I didn’t run over to it. Instead, I forced myself to locate all the doors into the lab. There were four—two opposite each other at each end of the room. So no matter what I did I was going to have to turn my back on at least one of them.
But there was nothing I could do about that. I went to the door across from me and put my ear to it for a long minute, listening as hard as I knew how, trying to tell if anything was happening on the other side. Then I went to the other two doors and did the same thing. But all I heard was the thudding of my heart. If Sharon’s Point was using sound-sensor alarms instead of field scanners, I was in big trouble.
I didn’t hear anything. But still my nerves were strung as tight as a cat’s as I went over to the gurney. I think I was holding my breath.
Under the sheet I found a dead man. He was naked, and I could see the bullet holes in his chest as plain as day. There were a lot of them. Too many. He looked as if he’d walked into a machine gun. But it must have happened a while ago. His skin was cold, and he was stiff, and there was no blood.
Now I understood why Ushre and Paracels needed a cremator. They couldn’t very well send bodies to the next of kin looking like this.
For a minute I just stood there, thinking I was right, Sharon’s Point used people instead of animals, people hunting people.
Then all the lights in the lab came on, and I almost collapsed in surprise and panic.
Avid Paracels stood in the doorway where I’d entered the lab. His hand was still on the light switch. He didn’t look like he’d even been to bed. He was still wearing his white coat, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to be up in his lab at I AM. Well, maybe it was. Somehow that kind of light made him look solider, even more dangerous.
And he wasn’t surprised. Not him. He was looking right at me as if we were both keeping some kind of appointment.
For the first couple heartbeats I couldn’t seem to think anything except, Well, so much for technology. They have some other kind of alarm system.
Then Paracels started talking. His thin old voice sounded almost smug. “Ushre spotted you right away,” he said. “We knew you would come back tonight. You’re investigating us.”
For some strange reason, that statement, made me feel better. My pick hadn’t failed me after all. My equipment was still reliable. Maybe I was better adjusted to being. cyborg than I thought. Paracels was obviously unarmed-and I had my blaster. There was no way on God’s green earth he could stop me from using it. My pulse actually began to feel like it was getting back to normal.
“So what happens now?” I asked. I was trying for bravado. Special Agents are supposed to be full of bravado. “Are you going to kill me?”
Paracels’s mood seemed to change by the second. Now he was bitter again. “I answered that question this morning,” he snapped. “I’m a doctor. I don’t take lives.”
I shrugged, then gestured toward the gurney. “That’s probably a real comfort to him.” I wanted to goad the good doctor.
But he didn’t seem to hear me. Already he was back to smug. “A good specimen.” He smirked. “His genes should be very useful.”
“He’s dead,” I said. “What good’re dead genes?”
Paracels almost smiled. “Parts of him aren’t dead yet. Did you know that? Some parts of him won’t die for two more days. After that we’ll burn him.” The tip of his tongue came out and drew a neat line of saliva around his lips.
Probably that should’ve warned me. But I was concentrating on him the wrong way. I was watching him as if he were the only thing I had to worry about. I didn’t hear the door open behind me at all. All I heard was one last quick step. Then something hit the back of my head and switched off the world.
5
Which just goes to show that being a cyborg isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Cyborgs are in trouble as soon as they start adjusting to what they are. They don’t rely on themselves anymore—they rely on their equipment. Then when they’re in a situation where they need something besides a blaster, they don’t have it.
Two years ago there wasn’t a man or animal that could sneak up behind me. The hunting preserves taught me how to watch my back. The animals didn’t know I was on their side, and they were hungry. I had to watch my back to stay alive. Apparently not any more. Now I was Sam Browne, Special—Agent—cyborg—hotshot. As far as I could tell, I was as good as dead.
My hands were taped behind my back, and I was lying on my face in something that used to be mud before it dried, and the sun was slowly cooking me. When I cranked my eyes open, all I could see was brush a few cm. from my nose. A long time seemed to pass before I could get up the strength to focus my eyes and lift my head. Then I saw I was lying on a dirt path that ran through a field of low bushes. Beyond the bushes were trees.
All around me there was a faint smell of blood. My blood. From the back of my head.
Which hurt like a sonofabitch. I put my face back down in the dirt. I would’ve done some cursing, but I didn’t have the strength. I knew what had happened.
Ushre and Paracels had trussed me up and dropped me off in the middle of their preserve, Smelling like blood. They weren’t going to kill me—not them. I was just going to be another one of their dead bunters.
Well, at least I was going to find out who was bunting what (or whom) around here.
Minutes passed before I mustered enough energy to find out if my legs were taped, too. They weren’t. How very sporting. I wondered if it was Ushre’s idea or Paracels’.
That hit on the head must’ve scrambled my brains (the pain was scrambling them for sure). I spent what felt like ages trying to figure out who was responsible for leaving my legs free, when I should’ve been pulling myself together. Getting to my feet. Trying to find some water to wash off the blood. Thinking about staying alive. More time passed before I remembered I had a transceiver .in my skull. I could call for help.
Help would take time. Probably it wouldn’t corns enough to save me. But I could at least call for it. It guarantee that Sharon’s Point got shut down. Ushre Paracels would get murder one—mandatory death sentence. I could at least call.
My tongue felt like a sponge in my mouth, but I concentrated hard and managed to find the transmission switch. Then I tried to talk. That took longer. I had to swallow several times to work up enough saliva to make a sound. But finally I did it. Out loud I said one of the Bureau’s emergency code words.
Nothing happened.
Something was supposed to happen. That word was supposed to trigger the automatic monitors in the tape room. The monitors were supposed to put the duty room on emergency status. Instantly. Inspector Morganstark (or whoever was in charge) was supposed to come running. He was supposed to start talking to me (well, not actually talking—my equipment didn’t receive voices. Only a modulated hum. But I knew how to read that hum). My transceiver was supposed to hum.
It didn’t.
I waited; and it still didn’t. I said my code word again, and it still didn’t. I said all the code words, and it still didn’t. I swore at it until I ran out of strength. Nothing.
Which told me (when I recovered enough to do more thinking) that my transceiver wasn’t working. Wonderful. Maybe that hit on the head had broken it. Or maybe— I made sure my right hand was behind my left. Then I tongued the switch that was supposed to fire my blaster.
Again nothing.
Twisting my right hand, I used those fingers to probe my left palm. My blaster was intact. The concealing membrane was still in place. The thing should’ve worked.
I was absolutely as good as dead.
Those bastards (probably Ushre, the electronics engineer) had found out how to turn off my power pack. They had turned me off.
That made a nasty kind of sense. Ushre and Paracels had already cremated one Special Agent. Probably that was where they had gotten their information. Kolcsz’s power pack wouldn’t have melted. With the thing right there in his hand, Ushre would’ve had an
easy time making a magnetic probe to turn it off. All he had to do was experiment until he got it right.
What didn’t make sense was the way I felt about it. Here I was, a disabled cyborg with his bands taped behind him, lying on his face in a hunting preserve that had already killed forty-five people—forty-six counting the man in Paracels’s lab—and all of a sudden I began to feel like I knew what to do. I didn’t feel turned off: I felt like I was coming back to life. Strength began coming back into my muscles. My brain was clearing. I was getting ready to move.
I was going to make Ushre and Paracels pay for this. Those bastards were so goddamn self-confident, they hadn’t even bothered to search me. I still had my knife. It was right there—my hands were resting on it.
What did they think the Bureau was going to do when the monitors found out my transceiver was dead? Just sit there on its ass and let Sharon’s Point go its merry way?
I started to move, tried to get up. Which was something I should’ve done a long time ago. Or maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. That didn’t matter now. By the time I got to my knees, it was already too late. I was in trouble.
Big trouble.
A rabbit came out of the brush a meter down the path from me. I thought he was a rabbit—he looked like a rabbit. An ordinary long-eared jackrabbit. Male—the males are a lot bigger than the females. Then he didn’t look like a rabbit. His jaws were too big; he had the kind of jaws a dog has. His front paws were too broad and strong.
What the hell?
In his jaws he held a hand grenade, carrying it by the ring of the pin.
He didn’t waste any time. He put the grenade down on the path and braced his paws on it. With a jerk of his head, he pulled the pin. Then he dashed back into the bushes.
I just kneeled there and stared at the damn thing. For the longest time all I could do was stare at it and think, That’s a live grenade. They got it from the Procureton Arsenal.
In the back of my head a desperate voice was screaming, Move it, you sonofabitch!
I moved. Lurched to my feet, took a step toward the grenade, kicked it away from me. It skidded down the path. I didn’t wait to see how far it went. I ran about two steps into the brush and threw myself flat. Any cover was better than nothing.
I landed hard, but that didn’t matter. One second after I hit the ground, the grenade went off. It made a crumping noise like a demolition ram biting concrete. Cast-iron fragments went ripping through the brush in all directions.
None of them hit me.
‘But it wasn’t over. There were more explosions. A line of detonations came pounding up the path from where the grenade went off. The fourth one was so close the concussion flipped me over in the brush, and dirt rained on me. There were three more before the blasting stopped.
After that, the air was as quiet as a grave.
I didn’t move for a long time. I stayed where I was, trying to act like I was dead and buried. I didn’t risk even a twitch until I was sure my smell was covered by all the gelignite in the air. Then I pulled up the back of my shirt and slipped out my knife.
Getting my hands free was awkward, but the serrated edges of the blade helped, and I didn’t cut myself more than a little bit. When I had the tape off, I eased up onto my hands and knees. Then I spent more time just listening, listening hard, trying to remember how I used to listen two years ago, before I got in the habit of depending on equipment.
I was in luck. There was a slow breeze. It was blowing past me across the path—which meant anything upwind couldn’t smell me, and anything downwind would get too much gelignite to know I was there. So I was covered— sort of.
I crawled forward to take a look at the path.
The line of shallow craters—spaced about half a dozen meters apart—told me what had happened. Antipersonnel mines. A string of them wired together buried in the path. The grenade set one of them off, and they all went up. The nearest one would have killed me if it hadn’t been buried so deep. Fortunately the blast went upward instead of out to the sides.
I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and lay down where I was to do a little thinking.
A rabbit that wasn’t a rabbit. A genetically altered rabbit, armed with munitions from the Procureton Arsenal.
No wonder Ushre and Paracels raised their own animals—the genes had to be altered when the animal was an embryo. No wonder they had a vet hospital. And a cremator. No wonder they kept their breeding pens secret. No wonder their rates were so high. No wonder they wanted to keep their clientele exclusive.
No wonder they wanted me dead.
All of a sudden, their confidence didn’t surprise me anymore.
I didn’t even consider moving from where I was. I wasn’t ready. I wanted more information. I was as sure as hell rabbits weren’t the only animals in the Sharon’s Point Hunting Preserve. I figured those explosions would bring some of the others to me.
I was right sooner than I expected. By the time I had myself reasonably well hidden in the brush, I heard the soft flop of heavy paws coming down the path. Almost at once, two dogs went trotting by. At least they should’ve been dogs. They were big brown boxers, and at first glance the only thing unusual about them was they carried sacks slung over their shoulders.
But they stopped at the farthest mine crater, and I got a better look. Their shoulders were too broad and square, and instead of front paws they had hands—chimp hands, except for the strong claws.
They shrugged off their sacks, nosed them open. Took out half a dozen or so mines.
Working together with all the efficiency in the world, they put new mines in the old craters. They wired the mines together and attached the wires to a flat gray box that must have been the arming switch. They hid the wires and the box in the brush along the path (fortunately on the opposite side from me—I didn’t want to try to fight them oft). Then they filled in the craters, packing them down until just the vaguest discoloration of the dirt gave away where the mines were. When that was done, one of them armed the mines.
A minute later, they went gamboling away through the brush. They were actually playing with each other, jumping and rolling together as they made their way toward the far line of trees.
Fifteen minutes ago they’d tried to kill me. They’d just finished setting a trap to kill someone else. Now they were playing.
Which didn’t have anything to do with them, of course. They were just dogs. They had new shoulders and new hands—and probably new brains (setting mines seemed a little bit much for ordinary boxers to me)—but they were just dogs. They didn’t know what they were doing.
Ushre and Paracels knew.
All of a sudden, I was tired of being cautious. I was mad, and I didn’t want to do any more waiting around. My sense of direction told me those dogs were going the same way I wanted to go: toward the front gate of the preserve. When they were out of sight, I got up into a crouch. I scanned the field to make sure there was nothing around me. Then I dove over the path, somersaulted to my feet, and started to run. Covering the same ground the dogs did. They hadn’t been blown up, so I figured I wouldn’t be either. Everything ahead of me was upwind, so except for the noise nothing in those trees would know I was coming. I didn’t make much noise.
In two minutes, I was into the trees and hiding under a rotten old log.
The air was a lot cooler in the shade, and I spent a little while just recovering from the heat of the sun and letting my eyes get used to the dimmer light. And listening. I couldn’t tell much at first because I was breathing so hard, but before long I was able to get my hearing adjusted to the breeze and the woods. After that, I relaxed enough to figure out exactly what I meant to do.
I meant to get at Ushre and Paracels.
Fine. I wanted to do that. There was only one problem. First I had to stay alive.
If I wanted to stay alive, I had to have water. Wash the blood off. If I could smell me this easily, it was a sure bet every animal within fifty meters could, too.
br /> I started hunting for a tree I could climb—a tree tall enough to give me a view out over these woods.
It took me half an hour because I was being so cautious, but finally I found what I needed. A tall straight ash. It didn’t have any branches for the first six meters or so, but a tree nearby had fallen into it and stuck there, caught leaning in the lowest branches. By risking my neck, and not thinking too hard about what I was doing, I was able to shinny up that leaning trunk and climb into the ash.
With my left hand the way it was, I didn’t have much of a grip, and I learned quickly enough that I wasn’t going to be able to climb as high as I wanted. But just when I figured I’d gone about as far as I could go, I got lucky.
I spotted a stream. It was a couple of km. away past a meadow and another line of trees, cutting across between me and the front gate. Looked like exactly what I needed. If I could just get to it.
I didn’t waste time worrying. I took a minute to fix the territory in my mind. Then I started back down the trunk.
My ears must’ve been improving. Before I was halfway to the ground (which I couldn’t see because the leaves and branches were so thick), I heard something heading toward me through the trees.
Judging by the sound, whatever it was wasn’t in any hurry, just moving across the branches in a leisurely way. But it was coming close. Too close.
I straddled a branch with my back to the trunk and braced my hands on the wood in front of me and froze. I couldn’t reach my knife that way, but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t picture myself doing any knife-fighting in a tree.
I barely got set in time. Three seconds later, there was a thrashing above me in the next tree over, and then a monkey landed maybe four meters away from me on the same branch.
He was a normal howler monkey—normal for Sharon’s Point. Sturdy gray body, pitch-black face with deep gleaming eyes; a good bit bigger and stronger than a chimp. But he had those wide square shoulders and hands that were too broad. He had a knapsack on his back.