The Empire Of Time Part 18

"Anita IKosi, Philon. Anita IKosi."

"Oh no, oh-Mr. Pierce, what the h.e.l.l was she doing here?"

Pierce curled his fingers around Philon's throat, feeling the hard, fragile lump of his larynx, the vulnerable vertebrae. Philon's face grew pale except for the three little red wounds where the flechettes had hit.

Reluctantly, Pierce loosened his grip. Once he would have performed an execution like this quickly, efficiently, with a mild pleasure and no reflection. Now he had to choose; he was a free man. But he had not expected freedom to mean suppressing his desire for Phi-Ion's death. No wonder the indents feared freedom, if it meant a constant battle between mind and reflex.

He gripped the Dorian by his hair and slammed his head against the linoleum floor. Philon's eyes rolled up. Pierce rucked the Mallory, its clip still half full, into his s.h.i.+rt. He walked slowly out the door that the others had fled through.

He did not look back at Anita's body on the couch. He could not bear to.

Chapter Eleven.

The corridor from the I-Screen room led eventually to an empty, unpaved alley on the far side of the building from the burning bus. The indents and the knotholers had vanished. He was alone.

For a moment Pierce felt a kind of serene detachment. No one owned him; no one had any claims upon him; he was obliged to no one but himself. If he chose, he could walk into the nearest bar and drink himself stupid, or rent a cubicle in a p.o.r.notheque, or go for a long walk out into the Alcatraz Valley-anything. The Sherlock missile might go up, or it might not; the Gurkhas might arrive in time, or they might not. He could try to interfere, but he did not need to.

-An illusion, of course; the illusion of stillness at the peak of a trajectory. He walked out of the alley, into a street full of mid-morning traffic. Many people seemed to be hurrying toward the fire behind him; others stood in quiet, intimate groups, talking softly. Pierce remembered some crisis of his childhood (Panama? Caracas? Zimbabwe?) when people had behaved like this, fearing the bombs as they hadn't feared them in twenty years. He had removed a phantom threat, only to replace it with a real one.

Chavez Street was a wooded cul-de-sac in a prosperous neighborhood; the Agency safe house was near the end, a large, low home with curtained windows. A safe house, for G.o.d's sake, in a Colony town. He rapped on the front door. A taped voice crooned: "Welcome to 160 Chavez. Please insert your ID in the slot and stand in front of the camera lens. Thank you."

Pierce complied. Philon's ID card vanished, then popped out again. The door opened: a broad-shouldered blonde in a blue leotard smiled impersonally at him.

"So you're Philon-" Her face hardened as she compared his face with the indistinct image on the video monitor. Pierce stepped forward and clipped her on the chin, caught her as she fell, and carried her into the living room.

The house was silent, even to his ears. He slapped her smartly, rousing her, and pressed the Mallory against her belly.

"It's set on ten. No bulls.h.i.+t. I want Philon's car and the keys to the jet."

"I don't-"

"Don't waste my time, or you'll be the Agency's very last martyr."

She surrendered, led him to a safe in the hallway, opened it, and gave him a set of keys and a pa.s.scard.

"The jet's in Hangar J at Farallon. Fuelled and ready."

He looked at the pa.s.scard. "Modified Lear 200?"

"Yes."

"Jesus Christ." The modifications included four air-to-air missiles and two .75millimeter cannons. "Car in the garage? Good."

He took her into the nearest bedroom and knocked her out with two flechettes, then locked the door. If Philon got away from the authorities and tried to follow him, he would find little help here.

There was no trouble at the airport. His pa.s.scard showed him to be Robert R. Schneider, the registered owner of the Lear 200, which had been waiting in Hangar J for a week. After a quick checkout, he filed a flight plan to Hawaiki and took off. Twenty minutes on a south-southwest course put him out of range of Farallon's radar; he descended almost to the waves and turned southeast. Automatically, he checked out the Lear's armaments: all functioning. The plane was intended for surveillance and interdiction, usually against endos, so its firepower was not great. But it would serve Pierce's purposes, as it had been intended to serve Wigner's.

The ocean was empty, a chaos of blue and white that mirrored the sky. Here and there, the rotting corpse of an iceberg wallowed in the current, bound for extinction somewhere far to the south. Once Pierce saw a pod of blue whales, also bound south, to breed in the warm lagoons of Baja. Their great flanks gleamed in the sun; they were proud and remote, their concerns far removed from humanity's. Pierce felt a stab of envy as he pa.s.sed over them, envy for their clean and simple life. Then they were gone, and he turned his attention to the coast looming ahead.

He crossed the coast not far north of Los Alamitos, and tilted the Lear into a steep climb. They would pick him up on radar, of course, but not in time to do much about it. In ten minutes he was forty kilometers above the WDS and beginning the long plunge to Mojave Verde. The Missile Facility was a small gray-brown patch of geometry against the green of the hills; from the hills to the north, smoke from fires set by Klasayat's endo hunters drifted toward the gantries.

Two fighters were climbing fast to intercept, their paths like pincers closing to crush bun. Pierce got a radar lock on the northern fighter and launched one of his four missiles. Three seconds later the fighter vanished, exploded into a ball of smoke that elongated toward him like a cheated ghost.

The other pilot was more adept at evasion; he escaped two missiles and launched one of his own. Pierce forced the Lear down and away, but he was still too close when the missile detonated. The concussion flipped the Lear over; metal fragments ripped through it, and Pierce felt the controls go dead. He was falling, not diving, and the fighter pursued him like a stooping falcon.

-A ferocious jolt as Pierce ejected, and a lesser one as his parachute deployed. The fighter snarled past, began a long braking curve that would bring it back to finish Pierce off as he dropped, defenseless, to the smoke-shrouded ground.

Watching that distant, glinting dart as it arced across the sky, Pierce felt again the serenity he had known in the alley behind Klein's. He was troubled by nothing but the increasing pressure on his eardrums and the sharp stink of burning chaparral. He had tried and failed. Briefed, he had failed; Cleared, he had failed disastrously.

But there was still one chance.

The smoke thickened with a s.h.i.+ft in the wind, and he dropped the last twenty meters through acrid grayness. The fighter pilot, losing his visual fix and overestimating Pierce's height above the ground, fired wildly and missed. The jet thundered past as Pierce hit the ground and rolled down a steep slope into the floor of a gully. Shaken, he lay unmoving for a few minutes, face pressed to the earth. The fighter's roar receded and vanished.

Slowly Pierce stood up and disentangled himself from the chute. Gathering it into a bundle, he buried it under the rocks and mud where he had fallen. But he kept the survival pack attached to the chute, and with its compa.s.s got his bearings. He had come down northwest of the Missile Facility, probably no more than twenty kilometers from Mojave Verde, and much closer than that to the endos. The wind was blowing toward the Facility; he should be able to cover much of the distance camouflaged by the smoke. Coughing, he scrambled out of the gully and began to walk.

For an hour or so the going was fairly easy, though visibility was bad; he was moving downslope through open country dotted with clumps of oak and occasional patches of pine woods.

He found the hunters where he expected to. They had heard him coming, however, and stood in a semicircle across his path. He stopped.

They were very short, thick-bodied men in s.h.i.+rts and trousers of deerm'de. Most carried bows and arrows, a few had pistols, and one was even armed with an archaic AK-47. The rifleman stepped forward as the smoke thinned a bit. He was over a head shorter than Pierce, broad-faced and large-eyed, with geometric black tattoos across his cheeks. His thick, dark hair was tied in many thin braids.

"Greetings, Klasayat," Pierce said in the Gra.s.slanders' purring language. "I come in brotherliness."

The rifleman recognized him, and looked surprised. "Then hawks have learned to swim, Jerry-mis-sanan'kaa." Deathwalker-his old t.i.tle.

"Greater wonders have happened, Klasayat Horsehunter."

Incongruously, Klasayat pulled a pack of cigarettes-Salems-from a pouch on his belt, and lit one with a Zippo. Pierce smiled and laughed.

"You burn the hills and still have not enough smoke. Always you were a man of marvels, O Klasayat."

"Once I was, Jerry-missanan'kaa. All the families of the Gra.s.slanders had fed from my kills, and many a husband hoped for one of my sons. Then you came, and destroyed us. There are no women in our camp, no children."

"You made war on us."

"And what else should men do when their land is taken?"

"I bear no anger for it You did what men should do."

"As we shall do with you."

"O Klasayat, this smoke has clouded your wits. I am not some whimpering blue-eyes to be robbed and eaten. I am the Deathwalker."

Klasayat came closer, his eyes fixed on him, the rifle pointed at Pierce's chest. "Are you? Walking alone and dirty across the hills? I have looked in the eyes of the Deathwalker before, but I do not see him now."

Pierce laughed until the smoke made him cough. "Old friend, old war-mate, I walk closer to you than you know. Do the horses not think themselves growing safe as they flee your fires and race for the cliffs? When the sloth drinks at the tar pits, does she not see her own reflection and walk gladly to her death? And here you stand, speaking with me, yet seeing nothing."

The hunters s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably. Klasayat puffed on his cigarette, his dark eyes moving quickly from Pierce to his companions. Pierce knew it was his att.i.tude more than his words that had kept Klasayat from killing him outright. The little glowing ember of hope began to brighten in his mind: what he could not do with all the Agency's weaponry, he might do with a handful of wretched, homeless hunters. This was the last chance.

"Yours was the skybird that fell, slain by the other."

"It was."

"Why does the Deathwalker, defeated, come to us if not to die at my hands?"

"To give you back your land. All of it."

"After destroying us to take it away?"

"I am the Deathwalker; I do not explain."

"And how will you do this thing?" asked one of the other hunters, ignoring Klasayat's glare.

"The men who build the firetrees, the rockets, have displeased me. I go to overthrow them. When they are driven from the land, it shall be yours again."

Klasayat spat. "What joy would we have of it? We are men alone, half-men." Again Pierce laughed, half contemptuously. "Does Klasayat tell me he can steal a rifle, tobacco, a fire-maker, but not women? Will the mountain people not beg you to accept their loveliest daughters when they see you rulers of the gra.s.slands again?"

The hunters looked at one another, and Pierce knew he had won them, knew that Klasayat had read the same message in their dark, yearning eyes. The muzzle of the AK-47 lifted; Klasayat slung it over his shoulder.

"It is well. What shall we do, Jerry-missanan'kaa?"

"We must go into the town where the rockets nest. Quickly."

"This is not easily done. We are great thieves, and we have often stolen from the blue-eyes' houses, but always at night."

"How close can you get in daylight?"

"Within easy bowshot of the guards, on the north side of the town."

On that side of Mojave Verde, Pierce remembered, there was dense undergrowth, some wooded patches, and outcrops of bare rock, all higher than the settlement. The town itself was a compact cl.u.s.ter of apartment buildings, stores, and offices-a typical akademgorodok. The Facility buildings were southeast of the residential area; Mission Control was at the top of a low ridge overlooking the town on one side and the launching pads on the other. The airfield was ten kilometers west of the town.

From the hunters' vantage point, he should at least be able to see the Sherlock missile if it was still on the ground; if it wasn't, there would be no point in going farther. And if the Gurkhas did arrive in time after all, he would have to disappear very quietly.

-And do what? he asked himself.

-Go endo for a while. With the Gra.s.slanders, perhaps, if I can talk them into accepting me, or with the mountain tribes in the Panamints. Do some hunting, some thinking. A lot of thinking.

"Let us go, then."

They turned and moved silently through the smoke. For about a kilometer they walked single-file over increasingly stony terrain. Abruptly, they stood on the edge of a steep-sided ravine. At the bottom, a stream pounded over rocks; halfway down the slope, four horses lay dead or crippled.

Klasayat smiled. "You bring us luck." Some of the hunters scrambled down to butcher the horses. They took the livers and tongues, and left the rest to rot.

"A waste of meat," Pierce remarked as they resumed their path.

"There are plenty of horses," Klasayat said. "Why should we not eat well when we can?"

"You speak well," Pierce replied. Why expect economy from the hunters who were driving dozens of species to extinction? And who was he, after all, to criticize?

Both they and the wind changed direction, and they could breathe pure air again. It was a beautiful day: the sun hung in the clear April sky, and the hills were fresh with new green. They were in open forest now, moving at an easy, steady pace under good cover. The endos noted the plentiful spoor of horse, camel, and deer, and with irony praised the blue-eyes for driving tigers and wolves out of the region.

Pierce liked them. They had been the scourge of the whole Mojave once, incorrigible thieves and woman-stealers, and quick to master the weapons they stole. But they had refused to let the blue-eyes sweep them away, had taken the invaders seriously but not fatalistically, and had made a spirited fight of it. To have lost as terribly as they had (Pierce had made a point of leaving the women's and children's corpses in their camps) and still stay alive and together was not a small achievement.

At last they crossed a wooded ridge and found themselves looking down at Mojave Verde. As Klasayat had said, the guards were very close. Fifty meters downslope, a high barbed-wire fence ran east and west. Beyond it was a strip of bare earth perhaps three hundred meters wide and then the nearest buildings. A sentry patrolled inside the fence in a jeep with an armorgla.s.s dome.

Pierce looked beyond, to the gantries rising .above the next ridge. And there it was, glowing in the late-afternoon sun: a tall, blunt-nosed missile, still plugged into its umbilicals but obviously almost ready for liftoff.

"What now, Jerry-missanan'kaa?"

"I must go to the big round house on the ridge. Once I am through the fence and across the empty strip, I will have no trouble. But I will need a guide through the wire, and a distraction to lure the guards away."

"And what will you do in the round house, Jerry-missanan'kaa?"

Pierce looked into Klasayat's eyes. "I will set fire to the firetree, burn it to ashes while its roots are still in earth. When that is done, those who have displeased me will be overthrown, for that is no firetree like the others that grow there. Other men are coming at my bidding; they will seize my enemies, and all will leave. Then you will possess this land again."

"When you came to us before, you promised to destroy us, and you kept your promise. Now keep this one, Jerry-missanan'kaa."

Pierce laughed softly.

The sun went down. The Gra.s.slanders ate raw horse liver and tongue, and exchanged hunting boasts. The lights of Mojave Verde gleamed like a carpet of stars, while the missile stood like a cathedral spire in floodlit splendor. The bare strip beyond the wire was not illuminated, though darkened floodlights were s.p.a.ced along the fence. At unpredictable intervals, the sentry jeep pa.s.sed back and forth.

"There is a path," Klasayat murmured. "To step away from it is to die. The great lights blaze forth, and the men inside come firing their guns. Each must step in the proper place, or all will be lost."

A sensor array, clearly, had been dug into the bare strip. Total interdiction would cause false alarms and inhibit the guards; this way, they could move quickly through clear lanes.

"How is it that you know where to step, Klasayat?"

"A strange question. We have eyes, we have noses. The path is clear to us."

"Even as you see where water-root lies buried in the dry season?"

"Just so. Can you not see such things?"

"Sometimes. But tonight I will follow where your feet go."

"Good. When shall we go? All are eager."