A RUSAMC soldier stepped forward. "Word from below. The building is sealed."
"Too late," said Barney. "Cati's gone. He left via the window back there."
"He — it — went past me," said the woman who had screamed after the lights went out. She rubbed her shoulder as she spoke. "It pushed me out of the way, and kept going."
The RUSAMC officer glanced from Barney to the woman. "Then we'll need some sort of search party."
"He could be halfway across the city by now," Barney said. "You're better off trying to get the power back on."
The officer hesitated, obviously reluctant to take no action at all. "Who's in charge here?"
Goss glanced around him again, looking for authority and finding none. "I guess I am, for the moment. Tell Jim Farquhar on the desk to round up as many people as he can. We have to seal and quarter the grounds. I'll be down as soon as I can to sort things out here."
"Yes, sir," said the officer, and relayed the orders through his throat mike.
Barney turned away, feeling worse than useless. No-one had been hurt, but that didn't assuage her bitterness. If she had followed her instincts, she might have prevented the attack. Instead, she had let Phil down.
Belatedly remembering the cyberlink, she called silently for Roads. "Phil? I hope you saw all of that, because you'll never believe me if you didn't."
She waited a moment, then repeated: "Phil? Phil, are you there?"
No answer. PolNet must have crashed along with RSD and the house security. She hoped he had made it into the building. God only knew, she needed his help to make sense of everything that had happened.
Cati had obviously been in the vents, as she had first thought. But security had told them not to worry about the dead zone in the basement. Security had therefore been wrong — or deliberately misleading. And the more she thought about it, the more the latter seemed probable.
She and Roads had already ascertained that Cati's controller had to be someone high up in RSD — or exceptionally skilled with the city's datapool — in order to gain access to archived data. Furthermore, that same someone must have arranged for the crates to be brought into the building, eavesdropped on RUSAMC information to tell Cati where to wait for the General's appearance, and then used the override codes to kill the power when escape was called for. If security had lied to prevent Cati from being detected, then that meant...
Cati's controller had been in the command centre during the attack.
The crowd had thinned slightly, but the sense of chaos remained. Barney threaded her way through to Roger Wiggs, who stood near where the air-conditioning vent had fallen.
"I still can't believe it," he said when he saw her. "Right under our noses — "
"Neither can I," she agreed, although she didn't have time for sympathy. "Listen, about half an hour ago, a call came from one of Stedman's cronies to ask about the air-conditioning in the basement. Do you remember who took that call — or at least who answered the question?"
Wiggs frowned. "I don't remember. We were busy."
"Think — it's important!"
"I don't know, okay?" Wiggs glared at her, and turned away.
"Shit." Barney went to find Goss, but caught sight of the imitation General Stedman instead. Restored to its original shape, the latter stood motionless, frozen like a statue to one side of the hallway. Occasional pools of light darted across its immobile features.
One of the RUSAMC officers had her hand buried up to the wrist in its side. Barney backed away as its face began to change again, becoming blank, neutral — a vacant template of a man. Then the image dissolved into a short-lived pillar of snow, and five balls hung in its place, floating unsupported in the air. Each was silver, roughly a hand-span across and buzzed softly.
"Oh my God," she said, all thoughts of Cati's controller suddenly evaporating. Again she called for Roads, and again she received only silence in reply.
"Neat, isn't it?" said O'Dell, suddenly at her side.
Barney spun to face him. "You sonofabitch," she gasped. "You knew all along!"
"No. Not until Blindeye."
"But you still didn't tell us?" Anger made the words choke in her throat.
"I couldn't. What use is a defence like this when everyone knows about it?" O'Dell waved at where the statue of Stedman had once stood. "They will now, of course — but it worked once, and that's the main thing. Cati's controller won't try again. I think we've demonstrated the pointlessness of resisting us any longer, don't you?"
Barney shook her head, speechless. O'Dell's grin mocked her ignorance, her lack of sophistication — mocked all of Kennedy Polis with her. For one timeless moment she hated him more than she had hated anyone in her entire life.
Then:
"Has anyone seen Antoni or Margaret?" asked Goss, shouldering his way through the crowd toward them. "They have the codes. We need either of them to restore some sort of order to the system."
"I saw DeKurzak heading downstairs earlier," said O'Dell. "He said he was going to check the foyer. I'll have someone try to track him down, if you like."
"Fuck DeKurzak," Barney whispered, feeling her grip on the situation slipping entirely. "Where the hell is Phil?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
11:05 p.m.
Roads took the freeway at sixty-five kilometres per hour — the fastest he could squeeze from the RSD vehicle's small electric engine. He had no clear idea of what he would do if he came face-to-face with Cati. He needed backup, a weapon, some sort of advantage. Yet, with PolNet down, he had no way to talk to anyone. Even the radio standard to all RSD vehicles was silent. The communications network had obviously been silenced from within. Until it was brought back on-line, the city was effectively dumb.
And he was on his own.
Instead of cursing fate, however, he used the time to consider the five small 'glitches' at the heart of the substitute Stedman.
That it was a technological product, not magical or biological, was obvious. The degree of sophistication it displayed was more advanced than anything Roads had ever seen — both before and after the War — but that didn't make it impossible. The RUSA had openly demonstrated a working knowledge of field-effects, which alone would account for the 'levitation' of the balls, the apparent solidity of the image and possibly even its knack of becoming invisible. The image itself was probably nothing more than an extremely high — resolution hologram, similar to that employed by both the Head and the RUSAMC's flag-bearing jeep. Compact batteries could power the whole arrangement, perhaps even EPA44210s like the ones Morrow had hidden in his stockpile on Old North Street.
Roads mentally sketched the design of the machine: at least two balls to generate the hologram; perhaps another two for the field-effects; and one to collect sensory data of its immediate environment. The last might also contain transmitters and receivers to relay data and instructions.
That left no balls remaining for its 'brain', but Roads didn't for a moment contemplate that the RUSA scientists had managed to squeeze an entire AI into the spheres. He guessed that the artificial Stedman had received its instructions from the control van; the General and his assistants had probably directed the thing remotely, never leaving it to its own devices. Certainly it would have been easier to relay Stedman's voice in real time rather than generate it artificially; that way, the stand-in's responses would appear genuine on every level.
The device was ingenious. Expensive, obviously, and clearly a breakthrough in miniaturisation alone. Roads would have had nothing but admiration for it, had it not been for one thing: there was more than one in the city.
The similarity between the Mole and the Stedman-substitute was too close to be coincidence. The Mole had imitated Roads with uncanny accuracy, could become practically invisible and change its shape, and had demonstrated the familiar five-point arrangement on at least two occasions. The theft of the EPA44210s was explained by its need for power; the strange delay between locating them in Morrow's inventories and
actually stealing them, likewise: the Mole wouldn't take the batteries until it was actually running low. And the lack of an obvious command centre didn't necessarily refute his theory, for the "brain" could be hidden anywhere in the city and communicate with the "body" by means of a little-used radio frequency.
When the fields were collapsed, the ball arrangement made it far more manoeuvrable than any human. This led to the conclusion that the Mole had indeed gained entrance to the KCU library via the sewers. Pursuing that thought, Roads called up a scale plan of the KCU grounds from his onboard memory. The nearest drain to the library opened in the small clump of trees where the timber wolf had vanished on the night of Blindeye. That made the wolf a mobile shape the Mole could assume when a less human appearance was more appropriate, and the intermediate stage, the werewolf form that had startled Roads in the library, a possible self-defence mechanism, designed to frighten people away rather than draw them into a confrontation.
So the Mole was, in a sense, a werewolf. And it belonged to the RUSAMC.
But what was it for?
Several possibilities sprang to mind — covert surveillance being the most obvious — but Roads could come to no firm conclusions without more data. All he could do was speculate about the Mole's motives — and those of the RUSA. He found himself in the unfortunate situation of now knowing what the Mole was and who had built it, but not knowing why it did what it did.
And until he knew the why, exactly, he was unable to decide what he should do in response.
He turned off the southern arterial freeway and headed into the older suburbs. Fifteen minutes had passed since the attack on General Stedman. Even allowing for Cati's superhuman pace and his own relatively slow progress, Roads felt safe that he would arrive in time.
Old North Street was darker than the rest of the city: no parties here, no lingering merriment. The whirring of the car's electric engine echoed from forbidding stone facades as he pulled to a halt outside 116. The familiar building stared mutely back at him.
Climbing out of the car, he jogged across the road and up the stairs. The building was silent, ominously so. Even with his artificial cochleae at their maximum sensitivity, he could hear no-one. Only the sighing of the breeze disturbed the stillness.
He nudged the door and it swung easily open. The lock had been broken. Moving swiftly, he crossed the narrow hallway to the stairwell. The only footprints on the dusty steps were his and Katiya's — yet he couldn't shake the feeling that somebody else had been here, and recently. All of his modified senses itched. His right hand ached for a pistol, anything.
At the entrance to the apartment Katiya and Cati shared, he stopped. The door was slightly ajar. Taking a deep breath, he pushed it open.
The room was dark. Furniture lay in ruins, torn to splinters. The sofa had been hurled against the wall. Roads could see a blotch of fading warmth where someone had recently sat, and a deeper patch in another corner. Stepping gingerly over the rubble, he bent to examine the latter, and found a pool of blood.
Moving rapidly from room to room, he found destruction everywhere. Someone had turned the apartment into a junk-heap. Every item in the small cupboards had been tossed to the floor; clothes lay torn beneath broken boxes. In the hallway, Roads almost slipped on a pile of scattered paper: Cati's wordless 'diary', strewn at random.
In the bedroom, the mattress had been torn in half. Foam and ripped sheets covered every flat surface, most thickly in the corners. Scrabbling through one such pile, he finally came across something warm: a bare, human arm.
Grabbing it with both hands, he pulled Katiya's body out of the wreckage and examined her. A deep bruise blackened her right temple. Roads bent lower over her face to check her eyes. She was alive, but concussed. The blood trickling from her left ear was still wet.
He grimaced, both with distaste and the ramifications of that observation. Katiya must have been knocked out only minutes ago. There was a fair chance that the responsible party was still nearby.
"Katiya?" he whispered. "Can you hear me?"
The woman didn't respond at first, and he tried again, a little louder: "Katiya!"
She stirred, scrabbled weakly at the air. He sat her up and swung her into the moonlight coming through the window.
"Can you hear me?"
She opened her eyes and stared wildly, her gaze blank and unfocused.
"It's okay, you're safe." He brushed her hair back from her face, trying to soothe her by touch. "Can you tell me what happened?"
When her eyes finally met his, her entire body stiffened and she opened her mouth to scream.
He smothered the cry with one hand while making desperate shushing sounds. "Hey — it's okay, it's okay. Whoever did this, they've gone!"
"No!" she hissed through his fingers, writhing under his touch. With one hand flat on his chest, she pushed herself away and crawled back into the corner. "Leave me alone! Go away!"
"Katiya, it's me. Officer Roads from RSD, remember?" He tried to smile reassuringly, and held out his hands, empty. "I'm trying to help you."
"Liar!" Her eyes regarded him from the corner. One was pinching shut as the bruise on her temple spread. "And I already told you: I don't know where Cati is!"
"But I do. He's on his way here."
"He is?" Katiya regarded him suspiciously.
"He was heading this way last time I saw him. He's wounded and in a lot of trouble. He needs your help."
Her eyes flashed. "When he sees what you've done, he's not going to be happy."
"What I've done ... ?" Roads stared around him, realisation suddenly dawning.
The Mole had beaten him there.
Before he could protest his innocence, the window burst inward. Shards of glass showered through the room, and Roads flinched away, bringing up one arm to protect his eyes. The heavy crunch of feet on the fragments coincided with Katiya's gasp:
"Cati!"
Roads rolled away to the far side of the room. Through the glittering starlight he saw the killer silhouetted against the broken window. He was even larger in real life than Roads had guessed, topping his modest height by at least forty centimetres. Despite his wounded arm, roughly bandaged with scraps of cloth, and his otherwise naked body, Cati looked like every soldier's nightmare brought to life: a demon made flesh, unstoppable and indefatigable. Just the sight of him made Roads feel defenceless.
Katiya still crouched in the corner, only slowly coming to her feet. As Cati looked around at the ruined bedroom and his wide, grey-black eyes took in the damage, his expression changed to one of intense fury.
"Cati, listen," Roads began, "she's safe, we're all safe — don't — !"
The killer crossed the room in a single, leaping step, his arms outstretched. Roads lunged aside and tried to scramble away. Before he had travelled a metre, two mighty hands grabbed his neck and belt and lifted him off the floor. With an incredible surge of strength, Cati threw him bodily through the bedroom doorway.
Roads struck the ground, skidded across the hallway and thudded heavily into a wall. His newly-healed ribs sang; his skull rang like a bell. He might have blacked out then, had it not been for the sight of Cati approaching.
Roads rolled aside, managing to gain his footing at the entrance to the lounge room. He ducked a whistling blow aimed for his neck, struck Cati in the stomach, and ducked again as the killer drove both fists down, aiming for his spine. A kick to Cati's left knee had no effect except to send Roads himself off-balance. Before he could recover, a glancing blow to his right cheek sent him spinning back to the floor.
Cati loomed over him. One massive, bare foot descended to stamp on Roads' face, but he slid away in time, blinking blood from his eyes. His hands found a plank of wood that had once been part of the lounge. He swung it at the killer's head. Cati used one hand to knock it aside, giving Roads a brief opening. A solid kick to the chest made the killer stumble back a step. Then Cati's guard was up again, and Roads backed away.
The trickle of blo
od from Roads' cheek met his lips, and he tasted copper. Fighting the urge to gag, he circled the room, looking for another weapon before the killer resumed his attack. Or for a chance to escape ...
Cati noted his glance at the doorway, and lunged. Roads sidestepped, grabbed Cati's massive forearm and twisted with all his strength. On an ordinary man the move would have dislocated a shoulder, but all it did to Cati was make him stumble. Flexing his biceps, he tossed Roads aside, sending him into the ruins of the sofa. Roads slid a metre down the wall before recovering. A fist smashed into the plaster beside his head. He twisted away and pushed backward with both feet.
Even with all his weight behind the thrust, he only just managed to overbalance the killer. They fell to the floor among the fragments of furniture. For the first time, Roads heard Cati grunt with surprise. It wasn't much, but it was encouraging.
Then — so suddenly he cried aloud — his head exploded with light and sound. The reactivated icons and screens of PolNet filled his mind, blinding him to reality for a bare instant. Data scrolled down his vision; remote inputs booted up his implanted processor, checked its status and opened the channels he had tried to access on the way to Old North Street. And on top of all of that, Barney's voice urgently called his name.
Cati's fingers found his throat while he was distracted. The killer lifted, began to squeeze. Roads dangled like a rag doll. The muscles in his throat and the strengthened bone of his spinal column prevented Cati from actually snapping his neck, but there was little he could do to stop the closure of his windpipe. He pulled at the clenched fists with all of his fading strength and shifted them less than a centimetre. His modified autonomic systems slowed his heart and diverted as much blood as possible to his brain, yet still he could feel consciousness gradually ebbing.
Gritting his teeth, he stared into the killer's alien eyes. The babble of voices intensified as darkness filled his vision and the fire in his lungs began to go out.
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