The Hammer Falls Read online

  He grinned. “Good thing the aft end is easily ventilated.”

  Her face scrunched up, and she sighed. “Dude humor.”

  He grabbed his crotch and grinned wider. “There’s even a codpiece, little sister.” The armor’s crotch comprised a rigid cup similar to what athletes wore, hinged for easy access.

  Tina grabbed a poker from the fireplace, approached him, and swung at his crotch, hard. With a meaty thwack, he felt the distinct impact of the blow, but the force of it was dissipated over his entire pelvis and the poker formed a U. “The manual says it’s effective against bullets, flechettes, and some types of rail gun ammunition, with limited protection against vibro- and electro-fiber weapons.”

  “I can live with that.”

  Her face screwed tighter again. “And I’ll be walking around in there practically naked.”

  “You can still back out.”

  “You need me.”

  “I don’t need anybody.”

  “A lie, and you know it.”

  She was right, and he indeed knew it. But pride that went all the way to the bone squirmed and chafed at the notion. Since leaving Las Vegas, he’d been depending on the goodwill of strangers. He couldn’t help thinking soon he would have to pay the piper.

  “Fine,” he said.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, fine. Don’t push it.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Next toy is an electro-fiber sword. Camouflaged to look like a small flashlight. That baby is mine.”

  “Pray, share with the class.”

  She opened a box and several layers of packaging to reveal a palm-sized flashlight with a flat black casing. She pointed it carefully away from herself and thumbed the button. With an electric snap, a thin, gray blade sprang forth, about as long as her arm. As she twisted it and flicked it in her hand, the blade disappeared when viewed on edge.

  Her brows rose in appreciation. “Light as a feather.” The bent poker was leaning against one of the metal shipping cases. A deft flick of her wrist, a metallic clink, and the poker fell into two pieces, neatly bisected. Her grin spread like a sunrise. “Holy shit!”

  “Yeah, and you could even take off your own leg with it.”

  “Stuff it, Grandpa. I’ve done more training with a sword than even you have.”

  “What’s next on Santa’s naughty list? Any vibro-cleavers in there?”

  “Hah! Check this out.” She handed him two black bracers that looked like leather. They integrated perfectly with the forearms of the armor. “Neuro-sensors in the cuff. In the right bracer, flex your fingers just so and you have electro-fiber blades. Won’t show up on a metal detector or scanner.”

  “I’ll have to make sure not to flex when I’m picking my nose.”

  “Gah! Must you?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. You know, when they’re crusty and stuck in the hair.”

  She mimed a retch.

  “You have delicate sensibilities for a ninja. Would you like me to test your bath water for you? Fluff your pillow?”

  “Fuck you, Jeeves. I’m still a female. If we degenerate into poop humor, you can read this yourself.”

  “Is there anything long range in there? Plasma cannon in a compact? Mini-nuke in a netlink?” He set about fixing the bracers to his wrists.

  “Which brings us to your left bracer. A one-shot, electro-fiber shuriken, with a range of twenty meters. Good lord, this lady has a fetish for hardware.”

  He almost said, She does indeed like her wares hard, but in light of his earlier conversation with Tina, he refrained.

  She apparently sensed him holding back and fixed him with a look not of disdain, but of thoughtful realization.

  “What now?” he said.

  “You’re acting pretty saucy tonight, even for you.”

  “You feel that? That’s being alive, little sister. I feel this way before every match.”

  She nodded. “I do feel it. Samurai used to train for a state of mind where they already believed themselves dead. Every day after that was borrowed time, on loan from their lord. Ninja had that, too, but they were a little more pragmatic about it.”

  He recognized his own speech to the fighters to let go of their fear of death. He and Tina had come to the same crossroads of philosophy by wildly different paths.

  “When I was living on the street...”

  “After your dad died.”

  Her eyes flicked toward him once, then she picked up the electro-fiber sword again and focused her gaze there. “The days I got away with the craziest, most outlandish, most brazen shit were those days when I did it because there was nothing else for me to do. My life was already over. It’s a fine line between this kind of freedom and sheer, suicidal despair. There’s an old Zen saying, ‘While you yet live, become a dead person. Then, do as you like.’ God, the crazy shit I did.”

  “So just don’t try to seduce me before Roxanne gets here. I’m spent.” He gave her his best deadpan face.

  She just stared at him for a moment.

  She was either going to be really pissed at him for that one, or...

  An irrepressible snicker bubbled out of her that cascaded into a full guffaw. “Ah, Horace. Ah, the humanity!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Horace The Hammer Harkness did not reside in the mirror anymore. As he applied the prosthetic tip to his finger, he could even fool a basic fingerprint and DNA scan now. With his identity concealed, he felt secure enough to amble out onto the balcony, feeling like a silverback gorilla walking upright, such was the bodily disorientation. He gazed down over the Strip, that bejeweled explosion of extravagance and decadence that defied the cold desert night with gaudy promises, manufactured excitement, and illusions of life. In the distance, the great domed hulk of the Coliseum blazed its spotlights toward the stars. A world of time and distance existed between this moment and his night in the Coliseum a week ago.

  Tonight, there would be no spots, no showmanship, no audience, no pumping up the crowd and giving them what they came for—at least not of a kind in his experience—nothing to expect except raw, untamed, unplanned combat and death. On second thought, perhaps it was all showmanship—roles to play, deceptions to maintain until the proper moment, but only for a small, specialized audience. With a thought of the impressive supply of hardware back inside, there would indeed be spots.

  The synth-skin made his flesh tingle as it tried to bond to wounds that weren’t there, or maybe it was the fact that his blood felt full of quicksilver. A painkiller had dulled the pounding beat of all the wounds of the last week—gunshots, laser wounds, contusions, lacerations, and deep, throbbing bruises.

  He paced and paced, took a swig straight from the crystal decanter of Courvoisier on the bar, his brain spinning through a litany of unhelpful thoughts. His heart could blow a gasket half a second before putting a blade into Yvgeny Mogilevich’s neck.

  Bunny emerged from her room. “Roxanne is on the way.” Her voice fluttered, and she wrung her hands like they were sodden dish rags.

  Clothed now in a new suit of nondescript dark gray with armor underneath, Horace stood over her and saw the awe, longing, and fear seeping from every pore in her face.

  “Any words of encouragement, Mr. He-Man?” she said.

  “Who are you today, Bunny or the White Rabbit?”

  “It’s been a long time since anybody called me White Rabbit. White Rabbit’s running legs are still amputated, just bloody stumps.”

  “Rabbits got some nasty teeth.”

  “Maybe my metaphor is backward. I can run, but with the lock on, I can’t fight.”

  “Knowing that you’re gonna be out there watching over us almost makes me think we have a hope. You saved us from that drone.”

  “I did do that. If the lock doesn’t come off in time, I’ll still do what I can do. But what I’m afraid of is that Mogilevich’s place will be a big netsec dead zone like Roxanne’s storage facility. That once you go in, you’ll be cut off, and I’ll
be stuck in the parking lot, blind and deaf. And that if it does go all sideways, I won’t see them coming to put a bullet in my head.”

  “If I die, you can have all my stuff.”

  A snicker cracked the brittle fear in her face. “Gee, thanks. Whatever shall I do with a matchbox that big?”

  “Charge admission. ‘The final remains of a once-great star!’ Someone somewhere will remember me.”

  “I’ll remember you.”

  The air in the car vibrated with pent-up emotion as Horace shut the door behind him and eased into the seat beside Roxanne. If anything, she looked more beautiful in a tantalizing burgundy evening gown, a velvety confection that set his memory afire. But there was no time to think about that anymore.

  Roxanne’s eyes burned with a firm resolve as she went through a checklist of preparations. She gave Bunny the destination, and Bunny took her place in the driver’s seat. Tina settled herself across from them, a knot of barely controlled tension, squirming in her designer couture gown.

  He adjusted himself, trying to settle into the armor. Without it, the silk suit would have felt like warm butter against his skin, but with the extra thickness of the stiff plates and battery pack, it felt like flimsy film wrapping an oddly-angled stone.

  As the limousine picked up speed, the lights of the Strip slid past, painting Horace and the women with great splashes of brilliant color, then grew sparser until nothing but desert night surrounded the car. The crumbling remains of Highway 95 stretched out before them, but its roughness could not penetrate their cushion of air.

  Roxanne checked a small flashlight that looked remarkably like the one in Tina’s clutch purse. “Mogilevich had a palace built on Bonanza Peak. It’s become quite a housing development over the last thirty years. Las Vegas’ highest rollers have houses up there. The views are breathtaking.”

  “Didn’t that used to be a national park or something? Protected land?” Horace said.

  “When was the last time you visited a national park, Horace?”

  “When I was a kid, I guess. Parents took me to Yellowstone. Never been the camping type, except for those times I had to sleep in my school bus.”

  Roxanne shrugged. “‘For the people’ was an idea promulgated by environmental crazies and communists such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Or so the oligarchs would have people believe, every time they seize another chunk of once-protected land for themselves.”

  Northwest of the city, the limousine turned southwest off the highway and headed toward a snow-dusted, moon-silvered peak skirted in the black foam of pine forest. Along the highway lay endless kilometers of rocks and sand, cacti and mesquite and Joshua trees, a hellish inferno during the day, but tonight a placid, diamond-dusted plain surrounded by distant mountains. Even in the climate-controlled limousine, the scents of the desert filtered inside, dust and desert flowers, the earth as it cooled, and as the mountain drew nearer in the video monitor, dewy pines.

  “We’ve picked up a couple of drones,” Bunny said over the intercom.

  Horace tensed.

  “Military types,” Bunny said. “Cousins to our friends from Buffalo.”

  “Does this happen every time?” he said.

  Roxanne straightened in her seat. “No. Those drones cost fortunes. Mogilevich’s resources seem to have expanded over the last couple of years.”

  Tina’s grin simmered with malice. “Or maybe we’ve made him nervous by still being alive.”

  Bunny’s voice came back to them. “Transponder codes, sent.... Green light to approach.”

  Horace let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

  Tina slapped him half-playfully on the thigh. “What happened to being okay with the walking dead man thing?”

  “A drone missile from out of nowhere is not the same as facing down someone in the pit,” he said. “When you can see their eyes, smell their sweat, and know whether they’re gonna stand against you or fold.”

  “Point taken,” Tina said.

  On the video screen at the front of the limousine’s cabin, enhanced to be as bright as day, they were passing through patches of strip mall, tourist shops, and retail outlets that had beaten back the natural landscape on the way up the mountain. Thickening pine forest had been chopped away from the road to make room for fast-food drive-thrus, clothing stores, restaurants, the forest relegated to distant clumps of dark-green foam. He tried to envision what this mountain, this rocky ripple in the fabric of the desert plains, might have looked like in its natural state, but he could not.

  The lights of other cars were visible before and behind, a train of stained, tarnished affluence congregating at the behest of the biggest, meanest, richest dog in the junkyard.

  The road wound and switched back, twisting to ever greater heights. Horace’s ears registered the steadily changing elevation.

  “How many people attend shindigs like this?” he said.

  Roxanne poured herself a glass of merlot from the bar. “Last year, thirty-three invitees, plus guests and bodyguards. Everyone is very well-behaved, although there is always a certain amount of primate posturing and chest-thumping.”

  Tina said, “I think us dames should just do away with the Y-chromosome altogether. Wouldn’t the world be a much nicer place?”

  Roxanne leaned forward and raised her glass with a brilliant smile. “I completely agree, Ambrosia.”

  “Right, we’re getting into character now,” Tina said, straightening her evening gown.

  Half an hour later, the limo pulled up to a massive, wrought-iron gate with an adjacent guard shack.

  Two men wearing battle armor and helmets, carrying carbine-like weapons of a type Horace had never seen, stepped out of the shack, one approaching the driver’s window, the other approaching the passenger compartment. One of them knocked on the rear passenger window.

  Roxanne opened it, and the guard leaned down, peering pointedly at each of the occupants. Roxanne offered their names and gave him a generous view of cleavage and inner thigh until he grunted and waved them on.

  As the car moved up the long, winding drive, Bunny came over the intercom, gasping almost in panic. “That guard wanted to look at my face! I could have been made!” They hadn’t changed Bunny’s face because she was not supposed to be visible to anyone. Most limos were handled by autonomous AIs. Drivers were redundant.

  “They’ve never done that before,” Roxanne said.

  Bunny said, “I almost wet myself!”

  “So what did you do?” Tina said.

  “I let my Jimmy talk to him, my artificial person. Since the windows are one-way only, he couldn’t see me. Jimmy powwowed with his security computer and told him the car is AI-controlled. And those guns they’re carrying? Those are military-elite grade. Caseless depleted-uranium slug-throwers. You could shoot through a bunker wall with those. Retail price is—”

  “I don’t even want to know!” Horace said, suddenly feeling as if his armor would be as useful as tinfoil. He fixed Roxanne with a steady gaze. “So we can assume most of the guards are packing.”

  “A reasonable assumption,” Roxanne said, meeting his gaze with cool steadiness.

  “Those guns.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And we don’t have any.”

  “Horace, I—”

  “Why would anyone agree to come to an event like this?”

  “It’s a way for Mogilevich to display his magnanimity. We are all now under his hospitality and protection. And we are not required to relinquish our own weapons until we exit the car. You can bet every one of these vehicles is a floating arsenal.”

  “But if anyone steps out of line, he can snuff them with no consequences.”

  “Like worms underfoot, yes.”

  “If, like you said, this is the way he keeps his enemies close, why doesn’t he just kill us all?”

  “If he were to kill his guests as you suggest, he would launch an open war with everyone. This world is an ever-shiftin
g battlefield of alliances and betrayals. There is a great deal of squabbling at the edges of our respective empires, but we all make each other a great deal of money. If he turned everyone against him, even Yvgeny Mogilevich would not last long.”

  “You got a roster that tells who’s playing for who?”

  She smiled faintly.

  He flinched as a display of text appeared in his vision beside Roxanne:

  NAME: ROXANNE SUKOVA

  ESTIMATED WORTH: $118 BILLION

  PRIMARY FINANCIAL INTERESTS: LABOR, LAW ENFORCEMENT, HYDROGEN, FUSION RESEARCH

  MARITAL STATUS: DIVORCED TWICE

  CHILDREN: UNKNOWN

  KNOWN ASSOCIATES: CONFIDENTIAL

  EDUCATION: B.A. IN ENGLISH LITERATURE (OXFORD), LAW DEGREE (PRINCETON)

  PRIVATE LIFE: CONFIDENTIAL

  OTHER: BLACK BELTS IN JUJITSU AND AIKIDO.

  “Blink twice to clear the message,” she said.

  He did so, and the second blink wiped his vision clean.

  He glanced at Tina and a new display popped up:

  NAME: AMBROSIA WELCH

  ESTIMATED WORTH: $7 MILLION

  OCCUPATION: ASPIRING ACTRESS, SINGER

  SEXUAL PREFERENCE: LESBIAN

  MARITAL STATUS: SINGLE

  CHILDREN: NONE

  EDUCATION: B.F.A. IN THEATER (MONSANTO UNIVERSITY)

  PRIVATE LIFE: KNOWN RELATIONSHIPS WITH TWO POPULAR SINGERS

  CRIMINAL RECORD: TEN YEARS PROBATION FOR TECH TRAFFICKING, AWAITING TRIAL ON LEWD CONDUCT CHARGES IN NORTH CAROLINA

  “Well, aren’t you interesting, Ms. Welch,” he said with a grin.

  “The contacts work similarly to netlinked glasses,” Roxanne said, “but Bunny oversees the data feed.”

  He flinched again as a white, fluffy, long-eared shape charged out of the distance into his vision and coalesced into a rabid leporine figure with razor-sharp, bloody teeth and blazing red eyes, going for his throat. His hands went up to grab it, but it disappeared in a puff of pixel smoke.

  And then an avatar of Bunny appeared in his vision and waved at him with an impish smile.