“No, but I’ve been modified. You can’t beat me.”
“Your eye is blow away. It looks silvery, purple underneath. That isn’t a human eye. Drop me out of this ship. I don’t want to become like—whatever you are. I want out.”
I shook my head. “You need to give me a few answers first.”
I sprang at her. For the first time, I used my full speed. I crashed into her, scooped her up, and squeezed her arms against her body, pinning them. She fired a few more rounds, aiming down. I felt lead burn hotly on my foot. I shook the gun from her hand.
She stopped struggling when it became obvious she was helpless. We were close. Face-to-face. Sweaty and scared, she looked younger and prettier to me now.
“I’d make a bad prisoner, alien,” she said.
“I’m human, not alien.”
“No. No human could move like that. You’re a freak,” she said, “that’s worse.”
“Just talk to me.”
“I won’t become like you,” she said.
I heard a crunching sound. I looked into her face, and I knew what she had done. She had bitten into something.
“Why don’t you tell me your name, at least?” I asked.
“Esmeralda,” she whispered, and then she collapsed. I held my breath and hopped backward. I felt bad letting her slump onto the Persian rugs, to die in a heap on the floor. But I didn’t want to breathe that stuff in. I wasn’t sure the nanites knew how to fix a lungful of cyanide—or whatever it was.
I looked down at her body regretfully. Somehow, killing Pierre’s assassin hadn’t been as fulfilling as I’d hoped.
Small black arms dragged Esmeralda to an open spot on the metal decking, where there weren’t any Persian rugs. She slipped through the floor as if it were liquid and vanished. The ship had released her. To them, she was biotic waste now.
“Dammit,” I whispered to nobody.
-19-
I was different now, with a coating of nanites inside me. I was able to walk through the walls of Pierre’s ship, if I wanted to. It felt as if a soap bubble passed over my body when I did it. I supposed the nanites considered me one of their own now, and maybe they were right.
When Pierre’s ship reached down to grab a new victim, I slid out along the long black arm and dropped the last twenty feet or so to the ground. The arm ignored me. The person riding upward looked terrified. I smiled, recognizing him. It was the cop who had told me to run back when I stood on the apartment roof. I thought, looking up at him, that he might have recognized me. His face registered more shock and terror than anything else.
“Just keep moving, follow the tests they talk about on TV,” I shouted up, cupping my hands. “There’s no one left to fight at the end. You’ll be okay.”
I wondered what the ship would do if there was no one aboard to fight. Would the basic tests suffice to have it accept him as commander? Or would the ship cage him and use him to test others? I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if he’d heard my advice.
I walked through the park for a few minutes. Summer in Virginia, at night. There was no one around, unsurprisingly. A few yellow-green fireflies glimmered hauntingly in the bushes.
I remembered days in the park like this, summer evening walks with the kids—and with my wife Donna. They were all dead, gone. Sometimes that weighs on a man. Sometimes, I felt I had been charged with saving the world that had taken everything I’d ever loved from me.
I didn’t call the Alamo for a few minutes. I knew Sandra was probably worried to death, but I just wanted to walk on the Earth’s crust again. It felt good under my feet. I thought about Pierre’s voice—I’d never met the tricky, pompous man in person. I thought about Esmeralda’s face, her true face, the one that had erased her tough snarl at the end. She’d been much more human than I felt myself to be, in her final moments.
This dreamy walk in the park only lasted a few minutes. I’m not good at introspection or self-pity. I had a war to fight. Like it or not, I was a Commander of Star Force. Never mind that a few nobodies had made the organization up just days ago. It had all become increasingly real to me. I recalled something a sergeant had told a scared recruit in an old war movie. When asked why us? The sergeant had replied because we are here, and nobody else. That seemed to sum up my situation. Why was I, of all people, fighting assassins and aliens? Because the Alamo had chosen me. It had to be someone—and this time it was my turn.
Alamo, come pick me up, I thought.
ETA ninety seconds.
I didn’t hear the ship’s approach. The Nano ships were amazingly quiet as they stalked the night skies. There was a crack or two of branches breaking as the thick, black arm snaked down into the park, damaging trees behind me. I didn’t turn around or even look up. The whipping, finger-like cables grabbed me around the middle and hauled me up into the ship’s belly, swallowing me whole.
As I rode back up into the Alamo I kept breathing in fresh air, as much as I could suck into my lungs. I listened to the muted sounds of the night and looked around at every tree, bench and streetlight. Standing in the cargo bay a moment later, I felt something in my hair. I reached back and found a leaf. It was big, and looked like it had belonged to a sycamore tree.
I walked onto the bridge. Sandra made a happy whoop when she saw me.
She hurried toward me, smiling. Then her face fell. She saw my mood, and the rips in my skin—and possibly the metal gleaming from beneath that torn skin.
I put my hand to my face, covering my left eye. That area had seemed the most upsetting to Esmeralda, so I tried to hide it from Sandra.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“Yeah. I’m sure the nanites will fix it. I can feel them working on it right now, knitting my cells back together.”
“Did you get your butt kicked?” she asked.
I tried to force a smile. “Something like that,” I said. “Here, I brought you a present.”
I held out the green sycamore leaf. She took it, and smiled at it. Such a small gesture, but she seemed to soften. She came to me and hugged me. We embraced for a while. She put her head against my right shoulder, keeping her eyes far away from my face and especially my left eye.
I touched her as gently as I could, as if I held the wings of a butterfly between pinched fingertips. I watched for any signs of pain, but she gave none. This relaxed me a fraction. I had wanted her to be free of the ship’s shackles, and now she was. The ship had no leash on her, nothing snaked around her waist or ankles to keep her away from me. But if I’d still been unable to touch her for fear of hurting her…. Well, that would have been worse.
It occurred to me that we might have trouble in the future if we wanted to be—intimate. There were times in the throes of passion for any man when he’s not himself. Human women were tough enough for a normal male, but what about an enhanced male such as myself? What if I’d had a few beers maybe, then moved too quickly—and tore her apart? It was a grim thought, and it made me move very cautiously around her. I think she knew I was holding back, barely touching her. I think it turned her on, too.
Before things proceeded further, however, she spoiled the mood by having an important thought. “Oh, I almost forgot. Crow has been calling for you. I couldn’t answer—the Alamo won’t listen to me at all, not even when you are gone. She’s such a bitchy computer—or a billion little bitchy computers, I guess. Anyway, Crow doesn’t know what happened to you. All he knows is that first Pierre vanished and then he lost contact with you. Kyle, you should call him.”