He felt the change under his feet as he left the metal catwalk and started running on concrete. Herrera fired once but missed, and in the strobe flash of her gun, Barrow located her outline.
He didn’t slow down, just lowered his shoulder and slammed into her like a linebacker. She went flying back into the darkness. Barrow heard a satisfying crack and then the clatter of a dropped weapon.
“Go away,” he growled. “I won’t let you hurt him.”
“Why not, Barrow?” Herrera asked, her voice tight as if she were in pain. “He’s not your problem.”
Even as she talked, Barrow could tell she was moving, but in the total darkness, he could only hazard a guess as to where she was. He raised his gun nevertheless. There was a soft patter of something hopping on the metal behind him, but right now he had no time for that.
“Just walk away,” he warned her. “You saw the bodies upstairs. It’s not worth it.”
There was a rustle of fabric against something hard and very stealthy steps from where Barrow guessed Herrera was. He backed up slightly and fired once at the ceiling. The noise in the narrow and enclosed space was unbelievably loud and left his ears ringing. But he had seen Herrera in the flash. And the shot had let her know he was serious.
The footsteps stopped, but only for a moment. “You’re saying that you killed an entire merc platoon up there by yourself, Barrow? Don’t be ridiculous. You are lucky the building defenses did not kill you as well. You’re a mildly competent security guard but nothing more. I doubt you could kill anyone in cold blood…. Unless I were to give you a broken length of pipe, of course.”
Barrow drew breath in sharply at the remark. He could not help it. How did she know?
When Herrera next spoke her voice was much more confident. “Oh, yes. I know all about the murder. When I am given a mission, I make sure to investigate my targets very carefully. Don’t worry, though, nobody else knows. My boss is a powerful man, Barrow. He could ensure your record stays clean and give you a nice big bonus on top of that if you turn over Aaron Blake. All you have to do is take me to him and you walk away a rich man. A rich, free man.”
“No.”
Herrera sighed theatrically. She was still moving, however. Her voice drifting to Barrow from different places, so he could not pinpoint her location precisely. Looking for something, perhaps. The gun she had dropped. “Is he paying you? Whatever Blake has promised you, Richard Tanner can double it and more. He is the richest man in Aurora. You have no idea of the extent of his wealth, or his power.”
“No. Go away, Herrera. I’m not telling you again.”
“It’s not money? Then what can he… oh. I see.” Her tone changed, becoming derisive. “You’ve just lost my respect, Barrow. You’re just like all other men, willing to risk everything for a hot piece of ass. And here I thought you’d be a worthy opponent…. But you’ll find out very soon that protecting Aaron Blake was a mistake.”
The air whistled, and something hit Barrow on the side of the head. Hard. The impact stunned him slightly, but he managed to fire even so. The shot went wide, and he had the briefest glimpse of Herrera moving in swiftly with a wicked long knife in her hand. Her eyes were covered by dark goggles.
Then she was on him.
Barrow felt two slashes of the knife dangerously close to his neck before he even had time to bring his gun around to bear on his attacker. He cried out and lifted the gun to shoot, but Herrera elbowed him hard on the back of the forearm and forced him to drop the weapon. She stabbed him once, but Barrow felt the motion and twisted away—the tip of the knife sunk into his bicep instead of his chest. The pain was unbelievable as the blade ripped flesh open, but he made a blind grab for Herrera even so. His fingers grasped air.
“Too slow,” Herrera taunted him. Her voice was coming from the right, and Barrow turned, eyes opened as wide as he could, useless. His entire left arm was burning, from the first two slashes on the top of his shoulder and now the shallow wound in his arm. Barrow hoped she hadn’t hit an artery, but he had no way to tell. And now he didn’t even have his gun. “You really should come more prepared, Barrow. Or at least have the brains to realize that I was just making time to put on my night vision gear. I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised, though. Those black market steroids you love to use must have finally addled your brain.”
Barrow gritted his teeth and tried to focus his anger. If he could just grab her—he was more than twice her weight. She would have no chance.
He made a lunge for the place where he guessed she was. He spread his arms out wide and resisted the urge to flinch from hitting the unseen wall. It was all or nothing now.
The knife slashed him again, shallow but wide across the chest. The fingers on his left hand barely felt a hint of long hair whipping by. Then he hit the wall.
He slammed into it at full speed, and the impact knocked the wind out of him completely. His nose made a sickening crunch as it hit concrete, and as Barrow stumbled away, he immediately felt the hot trickle of blood on his upper lip.
“I bet you thought I would be easy to beat?” Herrera teased. “There’s more to combat than brute force, Barrow. Here, let me show you.”
Quick footsteps and then the knife struck again, this time slashing across Barrow’s back. It wasn’t a deep wound, but it hurt, and by the time Barrow turned around, Herrera was somewhere else already. Barrow struggled to get his breath back, tensed up his muscles, and aimed a wide punch in a circle but hit nothing. A split second later the knife came again, slashing across his upper thigh. Barrow stumbled, unable even to cry out in pain. He could not breathe; he could not see.
She was playing with him, he realized, bleeding from ten places at once. She could see him, she was incredibly fast, and she was a trained killer who would not hesitate to finish the job she had been sent to do.
Barrow felt the steel grip of powerless rage taking hold of his heart. He was going to die here. Worse, she was going to go after Rigel next, and he would be defenseless, trapped in that machine while she calmly walked up to him with a gun in her hand….
There was just one thing he could do.
Barrow backed away, feeling on both sides of him with his hands spread out. He found the wall to his right almost instantly and followed it back, hoping madly that he was going in the right direction.
“Running away, Barrow? Well, scratch that. Inching away?”
Barrow felt cold sweat drip down from his forehead, mingling with the blood pouring from his nose. He was taking shallow breaths, still not recovered from the brutal impact with the wall. The adrenaline surge in his veins kept him moving, though. And then suddenly his right hand felt a metal railing.
He kept going back. His feet touched the wobbly surface of the catwalk. He was betting on her arrogance, her desire to finish him off spectacularly with the knife instead of just picking up a gun and shooting him dead.
But Herrera was cautious. Barrow clearly heard the scrape of something metallic being picked up from the floor and then the clicks of a gun being reloaded. It at least gave him time to walk out to what he guessed was close to the center of the catwalk. And now he really had nowhere to go.
He heard her steps on metal as she walked a bit closer, probably to aim better. Barrow backed away still more, forcing Herrera to get closer if she wanted to make sure of the shot.
“Of all things, I didn’t expect you to be a coward, Barrow,” she said, and her voice sounded almost bored. “Good-bye.”
Barrow threw himself down and to the side, his full weight striking the railing of the catwalk. Herrera fired in response, but the entire structure underneath them wobbled under the impact and messed up her aim. Barrow nearly fell over the side but gripped the metal. His gamble was that Herrera would be thrown off by the sudden motion.
No such luck, as Barrow heard her cry of surprise and then the sharp clang of metal hitting metal as she probably used her gun hand to hold on to the railing.
But now she had nowhere else to go.
Barrow vaulted to his feet and rushed at her for the third time, knowing there was nothing she could do to get away in the narrow space. He closed his eyes, useless now anyway. This was it.
Herrera fired wildly again, but it didn’t hit him. And then he collided with her.
He landed on top of her and heard Herrera’s cry of pain, but she had folded her arm in front of her as she fell, and Barrow landed hard right on her elbow. It dug into his abdomen, and he groaned in pain.
He grabbed her wrists with all his strength, forced them down, and something snapped under his right hand. But she twisted under him, brought her knee forward in a vicious kick, and got him right in the groin.
Barrow’s grip on her wavered, and she used his hesitation to hit him again, forcing him to let her go. Barrow had never felt pain like this before. He wanted to throw up and did, unable to stop himself, then he tried standing up but couldn’t and lay doubled over on the floor. He expected Herrera to shoot him, but for some reason, she didn’t. When he finally stumbled to his feet with his legs shaking under him, Herrera was just out of reach, judging by the sound of her labored breathing.
“Son of a bitch,” she panted. “You got me good. And now I can’t… ow. Shit. Can’t even shoot you.”
Barrow reached for her. Missed.
“But I got something else here. Even if I… if I dropped my gun. You felt it before too. Remember?”
Barrow heard the sound of something slipping out of fabric, a click, and an electric hum.
The Buzzer.
She hit him with it. The blow glanced off his cut-up shoulder, but the charged weapon delivered a shock anyway that seemed to slice right through him. Barrow cried out and stumbled backward. It felt like acid had been poured into his wounds.
He could try to take it from her, but Barrow knew she was too quick. She’d just keep torturing him.
Or he could make a last wild grab, drag her over the side along with him, and die together when they hit the rocks down below.
Barrow squared his shoulders. He knew what he had to do.
He gathered the power in his legs for a final explosive jump.
Something very cold hopped right behind him timidly, as if uncertain. Barrow turned around, but he could see nothing, and yet the proximity to it filled him with inexpressible animal terror. For the second time in his life, his bladder simply let go.
Herrera had night vision equipment, though. She could see.
“What is that behind you?” she demanded, and her voice broke like a little girl’s. “Barrow? What—”
Another hop, passing him by, and yet in that tiniest brush of proximity Barrow felt a cold that was deeper than death, something… something incomprehensibly empty.
He heard Herrera’s horrible scream, but it was as if it came from far off, as if he couldn’t really focus….
Click click
.
The catwalk wobbled again and then shuddered as if something heavy had destabilized it and was suddenly gone. Barrow stood there, rooted to the spot, and it was only when he heard the second fainter scream coming from below that he knew Herrera had fallen over the side.
An awful thud cut off the scream.
Then silence.
But the presence, it was still there, and as Barrow looked blindly at the spot where Herrera had stood seconds ago, he felt the thing turn its attention to him.
Prepare to be destroyed….
RIGEL LOOKED
around at the unfamiliar landscape. There was no source to the voice and nothing to see except a wide expanse of grassy plains that hinted at rolling hills way off in the distance. He had no idea what he was supposed to do or where to go, and so he stood motionless, waiting for something to happen. A light breeze blew past him and toyed with his hair. It brought with it the strange yet pleasant smells of wet earth and rain. The sky overhead was blue and cloudless, however. A perfect shade of blue to match the perfect shade of green of each perfect blade of grass.
He noticed the absence of the pain first. So many days had passed since Rigel had been forced to run away, using his injured hands in ways he would have avoided at all costs before, and the constant dull pain in his wrists had become sort of a background noise. It had turned into something Rigel was aware of but only peripherally, since there had been nothing to do but accept it, keep moving. Now, however, he existed in a place that depended not on his body but on his mind. And the pain was gone.
He lifted his hands, marveling at the inexpressible sensation of the total absence of pain. Not even inside Otherlife had he felt like this. He felt the difference in here. There was something tangible and incomprehensively more complex to be seen even in the simple virtual environment he was in right now. This was not a patchwork effort of clueless engineers trying to come up with glorified chat rooms for virtual users, like Otherlife had been. This was the real thing. True virtual reality.
He was still wearing his bionic braces over his hands, but they were subtly different, more stylized. They looked more like armor than medical supports. Even more astounding, Rigel felt… strong. He closed both hands into fists, and for the first time in many years, there was no trembling, no debilitating sense of weakness to his grip, no sharp spike of pain racing up the underside of his wrist. It was unbelievable, almost overwhelming, and Rigel felt a sense of elation such as he had almost forgotten he could feel. He knew it was only temporary, an illusion of sorts, but even so he was happy. And enormously thankful.
He noticed the house then, standing in the distance at the top of a gentle rise in the seemingly infinite field of grass. Curious, he started moving toward it. He had taken only a couple of steps when he noticed a strange light coming from the upper story of the house, visible through one of the windows. The light beckoned, pulsing slightly, and Rigel immediately felt the shadow of a whisper in his mind, urging him wordlessly to go there.
Rigel started walking again, feeling strange, almost as if he were playing a first-person game that was particularly realistic. He wished he knew what he was supposed to do. Atlas had only told him that Its main consciousness had been corrupted in some way. It had asked Rigel to try to eliminate the thing that had somehow taken hold inside It so that the true power of Atlas’s unfettered AI could be made manifest. Atlas had not given Rigel any more instructions than that, though. And now that Rigel was inside the corrupted mainframe of the ancient machine, walking up to a virtual house that seemed to be approaching much faster than it should have, he had a brief moment of doubt. Why had that strange voice issued a threat as soon as Rigel had connected? And what if this virtual place turned out to be dangerous in a very real sense?