The Hunt came howling after him.
He’d never moved the shell so fast before. He was forty feet above them, skipping along like a twenty-ton Frisbee. The massive stone arches of the bridge loomed overhead. Far below, the East River churned and foamed. The storm was whipping the river into a frenzy. Whitecaps danced a madman’s frenzy, waves crested and broke against the huge stone pylons. Lightning played among the drooping cables and lashed at the waters. The world had gone mad.
“The Wall,” Tom prayed. He clung desperately to the image.
The Huntsman had outdistanced the hounds and the other riders. For a moment it almost seemed as if the great bridge was shaking beneath him. His eyes were fixed on the Turtle’s shell, burning like two green stars. He blew his great horn, and now the bridge did shake. The hellhounds and the other riders followed, hot for blood.
“COME ON, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS,” the Turtle roared down at them. “COME TO POPPA.”
The Huntsman drew up beneath him, lifted his spear, threw.
There was a flash of green light that burned the eyes, and Tom felt his shell shudder, heard the scream of tortured metal. He blinked. Four feet of spear was sticking out of the floor, not a foot in front of his face. Smoke was still rising from the carpet where it had punched through. He could smell fused metal. The spear was golden, ornate, crackling with green fire. Without thinking, Tom reached for it, but it faded and dissolved before his fingers could touch it.
Wind whistled through the hole in the floor. Solid battleship plate, Tom thought numbly. He was too stunned to be afraid. The wall was forgotten. He only prayed the mob wasn’t on the bridge yet.
He thought of a hammer.
Bigger than that.
Bigger than that.
The biggest fucking hammer in the world.
He pictured it, half as wide as the East River, hanging in the air above the bridge. The hammer trembled. It was heavy. It was too fucking heavy for him to support it. He made it heavier still. Down below, the Huntsman raised another spear.
Tom let the hammer fall.
The center span of the Brooklyn Bridge exploded.
Stone, steel, and pavement blew apart like paper. The cables snapped with a screech straight out of hell. A huge fragment of roadway came spinning up past the shell. Tom barely had an instant to savor his glimpse of hounds, horses, and hunters all tumbling toward the river.
Then the shock wave hit, and swept him away.
Once Modular Man returned he reported to Bloat, who he found awake, with a few members of his staff and a bodyguard of fish-knights. Travnicek was nowhere to be seen. Modular Man made his report, then looked up at the vast figure. “May I speak with you, Governor?”
“Is it important?”
“To me.”
“Very well.”
“You know,” the android began, “if you’ve been in my creator’s head, that I’m here involuntarily. Seeing as that’s so, I’d like the same opportunity to surrender as was given your other followers.”
Bloat looked startled, then confused. “That’s Dr. Travnicek’s decision,” he said. “Not mine.”
Travnicek. So Bloat knew Travnicek’s name, presumably having plucked it from his mind. The android wondered if Travnicek would even care.
“As I understand it,” Modular Man continued, “your society on the Rox is based on ideals. Presumably your ideals don’t condone slavery.” The next piece had to be run several times through the android’s macro-atomic mind so that he could phrase it properly without disobeying his creator’s orders. He found himself having to phrase it as a theoretical problem.
“If someone brought a slave onto the Rox,” he said, “you could make it a condition of that person’s presence that the slave be freed.”
Even that was misleading: there was no way, short of ripping out circuits, that Bloat could “free” Modular Man from Travnicek. But Bloat could refrain from assigning him to any dangerous tasks.
“This is ridiculous!” Kafka said. “You’re a machine! The governor might as well free a Mixmaster!”
The android turned to him and tried to put quotes in his voice. “’The governor might as well free a roach.’ I am a sentient being, as are you. Either we are equal under Rox law, or we are not.”
“We are a society of ideals,” Bloat said. His high-pitched voice did not point to justice. “We’re fighting for our freedom, for our new country. All we ask is to be left alone.”
“I will leave you alone, if I can.”
“We hope you will join us of your own free will.”
“I am programmed to fight the enemies of society, barring my creator’s intervention. You would seem to be society’s enemy.”
“The enemy of what society? Have you noticed there’s more than one? How do you know George Bush ain’t the enemy of society?”
“I’m very careful in assigning those labels, if it’s left up to me.”
“That’s big of you, Mister Judge Your Honor Sir. We want nothing from the outside, let alone your labels.”
“You want nothing except the money you’ve stolen. The bodies you’ve stolen. The drugs and arms you’ve brought in illegally. The criminals to whom you give shelter, and the kidnap victims you permit them to bring here. And of course you want me to fight for your right to do that.”
Bloat’s voice was getting more insistent. “We’ve only taken what we’re owed. The outside doesn’t care about jokers! We do! That’s why we came here! We are a principled people.”
“If you wished to act with principle, you could have come out here with your group of idealistic jokers and occupied the place and issued your proclamations —”
“And starved to death.” Kafka’s voice was scornful. “That’s what happened to us — no one gave a damn. We needed those others to make it work.”
“As I understand it, idealists often suffer for their beliefs. It would seem to be part of the job description. And f you had starved here, you might have attracted favorable attention to your cause, sympathy, perhaps aid. But you didn’t want to suffer that way, so you let in the jumpers and the murderers and the drug dealers and the kidnappers and the arms merchants and the fugitives from the law.”
“The signers of the Declaration of Independence were criminals in the eyes of the British government,” Bloat said. “I don’t see any difference.”
“With respect, Governor, I see a number of differences between Thomas Jefferson and Governor Bloat. Not the least being that Jefferson and his allies were fighting to keep a land they already possessed, and hold it free from tyranny, while the other is trying to steal a land owned by others, with money he’s filched from strangers who have nothing to do with him, and in doing so is imposing tyranny on a rather wide variety of people, including myself, and I presume Pulse, and all those other people whose bodies the jumpers have stolen and hold in bondage.”
“Jefferson had slaves.”
“He didn’t create that system; he inherited it, and he had the decency to be embarrassed about it. What is more to the point, he didn’t demand that they fight for slavery.”
“Yeah?” There was a sneer on Bloat’s face. “Since you admire Jefferson so much, I tell ya what — I’ll follow his example. Jefferson didn’t free his slaves till after his death, right? I’ll give you the same consideration. Once I’m dead, you can leave.”If that’s the way you want it. The cold thought rolled through the android’s circuitry. He knew better than to say it.
He had used the wrong approach, he knew. He had expected to argue with an idealist, a figure knowledgeable on political and revolutionary theory. He hadn’t quite realized that Bloat was a barely educated adolescent whose political thought derived more from MTV than the Federalist Papers.