He’s going to ram it, Meewee thought in disbelief. There was hardly time to blink. <Arrow!> he sputtered in the convoluted metalanguage <Gate drop now!>
The pressure gate dissipated even as the lifechair reached it. The chair passed through and braked hard. The guards leaped aside as it flew past them, tires screeching. It came to a halt in front of the massive vehicle barricade. The chair stopped, but its passenger kept going.
SAMSON WENT ALL the way—in honest-to-God slow motion. At least the suicides at Moseby’s Leap had gotten that part right. Samson felt himself lift gently from the basket and float through the air. The barricade wall seemed distant, and there was ample time to take everything in.
To say I have no regrets would be a lie, he mused. I have plenty of them. I regret not being a better citizen, for example. I regret not being a better champion for the seared. I regret not making the most of every single blessed day of my life. But most of all, I regret not being a better man to Jean and Eleanor, and a better father to you. I suppose you might have been a better daughter as well, but I don’t hold that against you. And thank you for this marvelous parting gift of an opportunity to go out with a bang. I’m going to light a big candle for you, Ellie. Hope it helps.
The wall grew close enough to make out the pockmarked texture of its surface, like craters of the Moon, and Samson remembered his honeymoon with Eleanor. She had pulled him aside and told him she loved him more than all the craters of the Moon.
“GOOD GAIA!” MEEWEE cried. “Stop! Stop!” The lifechair braked in time, but the passenger, wrapped in a blanket, flew headlong into the wall, hitting it with a resounding thud. Meewee ran to see. He ran into the open gatehouse where one of the guards stopped him. “The man,” Meewee gasped, gesturing wildly at the crash victim, who lay in a heap against the barricade. A foul smell filled the place, and smoke rose from the crumpled form. Was that a man?
Dr. Rouselle shouted, “I am a doctor.” She and the medbeitor had caught up, but the guard prevented her from lending assistance. The other guard used his baton to unwrap the man’s blanket, and he sprayed the corpse with fire suppressant.
“That won’t help, I think,” the doctor said, sniffing the air. “He is a seared.”
But the smoke cleared, and the victim lay like a broken twig on the concrete floor.
The gateway chimed, and the guard shooed them toward it. “It’s all over,” he said. “Nothing to see.”
Meewee, remembering his mission, refused to budge. “I’m going through, Myr Jerry,” he said. “Don’t try to stop me.”
“Listen to you,” the guard said, drawing his standstill wand. The gate sprang up behind Meewee, but a slot opened, and the guard said, “Go on now. This is your last warning.”
Just then, there was a snapping sound from the corpse, and another, like firecrackers going off. The guard hesitated and turned to watch. The doctor took cover behind the medbeitor, and the other guard ducked into the scanway entrance. Meewee used the distraction to sidle toward the far end of the block where the vehicle entrance gaped wide open, and he reached it just as two powerful blasts filled the block with flaming human bits.
WHEN THE GATE dropped, Fred thought that Reilly had done it, but when he loosened his hold on the man, Reilly fell to the floor. Fred stood for some time looking down at his friend. Fred had been sure he was straining against Reilly’s face mask, but now he saw that Reilly had never deployed the mask. Fred crouched to feel for a carotid pulse and found none. Ugly bruises from the baton crisscrossed his throat, and the front of his uniform was singed from the heat of the gate.
“Medic!” Fred called at the top of his lungs. Something small and fast, the bluish blur of a flying mech, streaked out through the open gateway and shot down the path after Mary and the pike. Fred was drawn along too, but he could not leave Reilly like this. “Medic!” The gateway chimed a warning—the gate was going back up—and Fred had ten seconds to decide on which side he wanted to be when it did. “Medic!” he called desperately, searching through Reilly’s pockets for a cryosac. He couldn’t leave him like this, but at the last moment, he jumped across the gateway groove just as the gate sprang up. He was inside the clinic.
MARY’S PLAN HAD been to follow the south wall till it met the west wall, then turn right and follow that wall to West Gate. But she had already lost sight of the wall and was running blind along unfamiliar paths. She forced herself not to think of Reilly. The man wouldn’t bend the rules even to save her life. She couldn’t believe it.
Actually, she could believe it. Reilly was a russ through and through. Duty over all.
There were scraps of color in the woods. Two clinic guests and a retinue of hollyholo sims were strolling the path ahead. She hollered at them and raced to catch up. The syrup sloshed in the tote under her arm.
The guests stopped to gape at her. They were two of a kind—large, agile, gorgeous—and might have been brother and sister. As Mary approached, they lifted their hands and pointed their closed fists at her, aiming the rings on their fingers.
“Halt!” shouted the woman.
Mary stopped a couple of meters away and hunched over for breath. “You—must—help me,” she gasped.
The man said, “I’ve already reported you to clinic security. They are on their way, so I suggest you leave us alone.”
“Not clinic security. Call the Command. Go outside the gate and call them. Tell them I have Starke.” She patted the tote. “Call a medevac. Please help me!”
The affs regarded her coolly, keeping a bead on her with their rings. The hollyholos accompanying them, who had been quiet until then, now piped up to fill the silence. One of them, a tall woman, said, “What have you done with the ransom?”
“There’s no ransom,” Mary said. “I’m not kidnapping her. She’s my client.”
Another of the sims was Dr. Ted. Mary appealed to him, “You tell them. You tell them what’s happening.”
The sim turned to the others and said, “This girl is suffering from a brain pox and is clearly delusional. Avoid intimate contact with her at all costs.”
The aff woman began to wave her free hand. Mary turned and saw the groundskeeper coming toward them. He was swatting at a bee as he jogged. The bee in turn was batting itself against the man’s visor. At first Mary thought she’d be safe among these affs, ungracious though they were, but as the pike drew near, she panicked and ran again.
She ran over a little rise into a stand of beech trees. Fléchettes riddled the tree trunks around her. One sliced through the flesh at her side, but she hardly noticed. She came across a path and took it. She was beyond all calculation. Her only thought was to outrun the sounds behind her.
These sounds changed abruptly. The zing of fléchettes was replaced by the whine of laser fire. Two separate frequencies meant two different guns. She hugged a tree and peeked from behind it to see an amazing sight. A mech was firing at the pike. The pike had switched his weapon to laser mode and was sweeping the air with bursts of light, but he was unable to hit the mech at such close range. The mech, on the other hand, easily hit the pike, but its comparatively low-wattage lasers were no match for the pike’s armor. Undeterred, the mech continued to hit him, targeting only three points on the pike’s body and hitting those points repeatedly: his face mask, his groin, and the helmet seal at the back of his neck. The pike covered these spots as best he could with his gloved hands, but he couldn’t cover all three at once, and the mech circled and crossed the man’s head, almost too fast to see, firing a staccato stream of pulses. The man returned fire with choked spreads, like laser birdshot. His wild shots gouged smoking holes in the trees around him and brought down boughs and branches upon himself.