Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2) (11 page)

Reality slowed as Fitz
plunged into hyperkinesia. She pulled the Acton, thumbed the setting all the
way up as it cleared her bag.

The assassin reached
Pettigrew, the admiral handing him a dark object. A needler. Package delivered,
the fat officer hurried toward the exit.

Damn! How had he smuggled
that in here? Can’t worry about that now.

She grabbed the edge of
the table, hurled it out of her way. People screamed and scattered, not sure
what was happening.

The silver figure
pulled a pistol from his bag. A Cauldfield, as she’d expected, except this one
had an extra power pack jury-rigged to it. He swung around and pumped two shots
into Pettigrew before the fat admiral made it to the door.

Tidying up loose ends.

Fitz reached through
cyberspace and tripped all the alerts. A window opened in her inhead,
displaying the scene on the dais. Ari stilled and looked around. Kiernan
charged toward her. The Henge erupted into a chaos of strobing lights, wailing
alarms, and screaming, shoving people. Her tactical display showed Fen Donkenny
fighting his way out of the crowd, weapon already in hand. Braylin Pike, backed
up by Bartonelli, led a contingent of guardsmen through the East entrance. The
net drew tight around their prey.

The assassin spun. At
first Fitz thought he looked for a way through their cordon, but he kept
spinning, faster and faster. Like an ice skater, his momentum built, moving
into the hyperkinetic range.

Fitz recognized this
one; a killing maneuver only an augie could perform.

Broadcasting to every
comm in range, she screamed, “Kill Spiral! Take cover!”

Fitz dived behind the
overturned table, but not before she noticed his arms rise, slowing his spin
enough that she could see a weapon in each hand. The assassin’s pistol for
general murder and pandemonium; the needler to kill Lazzinairs.

As he spun, he opened
fire with both pistols.

Fitz ducked behind her
cover as a storm of black needles clattered around her and bolts of energy
glanced off the table’s metal legs, showering her with molten droplets. The
barrage could only last for seconds, but felt like it stretched on for hours.
Even with the additional power pack, he would exhaust the weapons’ charge
quickly, and no augie could maintain the demands of a Kill Spiral for long.
With the volume of fire he poured into the assembled crowd, it was enough time
to slaughter dozens.

Her inhead displayed
the scene on the dais, now clotted with white-armored Praetorians. Terrified
politicos tried to force their way out of the killing field. Nowhere could she
catch a glimpse of coppery red hair or imperial purple. She could only hope
Maks been quick enough.

Fitz paged through the
feeds from the hall’s monitors, looking for one that displayed the assassin.
There. She concentrated on the shaft of spinning silver, struggling to filter
out the chaos of screams and the pulsing alarms. Definitely slowing. He
wouldn’t be able to hold the Spiral for much longer. When he came out of the
spin he’d be disoriented, vulnerable, but only for a second. In that second,
she had to be ready.

The weapons fire
chopped off. Fitz snaked her head around the edge of the table as the assassin
lurched to a stop, briefly off balance. The now useless pistols clattered to
the floor. He stared at his hands, a look of horror flickered across his face,
then he turned and plunged into the terrified crowd. The mass of bodies
engulfed the silver form, pulling him along toward the exit.

Fitz cursed in
frustration, her voice lost in the panicked tumult as she shoved people aside.
Pike and Bartonelli pushed out of the crush, fighting toward her.

“Locate those pistols
he dropped, but be careful with the needler.” Fitz shot a pointed look at
Bartonelli. “Make sure Ari is safe and get her the hell out of here. I’m going
after the shooter. No chatter on the comm you don’t want the target to hear.”
She pushed her way into the crowd before the sergeant could argue.

The mass of people bore
her through the lobby and out into the courtyard, where the crowd surged to the
exits of the dome and bottlenecked. She pulled down an image of the shooter
from one of the surveillance cameras and transmitted it to all team leaders in
case he tried to slip out through the main exit in the confusion.

Colonel Donkenny
appeared at her elbow, nodding his head at the mob around the exits. “Is that
the only way out of here?”

Fitz gestured toward
the botanical gardens encircling Star Henge. “There’s a loading entrance at the
back, but I made sure it was sealed for tonight. I don’t think he can make it
out that way.”

Donkenny licked his
lips. “I’d be happier knowing how much of Wolf’s experience this guy can
access.”

“We have to assume that
anything Wolf knows, our shooter knows. Why leave the original personality
unless you needed his knowledge? If they just wanted an augmented body, that
would be easy to acquire. No. They needed his skills.”

“I was afraid of that.
So, we have to plan like we’re fighting Wolf.” The mercenary hissed as he
studied the confusion at the exits. “He’d have had plenty of other shots to
assassinate Ransahov if that’s all he had in mind. This was a statement, but
he’d never take the chance of going into an operation like this without a way
out. Most people would be concentrating on the exits, expecting him to slip out
in the confusion. He’s got another way planned.”

Donkenny had fought
beside her partner for a quarter century, and he thought Wolf would take the
back door. That felt right to her, but if she was wrong and he charged the main
exit, a lot of people could get killed—maybe even Wolf. As far as she knew,
even a Lazzinair wasn’t immune to a headshot. What if it was a suicide mission?
Tritico would have no qualms about sending Wolf to his death as long as he
could accomplish his goal of bringing down Ari and her government.

“There’s a way into the
gardens over here.” She led Donkenny around the side of the Henge. The ornate
wrought iron gates had been torn off their hinges, and the two guards she’d
posted lay scattered on the ground. She knelt beside one of the bodies.

“This one’s alive, but
his pistol’s missing.”

Donkenny checked the
other man. “Same here.”

The shooter had headed
straight here. The main entrance had never been in the cards. By now he’d have
quite a lead on them. In the raked sand of the garden’s path, she could follow
his tracks—widely spaced and dug in deep with hyperkinetic speed.

“Where’s this other
entrance?” Donkenny asked.

“All the way at the
back, behind the fountain.”

“Is there another way
into the garden on the other side of the building?”

Fitz nodded as she
tucked the panels of her dress up into her belt. Modesty be damned. She
pointed. “The path circles around the Henge and exits at that gate, but it’s locked
and guarded. You’ll have to convince them to let you through.”

“I can be very
persuasive when necessary.” The merc pulled his pistol from his shoulder
holster and checked the charge. “Then we can pin him between us.”

Fitz grasped his
forearm before he turned away. “Fen, are you going to be able to shoot him?”

She noticed the heavy
sigh before he answered. “I guess I have to, don’t I? Sure as hell didn’t think,
when I was invited to this soiree, I would end up hunting down my best friend.”

“Just put him on the
ground and keep him there. Don’t get close. Yell for me and I’ll pull his
spike.”

He nodded before
dashing away, cape billowing behind him.

Fitz slipped around the
ruined gate, bringing up her night vision with a thermal scan running in a
window at the corner of her inhead. A small shadow flowed across the path
toward her. She whirled, weapon trained.

“Whoa, Boss Lady. It’s
only me.”

Jumper was alone, and
with all the bolts flying around inside the Henge…

“Where’s Faydra?”

“She’s with Mama
Dragon. Told me to pass on that Ari is safe.”

Relief flooded through
Fitz. “And Maks?”

“Got grazed on the butt
by a bolt from that Cauldfield, but he’s okay. Just be taking his meals
standing up for a while.”

She gave silent thanks
that it hadn’t been the needler; she wanted to keep Maks as a friend for a
long, long time.

The tracks they
followed abruptly disappeared, and broken vegetation showed where the shooter
had veered from the path and plunged into the tangle of undergrowth.

“Can you track him,
Jumper?”

“Are you kidding? With
that perfume she, uh…he had on, I’d think even you could follow him with your
pitiful human nose. The jerk must not have access to all of Wolf’s memories, or
he’d know not wear so much stinky stuff with an expert tracker like me on the job.”

Even with her olfactory
augmentations, her senses couldn’t match the cat’s. He slipped into the
undergrowth and she followed, trying to keep his fuzzy backside in sight.
Occasionally she came across broken branches and trampled plants that told her
a person moving quickly had come through here, and not long ago. Either she was
able to discern a trace of his perfume on the night air, or something nearby
bloomed with a sickly sweet odor.

The dripping canopy
closed over her head, dangling leaves and aerial roots brushing against her
face, leaving trails of dampness that made her skin crawl. The odor of
corruption intensified. Ahead of her, Jumper sneezed.

Fitz stilled and
listened. Only the clicking of a large white-winged creature echolocating
through the heavy undergrowth broke the buzzing of insects. She started moving
again. To her enhanced hearing she sounded as loud and out of place as an
arkobeast in an art gallery.

Still nothing on
thermal.

Ahead, the trees began
to thin. A wave of scent flooded her olfactory systems, an odor of death so
thick it clung to the inside of her nostrils and choked her. She fought to keep
from gagging.

“Look out, Boss Lady.
Up ahead.”

She heard the cat’s
warning at the same time she spied the tall flash of silver through the
branches. More reflex than thought, she fired three times. As she leaped
forward into a clearing, a spray of warm foulness splashed across her face. Not
blood, but whatever it was she had no doubt it was the source of the rotting
corpse smell. It clung to her skin and clumped in her hair. Her eyes burned.
She pawed at her face, falling to her knees and retching until she thought her
stomach would turn inside out. Jumper broke into a long spasm of sneezing.

Remembering her exposed
position, she shut down her olfactory systems and scuttled back to the cover of
the undergrowth. A quick scan of the open area and the forest around it
revealed no heat sources large enough to be her target. That should have warned
her. She had checked her thermal only seconds before she spotted the jump suit
and should have known there wasn’t a body inside it, but she’d fallen for his
trick.

A single, ugly plant
dominated the clearing. Fleshy, spotted leaves, each as long as a human, formed
a flat rosette at its base. Two meters of thick bloom spike protruded from its
center. The shooter had tied the arms of the silver outfit around the stalk,
creating the illusion of a person standing, good enough to fool someone into
shooting first without waiting for identification. And, like a first year
cadet, she’d jumped into his trap with both feet. Now, smelling like a week old
corpse, sneaking up on him would be impossible.

She noticed the spike-heeled
boots abandoned nearby, and a trail of barefoot prints cooling in thermal lead
along a narrow path that curved back toward the main walkway. She’d lost too
much time here. If stealth was out of the question now, speed would have to do.

“Let’s go, Jumper.”

“Gak, that’ll sure get
rid of your hairballs.”
He scrubbed a paw against his
muzzle, then raced ahead of her.

At the walkway, her
quarry had turned left toward the fountain and the back of the garden,
confirming her suspicion that he would try to escape through the service
entrance. Before they reached the fountain, though, the trail simply ended—no
thermal trace, no disturbance in the dirt. The hairs on her arms prickled as
she scanned around. “Where?”

The cat studied the
branches overhead.
“Up. He’s gone into the trees.”

To her right, the
raucous cries of birds erupted, signaling something had disturbed them. On
thermal, ghostly blobs of color wove through the forest as the creatures
scattered. Her quarry was trying to work his way behind her. He must have
doubled back in hopes of ambushing her and stumbled across a flock of sleeping
birds. Fitz sprinted for the fountain. There was cover there, and she’d be
between him and his way out. He’d have to come to her.

First she had to cross
the open grassy area around the fountain, but that would only be a matter of a
few blurred seconds at hyperkinetic speed. The crystal and plexisteel statue of
a quolla rose from the fountain’s pool. In daylight, on yesterday’s inspection
of the garden’s security, the abstract sculpture had looked more like a
waddling turkzard, but in the shadows the thing seemed all teeth and claws.

She could take cover
behind the low stone wall surrounding the pool and wait for him. A curving
jumble of rocks ringed the back of the pool, hung with moss and plants. Water
splashed over the leaves and boulders into the pool, creating a white noise
that drowned out the sounds of movement around her.

She didn’t hear the
running steps hard on her heels, didn’t realize how close he was until Jumper
screamed in her mind.

“Behind you, Boss
Lady.”

Shots kicked up grass
and dirt around her and exploded off the wall, sending showers of rock
fragments across the side of her face. Jumper yowled. She dodged to the left,
but a bolt caught her high on the back, burning through muscle and exiting
below her right collar bone. Pain flashed down her arm as she fell to her
knees. Her fingers spasmed and she dropped the pistol. Fitz scurried across the
grass to reach it with her other hand, but the assassin beat her to the weapon
and kicked it away.

She turned to face him,
scuttling backward until her injured shoulder scraped against the pool’s
retaining wall, sending a jolt of pain through her. He stalked her, then stood
over her, pistol aimed at her skull. The skin between her eyes crawled with
expectation and then…nothing. He just stared at her, unmoving, though nothing
of the man she loved showed in his face.

Inside her head the
symbiont buzzed, sluggish in its reaction. The wound burned, but there was none
of the twitching, squirming sensations she’d come to associate with the
organism’s healing powers. She dumped all the elixir left in her pharmacopeia,
but it was only a single hit. In the rush of preparing for the event, she’d
relied on it too heavily and had neglected to refill it—again. That single hit
was all she had, and it wasn’t enough.