for the new Sony flatscreen. A cat staring at him resentfully from the top of a bookcase, hissing occasionally at the invader of its turf. Not too much in the way of frills and furbelows. It smelled like a woman's place, though; of sachet, under the agreeable scents of food.
"Henry, it's a good thing to be a gentleman, but sometimes you can overdo it."
Henry put the glass down on the table and reached for her.
***
"Slow," Vulk Dragovic said.
The Serb looked around warily as they walked down the gangplank, his hand inside the pocket of his long overcoat. That was not really necessary, although the New York spring was chilly. The gun within probably wasn't necessary either, but he didn't like taking chances. The darkened wharf was eerily quiet, despite the rumble of noise echoing in from Manhattan's towers. Cranes loomed above them like frozen metallic skeletons.
"Slow, coming in by sea. Why waste days?"
"Boats are harder to trace," Gwen said, coming up beside him. "And airports are easier to watch."
He could see her nostrils flare as she scanned the wharf. All he could smell was the foul water beneath. She could probably detect this Samothracian farting two kilometers away.
The green eyes turned toward him slightly. Fool, he told himself. Vulk meant wolf in his own tongue, but the Draka . . . Watch what you think, always, always.
She smiled at him, that slight curved turn of the lips. "Let loose the ants of war," she said.
Vulk turned and snapped an order to two of the Haitian servants. They carefully lowered the crate they had been carrying and opened the top with their prybars. A metallic rustling and clicking sounded within. Gwen's face went blank for a second; he recognized the expression, the look she took on when giving an order through her transducer. Dark six-legged shapes the size of a man's thumbnail poured out of the crate. The Serb pulled a foot back in revulsion as one skittered by him, suppressing an impulse to stamp on it like a bug. It was a bug, literally and metaphorically. A tiny self-contained android controlled by a vat-grown, gene-engineered version of an ant's nervous system implanted in a mechanical body. With a few simple imperatives: seek out a power outlet to recharge every five hours, proceed to designated locations and record, return to base to drop off the data. No transmissions, and virtually undetectable.
The pseudo-insects gathered into clumps and moved away; some into the night under their own power, others to the waiting cars to be driven nearer to their targets.
"It's a pity they can't breed," Alice said.
Vulk looked away from her. The six-month stomach was starting to show, which was disturbing. And the way she kept smiling . . .
"Too dangerous," Gwen said. Her head traced across the dock again, scanning. "We had to sterilize an entire habitat-city on the moon once, when we tried that. No way to stop them mutating. Selective pressure wiped out the implanted commands and they branched out on their own."
Vulk shook his head and concentrated on business. "We'd better get set up."
"You and Tom handle it," Gwen said. "I've got a few errands to run, first."
He opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. It was the humans who were in danger without her, not the other way round. One of the Haitians handed her a knapsack, anonymous black nylon to hide weapons and devices not of this world. She slipped her arms through the loops and walked off into the darkness, feet soundless on the concrete.
There were times when he wished he was back in Sarajevo.
***
"Hey, momma, you got the time?"
Gwen turned. There were four of them, none older than twenty. A damned nuisance. Kill them all now? On the other hand, she wasn't in that much of a hurry.
"It's 12:58, and far too late for you," she said.
There was a moment of shocked silence from the youths. That was not in their script for the incident. She smiled at the bewilderment on their faces. Anger started to spice their scents, mixing with the aggression and rut that had been floating to her for twenty minutes, since they began their stalk. Their
leader reacted first. Naturally. He can't be . . . what's the word? Dissed, that was it. Dissed out by a female, in front of his followers. Her smile grew broader as he pulled out his gun.
Be careful now. A bullet in just the right place could kill her as finally as any human. She'd had friends who'd died because living through the centuries fooled their under-mind into thinking itself immortal. And there was no tearing hurry.
She stepped closer to the young man. The street was deserted except for the pack and its chosen prey, streetlights glimmering dimly on wet pavement. He extended the gun, holding it sideways with the butt level with the ground, an odd firing position.
"Crazy bitch!"
Then he screamed. Her fingers closed on the gun and the hand that held it, clamping metal and flesh together as irresistibly as a vise. The leather of his jacket ripped under her other hand as she held him immobile and slowly, slowly tilted the gun up under his chin. The flesh dimpled under the cold metal. Sometimes humans can be very disagreeable. This one's urine smelled bad. His free hand beat at her, and he screamed again as he broke his knuckles on the side of her head.
"Goodbye," she said.
Pumpf. The sound of the shot was muffled. Blood and brain matter spurted from the back of the mugger's head. It spattered into the face of the one behind him, and he clawed at his face, at bone fragments and clots of brain. Gwen reached out and plucked the weapon from his belt, then hit him sharply on the side of the head with the butt. He dropped and sprattled in a final galvanic twitch.
The third was running away into the darkened street, slamming into walls and stumbling in his panic. A plastic garbage can spilled aluminum and trash and a squeaking rat in his wake. Gwen examined the weapon in her hand. It was a Calico, with a helical fifty-round magazine mounted over the barrel and action. Not a bad design, considering the available technology. Nine-millimeter parabellum ammunition. She turned to the last of the pack.
"Better put that down," she said. His pistol dropped from shaking fingers.
"Don't . . . don't hurt me." His voice squeaked a little; he couldn't be much more than sixteen.
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