Johnny was flung off his feet by the impact. I went to one knee and let the mini-gun train on the laser source.
Ten stories up along the residential Hive wall. My visor opaqued. Body armor burned off in a steam of reflective gas. The mini-gun sounded precisely like the kind of chainsaw they use in history holodramas. Ten stories up, a five-meter section of balcony and wall disintegrated in a cloud of explosive flechettes and armor-piercing rounds.
Three heavy slugs struck me from behind.
I landed on my palms, silenced the mini-gun, and swiveled. There were at least a dozen of them on each level, moving quickly in precise combat choreography. Johnny had reached his knees and was firing the hellwhip in orchestrated bursts of light, working his way through the rainbow to beat bounce defenses.
One of the running figures exploded into flame as the shopwindow behind it turned to molten glass and spattered fifteen meters onto the Concourse. Two more men came up over the level railings and I sent them back with a burst from the mini-gun.
An open skimmer came down from the rafters, repellers laboring as it banked around pylons. Rocket fire slammed into concrete around Johnny and me. Shopfronts vomited a billion shards of glass over us. I looked, blinked twice, targeted, and fired. The skimmer lurched sideways, struck an escalator with a dozen cowering civilians on it, and tumbled in a mass of twisting metal and exploding ordnance. I saw one shopper leap in flames to the Hive floor eighty meters below.
“Left!” shouted Johnny over the tightbeam intercom.
Four men in combat armor had dropped from an upper level using personal lift packs. The polymerized chameleon armor labored to keep up with the shifting background but only succeeded in turning each man into a brilliant kaleidoscope of reflections. One moved inside the sweep arc of my mini-gun to neutralize me while the other three went for Johnny.
He came in with a pulse-blade, ghetto style. I let it chew at my armor, knowing it would get through to forearm flesh but using it to buy the second I needed. I got it. I killed the man with the rigid edge of my gauntlet and swept the mini-gun fire into the three worrying Johnny.
Their armor went rigid and I used the gun to sweep them backward like someone hosing down a littered sidewalk. Only one of the men got to his feet before I blew them all off the level overhang.
Johnny was down again. Parts of his chest armor were gone, melted away. I smelled cooking flesh but saw no mortal wounds. I half crouched, lifted him.
“Leave me, Brawne. Run. The stairs.” The tightbeam was breaking up.
“Fuck off,” I said, getting my left arm around him enough to support him while allowing room for the mini-gun to track. “I’m still getting paid to be your bodyguard.”
They were sniping at us from both walls of the Hive, the rafters, and the shopping levels above us. I counted at least twenty bodies on the walkways; about half were brightly clad civilians. The power assist on the left leg of my armor was grinding. Straight-legged, I awkwardly pulled us another ten meters toward the Temple stairs. There were several Shrike priests at the head of the stairs now, seemingly oblivious to the gunfire all around them.
“Above!”
I swiveled, targeted, and fired in one moment, hearing the gun go empty after one burst and seeing the second skimmer get off its missiles in the instant before it became a thousand pieces of hurtling, unrelated metal and torn flesh. I dropped Johnny heavily to the pavement and fell on him, trying to cover his exposed flesh with my body.
The missiles detonated simultaneously, several in airburst and at least two burrowing. Johnny and I were lifted into the air and hurled fifteen or twenty meters down the pitching walkway. Good thing. The alloy and ferroconcrete pedestrian strip where we had been a second before burned, bubbled, sagged, and tumbled down onto the flaming walkway below. There was a natural moat there now, a gap between most of the other ground troops and us.
I rose, slapped away the useless mini-gun and mount, pulled off useless shards of my own armor, and lifted Johnny in both arms. His helmet had been blown off and his face was very bad. Blood seeped through a score of gaps in his armor. His right arm and left foot had been blown off. I turned and began carrying him up the Shrike Temple stairs.
There were sirens and security skimmers filling the Concourse flyspace now. The goondas on the upper levels and far side of the tumbled walkway ran for cover. Two of the commandos who had dropped on lift packs ran up the stairs after me. I did not turn. I had to lift my straight and useless left leg for every step. I knew that I had been seriously burned on my back and side and there were shrapnel wounds elsewhere.
The skimmers whooped and circled but avoided the Temple steps. Gunfire rattled up and down the Mall. I could hear metal-shod footsteps coming rapidly behind me. I managed another three steps. Twenty steps above, impossibly far away, the bishop stood amid a hundred Temple priests.
I made another step and looked down at Johnny. One eye was open, staring up at me. The other was closed with blood and swollen tissue. “It’s all right,” I whispered, aware for the first time that my own helmet was gone. “It’s all right. We’re almost there.” I managed one more step.
The two men in bright black combat armor blocked my way. Both had lifted visors streaked with deflection scars and their faces were very hard.
“Put him down, bitch, and maybe we’ll let you live.”
I nodded tiredly, too tired to take another step or do anything but stand there and hold him in both arms. Johnny’s blood dripped on white stone.
“I said, put the son of a bitch down and …”
I shot both of them, one in the left eye and one in the right, never lifting Dad’s automatic from where I held it under Johnny’s body.
They fell away. I managed another step. And then another. I rested a bit and then lifted my foot for another.
At the top of the stairs the group of black and red robes parted. The doorway was very tall and very dark. I did not look back but I could hear from the noise behind us that the crowd on the Concourse was very large. The bishop walked by my side as I went through the doors and into the dimness.
I laid Johnny on the cool floor. Robes rustled around us. I pulled my own armor off where I could, then batted at Johnny’s. It was fused to his flesh in several places. I touched his burned cheek with my good hand. “I’m sorry …”
Johnny’s head stirred slightly and his eye opened. He lifted his bare left hand to touch my cheek, my hair, the back of my head. “Fanny …”
I felt him die then. I also felt the surge as his hand found the neural shunt, the white-light warmth of the surge to the Schrön loop as everything Johnny Keats ever was or would be exploded into me; almost, almost it was like his orgasm inside me two nights earlier, the surge and throb and sudden warmth and stillness after, with the echo of sensation there.
I lowered him to the floor and let the acolytes remove the body, taking it out to show the crowd and the authorities and the ones who waited to know.
I let them take me away.
I spent two weeks in a Shrike Temple recovery crèche. Burns healed, scars removed, alien metal extracted, skin grafted, flesh regrown, nerves rewoven. And still I hurt.
Everyone except the Shrike priests lost interest in me. The Core made sure that Johnny was dead; that his presence in the Core had left no trace; that his cybrid was dead.
The authorities took my statement, revoked my license, and covered things up as best they could. The Web press reported that a battle between Dregs’ Level Hive gangs had erupted onto the Concourse Mall. Numerous gang members and innocent bystanders were killed. The police contained it.