Drakon Read online

  IC piston engines something like this were used for aircraft, he remembered. And sometimes for armored fighting-vehicles, compression-ignition Diesels, although the Draka had used a turbocompound system during the Eurasian War of the 1940s. Road vehicles had always been external-combustion, though—steam, from the early days of powered street transport in the 1820s, closed-cycle Rankin engines by the 1990s.

  Lord, you'd have to have had fairly advanced machining to use IC engines in road cars. High temperatures like that required close tolerances and corrosion-resistant materials compared to steam. This one was quite well-made, in a crazy sort of way; he pulled a sensor thread from his suitcase and scanned.

  Tolerances to within one ten-thousandth of a millimeter, the comp told him. Following alloys—

  He tried to imagine an early-Victorian precursor of the engine before him, and failed. Steam engines had started out heavy and crude, like the first road autosteamers themselves, and gotten gradually better. Steam turbines had powered the first dirigibles and aircraft; then internal combustion had been developed when those ran up against inherent power-to-weight limitations, in the 1870s. By then manufacturing technique had improved enough to make that practical. How on earth could gas engines like this have been developed first, though?

  He clanged the hood down and started north again. It might have been easier in an honestly weird analogue—something where Vikings had colonized North America, or the South had won the Civil War. There was just enough familiar here to be disorienting. Some sort of cheap hotel for the night, then to a library.

  I'll have to investigate before I contact the authorities, obviously, he mused.

  ***

  The motel room smelled of disinfectant, but it was spacious compared to quarters on an interstellar spaceship. The window outside showed a vista of wet dark parking lot, an anonymous part of an anonymous town in Ohio. Ken Lafarge had a car outside, two suitcases of local clothing and sundries; even a razor, just in case someone looked over his effects. This paper currency of theirs was childishly easy for his faber to duplicate, and if anyone caught the duplicated serial numbers his money would look more authentic than the originals.

  Not that anyone seemed likely to check him over. He didn't expect genescans, but there was almost nothing of the structure of identity documents and permits he remembered from history lessons about his world's America in the 1990s. These people didn't spend anything on defense, and very little on exploration. No national service, no youth-training camps, an incredible cultural balkanization that destroyed unity and purpose. They were only now getting anything like a reusable orbital launcher; by this date in his history, the first interstellar ship was nearly completed. And this Earth was so poor, so short of energy and materials, so filthy with the byproducts of horrendously inefficient industries.

  But it's not about to be conquered by monsters, he thought grimly. Not if I do my job.

  Kenneth looked back at the vid—the television, he reminded himself. Too strange. Too much.

  He could understand the standard language well enough; it was far closer to the rather conservative Samothracian dialect of English than the Domination's variety. It was the context he couldn't follow. Alien, alien. People in an ampitheater-like room were standing and telling a black woman things about their personal lives . . .

  Incest. Child molestation. Sexual combinations even a Draka would find disgusting. He sat on the bed and dropped his head into his hands.

  All his training and study had been aimed at the twenty-fifth-century Domination. This mission is a ratfuck waiting to happen. Lousy tradecraft. His equipment was aimed at that particular setting, too. Elaborate stealthing that he didn't need, and minimal power outputs because he couldn't possibly shoot his way off a hostile, highly-advanced planet. What he needed was brute-force stuff, weapons.

  Your blood chemistry is at less than 87% of optimum, the AI said in his mind. Indications of shock syndrome and stress, permission to adjust.

  Granted, he thought, and shuddered as a sudden coolness ran over his skin. Breathing slowed, sweat dried. He stripped and dropped to the floor; a hundred two-finger pushups with the weight of his case on his shoulders, stretching, squats, crunches. Better. A shower, and he began to feel like a human being again.

  "Let's get to work," he said and snapped off the TV.

  He sat by the telephone. Tendrils grew out of the case, pale threads thinning to invisibility. They wove their way into the native instrument. Ken closed his eyes.

  The cyberweb formed around him. Scan, he thought. Eastern North America, five-year intervals, following parameters.

  A long wait, in a floating world of colors. Waiting while the AI poured out through the low, slow bandwidth available, and communicated with machines several orders of magnitude more primitive.

  A structure began to grow before his mind's sight, three-dimensional and glowing with colors impossible for waking eyes.

  "Interesting," he breathed. "A distributed system?"

  Correct.

  The AI wove it backward in time, then forward again to show its growth. About the only commonality it had with the history of cybernetics he knew was that the original set of linkages had been military-inspired.

  "No central nexus?"

  No. Capacity is added incrementally. The basic units are small personal comps with open-access memories and instruction-set parameters.

  He whistled silently. "Grotesque," he said. So many separate processing units! And so easy to infiltrate; nothing but a few clumsy password systems and crude encryption codes. This would give any competent counterespionage agency the screaming willies, right back to the beginning of computers—back to the compressed-air-powered mechanical Babbage systems used in the nineteenth century, even.

  His attention flashed to an item culled from a database.

  New york, january 2, 1995, the machine said. Following details.

  Oddly limited details. Twenty men—petty criminals of some sort—slaughtered. A few pictures. The AI corrected them to 3-D, filled in probabilities in coded order. One with his head blown mostly off.

  "Plasma gun," Lafarge breathed softly. "Layer knife."

  Stripped metallic ions, superconducting guide coil and power source, flash chamber. Not a sophisticated weapon, in use for centuries—but nothing this world could build without boxcarloads of equipment.

  The others had been killed by blunt-injury trauma and the edged weapon. "Typical," he said.

  The drakensis had reacted with the bloodlust built into the species; and they loved to do it by hand, if they could. Killed everyone there in a single orgasmic burst of slaughter, crushing and ripping bone and organ, tearing the life out of the fragile human bodies.

  "Oh, I think you were a startled and unhappy little snake," he said.

  Follow the leads. He walked through luminescent tunnels of data. Barriers glowed for instants, then dissolved like sand under his fingers. Like movement in a dream, thick and honey-slow. Things took so long.

  Ah. Two more killings in New York. A derelict, and a businessman. He grimaced slightly at the details of the last. It lured him. Used him. The pheromonal dominance system; the poor primitive would never have known what hit him. Also the snake must have been recovering, getting its mental feet under it—that showed thought and planning, not blind fury.

  A description. Jesus. A female. He opened his eyes for a moment, returning to the realtime world.

  "Damn."

  That meant it could reproduce; the techniques were easily within the tech level here. Potentially hundreds, thousands of times, like digger wasp larvae in grubs. He swallowed queasiness and closed his eyes again. No immediate trace. There. A skin sample. Data cataracted down the link, built up into a picture.

  Know the enemy.

  He banished the sharp-featured image, sighing. Three years more time to track down; and with increasing caution. It would have anticipated pursuit, and built safeguards as soon as it could.

  ***
>
  "And you're from another galaxy?"

  Ken felt his eyes narrow. "I didn't say that," he said "Don't be absurd. I'm from a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. It's only 4.2 light-years from here."

  "Thattaway, just a bit," the young man said. "Engage."

  His partner snorted amusement; he was older than the agent talking to Ken Lafarge, heavier-set, and much less communicative. He was also standing behind the Samothracian, behind and to the left—a posture which made Lafarge extremely uncomfortable, since it put him in a bracket. The office was a cubicle in some unmarked office building northwest of Washington proper. It had the faint ozone smell he was coming to associate with here-and-now bureaucracy, the stink of primitive electronics with loose connections. The rest of it looked very ordinary, under a fluorescent light with an annoying subliminal hum.

  He could approve of that commonplace aspect, if nothing else: putting up a huge monolith with some equivalent of Secret Intelligence Headquarters on a big sign out front had been a bad habit of some of the old Alliance for Democracy's security agencies. Everything else might change across the centuries, but it remained a constant that this line of work attracted both paranoids and the boyish type who liked to show off their affiliation with powerful clandestine networks. Whatever this organization was, it was keeping the latter under control at least.

  "Look—what's your name, anyway?"

  "John," the young man said. "John Andrews. This is Clete Debrowski."

  "Look, Mr. Andrews, I thought I gave you some pretty convincing data."

  Andrews leaned back in his swivel chair. It creaked. John Andrews didn't look heavy, but his frame was packed with solid dense muscle.

  "Yup, you did, Mr. Lafarge. You know things you definitely shouldn't; about what went on in New York back in '95, and things from extremely classified databanks."

  He leaned forward again, the friendly smile dying away from his face. It had never quite reached his eyes. "So why don't you cut this spaceman shit," he spat. "Who are you working for, and what is going on?"

  "Who do you think?" Lafarge said. They don't believe me, he realized. They seriously don't believe me!

  "We don't know. We don't know who was dealing with those posse hopheads in the warehouse, or how your deal went wrong, or why you were using them—smuggling biohazards, whatever the hell you were doing. Hell, maybe you're working for the Russians; they may not be communists anymore, but they're not all that friendly. We do know it was dirty, and we do know you're going to tell us all about it."

  He laughed. "Unless you beam up really quick."

  Ken braced his palms against the arms of his chair. "Mr. Andrews," he said quietly. "If I don't convince you, events will . . . but by then it will be very late, very late indeed. You're gambling with the future of the entire human race."

  "And you're not in the offices of the National Enquirer," Andrews barked. "Sit down. This administration takes matters of national security seriously, whatever the previous occupants thought."

  Debrowski put two heavy hands on Lafarge's shoulders and pushed, using his considerable weight. The thin leather cushion smacked under his buttocks, and the high arms cramped him.

  "Mr. Andrews," he said quietly. "I appreciate your position, and I realize you think you're doing your duty. In a sense I'm an American too—"

  "Not according to our files," Andrews said. "Your ID is good paper but there's nobody of that age, name or Social Security number. I suggest you stop lying."

  "—but the stakes are too high. I can't let you detain me. It might well find out."

  And if it did while he was immobilized and separated from his equipment, he was a dead man. The planet with him.

  Debrowski spoke for the first time. "Let?" he said. "Let us detain you?"

  Andrews loosened his tie. "You're on the third floor of a high-security building," he said. "You're already detained. I also suggest you start exercising a little realism."

  Good advice, Lafarge thought regretfully.

  His hands darted up behind his head and closed on Debrowski's ears. Crack. The older man's nose smacked into the crown of the Samothracian's head. He bellowed with pain, recoiling backward; then struck down with both hands, a double chop that would have severed his opponent's collarbones like green branches . . . if the situation had been what he assumed.

  Time slowed as the net laid along his nerves activated.

  First level, he commanded: the biological price was too high for anything more. His bladed palms chopped up and out, thudding into Debrowski's forearms with a meaty, rubbery sensation. He used the momentum to drive himself upward, aiding the powerful spring of his legs and capturing the other man's arms under his own for a second.

  Crack. Crack. He punched the rear of his head into the others face again, slightly harder this time. Despite the reinforced bone, that was still a little painful for him, but much more so for Debrowski. The bulky figure toppled away behind him. Andrews was coming erect, his lips moving slowly and the gun coming out from under his arm. Lafarge's time-sensor clocked the movement; remarkable reflexes. The automatic system brought his softsuit flowing out from cuffs and collar to complete its coverage of his body. Cool neutrality insulated his skin, like dipping into dry water; it pressed his short-cropped hair against his scalp.

  Transparent, he commanded—no use giving away more than he had to. The locals would see only a slight shimmer over his skin, if they saw anything at all in the heat of the moment. He turned and leaped through the glass door, one foot driving down on the seat of the chair. Glass exploded away from his outstretched fists as his hundred and ninety pounds dove forward. He landed on his hands and front-rolled. The outer office was empty; and now he knew why Andrews had insisted on an evening meeting. Fewer witnesses, when they took his sedated body away to someplace secluded.

  Smart boy, he thought. Smart in the day-to-day sense, at least. Pity he didn't have much imagination. Lafarge skidded slightly as he cornered to drive down a corridor between rows of cubicles separated by movable partitions. The disguising shoes gave poor traction; no amount of strength or speed could increase the gripping surface on the soles of his feet. And—

  WHACK The 9mm bullet struck the base of his skull. Red-tinged blackness surged in, and the floor came up to strike him. The iron and copper taste of blood filled his mouth as teeth gashed lips or tongue. A diminished pinnnnnng caught at the edge of his attention as the ricochet whined off to lose itself in a computer or potted plant or water cooler. He twitched, fingers scrabbling at the synthetic carpet. The softsuit could sense the bullet coming and turn instantly harder than diamond and more frictionless than liquid mercury on dry ice. It couldn't repeal the law of conservation of momentum. A substantial fraction of the bullet's energy moved his head forward, and his brain surged backward in its bath of fluid as inertia prevented it from moving quite in synch.

  Time for concussion later. The combat web dumped chemicals into his carotids and stimulus into the motor centers of his brain. He rose to his knees.

  Bang-ptannng. Again and again; the next three shots hit him between the shoulders, ripping the disguising clothes and torquing his body around just enough to see the pistol coming out the shattered office door with Andrews's face snarling behind it. Partitions collapsed as he lurched against them. He scuttled forward like a mechanical crab on hands and knees, the fabric of his trousers ripping with his haste. More shots, none hitting this time; Andrews wavered sideways as Debrowski's body struck him at the waist.

  "Stop that, you stupid fuck!" Andrews screamed. He snapshot again as Lafarge pistoned up from the floor, running like an Olympic hurdler and leaping desks with a raking stride. "I've got him, I've—"

  Another shot struck Lafarge in the back of the knee. The softsuit saved the joint from the sideways leverage, but it cost him momentum toward the windows. The rectangle of the gasgun slapped into his palm, thrown forward by the holster. He shot; the windows burst away in a cloud of needles as the slug of ultracompressed air
hammered them out of his way like an invisible piledriver. He followed in a soaring leap.

  ***

  "He brothk my dose! De bathurd brothk my dose!" Debrowski yelled, as much in rage as pain.

  "Fuck your nose," Andrews shouted.

  The wounded man tumbled sideways, knocking over the wastebasket. The younger agent wrenched the door open—both panels of frosted glass were gone in a pile of shards that shifted treacherously underfoot. He went through in a skittering crouch, gun in a two-handed grip, down the aisle to the windows overlooking the parking lot. The bastard's body would have to be there. He wasn't necessarily dead; Andrews was fairly sure he'd hit him with at least one round, and a three-story fall onto pavement had to break bones, but doing wet-work you learned how tough the human body could be. He wouldn't be going anywhere, though. Not fast.

  "Nothing," he said, with more obscenity in the word than ten minutes' scatology. Then, quietly and with conviction: "Shit."

  He holstered his weapon. Alarms were ringing downstairs, and the stairwell doors burst open as a couple of the guards came through. Andrews spread his hands.

  "It's Andrews," he said, repeating it in a loud, clear voice.

  You couldn't tell what men would do when they came charging into a room expecting a firefight; except that it wouldn't necessarily be what hindsight thought best. When the gunmen straightened up from their crouch he went on:

  "Get a medic. Fast. Then get on the horn to the local police, put an APB out on Kenneth Lafarge, the picture's on my desk, armed and dangerous, wanted for assault and attempted murder." His calm broke. "Move! Now!"

  God alone knew who this fruitloop was really working for. God alone knew what he'd be doing now.

  Andrews shuddered slightly. In reaction, and for what might be. The Firm had dozens of scenarios on bio-terrorism, none of them pretty. Whoever had been using the Jamaicans as a conduit knew more about genetic engineering than anyone should; that arm from whatever-the-fuck-it-was proved that. Genetics was low-cost science, much easier to do in a private lab than nuclear weapons, even with plutonium coming out of Russia like piss out of a horse.