Kaleidocide (30 page)

“I didn't bring it!” he yelled back again. Then I could hear him asking Lynn if she had hers, but she didn't either.

I could sense how exposed his body was in the direction of the shooter, and could almost feel the impact of the rounds that were about to slam into it.
Please don't let them exit into Lynn and the baby,
I thought.

Then I heard numerous bullets slam into something, but it didn't sound like flesh, and Jon's view didn't jerk from the impact as I expected it to. He heard this new sound, too, and while still holding Lynn to the ground, he turned his head so that we both could see what it was. It was Min, who had reached the gravesite from the hillside hangar bay in about three jumps. (This looked like flying when he did it, but it was actually a superhuman leap powered by some augmentations that made use of the Sabon antigravity technology.) The Chinese bodyguard now stood just to the west of Jon and Lynn, blocking the sniper's line of fire with his big body, and more than that. His arms were extended out from his sides, and the Atreides shield that was slaved to his skin also spread out away from his body, emanating vertically from his arms in both directions and creating a barrier about ten feet wide and high.

The shimmering semi-transparent shields to each side of Min looked like the wings of a high-tech protecting angel, as they repelled many more shots from the valley below. I was sure that the shielded front of his body, which was facing away from us, was also being hit by the barrage. But he stood his ground, and the shooting soon stopped after three aeros from the hillside base streaked overhead en route to the vineyards below.

“Are you hit?” I shouted to the double. “Is Lynn okay?”

“I think so,” he said, shifting on the ground to see.

“Stay down. The shooting stopped, but don't count your chickens. Tell Lynn.”

“Michael says stay down,” he said dutifully. “And don't count our chickens.”

Min and his shield also remained in place, as we all waited for a report from the valley below. It didn't take long.

“We've got him,” Terrey said. “He's dead—fried his own junk. But have Min take you back to the house, just in case there's another one somewhere down here.”

“I'm on the line,” Min said. “I hear you.” The big cyborg turned his body 180 degrees to face Lynn and Jon, with the extended shields staying exactly where they were (another impressive trick). He moved slowly toward the two bodies on the ground, telling them that they could stand up when he was close enough.

“Thank you, my friend,” I said to him. “How did you know where to land and stand?”

“As I was making the jumps,” Min said, wrapping Jon and Lynn in his shimmering wings, “the triplets calculated the only possible trajectory of the bullets, using the Eye and their sweep data, and they transmitted it to me right before my last jump.”

“What about the baby?” Lynn asked, and I could see she was worried about being thrown to the ground so violently.

“Do you have your phone?” I said, and she got the idea. She pulled it out, brought up the BabyView app, and was relieved to see Lynley's heart beating—though it was beating slightly faster than usual.

“She'll be fine,” Min said. “It takes a lot more than that to hurt a baby inside its mother. And this will make your hearts race even more…”

He gathered both Lynn and Jon into his arms and leapt into the air, carrying them back to a safer place closer to the house. It made me wonder how far he could jump without the weight of several people in his arms. I also wondered what we might learn from the body of the sniper and the ballistics he had fired, when Terrey and his
Trois
were done examining them.

 

28

ARMED TO THE TEETH

“The good news is that we're all still alive,” Terrey said, when everyone was gathered together that afternoon for the first time since the gravesite episode. “The bad news is that we almost weren't.”

We were meeting in the cafeteria of the mountain base, which was one of the few parts of it that had a view. It was toward the top of the hill, and one wall of it was transteel, which allowed the people inside to see out, while from outside they were hidden by a large holographic cover, similar to the one that concealed the mouth of the hangar bay, which was several floors below. The protection team had eaten some lunch—mostly the astronaut food in tubes that Terrey had brought along. They were too rattled from the events of the morning to eat normal food, even though Tyra had been faithfully testing all of it. But the sniper had gotten by Terrey and the
Trois,
so clearly something else could as well. My friend was presently addressing this failure.

“Our opponent had us in check, and almost in checkmate,” he said. “Somehow he was more informed and aware than we were about the Ares' Sunday morning habits, and managed to plant the sniper just beyond the range of our sweep. He also must have correctly calculated how far out we would conduct the sweep, and he knew that when Michael and Lynn walked that far out to the graves, they would pass just barely into the sniper's range. I'm very sorry that I botched this, and put you both into danger.” He nodded at Jon and Lynn, who was still too shaken to go back up to the house.

“At least we know what the yellow part of the kaleidocide is,” Stephenson said. Terrey had told us that the sniper was wearing dark yellow and camouflaged in a grapevine of the same color. “And we know that part is over.” Stephenson and Korcz had spent the rest of the morning extending their sweep another five hundred meters on all sides of the house, and were fairly confident that the sniper had been the only one.

“Yeah,” Terrey agreed. “And we actually might know more than that. I thought to myself,
How did Sun know about your Sunday mornings?
And I had the triplets search the net about it. They found an interview where Michael was asked about remembering his daughter and shared how they visit her grave every week—obviously that was the source. Then it occurred to me: What else could the enemy have gleaned from information on the net? So we searched it from his perspective, trying to find data that could give him ideas, and we found another interview where Michael said that he and Lynn have a glass of red wine from Artesa almost every night.”

That was true. I didn't remember saying it in an interview, but we did love the exclusive wines from our favorite winery, which was built into a hill between Napa and Sonoma. We kept a stash of their limited release and single vineyard wines, at over $100 per bottle, in our Le Cache portable wine cellar (over $7,000 for that beast).

“So you think he might try to poison us through the wine,” I said through the room speakers, and tried to introduce a little levity: “At least Tyra will have a good time tasting all of it.”

“I don't think anyone should taste or drink it,” Terrey said. “It's too high on the possibility scale.”

“First you tell me I can't have my bananas,” Lynn spoke up, “and now you want to take away my wine? Sheesh.” She was smiling, but I could tell that her hands were shaking a little.

“There's too good of a chance that Sun heard that interview.”

“What about the bottles that were already here?” she said. “We can drink from them … I did last night. We just won't buy any new ones.”

“I wouldn't even mess with the ones you already had,” Terrey insisted. “At least not anything you bought in the last year or so, since that interview was broadcast. I've underestimated Sun once already, I won't again. It's too easy to substitute a bottle or introduce something into one.” He shrugged at Lynn, as if to say “Sorry,” when he noticed her head sagging down. “But I would keep buying them.”

“What?” she said.

“Order more bottles from Artesa, to draw out any possible attempt. We'll scan the packaging for explosives, and we'll open the bottles and test the wine. If we get a positive, at least we'll know what that we found the red-colored threat, and smoked it out. And maybe we can trace the foreign elements.

“Speaking of traces,” Terrey continued, “Go is working in the lab right now, a couple floors below us.” I noticed for the first time that only two of the triplets were in the room—Ni and San, presumably, though I couldn't tell them apart yet. “She has the sniper's body there and will be seeing if we can retrieve any information from his implants, which is unlikely because they were so well-fried when he killed himself, and if his rifle can be traced, which is also unlikely. He's not even Chinese, so I'm assuming any connections between him and Sun are quite well-hidden. We also extracted two of the fired rounds from the ground near the graves, and she'll be studying them as well.

“There was one curious thing about the sniper, in case any of you might have any ideas. I don't know what to make of it, if anything at all. His ammunition had been stored in a belt that was painted red, unlike the yellow that covered every other part of his clothing.”

“So maybe the sniper was the yellow
and
the red,” Stephenson said, obviously interested in the colors like he was in the meaning of his dreams. “And we don't have to worry about the wine so much.”

“I don't know,” Terrey said. “Seems odd to me, two colors. But what was also odd is that the cases on the belt, which held the bullets, were not the typical equipment used for that purpose. The belt was a highly secure, waterproof container like we used for amphibious operations.” He looked up as if he were thinking about me, his fellow soldier, and added, “When we were in the military.”

“Do you have any theories?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said, “except that I'm wondering if he traveled to his position through water. But there's not any around there. Like I said, it could be nothing, but colors never seem to be random with this barmy Red wanker.”

“What I'm most concerned about right now,” I said, “is that Lynn was involved in this. I want her as far away from the double as possible, starting now. And Lynn, if you don't feel safe enough in the house, Min should stay with you there. Her safety is a priority over the double, Terrey. No offense, Jon.”

“I agree,” Terrey said. “No offense, Jon. That's fine for Min to stay with Lynn, but you should know that a tech from Chinatown Underground is on his way here to take a look at the big guy, because he took some serious pounding acting as a shield earlier. Do you have a problem with the tech coming up to the house?”

I told him I didn't, because I knew that the techs from Cyber Hole who did maintenance on Min were also refugees from Sun's autocratic regime, and had always been trusted implicitly by Saul Rabin. Besides, even if something really weird happened with the tech, I was confident that Min could protect himself and Lynn quite well, even if he was a little banged up.

“So, Lynn, you go up there,” I said to her, “and I'll talk to you at the house. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said, still shaken but trusting in me, and in Min. The big brown mountain of a machine-man escorted her out of the room.

“One more thing, for Lynn and Jon.” I said this because looking at Min reminded me of something. “If you do go out of the house together again, for Terrey's photo op or whatever, make sure you have the shields he gave you. Now that you know why he did, hopefully you'll think to use them.”

“You should be in the personal protection business, Michael,” Terrey said after Lynn and Min had left.

“You're not gonna be,” I barked, rather impulsively, “if you don't take care of my wife.”

“Easy, mate,” he said, holding his hands up. “I wanted to store her somewhere, but she—”

“I know, I know. She insisted on staying in the house. But you've got to juggle all that. That's what you're being paid for.”

“Actually, it's not—I'm being paid to keep
you
alive,” he said. “Anyone else is usually extra.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I'm serious. You want me to thin out my team more, or you want me to focus on her more, you should pay me more.”

“So you're saying that if I pay you a million five per day, instead of a million, my wife will be safer?”

“Yeah, she'll be on my radar more. She'll figure into the plans more.”

“Okay, done. You're now being paid to protect her, too.”

“That was easy,” he said, and raised his eyebrows at the others in the room, who had been listening to our conversation.

“I'm not laughing, Terrey,” I said. “If anything happens to her, I will hold you personally responsible.”

“Whoa, mate,” he said. “I'm not the one trying to kill her.”

“Me. You mean trying to kill me.”

“I mean I'm trying to save her life, too. Always have been. But now I'll try even harder.”

*   *   *

A little later, I plugged one of the screens on the wall into the system at my house atop the hill base, and found Lynn moving around the kitchen, organizing and apparently beginning to prepare some dinner. She didn't like to sit still for very long under normal circumstances, and probably felt an even stronger need to keep busy under these. She also didn't like to wear an earpiece or glasses, and was one of the few people I knew who actually held her OutPhone up to her ear when she was talking on it. I had given her various earpieces and glasses over the years, and even tried an expensive gold necklace with tiny speakers and a mic built in, telling her that she could hurt her neck by working around the house with the phone wedged between her ear and shoulder, or get into an accident by holding it when she was driving. But she had consistently refused to use any of those beyond the first week or so, and usually ended up losing them (including the necklace, unfortunately). So I had given up trying to get her to change, and that's why I often used the net room equipment initially when calling her, and only switched to a more private means when necessary.