“Fawkes!” I shouted. One of the shapes in the distance turned.
Zooming in, I saw two of the remaining revivors with him quickly assembling some kind of tripod, while the third heaved a large, heavy cylinder from inside the crate, which was now open. I scanned the cylinder, and the computer isolated its shape through the snow. It was a surface-to-surface missile. He was going to try to blow the dish.
“Fawkes!”
I got to my feet and ran as the wind sheared over me, stinging my face and hands. I fired, and a bullet sparked off the launcher assembly.
One of the two at the launcher returned fire, while the second joined the third to help load the missile.
Something struck the armor plate on my chest and knocked the breath out of me. I stumbled as I fired again, straining to spot Fawkes through the snow.
I hooked into the stealth command-spoke package still resident in Faye’s system, and used it to open command links to all three of the remaining revivors. For a second, they were all being controlled by both Fawkes and me, but a second was all I needed. Before he could react to lock them down, I triggered the Leichenesser capsules in all of them.
The one carrying the missile dropped it and it hit the tarmac with a metallic thud before rolling in a slow semicircle. White mist began to shoot from the back of its neck, and it stumbled to one side.
The other two revivors tried to keep their footing as the flesh and bone inside began to dissolve. One fell back against the launcher’s tripod before it lost integrity, and I saw one arm slide from its sleeve and fall onto the ground next to it. The other went down on its hands and knees, then collapsed.
Fawkes saw what had happened and bolted away from them to avoid getting caught in the smoke himself.
I fired another burst at Fawkes and caught him in the leg. He lost his balance and fell, crashing down onto his side as I approached.
The lights from the transmitter lit his otherworldly face as he stared up at me. I took aim and was about to put a bullet in the side of his head when he pulled his shirt aside to show the mechanism strapped to his chest.
“Stop the transmission,” he shouted. “Or I will.”
I scanned the device. The explosives rigged to it were extremely powerful. They wouldn’t destroy the entire dish, but they’d knock it down, out of alignment.
“It’s a dead man’s switch,” he said. “If my signature ceases, it will go off.”
“It’s over, Fawkes.”
He lifted one hand and I saw the detonator. I fired a burst into his forearm and the flesh erupted in a splash of black blood. Sparks sprayed as the hand snapped apart to reveal the bayonet tucked inside, and the trigger spun off into the dark.
He recovered quickly; he got to his feet to go after it, but I’d closed the distance. I struck him in the chest with one shoulder and he pitched back down onto the ground.
He’d deteriorated a lot over the years, but he still had the strength of a revivor. He didn’t know pain or fear. He recovered and sprang back up from the ground. His moonlit eyes locked on me as he lunged with the bayonet.
I fired, and the bullet punched through one side of his neck. Blood pumped from the hole, but he kept coming. His cold left hand grabbed my shoulder as he thrust the blade into my gut. The armored weave took the brunt of it, but I felt the point bite through and warmth seep into the fabric.
I knocked his leg out from under him and shoved him back down onto the blacktop, coming down on top of him. He tried to stab at me with the bayonet again, but I pinned his arm under one knee and shoved the gun in his face. He tried to say something, but nothing came out. His teeth were stained black.
I shot him in the shoulder twice, and the arm stopped moving.
Vibrations sparked from the shoulder of my dead arm to its fingertips, and messages began to stream past in front of me. The nanoblood inside was responding to the transmission. Fawkes’s alien eyes widened as he realized it too.
I took a sample of his signature and re-created the waveform on my JZI. When they synchronized, I used my field knife to slice through the straps of his vest. I pulled it off of him, and the LED began to flash an urgent red.
Before it could explode, I slipped it on and pulled it taut around my chest. The mechanism homed in on the signature I’d cloned, and the LED turned blue again.
I knelt down in front of him and grabbed his tie. I twisted it under his throat and forced him back onto the tarmac. The blade of my field knife flashed as I aimed the point at an angle toward his neck.
I jammed the blade in and twisted. The edge severed the connections between the revivor nodes and the brain stem.
His signature warbled, then snapped out of existence, and the moonlit glow faded from his eyes.
13
AFTERMATH
Zoe Ott—Heinlein Industries
The next thing I remembered, I was outside.
The city was gone, but it wasn’t destroyed. Instead of the wasteland, I was sitting on a blanket that was spread out over thick, green grass. The blanket was on a hill that looked out over a big, open space that was covered in patches of yellow flowers. The sun was low in the sky, and it was shady and cool.
“What do you want to do tonight?” Karen asked. She was lying on her back, looking up at me. Her face was clear and smooth. There were no bruises or scars. All of her teeth were still there. She looked happy as she closed her eyes and stretched.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Watch a movie?”
I pressed my hand into the grass. It was soft, and cool. I liked the way it smelled.
I’d never really seen grass before, not like that. Somehow, though, I knew what I was seeing wasn’t a vision.
