Ash Ock

by Christopher Hinz

  But Saturday night’s date with the marketing VP . . . that was a different story.

  She did not dare go out with him. E-Tech Security would have certainly broken all of her computer codes by now, initiated surveillance on friends or acquaintances she might be expected to contact. There was no way Susan Quint could keep that date.

  But there was no way she could break it, either. Irryan social ethics prescribed certain principles; when you said you were going to go out with someone whose standing was above your own, you damn well went out with them. Excuses, with rare exceptions, were not acceptable. A serious injury, perhaps, or a death in the family. But if that were the case, and you had a genuine excuse, proof would have to be supplied.

  That was the way it was.

  A broken date for false reasons targeted you for immediate repercussions, including a demotion in status. And once demoted, it was very hard to climb back up again.

  Very hard.

  The Elvis Tways froze in midstride as the bass trio ended their song—a sizzling triplet of harmonic finger-slides down the necks of their instruments. The bartop stopped vibrating. Patrons throughout the cabaret raised their hands above their heads and clapped wildly. Susan kept her palms pinned to the bar.

  What am I going to do?

  “Costello and Presley—the Elvis Tways!” hooted the MC, mounting the stage. He wore an emerald-sequined jacket and a permanent smile. “Let’s give the Tways another big round of applause!”

  The crowd clapped and hollered.

  “And now, Cabaret Luge proudly presents—straight from his freefall engagement in the center-sky of Colony Prague—will you please welcome a creature that will certainly get things moving . . .

  “Big Bird!”

  There was a brief drum roll. Then a man in a gigantic yellow bird suit, with extended mechanical wings flapping vigorously, descended from a trapdoor twenty feet above the stage. He dropped in a full-gravity plunge, totally out of control, fluttering wings doing nothing to break his fall. He hit the stage with a loud crash. Amber feathers flew from his body.

  The crowd laughed wildly. The birdman lay on the stage, unmoving.

  The MC shook his head and stared forlornly at the downed creature. “Well, folks . . . I guess before we hired Big Bird, we should have explained that this wasn’t a freefall engagement.”

  The cabaret erupted—shrieking laughter followed instantly by a growing wave of spontaneous applause. People on both sides of Susan rose to their feet, clapping and hollering.

  The birdman staggered to his feet, folded a broken wing in front of his chest, and gave a graceful bow. Bare scrawny legs wobbled erratically as he exited stage right. Thunderous applause continued.

  The woman beside Susan turned to her with a wild-eyed grin. “A ten-G snaker! Blasphemy personified!”

  The MC chuckled. “Folks, I’d sure like to hire Big Bird for a night of raw sex. The problem is, I don’t believe in featherbed-ding!”

  A drum roll was followed by a fresh round of clapping. The delrin trio came to life in an explosion of heavily reverbed bass notes. Pinewood started pulsing. Dancers hit the floor.

  Susan remained motionless. The one-trick birdman had not amused her in the slightest. A few days ago, she would have been in hysterics along with the rest of them.

  She lifted her hands from the bar. They were shaking.

  I have to get out of here. I have to do something.

  But what?

  She needed to talk with someone about this whole mess. Obviously, she could not go to E-Tech. Aunt Inez’s betrayal made it impossible to contact any of her acquaintances within La Gloria de la Ciencia. And she really did not have any close friends—at least none that she could talk with about life-and-death situations.

  That was depressing.

  All right, Susan, she chided herself. There’s no sense in wallowing in self-pity.

  Years ago, when her parents had died, there had been a few individuals whom she had been able to open up to. There were many psychplan counselors during her teenage years, and two or three of them had been pretty decent. But the problem with psychplan counselors was that they usually demanded long-term commitments . . .

  No.

  She remembered some concerned career directors, too, from school. But her days of formal education were long behind her, and she had not bothered to keep in touch with any of those people.

  The Reformed Church of the Trust?

  At one time, the Church would have been an easy target for Susan’s pain and rage: indirectly, they had contributed to her parents’ insanity. But primarily because of a few people within the Church who had befriended her during those awful weeks following the tragedy, Susan had never felt cause to blame them. In particular, she remembered a young priest.

  She tried to recall his name. Lester . . . something-or-other. He had been there, comforting her in those hours immediately following the suicide of her parents . . .

  Lester Mon Dama.

  She had not seen him for well over a decade, either. But he was Church, and Susan’s parents had always maintained that the Church was there for you whenever you needed it.

  There for you whenever you needed it.

  The words revivified dull memories from her childhood; echoes of those days spent with her parents. They were sweet memories, but each had been layered over with a coating of pain. She bit her lip, fought back a wave of tears.

  No, dammit!

  Years ago, when things had been really awful, one of her psychplan counselors had taught her to add up the good things in her life in order to maintain some perspective on the bad. It was more productive than crying.

  Number one—I haven’t broken Saturday’s date. Not yet. I still have time to work something out.

  Number two—I’m still alive. Normally, that one did not count. But she figured that two close brushes with death in the past week qualified it for inclusion.

  She felt herself smiling.

  And my name hasn’t shown up yet on any of the E-Tech telecasts. Number three.

  A frown wiped away the smile. She hadn’t really thought about it before, but the fact that E-Tech was not officially searching for her was a bit puzzling. She had assumed that Donnelly and Tace had been operating under the authority of someone within E-Tech Security. But maybe not. Maybe that night, in her apartment, they had been receiving orders directly from someone else—someone who wanted Susan dead.

  Slasher—the killer in Yamaguchi Terminal. The man who had looked at her with recognition. That was, of course, the only possible answer. Since the massacre, she had been trying to convince herself that she could not know such a monster.

  But I do know him. That had to be the explanation. Either she knew him, or she knew his tway, if he was indeed a Paratwa. In the real world, that killer was someone whom she could identify.

  The assassins had professed to be from the Order of the Birch and that crazed organization purportedly had many influential friends. People with enough clout to corrupt a pair of E-Tech Security officers?

  She shook her head. Here, in the crowded cabaret, the whole thing seemed ludicrous. Nevertheless, Donnelly and Tace had tried to kill her.

  Aunt Inez should have believed me. A sigh escaped her. Looking back, Susan could understand why her aunt had not accepted her story at face value. Foolishly, Susan had allowed herself to go into hysterics the moment she arrived at her aunt’s apartment.

  A chill swept through her. For the first time, she consciously acknowledged what she already knew to be true. The assassin ordered Donnelly and Tace to kill me. And when the E-Tech officers failed in their mission, the assassin killed them, in order to prevent any real investigators from learning whom they were working for.

  Worse yet, that meant that the assassin must still be afraid that Susan could identify him. He’s going to keep on trying to kill me until he succeeds.

  A hand touched her shoulder. She spun violently. Her arm lashed out.

  Her elbow caught
the man in the windpipe. He staggered backward, choking, and slammed into a live barmaid. Woman and drinks spilled to the floor.

  A flood of laughter erupted from the nearest patrons.

  “I think he just wanted to dance with you,” said the woman beside Susan, grinning.

  Susan stared at the surrounding faces, at their mocking looks of contempt, and she knew that they were rating her well below the line, down with the 1Gs—the beggars and silkies, the fatix and unmainstreamed pirates—the sludge of the Colonies.

  I’m not one of them, she wanted to shout. But her mouth would not open.

  He’s going to keep on trying to kill me until he succeeds.

  She bolted from her stool and dashed from the cabaret.

  O}o{O

  Something is not right.

  Gillian paced back and forth through the crowded Yamaguchi Terminal, ignoring the distractions of silkies and dealers plying their trades, trying to allow his awareness to make the connection between this physical place and the vivid images that had been recorded here four days ago, trying to conceptualize the flow of events that had led to the brutal murders of a hundred and fourteen people.

  He had been wandering through the terminal for the past hour, mentally integrating the parameters of this huge space with an actual video record of the massacre’s aftermath, purchased from a young freelancer who had arrived in the terminal only minutes after the attack. Nick had used those images of human decimation, combined with the transit computer records acquired through La Gloria de la Ciencia at Inez Hernandez’s request, to generate a set of event sequence maps.

  The midget had studied hundreds of Paratwa killings, had learned to translate mass murders into cold data: information-chocked tables, charts, and grids. Such digital recreations were especially viable in the larger massacres, like this one, where the sheer number of victims provided for a statistical reliability impossible to develop from smaller attacks. Often in the past, Nick’s data alone had enabled them to actually identify the breed of assassin involved. On Earth, during the final days over a quarter of a millennium ago, the midget’s sophisticated techniques, combined with Gillian’s unique Ash Ock understanding of binary interlink combat, often had led them to their prey.

  Mounted on the inside of Gillian’s left sunshield visor was a microcomputer grid with an enhancer to permit his eye to focus at close range. He tapped the sensorized edge of the visor and watched as another of Nick’s charts dissolved onto the miniature screen. It showed the terminal as a gridwork of black lines, overlaid by one hundred and forty-nine multihued slashes of color, each slash representing the area where a dead or injured colonist had fallen. Each line of color indicated the victim’s suspected direction of movement at the moment of his encounter with the assassin.

  Victims of killer one—the assassin with the flash daggers, the man that the freelancers had dubbed Slasher—were displayed in a mixture of warm colors: shades of red, orange, and yellow, each differing hue symbolizing the specific time that that colonist had met his fate. The more numerous greens, blues, and violets marked Shooter’s prey: men, women, and children whose bones had been shattered under the rapid-fire assault of that weapon of unknown technological origin—the spray thruster.

  Utilizing Nick’s quarry motion chart, and with near-perfect recall of the video, Gillian had been able to mentally reconstruct the events of the Yamaguchi attack. Before his shuttle had even docked in Honshu this morning, he had been fairly certain that this massacre was not the work of a Paratwa. The patterns were all wrong, the methods inconsistent with the manner in which tways operated.

  These killers had begun the carnage from positions on opposite sides of Yamaguchi Terminal. According to the officially released E-Tech report, the place had been—like today—swamped with travelers. At the beginning of the violence, the two killers would have been far out of sight of each other, and if they were a Paratwa, that factor alone would have neutralized their single greatest advantage: the binary interlink’s ability to observe an identical scene from two separate locations, perceive the same situation through a dual set of eyes. Virtually all Paratwa, regardless of breed, went into combat with their tways as close together as feasible.

  There were exceptions to that rule, of course. Products of the deadlier breeding labs, such as the Russian-trained Rabbits from Voshkof Laser and Fusion, and the North American Jeek Elementals, tended to take more chances. Members of those breeds would occasionally risk separating the tways for brief periods. But even a Jeek as unpredictable as Reemul had always made certain that his tways were in close proximity when the epitome of violence was at hand.

  In this terminal, the two killers had been on opposite sides of a huge mob. A real Paratwa would not have attacked from such a position.

  Gillian had arrived at that conclusion only minutes after arriving in the terminal. Yet here he was, an hour later, still wandering through the vast space.

  Something is not right.

  He could not put his finger on what was bothering him; uneasiness refused to be shaped into thought. For about the hundredth time, he ran his conception of the events through awareness.

  The two killers position themselves on opposite sides of the terminal, facing the center. Slasher begins the murderous rampage with his flash daggers. Maybe six to eight seconds later, Shooter opens up with the spray thruster. They begin moving toward each other, toward the middle of the huge space.

  About halfway through the attack, the killers suddenly stop, and fill the terminal with their fanatic raving about the Paratwa not being allowed to return. “Long live the Order of the Birch!” they cry, one after another. The panicked crowd splits into a series of smaller mobs, squeezing toward the exits.

  The massacre ends with the two killers close enough to be within sight of one another. At that juncture, they change directions, begin moving on perpendicular courses. Slasher heads toward one of the west exits. Shooter marches southward. They hide their weapons, hurtle themselves into the thick of the crowds, and are swept out of the terminal, escaping along with hundreds of terrified survivors.

  Gillian shook his head. The modus operandi indicated a pair of transceiver-linked human beings. Not a Paratwa.

  And yet . . .

  Something is not right.

  He stopped pacing and closed his eyes, tried to shut off the sensory barrage of the terminal, force his mind to become a blank slate.

  Images and sounds blasted through awareness, burrowing beneath cerebral conceptions of quarry motion charts and recorded death images—a gestalt seeking clarity within the deeper reaches of his subconscious.

  But the trick did not work. When he opened his eyes and tried to integrate the gestalt with abstract awareness, he was left with the impression that this four-day-old killing scene was too cold for unconscious assimilations to occur. He needed a fresh murder site, where the bodies were still in place, where the heat of the violence could ease down into the deepest levels of his being, where the maelstrom of his unique Ash Ock subconsciousness could exhume a true picture of the brutality.

  He needed to wait until the assassins struck again.

  There was nothing more that he could learn here. He turned around, intending to head for the escalators that led to the shuttle docks, located far below the terminal. But suddenly an array of golden light burst forth at his side, and within that light, he saw the elfin face of a young woman.

  Catharine.

  For an instant, the image of Gillian’s long-dead tway seemed to overwhelm the halo of brilliance that surrounded her. Catharine metamorphosed into the beautiful creature she had once been, long brown hair flowing across her shoulders, the warm blue eyes locked onto his face.

  Catharine. Gillian moved toward her, knowing she was not real, knowing that she was an apparition from his deepest subconscious. She was his other half, the entity who could interlace her mind with his. Catharine and Gillian—tways who together could become the Ash Ock Paratwa, Empedocles.

  H
e stepped forward. She appeared to shift to the left, moving from his path. He changed directions to match her movement, but she angled to the right. He forced himself to stop.

  I can’t touch her. She’s not real. She’s a memory-shadow from my own mind, a distillation of Empedocles.

  But he longed for her nonetheless.

  Her lips moved. She was trying to say something. There were no sounds, no voices in Gillian’s head to match her speech. But he felt certain that she was trying to communicate with him.

  He shook his head, confused. She could not talk. She was not real. She was an abstraction, a mental construct.

  Her face grew darker, her expression more intense. She seemed desperately to want Gillian to understand what she was trying to say.

  Instinctively, he stepped closer, hoping to fathom her silent mouthing. His body bumped into something.

  “Watch out!” snapped a tall, black-haired man.

  Catharine disappeared, enveloped by a collapsing flower of golden light.

  “Watch where you’re going,” muttered the man again, but with less antagonism in his voice. He was staring at Gillian’s face and, apparently, something there was causing him to restrain his anger.

  “Sorry,” Gillian mumbled. He turned away from the man and scanned the terminal, looking for Catharine. But she was gone. He drew a deep breath, sighed.

  She was not real, he reminded himself.

  Abruptly, his right hand began to itch. As he stared down at the bandages, thoughts of Catharine retreated to that subconscious maelstrom from which they had sprung. Last night his burn injury had been treated by a team of Alexanders’ doctors, and since then, the wound seemed to be healing abnormally fast. Fifty-six years had at least produced some strides in medicine. Soon, his hand would be again able to grip a weapon. Soon, he would be ready to wield the Cohe wand.

  And the doctors had given him a different face as well: more fleshy in the cheeks, a reangled nose, eyes pinched slightly closer and tinted a darker shade of gray with cornea oils.