Johnny was struggling but one of the intruders had him around the throat in a choke hold while the other pinned his legs. I came off the floor in a crouch, accepted the blow from my number two, and leaped across the bed. The guy holding Johnny’s legs went through the glass and wood of the window without a word.
Someone landed on my back and I completed the roll across the bed and floor, bringing him up against the wall. He was good. He took the blow on his shoulder and went for a nerve pinch beneath my ear. He had a second of trouble because of the extra layers of muscle there and I got an elbow deep into his stomach and rolled away. The man choking Johnny dropped him and delivered a textbook-perfect kick to my ribs. I took half the impact, feeling at least one rib go, and spun inside, attempting no elegance as I used my left hand to crush his left testicle. The man screamed and was out of it.
I’d never forgotten the stunner on the floor and neither had the last of the opposition. He scurried around to the far side of the bed, out of reach, and dropped to all fours to grab the weapon. Definitely feeling the pain from the broken rib now, I lifted the massive bed with Johnny in it and dropped it on the guy’s head and shoulders.
I went under the bed from my side, retrieved the stunner, and backed into an empty corner.
One guy had gone out the window. We were on the second floor. The first man to enter was still lying in the doorway. The guy I’d kicked had managed to get to one knee and both elbows. From the blood on his mouth and chin, I guessed that a rib had punctured a lung. He was breathing very raggedly. The bed had crushed the skull of the other man on the floor. The guy who’d been choking Johnny was curled up near the window, holding his crotch and vomiting. I stunned him into silence and went over to the one I’d kicked and lifted him by the hair. “Who sent you?”
“Fuck you.” He sprayed some bloody spittle in my face.
“Maybe later,” I said. “Again, who sent you?” I placed three fingers against his side where the ribcage seemed concave and pressed.
The man screamed and went very white. When he coughed the blood was too red against pale skin.
“Who sent you?” I set four fingers against his ribs.
“The bishop!” He tried to levitate away from my fingers.
“What bishop?”
“Shrike Temple … Lusus … don’t, please … oh, shit …”
“What were you going to do with him … us?”
“Nothing.… oh, God damn … don’t! I need a medic, please!”
“Sure. Answer.”
“Stun him, bring him … back to the Temple … Lusus. Please. I can’t breathe.”
“And me?”
“Kill you if you resisted.”
“Okay,” I said, lifting him a little higher by his hair, “we’re doing fine here. What did they want him for?”
“I don’t know.” He screamed very loudly. I kept one eye on the doorway to the apartment. The stunner was still in my palm under a fistful of hair. “I … don’t … know …” he gasped. He was hemorrhaging in earnest now. The blood dripped on my arm and left breast.
“How’d you get here?”
“EMV … roof.”
“Where’d you ’cast in?”
“Don’t know … I swear … some city in the water. Car’s set to return there … please!”
I ripped at his clothes. No comlog. No other weapons. There was a tattoo of a blue trident just above his heart. “Goonda?” I said.
“Yeah … Parvati Brotherhood.”
Outside the Web. Probably very hard to trace. “All of you?”
“Yeah … please … get me some help … oh, shit … please ..… ” He sagged, almost unconscious.
I dropped him, stepped back, and sprayed the stun beam over him.
Johnny was sitting up, rubbing his throat, and staring at me with a strange gaze.
“Get dressed,” I said. “We’re leaving.”
The EMV was an old, transparent Vikken Scenic with no palm-locks on the ignition plate or diskey. We caught up to the terminator before we had crossed France and looked down on darkness that Johnny said was the Atlantic Ocean. Except for lights of the occasional floating city or drilling platform, the only illumination came from the stars and the broad, swimming-pool glows of the undersea colonies.
“Why are we taking their vehicle?” asked Johnny.
“I want to see where they farcast from.”
“He said the Lusus Shrike Temple.”
“Yeah. Now we’ll see.”
Johnny’s face was barely visible as he looked down at the dark sea twenty klicks below. “Do you think those men will die?”
“One was already dead,” I said. “The guy with the punctured lung will need help. Two of them’ll be okay. I don’t know about the one who went out the window. Do you care?”
“Yes. The violence was … barbaric.”
“ ‘Though a quarrel in the street is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine,’ ” I quoted. “They weren’t cybrids, were they?”
“I think not.”
“So there are at least two groups out to get you … the AIs and the bishop of the Shrike Temple. And we still don’t know why.”
“I do have an idea now.”
I swiveled in the foam recliner. The constellations above us—familiar neither from holos of Old Earth’s skies nor from any Web world I knew—cast just enough light to allow me to see Johnny’s eyes. “Tell me,” I said.
“Your mention of Hyperion gave me a clue,” he said. “The fact that I had no knowledge of it. Its absence said that it was important.”
“The strange case of the dog barking in the night,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
Johnny leaned closer. “The only reason that I would not be aware of it is that some elements of the TechnoCore have blocked my knowledge of it.”
“Your cybrid …” It was strange to talk to Johnny that way now. “You spend most of your time in the Web, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t you run across mention of Hyperion somewhere? It’s in the news every once in a while, especially when the Shrike Cult’s topical.”
“Perhaps I did hear. Perhaps that is why I was murdered.”
I lay back and looked at the stars. “Let’s go ask the bishop,” I said.
Johnny said that the lights ahead were an analog of New York City in the mid-twenty-first century. He didn’t know what resurrection project the city had been rebuilt for. I took the EMV off auto and dropped lower.
Tall buildings from the phallic-symbol era of urban architecture rose from the swamps and lagoons of the North American littoral. Several had lights burning. Johnny pointed to one decrepit but oddly elegant structure and said, “The Empire State Building.”
“Okay,” I said. “Whatever it is, that’s where the EMV wants to land.”
“Is it safe?”
I grinned at him. “Nothing in life’s safe.” I let the car have its head and we dropped to a small, open platform below the building’s spire. We got out and stood on the cracked balcony. It was quite dark except for the few building lights far below and the stars. A few paces away, a vague blue glow outlined a farcaster portal where elevator doors may once have been.
“I’ll go first,” I said but Johnny had already stepped through. I palmed the borrowed stunner and followed him.