—straight up.
There was an astonished pause as the soldiers blinked at the empty spot where she’d stood only a second before, and that moment of hesitation was enough to seal their doom. Before they could change tactics, she spun two machine pistols from flat-space holsters sewn against the fabric of her slacks on both hips; a millisecond later the barrels of both her guns belched fire and death down on their heads.
From the safety of the compound’s surveillance room, the Chief of Research and several Commando supervisors and security technicians stood frozen in front of a bank of surveillance screens. The Chief could feel the stress and anxiety building inside his skull like a massive migraine headache, the kind he’d gotten as a child before Beltane Pharmaceuticals had come up with the medication, an inoculation much like the smallpox shots of the old centuries that had ended migraines forever. His stomach churned with sudden nausea and little yellow lights sparkled at the edges of his vision. Yep, just like a migraine.
Gripping the edge of the counter, the Chief finally found his voice. It came out raspy and low, almost a whisper. “Christ—how did she
do
that?”
“She must have some kind of gravity leveler,” offered one of the techs nervously. He slapped his fingers against his face and wiped roughly at the corners of his mouth, the movement betraying his own fear. “Or—”
The Chief waved him away impatiently; he’d neither expected nor wanted an answer right now—explanations could wait for later. Right now, they had to think
forward
. “Well, whatever it is, it’s ours now.” He glared at the monitor that showed Violet scuttling along the ceiling of a corridor like some sort of oversized spider. God, how he wished he could reach right through the screen and pluck her through it. He’d throttle the bitch himself. “Because she is
not
going to make it out of this complex alive.”
Violet found the door to the emergency exit staircase almost immediately, but when she tugged it open she could already hear the security forces rushing up from the lower floors. Their boots clapped against the rubberized metal stairs, giving her a decent idea of their numbers. Clearly they weren’t concerned that she could hear them—they had plenty of confidence that they could best her by sheer numbers. It didn’t matter. Her gyroscope was still engaged and she saw them long before they saw her. The ignorant soldiers were, of course, looking forward and up—that was how the world in which they had been trained operated. Violet, on the other hand, was looking
down
at them from the rear, at an almost negative, Escher-like image of the staircase. Once you knew how this dimension worked, it was absurdly easy to walk across the ceiling over their heads and mow them down with machine-gun fire like the images in the old twenty-first-century video games.
She left the bodies behind with barely a glance, and the next corridor she stepped into was empty . . . but of course, it wouldn’t be for long. She kept her pace brisk and her gaze darted in every direction as she reloaded her guns from magazines stored in flat-space reservoirs on the inside of her coat, all the while never loosening her iron-tight hold on that priceless white briefcase. Even so, she damn near dropped it when the familiar voice of the Chief of Research came thundering out of a set of speakers hidden in the wall almost directly above her head.
“Violet Song jat Sharif! Tell me I’m wrong!”
Without looking up from her task, Violet snapped back, “You’re wrong.” It was a stupid thing for the idiot to say, so she gave him a stupid answer. Sometimes, the little things balanced out just right.
“Taking a break from blowing up government buildings?”
When she didn’t bother to answer, he continued in a more frustrated tone of voice,
“Why are you doing this?”
His voice was loud enough so that she could feel the vibrations through the soles of her boots. Of course, she was extrasensitive to most things that the so-called normal people missed on a daily basis—hearing, smell, taste. Wasn’t that funny, considering the public’s impression of “vampires” was still Bram Stoker and Bela Lugosi, neither of whom had been presumed to have any predilection toward real food.
But wait—he’d asked another stupid question, hadn’t he? And, of course, she was expected to answer. Just in case there were video cameras hidden in the walls as a companion to the speakers, she lifted her head so that her face could clearly be seen. Then she drew her mouth back in something that was part snarl, part derision, and the rest an exaggerated caricature of innocence. “Because I hate humans with every fiber of my being?” She widened her eyes and blinked, then her mouth twisted of its own accord. “And I’ll kill every one I see almost as quickly as they’ll try to kill
me.
”
“Listen to yourself,”
he came back immediately.
“You used to be human.”
He sounded absurdly like a parent trying to admonish a teenaged girl for doing something he couldn’t quite explain was wrong.
Unfortunately, his words—“
You
used
to be”—
had only validated her rage. Her expression was thunderous. “But not anymore, right?” She tossed her head and, with the briefcase tucked beneath her arm, spun the guns expertly in each hand. “I got
sick . . . and now I’m something
less than human.” Her voice slid down until it was nearly a hiss. “Something worthy of
extermination.
”
“It’s academic now, isn’t it?”
She could almost picture the man shrugging carelessly. He’d been running scared for a few moments there, but now he would be reenergized, confident that the abundant security forces had strategically repositioned themselves for her capture. Her
demise.
Yes, he had the same disregard for her and her race that the rest of them did; sometimes she felt that the noninfected looked at her and saw the word “
DISPOSABLE
” tattooed across her forehead. Then the Chief spoke again and her renewed anger wiped out the rest of Violet’s musing.
“You won’t make it out of here with that case.”
She snapped her wrists, then brought the weapons up to bear and lengthened her stride. “Watch me!” Before he could answer she turned a corner, paused to get her bearings, then spotted a ventilation grate high on the wall by the ceiling juncture. Without hesitating, she scuttled up the wall like a crab and pulled on the cover; when it resisted, she grimaced and forced her fingers through the slots, then yanked backward. The screws gave out and the metal screeched as she forced it free. When Violet peered inside, it was all clear. The security forces hadn’t thought about this route yet. She clambered inside and tried to put the grate covering back, but it was useless—too strong for her own good, not only had she sheared off every one of the screws when she’d pulled it free, she’d mangled it so badly that there was no way to bend the metal back into shape so she could at least fake it. She pulled it inside and let it drop noisily to the floor of the metal duct in which she was crouching. The sound was like thunder, reverberating along the metal pathway and bouncing back on itself. It didn’t matter; they were going to find her anyway.
There wasn’t much light inside the ventilation duct, just what bled in from the gratings every so many feet. Violet’s eyes adjusted to the lower light immediately but everything looked the same in every direction and she had to allow herself a precious few seconds to orient herself. Being in here at least gave her several choices, although predictably most of those would already be compromised—the security forces might not be as quick as she was, but they weren’t dummies either. They also had access to computer blueprint imagery showing every last space in this building, including all the ductwork, ingress and egress. There was nothing to do but charge ahead and let her instincts guide her toward her outside rendezvous and freedom. And she was
not
leaving this installation without this briefcase.
Violet nearly fell when she came to the intersection of another part of the ductwork, this one a vertical air shaft. With its drop-off only an inch or two in front of her feet, it fell away into muted silver shadows, backlit periodically by workers’ tube lights set into the metal every four yards or so. When she looked up the shaft, she could just spot the Medical Commandos getting ready to drop toward her.
She grinned, checked the integrity of the small gyroscope at her belt, then jumped into the air shaft and fell upward.
The Commandos writhed on their drop ropes and tried to get out of the way of her bullets, but there was simply no escaping the barrage of gunfire as she twisted and fired behind herself, taking advantage of the still activated technology. Good old gravity, that one thing that in the past had always been so very inescapable turned out to be their doom— in seconds they all hung there, limp and lifeless at the end of their rappeling cords; in another instant, Violet hit the grating at the top of the shaft with a
crash!
and exploded through it without having a clue about what was on the other side. She somersaulted up, then came back down as her body’s inner ear adjusted itself and intervened. When she landed, she was straddling one of the skylights and already belting out hundreds of rounds at the waiting security forces. They went down easily, and before their superiors could think to regroup and send more, Violet leaped off the skylight and ran for the edge of the roof. Again without bothering to look, she vaulted over the side.
She swung and, for the barest of seconds, went into free fall. Did birds feel like this? It was wonderful—weightless and giddy—and it was a damned shame she didn’t have the time to enjoy it. Then her trajectory, angled ever so slightly, took her back against the side of the building. She touched it and stuck, then instantly sprinted down its slick metal side. When she came to a huge plate-glass window, she jumped over its ten-foot expanse; there would be security forces on the other side of the glass, so she beat them to the draw and fired into it, showering them with jagged pieces of glass and the remains of the window frame, driving them solidly back into the interior. They returned fire even as they fell, until what was left of the heavy plate glass seemed to be going in all directions at once.
She sprinted onto the earth-gravity surface of the alley behind the building with the gyroscope still giving off a reassuring pulse at her hip. She blinked once and started to turn, then froze as she looked eye-to-barrel at the auto-rifle pointed directly at her nose, a mere half a foot separating her skin from the cold metal.
For the first time since she’d come out of the air shaft, Violet realized it was raining. Not that hard, but enough to coat her skin and slick her hair down against her scalp at the same time it drifted against the face visors of the seven Command Marines surrounding her. Raindrops trickled slowly down the dark shields, making it impossible for her to see the eyes of the men she was about to kill.
No matter. She never did.
She whirled within the circle of rifle barrels, becoming a blur that was moving too fast for them to see, much less track. Then she stopped and simply stood there, and for a very long moment no one else moved—not a muscle twitch, a word, or even a gesture with the end of a weapon. Then, almost as one, all seven Marines just . . . toppled over backward and lay still, their abdomens now nothing more than wide, gaping wounds matched edge for edge with the next dead soldier.
Violet glanced at them indifferently, then held up the chisel-nosed sword she’d used to kill her would-be assassins, holding it out so the rain would wash the blood from the Hindi-Thai script that scrolled the length of the black blade. When the last of the scarlet drops had run off the end and disappeared, she slid it back into the flat-space sheath strapped under her wrist. The sound it made—a strange cross between a tinny clanging and a whine—was the only sound in the alley besides the gentle thrum of the rain.
With a sudden rush of adrenaline, Violet spun and gripped the white briefcase tighter. No one with a great cause works alone and she was no different; her comrades had made sure her method of escape, a metallic midnight-blue motorcycle, would be parked at this prearranged location. She jumped on the throttle hard and slammed it into first gear, hearing the hopped-up motor respond instantly. Then, as the last of the medication she so loathed finally diluted and cleared out of her system, her other eye finally slid away from the brown into full violet-blue. She blinked a couple of times and grinned wickedly, then Violet hammered the bike into a tight spin and screamed out of the alley in a cloud of hot, white smoke.
In another few seconds, the rain and the scant breeze had washed away the last trace of her existence.
Violet guessed she had maybe ten seconds to contact Nerva before the L.L.D.D.’s forces would figure out her escape method and come after her. The rain was a nice touch, but when it really counted, it wasn’t going to help much. Ten seconds wasn’t a whole lot of time, so she’d better make good use of it.
The bike thrummed beneath her like a huge cat hungering for freedom, wanting to stretch its body and run. She wasn’t pushing the engine—not yet—but the time would certainly come. For the here and now she skimmed along rapidly but not at a breakneck pace; this way she could put some distance between her and the compound and avoid messing up her front wheel and getting blood—very traceable—on the motorcycle by running over any human security forces. Pedestrians were just as annoying.
Violet leaned smoothly into a right turn, then steadied the bike and jabbed a finger at the screen phone built into the console. A red digital readout flashed across the screen, but she couldn’t read it and drive at the same time. It didn’t matter, anyway—all this software cared about was her vocal cords. “It’s me,” she said breathlessly. Every time she did this, she worried that the computer wouldn’t recognize her. How could her voice sound the same when sometimes she was running for her life, and at others her day was about as exciting as a farmer watching the chickens peck at the gravel.