gaped. 'Shit,' Jonny said and released the manipulator, realizing (and the realization turned his stomach) that the animals were still alive, swimming in their absent way, against the whirling current of the protein solution, alien tissues taking root in their backs.
That's when he found Conover, chest neatly lasered open, lying on one of the autopsy tables. Jonny had turned in disgust from the lamprey tank and froze, staring down at the body of the smuggler lord lying under ten centimeters of clear liquid. But it was not the Conover Jonny knew. It was the Conover he had seen in photos in the storage room that earlier night. The Conover from Central America in the nineteen-eighties: healthier, before the Greenies addiction had set in. Jonny checked the other tables and found Conovers lying on each of them, sunk in the same fluid, torsos neatly split from crotch to chin. All the bodies were wired into a complex array of life-support unit. They were all missing certain organs, livers, stomach, hearts and pancreases, mostly. He knew then that what he was looking at was essentially a farm.
Conover had become a parasite, feeding on himself. Somewhere in his drug-ruined body, his techs must have found some cells that Greenies had not yet invaded. They had used these to clone copies of the smuggler lord to use for patch jobs. The liquid in which they floated would be some kind of perflourocarbon, Jonny guessed, to keep the bodies oxygenated. He just stared. It was amazing; suicide and murder all rolled into one package. The taste of tequila and bile was strong in his throat. Jonny fled through a door beyond the tables, away from the butchered young men.
The room he entered was still and very cold. The thermographic read-out in his eyes showed it to him as an almost seamless blue surface, broken here and there by neon-red patches of warmer electronic equipment. Some kind of gas vapor was crusting on cryogenic pipe inlets, drifting in white clouds to the floor. A dozen gray laminated tanks (he thought of coffins or sealed specimen cases) stood against the walls. Jonny spotted her in the only tank that was occupied, near the far end. When he tried to wipe a layer of frost from the Lexan faceplate, his fingers froze to it instantly. He jerked his hand away, stifling a small cry of pain as he left some skin behind. Using his jacket sleeve, he rubbed at the port until he could see her face clearly.
Sumi appeared to be asleep in the cryogenic tank. A VDT inset at chest-level in the gray laminate displayed her life readings as a series of slow-moving horizontal lines, hills and valleys indicating her body's various autonomic functions. The top of the screen was dominated by an animated 3D display of some growing crystal. For some reason, it reminded Jonny of a cocoon; he kept expecting to see some new form of plant or animal life to burst suddenly from the fragile egg shell facets that the crystal kept unfolding from within itself. Someone had written 'L VIRUS' on a strip of surgical tape and stuck it to the VDT just below the crystal display. Jonny nodded, recognizing the animation as a growth sequence. He had a pretty good idea just what the programmers had been modeling when they created the display. The lesions around Sumi's mouth confirmed this.
Jonny backed away from the cylinder, spun and kicked savagely at the door to the clean room, his face hot. All the half-conscious illusions of a daring rescue he had been nursing up the hill were dying fast. He prowled the edges of the frigid room, cursing to himself, punched a Sony monitor off a work station and kicked it into a wall, shattering the screen.
A minute later, he was standing in front of the tank in which Sumi slept. 'They never told us how it worked,' he explained. 'So naturally it got all fucked up.' It was an apology of sorts.
The concussion from the first Futukoro round cracked the Lexan plate above Sumi's face. Steam from the super-cooled liquid inside screamed through the broken plastic, condensing in the air as a miniature whirlwind of ice. Jonny kept on firing, pumping round after hot round through the walls of the cylinder until the room was full of freezing white vapor and the life readings on the tank registered as a series of flat, unwavering lines.
When some of the vapor had cleared and he could see again, Jonny peered through the cracked Lexan to find that Sumi's face had remained unchanged. He was aware, on some wordless level, that from that moment on, he would be utterly alone. But he found himself comforted by Sumi's face, the lines of her cheeks, the set of her lips. There was no hint at all of pain or betrayal in her smooth features. Jonny stepped back. Calmly, gratefully, he placed the barrel of the Futukoro between his teeth and aimed for the back of his head. Closing his eyes, he was filled with an odd sense of euphoria, thinking: From now on, we make our own rules.
He pulled the trigger.
The gun clicked once.
Jonny shouted and threw the thing across the room. Behind him, the door to the clean room slid open and Conover came in. Not one of the pretty boys on the autopsy slabs, Jonny saw, but the red-eyed death's head he knew. He was sure the smuggler lord had been watching him. 'Listen, son- ' Conover began.
'You pig!' Jonny shouted. 'How could you do that to her? Treat her like a piece of meat!'
'I never intended for you to see this,' Conover said. He opened his hands in a gesture of sympathy. 'Really, we had not choice. She could have infected everybody here.'
Jonny looked back at Sumi in the cryogenic tank. Most of the fluid had evaporated, leaving a few feeble streams of vapor trailing from holes the Futukoro shells had made. 'Did you kill all those people upstairs?' Jonny asked.
'I'm afraid so,' Conover said. He moved to sit on the edge of a disconnected Hitachi CT scanner. Jonny noticed that the smuggler lord was holding a Futukoro loosely at his side. 'In a sense, though, they were already dead,' Conover said. 'Between the virus and Zamora, if they didn't die now, they would be gone very soon.' He shrugged. 'Besides, I'm leaving. The life's gone out of it. L.A.'s no place for me anymore.'
'What are you talking about? You're leaving Last Ass?'
Conover lit one of his brightly-colored Sherman's and nodded.
'Yes, my ride ought to be here in a few hours. You interested in coming?'
'Where are you going?'
Conover smiled. 'New Hope.'
'What?'
'I think you should come,' the smuggler lord said. 'In fact, I insist on it.' Conover had moved the Futukoro so that it was lying across his legs, pointing casually in the direction of Jonny's midsection.
Jonny felt his brain frosting over, as if he were asleep and dreaming in one of the cases next to Sumi. 'Mister Conover, what the fuck is going on here?'
'It's the end of the world, son.'
'Great. Think anyone'll notice?' Jonny asked. He looked at Sumi and shook his head, thinking that once again, he had failed her.
Conover got up, dropped an avuncular arm around Jonny's shoulders and said: 'Don't sweat it, son. We've got big plans for you.'
He steered Jonny out the clean room, upstairs and through the Victorian wing toward the roof. 'There's so much to say over before our ride gets here, but if we hurry, I think we might just have time to give you the fifty-cent tour of the universe.'
THIRTEEN
'Yes, the end of the world, son, can't you smell it?' asked Conover. 'No finer time to be alive.' He chuckled reflectively, moving Jonny along a dark and narrow service staircase, idly jabbing him in the back with the barrel of the Futukoro.
'It's the war, isn't it?' asked Jonny. 'The Tokyo Alliance and New Palestine. They're finally going to do it.'
Conover nodded sleepily. 'What else?' he asked, shivered. He mumbled: 'Need a shot,' then louder: 'Yes, the war. Don't look so surprised, son. Historically speaking, it's long overdue.'
Jonny shook his head. 'Christ, then that Arab was telling the truth.'
'Arab?'
'There was this Arab at the Forest of Incandescent Bliss. Said that Tokyo and Washington were getting ready to launch a sneak attack on New Palestine,' said Jonny. 'When he said the Alpha Rats were involved, I thought he was just spaceman-happy, like Zamora.'
