Metal Fatigue (24 page)

Roads retreated back to the lane and ducked out of sight into a shallow alcove.

The three men entered the narrow passage. Whatever had attacked them in the building followed, judging by the sound of continued gunfire. Ricochets whined, followed by a sickening thud and a noise that sounded like someone trying to yell through a gag.

Chong was the only one to reach safety. He turned with a look of horror on his face and started to run along the lane.

As he went past the alcove, Roads tripped him. Chong went down hard and slid for a metre on his stomach. Screaming, he tried to crawl away on his hands and knees.

Roads followed, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and pinned him against a wall. Chong fought with inhuman strength, empowered by fear. It took an arm-lock and all of Roads' weight to keep him still.

"I'm not going to kill you," Roads hissed, but it didn't make any difference. Chong writhed, bent his head back. His eyes were wide, almost completely glazed over.

Roads shook him. "What the fuck
happened
in there?"

In reply Chong produced a knife from his sleeve, twisted an arm free and stabbed Roads deep in the right shoulder.

Roads fell back, gasping with pain. The pistol slipped from his numbed grasp and discharged, throwing sparks from wall to wall as the slug ricocheted along the lane. Chong kicked him in the stomach, and he fell to his knees, then Chong turned and fled the way he had come, hesitating only to pick up the gun he had dropped. Roads staggered to his feet and ran after him.

When he reached the crack down which Chong had vanished, Roads stopped and stared in horror.

The concrete path before him was slick with gore. Two bodies lay tangled together against one wall as though torn apart by a wild animal. One severed arm reached for him in a mute plea for help.

His gorge rose, and he fought it desperately.

Then a bullet whined past his ear, and he ducked by reflex.

Chong was standing in the middle of the street, waving the gun in Roads' general direction. His face was a mask of absolute terror.

"What are you?" screamed the bounty-hunter, an hysterical edge raw in his voice. "What the fuck
are
you?"

Chong fired a second time and Roads pressed himself flat against the wall of the building. The assassin's aim was wild — the bullet went high and to his right — but it was only a matter of time before another found its mark. He was about to make a dash for it when something caught his eye.

Behind Chong, on the other side of the street, the solid line of his building
bent
, as though a heat-haze had passed in front of it.

Chong turned just as the dimple in the air reached him. It swirled with half-seen motion — like a soap-bubble warping in a breath of wind. Chong screamed and fired at it, then turned to flee.

Too late. The back of his head blossomed as something punched through his face. He flew backward through the air, a futile motor-reflex making his feet kick. He hit the road with a sodden thump.

Then, with a flash as bright as the noon-day sun, Roads' building erupted into flame. For a split-second, the plastic composite that normally kept bad weather at bay held the facade together. Then the composite disintegrated, and a fiery shockwave sent fragments of glass and brick hurtling across the street, into Roads' narrow shelter.

He dropped to the blood-stained concrete with his hands over his ears, screaming inaudibly through the noise. The shockwave buffeted him, scorched his skin. Shattered bricks rattled around him, making him flinch. One fragment struck a glancing blow to the back of his head as he turned to crawl for shelter.

The last thing he saw was a ghostly shape silhouetted against the fire: an eerily translucent cloud of grey, with five shining points arrayed in a rough pentagon at its centre.

Then it too burst into flame, like a new-born star, and he passed out.

Tuesday, 18 September, 12:15 a.m.

The fire in Roads' building burned for two hours before the entire structure collapsed. With a roar of tumbling masonry, it fell outward and across the road, narrowly missing the Emergency Services vehicles assembled around the site. Peripheral fires lapped at the buildings to either side, but barely attained a foothold before powerful jets of water forced them back. None made it as far as the building directly across the road, where one red-skinned gargoyle larger than those around it crouched on the roof, watching.

In infra-red, the scene was a nightmare of colour. Orange and yellow heat blazed from the remains of the central fire, casting a furnace's breath along the street, reflecting off buildings, fences and the road. The generators of fire engines, ambulances, and police vehicles burned brightly in neon blue. Tiny green point-sources were people, scurrying to and fro like luminous ants, almost lost among the rest.

He switched to the visual spectrum and watched with detached interest as they cleaned away the bodies. He knew they would find more once the fire was out. Twelve people had entered the building after Roads, but only three had emerged.

Why they had died, why they had sought to kill Roads, and why the
thing
had killed them ... did not concern him. He was beyond caring what happened to ordinary people, the ones who would find him wanting and hunt him down, if they only knew who he was.

Besides, the one called Lucifer had told him to hide — to
keep out of the way
. With what had happened to him in the harbour the previous night still fresh in his mind, he was happy to obey for once. It had been foolish to become involved in the first place — although he
was
involved, whether he liked it or not. He had become entangled in a series of events that threatened both his Peace and his life.

Searching Roads' apartment had been risky, but worthwhile in putting his mind at ease on one score. Curiously enough, the policeman did not appear to know who he was. Perhaps it was not too late, after all, to return to the life he had known — free from his controller, Roads and the
thing
.

Angry heat ebbed slowly from the street below. As the fire retreated, a swarm of police searched the area. A pair of ash-flecked officers combed the roof of his building, but did not find him. He lay curled in the womb-like spaces of a ventilation shaft, obeying orders.

Hide
, his controller had said, so he did just that. There was a sense of security to be gained from the act of concealment, an illusion of safety, however shortlived. It was exactly what he had been doing for more years than he could number.

When the police officers were gone, he remained in his cocoon of metal. For the first time in two days, he truly slept.

2:45 a.m.

Barney paced the length of her study, unable to rest. Alternating between hope and despair, and with one word turning constantly through her mind, she stopped to make herself a cup of herbal tea, going through the familiar motions automatically, hoping against hope that a retreat into routine might ease her disquiet and allow her to sleep.

It didn't.

Outside, a sudden change brought rain to the city. It flurried at the kitchen window like a thousand tiny fists, beating to be let in.

The word was
metamale
.

Her hands were shaking.

The call from HQ had come two hours earlier, three hours after she had returned home from RSD. When the terminal had bleeped, she had rushed to answer it, only half-hearing sirens wailing in the distance as she did. The call hadn't been Roads, as she had half-expected, to apologise for his lateness. The reality had been far worse.

Emergency Services had been called to Roads' home in response to reports of an explosion shortly after nine o'clock. The building had been totally gutted, and had later collapsed. A number of bodies — four, at last count — had been found near the scene; the genetic fingerprint of each had produced a match with the RSD datapool: Danny Chong, Ingrid Toffler, Jamie Bazz, and Mark Johns. All were known criminals wanted on old charges of murder; two of them — Chong and Bazz — were on the Most Wanted list. A preliminary search of the wreckage had found two more bodies, as yet unidentified. Of Roads himself, or of his body, there had been no sign.

Margaret Chappel had then called Barney personally, telling her to stay at home.

"There's nothing you can do, Barney. Emergency has it in hand; you'd only get in the way. I suggest you try to get some sleep instead."

"But I want to help," she protested. "I want to know what happened."

"You'll know as soon as we do, I promise. I'll make sure you're the first to be told."

"But — "

"Stay
there
, Barney. How else will we know where to call you?"

She almost cried then, and hated herself for holding it back. She needed to
do
something. If Roads was dead, then part of her would always blame herself for not going with him, until she found a suitable scapegoat.

"Who?" she asked, the lump in her chest half-strangling her. "Who would do this?"

Chappel shook her head, and told her about Morrow's warning.

"He
knew
?" Barney couldn't believe it. Roads had known that he was in real danger but had still gone after the assassins on his own. It was exactly the same brand of heroics that had robbed her of her father, years ago.

She found herself reliving the painful months following her father's death. The last berserker Kennedy Polis saw had systematically hunted down over a hundred and forty-five people before RSD had cornered it in an old downtown building, where it held a woman hostage. Nothing had driven it out, and the four volunteers who had offered to go in after it had been killed.

In an attempt to neutralise the threat, radio-triggered explosive charges had been laid around the foundations of the building. The berserker, aware of RSD's plan, had made an unexpected offer to negotiate. It would hand over the woman if it was allowed to leave the city. Three officers, one armed with the trigger for the explosives, had entered the building to negotiate. The officer with the trigger had been her father.

Barney had been seventeen and not yet a member of RSD, but Roads had been there. He had been in charge of one of the parties which searched through the rubble of the demolished building. The body of the hostage had been found the following day. The autopsy was inconclusive, but suggested that she had been dead for several hours before the explosives had gone off.

That had been enough for Roads to piece together a picture of what had happened to the negotiators. The berserker had wanted to go in style, not cornered like an animal. It might have waited until the negotiators had seen the body of the woman before attacking them, or it may well have attacked immediately. Either way, Barney's father had pressed the trigger, killing the berserker and himself in the process.

When Roads had told Barney of his theory, years later, she had disagreed. The berserker hadn't killed her father; machismo had. If he hadn't gone into the building in the first place, he would still have been alive.

And now, years later, she was in the same situation.

"Don't blame him, Barney," Chappel had said, "or yourself. If he wants to do things alone, he will. That's just the way he is. Nothing you or I could say would make him change his mind."

For the first time Barney noted the grief in the eyes of the Director of RSD: hidden behind the usual mask of efficiency, but inescapably there, and deep.

"You've known him longer than I have," she ventured, unable to put into words the question she wanted to ask.

"Yes." Chappel's expression softened. "But only just."

"And you were close, once."

"We still are." Chappel frowned at that. "But we weren't lovers, if that's what you're driving at."

Barney felt herself blush.

Not long after that conversation had come the reply from the RSD mainframe. The search program had finished. Barney had settled down to read the results, glad for something to make her feel useful.

Between the list and the combined Kennedy/RUSAMC datapool three matches had been made. The first frightened her, the second seemed irrelevant, the third ...

She tried not to worry about Roads. He could look after himself. Only now did she know exactly how true that was.

That was when she had begun to pace.

In the kitchen, with the mug held tightly between both hands, she stared out from the confines of her claustrophobic, complicated world. She wanted to go outside and stand in the rain for a while, to literally drown her sorrows. Instead she turned out the kitchen light and watched the rain through the window.

She drank the tea without noticing it, remembering her father standing in that very spot, years ago, bemoaning the loss of smart cards. They had argued often when she was a teenager; so much that he had valued had seemed trivial to her, then. Who cared if e-money went the way of biochips and the World-Wide Web? Was technology really that important? The tragedy was that he had died before she could ever tell him how right he had been.

The tea wasn't helping. She was tired, worried despite herself — both about Roads and the Reassimilation, despite her intellectual acceptance of the latter's inevitability — and alone.

Putting the mug upside-down in the sink, she turned around just as someone ran past the window.

She gasped and jumped backward, almost tripping over her feet in surprise. The figure had only appeared for an instant — vaguely man-shaped, unrecognisable in the shadows. But it had been there,
in her yard
.

She ran to the study and grabbed her gun from the bottom drawer of her desk. Checking the windows in every room to ensure that they were locked, she tried to still her hammering heartbeat. If Roads' killers had come for her as well, she would put up a fight; she would not go down easily.

Back in the hallway, she listened to the hiss of the rain and pressed the pistol to her lips. Had she really seen light glinting in crystal eyes, or had
that
been her imagination?