The assassin was a very good shot. But Jay was a very good dancer—and fortunately the gun was a pulse job rather than a garden-hose-type continuous-beam laser. He twisted, arched, feinted, leaped, contracted, and bolts of shining death missed him by centimeters. He had one further advantage: he could use all four thrusters, while the assassin had to reserve one wrist for aiming. Thank God the man seemed to be out of knockout bombs.
But Jay could not hope to close; it was all he could do to stay alive. And any second his luck must run out. He could leap through the imaginary wall of the tunnel, but the killer would only follow. Any minute now the nearest six-pack would arrive behind him, and none of them would hesitate to fire through him even if they identified him as a friendly. Jay had time to realize that he was going to die protecting people he did not like or even respect, and then the tunnel had a blowout. A hole the size of a Frisbee appeared in its wall with a plosive phuff, jagged metal teeth pointing outward; the shriek of escaping air tore at their ears and pressure began to drop.
Of course it is impossible for a holographic cylinder to have a blowout, and in any case the nearest vacuum was hundreds of meters away. But both men were spacers; they reacted quite instinctively, dropping their quarrel and leaping for the hole together to seal it with their bodies if necessary. Only one of them remembered on the way that the greatest shaper in human space was presently in the tech hole, and that this tunnel belonged to him.
11
Eva was the first to enter the tunnel; nearly at once she reversed thrust and recoiled backward into Reb, who was at her heels. A weapon she was not licensed to possess vanished from her hand. Jay had clearly coped. Even her atrophied sense of smell could detect the odors of burned metal and burned meat.
“Nice work,” she said. “Remind me not to piss you off.”
Jay’s eyes met hers, but it took him a second or two to recognize her. “I got him,” he said wonderingly.
That much was clear. The body that floated between them was so obviously a corpse that Eva’s subconscious had ignored the gun it still clutched in one hand. Boiling brains leave a skull any way they can. Jay had a small smear of suet on his right cheek that must have burned him as it struck, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. Eva threaded her way through horrid drifting tendrils of brains and blood and took Jay in her arms. “That you did,” she said soothingly, wiping his cheek. “That you did.”
Rand arrived just then; at Eva’s signal he left Jay to her. She gestured again, and he and Reb took charge of the body, towing it backstage, shooing its gore along with it.
Sure enough, Rhea and Colly were the next to arrive. At the alarm, all five uips had ducked for cover and their guards had clustered around them, and mere vips had struggled to get away from them, and Tokugawa and Martin had called for information—but Rhea and Colly had both realized they had family in the firezone. Rhea hadn’t been able to stop her daughter, but had gotten—barely—ahead of her to shield her from possible fire. Eva moved so that she and Jay blocked their way. “He’s fine,” she said quickly. “Wait here for him.”
Rhea was frantic. “I’ve got to—”
“You’ve got to wait here,” Eva said, indicating Colly with her eyes.
“I—yes, okay.” She got a firm grip on Colly. “He’s really all right?”
“Not a scratch, truly.”
“He saved my life,” Jay said.
“And others,” Eva agreed. “Both of you did. I’m surprised at you, Jay—I thought you had more sense than to be a hero.”
“I had to,” he said. “It was partly my fault.”
She put a hand over his mouth. “He’s delirious,” she said to Rhea. “All the adrenalin.” She turned back to Jay, put her lips to his ear. “As your attorney, I advise you to shut the hell up. You are not competent to assess blame.”
He blinked at her. “You’re not an attorney, Eva.”
“The hell I’m not. I’m licensed for the High Court—and if you don’t start zipping your lip I’m going to need to be. When they get here, you tell them facts only, get it? Facts only. You can draw conclusions when you’re thinking more clearly. Okay?” She shook his shoulders. “Okay?”
“Sure, Eva. Facts only. That’s good.” She studied him carefully, decided he was not quite in shock in the medical sense—but close.
The tunnel went away; Rand must have reached the tech hole. Almost at once they were hip-deep in people, all talking at once—all five uips, assorted assistants and bodyguards, the Shimizu’s security chief, the house physician. The loudest by a good margin was Martin. Eva bellowed for silence, but her tired old lungs weren’t equal to the task.
Reb’s amplified voice filled the theater like the voice of God. “Ladies and gentlemen, please compose yourselves. There is no longer any reason for alarm. An attempted assassination has failed, and the situation is under control. Please return to the foyer as quickly and quietly as you can; emergency personnel will be arriving and you are in their way. You will all receive a detailed report when things have clarified.”
Rand’s voice joined him. “Dancers, please join our guests in the foyer and escort them to the reception room. The rest of tonight’s concert is canceled.”
The tumult of attempted conversation became even louder—but at Martin’s physical insistence, they at last began moving away, with Tokugawa in the lead. Rand told Rhea to take Colly back to their suite, and she agreed without argument. Dr. O’Regan and Chief Cruz remained behind. “Who was it?” Cruz asked.
“One of yours,” Eva said. “Dunno which—he didn’t have his face with him.”
Cruz’s face darkened. “I know which. Shit. Where’d they take him, the tech hole?”
“I think so.” She turned to Jay. “Can you stand another look at the son of a bitch? Chief Cruz needs you to show her what happened.”
“Oh sure,” he said.
As they left the tunnel, they had to duck around tumbling bodies and a few severed limbs—but fortunately no more horrid trails of blood, as laser amputation tends to self-cauterize. Eva noticed how hard Cruz had to work to ignore the one in Shimizu livery.
Cruz made them wait briefly outside the tech hole. Two crime-scene technicians and three interns all arrived at once; she and the doctor went inside with them. The security chief emerged with Rand in less than a minute, scowling blackly. The conference took place there in the corridor. Cruz—mortified that one of her own people had been the killer—obviously wanted Eva gone, but did not dare try to chase her out. Eva did not even have to claim status as Jay’s attorney of fact; a steely glance was all it took. She and Cruz had taken each other’s measure a long time ago.
So she was able to ride herd on Jay. She was fond of the boy, and his raving about the attempted assassination being partly his fault had unsettled her. If Cruz had heard that, the questioning might well have taken place under drugs. At Eva’s direction, Jay gave a baldly factual account of what had occurred. She spotted what he had meant as soon as he said it—“I told them to safety their damned weapons and continued on to the hole”—but of course no one else saw any blame in that. It was what anyone might have said in his place. She was glad she had gotten to him first.