“Optimistic,” she countered.
“What should we do now?” Yone asked.
Farley looked at Wennda. She smiled and nodded and he grinned. He held his hand to her and she clasped it.
“We should finish it,” Farley said to Yone. He saw Yone staring at the fallen curtain and he led Wennda off the stage and approached him. Yone looked startled when Farley clapped a hand on his shoulder.
“The curtain’s down,” Farley told him, “but the show’s not over.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The hand that reached into Broben’s field of vision had an intricate tattoo that looked like a metallic roadmap. It reached past him and pulled the throttle back. The engines quieted and the vibration lessened.
Broben tried to force his hand to his holster. The roadmapped hand beat him to it and removed the weapon. Thick plastic bands were wrapped around his wrists and cinched painfully tight. His headset drew taut on its cord, then slid from his head as he was pulled from the cockpit and dumped beside the top turret footrest like a sack of concrete. A figure knelt beside him. Stretchy armor, form-fitting black helmet, chunky nerve gun.
The helmet regarded him blankly. Broben could not make out a visor, just a black glossy surface. Broben saw no rim where it reached the neck, and he realized that it wasn’t a form-fitting helmet at all. It was the thing’s head.
The soldier moved aside as another helmeted Redoubt soldier emerged from the nose crawlway unconcernedly dragging Plavitz by the collar. Plavitz’s wrists and ankles were bound by thick plastic bands. Through the crawlway he glimpsed Boney in the nose, lying across his wrecked Norden bombsight, another of the anonymous troops standing beside him.
Broben looked into Plavitz’s eyes as he was pulled along. He sensed the man behind them but all else about Plavitz was a rag doll as he was dragged into the bomb bay and along the narrow catwalk.
Broben’s captor grabbed the back of his collar and dragged him through the bomb bay and radio room into the main compartment. Wen’s pet bug, Rochester, was still perched on the bright yellow hydraulic rig above the ball turret, two legs wrapped around the post and a leg on each aluminum ammo can, whiplike forelegs poised. The soldier didn’t even glance at the biobot as he stepped off the platform and dropped Broben to the deck beside Plavitz.
Broben could turn his head a little and move his eyes a bit. Wen, Garrett, Everett, and Sten had been dumped like cordwood alongside the upfolded seat boards. Redoubt soldiers in skintight armor combed through the aircraft. They were small and thin, but they had no trouble dragging a side of beef like Garrett. They moved silently and efficiently in the cramped space as if choreographed, and Broben wondered whether they had some kind of communication system. Headset radios, maybe. For all he knew they used a Ouija board.
The soldiers all went ramrod straight a moment before a figure entered the opened main hatch. At first Broben thought it was a man walking behind one of the spider things. Then he realized that both were one creature: A man from the waist up, a spider-like conveyance from the waist down. The steady taps of the articulated legs were heavy in the fuselage. It paused and surveyed the compartment. This man—or whatever the hell you’d call it—was larger than the soldiers, dressed in an angular, bulky, military-looking outfit that looked to be covering up a lot of tubing and machinery. His head was large and bald, and on one side of his scalp was a square of metal that looked like an access panel. A coiled cord emerged from under his stiff ring collar and plugged into a jack beneath the metal plate. He resumed his unnervingly smooth and alien walk toward the laid-out crew, and even as he neared them Broben could not have said whether he were looking at a man or some kind of robot.
The figure took in the aircraft, the bug above the ball turret, the twitching bodies of the crew. He pointed at Wen. Two soldiers picked him up and held him before the man. Wen fought to keep his head upright but it kept sagging forward like a man fighting to stay awake.
The man set a hand on Wen’s chin and held his head up. A network of metallic tattoos disappeared into the man’s sleeve. He turned Wen’s head left and right, then let go. Wen’s head drooped.
The man looked down at the inert crewmen. “Ten men,” he said. His accent was harsh and difficult to understand. “And five more inbound.” He looked again at Wen. “The organ tank won’t need you now.”
Broben heard a sudden meaty smack, and Wen’s head snapped back. His nose was bleeding. It looked broken. Had the man punched him? Broben hadn’t even seen his hand move.
“You thought I would not know that you had repaired your warplane.”
This time Broben saw the blur before he heard the blow. Wen doubled over and the soldiers held him up. Blood dripped from his nose. His mouth worked as if he were trying to say something.
“You thought I would not know,” the man said, as if reciting, “that all the accidents and delays were your little sabotages.”
Wen’s head snapped to the side. Broben heard teeth patter the hull. It had been a haymaker and it had come from very low and no human being could swing that fast. The lower half of Wen’s face was covered in blood and his jaw was out of line.
“You thought that I would just let them come here and fly away with the means of our resumption.”
A gut shot buckled Wen’s knees. The thud of it like an axe biting into a tree.
“That there has been a moment,” the man continued, “when you have not been watched.”
Wen tried to duck the next blow and it caught him on the forehead. His head rocked backward and his eyes glazed as they looked up. Again he tried to say something.
A soldier grabbed his hair and made him look at the man. The man held his bloody fist in front of Wen and Broben knew that there would only be one more punch.
“You thought we were that stupid,” the man said. “That I am that stupid.”
Wen looked past the lethal fist and directly at the man. He coughed and spit blood. “Muh,” he said. “Monkey wrench.”
The man cocked his head. Broben got the impression he was processing the phrase, waiting for something to tell him what it meant. Then he smiled and drew back the fist.
Two snakelike tentacles wrapped around his waist where it joined the multilegged life support, and tore him in two. The spider legs splayed. Blood and viscera splashed onto the deck, and Broben heard faint sputtering and saw bluewhite flashes from the severed spinal column. A wisp of pale gray smoke rose. The man’s head turned. Perhaps he saw what had grabbed him. Perhaps some awareness remained in him as Wen’s pet biobot dropped his sputtering torso into the warm red porridge on the deck beside his four convulsing multijointed legs.
Wen’s biobot spider flowed down from the turret rig and swarmed the nearest soldier holding Wen. It reared up and reached toward the helmet and turned. The soldier’s body toppled to the deck. The head hit next.
The second soldier holding Wen had let him go and was reaching for his weapon. The bug lanced his chest with both forelegs and then opened them outward as the other soldiers leveled their weapons at it and fired. The nerve guns had no effect.
Behind them another bug unfolded from the main hatch like a nightmare flower and swarmed the closest soldier with horrifying speed as yet another drone blossomed into the bomber.
Broben saw a service .45 in a sludge of bloody chunks two feet away. He reached for it, but his hand would only flop like a landed fish. He tried to get up but his legs only kicked stupidly.
A bug stopped with one leg planted in the slurry of blood and entrails and fine circuitry that had been the man who’d beat hell out of Wen. It turned toward Broben with a nauseating jittery motion. A foreleg came up.