Counting Heads

by David Marusek

  He’s going to ram it, Meewee thought in disbelief. There was hardly time to blink. he sputtered in the convoluted metalanguage

  The pressure gate dissipated even as the lifechair reached it. The chair passed through and braked hard. The guards leaped aside as it flew past them, tires screeching. It came to a halt in front of the massive vehicle barricade. The chair stopped, but its passenger kept going.

  SAMSON WENT ALL the way—in honest-to-God slow motion. At least the suicides at Moseby’s Leap had gotten that part right. Samson felt himself lift gently from the basket and float through the air. The barricade wall seemed distant, and there was ample time to take everything in.

  To say I have no regrets would be a lie, he mused. I have plenty of them. I regret not being a better citizen, for example. I regret not being a better champion for the seared. I regret not making the most of every single blessed day of my life. But most of all, I regret not being a better man to Jean and Eleanor, and a better father to you. I suppose you might have been a better daughter as well, but I don’t hold that against you. And thank you for this marvelous parting gift of an opportunity to go out with a bang. I’m going to light a big candle for you, Ellie. Hope it helps.

  The wall grew close enough to make out the pockmarked texture of its surface, like craters of the Moon, and Samson remembered his honeymoon with Eleanor. She had pulled him aside and told him she loved him more than all the craters of the Moon.

  “GOOD GAIA!” MEEWEE cried. “Stop! Stop!” The lifechair braked in time, but the passenger, wrapped in a blanket, flew headlong into the wall, hitting it with a resounding thud. Meewee ran to see. He ran into the open gatehouse where one of the guards stopped him. “The man,” Meewee gasped, gesturing wildly at the crash victim, who lay in a heap against the barricade. A foul smell filled the place, and smoke rose from the crumpled form. Was that a man?

  Dr. Rouselle shouted, “I am a doctor.” She and the medbeitor had caught up, but the guard prevented her from lending assistance. The other guard used his baton to unwrap the man’s blanket, and he sprayed the corpse with fire suppressant.

  “That won’t help, I think,” the doctor said, sniffing the air. “He is a seared.”

  But the smoke cleared, and the victim lay like a broken twig on the concrete floor.

  The gateway chimed, and the guard shooed them toward it. “It’s all over,” he said. “Nothing to see.”

  Meewee, remembering his mission, refused to budge. “I’m going through, Myr Jerry,” he said. “Don’t try to stop me.”

  “Listen to you,” the guard said, drawing his standstill wand. The gate sprang up behind Meewee, but a slot opened, and the guard said, “Go on now. This is your last warning.”

  Just then, there was a snapping sound from the corpse, and another, like firecrackers going off. The guard hesitated and turned to watch. The doctor took cover behind the medbeitor, and the other guard ducked into the scanway entrance. Meewee used the distraction to sidle toward the far end of the block where the vehicle entrance gaped wide open, and he reached it just as two powerful blasts filled the block with flaming human bits.

  WHEN THE GATE dropped, Fred thought that Reilly had done it, but when he loosened his hold on the man, Reilly fell to the floor. Fred stood for some time looking down at his friend. Fred had been sure he was straining against Reilly’s face mask, but now he saw that Reilly had never deployed the mask. Fred crouched to feel for a carotid pulse and found none. Ugly bruises from the baton crisscrossed his throat, and the front of his uniform was singed from the heat of the gate.

  “Medic!” Fred called at the top of his lungs. Something small and fast, the bluish blur of a flying mech, streaked out through the open gateway and shot down the path after Mary and the pike. Fred was drawn along too, but he could not leave Reilly like this. “Medic!” The gateway chimed a warning—the gate was going back up—and Fred had ten seconds to decide on which side he wanted to be when it did. “Medic!” he called desperately, searching through Reilly’s pockets for a cryosac. He couldn’t leave him like this, but at the last moment, he jumped across the gateway groove just as the gate sprang up. He was inside the clinic.

  MARY’S PLAN HAD been to follow the south wall till it met the west wall, then turn right and follow that wall to West Gate. But she had already lost sight of the wall and was running blind along unfamiliar paths. She forced herself not to think of Reilly. The man wouldn’t bend the rules even to save her life. She couldn’t believe it.

  Actually, she could believe it. Reilly was a russ through and through. Duty over all.

  There were scraps of color in the woods. Two clinic guests and a retinue of hollyholo sims were strolling the path ahead. She hollered at them and raced to catch up. The syrup sloshed in the tote under her arm.

  The guests stopped to gape at her. They were two of a kind—large, agile, gorgeous—and might have been brother and sister. As Mary approached, they lifted their hands and pointed their closed fists at her, aiming the rings on their fingers.

  “Halt!” shouted the woman.

  Mary stopped a couple of meters away and hunched over for breath. “You—must—help me,” she gasped.

  The man said, “I’ve already reported you to clinic security. They are on their way, so I suggest you leave us alone.”

  “Not clinic security. Call the Command. Go outside the gate and call them. Tell them I have Starke.” She patted the tote. “Call a medevac. Please help me!”

  The affs regarded her coolly, keeping a bead on her with their rings. The hollyholos accompanying them, who had been quiet until then, now piped up to fill the silence. One of them, a tall woman, said, “What have you done with the ransom?”

  “There’s no ransom,” Mary said. “I’m not kidnapping her. She’s my client.”

  Another of the sims was Dr. Ted. Mary appealed to him, “You tell them. You tell them what’s happening.”

  The sim turned to the others and said, “This girl is suffering from a brain pox and is clearly delusional. Avoid intimate contact with her at all costs.”

  The aff woman began to wave her free hand. Mary turned and saw the groundskeeper coming toward them. He was swatting at a bee as he jogged. The bee in turn was batting itself against the man’s visor. At first Mary thought she’d be safe among these affs, ungracious though they were, but as the pike drew near, she panicked and ran again.

  She ran over a little rise into a stand of beech trees. Fléchettes riddled the tree trunks around her. One sliced through the flesh at her side, but she hardly noticed. She came across a path and took it. She was beyond all calculation. Her only thought was to outrun the sounds behind her.

  These sounds changed abruptly. The zing of fléchettes was replaced by the whine of laser fire. Two separate frequencies meant two different guns. She hugged a tree and peeked from behind it to see an amazing sight. A mech was firing at the pike. The pike had switched his weapon to laser mode and was sweeping the air with bursts of light, but he was unable to hit the mech at such close range. The mech, on the other hand, easily hit the pike, but its comparatively low-wattage lasers were no match for the pike’s armor. Undeterred, the mech continued to hit him, targeting only three points on the pike’s body and hitting those points repeatedly: his face mask, his groin, and the helmet seal at the back of his neck. The pike covered these spots as best he could with his gloved hands, but he couldn’t cover all three at once, and the mech circled and crossed the man’s head, almost too fast to see, firing a staccato stream of pulses. The man returned fire with choked spreads, like laser birdshot. His wild shots gouged smoking holes in the trees around him and brought down boughs and branches upon himself.

  Back and forth, the mech flew, hitting its targets repeatedly. If its fuel held, it would eventually wear through the armor. Mary was fascinated by this deadly ballet, but could not stay to watch. She looked all around for the wall. That’s when she saw the second pike. He was standing very still, holding his car
bine at his side, letting it self-target. The gun discharged a prolonged pulse that raced through the woods and hit the mech. The mech exploded as its plasma reserve was ignited. The concussion knocked the groundskeeper off his feet.

  The second pike lowered his carbine and gestured to Mary to stand still. A utility cart, like the one at the cottage, rolled up behind him.

  FRED HEARD THE explosion and set his visor to calculate its location. As he ran, the ground he covered was added to the theater map under construction in the corner of his visor. It was a growing band of known terrain in an unknown territory. The explosion had come from an unexpected direction. If it marked Mary’s location, it would mean that she was doubling back to the plaza in a large arc.

  Fred ran toward the explosion marker in his map. He crossed several footpaths and climbed small wooded hills. The terrain was rich in natural cover, which his visor mostly filtered out. Suddenly he was buzzed by a mech, bluish, like the one that had streaked from the gatehouse. He guessed it wasn’t a clinic mech, but didn’t know how it figured into the action. It circled him twice and flew off. Suddenly all of the unknown territory in Fred’s map was filled in. Not only that, but personnel markers appeared, and he had access to clinic comm. Fred paused in order to analyze the situation. Two of the markers were to his left and receding at a good pace. One of them, flagged as armed, was pursuing the other, who was unarmed—Mary? To his right, another marker was at the location of the explosion. It was flagged as armed and uninjured, but unconscious. There was another marker much farther inside the clinic. It was marked by a battlefield lid, which meant it was a casualty. Fred couldn’t read its vitals, but a picture was quickly forming in his mind. Pikes often came in tactical teams of three. These three had been sent to destroy Ellen Starke, but ran into trouble. One was down. A second was stunned by the explosion. And the third was pursuing Mary.

  Fred turned to follow Mary but stopped again. She was too far away to reach in time. He needed another plan. He knew that the pike chasing Mary had to be wondering who he was and what he was doing there. The pike could see in his own visor that Fred was unarmed, yet wearing body armor, and that he wasn’t attached to clinic security. The pike had to be watching Fred’s marker on his own map with growing apprehension, for he had made a serious mistake. He hadn’t expected to run into a loose russ, and left his teammate vulnerable. If russes were predictable, pikes were doubly so. They never left their brothers behind. Clients be damned.

  On Fred’s map, the pike slowed down, a calculated move. He was still within striking distance of Mary, but he was giving Fred a chance to catch up, luring him away from his teammate. A russ would surely take the bait, especially if his duty was to save the Starke girl, and Fred nearly went for it. The Starke girl wasn’t his client this time, though. This time he was his own client. The downed pike was just over the next rise, and on a counterintuitive impulse, Fred rushed there instead.

  Fred topped the hill and crouched close to the ground to study the fallen man who lay amid a litter of shattered and smoking tree branches. His groundskeeper uniform had been burned off at his shoulder, revealing an armored suit underneath. His breathing seemed regular, and his suit looked intact. His carbine lay several meters away in the grass.

  Fred scampered down the hill and retrieved the gun. It had timed out, and he brought it to the pike. He took the fallen man’s left hand—pikes were southpaws—and wrapped it around the grip. The gun controls became enabled, and Fred reset the force and shape of the laser pulse to its highest, narrowest setting. In his visor he saw that the other pike had left off pursuing Mary and was heading back to him. Excellent! If his new friend here cooperated, Fred had a target and a weapon.

  Fred pushed the pike’s index finger into the trigger guard and laid his own finger over it. He pulled the man’s body around a little and lay down behind it.

  But the pike’s eyes fluttered; he was coming around. Suddenly his free hand made a fist and roundhoused Fred on the side of his head. Fred’s cap took most of the blow, but even so, his ear sang.

  They struggled for the gun, the pike punching Fred savagely. Fred was losing control, so he pressed the pike’s trigger finger and squeezed off a shot. A terrific bolt of light erupted from the gun so close to Fred’s face that it dazzled him, despite his visor. The blast rived the trunk of a nearby tree like a lightning strike, splitting it in two. On the way, it vaporized the pike’s right hand.

  The pike gasped, and his suit quickly sealed his stump with battlewrap. Fred wrenched the carbine and pressed the barrel under the pike’s chin.

  “Tell your pal to stop where he is!” Fred ordered him.

  The pike didn’t respond. His pupils closed to pinpoints. His suit was doping him for the pain. The other pike was almost in sight. Fred poked the muzzle of the gun hard against the man’s throat and repeated his order.

  The pike smiled in drugged serenity. “I see you are unarmed, friend.”

  “What do you call this, friend?” Fred said and jabbed him again with the muzzle.

  “A soft cock if you kill me with it.”

  He was right. The moment the pike died, his gun would shut down, leaving Fred weaponless.

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” Fred said and carefully re-aimed the gun. He fired again, taking off the side of the pike’s helmet, his ear, and a strip of his scalp. Before the suit could patch itself, Fred grabbed a splintered branch from the ground and stuck its pointy end several millimeters up the pike’s exposed ear canal.

  “Lie still!” he yelled in the man’s good ear. But the pike struggled all the more fiercely, so Fred shoved the stick in until it passed through his brain and jammed up against the inside of his skull. The pike convulsed a couple of times and went limp. On his map, the pike was flagged injured. With any luck he would take a while to die.

  Meanwhile, the other pike’s marker stopped just over the next rise, and Mary was making good time back to South Plaza.

  “Such a deal,” Fred said and reset the carbine’s spread pattern.

  MARY CAME TO a path she recognized. To her surprise, she wasn’t far from the plaza where she had started. On impulse, she turned left, away from South Gate and toward the central complex of clinic buildings. She’d feel safer there, and from there she could choose any of the other gates. But the blue bee, her guardian angel, intercepted her and urged her toward South Gate with pulsing arrows.

  Vehicles, both homcom and police, filled South Gate Plaza, but no medevac ambulance. Mary shifted her terrible burden from one arm to the other and approached a belinda in a hommer uniform, but a crash cart intercepted her first. It lowered its treatment platform, and asked Mary to sit.

  “No, not yet. Can you call me an ambulance? A medevac?”

  The holo of a man projected next to the cart. He was a stranger, but he seemed to know her. “Ah, Myr Skarland, at last! Hurry, give Ellen’s head to the cart. We’ve got a fresh tank waiting for her. There’s no time to lose.”

  The cart proffered its arm, and Mary ached to give Ellen to it and be done with it. “That’s right,” the man encouraged. “Give your bag to the cart.”

  Mary said, “Who are you?”

  “Byron Fagan.”

  Mary clutched the tote to herself. “Fagan Health Group? Concierge’s sponsor?”

  “Yes, I am. Or rather, I was. Concierge was altered, I don’t know when, or by whom. It fell under the influence of unknown parties. I only discovered this a little while ago, when it was thrown off-line. I have launched a secure backup. He’s back now, as good as new. There’s no need to worry, Myr Skarland. You’ve done a heroic job, and everything is safe now.

  “But we must act fast, if we want Ellen to survive.” He pointed at the syrup dripping from the tote. “That is, if she’s still alive. You must trust me, Myr Skarland. I’m the one who called in the Command.”

  He seemed sincere. “My sisters, and Nurse Hattie and Matt,” Mary said, gesturing toward the woods.

  “We’re alr
eady attending to them,” Fagan said. “It’s Ellen Starke we have to think of now.” The cart’s arm reached for the tote.

  “Hello! Evangeline!” someone called from the gatehouse. A little man and a tall woman hurried toward her, carrying an odd device between them. “Don’t listen to him,” the man called. “Wait for us!”

  The couple stopped next to the crash cart and lowered their burden to the ground. “My name is Meewee. I know you. I worked with Wee Hunk.”

  “Where is Wee Hunk?” Mary said. She raised her face to the sky and called, “Wee Hunk, I need you.” But the Neanderthal did not appear. “Let Wee Hunk in!” Mary ordered Fagan.

  Fagan held up his hands and said, “I assure you, Myr Skarland, I am not—”

  “Wee Hunk is dead,” the little man said. “He was contaminated.”

  “There’s no time for this,” Fagan declared. “Every second is crucial. For pity sake, Mary, turn over Ellen’s head.”

  While her competing benefactors were vying for her trust, the woman who had come with the little man bent over their device on the ground. She opened its lid, revealing a snug compartment of gleaming chrome. She smiled up at Mary and said, “If you please.”

  “This is Dr. Rouselle,” the little man said. “She doesn’t work for Fagan, and this is a portable hernandez tank. Please, Myr ’Leen, let the doctor save Ellen.”

  “Save her?” Fagan snapped. “He wants to hold her hostage. Her mother had her brought to my clinic because she trusted us.” The crash cart edged in closer and opened a side compartment; inside was a large glassive jar, brimming with bubbling amber amnio syrup.

  Mary unwrapped her tote and gently lifted the head from the dregs at the bottom. She cradled the dripping head in both hands, but she couldn’t force herself to return it to the clinic. “Wee Hunk,” she cried, “where are you?”