Aurora in Four Voices (5 page)

"Go to hell," Jato said.

"Tie her hands."

"No."

"Commence protocol," he said.

Three syringe guns slid out of the globe. Jato didn't duck fast enough, but it didn't matter: none of the shots were aimed at him. Soz moved in a blur, but she couldn't go anywhere with her ankles chained to the ledge. One shot missed her, but judged from her reaction, the other two hit home. She jerked as if she had been struck and her entire body tensed.

"What are you doing?" Jato shouted at Crankenshaft.

"Jato, it's all right," Soz said. "I'm fine."

"It's a clockwork venom," Crankenshaft told her. "Even your meds can't adapt enough to deal with it."

She said nothing, just focused her attention on him with an unsettling intensity.

"What's a clockwork venom?" Jato asked.

Soz glanced at him. "The name comes from clock reactions." Although she sounded cool, sweat was beading at her temple. "Combine certain chemicals under proper conditions and they cycle through a series of reactions. In human blood, clockwork venoms undergo a cycle, each step producing a different poison."

"Can your nanomeds fight it?" Jato asked.

Crankenshaft answered. "Even sophisticated meds have trouble with complicated cycles. This one has hundreds of steps, all with varying duration lengths and side reactions that change from cycle to cycle. It's a brilliant work of chemistry." He gave Jato an appraising look. "You've felt one poison in the cycle. Last time you were here. Perhaps you recall?"

Jato remembered all right. It had burned like hell.

"The others have different effects," Crankenshaft observed, as if Soz were a lab experiment. "Nausea, muscle stiffness, dizziness, pain. She'll start vomiting soon. Eventually she will die."

Soz remained calm, but sweat was running down her temples. When she wiped at it, the motion looked mechanical, as if she had let the hydraulics in her body take over.

"As soon as her hands are bound," Crankenshaft said, "I'll give her the antidote."

"Jato." She spoke quietly. "Do what he says. Please."

There was no mistaking the strain in her voice. Jato grabbed the thong off the floor and wrapped it around her wrists. The broken lock mechanism on her manacles felt warm, probably from the energy released when her chompers ate it. He tied the thong loosely around her wrists, making no attempt to knot it. But the ceramoplex balls activated and yanked the cords tight, binding her wrists and then locking into each other.

"Leather," Crankenshaft said.

Jato straightened up. "What?"

"In molecular terms, it's complex," he said. "More heterogeneous than, say, manacles. Not as strong, but a logical backup when dealing with disassemblers."

Jato gritted his teeth. How did Soz stay so cool? She just watched Crankenshaft, intent and quiet. Crankenshaft took a ring with two mag-keys off his belt and threw it to them. As the keys hit the floor near Jato's foot, a syringe on the globe hissed. Soz moved like an automaton, trying to duck, but the shot hit her anyway.

"That had better be the antidotes," Jato said.

"The red key unlocks your ankles," Crankenshaft said. "Gold unlocks hers."

After Jato freed their ankles, Soz moved stiffly, swinging her legs off the ledge.

"Go to the pool," Crankenshaft said. "Both of you."

"No," Jato said.

"Don't make it harder on her than necessary," Crankenshaft said. "I can calculate a lot of what I need, but I'll achieve better results with genuine images of the two of you to work from."

Jato stayed put. "I won't rape her and I won't kill her. You can doctor holos to make me look like a Trader, but nothing can make me act like one."

Crankenshaft's voice hardened. "Go to the pool. Otherwise, I'll pump her so full of clockwork venom she'll beg you to kill her."

With no warning, Soz moved.
Fast.
Dropping to one knee by her boots, she whipped out her hands, shreds of leather flying away from her wrists. She yanked the "decorative" tubes off her boots and brought them up, one in each hand, liquid shooting out from both. One stream splattered over the drone, creating clouds of gas. The other hit Crankenshaft's carbine and splashed into his face. He shouted, dropping the laser as he covered his face with his hands. When the gun hit the ground, it shattered like porcelain.

The Mandelbrot globe hissed and a shot from its air-syringe hit Jato in the neck. In a bizarre blur of motion, Soz threw her boots. They hurtled through the air and smashed into the globe, shattering its outer shell where the liquid from her cylinder had doused it. The whole assembly crashed to the floor, its innards breaking apart on the stone. Blinking and humming, the debris moved in twitches as it began to reassemble itself.

"Smash the components!" Soz yelled, sprinting across the studio. She moved like a puppet, her body under control of hydraulics rather than muscles and bones.

As Jato strode over to crush the remains of the drone, he saw Crankenshaft lower his hands, revealing a face covered with burns. In the same instant that he grabbed for a gun on his belt, Soz reached him. She brought her hands up with eerie speed and hit him under the chin, snapping back his head. He flew over backward, crashing to the ground. His head hit the floor and he lay still, breathing but unconscious.

"Soz, no!" Jato raced forward when she jerked up her leg. He collided with her as her foot came down, and they staggered to the side, enough to make her miss Crankenshaft. Her foot hit the floor with a teeth-jarring impact that would have crushed the Dreamer's chest.

Jato gulped in a breath. "No killing."

She turned to him like a machine, no emotion on her face. It was hard to believe this was the same woman he had kissed on the Promenade.

Then her expression became human again, as if she had reset herself. She exhaled. "He'll live." Grimly she added, "We might not. Are you all right?"

A familiar burning was spreading in his neck and torso. "I took a shot of venom. Did he give you an antidote?"

"No. More venom." She went to retrieve her boots and their tubes. "My meds are trying to synthesize an antidote, but it's hard to do when their target keeps changing."

"We better hurry." He grabbed his bird off the console. "His node must have alerted the city and his other drones."

She pulled on her boots. "I put locks on his system. It will take a few minutes for it to break them." Her voice sounded strained. Labored.

As Jato turned toward the door across the room, his gaze raked the pool — and he froze.

The holosculpture was still evolving. It had spawned more and yet more Jatos, until they blended into a design of feathered motion. A superimage had formed, a fractal, its pattern repeating on a finer and finer scale. Superimposed on the fractal, a face was coming clear. A giant Trader face.

His face.

"
No
." He spun back to the console.

"Come on!" Soz called.

He stabbed at the console. "We have to destroy that sculpture."

"We have to go! We don't have much time."

"He stole my
life
." Jato gave up on the computer and swung around to her. "He created a mirror of himself, but he put it on me. It's like — like — " He slammed his palm against the console. "He's a thief. Of my soul." He pointed at the sculpture. "That's me. No matter where I go or what I do, as long as that exists he owns me."

Sweat was dripping down her face. "I can't guarantee I'll find all his backups."

"If anyone can, it's you." He clenched his fists. "He owes me. And for him, losing his 'masterpiece' will be a punishment worse than dying."

Soz strode to the console and went to work, making hieroglyphics ripple across its panels in garish displays. She didn't waste time pulling out her wrist socket; instead, she hauled off her boot and set her foot on the console, showing no strain with the contorted position as she plugged a prong from the console into her ankle socket.

Seconds passed.

Longer.

Waiting.

"Got it!" Soz jerked out the prong. "Downloaded one copy into my internal memory for you. Erased everything else." She yanked on her boot. "Now let's go."

They ran across the studio to the cliff door. As they stepped outside, into the blasting wind, she stared down the stairs. "No rail."

Jato struggled to keep his balance, fighting the gales and his venom-induced dizziness. "I'll go first. If I fall, I won't hit you. You're light enough so if you fall you probably won't knock me off."

"All right." Her voice sounded thick.

He had expected her to insist on going first. His gut reaction ignored the obvious; she was part computer and machines worked on logic rather than heroics.

Clutching his statue, he started down the stairs. An abyss of air and rushing wind surrounded them, turbulent, violent. Step. Step again. He took it slow, halting when waves of dizziness hit.

Step.

Step again.

Scrapes came from above and he jerked his head up to see Soz lose her footing. Lunging for her, he lost his own balance and stumbled on the step, teetering over the void. Lurching back, he reeled to the step's inner edge, where he fell to one knee and found himself staring down the shaft of air in the center of the spiral.

"Jato?" Soz rasped.

He took a breath, looking up to see her kneeling on the step above him.

"You all right?" he asked. She nodded and they got up, then continued their descent.

The wind was probably cold, but with the fever burning in his body he couldn't tell. He moved in a haze of nausea and dizziness.

Step.

Step again.

Step —

No step. He looked down. They had reached the bottom.

Soz made a strangled sound and sagged against his back, grabbing him around the waist with both arms to keep from falling. Turning, he put his arm around her for support.

They walked around Nightingale, far enough outside the city to let darkness cloak them. His legs strained to run but he held back, not only because his poisoned body couldn't keep such a pace but also because it would draw attention. A couple strolling arm-in-arm along a romantic path was one thing; two people running was another.

He motioned at the tubes on her boots. "What's in those things?"

"Liquid nitrogen." She sounded hoarse. "With disassemblers to boost its effect. It freezes what it hits and the chompers eat it. They're less specialized than the ones in my body, which makes them more dangerous, but they dissolve after exposure to air."

"How did you free your hands? Do the chompers in your sweat eat leather after all?"

"No." She grimaced. "Mine are far too specific. Anything general enough to take apart a material as heterogenous as animal hide would probably take apart our hides too." She showed him the broken chain on her manacle. "Feel."

He ran his finger along the jagged edge. "It's sharp."

"So was the part on the ledge. I rubbed the thong against it until it cut the leather."

"No tech that time," he said. "Just brains."

She smiled wanly. Sweat soaked her collar and she walked stiffly, her legs controlled by the hydraulics inside her body.

The starport was so small it had no terminals, just a gate at the airfield entrance. As they neared it, two Mandelbrot globes rolled out to intercept them. Jato tried to dodge, but the one headed for him easily compensated for his evasive actions. It slammed him in the chest and he stumbled backward, then recovered and sprinted to the side. As the globe followed, he doubled back to run around it. The ploy worked with Crankenshaft's drones on days he programmed them for slower responses, to make the chase "entertaining." Jato doubted this one belonged to Crankenshaft, though; after what had happened, his would go for the kill.

This globe caught him — and rammed his head. As he fell, patches of light punctuated his vision and loud noises buzzed in his ears. With his statue cradled against his chest, he hit the ground and groaned. As he rolled away from the whirring demon, he caught a glimpse of the aircontrol tower. Lights were coming on inside it.

They had run out of time.

Then Soz said, "Eat it, fractal."

A stream of liquid arched into view, bathing the drone in a shower of glistening drops. The globe reoriented on Soz like a giant ceramoplex balloon. As it went after her, she tried to feint, but she lost her balance and fell to her knees. When the globe swooped in on her head, she jerked to the side. It hit her shoulder — and shattered, raining Mandelbrot innards all over her body. In seconds, she was kneeling in the midst of junk large and small, from both globes, lights blinking and components humming.

Soz and Jato stared at each other. Then they scrambled to their feet and sprinted for the airfield. Alarms were blaring, coming from the distant airtower and speakers along the field's perimeter. As they ran through the gate, which was no more than a few bars that swung to one side, Jato saw a Jag starfighter out on the tarmac. It gleamed like alabaster, as much a work of art as any sculpture.

When they reached the Jag, its hatch dilated like a high-speed holocam. As soon as they lunged through the opening, it snapped closed. A membrane irised in the nose of the ship, revealing a cockpit. As Soz squeezed into the pilot's seat, it folded an exoskeleton of controls around her like a silver-mesh glove. Jato stood behind her chair, hanging on to its back while his nausea surged.

"Neck and lower spinal nodes blocked," an androgynous voice said.

"Ankles," Soz said, intent on her controls.

While her hands flew over her forward controls, a robot claw pulled off her boots and a mesh enfolded her feet, plugging into her ankle sockets. After that Jato heard nothing; the ship was communicating directly with her internal systems.

Suddenly Soz spun around her chair and pulled down Jato's head. He fell forward, grabbing the arms of her seat to catch himself. She kissed him hard, pushing her tongue into his mouth.

He jerked away. "Are you craz — "

"I'm giving you the antidote. In my saliva. My web figured it out and my meds made it." She pulled him back into the kiss.