city blues 02 - angel city blues (45 page)

“I’ve got a question for you, Aoki-san,” I said. That wasn’t his real name, but Nine-fingers, knew that I was talking to him. “Have you ever wondered why Jiro suddenly decided to give up the Dream Snatcher role? He was the star of the show for the first dozen or so recordings, right? Then he handed the ball to you, and he never touched it again. Doesn’t that make you curious?”

“You’re dead,” Nine-fingers growled. “I don’t talk to corpses.”

I couldn’t resist the obvious jab. “
Corpses
? You mean like your two pals, who just got atomized? Funny how often that happens to people who associate with Jiro, isn’t it? One minute, they’re laughing and scratching. The next minute, they’re ground up too small for fish food.”

I kept going before Nine-fingers could respond. “Let’s get back to the SCAPE thing for a second. Jiro has been pulling his own Dream Snatcher recordings off the street, did you know that? Don’t take my word for it. Check your distribution channels, or whatever.
Your
recordings are flooding the market.
Jiro’s
are quietly disappearing. Want to know
why
? Ask Jiro.”

The buzzer sounded again, and the two halves of the geodesic sphere began to separate.

“I think we’ve heard enough,” Jiro said.

My eyes stayed locked on Nine-fingers. “He doesn’t want you to know why, but I’m going to tell you anyway.”

“I said that’s
enough
!” Jiro shouted.

“Because Rhiarra Dancer might have emailed her algorithm to a friend, or stored it on some server outside of LAPD’s influence. Somebody could be using it right now to track down the Dream Snatcher. And Jiro wants to make damned sure they go after
you
, instead of
him
.”

Jiro pushed off hard, and started floating in my direction. “That’s a fucking lie!”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “You make your friends as expendable as your enemies.”

When he was about an arm’s length away, Jiro latched onto a grab bar and braked to a halt. He gave me a shove that sent me floating toward the open sphere.

It took every gram of willpower to keep the rising fear out of my voice as I sailed toward the site of my death. I had no weapons left but words. All I could do was keep talking, and hope that something I said would alter the balance of the situation.

“What
really
happened to your brother?” I asked. I put my best sneer into my voice. “Ichiro’s shuttle accident was awfully convenient, wasn’t it? He was your father’s favorite son, right up until his flight burned up on re-entry. A half-dozen cracked tiles in the heat shield, and suddenly you were Daddy’s favorite boy. Or at least his
only
boy.”

“Shut your filthy mouth!” Jiro hissed.

“Or
what
? You do to me what you did to your two buddies just now?”

Nine-fingers made no move to intercept me as I drifted past the sphere. Jiro had to dive through the air to chase me down. It took him a minute or so for him to check my movement, and bring me back around to a stop between the separated hemispheres. He shoved the detritus of Arm-twister and Messenger-boy aside. Shoes, clothing, and innumerable loops of filament spinning and undulating through the air like so many freeform sculptures.

“Did you handle the heat shield yourself?” I asked. “A little space-walk with an EVA suit and a hammer, maybe? Or did you let one of your expendable friends take the risk?”

Jiro’s jaw muscles tightened, but he had apparently decided to ignore my jibes. He launched himself in Vivien’s direction.

I called out to his receding back, “I’m guessing that somebody else did the dirty work for you. Because you don’t have the guts to do it yourself.”

Jiro didn’t respond as he flew to an anchor point and shoved Vivien’s cocoon toward me. This time—aware that he wasn’t going to get any help from Nine-fingers—he coasted along close behind, ready to handle the braking maneuver himself.

He brought Vivien to a halt next to me. “I’m doing
this
myself,” he said.

Vivien’s laugh dripped with condescension. “Oh, yes… You’re doing it yourself…
after
somebody else has rendered your enemies helpless. You were practically pissing yourself when we pulled you out of that shower. You only get brave when there’s no risk involved.”

She shifted to Japanese. “Tansho! Konjö nashi!”

Jiro leaned closer, until his face was only about ten centimeters from hers. His grin was nasty. “Kono joro!”

He raised his voice. “I killed him myself, you stupid bitch!
I
wrecked his heat shield. And then I laughed as my dear brother hit the atmosphere and fried.
Beautiful
Ichiro.
Wonderful
Ichiro. My father’s perfect son. The hope and future of our family. But I brought the little bastard down. Burning across the sky like a falling star. Ashes scattered across half a continent.”

Jiro pushed off from the rim of the sphere, and floated back outside of its perimeter. “Now, I’m afraid it’s
your
turn.

The buzzer sounded, and the spherical chamber began to close around us.

This was it. The end of things. All of my clever deductions, stalling tactics, and divide-and-conquer strategies had come to nothing. My final and only weapons, my words, had failed. It was over.

The geodesic hemispheres met and latched together with a heavy thunk.

Jiro extracted the nano containment pod, or whatever the gray pistol-like gadget was called. He darted to the table with the rack and swapped out the used device for a new one.

He was back a few seconds later, inserting the nozzle end of the object into the fitted receptacle in one of the metal bands that bisected the sphere. The inside surface of the band was pierced by hundreds of parallel vents, the opening of each shaped like a crescent moon or a fingernail clipping.

Jiro pulled out his data pad and finger tapped his way through the routine that would presumably program the nano-machines.

We were seconds away from being devoured by microscopic robots. But unlike our predecessors in the chamber, we were not already dead. I didn’t even want to
think
about what this was going to feel like, so I decided to distract myself, and (hopefully) Vivien as well.

The cocoon wouldn’t let me turn my head very far, so I had to make due with looking at her out of the corner of my eye. The first thing that popped into my head was stupid and banal, but I said it anyway. “Any regrets?

Vivien raised an eyebrow. “Yes, as a matter of fact. I regret not fucking you after I got this great Kabuki-girl makeover. I think I look pretty hot right now.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “You look
damned
hot right now. I can’t believe we didn’t get around to that.”

“Maybe next time,” she said softly.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe next time.”

I heard the beginnings of a low whistling sound, and the air around the crescent shaped vents took on a shimmer. The nano-bots were flooding into the sphere now.

I could see the mist forming around us, restless plumes of darkening haze, their myriad movements announced by the rising wail of a miniature cyclone—just a couple of meters in diameter. Barely large enough to engulf two helpless humans.

And then the cloud of hungry machines converged on us, and I felt a million microscopic touches on my body.

Vivien screamed.

Or maybe it was me.

CHAPTER 38

We were at the center of a swirling maelstrom of voracious robots, each of them ripping, tearing, gobbling one molecule at a time. The pain hadn’t hit me yet, which probably meant that the nano-bots probably hadn’t bitten in deeply enough to hit nerve receptors. But I knew that agony was not more than a second or two in my future.

“Look!” Vivien shouted.

I frantically scanned the nano-cloud, wondering what new threat she had spotted. “
Where
?”

“Not in here!” she shouted. “Out
there
!”

I shifted my plane of focus to the laboratory outside of the sphere. Even through the cloud of teeming nano-bots, I could see what she was talking about. The display screens throughout laboratory had come to life, and they were all showing the same thing: the grinning face of Priscilla Dancer.

What the
hell
?

Somehow, on every screen, Dancer was looking directly at me. As soon as she was sure that I had noticed her, she threw me an exaggerated wink.

It was hard to know which was more bizarre: seeing the face of a dead woman who could not possibly be here, or being winked at by an electronic ghost while I was in the process of being devoured by a swarm of nanoscale robots.

Although, come to think of it, the little monsters didn’t seem to be doing much in the way of devouring. I glanced over to Vivien and saw the outer layer of her cocoon filaments eroding. Strands were fraying, parting, and falling away. I couldn’t tilt my head far enough to look down at my own body, but I still wasn’t feeling any signs of pain. The nano-cloud wasn’t eating us. It was eating the cocoons.

“It’s Dancer!” I yelled. “She reprogrammed the nano-bots!”

We were not going to be eaten! We were not going to be eaten! We were not going to be eaten! The litany of unexpected survival was cycling through my brain so rapidly that I nearly missed the opening of the next act in our little drama.

It started with the senator slapping the side of his neck, like he was trying to swat a gnat or a mosquito. Apparently, he wasn’t very well anchored, because the sudden motion spun him away from his foothold and he began rolling through the air, swatting violently at himself.

Then, Nine-fingers and Jiro got in on the act, both men slapping at their arms, faces, necks, and any other stretches of exposed skin. They maintained their footing longer than the senator had managed, but their swats were no less frantic. A few seconds of increasingly wild convulsions jerked them loose and sent them tumbling through the zero-gravity environment.

I glanced over toward the table where the nano containment pods were racked. The air fumed and wavered around the nozzle end of every device. Dancer had apparently triggered them all at the same time, and the laboratory outside of the sphere was rapidly growing darker with teeming nano-machines.

I was suddenly glad to be inside the chamber, instead of out there, where the nanos were getting down to their nasty business.

It was a thousand times worse than what had happened to the bodies of Arm-twister and Messenger-boy, because the two thugs had already been dead. The three men outside of the chamber were alive, at least for the moment. Their cries rose to shrieks. They thrashed, and contorted, ricocheting off walls and equipment, flinging sprays of blood droplets as their flesh eroded away. The nano-bots guzzled down each drop, scouring the lab for every mote of human tissue.

Either Nine-fingers or Jiro (it was no longer possible to tell which) floundered into the side of the chamber and bounced off. As the pitiful figure rebounded away, one gnawed arm slapped wetly against the transparent surface, leaving a red hand-shaped smear on the faceted diamond analog. That was when I closed my eyes, and tried to ignore the mewling wails of the three dying things that had once been men.

I didn’t open them again until I was sure that everything was over. When I did, the last vestiges of the cocoon filaments were gone, and the sphere appeared to be empty of nanos.

Vivien floated beside me, her eyes still closed—legs drawn up, and arms wrapped around her body.

Out in the lab, I could see odd bits of clothing drifting about, but no sign of the senator, or Nine-fingers, or Jiro.

The buzzer sounded, and the sphere began to open.

Vivien flinched at the sound, and her eyes snapped open. I knew she was feeling the same rush of panic that I was experiencing. We both began scanning the area outside for signs of the nano swarms. I couldn’t see any, and Vivien didn’t call out any warnings. Nothing came surging through the widening gap to eat us, so apparently the lab was clear.

The noises of the whirlwinds had died away now. The only sounds were the cooling fans of some of the laboratory equipment, overlain by the ragged breathing of two people sliding down the back side of an adrenaline crash.