Firedance

by Steven Barnes

  Within that calm, thin frame there raged a fire, very close to out of control. Leslie’s eyes were unnaturally bright, the pupils contracted. There was a light dew of perspiration on her forehead. Her hands, so small and delicate, lay upturned on her knees.

  Promise whirled. Wu stood in the doorway. She didn’t know how long he had been there.

  “Yes?”

  “Our flight plan has been logged and accepted. We have to tie into the PanAfrican Network now,” he said. “The moment any word about Swarna’s condition leaks out, there will be an automatic moratorium on traffic.”

  “I’m ready. Leslie?”

  Without a word, her daughter stood, calmly. With total relaxation. Balanced perfectly. Her pupils contracted, tight.

  Promise shut her suitcase and carried it over to Leslie. “Would you carry this for your mother?”

  Leslie smiled, perfectly. Perfect teeth shining in her small, perfect face. She accepted the suitcase into one perfect hand, and fell into perfect step alongside her mother as they moved rapidly to the waiting skimmer.

  Everything is just perfect, Promise thought, fighting hysteria.

  Just fucking perfect.

  32

  At the moment, Sinichi Tanaka’s entire world consisted of Phillipe Swarna’s medical readouts. He didn’t understand the majority of the symbols or words that flashed before his eyes, but he was determined to understand what he could. “What is the primary’s condition?” he asked, when Saito finally approached him.

  “Tanaka-san,” Saito said nervously. “Right now, his body is under attack. Any poison we could have countered—indeed, would have overridden almost immediately. But billions of nanocytes are literally eating him alive. We have countered them with our own units, but it is a delicate matter.”

  Saito spoke a few rapid words, and the computer fed them a vastly enlarged representation of a nanoassassin. It looked like a chrome aspirin tablet. “This is one of the invaders. They reproduce themselves by scavenging calcium and iron. We are killing them as fast as possible, but …”

  Tanaka’s face was dark. This was grave. Never had he lost a primary, and it would be an intolerable blot on his reputation. He was not a man used to failure.

  Nanodot technology. That ruled out all but a small handful of commercial rivals, and perhaps a nation or two. America. Germany. Even National Japan might not be able to afford such a thing. A dozen Japanese corporations. Two or three American corporations.

  But when had it been introduced into Swarna’s system? The primary was so carefully screened. There had to have been active penetration.…

  “I assume,” he said slowly, “that the primary was compromised within the last twenty-four hours. At the festival. I warned him of the risk.” Tanaka sat in a canvas-backed chair, facing a flat video screen. Heavy lines creased his brow. “The Swarnaville Festival.” He raised his voice a click. “Tanaka. Reply Swarnafest. Stay with the primary.” There was a pause of perhaps seven seconds, and then the computer displayed the moment that Swarna’s skimmer first came floating down from a gray southern sky.

  It touched down, and the primary disembarked, to the cheers of thousands.

  And the hatred of how many?

  Tanaka would have to examine every second of the six hours Swarna spent at the festival, retrace every interaction. Everything touched, everyone greeted.

  Merciful heaven.

  So little time, and so much to do. But at the very moment when despair threatened to rise within him, one of his lieutenants, a muscular Zulu woman named Qui, approached him, a scrap of printfilm in her hand. “Sir?” she said.

  He remained hunched over the screen. There had to be a way to sort the vast collection of data.…

  “Sir?” Qui repeated, patiently.

  “Eh? Yes. What is it?” His eyes were still riveted to the flow of images. Here was Swarna at a frozen-ice stand. And here, congratulating a particularly fat pig at the agriculture booth.

  “Sir,” Qui repeated patiently. “We have news. There was an accident off the road, thirty kilometers south of Swarnaville. The Nullboxer, Azziz, is dead.”

  Tanaka sat bolt upright. The Nullboxer. A succession of images flashed before his eyes. In the midst of the excitement, during the festival, there were too many separate bits of information for him to pay maximum attention, to thoroughly interpret any single event.

  But now he ran the boxer’s body language through his mind … then, even more revealingly, his martial technique. Not sport technique. Not a do, a “way of living,” or a sport. It was bugei, a warrior art. A killing technique, barely repressed.

  Yes. The boxer Azziz.

  Tanaka’s eyes glittered. “Seal the borders,” he said.

  33

  Swarna’s body was under constant scan. Bones were being torn apart and rebuilt. Armies of nanocytes warred within him for his life.

  Saito examined a sample of the enemy nanocytes, and his eyes suddenly widened. He recognized this. His doctoral dissertation at UC Berkeley had been on nanosystems, and the present model was an offshoot of a Korean design. He thought that he recognized the design modifications. Hadn’t there been a Canadian researcher…?

  “Lower his core temperature,” Saito snapped. “I think I know what we are dealing with.”

  His coworkers hesitated only a moment, and then sent coolant flowing into the coils surrounding Swarna’s ashen, wasted body.

  The chief physician, a black African named Mgui, supervised the process, and then approached Saito. “I assume that you have a damned good reason for this?”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied. “This nanotech design originated at Montreal University. There was a small scandal when it was discovered that American Intelligence had funded the study.”

  “And?”

  “The whole thing smelled, sir. The nanocytes were designed to break down when the patient’s core temperature reached ninety-six degrees. In other words, utilizing the Moritz formula and estimating average ambient room temperature, when the patient has been dead for about two hours.”

  “An assassination nanocyte.”

  “Yes. And under normal circumstances, an untraceable one. Phillipe Swarna is one of perhaps three men in the world who would have any chance at all.”

  For the first time in hours, Mgui smiled. “Very good,” he said. “Very, very good.”

  Together, they watched the life signs as they flashed from the medical scanners. Slowly now, very slowly, the rate of damage slowed. And then dropped to zero.

  And Swarna’s tame nanobots began to rebuild.

  34

  It was dark now. Tanaka finally breathed easier. His primary had stabilized, and would live. Damage assessment would come later. There had been extensive nanoactivity in the central cortex, but Tanaka had faith that repairs could be made. They had always been made in the past.

  What was more important was determining the source of the nanoassassins. After Swarna’s stabilization, Tanaka had flown to see firsthand the site of the accident, a godforsaken stretch of hard-packed desert road south of Swarnaville. There were no villages in sight. There were no major trade routes, and the nearest main highway was almost a hundred miles east.

  It was, all in all, a miserable place to die, a back road leading to a tiny half-deserted farming village. All rocks and scrub and burnt sand, with nothing but dusty mountains to ease the starkness of the horizon. This is where Azziz had died, in a car that stood upside down in a ditch, black skid marks creasing the road like twisted railroad tracks. The car was burnt and blackened, a broken box that smelled like charred rubber and metal.

  He had insisted that the local police officials leave the accident site as they had found it. Tanaka turned his collar up. Desert nights were cold, and miserable, with no redeeming feature save the exceptionally clear star field overhead. There was no moon. “What was he doing out here?” Tanaka asked, of no one in particular. He crawled into the inverted vehicle, repressing his revulsion, and examined the body, scrun
ched up between the collapsed ceiling and the dashboard. It was burnt, but not beyond recognition. Azziz’s neck was broken.

  Tanaka crawled back out and inspected the engine. The power cell had exploded. On impact? Perhaps. Or … it had exploded and then the vehicle had plunged from the road. Either could be the case. He guessed that it had happened upon impact. A loss of control, followed by impact. Murder? Perhaps, but Azziz hadn’t been greatly disfigured, so there had been no attempt to conceal anything.…

  Or had there?

  “I want a complete scan on this man. Now.”

  His assistant brought a portable scan from the skimmer and brought it into play. Within seconds, he had part of his answer. “Tanaka-san. This man was dead before the crash.”

  Tanaka squatted by the side of the car. He trickled a handful of sand through his fingers. So many grains. The wind blows them from everywhere, he thought. How unlikely, how incredible that they somehow end up here, together in the same handful. No meaning there, but no meaning to anything.

  His eyes were dead, his soul sang.

  He stood, dusting his hands on his pants. “This is a decoy,” he said. “The man in this vehicle is not the man who shook hands with Swarna. By now, undoubtedly, the genuine assassin is gone.”

  He stood, smoothing out the wrinkles on his pants. Where were the Four? They had been out of touch for hours. Maintaining radio silence. That might well mean they were stalking prey in enemy territory. They had their own ways, those Four.…

  “We will find this man,” he said finally. “I want to know everything. One last thing. He is extremely dangerous. Take no chances. I’m invoking the mutual security act of 2031, regarding pursuit into the CAR.”

  “Central African Republic?”

  “Yes,” Tanaka said. “That is where he is.” He looked to the northern horizon. “I can smell him.”

  35

  Aubry sat in their rented room, staring out the window at the street below him. As far as his eye could see, the streets were lined with shops and merchants, street carts and banners proclaiming FINE MEATS! BEST CLOTHES! IMMIGRATION SERVICES!

  A shrill whooping sound filled the air, and a security skimmer dropped into view, cruising just meters above the heads of the nighttime shoppers, scanning, searching. In the distance, he could hear other skimmers, questing restlessly through the night, like a flotilla of air sharks.

  Jenna knelt upon the couch next to him. A searchlight slid across her face, making her eyes shine. Bloodeagle leaned against the wall, watching them both.

  “We should be safe,” he said.

  “But the man at the border recognized me. We don’t have very long,” Aubrey said, unemotionally. “How long will it take to arrange transportation?”

  “I could be wrong,” Bloodeagle said. “Perhaps you should have gone through the escape route STYX planned for you.”

  Aubry shook his head. “I don’t think so, Miles. I think that you were right. They wanted me dead.”

  36

  A mile outside the small fanning village south of Swarnaville, two STYX operatives named Red One and Red Two were waiting. If Knight had shown up on schedule, with no complications … he might have been allowed to live. But the slightest hint of a problem, and the termination order would proceed. There had been, one might say, more than a hint of a problem. The real Azziz had already been killed, and planted. If Knight managed to make it here to the village, he would be killed as well, and his body strategically hidden.

  But so far, no sign of the target.

  “We’re getting no reading,” Red Two said. “Don’t know where the hell he is. Somebody disabled the tracer. Could the entire unit be destroyed?”

  “And him along with it?” Red One said. “I don’t think so.”

  Red Two was irritable. He hated the country, and hated the job. Any interest in the operation was long dead. Now he just wanted to get out, and get the hell home. “Should we trigger?”

  “Just in case? Yes.” Red One opened a slender case, and began to tap in a series of commands. He uploaded the instructions to a geosynchronous STYX satellite, which bounced the message of death back down. “Well,” he sighed. “That was that.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  “Yeah. Hell of a fight, wasn’t it?”

  “Hell of a fight.”

  Bloodeagle’s case beeped.

  “Shit,” he said nervously. “The self-destruct is trying to activate.”

  Aubry looked at his leg with horror. “Can it?”

  “This jammer is supposed to be working. The satellite is changing frequencies to get around the jam. The two units are trying to talk to each other.”

  “And if they do?”

  “The room goes.”

  “What are my options?”

  “We can hope that it will stop trying, or … shit.”

  Bloodeagle watched in horror.

  “A chunk of undigested code got through. It’s a cryptogram, in unbroken form. The leg unit is attempting to break the code. At its present rate of decoding, I would estimate it might take … two hours.”

  “Two hours,” Jenna whispered.

  Aubry’s voice went hard and very flat. “Get the hell out of here. You’ve done everything that you can.”

  “No,” Bloodeagle said. “There is one more thing I can do.”

  Jenna sat at a bar across the street from the hotel. She was not dressed as herself. She wore too much makeup, and a dress that was uncomfortably tight. It was long and black, but the mere revelation of her figure, combined with her lack of male escort, made her every gesture and movement an open invitation.

  A tiny transceiver lay concealed in her ear, and a matching microphone nestled almost invisibly against her throat. While she sipped a bitter local brew slowly, trying to fit into the nighttime bar crowd, she kept her eyes on the room. Her heart was pounding. It was all up to Bloodeagle now. Otherwise, Aubry Knight would be dead in just over twenty-three minutes.

  Leslie’s head whipped around. Promise had settled into the suite of the New Nippon Hilton, and she was trying to get her thoughts together.

  Wu said, “Is something wrong?”

  Leslie’s nostrils flares. “I …” Her brows furrowed, and she seemed terribly troubled. “There’s something wrong. I can’t …” Leslie closed her eyes.

  “Father …” she whispered.

  37

  Aubry lay unconscious, his great dark head lolled onto his left shoulder. Bloodeagle stood above him, his breathing meticulously controlled to prevent a panic response. He was fully trained in medical procedures, and just as well-trained in bomb disposal. But the combination of the two areas was enough to give him nightmares.

  The bomb and its triggering processor were sheathed by a titanium-ceramic tube within the living core of Aubry’s left femur. Access could be gained through the thigh muscle. The muscle grain had been split once, and reentry should be relatively simple.

  Still, under conditions like this …

  Aubry’s leg was completely covered by a plastic bubble, through which Bloodeagle performed his terrible, delicate miracles. He peeled back the epidermis. He went in between the adductor magnus and semitendinosus, angling toward the side. The blood vessels were carefully peeled back and arranged by the thin delicate arms of the Gorgon field-autosurgeon unit. But the autosurgeon didn’t know how to remove a bomb. Its textbooks and tapes could guide Bloodeagle, but not replace his judgment.

  And so he fought panic. So far he was winning, but the fight wasn’t over yet.

  There. He gripped the end of the capsule and began teasing it out. He stopped, and whispered into his throat mike. “All clear?”

  Jenna’s voice came back to him. “All … shit. A jeep just landed on your roof. No, the roof next door. This doesn’t look good.”

  “How many? Just a little more time.”

  “Maybe three. Could be a random patrol.”

  “Can you buy me some time? I need five minutes.”

  Jenna
smiled grimly. “Or die trying.”

  “Jenna …” Bloodeagle said softly. “That’s not your job. Remember your promise to Aubry. Stay peripheral. Somebody has to get word to the Scavengers if … anything goes wrong. Promise me. Like you swore to Aubry.”

  “Damn you.”

  “Promise me, dammit!”

  There was a long pause, filled with nothing but electronic crackle. Then: “All right. I promise.”

  38

  The building next to their hotel was crowded with a hundred small sounds of living and survival. Jenna slipped silently through the shadows, surprised at her own nervousness.

  She understood perhaps five percent of the words she heard, the occasional snatch of French or English. She had never experienced the shock of being in a completely foreign land, had had no preconception of how that distorted your sense of identity.

  She had the odd sensation that she didn’t completely exist. Paradoxically, at the same time she felt more substantial, more essentially real than the things and people around her.

  In shadow, she waited, counting minutes. Her thumb tested the sweetly curved six inches of her durga blade.

  How accurate were the enemy scanners? They couldn’t be maximal, or they would have landed on the correct building.

  A man came down the stairs. Japanese. A team leader.

  As his weight transferred from one stair to the next her hand snaked out, grabbed his wrist, and yanked him. She sliced his throat in midair. He thundered through the railing, smashed into the floor, and was still.

  Good.

  Then she heard shouts, and shots from the hotel next door, and realized that she had been terribly wrong.

  This was just the first ship. They hadn’t landed on the wrong roof—they had surrounded the building, cutting off escape, and the sounds of shots next door—

  She considered running to their assistance. Goddess—it was death. The radio button in her ear began to speak.