He’d left behind a great many things already. He had left his life in the future. He had buried the woman he had lived with for thirty years, long before he dreamed the existence of fractal, knitted time. He wasn’t a stranger to loss or abandonment.
He had been recruited at the end of a life he’d come to terms with: maybe that was a requirement. The time travelers had seemed to know that about him. Ben recalled their cool, unwavering eyes. They appeared in human form as a courtesy to their custodians; but Ben had sensed the strangeness under the disguise. Our descendants, he had thought, yes, our children, in a very real sense … but removed from us across such an inconceivable ocean of years.
He listened for the sound of footsteps up the stairs. He hoped Catherine Simmons and the others had deployed outside the house … fervently hoped they wouldn’t be needed. He had volunteered to defend this outpost; they had not, except informally and in a condition of awe.
But the nanomechanisms were already doing their work, deep in the body of the marauder: Ben felt them doing it.
Felt them as the marauder came up the carpeted stairs. Ben watched him come. The marauder moved slowly. His eyepiece tracked Ben with oiled precision.
He was an amazing sight. Ben had studied the civil wars of the twenty-first century, had seen this man before, knew what to expect; he was impressed in spite of all that. The hybridization of man and mechanism was mankind’s future, but here was a sterile mutation: a mutual parasitism imposed from without. The armor was not an enhancement but a cruel prosthetic. Infantry doctors had rendered this man incapable of unassisted pleasure, made his daily fife a gray counterfeit, linked every appetite to combat.
The marauder, not tall but quite golden, came to the top of the stairs with small swift movements. Then he did a remarkable thing:
He stumbled.
Dropped to one knee, looked up.
Ben felt the nanomechanisms laboring inside this man. Vital connections severed, relays heating, redundancies overwhelmed … “Tell me your name,” Ben said gently.
“Billy Gargullo,” the marauder said, and fired a beam weapon from his wrist.
But the marauder was slow and Ben, augmented, anticipated the move and ducked away.
He fired his own weapon. The focused pulse, invisible, seemed to pull Billy Gargullo forward and down; his armor clenched around him like a fist. He toppled, convulsed once … then used his momentum as the armor relaxed to swing his arm forward.
This was a gesture Ben had not anticipated. He dodged the beam weapon but not quickly enough; it cut a charred canyon across his abdomen.
Ben dropped and rolled to extinguish his burning clothing, then discovered he couldn’t sit up. He had been cut nearly in half.
Precious moments ticked away. Ben felt his awareness ebb. A wave of cybernetics poured out from the walls, covered the wound, sealed it; severed arteries closed from within. For a brief and unsustainable moment his blood pressure rose to something like normal; his vision cleared.
Ben pushed himself up on his elbows and fumbled for his weapon.
He found it, raised it …
But Billy had left the room.
Twenty-two
By the time he reached the foot of the basement stairs Billy assumed he was dying.
He knew his armor was crumbling away, somehow, inside him. His eyepiece displayed bright red numerals and emergency diagnostics. He felt cut loose from himself, afloat, hovering over his own body like a bird.
This was very sudden, very strange, unmistakably hostile. He didn’t let it slow him down.
He came up the stairs still operational but awash in strange emotions: vivid lightnings of panic; blue threads of guilt. Billy was coherent enough to understand that he’d walked into a trap; that his prey, the time traveler, someone, had interfered with his armor. There was a perpetual high-pitched keening in his ears and the diagnostics in his eyepiece read him a catalogue of major and minor malfunctions. So far, the gland in the elytra was still pumping—though fitfully—and his weapons were functional. But he was vulnerable and he was slow and before long he might be altogether helpless.
None of this affected Billy’s resolve. Sensing his panic, Billy’s armor flushed potent new molecules into his blood. The killing urge, which had seemed so powerful in the past, blossomed into something new and even more intense: an agony of necessity.
At the top of the stairs he faced a man he had killed once before, a time traveler. Billy didn’t question this resurrection, merely resolved to kill the man again, to kill him as often as necessary. Some momentary fluctuation caused him to topple forward; he fell, looked up, and the time traveler asked him his name. Billy answered without thinking, startled by the sound of his own voice.
Then he raised his wrist weapon. But the chaos inside him had made him slow and the time traveler was able to aim and fire his own weapon, a beam device that seemed to lock Billy’s armor into a momentary rictus, so that Billy toppled forward in a parody of movement, like a statue tumbling off a pedestal.
He didn’t waste time regretting his vulnerability; only waited for it to pass. As soon as his arm was mobile he brought it up and forward with all the precision his failing neural augmentation was able to calculate and burned open the time traveler’s belly.
The result was impressive. The walls seemed to crumble. Machine bugs rivered across the carpet. A stab of primitive revulsion made Billy leap to his feet and back away. He detonated another pulse grenade—his last—and it slowed the bugs but didn’t stop them.
Detonated aboveground, the pulse did have a profound effect on the local electrical grid. The houselights flickered and dimmed, brightened and flickered again. Down the length of the Post Road, three different families would wake to find their television sets fused and useless. In a dozen homes in the east end of Belltower groggy individuals stumbled but of bed to pick up ringing telephones, nothing on the other end but an ominous basso hum.
The cybernetics churned around the body of the fallen time traveler—healing him or devouring him. Billy didn’t know which, didn’t care.
Dying, Billy hurried for the door.
Twenty-three
Tom had circled to the front of the house when the last intact window—north wall, master bedroom—was blown out by a second concussion.
The floodlights dimmed, brightened, dimmed again. So did the streetlights down along the Post Road.
He cut through the front yard and across the open width of the road to the gully on the far side. Ben was supposed to be covering the front door of the house; but it had occurred to Tom that Ben was not an impenetrable barrier and that the front door was handy to the basement stairs. He left Doug out back with Joyce and Catherine and prayed the three of them would be safe there.
The shock of being roused out of a deep sleep had nearly worn off. He was as awake now as he had ever been, clearheaded and frightened and acutely aware of his own peculiar position: barefoot and carrying a SPACE SOLDIER ray gun from K-mart, modified. Every window in his house had been blown out and he was tempted to reconsider the logic of this adventure. What kept him moving was Joyce—her vulnerability overriding his own—and the single glimpse he had caught of the marauder in an empty street in Manhattan. Those eyes had contained too many deaths, including Lawrence Millstein’s. Eyes not vengeful or even passionate, Tom thought; the look had been passive, the distracted stare of a bus passenger on a long ride through familiar territory. Tom had not especially liked Lawrence Millstein, but it hurt to think that Millstein’s last sight had been that leathery muzzle, those thousand-mile eyes.