Brennan drew an arrow and snapped off a shot from a kneeling position.
The arrow was fletched with color-coded red and black feathers. Its shaft was hollow aluminum, packed with plastic explosives. Its tip was a pressure-sensitive detonator. The arrow was too heavy to be aerodynamically stable over long distances, but the thing masquerading as Tachyon was less than twenty-five feet away.
Brennan’s arrow struck it high on the chest and exploded, sending a shower of flesh and green ooze over the room. The thing was flung backward by the impact. Its upper half disappeared, leaving a twitching pair of legs attached to a trunk that spilled inhuman organs and oozed a thick green ichor. It was some moments before the legs ceased their attempts to walk.
“What was that thing?” Brennan shouted over the roaring in his ears.
“Damned if I know,” Fortunato said, getting up from where it had flung him. “I tried to scan its mind, but it had no mind. Nothing human, anyway.”
“It looked like Tachyon,” Brennan said in a lower voice, his hearing returning to normal. “Down to the last detail.” He frowned, looked at Fortunato. “Tachyon’s mind wasn’t taken over. He was replaced.”
“When was the last time you saw what you’re certain was the real Tachyon?”
“Yesterday. At the clinic. Before he went to a meeting at the Olympia Hotel with that Lankester fellow from the State Department.”
“Let’s check in.”
The frail, white-haired old man in the bellhop uniform lifted Brennan over his head and slammed him against the wall. Brennan hit the wall hard and slid down to the carpet, panting like a dog for breath. He was in trouble.
The bellhop loomed over him, no expression at all on his lined face. Brennan surged to his knees, his lungs on fire, and saw the bellhop’s eyes roll up in his head. The bellhop tottered backward, windmilling his limbs as if he were caught in a hurricane wind. He did a crazy staggering dance and crashed through the window at the end of the hall. It was a long way to the street below.
Brennan pulled himself upright while Fortunato flexed his fingers. He took Brennan’s arm and said, “No brains to control, but you can push them around.”
“Someone probably heard that,” Brennan gasped, the breath returning to his lungs.
“I could have let it smash you flat.”
“There’s that.” He took a deep, grateful breath. “We need to lie low for a while.”
They stopped in front of one of the rooms.
“How about this one?” Fortunato asked. Brennan shrugged silently. Fortunato put his hand on the knob and reached out with his mind. Tumblers clicked and bolts lifted and the door opened.
“It’ll take them some time to track us down,” the ace said as they entered the dark hotel room. “How many agents you think they have?”
“No telling,” Brennan said, stretching his aching back carefully. “More than I suspected, for sure.”
“I thought you were surreptitious as shit.”
Brennan shook his head. The plan had been for him to scout the floor where Lankester’s suite was located, gathering what intelligence he could, while Fortunato used his mental powers to monitor his progress from the stairwell. The false bellhop had spotted and attacked him almost immediately. It was all Brennan could do to hang on until Fortunato arrived.
“We’d better try our alternate plan,” Brennan said.
“It may take some time.”
Fortunato settled himself on one of the double beds, legs crossed in front of him, back straight, hands dangling in his lap. He stared ahead at nothing. Brennan stood between him and the door, listening for sounds in the corridor outside, as he removed his bow and quiver of arrows from the case Fortunato had kept for him while he scouted the hotel.
Fortunato seemed to sink deep into a trance, not unlike, Brennan thought, a student of Zen descended into zazen, the state of meditation. After a moment, a set of ram’s horns materialized from Fortunato’s bulging forehead, shimmering and indistinct in the darkness.
Brennan watched with pursed lips. His Zen training had taught him that there was no such thing as magic, but here was evidence to the contrary, right before his eyes. What was magic, perhaps, but unexplained science?
Brennan filed the question away for later meditation as Fortunato abruptly opened his eyes. They were pools of darkness, his pupils dilated so much that they almost swallowed the irises. His voice was husky, a little shaken.
“They’re all around us, those things,” he said. “At least twenty. Maybe more. They’re not human, not even of this Earth. Their minds, if you could call them that, are alien, utterly beyond my experience.”
“Are they Swarm creatures?”
Fortunato rose with easy, fluid grace, shrugged.
“Could be. I thought the best they could do was hulks that looked like the Pillsbury doughboy. I thought bellboys and shit like that was beyond them.”
“Maybe they’ve refined their technique.” Brennan held up a hand, pressed his ear to the door. The footsteps in the corridor beyond passed by their room as he and Fortunato waited quietly. “What about Tachyon?”
Fortunato frowned. “I contacted one human mind. A maid. She didn’t realize anything unusual was going on. A little pissed off that the guests on this floor weren’t tipping too well. Weren’t tipping at all, in fact. There was also something I touched by the elevators. Could’ve been Tachyon’s mind, but there was a blanket on it, a fence around it. I could catch only vague, filtered notions. They were full of weariness. And pain.”
“It could be Tachyon?”
“It could.”
Brennan took a deep breath. “Any plans?”
“All out of ’em.”
The two looked at each other. Brennan touched the quiver at his side.
“I wish you had a weapon,” he said.
“I do. Several.” He tapped his forehead. “And they’re all in here.”
They waited until it was quiet in the corridor outside, then opened the door and moved fast. They ran as quietly as they could down the hotel corridor, hung a right as it turned to a T, and found themselves by the bank of elevators. In a niche, off to one side, was something that looked like a linen closet. Brennan notched an arrow and drew it back while Fortunato gestured the door open.
Brennan lowered the bow.
“Sweet Christ in heaven,” he murmured. Fortunato glanced from him to the closet, and froze.
Tachyon was inside. His hair, drenched with sweat, fell over his face in limp curls. His eyes stared through the tangle of hair. They were puffy and bloodshot, and glazed with pain and weariness. The shelves and linens had been removed from the closet, making room for Tachyon and the thing that embraced him. Tachyon was pressed against a vast, purplish couch of biomass that bound him with a score of ropy tendrils across his neck, chest, arms, and legs. The thing pulsed rhythmically, rippling like a fat lady bouncing on a water bed. Tachyon was set into a hollow in its surface that cupped him securely, perfectly following his contours and dimensions.
His eyes focused upon Fortunato, flicked to Brennan.
“Help,” he croaked, his lips working for several moments before any sound came out.
Brennan reached down, drew the knife he carried in an ankle sheath, and slashed at the tendrils binding Tachyon to the thing. It was like cutting through hard, stretchy rubber, but he sawed away grimly, ignoring the increasing pulsations of the thing and the greenish ichor that splattered himself and Tachyon.
It took a minute to saw through all the tendrils, but even then it still clung to Tachyon. It was then that Brennan noticed the suckers fastened to the sides and back of Tachyon’s neck.
“How do we get you out?” he asked.
“Just pull,” Tachyon whispered.
Brennan did, and Tachyon began to scream.
The doctor finally came free. He collapsed into Brennan’s arms, stinking of sweat and fear and alien secretions. He was deathly pale and bleeding profusely from the points where the
suckers had fastened. The wounds didn’t look serious, but there was, Brennan realized, no telling how damaging they actually might be.
“Look out,” Fortunato said, “we’ve got company.”
Brennan looked up the corridor. A dozen of the human simulacra were approaching, dressed as bellhops, maids, and ordinary men and women in dresses and three-piece suits. In the middle of them was Lankester of the State Department.
Brennan dragged Tachyon over to the elevator as the creatures advanced at a steady pace, their faces composed and utterly unemotional. Fortunato joined him, a worried look on his face.
“What do we do now?”
“Punch for an elevator.”
The things were twenty feet away when they heard the chime of an arriving elevator.
“Take him,” Brennan said, thrusting the limp, barely conscious form of Tachyon into Fortunato’s arms. He drew an arrow from his quiver as the elevator door swished open. Inside were three middle-aged men dressed in conservative business suits with Shriner’s hats on their heads. They stared wide-eyed as Fortunato dragged Tachyon inside. Fortunato looked at them.
“Basement, please,” he said. The one standing by the panel of buttons punched it automatically as Fortunato stopped the door from closing with his foot. Brennan placed three explosive arrows in the midst of the advancing creatures. The first one hit Lankester in the chest. The second and third exploded to the left and right of him, blowing gore and protoplasm all over the hotel corridor. He fell back into the elevator and Fortunato let the door close.
Brennan leaned on his bow, took a deep, relieved breath. The Shriners huddled together fearfully in the corner of the elevator.
Fortunato looked at them.
“First time in town?”
iii.
“SO LANKESTER HAD BEEN replaced by one of these new-generation swarmlings some time ago?” Brennan asked.
Tachyon nodded and took a long pull from the mug Mai handed him. It was full of thick black coffee, laced generously with brandy.
“Before I ever met him—it. That’s why it was pushing for that insane attack plan. It knew we wouldn’t be able to really harm the Swarm Mother, yet such an attack would make everyone think something concrete was being done to fight the menace.” He paused, took another long pull from the mug. “And there’s another thing. The Swarm Mother might want specimens of aces.”
Brennan looked at him quizzically. “Specimens?”
“To take apart and replicate from her own biomass.”
“Shit,” Fortunato murmured. “It wants to grow its own aces.”
They were in Tachyon’s office at the clinic. Tachyon had cleaned up, but was still pale and shaky from the ordeal he had undergone. There was a bandage around his neck where the Swarm creature had attached its suckers.
“What happens now?” Brennan asked.
Tachyon sighed, set the mug aside.
“We attack the Swarm Mother.”
“What?” Fortunato said. “That Swarm thing scramble your brains? You just said it was insane to attack the Mother.”
“It was. It is. But it’s the best option open to us.” He looked from Fortunato, who was openly incredulous, to Brennan, who looked blankly noncommittal. “Look, the Swarm has started a new wave of attack which is much more sophisticated than its previous ones. There’s no telling how far they’ve managed to penetrate into the government.”
“If they could replace Lankester,” Brennan murmured, “who else might they have gotten?”
“Exactly. Whom does it have?” Tachyon shuddered. “The possibilities are mind-boggling. If it could replace enough key personnel to carry it off, it’d think nothing of starting a worldwide nuclear exchange and simply waiting the necessary millenia until the surface of the planet is inhabitable once again.
“It’s obvious that we can’t trust anyone from the government to help us attack the Swarm Mother. We have to do it ourselves.”
“How do we do that?” Fortunato asked in a tone that indicated he wasn’t won over by Tachyon’s arguments.
“We have the singularity shifter,” Tachyon said, his voice rising eagerly. “We need a weapon, though. Takisians have successfully used biological weapons against Swarm Mothers in the past, but your biological sciences aren’t sophisticated enough to produce a suitable weapon. Perhaps I can come up with something.…”
“There is a weapon,” a quiet voice said. The three men turned and looked at Mai, who had been silently listening to their conversation.
Tachyon stared at her, and then sat upright in his chair, sloshing the brandy-laced coffee over the front of his brocaded dressing gown.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” he said sharply.
Fortunato looked from Tachyon to Mai. “What is this shit?”
“Nothing,” Tachyon said. “Mai works with me at the clinic. She’s used her power to help some of my patients, but it would be out of the question for her to get involved in this.”
“What power?”
Mai lifted her hands, palms facing outward. “I can touch a person’s soul,” she said. “We become one and I find the sickness in it. I take the sickness to myself and soothe it, smoothing the curves of the life pattern and mending the breaks. We can then both become well again.”
“Meaning, in English?” Fortunato asked.
“She manipulates genetic material,” Tachyon said with a sigh. “She can mold it in near any way she visualizes. I suppose she could use her power on the Swarm Mother in a reverse manner to cause cellular disruption on a massive scale.”
“She can give the Mother cancer?” Fortunato asked.
“She probably could,” Tachyon conceded. “If I allowed her to get involved, which I’m not. It would be insanely dangerous for a woman.”
“It’s insanely dangerous for anyone,” Fortunato said sharply. “If she’s the best bet against that Mother and she’s willing to try, I say let her do it.”
“And I forbid it!” Tachyon said, sloshing coffee from his mug as he slammed it against the arm of his chair.
“It is not for you to forbid,” Mai said. “I must do it. It is my karma.”
Tachyon turned to Brennan. “Can’t you talk some sense into her?”
Brennan shook his head. “It’s her decision,” he said slowly. He wished he could agree with Tachyon, but Brennan knew he couldn’t interfere with Mai’s karma, her chosen path to enlightenment. But, Brennan resolved, she wouldn’t walk her path alone.
“That’s settled, then,” Fortunato said flatly. “We get Mai up to the Swarm Mother and she sticks it with a fatal dose of cancer. I’m going, too. I want a piece of that motherfucker myself.”
Tachyon looked from Fortunato to Mai to Brennan and saw that nothing he could say would change their minds. “All right,” he sighed. He turned to Fortunato. “You’ll have to power the singularity shifter,” Tachyon said. “I can’t do it myself.” He dragged his fingers through his curly hair. “The swarmling temporarily burned out some of my powers in trying to suck out my memories for the duplicate Tachyon. We can’t afford to wait until they come back.
“I can, however, ferry a boarding party close to the Swarm Mother in Baby. Fortunato can shift the party inside the Swarm Mother. Speed and stealth will be necessary, but the boarders will need some protection. Modular Man perhaps, or maybe one of Trips’s friends…”
Brennan shook his head. “You said speed and stealth would be necessary. If you sent Modular Man in there blazing away, he’d bring down the defenses of the Swarm Mother in an instant.”
Tachyon massaged his forehead wearily. “You’re right. Any suggestions?”
“Of course.” Brennan took a deep breath. This was getting far from his original reasons for coming to the city, but he couldn’t let Mai face the Swarm without him. He wouldn’t. “Me.”
“You?” Tachyon said hesitantly. “Are you up for it?”
“He was up for rescuing you from the blob,” Fortunato broke in. He looked at Brennan, the doubt in h
is eyes replaced by certainty. “I’ve seen him in action. He can handle himself.”
Tachyon nodded decisively. “It’s settled, then.” He turned to Mai. “I don’t like sending a woman into danger, but you’re right. You’re the only one who has a chance of destroying the Swarm Mother.”
“I’ll do what I have to,” she said quietly.
Tachyon nodded gravely and took her hand in his, but a cold chill passed through Brennan at her words. He was sure that Tachyon had heard an entirely different meaning in them than he had.
Lift-off was something Brennan filed away as an interesting experience. He would not willingly seek it out again, but the sight of the Earth in Baby’s viewscreens was a scene of awesome beauty that he would carry for the rest of his life. He felt almost unworthy of the sight and wished that Ishida, his roshi, could view it.
There were three others in the Arabian Nights fantasy that was Tachyon’s control room. Tachyon guided his ship in silence. He was still hurting from his mistreatment by the Swarm. Brennan could see that he kept himself going by willpower alone. His face was lined with weariness and uncharacteristic tenseness.
Fortunato virtually crackled with impatient, nervous energy. He had spent the time before lift-off charging his batteries, as he had put it. He was now ready, and impatient for action.
Only Mai seemed calm and unmoved. She sat quietly on the control room’s couch, her hands in her lap, watching everything with unworried interest. Brennan watched her watch. She had agreed readily to Tachyon’s plan. How she would carry it out, though, was a different matter. That thought worried him.
After a time, Tachyon spoke, tension and weariness cracking his voice.
“There it is.”
Brennan peered over Tachyon’s shoulder at the globular monstrosity that filled Baby’s forward viewscreens.
“It’s immense,” he said. “How do we find our way around it?”
Tachyon turned to Fortunato. “Instruct the singularity shifter to take you to the middle of the thing. You should end up pretty close to where you want to be. You can find the nerve center by tracking its mind.” Tachyon felt the mind of his ship tug at his brain. What is it, Baby?