Starhammer (5 page)

"Stop, Arnei!" the pursuer shouted. Arnei covered the gravel in three grotesque bounds and hurled Melissa into the door, driving it open. Arnei smashed through it and rolled into a firing position, his gun roared impossibly loudly in that enclosed space. Hot streaks zinged out the door over her body. Her bowels released as she pressed her face into the tile.

People were screaming and running up the stairs of the tower. Arnei slid in another magazine and pumped bullets up the stairwell. Some of the screams took on a different timbre.

Bullets came through the door, explosive things that dug inch-deep holes in the wall blocks opposite. But Arnei Oh had rolled aside and was in the shadow of the door. His hand stretched out for her arm. She stared horrified, but was unable to move. He had her by the wrist. One strong jerk and she was slammed into him, feeling his hot coffee breath in her face.

He was brutally strong. Still, she swung at him, landing a punch against a leathery cheek. He snarled and then opened his mouth. His teeth were filed to points. He lunged and seized her shoulder and bit down. She screamed, the sound echoing in the small room at the base of the tower.

He crushed her behind him, pressed her against the wall. Shifting position, his gun ready. She watched helplessly as he pulled out a black tube about a foot long. He punched a button on it and a dire little red light came on.

He stuffed it back in his coat and seized her by the hair. With a flurry of shots out the door he dragged her across the room to the stairs. In three bounds he was up the first flight, dragging her willy nilly. As she smashed into the wall on the second leap, she felt her forearm break.

Arnei Oh's gun boomed again, and there were more screams from above. But he was trapped, and he knew it, so he would take them all with him. The feat would mark him as the King of Killers in his own time.

He decided on a whim to take the dark-haired girl's scalp as well. He dropped her, knelt on her back to hold her down, and fumbled out his knife. With his gun hand he grabbed her hair and brought the blade up to her forehead, but there were footsteps on the stairs. He cursed. This operative had to be suicidal. He let go and brought the gun up, but the guy kept coming. Their guns boomed, a salvo at ten paces. Arnei's shot took Jon Iehard in the midriff but didn't cut the body shield. Jon's small plastic bullet stroked Arnei's shooting hand and exploded. Arnei saw the man fall, roll, and his own hand fountain blood. The shock turned him and flung him back into the stone wall.

Arnei gasped once and then shrieked his rage. He dropped the knife and reached for the bomb, one flick and it was green. Then Iehard's second shot took Arnei's head off and ended the career of the king of the Kali Dragons. Jon didn't stop, however, reaching Arnei before the body even reached the floor. He picked up the bomb and threw it down the staircase with a scream of warning to any fools who might be down there.

The resulting explosion deafened Melissa, who was lying flat under the operative, and shook dust and stones out of the entire tower. Shrapnel whined around in the downstairs room for a few seconds thereafter.

It was over.

The man got up off her with a groan. She watched open-eyed, breathing in gasps, as he pulled off his coat and fumbled at the straps of a suit of body armor. There was a big dent right in the middle of the chestplate. Melissa could smell herself, and the blood of Arnei Oh, which was everywhere. She wanted to vomit but before she could, she fainted.

For a few long seconds there was a silence. The peace of the dead once again, thought Jon, who had felt it many times before.

Then from above came footsteps, cautious ones. Outside and some distance away he heard police klaxons. He hoped the medics would be along soon; his chest hurt pretty bad. He felt like he'd been kicked by a horse. He wondered if he had any broken ribs this time.

The first few adventurous souls from upstairs finally stuck their heads into the second-floor room.

Wordlessly they stared at Arnei Oh's headless corpse. Then, hands over their mouths, both men ran for the stairs. The woman following them merely shook her head grimly and picked her way through the carnage and followed them. For a moment her eyes met Jon's, and then she looked away.

He pulled himself to his feet, shed the armor where he was, tucked his gun into his waistband, and bent over the young woman who had fainted. After a gentle shake she awoke. He helped her to her feet.

"My arm," she complained quietly. "It's broken."

"Is that all?" he said.

"No!" She gasped. "My foot." And she would have fallen but he caught her and swung her up into his arms. He carried her down the stairs and outside onto the lawn. The cops were arriving, the klaxons howling off the buildings.

Other people, dozens of them in expensive evening dress, were running across from Shrad House. The anxious parents of the top forty. Jon sat beside the girl and watched several emotional reunions.

But a number of still bodies were scattered around the lawn. Arnei Oh hadn't had long to operate, but in those few seconds he'd taken five lives.

A man fell down sobbing beside the still body of his son. Jon shook his head. This operation had been something of a disaster. He wondered if he would manage to secure the full liquidation fee. Arnei Oh should be worth Triplefull rate, but with so much carnage Jon feared he'd lose a percentage to victims' families. Just then judges were as ill tempered about that kind of business as everybody else.

A tall man in a well-cut gray silk suit appeared, eyes distraught. He caught sight of Melissa.

"Lissa!" He bounded across the lawn.

"Are you all right?"

"My arm is broken, I think my ankle is too."

"What the hell happened here?"

"I don't know, Daddy. Ask this man, he killed him."

The tall, imposing fellow whirled on Jon. "Killed? Who did you kill?"

Jon had it—he faced Jason Pauncritius Baltitude, the gas baron. He'd seen him on TV news.

"The perp's name was probably Arnei Oh. We had a few others for him. Responsible for at least twenty-three dead. Mass killer, the reputed top boy of the Kali Dragons."

Mr. Baltitude gave out a bitter oath. "Why the ordinary citizen cannot have adequate protection against these bloodthirsty swine is beyond my understanding. How did this creature get inside the university grounds?"

"I assure you that wasn't the difficult part," Jon said tersely. He watched the police drive up. An ambulance was with them.

"Medics are here, Miss Baltitude," he said. "They'll give you something to kill that pain, I'm sure."

Another ambulance was approaching. You never knew with mass-murder stuff whether you were going to need one or fifty of the things. Bright lights whirled and flashed around the groves of academe.

"So tell me what happened," Baltitude said. "I want to know how this horror could be allowed."

Jon would have shrugged but it would have cost too much pain. "We were tracking for him. We had pretty good predictions on Arnei Oh. He had enough of a record to give the computer something to get to work on. But these guys are elusive, and it's hard to protect every target. Luckily I guessed right. I thought he'd take a crack here, because of the useless security system. Big crowd, poor security, that's natural meat for a shark like Arnei Oh."

"You were here?" Baltitude seemed shocked.

"Over by the fountains. Bigger crowd there, I was afraid he'd just frag them out of the dark."

"You were over by the fountain, when you suspected this beast was loose in here? You were protecting the pigs when we had the top forty gathered in one place! I think you have some very tough questions to answer, my man. I'll be discussing this with your superiors at the earliest opportunity."

For a moment Jon stared up in disbelief. "I just risked my life to save your daughter, you realize."

"I realize nothing. I realize that your incompetence almost cost her her life. To say nothing of those that lie cold and dead over there. What were you doing while they were being slaughtered?"

"I was running as fast as I could. He started out in the shrubbery, I sensed it then. That's what tipped me off. If he hadn't paused to take some poor fool girl's scalp out there I would have missed him completely. He probably would have killed twenty of your top forty and gotten clean away. Arnei Oh has been at the top of this game for years."

"Game? Are you mad?"

"Game, Mr. Baltitude. I take it that you don't much concern yourself with how these things go on, since they mostly do take place down on the ordinary rent levels. Perhaps you should follow the newscasts more closely. There's a war on out there, these crazies versus the rest of the universe. That's the way they like it."

"Daddy, you're wrong, completely wrong. Now will you please get me a medic, I want some painkillers!" pleaded Melissa Baltitude. "This hurts terribly!"

Slowly Baltitude backed away, and then he turned and strode off toward the ambulances.

Jon got to his feet. "Well, Miss Baltitude, I think I'll be getting along now. I don't think this conversation is going anywhere. So, good night then."

"But I don't even know your name."

"Iehard. Operative Ex-five Double One. Tell your daddy to complain directly to my section head, whose name is Copter Brine." Jon turned and stumbled off to the ambulances.

In the control chamber of the great machine, the Keeper progressed through a utilities check. Although the crew was unaccountably absent, the machine's routines went on undisturbed.

As it had every so often in the eons of loneliness, the Keeper noticed discrepancies in some sections. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the engineering complex enemy cells still diverted energy, in quite extravagant quantities, from the engineering section power grid. That perennial problem necessitated recharging the energy banks far more frequently than the original maintenance program had ordained. The Keeper had been forced to change programming levels in the effort to find a way around the problem. The Keeper had even grown additions to its own intelligence in the effort. None of the changes had been easy.

The energy drain to engineering was frustrating. The Keeper did not have a real pain-pleasure circuit. In this, its programmable capacities were much less than those of other machines of its own era. It did have a node of dissatisfaction, however, related to failures in execution of prime programs. And over the eons the node of dissatisfaction had grown. The Keeper now had a very great urge to leave the Control Chamber and to go down to the Engineering section and find the annoying enemy cells that diverted so much energy, and render them permanently inoperative.

That idea returned ever more frequently to the forefront of operations in the spherical computational area set inside its massive batrachianoid skull. Unfortunately, the prime program forbade the Keeper's leaving the control chamber before the crew, or its replacement, returned to duty. Eternal vigilance, that was the program's watchword. It was enough to make the Keeper snap its mechanical jaws in sheer frustration.

Jon Iehard awoke from the usual set of nightmares: Hut 416 and huge, giggling pinhead guards and silent mass killers who wreaked awful havoc while he fought helplessly to prevent them. It was always the same. Sometimes he thought he might be better off if he didn't bother with sleep.

Around him, his grungy little apartment seemed stale and even messier than usual. An empty booze bottle stood in the middle of a nest of dirty glasses. A pile of movie modules decorated the carpet along with the clothes he'd discarded last night.

He moved, and groaned. His chest hurt like hell. He checked the timepiece. It was six thirty. The engineers would be lifting the filters soon for dawn. Throwing back the covers, he turned the TV on with an audible and examined the instacaf situation.

With a hot mugful, he came back in time to see Blankette Va Vroe, the mayor with the famous cheekbones, speaking passionately about the latest refinancing crisis for gigahabitat Nostramedes. A lot of loans were riding on refinancing, but the wealthy watermoons of William, Ingrid, Shala, and Hideo were balking at the size of their contributions.

He gulped down the instacaf and went in for a shower. The laowon weren't about to disappear, so Nocanicus was in a box and the shipbuilding gigahabitats were doomed.

When he came back he felt much better. The news had shifted to the crime beat. Extra detective Coptor Brine was fielding questions at last night's emergency press conference. Jon listened with half a mind.

"...suspect was identified as Mood Oh Arnei, or Arnei Oh. Believe me when I tell you this one was one of the worst cases we've ever pursued. The leader of the Kali Dragons, with twenty-three killings to his name prior to this latest outrage."

A newswoman bored in. "There have been charges made about this case, Extra Detective Brine. What do you say to the accusation of, and I quote, 'Gross incompetence on the part of the security forces who could easily have prevented this slaughter'?"

"I guess I would agree. I should add we warned the university as much as three years ago that their security on Wintergame Day had gotten pretty slack. I think you'll have to take it up with them."

"There are also charges against your operative in this case, Extra Detective."

Coptor's big flat face grew hard. "Yes, I've seen those and I would like to state publicly right now that I think they're malicious, unsubstantiated, and stupid. We have precisely seventeen sensing operatives. We can't cover every potential outrage site. Our man on this case performed a near miracle as it was, getting the perpetrator and keeping the loss of life to half a dozen. I think he deserves a medal, not these mean-spirited accusations!"

"Thank you, Coptor!" Jon said as he snapped off the set. He pulled on some clothes and let himself out carefully. Jon was living, temporarily as always, on a very mode-ish ramp. Very pastel, very audio-video-holo; ambisexual singles' parties every weekend. Jon felt like a sore thumb in his grays and blacks, and worked extra hard at keeping his profile very low. He was looking forward to moving on soon. The Mass Murder Squad encouraged its operatives to move constantly. The Kill Kults were well organized, determined, and prepared to do almost anything. Personal security was precious and precarious. In Jon's nine years, five senser operatives had been blown away in their own homes.