He was the pawn of a willful, desperate, and ignorant teenager.
If that’s the way you want it. That was always an option.
“Go away!” Kafka made shooing gestures with his hands. “We’ve got important things to consider! Go help your creator!”
“I am not aware that my creator needs any help.”
“He’s with the Wild Hunt! Go help him kill Hartmann and make yourself useful!”
Calculations snarled through the android’s circuits, ran into brick-wall hardwired imperatives. “That storm?” he said. “You let him go?”
“Hey, it wasn’t my idea.” Bloat laughed. “The guy jumped down from his tower, knocked Roly-poly right off his horse, hopped on, and rode off. He must have been susceptible to Herne’s message.”
Modular Man’s programming lifted him into the air and fired him out of the room like a gunshot. He had an image of Kafka and Bloat gaping in surprise and then the night and fog enveloped him.
He shot straight up to get out of the radar clutter and the fog, then took visual bearings. The dark storm was prowling over the eastern approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge, and Modular Man fired himself straight for it, streamlining his guns back over his shoulders to decrease air resistance.
He didn’t know what to hope for.
The storm seemed to lose intensity even as he raced for it — the lightning ceased to crackle, and the thunder died away. There was the brief radar image of a small flying object — the Turtle? — racing off to the north.
And then Modular Man was above the broken bridge, absorbing the shattered image of the shattered span, watching as emergency vehicles poured up the bridge approaches.
What if his creator was dead but never found? he wondered. He’d have to obey the dead man’s orders forever, defending the Rox till there was nothing left.
In cold panic he spiraled toward the water. A few figures splashed forlornly in a boiling tide that carried them toward Sandy Hook. The android floated down over the cold, choppy water, saw hands raised toward him in pleading. Stag horns jabbed high above the water, and the android sped toward them.
“Where is my creator!” he shrieked.
“Ah dinnut ken!” This did not seem to be Received Standard English. Herne gulped water, spat it out. “Find the hoern!”
Both Herne’s horns seemed to be all right. Modular Man ignored the frantic cry and began a swift spiral in search of Travnicek.
He found him close to the Brooklyn shore, swimming strongly across the tide toward land. Modular Man dropped into the water beside him, lifted him with arms across the chest, and brought him to the end of Brooklyn Pier 5.
Travnicek stood on the end of the pier, water pouring off his torn clothing. “Magnificent!” he shouted. There was a gloating tone in Travnicek’s voice; he didn’t seem injured. “I never knew how glorious it was to kill!”
“Sir? Are you hurt?”
“Pah!” He gave a contemptuous wave. “The horse broke my fall.” He tilted his head back and gave a howl. “Magnificent! I snapped that woman’s neck! I felt the shock run through her brain! I felt her terror. I tore at her neck with a piece of broken glass and licked her blood before she died.”
The android was appalled. His mind was refusing to process any of this. “I should return you to the Rox.”
“Lemme tell you something,” Travnicek said. He sounded exalted. “I learned an important lesson when the Krauts machine-gunned my family back at Lidice, okay? As I was lying under a bloody pile composed of my second cousins, I realized something. There are two kinds of people in this world — the shooters and the shootees.”
He gave a laugh. “The shooters are the ones with authority, and they have authority because they control the guns. The shooters kill other people, or they get other shooters to do it for them. And the rest — they’re bullet fodder. Bloat’s a shooter — you don’t see him out on the front lines risking his ass, do you? Even as the Outcast? Zelda’s a shooter — she’s got a whole other body to do the killing for her. And” He pointed at himself with his cilia. “I’m a shooter too. I got the best gun in the world — that’s you, toaster.”
Travnicek leaned closer to the android. His sensory necklace pulsed with emotion. “Are you a shooter or a shootee, toaster? A winner or loser? That’s what you gotta decide.” He pointed commandingly back out at the East River. “Find Herne and bring him here. I’ll want to ride with him again.”
“Yes, sir.”
There were fewer swimmers now, and the huge rack of horns made Herne easy to spot. The big joker was racing frantically toward the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, but the tide was carrying him away faster than he could swim.
The android grabbed him by his shaggy mane and began to pull him toward shore.
“No!” Herne was almost sobbing. “Find thee the hoern! The hoern!”
“Your horns seem to be intact.”
“The hoern, the hoern! Aa lost me goelden hoern! Aa kinnut sommon th’ Hoont!”
Modular Man lifted the ace from the river, hauled him to where Travnicek waited by the pier. “Where is it?” he asked.
“Oonder thon bridge!” Herne pointed desperately.
Somehow Modular Man knew that, even with a featureless face, Travnicek was leering at him.
“Fetch, doggie!” Travnicek said.
The android arrowed toward the bridge, calculating distances, flow rates, wind velocity. The storm cloud overhead had completely dispersed, and only a few people were still swimming. Modular Man dove into the water and propelled himself toward the bottom.
Radar was useless under the water and the water was completely black. Even infrared vision revealed only crumpled ruin, huge chunks of bridge span lying in opaque clouds of bottom mud.
Finding the horn took him almost twenty minutes, working methodically, by feel alone. He was lucky he didn’t need to breathe.
When he rose from the water with the battered old hunting horn, the water was empty of survivors. So far as he knew, only Herne and Travnicek, of those who had fallen, had survived the end of the Wild Hunt.
Modular Man deposited Travnicek, a naked Dylan Hardesty, and a weed-snagged horn on the floor of the Crystal Castle. The Outcast was waiting there, below the dreaming Bloat, below the spectacle of Liberty’s torch. A bit of dirty East River water dribbled from the bell of the horn onto the tile floor.
The Outcast stared at the scene grimly. “So many gone… One-Eye, Bumbilino… God damn it!” His nostrils flared, the amethyst gleamed in purple fury. “How?”
Modular Man answered before Herne could speak. “Moose Man here did his best. Morning traffic’s going to be hell, that’s for sure.”
“Ye Tuhtle… destroyed the Hoont.” Dylan shuddered. The Outcast made a gesture with his hand; a large blanket appeared around the huge figure. In Dylan’s mind there was residual horror — remorse for what he’d done as Herne, fear from the memory of the bridge. The Manchesterian accent was thicker than usual. The coloring of dialect drifted into Dylan’s usual impeccable cultured British. “Ah dinnut see anything, but alla soodden sommting cum a’smashin’ inna oos and yonder bridge was toomblin’…” He pulled the blanket tightly around his shoulders. He paused and corrected his speech in his head. “Sometimes I hate myself, Governor. I really do.”
“I saw it,” Travnicek said. “A hammer of gravity and air. Excitement. Blood lust. It was.. pleasant.” There were odd images in the man’s head — he was seeing with some other sense than any the Outcast had ever experienced. It made for extremely confusing but very colorful images, like falling into a whirling Mandelbrot set.