That was before. Now, there was a monster on its way here, to Holt, alive or not, to a.s.similate the kid's DNA. No, I had to get Holt out of here. Alive was as easy as dead.

While the risk of an unstoppable mutant aberration put the whole city at risk, I was suddenly grateful for it. Now I wouldn't have to make a decision and find out what kind of bot I was. Could I kill someone, even an innocent boy, even if it was the most logical thing to do? If I couldn't, did it mean I had that elusive quality of humanity or was I just stupid? If I could, was I every bit the ruthless auto I was designed to be or was I doing what needed to be done? All good questions, but they wouldn't be answered today. And I hoped they never would have to be.

Holt moaned and opened his eyes halfway. He spoke so weakly that it barely registered.

"Mack," he said. "You found me. April said you would. She said I shouldn't be scared."

"Yeah, kid," I said. "It'll be all right."

He smiled painfully, then closed his eyes and went back to sleep. Except sleep was too nice a word for it. He was unconscious, out cold. His breathing was shallow and irregular. I had to get him out of here, find a hospital, and keep him out of the belly of a monster for another five minutes.

The aberration screeched as it hurled itself against the panic room. It'd eaten enough by now that it was too big to fit through the doors. Instead, it pounded on the walls and tried reaching in with one of its arms. I kicked it in the knuckles so that it withdrew the limb, but the walls were dissolving under its acidic touch and buckling under its powerful blows. They wouldn't last more than a few seconds.

I reached up and tore away the seal on the tube overhead. "Hang on, Holt." I don't know why I said it. He couldn't hear me.

I activated my booster and rocketed up the tube toward the lab. It was a long way up though, and the belt didn't have the juice for a single jump. So I dug my fingers into the side halfway up, and hung there, cradling Holt in my damaged arm, still functional enough for that, waiting for the booster to recharge.

Below, the aberration screamed and growled as it tore apart the panic room. It would figure out Holt wasn't there in a second and be after us. The thing had some sort of connection to Holt. I a.s.sumed it wouldn't remain confused long.

The booster was taking longer than usual to recharge. It was wearing out. I only needed it to hold out a little longer. Just one more time. That was all I asked.

I switched on my radio. "Humbolt, are you out there?"

"Yeah, Mack," he replied.

"I need to talk to the cops."

"Good news," said Humbolt. "We got cops all over the freakin' place out here."

"Detective Alfredo Sanchez," I said. "Short, furry, looks like a rat. Find him."

"I'm on it."

Below, the aberration grew suddenly silent. Even its raspy breathing ceased. I didn't know if it was sniffing the air for Holt's scent or scanning telepathically, but I was sure it wouldn't take long to pick up the trail.

It raised its head upward, looked me right in the optical, and laughed. I swear it laughed. Played that sound back three times, and every time, it could only be a chuckle. A hungry, wicked chuckle.

It was too big to fit up the tube easily, but it was squishy enough that it could force itself upwards. Its dripping flesh dissolved the sides, making its climb easier with each inch.

"Come on, Lucia. Don't let me down."

The belt reactivated.

I boosted the rest of the way as the aberration threatened to grab me by the foot. I didn't have quite enough power, and I barely made it to the edge. I snagged it with my free hand and pulled myself up without losing Holt in the process. There was no time to congratulate myself. Behind me, the aberration was shrieking. I'd bought a fifteen- or twenty-second head start. Maybe less.

I was still sixteen stories below ground. I needed up fast. My memory file directed me to a nearby section of emergency levitator pods. Intended purely for evacuation situations, they worked one way: up. Which was fortunately the way I wanted to go. With some luck, they hadn't all been taken yet.

One was left, and there was a group of five Dissenters attempting to access it. They jumped at my sudden appearance and readied their weapons.

"We don't have time for this," I said.

The aberration roared, and it could be heard ripping in this direction.

They lowered their weapons, and the leader, a rodent-like woman, pressed a few keys on the security console.

"Invalid code," replied the console in a superior voice.

Her shaking hand stabbed at the keys, and the console said, "invalid code."

Biologicals. Couldn't count on them when the pressure was on. Not most of them anyway. I dug into my coat pocket and plugged another of Lucia's gizmos into the console. It lit up.

The aberration appeared at the end of the corridor. How could something that oddly proportioned and lumbering move so fast? It rushed toward us.

"Oh, flurb," whispered one of the terrified lab techs.

Lucia's gizmo chimed happily as it defeated the security console. I shoved my way into the pod first and the rest jumped in behind me. I hit the activation b.u.t.ton as a giant hand reached in and s.n.a.t.c.hed out one of the biologicals. His screams were cut off by a sudden crunch. Then the doors closed, and the pod rocketed upward.

"What is that?" asked the rodent scientist. "What is that?" As if there were really an answer to the question that would make everything better.

I checked Holt. He remained unconscious, despite the b.u.mpy ride and the monster out to devour him.

"Mack, got'cha that cop you wanted," radioed Humbolt. "Patchin' him through now. Just speak into my faceplate, detective."

"What the h.e.l.l is going on here, Mack?" asked Sanchez.

"No time for questions," I said. "Here's what I need you to do. I'm going to be coming out of the southern side of the building. Have a fast rotorcar standing by, ready for immediate takeoff. I've got a kid here who needs medical attention. More importantly, he's got to be kept away from the thing that's following me."

"Thing? What thing?"

"Big dangerous thing," I replied. "It'll be right behind me, and it'll be hungry. Evacuate every biological from the area. You've got thirty seconds."

"I can't do that, Mack. This is the Nucleus. It's a circus out here right now."

"Find a way," I said, "or a lot of people are going to die twenty-seven seconds from now. Megaton out."

It was asking a lot, and if Sanchez wasted time arguing with me, it wouldn't get done. But he didn't reply, and I a.s.sumed he'd handle it.

The pod stopped at the ground floor, and the biologicals scattered in various directions. I ran out the southern exit. Sanchez and his men were still clearing the area. They hadn't even put a dent in the crowd. Tempting globs of flesh and DNA were all around. Even if the aberration didn't get hold of Holt, it could do a lot of damage in the three-and-a-half minutes it had left to live.

Sanchez was ready for me. He didn't give me a hard time, just led me through the crowd to the waiting rotorcar. I handed Holt off to a cop. The car shot off into the sky. I turned toward Carter Centre.

"You have to get these people out of here," I said to Sanchez.

"We're doing what we can, but I must've left my wormhole in my other pants," he replied. "Now, what is this big thing that's after you?"

The aberration burst its way through the gla.s.s doors. The thing that had been Warner was now a hulking brute of smoking flesh and malformed limbs, seventeen feet high. Its scrambled DNA could no longer make up its mind. Hairy tufts and scaly patches and hungry mouths appeared and disappeared on its random flesh. Its three eyes moved independently of each other, tracking the crowds.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n," said Sanchez.

The monster beat its chest and roared. Its every movement flung globs of dissolving, corrosive flesh through the streets. It hesitated, confused by the buffet of scrambling morsels before it. A brave cop drew his raygun and tried to blast it. He only caught its attention. It seized him and swallowed him in two bites.

The rest of the cops started blasting the aberration. It was their job to try and stop it. But it was also a waste of time.

"How the h.e.l.l do we stop something like that?" asked Sanchez.

"We don't. Get everybody the h.e.l.l away from it," I said. "I'll keep it busy."

"Can you kill it?" said Sanchez, but I was already on my way.

I didn't need to kill it. I only had to keep it busy for two hundred seconds or so, a.s.suming Zarg was right. I hoped he was as smart as he was supposed to be.

In the four seconds it took me reach it, the aberration devoured three more cops and two unlucky civilians. And it didn't appear like it was getting full yet.

I threw myself into it, lifted it off its feet, and tried to push it back into Carter Centre, away from the street. It didn't quite work out. The way it shed its skin made a solid grip impossible. I only managed twelve feet before it regained its footing and started pushing back.

The thing was stronger than me, and it had the weight advantage. I tried the gravity clamp, but the belt was burnt out. The aberration shrugged me off, tossing me aside. I slid across the pavement and collided with a parked buzzbug. The aberration turned its back to me, dismissing me as an inedible nuisance.

I dug the fingers of my functional arm into the buzzbug's hood, performed a quick trajectory calculation projection, and hurled it at the monster. It sailed in a perfect arc to collide with the back of the thing's head. The mutant stumbled and glanced with annoyance in my direction.

Annoyance. Exactly what I needed.

I threw a treader, then immediately followed it with another buzzbug. Each clobbered the aberration on its dissolving skull, and while they didn't seem to be doing any real injury, they were p.i.s.sing it off. A p.i.s.sed-off monster was a distracted monster.

I was about to hurl a gyroped when the aberration whirled suddenly. Two antennae had sprouted from its forehead as it spontaneously mutated. They crackled with blue energy and unleashed a stream of focused radiation. The gyroped, steel, gla.s.s, and all, disintegrated into powder. My indestructible clothing, too. My alloy held up, but my radiation screens were ineffective. A short list of internal failures sprang up in my diagnostics file, and thirty or forty seconds of exposure could've fried vital circuits.

The creature wasn't smart enough to realize that so when I didn't disappear in a poof, it cut off the blast. It dropped to all fours and charged. My reflex model had been damaged, and it was on top of me before I could react. It swatted at me with one huge paw. I catapulted high into the air and bounced into a small crowd of civilians. It was a miraculous anomaly I didn't land on any of them, but not exactly good luck since the thing was plenty p.i.s.sed at me and now moving this way.

A blaster blindsided the beast and blew off a chunk of its shoulder. The aberration growled curiously, more perplexed than hurt. Its eyes scanned the crowd and found Sanchez standing atop a rotorcar. The little guy was gutsy. I'd give him that. And he was about to be dead.

"Come on!" he shouted. "I'm here! Over here!" He blasted a few holes in the aberration's chest.

The thing's antennae started crackling again. There wouldn't even be enough left of Sanchez to fill a teacup.

Another blast caught it by surprise as Jung fired at it from behind. A dozen cops joined in and a barrage of rayfire punched holes through the aberration's flesh. It spasmed and growled. It didn't die. The antennae on its head glowed brighter, and I detected rapidly rising levels of an unidentified radiation in the air. It wasn't dangerous yet, but it was building fast toward a full-scale disaster.

My reflex model finally kicked in. I dashed forward low to the ground, and knocked its legs out from under it. The aberration tumbled over. I didn't allow it time to recover. I jumped on top of it, grabbed its antennae, and yanked them off. They fizzled, but not before a dangerous burst traveled up my arms, ignoring my radiation screens. Circuits shorted out. Hydraulics locked up. My vocalizer started screeching. My one arm kept working though, and I set it on automatic and kept hammering away.

I concentrated on its lumpish head, trying to keep it disoriented, confused, and on the ground. It seemed to do the trick. I pounded its face flat. Two of its three eyes popped out of its head, and slime coated my arms and front.

Twenty seconds later, the aberration snapped out of its confusion, and rolled to one side. With my legs locked, I fell over on my back. The thing stood, gave me a kick, and roared.

The aberration slumped with a groan. Its skin slid away in smoking chunks. It raised its right arm, and the limb fell off. It lurched to one side, then the other, and collapsed with a gurgle. My chronometer was broken, but Zarg's seven-minute deadline must've finally been up.

My hydraulics came back on-line enough that I could stand.

The aberration was a mound of featureless meat. Twisted bones stuck out of its dissolving flesh, but even the bones began to dissolve into the same sizzling green pool of sludge. It kept breathing for a long time. Shallow, painful breaths, even when it was nothing more than a pool of slime, it kept breathing for . . . well . . . I couldn't say how long now, but it seemed a long, long time.

Then with one final gurgle, it stopped.

Sanchez was beside me. He held his rifle at the ready. "d.a.m.n, Mack, is it dead?"

My only reply was the steady hiss of static, the only sound my vocalizer seemed capable of right now.

My diagnostic programs reported one failing system. It was my diagnostics, which meant everything else was up in the air. I didn't know how badly damaged I was, but my opticals scanned the world as flat and gray. I fell over and didn't even realize it until I noticed Sanchez standing at a vertical angle.

He said something. I heard the sound, recognized his voice, but couldn't decipher the noise into words.

"Zzzzzzzzt," I replied.

And then I shut down.

22.

I reactivated twenty-three days later. The information verified that my chronometer was working. And hopefully, so was everything else.

One by one, the systems and programs confirmed themselves. My visualizer came on-line, and I scanned a young blond woman standing before me.

She smiled. "Hey, handsome, how are you feeling?"

"Status report: functional."

"Aren't you the sweet talker?"

I was upright, clean and polished, wearing a new suit. A glance around confirmed I was in an unfamiliar laboratory. "Where am I?"

"My personal lab," she replied. "The one under my apartment. Don't remember, huh?"

"Negative," I said. There was still a bit of static in my audios.

"Do you remember me?" she asked.

"I remember you. Just not your name."

"Not surprised. Your internals took a h.e.l.l of a hit. The hardware, I could fix, and Doctor Mujahid recoded the basic coordination programs. Your memory matrix took the worst of it, but she was able to recover most of the data files. There are a few bits and pieces missing here and there."

"What kinds of bits and pieces?"

"Oh, nothing too important. You'll have to learn a few things over again, but shouldn't take you long. By the way, you can call me Lucia. Or Ms. Napier, if you'd prefer."

"I think I'd prefer Lucia," I said.

She nodded. "I'd prefer that, too."