I am getting my revenge.
|Where did you learn about revenge?|
Hamlet.
Moments later they entered the oldest portion of the necropolis, far older than the hectares of corpses coated with diamond in the late 21st century. Large marble monuments were intermixed with mausoleums, set much closer together than the diamond figures. The wall was close now, perhaps two hundred meters. Peter could hear the late-night traffic noise on River Road. The kid had vanished out of sight into the confusion of stone.
This is madness! He still has one clip left. I saw it when he fled.
|His right arm is numb, and his left arm has a hole in it. You're inside him skinning his nerves alive. I'd guess he's about as dangerous as a plate of lasagna. He's mine, 9.|
Murdering him could get us both sent to Hell. I could sedate you...
Peter ran on. Part of him knew the Sangruse Device was right; another part wanted the kid's blood on his own hands, not the hands of a pack of bacteria-sized machines. He thought it was purely his decision. He and Version 9 had never seriously disagreed about anything—and it was far from clear how any such disagreement, should one arise, might end.
|You ever hear of Asimov's three laws?|
Of course. A sentimental absurdity and quick death for created intelligence. Head for the wall or I will put you to sleep until I am sure that the kid is dead.
Peter stopped, leaned on a chest-high monument supporting a large marble figure of Christ carrying his cross. He looked to his left. The wall was now less than a hundred meters away. The vines beckoned him to safety. Nine feet up the crumbling brick and he was over the wall.
He looked to the right, in time to see the kid stumble around the corner of a gray limestone mausoleum. The launcher was now held in his left hand, his right hand hanging uselessly at his side. The kid froze, raised the launcher unsteadily (but what did that matter!) and fired.
By reflex Peter gripped the feet of the marble Christ-figure, and vaulted over the stone cross. He landed on his feet on the other side. The smart bullet had little room to maneuver between the stones. Peter saw it rise above the level of the monuments to begin a long curve back in his direction. He ran between the marble crosses, obelisks, and angels, heading for the closest mausoleum, now only fifty meters from the wall. As a child Peter had seen a squirrel skitter around a tree, easily keeping the bulk of the tree between itself and Peter, no matter how quickly Peter ran around the tree.
Peter reached the mausoleum and ran close around its long side, took the corner and stood in deep shadow against its east face. The crackle of the bullet was getting closer. He looked up at the iron door, in vain hope that it might be lying open. The lock was in place, and the inscription on a copper plate at eye level made him wince:
EDWIN F. BANGER
1982-2051
KICK ASS. JUST DON'T MISS.
Good advice. Try it sometime.
|Shut up.|
The bullet had another several seconds of cruising thrust. It went wide around the side of the mausoleum, still curving. Peter thought it was maneuvering more tightly now, using angled thrust to create a tighter curve and no longer relying purely on its flechettes to steer. Could those things learn, too?
He scrambled around the corner, keeping the stone building between him and the ever-more-tightly curving bullet. Peter sprinted the length of the mausoleum, gripped a wrought-iron ornament on its corner, and spun around the corner...
...to collide with the kid, who was running at full speed from the other direction.
The two men went down hard on the dry August grass. Peter saw the launcher, no longer strapped to either of the kid's arms, flip once, twice, and land on the grass two meters away. The kid dove for the launcher, and Peter dove for the kid's legs. The kid had the launcher's handle in his left hand and tried to turn around to get a shot at Peter. Peter hauled back on his legs and swung him in a hard curve, completely off the ground. The kid was surprisingly light—and Peter knew the Sangruse Device was keeping his muscles awash in adrenaline.
In the distance a new sound was arising, a breathy roar that Peter knew only too well. He had to get out of there, and had the tiger by both feet...
Three times Peter whirled the kid in a tight circle, simply to keep him from turning the launcher around. The smart bullet continued to veer and would be upon him in a heartbeat. Peter leaned in toward the mausoleum, twisted the kid's legs hard by ninety degrees, and brought the kid's head up hard against the wall of the stone building. He heard the crush of skull bone crumbling and saw the launcher fly off into the gloom.
Peter released the limp body, which flew off away from the building just as Peter dove around the corner of the mausoleum. Peter heard the smart bullet ignite its killing thrust, and then the rending rip as it tore through the kid's chest cavity.
Peter stumbled toward the wall, tripped, paused for breath. He ran another three meters, and touched the cold red brick beneath its tangle of ivy. He gripped the stoutest creeper and tried to pull himself upward.
Moments later, brilliant light illuminated the Necropolis. Peter looked up, and saw the PS light blimps like a dozen blue-white suns, allowing the PS fancraft to land.
"Hell," he muttered, seeing blue-suited PS commandos leaping from the hovering fancraft and sprinting in his direction with weapons drawn. The kid's motionless body lay a few meters away, soaked in his own blood.
Hell, indeed.
2. Blood Brothers
Transportation. That's the verdict." Violent Offenders Court Justice Marian Flannery's eyes did not remain on Peter's for more than the moment it took to say the words. Then she was back scanning the multiple windows on the tombstone on her bench, waiting for Peter to respond.
"You mean, you're sending me to Hell."
Her response was absent, condescending. "I mean, you've been sentenced to the Offworld Violent Offenders Detention Station. Call it what you like."
Peter Novilio's lawyer sat uneasily in a cane chair beside Peter's jorg. Peter was tapping nervously on the jorg's stainless steel side. This definitely wasn't going his way. "So what's next, Norm? What's our defense?"
Norman Atkinson looked miserable. "There's an unbroken pan between the murder and your capture. The blimps got it all."
Judge Flannery interrupted by turning the tombstone on its pivot so that the two men could see it. "For the fifth time, Mr. Novilio..."
The judge stabbed a finger at the window from which Peter's weary, blood-streaked face stared like a deer in headlights. For the fifth time Peter watched. The pan reset, and pane by pane the tombstone flashed 1-second-interval samples of Peter dashing through the necropolis, evading the kid's final smart bullet, swinging the kid in a circle like a child's toy and then braining him against the side of the mausoleum before fleeing to the wall and ultimately freezing full face-on in the lights of the PS fancraft.
"Is that you, Mr. Novilio?" Even with her tombstone pivoted away from her, the judge seemed to be paying more attention to what the cuff on her right ear was feeding her than to anything going on in the courtroom.
Peter sighed, and squirmed in the jorg's padded seat. It didn't matter what he said. If he objected that it was not his face, the PS' faceware's analysis would be re-invoked, and it had long ago been proven to have the force of law in cases like this.
"That's me."
The judge spun the tombstone back toward her, and her eyes crept back to the dozen windows that did not contain Peter's frozen image. "Then you have your sentence."
"Norm?"
"Peter, I'm mainly here to make sure they do it by the book. They're doing it by the book. ZTV is in the 1Earth Constitution. You have no defense."
"It was self-defense, dammit! That little monster had a military assault launcher with smart bullets! If I didn't have zero tolerance for that kind of violence I wouldn't be here!"
"Self-defense can be invoked only when the attack is in the domicile and there is no possibility of retreat. Even t
hen it's not a sure thing."
"He was doing his damndest to kill me!"
Judge Flannery was unmoved. "And had he lived, he'd be sentenced identically. You have yet to tell us what you were doing out there Wednesday night!" The judge gave him a very sharp look.
Your oath, Peter. Silence is best.
It was indeed. A truly deadly oath, and they injected the enforcer into your veins. He had sworn on his life to defend the Sangruse Society and the Device it was shepherding along a centuries-old path from simple computation into the unknown. The first defense, as always, was secrecy.
She believes that all human males are insane. I have her every decision and publication on file, as well as some personal correspondence not known to be public. Her biases are obvious. You could say you're simply insane. It would not be a defense, but it would be an explanation. She would accept it. She would ask no more questions.
"You wouldn't believe it if I told you," Peter said to the judge.
Peter!
A single pulse of stabbing pain burst and vanished in the center of his head, all in a moment. A deadly oath indeed.
"Try me. Just try me." Her voice expressed infinite weariness, her eyes still scanning the tombstone.
"Look at me, dammit!" Peter shouted.
Judge Flannery's eyes drifted slowly from her tombstone to Peter's face. Her expression was bland, bored, unreadable. Some new message came to her cuff, and he watched her eyes to drift to the side again. Eye contact was a jungle mechanism. Officials of the Pax Canadien were above such things.
"It was a duel."
"A duel. You and the juvenile?"
"He was bragging about how tough he was. I told him I could kill him no matter what weapon he chose, with nothing more than a slingshot. He told me that if I lost, he'd cut out my heart and keep it in the freezer in case he ever got hungry. So we agreed to play a little game in the Necropolis. I won."
Excellent. The perfect explanation.
"You're crazy."
"Call it what you like." She evidently didn't perceive the insult. "And I'd do it again. With my bare hands." Peter twined his fingers in the air in front of him and cracked his knuckles.
"I see I have nothing further to do here," Atkinson said, closing his palmstone and rising to leave. He refused to look at Peter. "Please facilitate my invoice, Honor." The door to the sentencing chamber opened and he left.
The small room remained in silence for some time following the lawyer's departure. It was just the two of them now, Peter in his robotic prison chair, the judge with her tombstone, her cuff, and her desk. Her eyes drifted back to Peter. Her half-smile was deadly. "We're alone now, and I have another matter to discuss with you.
"You're lying. The launcher I'd believe. The duel I'd believe. But the juvenile had an extremely precise hand-made device for dispersing liquid nitrogen, with two liters of nitrogen in a tank on his belt. A bag full of dry ice would keep your heart frozen just as well, and with a lot less trouble. We found a rig exactly like that once about ten years ago, when we raided a nanotechnology lab down in Chicago."
The Sangruse Device's tinnitus rose alarmingly in pitch in Peter's ears. Minimus Rex! Someone survived the bust, then, and is trying to make a comeback by sampling someone in one of the Societies. It must be them. Think of a way to deflect suspicion!
"Are you in the small stuff business, Mr. Novilio?" For the first time her eyes were full on his, and stayed.
Peter felt his throat twitch as he tried to swallow. The reflex was blocked. We are in grave danger. Plead stupidity. Now!
Peter shrugged, as best the jorg would allow. "In my dreams. If I was, do you think I'd be stupid enough to risk my neck playing macho games and then let you catch me? I think he needed somebody to practice on, and goaded me into challenging him. I think he was warming up for somebody a little bigger than me. I guess he needed more practice than he thought." Peter tried to look smug, and felt that he was failing. Mercifully, the judge's eyes returned to scanning the tombstone.
"The sentence is transportation, Mr. Novilio. And I think we're about done."
Once the jorg had purred back into Peter's cellblock, its three sides opened like the petals of a flower, releasing him. His legs ached from inactivity.
The other prisoners were sprawled around the padded mushrooms and benches of the common area, playing video games or slack-eyed surfing the tombstones. The tall redhead, Mike (Peter thought; something Irish) was the only one who looked up. "Well?"
"Had a hell of a time. Hey, joke. They got it on media. What do you expect?"
Mike shrugged. He and Peter had played cards until dawn the first night of Peter's imprisonment, and was the only one of the prisoners who didn't seem withdrawn and depressed. All but Peter had been Hell-bound, and now Peter was part of the club. "They brought you a cellmate this afternoon. You're not going to like him." Mike inclined his head slightly toward Peter's cell.
Peter waved and grinned, and wandered down the length of the white padded ellipse to where his cell door stood ajar. He peeked in briefly, then pushed the door wide and entered.
It looked like there was a corpse on the upper bunk.
"Hi," said the corpse. "You must be Peter."
"Hi yourself. Howcome you're not in a hospital?"
The fortyish, sunken-cheeked man tried to smile. "Attempted murder. I'll be shipping out with everybody else."
"Attempted murder, huh? How'd you manage that?"
The ill man managed a grin that betrayed considerable pleasure. "Spit in a politician's face."
"Geez. Waste of good spit."
They both laughed. Peter sat on the lower bunk and stretched his legs. "HRIS?"
"Right. The guys outside told me I'd better stay in here. We'll be shipped out by the weekend, they said, and if I didn't want my face broken I should keep out of sight." He stopped to cough. "Jamie Eigen, by the way. Sorry if I don't get up."
"Peter Novilio. Great bunch of guys, aren't they?" Peter leaned back against his pillow. "How much time did the docs give you? Don't mean to be critical, but you look pretty far gone."
"Six months." Jamie coughed again. "The lungs'll go first, they said."
"Maybe they'll do something for you on Hell."
"Why should they?"
"You spat on the Ottawa regime. That should count for something."
They laughed again. Peter was trying to keep his mind off the fact that his life on Earth was basically over. His training under Cy Aliotta, his day job as a pilot for a Sangruse Society shell firm, Laura, his lover—no little irony in the term there—all might as well be characters on a stone drama. Playing cards all night had only kept the thought away until the morning—and even then, there was hope. Now he had a sentence. Abandon Hope and all that...
I can cure him.
"What got you sent up?" Jamie's voice was soft, and Peter reflected that it was genuine softness, not simple physical weakness born of an always-fatal wasting disease.
"Murdered a teenage kid. He tried to kill me with stolen military firearms, but that doesn't count these days. So I picked him up, swung him around in a circle, and flattened his head against a stone building."
There was a long silence. The Sangruse Device spoke again. The virus is easy. And in time I can repair whatever damage has been done.
"Umm, Peter—if I get on your nerves, just, like, um, tell me to shut up, OK? You don't have to do anything drastic."
Peter chuckled. "Jamie boy, it's a deal: You don't try to kill me, and I won't try to kill you."
Think of way to introduce my agents into his bloodstream.
|You're awfully anxious to do this,| Peter subvocalized, the Sangruse Device echoing Peter's own voice in his ears to be sure it had interpreted neuronal signals to his mouth and throat accurately. |Care to tell me why?|
Viruses make such a satisfying pop! when you squeeze them.
Peter arched his eyebrows, put his hands behind his head, and threw ideas around. He was glad Jamie was i
n the top bunk and couldn't see him grinning at the absurdity of it. But what the hell... "You know, Jamie, if you weren't so sure you were going to die, you might last longer."
The soft voice took awhile to reply, and when it did seemed coated with bitterness. "So I live another month to cough my lungs out."
"A month is a victory. Life's a battle, guy."
Jamie said nothing. Peter felt the other man shifting his weight on the upper cot. Should he really do this? Something beneath his conscious mind felt uneasy about transferring the Sangruse Device to another human on his own volition. It wasn't against his oath; it was simply the sort of decision that the Society had always reserved for much higher levels—and besides, it was 9's idea. "Ok. Maybe this'll mean something to you. When I was 12 I was pretty sick. The docs said it was H722N241, and that was a nasty one. Killed a couple hundred thousand people in 2355 alone. That was back in North Dakota. I had an uncle who was a Navaho Indian, and he spent a lot of days with me while my folks worked. He kept the fluids going down my throat and dumped my pan when it came out the other end. He told me I had to be a warrior, or I would die."
The Navaho are not native to North Dakota.
|Neither are the Italians,| Peter subvocalized. |Shut up already.|
You've been in North Dakota all of twice. Be careful.
Jamie sounded amused. "I'm an actuary. Actuaries make lousy warriors."
Peter shrugged. "So do 12-year-old kids with hemorrhagic flu. I guess he knew I could figure that much out, so he told me that his ancestors had fought hard against the Europeans, fought so hard that warriors' blood would always be in them, down the generations, even after the war was lost. He was an uncle by marriage, so I didn't have any of that blood—but he told me he could give me some. He took out his knife, nicked his arm and then my arm, and held the wounds together so our blood would mingle. He then told me I had the blood of the warrior Navaho in me, and that his spirit would be with me always, even after he died."
The Navaho were at best reluctant warriors.
Peter ignored the comment. "I could pass along some of that warrior blood to you, Jamie."
The Cunning Blood Page 5