men in maintenance coveralls lying about on the floor, motionless, pasted to the deck with their own blood. They seemed to have been hacked up by some sharp blade.
Bill sighed, stomach contracting at the sight. “Yeah. I don’t see that splicer. Maybe…”
Karlosky nodded, musingly patting the breach of his tommy gun. “Not good workers, those splicers,” he said dryly. “They go crazy; they kill. A man does not get job done when busy being crazy and killing.” After a moment, he shrugged and added, “Unless killing is the job.”
“Well, I’m going to make a list of cracks and leaks and get a team in here with a constable escort,” Bill said. “We can’t risk…” He broke off, staring at a small figure in a pinafore, a child, moving through the shadows of the Jet Postal sorting room. Steel boots clanked; a great metal shape loomed up behind her.
A Big Daddy and a Little Sister. She skipped along, a large syringe in one hand, singing a song they couldn’t clearly hear. Something about “Mr. Bubbles” and “the angels.” Her enormous chaperone stumped along close behind her.
Bill and Karlosky watched with an uneasy mix of fascination and revulsion as the little girl squatted by a man’s awkwardly sprawling, facedown corpse and jammed the syringe into the back of his neck. She did something with the syringe, chirruping happily to herself, and it began to glow with extracted ADAM.
Bill stepped closer to the window and bent over to peer at the Little Sister. “Karlosky—is that Mascha?”
Karlosky groaned to himself. “Yes, maybe—maybe not. All Little Sisters look much alike to me.”
“If it’s her—I owe it to her folks to get her back.”
“We tried, Bill! You spoke to many people—no one would help.”
“That’s why I’ve got to do this myself, right now…”
“Please, don’t argue with Big Daddy, Bill—oh—there is splicer!”
A spider splicer was creeping upside down on the ceiling over the Little Sister. He had a hooked blade in one hand. He was chattering to himself—the intervening pane of glass muted the sound.
The Little Sister stood up, turned toward the Big Daddy—and then a blade spun past her, whipping through the air like a boomerang. The blade narrowly missed her head—so close it cut a bit of her hair, which drifted prettily away. The weapon circled the room and returned to the splicer, who caught the blade handle neatly, cackling as he did it.
The Little Sister’s guardian reacted instantly. The Big Daddy stepped into a pool of light, raised a rivet gun to aim at the ceiling, and fired a long strafe of rivets at the spider splicer. The gun nailed its target at such close range it cut the splicer in half. The spider splicer’s lower half and its upper half clung to the ceiling… separately, by feet and hands, the two halves gushing blood. Then they let go, and the halves of the splicer dropped heavily to the floor.
The little girl chirruped happily.
“You see?” Karlosky whispered. “If you interfere with her—you end up like him!”
“I’ve got to try,” Bill said. “Maybe if you distract him, I can grab her…”
“Oh shit, Bill, you son of bitch bastard!” Karlosky said, and muttered another imprecation in Russian. “You get me killed!”
“I’ve got faith in your gift for self-preservation, mate. Come on.” Bill led the way to the door of the Jet Postal sorting room. He hesitated, wondering what Elaine would want him to do. She would want Mascha rescued—if this Little Sister was in fact Mascha—but Elaine wouldn’t want him to risk himself this way. Still—there probably wouldn’t be another chance.
He opened the door, then stepped back, crouching down to one side, signaling to Karlosky. “Do it. Then run…”
Karlosky swore in Russian once more, but he raised his tommy gun and fired a short burst toward the Big Daddy—a burst from a tommy gun wasn’t going to kill it, and Karlosky wouldn’t risk the wrath of his employers by destroying the valuable cyborg, but it got the Big Daddy’s attention. The lumbering metal golem turned and rushed like an accelerating freight train at the source of the assault. Karlosky was already running, cursing Bill as he went. The Big Daddy clanged past Bill, not seeing him crouching by the door.
Bill slipped behind the metal guardian and through the door, seeing the little girl standing up from another extraction, blood-dripping syringe in her hand. She looked at him with big eyes, mouth opened in a round O.
Was this Mascha? He wasn’t sure.
“Mr.
“Mascha,” Bill said. “Is that you?” He took a step toward her. “Listen… I’m going to pick you up, but I won’t hurt you—”
Then a metallic clumping close behind Bill turned his blood cold. He spun about just in time to be struck across the chest—the Big Daddy, returned to protect its charge, swinging the weapon in its hand like a club. Bill was knocked backward, off his feet, the air smacked from his lungs, the room whirling.
Gasping, he lost consciousness for a few moments. When the spinning specks formed shapes and the room coalesced, he looked dizzily around—saw that he was sitting up on the floor, back against a bulkhead. The Big Daddy and his little charge were nowhere to be seen.
Bill got up, moaning to himself with the pain of his bruised chest, and staggered to the door. He was met by Karlosky. “You okay, Bill?”
“Yeah—good to see you alive. I thought I’d got you killed…”
“No, I outsmart that steel bastard. Look…!”
He pointed across the open space of the depot—on the far wall, the little girl was climbing into one of the key-shaped art-deco apertures that the Little Sisters used to enter hidden passageways. They scuttled through the passageways to take their scavenged ADAM back to Ryan’s laboratories.
Mascha or not Mascha? He would never know. She simply vanished into the wall.
The Big Daddy waited quietly by the big art deco keyhole for his Little Sister to return.
Bill shook his head and turned away, grimacing with pain—and wanting only to get back to Elaine.
Once more, his determination to escape Rapture was underscored. He had to get his family back to the surface. Back to blue sky and sunlight and freedom…
“Ryan and ADAM, ADAM and Ryan… all those years of study, and was I ever truly a surgeon before I met them? How we plinked away with our scalpels and toy morality! Yes, we could lop a boil here and shave down a beak there—but could we really change anything? No! But ADAM gives us the means to do it, and Ryan frees us from the phony ethics that held us back. Change your look, change your sex, change your race. It’s yours to change, nobody else’s!”
Wearing a blood-soaked surgical gown and white surgeon’s cap, his hands in rubber gloves, Doctor J. S. Steinman hit Pause on the little tape recorder that he’d wedged between the blond patient’s ample breasts; then he pushed the gurney, its wheels susurrating through the shallow water that had leaked across the floor of the surgery. He hummed to himself, singing an Inkspots song, “If I Didn’t Care,” over the muffled moaning of the patient he’d strapped to the little wheeled bed. “Would I be sure that this is love beyond compare? Would all this be true—if I didn’t care… for… you!”
He pushed the woman into place under the glaring surgical light and reached into his coat pocket for his favorite scalpel. Tiresome to do without a nurse, but he’d had to kill Nurse Chavez when she’d started whining about his efforts to please Aphrodite, threatening to turn him into the constables. Of course, he hadn’t killed her till he’d done some fine experimentation on her doll-like visage. He still had Chavez’s face in a refrigerator, somewhere, along with some others he’d peeled off and saved in preservative jars, faces from patients who’d given their lives for his perfect fusion of art and science. He really must try to organize his preserved faces with a filing system.
Steinman paused to admire this latest woman writhing in her restraints on the gurney. She’d used some
