|She's dreaming. Emphasize that we pay on delivery. Our man must come back or she gets nothing—and tell her we're sending her a hired snoop who doesn't contain the Device or even know who we are. If she thinks Peter has the Device, she'll just send somebody with some SIS gimcrack that'll drop a man in his tracks from a hundred meters. I'll concoct a story for Peter. My intuition tells me something's going on down on Hell. If something is, we need to be there first. Just imagine what would happen if Protea beat us to it…|
"No plan. I'll…I'll do better from now on. Sorry to wake you up."
"Tsk. I'll just bet." This time there were no words within the words.
"Gone," said Kolitz. |It will be done, Nautonnier.|
The blond man put the phone back on the nightstand. The real challenge, of course, was one that had to remain unspoken: How much do I tell Peter's copy of the Device?
Fear was something he didn't admit to easily. Was he getting old? Losing his nerve? Or was there really something to be feared in the thing that lived in his veins?
He shook his head and reached for the lamp on the nightstand. He knew the Device affected the man it lived in. Supposedly the man had no effect on the Device—but years into the experiment that was Version 9, the leader of the Sangruse Society was beginning to have his doubts.
On the edge of sleep, the blond man realized his hesitation: Peter Novilio is cocky, fearless in the pathological sense of aphobia, never one to duck an adrenaline rush. If the Sangruse Device grew too much like him—now, that would be something to fear!
1. In the Diamond Necropolis
Peter Novilio saw the kid's muzzle flash reflected in a dead man's eye. So the kid had doubled back, picked his way through the forest of glittering moonlit figures, and found a clear shot from a direction Peter had not suspected.
The smart bullet veered in Peter's direction, crackling like bubble-pack crushed in the hand, distinct against the distant rush of city beyond crumbling red brick walls and their layers of ivy. Peter saw its hot white exhaust reflected against rank upon rank of diamond-coated corpses knee-deep in August-wilted weeds.
He knew he had only seconds. Smart—but not brilliant. If the bullet had been brilliant, he would be dead twice over, from the kid's first shot if not from this one. The kid's ammunition was slow as bullets went, and slow was in some ways worse than fast.
Slow gives their simplistic silicon minds time to think, the Sangruse Device had said (somewhat smugly, Peter thought), when Peter saw the first shot leave its weapon. They were granular rockets, with twenty-five seconds worth of cruising thrust and a final killing burst of speed stored in tiny particles gated into the nozzle as needed. Behind a quartz lens in their noses the bullets had infrared imagers, and what they lacked in resolution they made up in sensitivity. With their flechettes extended, they were in fact aerodynamic projectiles, and steered by tilting one razor-edged wing or another against the wind.
Unlike the kid's bullet, Peter had no time to think, nor consult with the inner presence whose thoughts echoed in his ears as the faint tinnitus of distant bells. He blundered back, trying to gauge the speed of the bullet, and slammed into the body of a portly ancient, imprisoned in four millimeters of nanogrown diamond.
Weird light arose behind him as lamps beneath the corpse's feet sensed the touch of Peter's shoulder. The diamond carried the light within it, making the skin of the dead man appear luminous blue against the night, like a creature made of glowing neon.
"My name is Isaac Raditsky. I was born June 3, 2036, in Pacific Grove, California..." The sound came from the base of the monument, hidden beneath the weeds.
Indirect and blue were not good. Peter cursed and stared down the line of corpses. The bullet came on. Seven seconds? Five? One corpse about seven down the row stood two heads taller than the rest. That was a clue, a desperate clue, but Peter took it.
"Ego…ego…ego…ego!" he shouted, leaping from one granite base to the next, slapping his hand against diamond-frozen arms, breasts, or bellies as he passed. The first stayed dark. The next lit like the first, as did the two after that. The next corpse in line was broken off at the waist, with jagged daggers of diamond reaching upward toward the sky, now guarding nothing but legs and hips filled with stinking mud. Peter couldn't afford to watch his feet, but simply tried to stay out of the weeds and the deadly fragments they might be hiding. Two more and then…
"…ego…ego…EGO!"
He kicked high and hard, to carry himself almost two meters from the lower stone base to the carved red marble pillar on which his target stood. He grasped the tall, leonine figure in a tight hug, using his momentum to carry himself around its back. Instantly six blinding floodlights triggered, bathing the corpse and Peter in hot yellow-white light. Perfect! Peter laughed. So far, so easy. Now the risk…
"Peace to you who have come to regard me. In life I was Alexander Higdon-Thomas IV…" The voice was loud, imperious, perfect.
Peter scoped the grass between his perch on the low marble pillar and the impenetrable bushes some meters north of the line of monuments. The wash from the floodlamps betrayed no lurking glitter, and the nearby monuments were all intact. Life was risk, no? Peter grinned at his recent mistakes. It had been awhile since he'd misread an opportunity as badly as this one.
"Ready seal and heal!" he hissed, to no one farther than the blood ringing in his ears.
I've been ready every moment since we climbed the wall, it whispered in reply.
Peter Novilio nodded and leaped to the bushes, pushing his way into their snagging, tearing branches, feeling his skin ripped in countless places, only his thin nightspecs protecting his eyes. The crackle of the bullet rose momentarily to a staccato-punctuated roar—then rang like a bell as it gated its killing charge and struck the illuminated figure at Mach 2. Alexander Higdon-Thomas IV's diamond coating shattered into countless deadly needles and angular razor-sharp shards.
Smart. Not brilliant.
The Sangruse Device, Version 9, was good. The pain in Peter's face faded as quickly as it came, and the heel of a hand brushed against his cheek came back without any hint of blood. Beyond the tearing brush was more brush, if sparser: the remnant of a meditation grove, long overgrown with small trees, yew, and nettle. Peter blundered further in, straining for any light in the ghostly greenish universe revealed by his nightspecs. He smelled decaying vegetation, a hint of animal musk, and something else more disturbing.
A long, low marble bench recalled the place's original purpose, but atop the bench lay a heap of bones and gristle amidst tatters of rags in roughly human form. Peter recalled the necropolis' dark history: It had been more than seventy years since Chicago's last food riots, when the desperate poor had poured into the ancient cemetery with sledge hammers, shattering monument after monument and hacking limbs off the entombed corpses for meat. Many had sickened and some had died after eating the embalmed flesh, and many more had sliced or impaled themselves, often fatally, on the long, slender shards into which the corpses' diamond sheaths tended to shatter. After most of the bodies of the rioters had been removed—and after several injuries to the Public Safety officers charged with retrieving the injured and dead—the diamond necropolis had been sealed to normal traffic.
Closed and locked, but not patrolled. PS had learned its lesson, but those who wanted to enter badly enough could find ways. Peter had simply gone over the wall. The old mortar was sporadically rotten, and enough bricks had fallen away (or been deliberately removed) from the alley side to make the clamber an easy matter of seconds.
That had been the last part of the mission to go as planned.
Peter cursed his own infantile sense of adventure that had made the new Society's invitation so compelling. Cy Aliotta had been less sure, his face troubled as he described the invitation to his youngest and most eager initiate.
"A small stuff lab in a mausoleum would be a first. I'm still not sure that I buy it." Cy had been fingering the gold Celtic cross he always wore under his
shirt.
"You saw the nanoshaper that Theometry put together," Peter encouraged. "One cubic meter. Fifty watts. One solar panel on the roof. And who'd look for small stuff in a tomb?"
"Anybody who knew anything about small stuff." Cy had seemed even more morose than he often looked in these dark days. "We never heard of them before, nor did anyone we know, and that scares me. Sometimes I think we've been too focused on Version 9. The rest of the world could be getting away from us." Cy had turned away from Peter, staring into the corner of his sparse little study. "I wish we had someplace else to hide. We never managed a chapter on Numenor, and only 1Earth officials go there now. Peter, this will be dangerous."
Cy had paused, his face tightening as though preparing to sneeze—then, abruptly, he regained his composure, and his face turned hard and decisive.
"You and I know they can't sample you—but they may feel like it's worth a try. You've got the coordinates. Meet him then, and bring me back the whole story—but remember, if you don't come out we won't come looking for you." With that, Cy had pointed at the door and turned away.
Cy, of course, had been right. It was a lie, a bungled attempt by parties unknown to sample the Sangruse Device, but Peter Novilio fully intended to come out. All he needed was a wall. The map flickered on the inside surface of his left ocular, his own position fixed by XGPN as a small red dot off-center to the north. Diamond Necropolis was a full klick square, heavily overgrown and divided into regions by the once-sculpted bushes now turned to thickets twice a man's height and more. The kid was smart enough to keep herding him toward the center and waiting for him to make a break.
Getting into the bushes was good. The kid might have trouble following him there—especially if his Society were truly a fiction (as Cy Aliotta suspected) and no small stuff flowed in his blood to advise and heal him. The corpse interested him less than what he perceived as a thinning of the brush leading away from the marble bench. Not quite a path—or perhaps a path being reclaimed by the nettles.
That is not a seventy-year-old corpse, the Sangruse Device advised. Peter nodded, sure that it could see far better than he; seventy years would leave only bones. More like five or six—then it was a bum, a vagrant. Peter listened for the kid's approach, heard nothing. A bum would need to foray into the city regularly, to panhandle and buy food, booze, or drugs. The path could lead straight to a wall, under cover all the way. Peter took one last look over his shoulder, gauging the dent he had left in the bushes. If the kid could see it he could follow it, but if he had no nanomachinery in him it was going to hurt. Peter chuckled with grim satisfaction and picked his way down the thin channel between the bushes as quickly as his nightspecs could guide him.
Less than twenty meters further on, the path broadened into a small clearing. Peter heard the quiet sound of flowing water. At the far side of the clearing the land sank into a gully that wove around the roots of the great ash trees, carrying less water in August than it doubtless did in April.
Crossing the gully was a low footbridge of poured concrete with inset flagstone accents, many of which were now gone. A crude corrugated iron roof had been erected between the bridge's handrails. Toward one side of the clearing was a stone ring, plainly for a cookfire. Someone had lived there, but not recently, and Peter assumed he knew whom.
The challenge was to find the path away from the clearing and the bridge. Peter scanned the vegetation, simultaneously glad it was night and wishing for more light. He peered into the musty shelter, saw a rear wall of corrugated iron. On the other side of the gully the brush was three meters high and looked completely impenetrable without a machete. Elsewhere around the clearing there were makeshift wire fences strung randomly between the trees, and beyond those fences the vegetation looked undisturbed.
The path begins here, then, the Sangruse Device said, echoing the conclusion Peter had drawn but been afraid to admit. The way to the wall was back the way Peter had come, past the marble bench and toward the advancing assassin.
Peter felt the cold detachment form confidence that in another man might have become fear or panic. His training was intelligence; stealth, attention to detail, reliance on good instruments. Weapons were a minor part of it. The Special Implementer Service stressed finesse, not brute force. Much of what he knew of weaponry he had learned from the small stuff that flowed in his veins and carried all human knowledge worthy of recall encoded into synthetic protein molecules of a design not found in nature.
A machete would be good, but even a small knife could save his skin now. Peter returned to the stone ring and began poking in the weeds with a stick. There were rusted paint cans, a long-shanked screwdriver, an oddly shaped glass bowl, like a fishbowl—and there, tucked between two of the stones in the ring, was a pair of knives made of diamond shards lashed into ash wood handles.
"More like it!" Peter whispered aloud. He hefted the larger knife of the two. The bulky, lopsided tree-branch handle threw off its balance. The smaller one was better: The wood had been whittled into something like a real handle. Peter weighed it in his hand, recalled the long hours of practice he had endured under the eye of men like Cy Aliotta. His hand flipped almost effortlessly, and the knife thunked into a nearby ash, precisely where Peter had intended it to strike.
Guns were highly illegal outside the PS and military support organizations like the SIS. Running into the PS with a weapon meant a one-way trip to Hell. The Sangruse Society did not own many projectile weapons, and did not teach them to all initiates. There were thousands of ways to stun, to wound, to kill, that had nothing to do with guns. Peter knew quite a few. "In ten years, you're going to be pretty damned dangerous," Cy had told him, grinning, at his initiation. Peter whistled softly through his teeth. Too bad he still had five years to go.
The large knife made certain things possible, but he first had to know where he was. In response to his whistle, his nightspecs brought the XGPN display back to his left ocular. Peter soon found the gully, and the bridge was a perfect landmark. In the cemetery's plan, there had been a real path from the bridge, through the meditation grove, and onward. It took the long way around, but six hundred meters or so would bring him to the north wall. There, in the oldest part of the cemetery, the map showed him close-set mausoleums that surely dated back to the twentieth century, or even before. The path wove between trees and avoided the fields of monuments, meaning it was probably mostly under cover now.
That was his chance. He had better hurry.
Peter twitched at a sound that was all too close: The muzzle burp of the kid's launcher. The crackle of the smart bullet was unmistakable, but it seemed to be growing fainter with the seconds. Was the kid shooting at someone else?
Look upward! the Sangruse Device ordered. Peter complied, and against the dark rose-gray spaces between the trees he saw the exhaust light of the bullet as a brilliant green streak on his nightspecs, travelling vertically into the sky. The Sangruse Device had monomolecular photosensors dispersed in huge numbers between the rods and cones in Peter's eyes. Its precise vision was not gathered into a fovea; the Device could scrutinize every part of the eye's image at once.
"He's signaling for help!" Peter said with a hiss, not bothering to subvocalize.
Perhaps...
"Oboy!" Peter said to no one as a much worse possibility occurred to him. He began rising to retrieve the small knife from the tree, then froze as something struck branches above him, something that buzzed and burped amidst the tree cover, and finally fell hard on the weeds and the dirt in the center of the clearing.
A smart bullet, flechettes extended, lay on the soil where he had earlier tramped the weeds. As he watched, it jittered and jumped, once, twice, gating thrust particles individually into its nozzle. Peter realized that its ocular-equipped nose was pointing away from him. It jumped again, not enough to leave the ground, but only enough to cause it to roll to the right, bringing its nose thirty degrees in his direction.
It knows you're here. It saw you from ab
ove, and steered its fall aerodynamically into the clearing. If it hadn't struck a branch on the way down you would now be dead.
Peter nodded, hesitating even to subvocalize. Once it was aimed in his direction it would fire its killing thrust, and at this range there would be no time to dodge.
The bullet jumped once and did not roll. It jumped twice again, and rolled another thirty degrees toward him. Pale smoke from the thrust particles curled up into the night air and added an acrid tang to the clearing's earthy reek of rotting vegetation. Peter edged quietly to his left, trying to keep to the bullet's blind spot. His foot nudged something and he almost stumbled.
The fishbowl.
But it was not a fishbowl. Peter found a moment to grimace: It was the greater part of a human head made of nano-grown diamond, broken roughly at the mouth. A man, bald, with protruding brows and Roman nose. The bum must have used it for a cookpot. Diamond was a good conductor of heat, and tough.
Tough!
Peter reached down and grasped the diamond skull, which was surprisingly heavy. The bullet tried another tack, and gated several particles at once, with a ragged pop! It leaped several inches into the air, but miscalculated, and hit the ground nose-down. Peter took the opportunity and leaped.
He slammed the diamond skull down over the bullet and leaned over it, shoving the ragged broken edges into the soft soil with the full weight of his body.
Peter said nothing. The smart bullet spat thrust from its nozzle and rolled over, its glittering eye looking directly up at Peter. Peter kept shoving, and the skull worked further down into the soil. The glint from the diamond material of the skull must have confused the smart bullet slightly, so it was slow to launch, and by the time its killing thrust ignited there was little room inside the skull to gain any velocity. White smoke filled the skull as the bullet clanged against its inner surface and remained there, hammering at the diamond like an infuriated bee. Peter grimaced and kept shoving, and seconds later, with its killing thrust spent, the bullet fell silent.
The Cunning Blood Page 3