Mildred yanked the pin from a red canister, paused, then gently rolled the cylinder underhand onto the elevator floor. Fountaining white sparks, like a roman candle, the thermite gren sputtered between the enforcer’s thighs, directly under its prominent gonads.
A very different kind of howl erupted from its throat when a second later the gren fully ignited and took the puddled chemical sweat with it. The resulting blast of four-thousand-degree heat sent Ryan and the others staggering away, shielding their faces with their forearms. Even though the enforcer was engulfed in fire, head to foot, it crumpled the edges of the elevator doors trying to pull itself free.
There was no escape.
In seconds the car’s thin steels walls began to melt around it. The enforcer reeled back from the doorway, arms thrashing. Flames roared upward, burning through the roof of the car, as though it was made of candle wax, and sucking the air in the corridor into the elevator shaft, as if it were a giant chimney. As the enforcer collapsed, the car broke free of its cables and plummeted downward.
Ricky’s dark eyes widened in disbelief. During the brief, one-sided firefight, his De Lisle carbine had been stuck firmly at port arms. “Were you shooting it in the head?”
“Shit, yeah,” Jak said, dumping six smoking hulls from his Python.
J.B. clapped a hand on the youth’s shoulder and said, “Those knobby, sweaty bastards die triple hard. Don’t worry, kid. You’ll get used to it—mebbe you’ll even get a shot off next time.”
Ricky shrugged. “Next time I’ll know where to aim.”
The muffled crash of the elevator car rolled up the shaft. It was a long fall to the bottom.
Ryan heard more bellows of fury—seemingly coming from all directions at once. It sounded like three hours past feeding time in a mutie zoo.
Retreat was definitely no longer an option.
“We’ve got to reach the mat-trans,” he said. “Don’t waste ammo. Use the grens to clear a path. Let’s go!”
With that, he and Jak led the full-out charge down the corridor. One hundred feet ahead was an intersection with another corridor. As they neared it, Ryan waved for Jak to slow down. They stopped and peered around the corners as the others stormed past. In the dim overhead light, way down the corridor on the right, he could see lumpy heads bobbing toward them. It was the same story when he looked in the opposite direction.
He and Jak rolled incendies both ways, then without waiting to see the effect, chased after the others. Ryan knew the thermite grens would keep the enforcers back, but only the first wave, and only temporarily.
In front of them, Krysty, Mildred, J.B., Doc and Ricky disappeared into a doorway on the left. Then the floor jolted violently under Ryan’s boots, sending him slamming shoulder first into the wall. Concrete dust rained down from the ceiling. Dozens of levels below, the generator’s whine died away, like a falling artillery shell, and the corridor lights winked out.
For an instant it was so dark Ryan couldn’t see the end of his nose. Pitch-black, but not quiet. Over the pounding of his heart, he heard what sounded like dozens of bare feet slapping the floor. The generator recovered after only a second or two, starting the climb to peak power, and then the lights came back on.
When Ryan looked behind them, he saw a corridor filled wall to wall with wide bodies, and they were bearing down fast. “Run, Jak! Run!” he shouted.
The entrance to the mat-trans unit’s control room stood open. Ryan was the last across the threshold. He spun around, located the keypad and, desperately hoping that the usual codes worked in this redoubt, punched in the one that would close the door. It worked. Breathing a sigh of relief, he quickly entered another to lock out access.
“We’re too late,” Krysty said as he turned. “We just missed them.”
He’d already guessed that. In a single go, something had drained the tremendous power load to zero.
Ryan rushed past panels of blinking, multicolored lights and the madly chattering, predark machinery, into the anteroom. The door to this mat-trans had a porthole, and he could see the tendrils of jump fog slowly lifting. Though his view was obscured, there were no feet below the mist and no slumped bodies on the floorplates near the door—just shiny smears of sweat.
There was no way to tell where or how many of their quarry had gone. Or even if Magus had jumped with them.
A resounding boom from a foot or fist against the outside of the control room’s door put an end to that train of thought. More banging followed, and under the rain of blows, the barrier began to bulge inward. Amber thumb hooks poked between the edge of the door and its frame, bending back the double-walled steel as if it was pot metal.
It wasn’t going to hold.
Krysty pulled out a red canister.
“No!” he said, catching her hand by the wrist. “If we use incendies in here, we’ll end up cooking ourselves and the mat-trans.”
Behind them, a knobby arm reached through the gap, a hand flailing clumsily toward its prey
“Into the chamber!” Ryan ordered as the anteroom entry was pried open.
The companions piled through ahead of him. Once inside, he shut the door, which didn’t have the usual lever for a handle. He dogged it with the locking wheel—just in time. On the far side of the porthole, inches from his face, enforcers tore madly at the hatch. The locking cams of vanadium steel were too strong for them, but the tips of their amber talons scored the glass, crosshatching it.
Ryan knew he had only seconds before the automatic cycle started. He lunged for the unit’s Last Destination button.
At almost the same instant, Doc shouted from the rear of the chamber, “Wait, Ryan! Do not press—!”
But the button had already clicked under his thumb.
“By the Three Kennedys, look here. Look at this!”
The floorplates beneath his boots throbbing with pulses of light, Ryan pushed past the others and glimpsed what he hadn’t been able to see before: a second porthole door, the mirror image of the one they had entered through. He pressed his face to the armaglass and saw nothing. What was on the other side was not only devoid of light, it swallowed light, like a bottomless hole.
Gray fog materialized near the chamber’s ceiling. As Ryan breathed in the stinging mist, his head began to spin, then his knees gave way. He crumpled to his back on the floorplates. Beside him, Krysty and the others were already down, writhing and screaming. Jumping had never hurt before—the fog had always produced a merciful blackout. Mat-trans units never had two doors. Mind racing, he tried to make sense of it.
Then something incredibly powerful seized his wrists and ankles and stretched them in opposite directions. He roared in pain, certain that every tendon and joint would break under the accelerating pressure, but they didn’t—instead, the opposing forces pulled his body thinner and thinner, as if it were made of rubber.
He couldn’t make it stop; he couldn’t even slow it down.
Chapter One (#ulink_865b404b-67c0-5775-b005-ef422e94ea7d)
Once again Veronica Currant found her attention wandering across the luxuriously appointed dining room, past the dark leather booths, crystal chandeliers and liveried waitstaff. It came to rest on the TV above the Manhattan restaurant’s bar. Because the presidential inauguration was less than a day away, media was replaying the whole “lost ballot” business in excruciating detail: the characters in the Florida GOP implicated in the computer tampering conspiracy, and the Supreme Court decision that had ultimately determined the outcome of the election. The country was sick of hearing about it, and so was she. She just wanted it over with. After all, there were checks and balances built into the system, no matter who was elected. The Republicans had had three successive terms in the White House since 1980. How bad could a Democratic President be?
The tall, gaunt man on the other side of the table tapped his water goblet with a silver spoon to get her attention. “We were discussing terms on a multibook deal,” Noah Prentiss reminded her.
It took an effort of will on her part not to stare at the swollen red knob of his nose and the constellations of tiny starbursts on his cheeks.
Prentiss was an alcoholic, low-rung literary agent. His low-rung client—a small pudgy man who bit his nails—sat to his left. They had turned their half of the white linen tablecloth into a veritable Jackson Pollack of red-wine spills, meat juice and grease spots, bits of discarded gristle, drips of Caesar dressing, shreds of romaine and escaped bread crumbs.
“Kyle and I have discussed the matter at length,” Prentiss went on, “and feel a raise in advance is appropriate on the next Clanker contract.”
Clanker was one of the eight-book series Veronica edited for a New York City paperback house. The central character of the same name was a steampunk cyborg—coal and wood fired.
“No one writes Clanky as good as me,” Kyle Arthur Levinson boasted, somewhat thickly after four martinis and a half bottle of cabernet.
Veronica looked from one man to the other but did not reply. Silence in answer to a question was a negotiating technique she had learned from the five-foot-two pulp-fiction publisher, cigar-smoking entrepreneur and renowned tightwad who was her boss. It was a strategy that put the opposition at an immediate disadvantage.
If she had chosen to, she could have listed many reasons why Mr. Levinson didn’t deserve more book contracts, let alone a raise in pay. He never turned in his assignments on time. Despite the advance outlines to the contrary, he wrote the same story over and over. Clanker aways ran short on energy at a crucial moment in the plot and broke up some chairs or bookshelves to burn in his brass firebox, thus saving the day. Levinson cannibalized action and sex scenes word for word from his own books. He never researched or fact-checked his work. He never read books by the other ghosts in the series, which created conflicts with canon. None of these issues set him apart from the rest of the stable—to one degree or another, all the writers were guilty of the same offenses. So why should he get more money?
Prentiss had an answer for that.
“Remember,” the agent said, “Kyle’s been on this series from the start. He helped build its current global audience.”
“I’m the one who invented ol’ Clanky’s catch phrase, ‘Stoke me!’”
