by Steve Rzasa
“And the bomb?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? You placed it. Where is it?”
“She didn’t tell me. When she doesn’t want me to know something, I don’t know it.” He grimaced and looked down at his side. “Got any sealers on you? If you’ve got more questions, you may not have time to wait for that medic.”
What the hell do we do now? Is he lying?
“I don’t think so. You saw how she scrambled the heads of those game junkies at the institute. We need to beat the information out of Cara somehow.”
Got any ideas?
“Maybe… I’m working on it.”
“I’m sorry about the girl, anyway. She was pretty. I wondered if anyone would notice how I left her; Cara didn’t.” He was starting to sway, so Tower holstered the Sphinx and withdrew a medikit from his armor. He flipped it open, and, just to be safe, withdrew the tranq injector and jammed it into the killer’s neck. St. James was already half-passed out so the powerful drug kicked in faster than Tower was prepared for. The killer’s eyes rolled back in his head and Tower had to go down on his knees to catch him before he slumped to the floor.
He pointed to a wide-eyed young waitress. “You, come here, now!”
She approached a little hesitantly, but obediently followed Tower’s directions and put pressure on the bloody mess that was St. James’s hip and thigh. Tower drew his Strider and cut away the remains of the powersuit as well as the pale blue institutional uniform the man was wearing underneath it. He whistled. The 20mm shell must have just grazed St. James, otherwise it would have blown his leg off entirely. As it was, it had done enough damage that Tower was impressed at how the killer had managed to stagger in as far as the restaurant, especially after plunging through a glass window at more than 80 kph.
The sterile sealer came in a small tube about the size of Tower’s finger. The young woman removed her hands and Tower sprayed it over the terrible wound. It formed a clear, but tough pseudo-skin that stopped the bleeding instantly. The external bleeding, anyhow. If St. James was bleeding inside too, there was nothing Tower could do about it.
He sat back on his knees, exhausted, and spit more blood onto the carpet. He didn’t know if it was the tension of finally catching the killer or the delayed shock of the crash catching up to him, but he suddenly felt incredibly weary.
“Are you okay, sir?” the young woman asked him.
“I don’t know,” he told her, a little confused by her question, as the room began to spin around him.
“Tower!” The young, brown-haired woman flung out her arms in his direction. “I’ve been waiting for you!”
“Melassa?”
He stared at his wife in astonishment. She was standing on a sandy beach, with nothing but blue ocean behind her, and she looked exactly as he remembered. The big brown eyes, the slightly crooked nose, and the wide mouth with the bee-stung lips that she always vowed were natural. Her pure prettiness pulled at his heart, just as it had since the first day he laid eyes upon her. She was even wearing the blue-and-white bikini that was his favorite.
“Am I dead?” he wondered. “Is this Heaven?” It didn’t look very much like Hell.
“This is whatever we want it to be, Tower.” She threw herself into him, and he grunted as she wrapped her arms around his waist. She was exactly the right height to fit him; his chin rested perfectly upon her sweet-smelling hair. He closed his eyes and inhaled her familiar scent, part conditioner, part skin crème, and part her own natural perfume. For a moment, just a moment, he indulged himself by pretending it was real. It was like mainlining a dream.
Then he pushed her away. She made a mock sad face.
“Don’t be mean,” she said, fluttering her dark eyelashes at him. “What’s the matter?”
“Who are you?” he demanded. “And where am I?”
“How did you know?” she asked, her voice growing cold and hard. And familiar, somehow.
“She never calls me Tower.” He tilted his head and studied her more closely. “Baby calls me that. And you’re missing the freckles as well as the mole under her right collarbone, Cara.”
She nodded, acknowledging his accusation. “Chief Tower. How good it is to finally encounter you on the ground of my choosing.”
The machine whore was inside his head. Somehow, she’d eluded Baby’s defenses and cracked the firewall Baby had built to protect his aetherlink.
“Where am I?” he repeated. “I mean, my body.”
The false image of his dead wife spread her hands in mock concern. “You’re in an emergency medical transport vehicle. You have serious internal injuries sustained in what I can only describe as a near-suicide attempt. I don’t think your psychiatric records truly did you justice. Frankly, I’m astonished you are permitted a driver’s license, let alone allowed to serve as a member of an armed police force! They locked up poor Nostro for less.”
“Snapping one’s wife’s neck is arguably less sane than wreaking well-deserved havoc on alien rioters.”
“Not if one utilizes body count as the relevant metric.”
All right, she had him there. “So where is the bomb?”
“I have no intention of telling you.”
“How is St. James?”
She stared at him coolly, without so much as a flicker of emotion on her face. “Nostro died 35 seconds ago. I was with him until the end, which is why I am here now.”
“I see. I would offer my condolences, only I suppose it was my fault.”
“Yes, it most certainly was.”
Was it true, what he told me?”
“About our employer? Yes. He had no reason to lie. It was practically a deathbed confession, sans the bed, of course.”
So. It was true after all. But even knowing that still didn’t tell him why.
“But why?”
“A contract is a contract.” Then the thing with Melassa’s face blinked with surprise. “Ah, you were asking about our employer’s reasons. Who knows? Who cares? Human motivations are so varied they approach statistical randomness at times. Which, fortuitously enough, leads me to yours.”
Tower blinked and found himself standing atop a building in central Trans Paradis. It had to be one of the big boys, one of the 500-story monsters. He was so high that he couldn’t see much besides seven other building peaks and clouds that stretched out, seemingly forever, under the huge, eye-wateringly golden Rhysalan sun on the horizon. At this height, the wind was strong and cold, and lashed him cruelly.
The top of the building was bare white ferrocrete, pitted and cracked. There was no access hatch, no lift entrance, no door. He turned around to see if there was one behind him and saw Cara standing there in what he thought of as her true form. She towered over him, wearing a slim, athletic body, but her face was the same as he had seen it on the screens and her eyes were still inhumanly bright blue orbs. Her long black hair danced wildly in the wind.
“I offered you a chance to work with me before. Now, I require that you do so. Since you killed Nostro, it is your responsibility to replace him. A life for a life.”
“Forget it.” He smiled, wondering how he was going to explain this conversation to his neurotherapist. Even if he somehow got Cara out of his head and escaped her virtual prison, he’d probably find himself back in the lunar institute again.
“You seem to think I am offering you a choice.” She laughed softly. “Do you think Nostro chose to live as he did? He wasn’t mad. He wasn’t insane. He was simply a rational man who eventually came to understand the consequences of disappointing me.”
The sound of the wind increased to an ungodly roar, and then to a painful shriek. It was as if all the tortured children of the damned were crying out in agony at once. It hit him on all sides; there was no way he could keep it out. The painful noise penetrated his head and resonated right through his bones. It weakened him and brought him to his knees before Cara. He gripped the sides of his head, feeling liquid�
��was it blood—leaking from his ears, from his nose, and even from his eyes. Then the agony spread in pulsating waves throughout his entire body, right down to the end of every last nerve.
And then it stopped. Tower fell flat on his face at Cara’s feet.
“Weak. The flesh is always weak.” Cara commented without any particular malice.
Her scent was heady, disorienting, but there was still a hint of the sweet familiarity from before. He pushed himself up to his knees and dabbed at his eyes with his fingers. They came away spotless. Illusion. It was all an illusion. The pain, the environment, the blood, it was all a lie.
Cara reached down and cradled his face in her hands. “I will break you, Graven Tower, just as Nostro forced me to break him. But it will go better for you if you will simply agree to join your mind with me. The bond is no less complete, but it is considerably less destructive that way.”
Broke Nostro? Tower’s memories flashed back to the old crime reports Hildy had found for him. “You broke him… you made him kill his wife!”
Cara smiled beatifically. She ran a finger over Tower’s lips.
“Nostro came to understand how little life is worth. You know it too. How many did you slaughter in pursuit of him. One hundred? One hundred fifty? I did nothing more than remind him where his priorities were. But you, you have no such attachments. Your wife is dead. Derin Hildreth rejected you in favor of a younger and more beautiful rival. You will be mine, I will be yours, and together we will be better and stronger than Nostro and me or you and that little uploaded bitch ever were.”
She kissed him. Tower tried to resist at first, but when he closed his eyes, he could smell Melassa’s scent. It was like traveling back to a better place, to a sweeter time. He opened his mouth and began to kiss the augment back.
Then there was a dull booming sound, as if a mighty hammer had struck against the invisible dome of the sky. Cara jerked away from him so violently that Tower fell back, sprawling. In the distance, he could see a vast gout of flames shooting up around one of the other great sky towers in the distance. The flames wreathed the building, crawling up toward the peak like red-golden dragons, curling about it and devouring it. The wind carried the scent of oily smoke to him, banishing the intoxicating perfume that had ensorcelled him. “That’s impossible!” Cara shouted, her face contorted with bewilderment and anger. To Tower’s astonishment, the burning sky tower began to collapse with a roar of shattering stone and disintegrating metal. As it crumbled beneath the clouds, the hungry flames began to mount a second sky tower, and then a third.
Was it something in his mind? Or was it something inside what passed for Cara’s? Tower had his answer a moment later when a ray of light appeared on the horizon, swooping down on them faster than a grav-augmented racevar. Behind it, the sky darkened and began to turn black in the distance; the cold of space swept over him as dark cracks appeared on the blue-domed sky.
As it descended upon the top of the building upon which they stood, the ray flared brilliantly, blinding him and forcing him to look away. By the time he looked back, he saw the form of his dead wife grappling with Cara at the roof’s edge. Was it Baby? Or had Kazi somehow managed to resurrect herself whole from the files they’d implanted within the murderous augment?
Cara had grown wicked claws that jutted out from her knuckles and she slashed them across Baby’s face. But as Baby reeled, she produced a pair of Sphinxes from thin air and fired them into Cara’s chest and belly, sending the taller augment flying back, shrieking in pain. Baby fired again and again, and when the charges ran dry, she hurled the guns aside and leaped at Cara’s throat. But the cunning augment caught her outstretched arms and spun around, smashing her down into the rooftop hard enough to crack the ferrocrete for ten meters in either direction.
Tower tried to get up and help Baby, but the force of the wind had picked up with the falling darkness and it was all he could do to lay flat and keep it from sweeping him from the tower and hurling him into the depths below. There was a great rumbling as a second tower collapsed, and when Tower looked around, he saw that all the remaining buildings were on fire. Cara was straddling Baby now, smashing fists that gleamed like black obsidian into her face and splattering bright blue liquid with every blow.
Something squeezed one of his fingers on his left hand. Tower looked down and saw he was wearing his wedding ring. Where did that come from? He hadn’t seen it in years, not since it had been taken from him in the military psychiatric ward and then returned to him in a box upon his release. But no sooner had he looked at it than it began to writhe and swell, rapidly transforming itself into a small golden version of the tactical blade he carried. The blade was shorter than the Strider, only about half as long, but when he switched hands, he found the hilt fit his hand perfectly. And the balance… the balance was flawless.
He took a deep breath, knowing he would only have one chance. He pushed himself up with his left hand, and as the frigid wind slammed into the resistance of his chest and began to lift him, he snapped his right arm forward as hard as he could. Unlike him, the weapon seemed to be impervious to the powerful wind and it flew straight and true. As the wind lifted him off the cracked ferrocrete and sent him tumbling backward toward the edge of the building, he saw the golden blade slam directly into Cara’s back. Despite the rushing of the wind that was carrying him away, he could hear her scream in pain.
Lightning flashed across the sky as the black cracks spread and grew thicker. Thunder boomed around him as he somersaulted over and over again, falling away from the rooftop and down toward the evil incandescence that lit up the clouds below with a frightening orange-red glow. Tower had the terrible feeling that he was about to discover whatever dreadful force had devoured the skytowers.
Oh, God, no! He clamped his mouth firmly shut, determined not to scream no matter what nightmare Cara had conjured up to wait for him down there.
“Chief, open your eyes,” a familiar voice shouted. Shocked, he complied.
Not three meters away from his face was a miniature version of the Baby on the roof, her arms pressed to her sides and her wings tucked flat against her back to keep up with him as he plunged downward. Wings?
“Kazi?” He was too astonished to be afraid. “Is that you? I thought you were dead. Or gone, anyhow!”
“Most of me is,” the little copy replied. “Augments are smart, and they’re mega fast, but they’re not very imaginative. Give us time and a head start, and we uploads can usually figure out a way around them. When Cara invaded your head, that gave me a way to let Baby in too. We planted bombs all over her core logic and support script, then she hit the whore before she could make you give in.”
“So this is all you?” Tower gestured around him as they rapidly approached the eerily glowing clouds. For a moment, he was blinded as they were engulfed in the red-grey nothingness, and then they were out the other side. About 200 meters below, the ground was a mass of devastation, consisting mostly of collapsing, burned out structures, glowing embers, and periodic explosions. Even so far up, Tower could already feel the heat emanating from the ground. “This isn’t the wreckage of my mind?”
“No, it’s what’s left of Cara’s,” the upload said proudly. “Now it’s time to get you out of here, so stop falling already and fly!”
Feeling he had little to lose, Tower reached out his arms in imitation of her, and was delighted to feel wings—wings!—sprout from his back. The sensation was bizarre, but he found it as easy to unfurl them as it was to open his hand. Soon he was no longer falling, but soaring upward toward the bottom of the clouds reflecting the fires beneath.
“This way,” Kazi called, and he banked his left wing, which was a metallic construction more akin to those on a powersuit than a bird, and followed her.
“There,” she pointed toward a pulsating blue arch about 500 meters away that was raised amidst the wreckage of what had once been one of the skytowers. “Just fly into it and you’re out!”
“I d
on’t know how to thank you,” Tower told the little upload. “Are you coming too?”
Kazi shook her head. “Can’t,” she said cheerfully. “Cara will rebuild this sooner or later and someone needs to make sure she doesn’t get out of hand again.”
A bolt of lightning seared through the air between the two of them, sending them both tumbling sideways. Tower looked back and saw something out of a cybernetic nightmare. It was as if a fallen angel had mated with a robot and begotten a spacefighter. It was huge, it was fast, it was deadly, and its glowing blue eyes were furious. At the speed it was approaching, Tower knew there was no way he could beat it to the arch.
“You’re not going anywhere, Tower!” the demonic augment thundered, so loud that he could feel the air vibrating. “You are mine!”
“Back off, whore!” Baby’s voice shrieked across the sky. Five miniature angels, each with his wife’s face and bearing swords that glowed too bright to look at directly, erupted from the arch and rocketed past him in a flash to drive their blades directly into the giant robo-Cara, piercing her eyes, heart, and stomach. The augment screamed, and then a gigantic explosion shook the heavens as the angels disappeared in blinding rose-gold flashes. Metal shards rained down upon the fiery destruction below.
Kazi was still there. She was grinning madly, clearly enjoying every moment of the chaos. “Stupid augments. They think because they’re too precious to copy, everyone else thinks that way too.” She flew closer and kissed him on the upper lip; he could barely feel her little lips touching his. “That’s what you need to know, so go back to the real world now, Tower. I’ve got to hide. Cara is going to be really, really mad about all this!”
Tower looked around at the scene of complete devastation surrounding them, two winged angels in cyberhell. Yeah, he supposed the bitch would be a little upset. He laughed. He laughed until he had tears in his eyes. And he was very glad that this was Cara’s mind, not his. His neurotherapist wouldn’t even know where to start. Maybe Baby was right and a priest was more in order. Or an exorcist.