Counting Heads (57 page)

There was a burning pain in Mary’s arm where a fléchette had passed through without striking bone. Her sleeve was bright with blood, but the wound seemed minor, and she paid it no attention. It was the tote she was afraid for. A fléchette had entered but not exited, and syrup seeped down its side. One of Cyndee’s bladders was also leaking. “Here,” Cyndee said, thrusting it at Mary, “put this one in the bag and this one in your togs. The clinic wall”—pointing in the direction with a stick—“is over there. Not far, maybe a quarter klick. When you reach it, turn right.”

“What about you?”

Cyndee probed the ground with the stick and pried up a large rock. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“You’re crazy,” Mary said.

“So are you, Mary Skarland. When you get out, send crash carts.” Cyndee kissed her sister, gathered up her rock, kissed her sister again, and headed back the way they had come.

THE LIFECHAIR IDLED twenty meters from the pressure gate.

“What about the distance?” Samson said. “Will we get up enough speed? I don’t want to die of a broken ankle.”

Belt Hubert said, “I’m releasing your lap belt and uncoupling your Foley. That way you’ll fly off and hit head first.”

“You’re a good helper.”

“Thank you. Ready?”

“Tell them this is for Ellen Henry Starke.”

“The media is still patched in.”

“She needs me, and I’m coming.”

The chair’s micro-turbines revved up, and the chair thrummed with energy.

“Ready?” Belt Hubert repeated.

“Is Kitty clear yet?”

WHEN MARY REACHED the imposing clinic wall with her leaking tote, she was beyond exhaustion. She slumped in a near faint behind a large oak. Her breath whipsawed through her open mouth. The tote bag lay next to her feet, its side wet with syrup and blood. She wrenched it open and looked in at her passenger, afraid to see a ruined mockery of their sacrifice.

The skull lay in the corner of the tote, in a puddle of syrup, its crown completely exposed to the air. The bone was pockmarked with holes where wires and tubes had run. Scraps of raw skin hung from it.

Mary reached her bare arm into the syrup and hunted for the fetus. She thought she felt its heartbeat but couldn’t be sure. The skull’s eyes, in their lidless sockets, seemed to follow her.

Mary tried to untie the knot in the foil glove bladder, her last one, but it was too tight. She searched her pockets for something sharp. She tried to bite through it. Then she heard a buzzing sound next to her ear and was startled by a mech hovering there. It had a jeweled head of blue, and Mary thought it must be a clinic bee.

The bee alighted on the foil glove for a moment, and when it lifted off, there was a thumb-sized hole in the glove. Mary poured the syrup over the head, meanwhile keeping an eye on the bee. It seemed docile enough, but when she tried to stand up, it opened a tiny frame with a Uglyph that meant Keeping Still. Immediately, she heard footfalls crashing through the undergrowth. She huddled against the tree trunk and held her breath, wondering if the pikes’ visors could image through solid oak.

The footfalls grew nearer. Mary looked all around. She was trapped. Suddenly she was staring into a mirror. Her own grimy face startled her. But it wasn’t a mirror. It was a holofied sim of herself, complete down to the bloody uniform and tote. Her mirror image showed her a “You Are Here” map of the clinic grounds, with a pulsing arrow pointing the way to South Gate. Mary was closer to the gatehouse than she had thought. Then her sim double got up and ran in the opposite direction.

Mary heard a grunt of surprise on the other side of the tree, followed by the swoosh of fléchettes. The pike swore under his breath when he missed the decoy, but he did not pursue her at once. Instead he called in. He spoke in low tones, but Mary heard his half of the exchange.

“Repeat that,” he said. “Negative, she’s heading east toward A-three-six.” His tone sounded more inconvenienced than concerned. There was a mechanical click as he reloaded his weapon. “How’s Reggi doing? Say again. No, deploy the battle lid and clean up the mess. That’s an order.” The sound of his voice trailed off in the direction the bee had lured him.

Mary waited until the pike had disappeared into the trees before rolling the tote around Ellen’s head, tucking it under her arm, and dashing to South Gate Plaza. She didn’t slow down until she reached the pressure gate. It was shut solid. There were two shapes on the other side. “Reilly?” she cried. “It’s me, Mary.”

Reilly’s reply came through a speaker over her head. “Mary? What’s happened to you? Are you hurt?”

Mary looked down at herself and felt her arm with her fingers. “No, Reilly, but they’re killing my sisters. Please let me in.”

“No can do, Mary. We’re in Orange. We’re locked down. But I’m ordering a crash cart for you. Hang in there; help is coming.”

As though from a distance, Mary heard the voice of another russ in Reilly’s intercom. He was shouting at Reilly to drop the gate.

“Reilly,” Mary said, “I don’t need a crash cart, but send carts to Feldspar Cottage. There’s three—four dead there. And one more behind me in the woods.” She waved her arm behind her where she and Cyndee had parted. “But, Reilly, please, bend the rules for once, can’t you, and let me in.”

Inside the gatehouse, Reilly unhooked his baton and pointed it at Fred as he replied to Mary, “I would do anything in the world for you, Mary. You know I would, but you ask the impossible. I’m forbidden to open the gate while we’re in Orange.”

“At least take this through,” Mary said and held out the rolled-up tote. Fred approached the gate, but Reilly jabbed him with the baton. “I won’t tell you again, Planc. Leave this block at once.”

A shower of fléchettes bounced against the gate above Mary’s head. She ducked low to the ground and ran along the gate to the end of the plaza where, with a parting look, she disappeared down a path. Reilly watched her go, and Fred used the distraction to wrench the baton from his hands. A man in a groundskeeper uniform approached the gate and watched them struggling for a moment before crossing the plaza and taking the same path as Mary.

Fred slipped behind Reilly and caught him in a choke hold with the baton. He pressed him against the hot pressurized air. “Open the gate!” He screamed.

WHEN MEEWEE, THE doctor, and the medbeitor passed the lifechair, Meewee saw that there was an emaciated passenger inside. “What do you suppose?” he said.

“I’ll look,” the doctor replied and stayed back, but before Meewee advanced much farther, the chair tooted its horn and shot past him, accelerating at a frightful speed directly at the pressure gate.

He’s going to ram it, Meewee thought in disbelief. There was hardly time to blink. he sputtered in the convoluted metalanguage

The pressure gate dissipated even as the lifechair reached it. The chair passed through and braked hard. The guards leaped aside as it flew past them, tires screeching. It came to a halt in front of the massive vehicle barricade. The chair stopped, but its passenger kept going.

SAMSON WENT ALL the way—in honest-to-God slow motion. At least the suicides at Moseby’s Leap had gotten that part right. Samson felt himself lift gently from the basket and float through the air. The barricade wall seemed distant, and there was ample time to take everything in.

To say I have no regrets would be a lie, he mused. I have plenty of them. I regret not being a better citizen, for example. I regret not being a better champion for the seared. I regret not making the most of every single blessed day of my life. But most of all, I regret not being a better man to Jean and Eleanor, and a better father to you. I suppose you might have been a better daughter as well, but I don’t hold that against you. And thank you for this marvelous parting gift of an opportunity to go out with a bang. I’m going to light a big candle for you, Ellie. Hope it helps.

The wall grew close enough to make out the pockmarked texture of its surface, like craters of the Moon, and Samson remembered his honeymoon with Eleanor. She had pulled him aside and told him she loved him more than all the craters of the Moon.

“GOOD GAIA!” MEEWEE cried. “Stop! Stop!” The lifechair braked in time, but the passenger, wrapped in a blanket, flew headlong into the wall, hitting it with a resounding thud. Meewee ran to see. He ran into the open gatehouse where one of the guards stopped him. “The man,” Meewee gasped, gesturing wildly at the crash victim, who lay in a heap against the barricade. A foul smell filled the place, and smoke rose from the crumpled form. Was that a
man?

Dr. Rouselle shouted, “I am a doctor.” She and the medbeitor had caught up, but the guard prevented her from lending assistance. The other guard used his baton to unwrap the man’s blanket, and he sprayed the corpse with fire suppressant.

“That won’t help, I think,” the doctor said, sniffing the air. “He is a seared.”

But the smoke cleared, and the victim lay like a broken twig on the concrete floor.

The gateway chimed, and the guard shooed them toward it. “It’s all over,” he said. “Nothing to see.”

Meewee, remembering his mission, refused to budge. “I’m going through, Myr Jerry,” he said. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“Listen to you,” the guard said, drawing his standstill wand. The gate sprang up behind Meewee, but a slot opened, and the guard said, “Go on now. This is your last warning.”

Just then, there was a snapping sound from the corpse, and another, like firecrackers going off. The guard hesitated and turned to watch. The doctor took cover behind the medbeitor, and the other guard ducked into the scanway entrance. Meewee used the distraction to sidle toward the far end of the block where the vehicle entrance gaped wide open, and he reached it just as two powerful blasts filled the block with flaming human bits.

WHEN THE GATE dropped, Fred thought that Reilly had done it, but when he loosened his hold on the man, Reilly fell to the floor. Fred stood for some time looking down at his friend. Fred had been sure he was straining against Reilly’s face mask, but now he saw that Reilly had never deployed the mask. Fred crouched to feel for a carotid pulse and found none. Ugly bruises from the baton crisscrossed his throat, and the front of his uniform was singed from the heat of the gate.

“Medic!” Fred called at the top of his lungs. Something small and fast, the bluish blur of a flying mech, streaked out through the open gateway and shot down the path after Mary and the pike. Fred was drawn along too, but he could not leave Reilly like this. “
Medic!
” The gateway chimed a warning—the gate was going back up—and Fred had ten seconds to decide on which side he wanted to be when it did. “Medic!” he called desperately, searching through Reilly’s pockets for a cryosac. He couldn’t leave him like this, but at the last moment, he jumped across the gateway groove just as the gate sprang up. He was inside the clinic.

MARY’S PLAN HAD been to follow the south wall till it met the west wall, then turn right and follow that wall to West Gate. But she had already lost sight of the wall and was running blind along unfamiliar paths. She forced herself not to think of Reilly. The man wouldn’t bend the rules even to save her life. She couldn’t believe it.

Actually, she could believe it. Reilly was a russ through and through. Duty over all.

There were scraps of color in the woods. Two clinic guests and a retinue of hollyholo sims were strolling the path ahead. She hollered at them and raced to catch up. The syrup sloshed in the tote under her arm.

The guests stopped to gape at her. They were two of a kind—large, agile, gorgeous—and might have been brother and sister. As Mary approached, they lifted their hands and pointed their closed fists at her, aiming the rings on their fingers.

“Halt!” shouted the woman.

Mary stopped a couple of meters away and hunched over for breath. “You—must—help me,” she gasped.

The man said, “I’ve already reported you to clinic security. They are on their way, so I suggest you leave us alone.”

“Not clinic security. Call the Command. Go outside the gate and call them. Tell them I have Starke.” She patted the tote. “Call a medevac. Please help me!”

The affs regarded her coolly, keeping a bead on her with their rings. The hollyholos accompanying them, who had been quiet until then, now piped up to fill the silence. One of them, a tall woman, said, “What have you done with the ransom?”

“There’s no ransom,” Mary said. “I’m not kidnapping her. She’s my
client
.”

Another of the sims was Dr. Ted. Mary appealed to him, “You tell them. You tell them what’s happening.”

The sim turned to the others and said, “This girl is suffering from a brain pox and is clearly delusional. Avoid intimate contact with her at all costs.”

The aff woman began to wave her free hand. Mary turned and saw the groundskeeper coming toward them. He was swatting at a bee as he jogged. The bee in turn was batting itself against the man’s visor. At first Mary thought she’d be safe among these affs, ungracious though they were, but as the pike drew near, she panicked and ran again.

She ran over a little rise into a stand of beech trees. Fléchettes riddled the tree trunks around her. One sliced through the flesh at her side, but she hardly noticed. She came across a path and took it. She was beyond all calculation. Her only thought was to outrun the sounds behind her.

These sounds changed abruptly. The zing of fléchettes was replaced by the whine of laser fire. Two separate frequencies meant two different guns. She hugged a tree and peeked from behind it to see an amazing sight. A mech was firing at the pike. The pike had switched his weapon to laser mode and was sweeping the air with bursts of light, but he was unable to hit the mech at such close range. The mech, on the other hand, easily hit the pike, but its comparatively low-wattage lasers were no match for the pike’s armor. Undeterred, the mech continued to hit him, targeting only three points on the pike’s body and hitting those points repeatedly: his face mask, his groin, and the helmet seal at the back of his neck. The pike covered these spots as best he could with his gloved hands, but he couldn’t cover all three at once, and the mech circled and crossed the man’s head, almost too fast to see, firing a staccato stream of pulses. The man returned fire with choked spreads, like laser birdshot. His wild shots gouged smoking holes in the trees around him and brought down boughs and branches upon himself.