Dealer's Choice

  He had very little left. Already the Outcast was beginning to fade. He was going back to Bloat, and then he’d be able to do nothing. Nothing at all. The shells would come and destroy the Rox. Already the Wall was fading from his sight.

  “Damn you!” he said again, and he spoke in the voice of Bloat. Joker guards looked at him in mingled sympathy and fright. Outside the transparent bulwarks of the castle, the fog was tinged with the hues of hell. "Stop it! You’re killing us!” Bloat wailed.

  As if in response, a series of long, distant, rumbling bass reverberations trembled the Rox from far out beyond the Wall.

  Modular Man ghosted just above the waves with Mistral! Molly at his side. He knew he was going to be taking on an entire naval task force and he wished Mistral could both fly faster and make a less conspicuous target.

  His radar caught another salvo in flight. Nine shells, he counted, a full broadside from the New Jersey, instead of the ranging shots fired earlier. They’d found the range.

  That didn’t necessarily mean that every shot would hit, but on the other hand the Rox wasn’t exactly an agile, hard-to-miss target, either.

  Each shell weighed over a ton. Nothing in the Rox’s architecture could withstand them.

  He calculated speeds, ranges, flight times. The huge rounds were taking almost a minute to fly from the gun barrel to the target, which meant the New Jersey was near the limits of its range, twenty miles or so out. That was a long distance to fly, but it also meant fewer salvos.

  “How do we beat a battleship?” Mistral said.

  “We don’t.”

  She gave him a look from goggle-covered eyes. “So what are we doing here?”

  “Why aren’t the shells failing into Jersey City?”

  “I dunno. You tell me.”

  “Somebody’s spotting them. Someone’s watching them fall and reporting back to the New Jersey.”

  “But they can’t see anything through the fog.”

  “Right. So the spotting is being done by radar. I know the services have radar sets that are good enough to spot individual shells falling. And apparently the radar spoofers placed around the Rox aren’t working well enough. There’s someone sitting at the radar sets communicating to the battleship by radio.”

  “Okay.”

  “What we do is wreck the New Jersey’s radio antennae. They’ll have at least a couple microwave antennae for satellite linkage and a whole battery of antennae for radio communication. We don’t know which they’re using, so we’ll have to destroy them all.”

  “With my winds? Piece of cake.”

  “I hope so.”

  The fog parted, twisted into streamers by Mistral’s winds, and the ocean opened before them. Lights winked on the horizon, and seconds later came the boom of distant thunder.

  Another salvo wailed overhead.

  Outcast wavered, his image distorting as if someone were trying to pull a paper cutout apart. He blipped out like the dot on a television monitor when the power is cut.

  There was the sound of anvils being struck together. The airburst rained acid down upon the trees in the swampland. Wyungare sought shelter as the droplets hissed and burned their way through the verdant foliage around him.

  And then something new, something that dwarfed everything that had gone before, picked Wyungare up like a child grasping an unresisting doll.

  It sounded like the sharp crack of thunder rushing on the tail of the lightning striking the plateau of Uluru.

  It felt like the ravenous grasp of Wurrawilberoo, the desert whirlwind devil.

  Slammed out of his concentration, Wyungare abruptly felt like one of the Keen Keengs, the flying men descended from giants. Except that he was not a giant himself and the stone blocks splintering and clashing around him were as big as he. He was falling.

  The cell had come apart, the floor was no more, and his body caromed off hard surfaces. Wyungare heard yells, curses, a scream. Instinctively he twisted in the air and ducked to avoid a piece of castle that would have smashed his skull like a maira, a paddy-melon. Wyungare allowed his eyes to see what he could of his surroundings more slowly, and so his body could react.

  Actually he could see very little. For a sudden and brief moment, a high-explosive flare lit his plunge. Then he fell not quite so far into the crashing, splintering darkness as he had expected. Perhaps, his own inner voice guessed, as little as one level. Regardless, the fall felt like the plunge from the top of Uluru.

  His lungs filled with airborne chaff from the straw that had lined the floor of the cells. He gagged.

  Stone, he thought. My landing place will be on granite and my body will break in a thousand ways.

  But that did not happen.

  His face suddenly whipped through spray and he plunged headfirst into cold water. It was salty ocean water; he knew that as he struggled back to the surface, spitting and blowing like a wounded seal.

  Concussive waves battered his ears. Artillery? he wondered. Or carpet bombing. An arc-light operation, he speculated. Debris splashed into the water around him. He could not see anything. This was a case of having to trust to luck. Blind luck.

  Then the area lit up with a baleful crimson glow. Some sort of chemical fire cripped down a stone escarpment about a hundred meters away. It looked almost like lava leaking out of a volcanic crater.

  Wyungare squinted. He could see the woman prisoner — Mistral — struggling to stay afloat. She was holding on to the fur of the black cat with one hand. The large feline, in turn, was paddling for the shore.

  “Wait!” Wyungare called. The chemical fire flickered and went out. The Aborigine started swimming for the place he’d seen Mistral and the cat.

  The light flared up again. No woman. No cat. But Wyungare did find a rock he could use to haul himself out of the cold water. On shore, he scanned the heap of jumbled stone wreckage until he found a deeper shadow than the rest, the opening to a passageway.

  Wherever it led was fine, so long as that direction was up.

  The Turtle took the long way home.

  The Rox was between him and his junkyard, hidden beneath a roiling carpet of fog. Tom gave it a wide berth. He veered well to the east, then turned due south over Brooklyn, staying on the fringes of the fog, figuring he’d cross at the Narrows, zip across Staten Island, and come into Bayonne from the south.

  The chopper caught him near the old Brooklyn Navy Yard.

  Tom had turned off his radio and his external mikes; he didn’t want to hear it, whatever it was. The chopper cut across his flight path, missing him by no more than ten feet.

  Idiots, Tom thought furiously. It was one of those little two-man bubble-canopy jobs. At first he thought it was some asshole news crew after an interview. Then he saw Danny, waving at him frantically.

  It was a different Danny: the young sex star. Even in fatigues, she managed to look hot. She’d tucked her pants into thigh-high lace-up boots that made her legs look even longer. His Danny had seen where he was going, so they’d scrambled a chopper from Governor’s Island to intercept.

  He turned on the speakers. “I DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU. TO ANY OF YOU. STOP FOLLOWING ME.” There was no way he could go home with the goddamn chopper on his tail.

  The copter came around again. Danny was waving. She looked … frantic. She was screaming something at him. Reluctantly, he reached out, flicked his microphones back on.

  Even then it was hard to make out what she was saying over the roar of the rotors. Something about New Jersey…

  “WHAT?” he boomed. “I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”

  The copter veered closer. Danny cupped one hand around her mouth and screamed at him “… Jersey … under … attack…”

  “NEW JERSEY IS UNDER ATTACK?”

  Danny shouted something else, but the wind whipped her words away. For a moment Tom didn’t get it. Then it all fell into place. “THE BATTLESHIP,” he blurted.

  Danny’s nod was frantic.

  The battleship New Jersey was off Sa
ndy Hook, miles and miles beyond Bloat’s farthest reach. If it was under attack…

  “…only one left…” Danny shouted.

  The only one left. The last ace in the government’s deck. The rest were dead, wounded captured, trashed.

  “I QUIT, REMEMBER?”

  He couldn’t hear her reply.

  Frustrated, Danny turned away for a second, said something to her pilot. The chopper lifted suddenly. Tom had to resist the urge to duck as it came in low over the shell, hovered.

  He heard a soft thump as Danny vaulted down onto the top of his shell. Before he could protest, the chopper had peeled away. Danny clung to the torn netting.

  “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?” he roared.

  By then the chopper was well on its way back to Governor’s Island, the sound of its rotors receding. “Turtle, please,” Danny pleaded. “Mistral … Modular Man they’re tearing the ship apart. You have to stop them.”

  “WITH YOU ON MY BACK? YOU WANT TO GET KILLED?”

  “No,” Danny said, and for the first time Tom heard real

  fear in her voice. “Turtle, please … I’m on that ship.”

  The New Jersey loomed ahead, a steel wall rising from the gray sea. It was three football fields long and its awesome, purposeful architecture made Bloat’s sprawling castle look like something from a child’s playset.

  Gusts tugged at Modular Man as Mistral built a whirlwind overhead. Thus far they’d avoided being seen by the dozen or so ships visible in the task force, but that luck couldn’t last.

  The windstorm took on shape, purpose. Modular Man sped on ahead, glancing over the superstructure with its array of antennae. There was scarcely a sailor to be seen: nearly everyone had taken shelter beneath the ship’s armor. The android fired a burst of microwave energy at one of the satellite antennae, hoping to overload it. The whirlwind touched the surface of the water and a buzz-saw snarl filled the air.

  The three triple turrets fired. A blast of hot gases slammed against the android’s body. One-ton shells howled as they shattered the air.

  Modular Man fired at another microwave antenna. The shot seemed pointless and ineffectual.

  The funnel cloud, mounting, screamed in off the sea. A burst of lightning filled the air with ozone.

  The whirlwind engulfed the ship’s bridge and the towering array of antennae above it. Glass imploded; pieces of metal blew high as if from an explosion. One of the ship’s radars spun away. A panicked sailor ran for the nearest hatch. Antennae were wrenched into pretzel shapes.

  The New Jersey continued on course, its way unimpeded. The funnel cloud walked up and down the superstructure, concentrating on the radio and radar towers, then began to disperse.

  Modular Man counted radio antennae. He could find none in working order.

  He turned, sped away toward Mistral. Sirens wailed from the surrounding ships.

  “It’s over,” the android said. “We’ve done our job.”

  Fire winked from the battleship’s side. Antiaircraft rounds cracked overhead. Modular Man put on speed, jinked left and right. Mistral danced near the wave-tops as her winds whipped up a screen of concealing spray.

  Modular Man put on a burst of speed and left the battleship far behind. He turned and hovered, watched as Mistral jittered away from the bullets and shells that were reaching for her.

  The New Jersey blew up.

  What surprised Modular Man was that it happened in complete silence. There was a blast of flame that threw the stem turret far into the sky, tumbling, gun barrels waving, and then the irruption of boiling smoke and debris that shot into the air, high above the battleship’s highest towers…

  All in silence.

  The stern section tilted up and sank in a gush of watery foam, all in less than four seconds. The forward part continued on its course, its momentum too massive to be stopped simply by the event of its own destruction. As it glided forward the bow gradually canted upward until the knifelike cutwater rose into the air. The wake slowly diminished.

  The forward part of the ship slowed and just hung there, not quite sinking. Hatches opened and crewmen boiled out.

  Mistral/Molly turned, headed for the battleship again. Another whirlwind appeared in the air above the stricken vessel.

  Apparently she was going to try to finish it off.

  Modular Man remembered sub-munitions falling on Sandy Hook, the screams of the missile battery troops as they died.

  It was all so useless. He had no wish to support Mistral in this ridiculous act of slaughter.

  Dual-purpose shells began reaching for him. He put on speed for the Rox.

  As he looked back he saw something flash brightly among the running crew of the New Jersey. People screamed and fell and died.

  Pulse.

  Wyungare heard the roar of an angry — or hungry — alligator. He ran down the stone passage, depending on vague shadows in the darkness to warn him against smashing his head against some low overhang.

  He rounded a tight elbow in the corridor and stopped behind cover. In the large, flare-lit chamber beyond, he took in the whole picture of it.

  In his alligator incarnation, Jack Robicheaux had cornered Wyungare’s prisoner comrades. The two men and the woman were backed into a jagged elbow of tumbled stone. Detroit Steel was in front of the other two, his hands outstretched, palm first, toward the reptile. “Get outta here,” said the big man. “I’ve trolled for bigger than you in Lake Michigan.”

  The alligator took another step forward, jaws opening and closing like enormous steel scissors. "Beat it,” said Detroit Steel.

  The sensation Wyungare could pick up from Jack’s mind was one of primal hunger. The alligator hadn’t eaten in quite some time. The gator version of Jack possessed no patience. Wyungare glanced on beyond the reptile. They saw the dark shape that suggested a tunnel entrance. It was worth a shot.

  Go! Wyungare thought at the gator. Food, you’ll get food at the other end of that passage. He hated to lie, but this was a time of extreme measures. The reptile grumbled. Go! he thought again. Good food! He realized he didn’t need to sell the concept of food — merely establish the possibility to the alligator’s satisfaction.

  The alligator abruptly turned and struck for the passageway. He moved faster than Wyungare had believed possible. The reptilian hiss dwindled and died in the passage.

  Wyungare trotted to where the other prisoners waited. He realized that Mistral’s appearance hadn’t accurately reflected the woman’s degree of injury. As Mistral drew in her breath and winced, Wyungare discovered that he could feel at least two major breaks in her lower arm. Maybe more, he thought. This is just the top of the iceberg. He said nothing aloud.

  Nothing.

  “I think she’s hurt pretty bad,” Detroit Steel volunteered.

  Wyungare nodded.

  “We can carry her,” said Reflector, “if you can guide us out of here.”

  Wyungare weighed the possibilities. He stared at the passage into which Jack had waddled in alligator form. It looked to be the only way out.

  The towers of the Verrazano Bridge were vague shapes in the mist as the Turtle moved through the Narrows. This far south, the fog was starting to thin out. He didn’t like that one bit. Down by Sandy Hook, he’d have no concealment.

  “Hurry!” Danny urged from atop the shell.

  “LISTEN,” Tom said, “I’M GOING TO DROP YOU OFF ON THE BRIDGE. ONE OF YOUR SISTERS CAN SEND A CHOPPER TO PICK YOU UP.”

  “There’s no time,” she told him.

  “YES THERE IS. THAT’S A BATTLESHIP. EIGHTEEN-INCH GUNS. SAME KIND OF ARMOR PLATE I’VE GOT. THOUSANDS OF ARMED MEN, CRUISE MISSILES, MACHINE GUNS, RADAR. IT SURVIVED WORLD WAR II, IT CAN SURVIVE MODMAN AND MISTRAL.”

  “You need me,” Danny said. “I know where I am. I can take you to me. You’ll never find me without me.”

  “I’M DROPPING YOU OFF. YOU’RE TOO EXPOSED UP THERE.”

  “Then let me inside.”

 
The shell moved over the suspension cables, settled toward the wide span of the roadway. There was no traffic visible anywhere. “I DON’T LET PEOPLE INSIDE.” He looked up at her on close-up. Her face had gone white. “WHAT’S WRONG? WHAT’S HAPPENED?”

  She could barely speak. “The ship… my God… they blew up the ship!” She bit back a scream.

  The Turtle hovered ten feet over the bridge, unmoving, as Tom hesitated. A battleship, he thought. They blew up a fucking battleship! All around him, the fog was being torn into ribbons by rising winds. A storm to the south… Mistral…

  Tom took a deep breath and punched a combination into his control panel. There was a hiss of escaping air as the hatch unsealed. “INSIDE,” he said “AND CLOSE THE DOOR BEHIND YOU.”

  Bloat’s underground playground was quiet as Ray and the others made their way back through it. The traps had already been sprung, the guards disposed of, and Bloat now had other things to occupy his mind. Still, every now and then everyone had to grab the nearest wall while the ground jumped and they shook like pork chops in the bottom of a Shake ’n Bake bag.

  Maybe the big guns on the New Jersey had slowed down while the army was trying a second assault. Good thing too, because soon they’d reach the stone arch over the lava river and that sucker didn’t have a guardrail. Ray wasn’t afraid of heights but he had no desire to be halfway across that narrow ribbon of rock when another one of those bombs hit and started everything bouncing and shaking —

  There was a scream from the group behind him. It was Danny voicing a wail of fear and denial that echoed weirdly in the confined corridor.

  “What is it?” Ray asked.

  Danny was staring inward, a look of disbelief on her face. “The New Jersey,” she said in a choked whisper. “They blew it up.”

  “Shit,” Ray said, and even Battle looked perturbed.

  “Is your sister all right?” Ray asked.

  “She’s on part of the ship still above water,” Danny said. “The Turtle is on his way —”

  Ray wondered what would happen to Danny if one of her so-called sisters died. But for once he had the sense to keep his mouth shut.