Steel Beach (69 page)

It was a scene from hell. Crazed by pain, the woman was swinging her arm wildly, trying to get the dog to let go. Winston was having none of it. Bleeding from many cuts, he ignored everything but his inexorable grip. He’d been bred to grab a bull by the nose and never let go; a K.C. policewoman wasn’t about to get free.

But now she was scrabbling for her holster, forgotten in her fear and panic. She got her gun out and aimed it toward the dog. Her first shot went wild, killing nothing but an ice cream freezer. The second shot hit Winston in the left hind leg, where it was thickest, and
still
the beast didn’t let go. If anything, he fought all the harder.

Her last shot hit him in the belly. He went limp—everything but his jaw. Even in death he wasn’t going to let go.

She took aim at his head, and then slumped over, passed out at last. It was probably for the best, because I think she would have blown her own arm off, the way she had the gun pointed.

Later, I felt sorry for her. At the time I was simply too confused to feel much of anything but fear. I mourned Winston later, too. He’d been trying to protect me, though I recall thinking at the time that he’d over-reacted. She’d only been trying to handcuff me, hadn’t she?

And what about the soldiers? It had looked to me as if the Heinleiners had fired the first shot. All sane reasoning would lead me to think that, if that first soldier hadn’t been hit, this could all have ended peacefully at the jailhouse with a lot of lawyers arguing, charges brought, countersuits filed. I’d have been out on bail within a few hours.

Which was still what I’d have liked to have done, and would have, but any fool could see things had gone too far for that. If I stepped out waving a white flag I was pretty sure I’d be killed, apologies sent to the next of kin. So Hildy, I told myself, your first priority is to get
out
of here without getting shot. Let the lawyers sort it out later, when the bullets aren’t flying.

With that end in mind, I started crawling toward the door. My intent was to stick my head out, low, and see what stood between me and the nearest exit. Which turned out to be a black boot planted solidly in the doorway, almost under my nose by the time I got there. I looked up the black-clad leg and into the menacing face of a soldier. He was pointing a weapon at me, some great bulky thing I thought might be a machine gun, whose muzzle looked wide enough to spit baseballs.

“I’m unarmed,” I said.

“That’s the way I like ’em,” he said, and flipped up his visor with his thumb. There was something in his eyes I didn’t like. I mean, beyond everything
else
I didn’t like about the situation. Just a little touch of madness, I think.

He was a big man with a broad face entirely innocent of any evidence of thought. But now a thought
did
flicker behind those eyes, and his brow wrinkled.

“What’s your name?”

“H…  Helga Smith.”

“Nah,” he said, and dug into a pocket for a datapad, which he scanned with a thumb control until my lovely phiz smiled back at us. He returned the smile, but I didn’t, because his smile was the worst news I’d had so far in a day filled with bad news. “You’re Hildy Johnson,” he said, “and you’re on the death list so it don’t matter what happens here, see?” And he started working on his belt, one-handed, the other hand keeping the gun pointed at my forehead.

I found myself getting detached from events. Maybe it was a reflex action, something to distance oneself from an abomination about to happen. Or maybe it was just too many things that couldn’t be happening.
This can’t be happening
. I’d silently shrieked it one too many times and now a mental numbness was setting in. I ought to be thinking of something to do. I ought to be talking to him, asking questions. Anything. Instead, I just sat there, squatting on my heels, and felt as if I’d like to go to sleep.

But my senses were heightened. They must have been, because with all the shooting going on outside (how could he
do
this in the middle of a war?), and over the scream of a dying compressor motor in the overturned freezer I was able to hear a voice from the grave. A
growl
.

The soldier didn’t hear it, or maybe he was too busy. He had his pants down around his heels and he knelt in front of me and that’s when I saw Winston, dragging his hind leg, bleeding from his gut, eyes filled with murder.

The man lowered himself over me.

I wanted Winston to bite him…  well, you
know
where I wanted Winston to bite him. I got second best. The bulldog fastened on the soft flesh of the soldier’s inner thigh. The man’s leg jerked in pain, and he was flying over me. I grabbed the strap of his rifle as he went by.

He had strength and mass on his side, but there was the little matter of Winston. The dog had cut an artery. The soldier tried to wrestle his rifle away from me with one hand and pry Winston loose with the other and ended up doing both things badly. Blood was spraying everywhere. I was screaming. Not the big full scream you hear at the movies, and not a scream of rage, but a high-pitched scary thing I was powerless to stop.

Then I got one hand on the barrel of the rifle, and one hand on the stock, and fumbled for the trigger as he realized what was happening and gave up his struggle with Winston, concentrating on me. He got his hand over the barrel. Sadly for him, it was over the end of the barrel, and when I squeezed the trigger his hand wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t anywhere anymore, but the air was full of a red mist.

The soldier never did stop fighting. I guess that’s why they’re soldiers. With Winston hanging from his leg, his pants around his ankles, missing a hand, he still came at me and I swung the rifle up and held the trigger down and didn’t really see what happened next because on full auto-fire the weapon packed such a kick that I was knocked on my ass again, and when I opened my eyes he was mostly on the walls, except for bits here and there on the floor, and the one big piece still in Winston’s mouth.

I could say I paused and reflected on the enormity of taking a human life, or how nauseated I was at the sight of his dismembered body. I did think of those things, and many others. But later. Much later. At that time my mind had collapsed on itself and was only large enough to hold a few thoughts, and only one of those at a time. First, I was going to get
out
of there. Second, anybody between me and getting out of there was going to have a Hildy-sized hole drilled right through his or her stinking carcass. I had killed, and by god I meant to keep on killing if that’s what I had to do to get to safety.

“Winston. Here, boy.” I got up on one knee and talked to him. I didn’t know what to expect. Would he recognize me? Was he too far gone in bloodlust?

But after a final shake of the soldier’s leg, he let go and came to me. He was dragging his hind leg and he was gut-shot, but still walking.

I will admit I don’t know why I took him. I mean, I really don’t. My holocam recorded the scene, but it doesn’t tape thoughts. Mine weren’t very organized just then. I remember thinking I sure as hell owed him. It also crossed my mind that I was probably safer with him than without him; he was one hell of a weapon. I prefer to think I thought those things in that order. I won’t swear to it.

I scooped him up in one arm, holding the rifle in the other, and stuck my head around the corner. Nobody blew it off. Nobody seemed to be moving at all. The square was a lot smokier and there was still a lot of gunfire, but everyone seemed to have taken cover. I could do that, too, and wait for somebody to find me, or I could use the smoke to hide in, knowing I could easily stumble on someone
else
who was doing the same thing, and was a better shot than I was.

I don’t know how you make a decision like that. I mean, I
made
it, but I don’t recall weighing the pros and cons. I just looked around the corner, didn’t see anybody, and then I was running.

Actually, running is a very generous word for what I did, with a dying dog tucked under one arm and a heavy weapon dangling from the other. And don’t forget a belly the size of Phobos. Thank god holocams record only what you see, and not what you look like. That couldn’t have been an image I’d like preserved for posterity.

My goal was the entrance to a corridor that led back toward the
Heinlein
, and I was about halfway there when someone behind me yelled “Halt!” in a firm and not-at-all-friendly voice, and things happened very fast…  and I did everything right, even with all the things that went wrong.

I turned and kept back-pedaling, slowly, and I dropped Winston (who uttered the only yelp of pain he made through his entire heroic ordeal—and I’m sorry, Winston, wherever you are). I saw it was a King City cop, and he was young, and he looked as scared as I was, and he carried a huge drilling laser, which was pointed at me.

“Drop your weapon,” he said, and I said
Sorry, chum, this isn’t personal
, only not out loud, and I pulled the trigger. Nothing happened, and it was then I noticed the blinking red light on this curved metal thingy that must have been the ammo clip, and which must have been saying
feed me
!, or words to that effect in gun-language, and understood why what I’d thought was a short burst had had such a cataclysmic effect on my would-be rapist. So I dropped the gun and I held up my hands, and I saw Winston making his last dash, hobbling across the ten meters or so that separated us, and I put my hands
out
, palms
up
, and I shouted
No
!, and I will swear in any court in the world that I saw the man’s finger tightening on the trigger from ten meters away, with the muzzle wavering between me and Winston as if he couldn’t decide which to shoot first. And I know this is flatly impossible, but I even thought I saw the light start to come out the end of the weapon in the same fraction of a second that I grabbed my null-suit control and twisted it
hard
.

I was dazzled by green light. For a few moments I was blind. When vision returned the world was full of multi-colored incandescent balloons that drifted here and there, obscuring the world, popping like cartoon soap bubbles. I was sweating horribly inside my suit-field. It could have been worse. Outside the field, most everything seemed to be on fire.

About the only way you can go wrong with a laser is to shoot it at a mirror. You couldn’t blame the cop for that. I hadn’t been a mirror when he pulled the trigger; it was
that
close.

But he really should have let go a lot sooner.

Everywhere the beam hit me, it was reflected back, but because the human body is such a complex shape the reflected beam went all over the place. The resulting scorch line hit the walls in many places, melting plastic panels and starting fires behind them. It hit the cop at least three times. I think any of them would have been fatal without quick treatment. He was lying still, with flames engulfing his clothing in three deep, black slashes.

Somewhere in its wild gyrations the beam had hit Winston.

His fur was on fire and he wasn’t moving, either.

I was trying to think of what to do when a high wind rose. It briefly whipped the flames into a white-hot frenzy, but then it snuffed them out. All the smoke cleared in an instant and the scene took on that crisp clarity you find only in vacuum.

I turned, and ran for cover.

I crouched in a pile of chrome-plated pipes not twenty meters from two patrolling figures in spacesuits, trying to pretend I was just another piece of bent pipe. I wasn’t quite sure how to go about this. Don’t move, and think tubular thoughts, I finally decided, and it had worked so far.

I was keeping one eye on the clock, one eye on the soldiers, and one eye on the blinking red light in my head-up display. Since this adds up to three eyes, you can imagine how busy I was. I was the busiest motionless person you ever saw. Or didn’t see.

As if that weren’t enough, I was calling every telephone number in my vast mental card file.

Forget those trivial inventions like fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, the plow. Man didn’t become truly civilized until Alex Bell uttered those immortal words, “Shit, Watson, I spilled acid all over my balls.” Hiding there with my oxygen running out, my only hope of staying alive lay in getting some help over the telephone, and if it worked I resolved to light a candle every year on Mr. Bell’s birthday.

My situation was dire, but it could have been worse. I could have been a member of the King City police dragooned (I later learned) into the first wave of the assault on Virginia City. In addition to the hazards of an armed populace, not to mention the meanest, gamest dog who ever lived, they had the added problem of not having pressure suits when the
second
wave, which attacked from the surface, began cutting the cables which brought power from the solar panels topside, which powered the null-fields which kept the air in.

That’s what had happened just after I was lasered by the last cop. It was the air rushing out of the public square that had first fanned, then extinguished the flames on Winston’s corpse.

It wasn’t a blow-out like the one at Nirvana, or I wouldn’t be here to tell you about it. What we’re used to in a blow-out is a lot of air rushing through a relatively small hole. You get picked up and battered, then you get squeezed, and even in a null-suit your chances of survival are slim. But when a null-field goes, it goes all at once, and the air just expands. You get a gentle wind, then
poof!
Like a soap bubble. And then you get a lot of cops and soldiers grabbing their throats, spitting blood, and falling quietly to the ground. I saw two people die like this. I guess it’s a fairly quick, peaceful way to go, but I still get nauseous just thinking about it.

At the time I thought the Heinleiners had done it. It was a logical tactic. It was the way they customarily fought fires, and god knows there were plenty of fires by the time the air went. And it just didn’t make
sense
that their own people would cut the power, knowing the first group didn’t have suits.