The Widowmaker: Volume 1 in the Widowmaker Trilogy (12 page)

He dove behind the couch to get out of the line of fire. An instant later the couch moved rapidly to his left, and he scrambled on hands and knees to remain behind it as her laughter reverberated through the large chamber. He saw a doorway some fifteen feet away and dove for it. Weaponfire followed him, but he made it intact and raced through another doorway.

He moved quickly from room to room, aware of the danger behind him, unwilling to plunge blindly into potentially greater dangers ahead of him. Once he was too slow, and a beam of solid light singed his ear.

And then he came to a room from which there was no exit. It contained a huge circular bed that spun slowly a few inches above the floor, a pair of glittering silver chests, a large mirror, and a holograph of Spanish Lace herself. A small circular computer hovered near the bed. Dominating the room were some fifty clocks of all types and makes, from an ancient grandfather clock to a complex mechanism giving digital readouts in 36 different languages to a rotating holographic representation of Yukon divided into time zones. Nighthawk pulled his tiny circular camera out and tossed it onto the bed; if he was going to die, Malloy might as well see how it happened so the next man the Marquis sent would be better prepared.

"Ah, here you are!” said a voice from the doorway. He spun around and found himself facing Spanish Lace, with his weapons still floating in the air just next to her. “You led me quite a chase, Jefferson Nighthawk, but now it's over."

Nighthawk's gaze darted around the room, trying to find something, anything, he could use to his advantage.

He survived a hundred or more battles. Some of them had to be against aliens or mutants with even greater powers than she possesses. Think! What would
he
have done?

"These are my prizes,” she said, gesturing to the clocks. “My booty. All else I sell or trade, but the clocks I keep, to tick off the minutes and hours of my life, until I am no longer in bondage to this unwanted body.” Her face suddenly became a mask of fury. “And you dare to stand among them and insult me?"

A shot rang out and a bullet ripped into the wall behind him, spraying his face with dust. He dove behind the nearest chest for cover. Two small alien statues stood atop it. He grabbed one of them, hurled it at her, picked up the second as the first bounced off an invisible barrier a foot from her head, and hurled it more carefully. She grinned as it whizzed harmlessly by her, but it hit what Nighthawk was aiming at, shattering the sonic pistol and careening off the projectile gun.

"You think I need weapons?” she said harshly, as a portion of the ceiling came loose and fell on top of him. He was up again in an instant, positioning himself directly in front of the mirror. When he sensed the laser pistol was about to fire, he fell to the floor, and the beam bounced off the mirror. The angle brought it within inches of Spanish Lace. She ducked instinctively, then grabbed the laser pistol and hurled it through the doorway into a corridor.

You ducked! You weren't expecting the beam to bounce back at you, and you had to duck. That means it takes you a fraction of a second to erect those invisible walls and shields. Now, if I can just find a way to use that...

"On your feet, Jefferson Nighthawk."

He saw no reason to keep hiding, so he stood up and faced her. “What now?"

"Now we end it,” she said.

And suddenly the furniture, the walls, the ceiling,
everything
began closing in on him. Vases flew at his head, lamps at his chest, the floor began swaying beneath his feet. He struggled futilely to keep his balance, fell heavily to the floor, got up again, and backed away from her until he was pressed up against the ancient grandfather clock, clinging to it desperately.

Another section of the ceiling came away, burying him. He moaned once, then lay absolutely motionless in the rubble.

Spanish Lace approached him cautiously, poking his spine to see if there was a reaction. There wasn't. She knelt down next to him, still half-expecting him to jump at her, but he was motionless.

"All right, clone,” she murmured, turning him onto his back and feeling for his identity disk. “Let's see if you're who you said you were."

She deftly removed the disk, and as she was studying it his hand suddenly rose and came down on the back of her neck—burying the grandfather clock's minute hand into the base of her brain. She fell across him without a sound, dead.

Nighthawk shoved her body off his and stood up. He reached out a foot and turned her over. Her face was serene in death, as if an overwhelming burden had somehow been lifted.

You were as much of a freak as me. You could have been my friend. Why did you make me kill you?

He shook his head, as if to physically rid it of that train of thought. It didn't help.

The Widowmaker must have had brothers. Maybe cousins. Maybe even a son or two no one knows about. There could be twenty or thirty men carrying his blood. None of them are doomed to spend their lives killing everyone they meet. Why me?

But of course, they were carrying some of the Widowmaker's blood. He was carrying
all
of it, because he
was
the Widowmaker. Not a brother. Not a son. Not Version 2.0. But the Widowmaker. And what the Widowmaker did was kill people. Even people who might have been his friends.

Suddenly he found that he was shivering, and he realized that what had kept the interior of the Ice Palace warm was not a furnace or any heating plant, but Spanish Lace, who had used a tiny portion of her abilities to keep the molecules of air in constant motion, spinning them fast enough to make the temperature habitable.

He began searching the room. The chests contained only clothes, but behind the mirror he found a small safe embedded in a quartz wall. He couldn't open it, so he cut it out with his laser pistol, tucked it under his arm, and was about to return to his ship when something caught his eye.

He walked over to it, and found it was a small holograph of a group of girls, perhaps ten or eleven years of age, their arms interlinked, all smiling at the camera. He studied it for a long moment, trying to pick out the girl who would someday become Spanish Lace, and found that he couldn't.

Interesting. One of you might have grown up to be an artist. One an accountant. One a mother of six. One a bitter, barren old woman. One a spaceship mechanic. One a professor of ancient languages. And one a notorious thief and assassin.

And suddenly he understood why she should keep that, of all holographs, of all mementos.

It was the last time you could be mistaken for normal, the last time you
fit
anywhere.

He stared at the holograph again, at all the smiling girlish faces.

I envy you. At least you had ten years.

He located his laser pistol on the way out, then hunted up her powersled and was about to take it back to his ship when he decided that she deserved to be buried. He walked back into the Ice Palace, attached his laser pistol to his power pack, rigged the charge to overload, and left both the gun and the pack right next to her corpse. Then he returned to the powersled and began racing over the frozen plains. When he was five miles away he stopped and looked back, shading his eyes against the sun and its blinding reflections. He could barely see the Ice Palace. He waited five seconds, ten, fifteen—and suddenly he could hear the explosion. Another moment and the towers and turrets began collapsing inward upon themselves. He thought it would be appropriate to whisper a prayer, only to discover that he still didn't know any.

He rejoined Lizard Malloy at the ship. The leather-skinned little man had witnessed the entire fight on his receiving device and wanted nothing more than to talk about it, while Nighthawk wanted only to put it out of his mind.

"What's the matter with you?” complained Malloy as their ship took off for Tundra. “You kill the most dangerous woman on the Inner Frontier, and suddenly you're acting like you just lost a friend."

"Maybe I did."

"Are you crazy? She did her damnedest to kill you."

"We had a lot in common, she and I,” answered Nighthawk thoughtfully.

"You think so, do you?"

Nighthawk nodded his head. “She was just a friend I hadn't made yet."

"You're crazy, you know that?” said Malloy.

Nighthawk shrugged. “You're entitled to your opinion."

Malloy pulled a small cube out of his pocket. “If I show this to the Marquis, if he sees you offering that bitch her life, you're history. He'll throw you out on your ass so fast you won't know what happened."

"I can live with that."

Malloy tossed the cube into the ship's atomizer. “
I
probably can't,” he said wryly. “You're still the only thing standing between me and a very slow, very painful death."

"Then you're still under obligation to me."

"I suppose, if you put it that way,” acknowledged Malloy uncomfortably.

"I do."

"I have a funny feeling you're bringing that up for a purpose."

"When we land, I want you to take a message to the Pearl of Maracaibo for me."

"I thought the Marquis told you she was off-limits,” said Malloy.

"He did."

Malloy stared at him. “You're crazy, you know that?"

"I've decided that life is too short to worry about what you or the Marquis or anyone else wants,” said Nighthawk. “I'm going to start thinking about
me
while there's still time, because every other person I've met, without exception, has either tried to use me or kill me."

"Not me!” said Malloy devoutly.

"You, too—or don't you want me to protect you from the Marquis?"

"That's a trade,” said Malloy. “I do favors for you, you do them for me."

"Right,” answered Nighthawk. “And it's about time you started fulfilling your end of the bargain."

"What the hell happened to you in the Ice Palace?” demanded Malloy. “You're different somehow."

"I realized that life is short, and that everybody goes through it alone,” said Nighthawk. “Today is the first day of the rest of my life, and from now on, I'm living it for
me
."

"All that from killing one woman?"

"All that, and more,” said Nighthawk, wondering idly why he didn't
feel
more free for having declared his freedom.

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"Well, Widowmaker, you're as good as you're supposed to be,” said the Marquis of Queensbury as he looked across his desk at Nighthawk.

"I'm not the Widowmaker. And you didn't warn me what I was going to be up against."

"You're who I say you are,” replied the Marquis. “As for the rest of it, I want my second in command to be resourceful. View it as a test."

"I thought my test was fighting you in the casino."

"It was."

"Well, then?” said Nighthawk.

The Marquis looked amused. “Did you think life involves only one test?"

"You're supposed to be a good businessman,” said Nighthawk, trying to hide his anger. “It was bad business to send me up against someone with Spanish Lace's powers without letting me know what she could do. Why risk getting me killed by not telling me everything I needed to know before I went up against her?"

"It'd be worse business to keep you in your current high position if you couldn't improvise well enough to kill her,” answered the Marquis. “Just out of curiosity, how did you finally do it?"

"By deceit and trickery. If she could be killed in any other way, it still hasn't occurred to me."

"You're young yet."

"How would
you
have killed her?” asked Nighthawk.

"Me?” The Marquis laughed aloud. “I'd have someone else do it for me. That's what being the boss is all about."

"I suppose so,” acknowledged Nighthawk. “The thing is, talk like that makes me want to be a boss too."

"That's good. I admire ambition in a man.” The Marquis’ smile vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “But you would do well to remember that this organization only has room for one boss—and I'm him."

Nighthawk stared at him, but made no reply.

"You know,” continued the Marquis, “in most employees that kind of sullen look would constitute insubordination. In your case, I think I'll write it off to the arrogance of youth.
This
time. But don't press your luck. You'll need it all just to kill our enemies."

"
Your
enemies."

"You work for me. That makes them your enemies too."

"If you say so."

The Marquis stared at him through narrowed eyes. “You know, I can't decide if you're
trying
to annoy me, or if you're so socially maladroit that you can't help it. I have to keep reminding myself that you're only a couple of months out of the lab."

"And now
you're
trying to annoy
me
,” responded Nighthawk.

The Marquis shook his head. “Not at all. I'm just stating facts."

"Let's say, then, that you choose very unpleasant facts to state."

"You've got a lot to learn,” answered the Marquis. “Facts are true or false. Pleasant or unpleasant is just the spin you put on them."

"That sounds reasonable, but it's bullshit and you know it."

"You're in a lousy mood. They tell me this happens in three-month-olds, so I'll forgive it this time, but if I were you I wouldn't make a regular habit of it—at least, not when you talk to me. Are we clear?"

Silence.

"Are we clear?” repeated the Marquis.

Nighthawk nodded his head. “We're clear."

"I think I know what's got you depressed,” said the Marquis. “I'll tell you what: Let me catch up on business here and maybe I'll go to Deluros in a week or two and kill the real Nighthawk for you."

"I
am
the real Nighthawk."

"Let's not get into semantics. Once I kill him, you'll be the
only
Nighthawk."

"That's no good."

"What isn't?"

"
I
have to kill him."

"You know, you could become a real pain in the ass without half working at it,” said the Marquis irritably. “Get the hell out of here before we really
do
come to blows."