He turned to her. “Must I?”
She squared her shoulders. “Of course you must.”
He went toward her, and thus also toward the wall behind her.
“Guards,” Echidna said mildly. “Stay with him.”
Samson came, and with him his heavily armed escort.
Wylie was still bound, of course, but he came to Ann Coulter and looked down at her. Her scales fluttered and surged, and a black substance that smelled of sulfur began to ooze from under her eyelids.
“Ann,” her husband hissed, “you’re compromising yourself.”
She was really steaming. She loved a man in bondage, that was clear.
Wylie saw that he had a moment, and only one, and it was this moment. He opened his mouth and drew his tongue along the backs of his teeth in the best imitation of a whore that he could imagine.
She tittered. Her breath had in it the flat muskiness of death.
“Will somebody please remove these children?” Mugabe shouted. A number of them had foregathered to watch the fun.
“Part of their education,” Echidna said. Her husband now joined her. Wylie had forgotten the name of this huge being, but he was peerlessly imposing in his sleek black suit, with his shimmering skin and brilliant, watchful eyes. Another ancient ruler riding the ages on a foam of clones.
He tilted his head and felt Coulter’s kiss invading his mouth like a soaked chaw of somebody else’s tobacco.
With all the power in him, his every muscle singing, his whole heart and soul and mind devoted only to this one movement, he sprang upward. These lizard forms were not as earthbound as human bodies. They didn’t feel as much, either, not pain, not love, not pleasure. But they were ferociously strong, and he was strong, he had kept himself well, understanding now the obsessive hammering away he had done at Gold’s in Wichita. He’d scared people, the way he would swim laps like a machine. He hadn’t known why his body was like this, just that he needed the swimming, the running, the boxing, the karate, all of it, needed it and devoured it.
The guard had made one mistake, early on. He’d seen him as human and bound him as human, careful of the delicate skin of a much more fragile creature than a seraph. He ripped his arms free with ease.
Unfortunately, the gun had gone. They’d left it with him only to amuse themselves with his disappointment when it was taken. “These sell for a nice price,” the guard had said as he removed it.
For a moment, there was nobody between him and the great control panel. He grabbed a lever, pulled it. Grabbed another, did the same. The action was so damn satisfying that he growled, he screamed, as he pulled another and another.
Echidna roared, her husband—Beleth, that was the name—leaped toward him—and came crashing into Mugabe, who threw himself into his path. Samson turned, and Ann Coulter slashed him with a molting hook, drawing his skin open and revealing the muscles beneath. He shrieked in agony. It felt good to draw off dry molt, of course, but raw like this, it was torment.
Coulter Union! Her human disguise was brilliant—a spokesman for the aims of the Corporation so extreme that she made them look ridiculous.
Wylie leaped, giving Beleth a head kick that he could feel smash the skull. Gabbling, his brains flying, he pitched back into his own onrushing guards.
“Samson’s aircar,” Ann shouted. “Go!”
“It’s ensouled!”
“Of course it is, you damn fool, go!”
There was a whispering crackle and Ann flew into a thousand red chunks. One of the guards now turned his weapon toward Wylie, who hit the floor as he pushed Echidna into the line of fire.
Her legs and bottom half, spurting fountains of blood, ran a few steps and collapsed at the feet of the surprised guard, while the top half, which had hit the floor smack on its bloody, waist-level base, uttered whistling gasps, waved its arms, and tore at its hair as shrieking, laughing children, who had mistaken the whole thing for a game, surrounded it, running in and pinching and squealing and then running away.
As Wylie crossed the floor, he heard the snicker of more guns. Then a dozen outriders came swinging down from above on webs like thick ropes dripping with glue. But he was outside now, and the aircar was waiting there, its now unattended motorcycle escort lined up neatly on the ground.
He kicked them over and dove into the interior. Expecting the car to resist the entry of what would be a known enemy, he yanked the door down with all his might.
“Hello, Brother,” the car said, and the voice hit Wylie with a shock like freezing water and the joy of the first morning of the world.
He hadn’t heard his brother speak aloud in over thirty years, but he recognized his voice instantly.
When Wylie was just a tiny boy, his beloved older brother had been killed by Corporation marauders and his soul kidnapped. His brother had been a great soldier. They’d kept his Medal of Valor and his various orders in a glass case in the family room, proud mementos. Wylie had gone to the human world because it took courage, and he wanted to show that he, also, had the ability to fight well for the Union.
They swept into the air. “Brother,” he said, “did they steal your soul?”
The car did not answer, and a flash of unease went through him. Abaddon was a place of deceptions, so maybe—
But then he looked down at what they were circling, and saw that the lens below him was now surrounded by as vast a crowd as he had ever seen. But things were not going well. The blackness of it had turned angry red, and it was boiling like a lava pool, and the surging crowd, in trying to escape, was instead falling in from all sides. Smoke and steam rose from the massive pyre.
“Are they dying?” Wylie asked.
“I think they’re going through. But it’s not right. It’s very not right.”
“Brother, has your soul been trapped in this car all this time?”
“Hell no, I stole the car yesterday. I’ve got a lot of bodies. I use them like scuba gear, to dig into the physical whenever I need to. And—uh-oh!”
There was an angry rattle against the vehicle, which proceeded to shoot upward so fast that Wylie blacked out momentarily. When he came to, flashes were speeding past the windows. “Pulse/Strider,” his brother said.
This was a weapon that delivered pulses of discrete superexcited electron plasmas that could instantaneously incinerate a car like this.
“Fly me, Brother.”
“Me? I don’t know how!”
“You were a hell of a pilot as a boy.”
“How could you know? You were…dead.”
“I’m an operative just like everybody else in the family. They were tricked into believing they’d captured my soul.”
Mean red light filled the car, and it tumbled wildly through the air.
“Brother, I need you to remember your piloting skills! Do it now!”
The words cause memory to flood Wylie’s mind, of being at the controls of a machine like this, of handling the twin sticks, of firing its weapons at sky targets, of having a glorious time in mock dogfights and evasion training.
He’d expected to be a pilot, but his aptitude tests were what had gotten him dragooned into intelligence. That, and he now also realized, the fact that his brother was already an agent. He remembered it all now, his whole life as a Union kid, his training…and something so poignant that he could almost not bear the recollection. He’d had a girl. He’d married her. He had a wife here on Abaddon, in the Union, the one good place that remained.
The car rattled, there was a flash, and this time the cabin filled with smoke and the fire alarm started.
“Fly me!”
Wylie gripped the controls. He swung the car from side to side, spotted the telltale sparkle of the Pulse/Strider installation on the ground. He turned hard, thrust the nose down, opened the throttle and slammed both sticks hard over.
The car shot like a diving eagle straight toward the installation. Pulses poured out. They would be forced to go on continuous triangulation, and his random jigging of the controls meant that not even he was sure of the
