together body.
So where the fuck’s the brain?
Because once she’s mapped that, she can get out. Back to Sinclair’s people. Back to the ones who put her in here.
Something catches her eye. New data seems to be flowing. Haskell focuses on a series of lines that carry particularly heavy traffic. Each line winds through buildings. Each terminates in what looks to be a dead end. But something’s crouching at each of those ends. Something that seems to be winding up through incremental stages of activation.
Even as she takes this in, she’s noticing the same thing going down in other cities. Sao-Rio. Greater Caracas. Japura. In each city, it’s the same: communications back and forth. Things being queried. Things responding…but what does it mean? Is this a pattern she’s just now seeing? Is something changing? Is this the key to it all? Was this happening already? She can’t figure it out.
For just another moment, she lets it clarify. During which time those nodes keep brightening. To the point where she realizes it’s not just her focus getting better. It’s not just her read on this place improving. These changes are real. They’re making her current position far too dangerous. The Jaguars could be on to her. She’s got to beat a retreat. She’s got enough to go on. She starts to withdraw.
But they move first.
Marlowe looks around. The chamber he’s in is perhaps twenty meters by another fifteen. At least one level has been cut away above it to accommodate its vaulting ceiling. Yet in all this space, it’s the center of the room that really gets Marlowe’s attention.
Because that’s where the missiles are.
Five of them. All of them protruding from a cylinder-shaped launcher that sits upon a dais. Each is about three meters long, with the green cat-skull of the Jaguars painted upon its nose cone. All around lie consoles, electronic equipment, bundles of wire. Marlowe creeps in toward the launcher. Smoke from the flames behind him is beginning to waft into the room. But he pays it no heed. He reaches that center structure and leaps forward, vaulting over it, holding his arms and guns perfectly level.
Two meters in front of where Marlowe’s just landed, a man sits cross-legged, calmly gazing up at him. The man’s skin is darker than that of any of the guerrillas Marlowe has encountered thus far. Greyish-black hair falls down around his shoulders. He regards Marlowe with a strange mixture of interest and indifference. His eyes are as black as his hair must once have been.
“Yanqui.” The voice is low. It sounds almost amused. “You were too fast for us. We thought we would have had more warning. We failed to prepare for just one man.”
The Jaguar’s stalling for time is transparent. But Marlowe needs information. This is almost certainly the man he’s charged with bringing back—but the missiles have changed the nature of the mission automatically. The man opens his mouth to speak again, but Marlowe cuts him off: “Where’d you get the missiles?”
“Missiles?” The man rises to his feet. He smiles. Marlowe’s wrists flex upon the edge of trigger. “I see no missiles. All I see are the teeth of the Great Cat.”
“The jaguar?”
“You defile its name even as you speak it, Yanqui. Just as you defile our land. Do you not recognize these weapons? When the gate to their cage is lifted, they will go faster than the wind, and they have more cunning than do mere men.”
“You’re saying that these missiles are hypersonic?” Marlowe doesn’t dare turn and inspect the engines to confirm the claim. “Tell me where you got them, or I am going to kill you.”
“Shoot me if you like, then, Yanqui—” Accepting the invitation, Marlowe lowers his left arm and switches to regular ammo, blowing the man’s right kneecap into splinters. Blood and flesh spray through the air. The man goes down—and then rolls over and looks up at Marlowe. Blood’s pouring from his shattered leg. He’s still smiling. And still speaking as calmly as before.
“My soul has already gone to join my ancestors, Jason Marlowe. But I left my body behind to tell you that the Jaguar of all our souls is even now among us. Ready to purge this land of all who oppress us. Ready to lick clean your bones. Are you listening now, Yanqui?”
“How do you know who I am?” says Jason Marlowe, and thrusts one of his guns into the man’s smiling face. “So help me God, man, you’d better tell me what you’re saying.”
“But I’m saying nothing you can understand.” Spittle flicks onto the barrel of Marlowe’s weapon. “Except for the fact that your people are about to be dealt retribution in full. As for how I know your name—Paynal, He Who Walks Upon the Wind and Carries Their Decrees, has imparted much to me. He has informed me that They have decided that if you can pass Their servant’s test of quickness, then you are worthy to play your part in the final drama.”
“If you keep talking, the next bullet’s going straight through your teeth.” Marlowe knows he shouldn’t even bother to make the threat. He knows that he should kill this man right now. But he also knows that he won’t. Now he’s wondering if he’ll be able to shoot him at all. Somehow this crippled man bleeding on the floor has gained the upper hand.
As if sensing his advantage, the man laughs. “The test of quickness, Yanqui. In your language they call it ‘beating the bullet,’ do they not? But no matter—you’ve already failed it, as you sit here prattling with me. For behold, my spirit-guardians have crossed the threshold and are here to join us—and in mere seconds so will my mortal sentinels.” As the man speaks, Marlowe suddenly senses a presence moving up behind him, creeping in between the blind spots of his sensors. He can even
Whirling, Marlowe confronts only air—and then instinct saves his life, for instead of drawing up dumbfounded, he keeps moving, diving as his adversary’s knife (replete with powered saw-edges to shear through even heavy armor) flies through the space where his head had been a moment before. Dive seamlessly switches to somersault, leaving him on the floor, firing backward over his head, riddling the man with bullets. The whole action has taken less than two seconds. Whoever he was, this man is now dead.
His comrades, however, are clearly still alive. Marlowe can hear shouts drawing closer—the blaze-battling operation reclaiming this piece of the building. Marlowe leaps to his feet, turns his attention to rigging a hi-ex charge onto the missiles—and discovers that the situation is even worse than he’d thought. Not only are the missiles hypersonic, but so are the payloads: each nose cone contains ten tactical warheads, each one fixed to its own hypersonic motor and capable of acting as an autonomous missile anytime after firing. How many more such missiles might there be in this city, sitting inside a continental defense perimeter that encompasses three-fifths of the U.S. launch infrastructure, each base crouched within its own defenses—defenses that would be hard-pressed to withstand an assault with this kind of weapon from this kind of range…the implications keep on stacking up in Marlowe’s mind, and each is but one pulse in the staccato blast of signals that he’s sending out toward the jet- copters and zeppelins overhead, toward the satellites an instant beyond—but none of them can hear him: Marlowe’s signals are bouncing back upon him. The room’s walls must be lined with something—anything to prevent those outside from probing to discover its contents.
Then two men race into the room. Marlowe scarcely looks up to shoot them down. His bomb-rack tosses more grenades through the doorway through which they’ve come. Then he sets the missile controls to manual, starts the ignition sequence. He starts racing forward, extends the fins on his armor. He sees the walls in front of him begin to slide away, just as he’d hoped they would. Fragments of cityscape glimmer through the heaped mountains of the chem-smoke. He hears thunder roar to life behind him—feels himself seized by his thrusters, hurled forward, out into the city.
He watches the ’scraper falling away behind him, sees a sudden flash blossom behind him as his charge detonates. None of that explosion’s nuclear. The charge was set to destroy those warheads. But the blast must have touched off a Jaguar ammunition cache: because now the walls around the floor where he just was rupture, blast outward, tumble downward even as the whole building totters—and then collapses. It comes down like a house of cards, debris flying up in great chunks as it disappears into the murk below—and Marlowe refuses to think about the innocents he’s just killed, because there might have been still more missiles in that building, and
