"No, no," Gwen said. "I have heard of Mr. Carmaggio, of course. And now I have to run. Enjoy yourselves."
Carmaggio drew a deep breath as she walked away, conscious of how his palms were wet and how sweat was trickling down his flanks.
"A bit overwhelming, isn't she?" Jennifer chuckled.
"You could say that," Henry replied grimly. "Jenny, there is something you should know. My place afterwards?"
"Sure," she said, looking after Gwen with a thoughtful frown.
***
I hope it wasn't a mistake bringing Henry here, Jennifer thought, as she drifted off to circulate. She had to go—it was a business reception, when you came right down to it—and she was damned if she was going to look like she was ashamed to be seen with him. Particularly now, with that horrible thing happening to him at work. But he did seem nervous. Even if he looked adorable in a tux.
It was a relief to break out into the ballroom, decorated in a fantasy of peacock feathers and draped silk along the walls. The usual mill-and-swill, with a buffet along one wall, and the other was windows looking out on Central Park to the west. The mood was good, the launch had been a success beyond expectations. She frowned. Beyond all reasonable expectations. The way Lather Enterprises had jumped in was ridiculous; they'd had to split two-for-one right in the middle of things. Talk about overallotment.
She nibbled at things from the trays, sipped at a glass of Chardonnay, drifted and talked. A hour found her behind a piece of dreadful modern sculpture, out of sight and sound of the rest of the party.
"Well, hello," a voice purred behind her.
She turned, feeling an unaccountable looseness in her knees. Damn, how does she do that? Gwen was leaning one arm against the wall.
"I was starting to think you were avoiding me on the 'road show,'" she said. "Three weeks of touring, and hardly a word."
"Ah—" Jennifer hesitated. I was avoiding you, of course. "Well, we were all so busy."
"Tell me about it," Gwen said. She chuckled. "And then I thought your SEC would never declare the registration statement effective, not to mention the problems with the final prospectus. I thought this was a capitalist country?"
"You wouldn't think so, would you, sometimes."
A silence fell, evidently much more comfortable for Gwen than for her. Jennifer felt her skin itch, as if the room had suddenly gone up ten degrees and brought out a sweat. Oh, God. Nobody else affects me this way. It's not fair!
Gwen took a sip from her goblet, breathed the heavy, fruity scent of the brandy. Her head arched to one side slightly, with a play of tendons in her neck.
"All's done, though," she said. "You know, I don't have any murals here, but I do have some fascinating etchings."
Jennifer was excruciatingly conscious of the hangings brushing against her back and calves. She gulped for air. "Ah, that is—God, please—I don't want—"
Gwen swayed back. "Well, there's always tomorrow," she said, not unkindly. "You'll find I'm extremely good at getting my way. Good job on the papers to the bank syndicate." She fished in a small, elegant belt-pouch. "And if you reconsider over the next few days, do drop by—here's the admission code."
Jennifer slumped back against the wall as she left, fighting for calm. What's happening to me?
***
Damn, Carmaggio thought, repressing a start as Gwen came up to one side of him. How does she do that? And in heels?
"I place my feet down instead of tapping them the way you humans do," Gwen replied. "Steel can touch steel without sound, if you put them together without enough impact to start harmonics."
Carmaggio began humming soundlessly in his throat, hunching his head down into his shoulders and glaring. Ingolfsson stood hipshot, one hand holding the snifter and the other on her belt. That reminded him painfully of the fact that there was no belt holster at the small of his back. All things considered, it would have been nothing but a security blanket here, but that wasn't to be despised. God, what a mantrap, he thought. If you liked jockettes; not an ounce of spare tissue, except the smooth curve of breasts under the creamy silk. She reminded him of the old story about the statue that had come to life; you just couldn't look away from her. I wonder what the impact would be like without the pheromone blockers Lafarge gave me?
Her nostrils expanded slightly for an instant. "Ah, I see our mutual Samothracian friend has been taking precautions with you—it dulls your scent. And makes life less pleasant than it might be. You people are scent-blind enough, without making it worse."
"I prefer to be my own man, thank you," Henry said quietly, bracing himself against the force of personality that blazed out at him, as he might have against a physical wind. "And this isn't your place."
"Your own? Or the Samothracian's?"
She raised a slim eyebrow, the movement as coolly precise as everything she did. Habits of observation quirked at him. She's got no tics, he realized. No waste movement. Nothing that isn't to a purpose or deliberate. It made him feel heavy and clumsy and old, like some dirt-stained cotadino in the old country stumbled into a country-house ball.
"Have you," she went on, "ever considered that you might have been sold a bill of goods as to our relative merits? I doubt you'd find Samothracian society very pleasant either, you know."
Henry nodded jerkily. "He isn't trying to take us over. And he hasn't killed anyone here."
"He killed one of my guards, in the Bahamas," Gwen said reasonably. "He'll kill any number of you to get at me. A bit of a fanatic, don't you find? And no sense of humor at all."
Henry thrust down doubts. She cannot read my mind. "You've left a trail of bodies from the day you arrived. I'm a cop; it's my job to catch people like you—even when they aren't people."
"Will anyone miss Marley Man and his posse?" Gwen asked.
"You're not the courts. And there's Fischer, God knows how many others."
"Ah, well, that's war for you. You had a war of your own, didn't you, Detective Carmaggio? Didn't any bystanders get killed in that one?"
Henry felt sweat trickling down into his collar. "You're going to be stopped."
"Everyone's the hero in their own story, Lieutenant," Gwen said, smiling and shaking her head. "Think. This might be my story—in which case, I'll win, and you are a minor character." She paused, considering. "I will win. I've lived nearly half a thousand years, human, and I always do win. Don't sacrifice the few years you have smashing your glass against my iron."
He stayed silent. She nodded. "Yes, I can understand what Jennifer sees in you. Pity if she were hurt, wouldn't it?"
Carmaggio flushed. Then a movement caught his eye. By God, he thought. That's Captain McLeish, by God!
"Yes, a number of you have seen the . . . wisdom of cooperating with me. I could use someone like you in my . . . organization."
He looked into the clear green eyes. "I've done some, ah, questionable things, in my time," he said with quiet finality. "But I've never been on the pad."
She shrugged and turned. "Your choice."
Shaking, Carmaggio emptied his drink. One more, he thought. Then we're out of here. Enough secrecy. Jenny has a right to know what she's facing.
Even if it scared her shitless and risked her life.
***
Carmaggio's apartment was new territory to Jennifer. She'd assumed that was for the usual bachelor reasons; terrible housekeeping, for starters. Instead it was extremely tidy, in a ruled-off way, probably the result of weeks of intensive effort. The smell of wax and cleaner certainly hinted at that. Larger than hers too, although of course it was on Mulberry north of Canal, not the Upper West Side. She looked around as Henry struggled with their coats in an overstuffed closet. A couple of pictures, mostly photos. Family shots, and Henry as a young man stiff and self-conscious in uniform. Quite a few books, looking well-thumbed. A good computer off in a nook by the living room, with a rack of CD-ROMs beside it. A peek into the bedroom showed a folded exercise machine in one corner.
"Henr
y, there's something I should tell you," she began slowly, coming back toward the hallway. I hate confessions. How did Catholics do them all the time?
Henry smiled. "Not quite yet, I think. Activate."
On the kitchen table lay a black rectangle the size of a business card. When he spoke, a twisting column of light appeared above it—a three-dimensional image, looking like an impossible moving sculpture of liquid.
"I—what is that?"
"I don't really know myself," Henry said. She looked over at him, feeling her eyes go wide. "But it's got some interesting qualities."
He spoke to it again. An image of Gwendolyn Ingolfsson appeared over the table: life-size, nude, and utterly indistinguishable from reality, except that it neither breathed nor moved.
"Shit!" Jennifer shouted, and scrambled backward.
She lurched into a chair and tottered, arms wind-milling. Carmaggio leaped forward and caught her. An urge to push him away fought with an equally strong desire to cling, until all she could do was stand and shiver. After a while the blackness receded from her eyes.
"Wha . . . what is that?"
"Jenny." She turned and looked into his face. "Until you went to the Bahamas, I didn't have any proof—just some suspicions. And then I couldn't tell you because it'd put you in danger. You've got to understand that first. Understand?"
Jennifer shook herself. Think, you cow, she told herself. "I . . . I think so. What does it mean?"
Carmaggio took a deep breath. "Okay," he began.
***
"Pheromones?"
Jennifer stared at the skeleton the impossible machine was showing, rotating slowly to give an all-around view. She remembered more than enough of her premed studies to know that the skeleton was impossible, too. The flanged bones, the high-leverage double-acting joints, the too-large nasal and ear cavities . . .
That isn't a human being. That isn't a human being.
"Yeah, pheromones, supercharged variety. Lafarge says they can play games with your head."
"Oh, my God," Jennifer said. She put a hand to her mouth. "Oh, my God, I went to bed with—"
Suddenly she was up and running, struggling to hold back the bitter-tasting bile. Remembering fever-hot skin tasting of cinnamon and salt, weight that crushed out her breath, a growling chuckle in her ear. Vomit splashed into the bowl as she knelt, heaving and retching uncontrollably; the raw physical misery was a relief, crowding thought away. When she was finally conscious of something else, it was Carmaggio standing beside her with a towel and damp facecloth.
"Here," he said, helping her clean up. "C'mon, sit, get your head down a little, try this."
She washed her mouth out with water and then took a sip of the brandy, sitting on the edge of the bathtub and shivering. A hand rubbed her back and she leaned into it gratefully.
"Don't sweat it," he said gently. "You're not to blame."
"That's just it," she said roughly and took another swallow of the brandy. "I thought I was seduced, and I was drugged, I was raped—and I didn't even know it. I was an accomplice!" She set the glass down carefully. Remembered words fell into place with little mental click sounds. "The bitch, the bitch, she was laughing at me all along. Laughing. I want her dead."
"Well," said Carmaggio, and put his arm around her shoulders. "Yeah, that's the option we've been looking at, actually."
***
"I think we have something!" Mueller exclaimed. The words echoed through the huge empty spaces of the warehouse.
It was brightly lit now, with banks of overhead fluorescent lights; the interior was painted white, including the surfaces of the windows. Armed guards stood at intervals on catwalks around the upper interior walls, and another spanned the arch of the building. Below was the great circular ring of the fusion generator, man-high and twenty meters in circumference. Lying within that was another ring almost as large, smooth enigmatic metal with heavy fiber-optic cable junctions at its four corners. The air held a heavy electrical smell, overlain with new paint and hot metal.
The German scientist was standing at a console on the warehouse floor. Above in the glassed-in control chamber Gwen twitched her ears forward to pick up his voice, then glanced over at the display monitors.
"I think you're right," she said. "Get—"
CRACK.
The noise was deafening even here in the control chamber. The tragus clamped automatically across the opening of her ears to protect the sensitive inner mechanisms. Humans screamed down on the floor, clutching their hands to either side of their heads.
From within the center of the inner ring a thread of light too intense to see speared upward, cutting through the roof with hardly even a spark as the steel flashed into its constituent atoms and the atoms were stripped to ions. It was thinner than a thread, Gwen realized as she flung up a hand and glanced away, blinking at the line of darkness scored across her sight. She opened the door and stepped out onto the new metal of the catwalk, past a Haitian bawling in panic and fumbling with his heavy Barrett .50 sniper rifle.
Thinner than a thread and utterly rigid. The source was—her mind and transducer did quick calculations—a spot 7.32 meters above the exact center of the inner ring. Head height for her, now that she was out on the catwalk that spanned the transposition circle.
Her breath was fast and heavy; she controlled it, and throttled back the beating of her heart.
Below the thread of energy a spot opened. It swelled outward into a perfect circle a meter wide, and then flashed from silver to transparent.
"Well met," she breathed to the one who stood there. "Glory to the Race."
"Service to the State," Alexis Renston replied. "Sorry for the side effect," he went on, pointing upward to the beam. "Energetic particle byproduct."
The Archon was in a suit of powered infantry armor; it mimicked his form a few millimeters out, flexible as liquid and as strong as anything in the universe, set to a shiny jet-black at the moment. Molded lumps and protrusions told of engines concealed within, and weapons deadly enough to savage whole cities. It slid from face and hands as he tilted his head back slightly to take in Gwen, then glanced around at the interior of the warehouse. Behind him she could see others, and the hulking hyena-ape forms of ghouloons. The background was Reichart Station, but the forest beyond it had been cleared and the surface smoothed. Machines rested on it, waiting, and more hovered in the sky. The heavy iron was ready.
"I see you haven't been idle," the Archon said.
"Nor have you," she said.
There was a servus off to one side, operating some equipment. Ah, Tolya. The servus physicist looked . . . younger. Well, she deserved the ultimate reward.
Datadump, she commanded her transducer. There was a barely subliminal hum along her nerves as it sent/received data at a rate far too high for conscious reflection. But it would be there, and here, when needed.
"Timeframe?" she went on, while the machines spoke to each other.
"This molehole is barely at the atomic scale," Renston said. "Proof-of-concept. Scaleup is proceeding rapidly and shouldn't present any problems, provided you keep the beacon in operation. Planetary Archon Ingolfsson," he added. They both wolf-grinned at the essential clarification of status.
"News?"
"The Samothracians attacked, with moleholes in place. We stopped them, but only just. We're making excellent progress on our own moleholes for interstellar travel."
"Gravitational effects . . . slipslide?"
"Exactly. Deeper into the solar gravity well than the Oort, and you go sideways. Very high energy costs, too."
"Acknowledged. I suggest we break off until you can establish full contact. The situation here's a little delicate; the enemy sent an operative through. He'll detect the spike . . . even the natives will detect it, and that could be awkward."
"Confirmed," Renston replied. His eyes had a slightly detached look, that of someone reviewing transducer-linked data. "Ahhh, good hunting there, grandmother."
"Very g
ood. See you soon."
CRACK
The thread of intolerable light disappeared, leaving nothing but the ringing in her ears and the memory of heat and light. With it went the holographic window. The humans were babbling and rushing about, some screaming or weeping, others exultant. Gwen stood rock-still; she'd have to see to them, but not in this instant of purest joy.
"I'll see you all, my brothers, my sisters," she whispered. "And we shall hunt together, forever."
***
Across New York, static seared radio and television. Instruments jumped and computers stuttered, data scrambled on electromagnetic disks. And nearly a million eyes saw a spike of intolerable fire slamming into the sky above Manhattan, like a line of blue-white light reaching into space and scoring the face of the moon. For six seconds it hung above the city.
When it ended, darkness fell as overloaded transformers shattered and exploded in fountains of sparks.
***
"What the hell?"
Carmaggio jumped up from the sofa. Jennifer stayed, but turned her red-rimmed eyes around while her handful of Kleenex fell unnoticed to her lap. The apartment lights flickered wildly, and the telephone rang—a single long note that went on and on. The computer in the corner of the living room switched itself on, flashed system error, and died. Then the lights followed with an abrupt finality; but the blackness that followed was only partial. An actinic blue-white light lit it, reflected off buildings and through windows. Thunder boomed in the distance.
Jennifer came to her feet. The two humans clutched at each other. For five long seconds the unnatural lightning-light lasted, until true darkness fell.
"What was that?" she asked.
"The end of the world, unless we're very lucky," Carmaggio said.
He fumbled in his pocket and pushed the tiny button into his ear.
". . . working," Lafarge's voice—or his machine's—sounded. "The enemy has made a breakthrough. It's not a full-scale molehole but we can expect that soon. I'm coming to—"
The door burst open. A man-shape walked through, then lit to cast a background luminescence.
"There's no more time," it said. Glowing material ran like water down its face, revealing Lafarge. "No more time at all."
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