Out of the Black (41 page)

The cop looked like she was going to cry.

Ping looked from Anne back to Alex. "So, what are we supposed to do now?"

"Uh... he didn't mention anything about that." Anne said, shaking her head.

Alex looked up, startled out of his thoughts. "Run... we run! Now!"

"What?" Ping's eyes darted to the exit; to the shattered observation window.

"Kaspari's here! Come on!" Alex took a step toward the exit, but Anne caught his shoulder.

"What about them?" She waved her hand toward the two unconscious Feds. "We leave them, they're dead, right?"

"We can't fight him... you don't understan..." Then he checked himself, set his jaw. "You're right. We can't leave them."

Anne turned to the doctors. "Sean!"

The surgeons looked up from their work on Hawthorne.

"How long for you to stabilize her enough for us to take her?"

He looked reluctant, "Maybe two hours for prep and... but Anne, you know you can't take..."

"Now listen, Sean," She interrupted with a hard voice she'd picked up somewhere, "There's more of those disco zombies on their way, and I'm pretty sure anyone who's still here is on the buffet, if you get my drift."

The surgeons glanced quickly at each other. "Five minutes." Sean concluded. They went back to work.

"We got five?" Anne looked to Alex. He didn't think long before giving his head a slow shake. This was going to end badly.

Rae and Ping checked their remaining ammo. Ping discarded his assault gun onto a nearby cabinet. He limbered his pistols in their holsters, adjusted his sword in his jacket pocket. He then straightened his jacket, making sure the weapons were out of sight. Rae ejected the drum from her fletcher, slammed another into the port.

Ping looked at their small company. "Maybe I should head back up to the observ..."

"Crap!" Alex shouted, squeezing his eyes shut and raising his arms before him as if to ward off a blow. There was a sharp, wet sound and he was blown off his feet as if hit by a car. Rae screamed, but brought her fletcher up as quick as any hero in an action video. Anne's head snapped around, looking for an attacker. Ping stood perfectly still, one hand in his jacket pocket, eyes moving to the doorway. Alex slammed into the wall at the far side of the OR. He fell limp to the floor, leaving a crater in the tiled wall.

The double doors from the hallway opened inward and a woman in a rich brown suit strode in as if she were on a catwalk, exuding confidence. Her fingers sparkled with bright metal and rubies. Her smooth skin was only a few shades lighter than her suit. "Hey, how 'bout I just kill..."

Anne was moving before the newcomer finished speaking. She was into the slipstream of relative velocity, three steps toward the newcomer when she left the ground. Force tingled across her skin. She raised perhaps twenty centimeters into the air, peddling her feet like a cartoon character before a big exit.

Her wrists and ankles stretched out painfully. Every joint strained to the point of breaking under the unseen force. A short cry escaped her lips before she squeezed them shut.

The woman in brown laughed. She didn't flinch as four explosions rattled off with no discernable time between them. The air before the woman filled with sparks as she deflected the fletchettes. Rae's weapon flew from her hands and into the brown woman's ready hand. "Thanks honey!" She smiled without warmth.

The woman brought up her right hand with a theatrical flourish. She snapped her fingers like a commanding debutante and both Ping and Rae were struck in the face. They both went down hard, their legs above them as they hit the floor.

"Stay!" the woman commanded with an outstretched finger and an inward-directed chuckle. Shiva was ever playful at work. She returned to regard Anne, floating and stretched taught by invisible bonds. "Now you've been quite bad!" She had a flash of inspiration. "You know, something's missing." Her smile broadened.

Anne didn't scream as the holes opened in her outstretched palms, the blood flowed onto the floor. "Lets play charades- your turn." Anne's ankles snapped together. "Wait! I know this one..."

Then their eyes met. Shiva had expected the most satisfying form of terror. She'd expected despair. After four hundred years, only despair still warmed her jaded heart. But here, in this disgustingly fat woman, in that swollen bag of a face, Shiva saw no fear. Where by all rights she'd expected a blank bovine gaze, she saw the dark eyes of the predator, of the patient shark. She saw her own death with confidence. Here was a woman totally helpless, yet able to make Shiva's bravado falter with only a glance.

She looked away, shaken. She'd fought Torpedoes before, but this was different. She'd forgotten what she was saying...

Another shot ricocheted off her shield at ankle level. The cop had managed to wrestle her service pistol out and she was seeing if Shiva's shield went all the way to the floor. A few more shots flew away harmlessly as Shiva examined the fallen cop. She was still on the ground next to the Asian guy who had apparently been knocked unconscious. Her nose was broken and one eye was well on its way to swelling closed. Again, no satisfying despair. What was wrong with these people?

Disappointed, Shiva realized she might as well just kill her. W mental shrug, her hand came up, her smile broadened. She paused, waiting... Hopefully, when the cop realized, she'd get just a taste of satisfaction.

The cop must have understood the look in Shiva's eyes, because she held her trigger down, releasing a stream of ineffective hypersonic needles at her. Still, it was frustrating determination behind the cop's eyes. Maybe once the evisceration began...

The fear emerged first from the bruised and broken landscape of Alex's senses. Shots filled the air, desperate and pointless, their rapid snaps crested over the ringing in his ears. Blood filled his mouth, covered the dusty floor beneath him. Not far away, he could hear the urgent and hushed pleas of one of the doctors to a God it was clear he wasn't that familiar with. He heard a woman's mocking, confident laughter.

He was about to lose everything. Before he saw it, he knew.

No strength left, yet somehow Alex managed to get a hand beneath him and press away from the floor enough to see the scene at the other end of the room. Rae was on the floor, her legs sprawled out, both hands holding her gun firmly, pumping out shots that ricocheted harmlessly away from the laughing woman. Rae's broken and bloody face was set in grim determination, but Alex knew her well enough to understand that she knew that this was the end.

The laughing woman's hand stretched out toward Rae, "My turn." she snarled.

Slower. Alex could see eddies of the Loom's power responding to the woman's dark will- but that power, though substantial, was a clunky, clumsy thing. Alex wondered briefly if it was a blessing or a curse that time seemed to be lengthening for his last few seconds with Rae.

Weaker. He has no power left, every template and weaving had been swept away by the woman's initial attack. Though he seemed to remain connected to the workings of the Underworld somehow, it was now like standing in a desert. Some of the mental speed remained, but he had no power to act. She was too strong and he was too weak to do anything but watch as everything that mattered to him was wiped away by this arrogant, careless woman. Rae's eyes were hard and filled with angry, hopeless tears, but Alex didn't even have the time to weep.

Closer. Through the skeins and currents of the Underworld, his consciousness drifted closer to Rae, letting her desperation and fear fill his vision until he could almost taste the tears. Loss surrounded him, but his pain was only her pain, his frustration became hers, and he was empty and alone, only wanting somehow to help her. Around him, the music of the Loom resonated with his compassion.

Then there was a moment of clarity that he felt before he understood- Coldness, a spark of fire, then an ocean of warmth surrounded him. He was alone then realized he wasn't, that nobody ever was. Hope touched briefly on anger then he was afloat in a love as boundless as the sea.

That was when Alex realized what Ivo had been trying to teach him- the magic behind the science of the Loom.

Shiva almost didn't feel it in time. Distracted as she often got while killing, the tingle of warning came almost too late. As it was, she barely had time to temper her shield before the current of power struck. She was knocked off her feet, through the wall into the hall, through another wall into a bathroom, through three stalls but only two toilets, through the exterior wall, tumb almost dind spinning through the air above the street- shattering impact- and she fell to the cracked concrete floor halfway through the parking structure across from the hospital. Behind her, the cracked support column that had finally stopped her flight groaned and the building around her rumbled as it adjusted to the structural damage.

Alex pushed himself off the floor. The world was still spinning, but he wasn't that interested in the world. He settled back onto his heels, kneeling, focusing- accumulating power. That had gone far better than he could have hoped, but it wasn't over yet.

Focus... he had to focus, but the love kept trying to make him laugh and cry, and the fury kept trying to push all thought from his mind. He'd almost lost Rae.

He didn't want to squelch the emotions, just subdue them enough to think somewhat clearly. He remembered Ivo telling him that the Loom responds to focus and passion. Looking at the patch of night sky through the three walls before him, he had to agree. Right now, he had all the passion he could handle. He had to close his eyes... across the room, Rae's battered face evoked the hottest and darkest feelings.

Shaking with fury, stretched taught with focus, Alex knelt and accumulated power for the next round.

Fortunately, Shiva's shield had mostly held. Her left arm was shattered below the elbow, missing below the forearm. Her suit was ruined. That second toilet she'd blown through must have had a broken flusher. After about twenty seconds, she'd stopped the worst of the bleeding and blocked the most excruciating pain. There was nothing to do about the smell.

Feeling rather put off and looking and smelling much more like crap than she would prefer, Shiva rose into the air. She crossed the street and reentered the ragged two-meter hole in the fifth floor of the Hospital.

No more games. She deeply wished she had the time to really make this hurt. She hated to admit it, but it wasn't time she lacked, it was confidence. The kid had surprised her. The briefing in the whispercraft had said he'd been in the Loom for less than two years, but that simply couldn't be true. Ether Lutine had been an amazing teacher or this kid was the Mozart of the Loom.

She was no longer sure she would be able to win if she kept playing with her prey. This admission was hard on her pride. After four hundred years, she'd thought that she'd be able to handle an unarmed and inexperienced Torpedo, an inexperienced Savant, and two grunt cops. Now it was time to finish this quickly.

She touched down on the floor and moved back through the destroyed bathroom. Water on the destroyed bathroom floor mixed with her blood to complete the destruction of her expensive shoes. The kid tried to bring a part of the building's superstructure down on her, but her shield held. She invoked the Cast of Turbulence. It began to stir the currents of power in the Underworld around the kid and the weave he'd been constructing dissolved as the storm around him intensified.

She'd just moved from scowl to smile when the Underworld seemed to blur around her.

Around Alex, the currents of power grew wild. They tore through his Collection Cast before he could compensate. They tried to buffet him back out of the Underworld, away from the Loom. But too much was riding on this conflict for him to fail. He u the small amount of power he'd already collected to weave a loose Obscuring. He used it to distract the Savant long enough to try an ill-conceived counterattack.

While she was making short work of his Obscuring, he managed to anchor himself to her Turbulence Cast. He used her Cast's order as a shield against the storm it was causing. Then, with no energy left to launch his own counter-Cast, he improvised again. He tunneled through the outer weave of her Cast, patching in a weave of his own. Just as he added the tripwire to her Cast, she cleared his Obscuring. He disengaged from her Cast, hoping she wouldn't notice his work until it was too late.

Shiva swept the child's Obscuring aside. While she'd been distracted, the kid had managed to mostly disable her Turbulence Cast. It was still causing distortions around him, but it was now only an inconvenience. She recalled her crippled Cast back into the Loom, and transferred its power into another template she kept ready. As soon as her Hellfire was powered, she'd burn him slowly into cinders- or maybe quickly. Yes, as quickly as possible.

She never got the chance. As the power began to flow out of her crippled Turbulence Cast, the weave exploded. The kid had grafted a rider into her Cast! He was casting without templates, modifying both of their weaves at will.

A lesser Savant would have been destroyed, or at least incapacitated. Even Shiva was knocked to the ground. The energy that blew from her sabotaged Cast was mostly twisted around her closest shields, but her grip on the Loom had been shaken. She scrambled to reinforce her defenses, to get them back together before the kid made his next move.

She wanted to pretend that this was exciting, that it was great to finally have a real challenge, but like most of the cruel, she was a coward. She hated this struggle, and would have fled if she dared- if she weren't more afraid of reprisals from her masters at Asado, not to mention their hungry, playful ally. She shuddered at the thought of what it would do to her if she failed to acquire its precious key.

She had mostly rigged her defenses, but the kid just kept plunking away at them. He might be some kind of prodigy with the Loom, but he hadn't been able to accumulate much power before she knocked down his collector. He was again accumulating power, but he was using it as fast as it came in with a quick series of small and ineffective attacks. He was still young, still foolish. He had to realize that his attacks weren't doing much more than keeping her occupied.