The Sagittarius Whorl Read online

  Was Leather using a warm-body scope or a light magnifier to spot me? The capability of either one would have been stretched to the limit in a snowstorm, with the target skittering among closely packed moving cars whose engines radiated infrared, on a heated pavement swirling with vapor. Maybe he wasn't trying to hit me at all, but hoping to flush me out of the traffic so his buddy could shoot me on the side of the road.

  I went into a crouch and duckwalked ludicrously between the lanes, splashing through icy slop, doing my best to shield my legs under the skirts of the anorak. God only knows what the passing motorists thought about the wacky spectacle. Not a one had attempted to intervene personally. In their place I'd have opted for noninvolvement, too.

  The firing stopped. So did I, a few minutes later.

  I'd made it—sort of.

  I was beneath the gargantuan pylon structure at last, shuddering with cold, squatting between creeping streams of traffic in lane five and the express lane. All I had to do now was cross the exposed shoulder, pass through an opening in the inner guardrail, and climb three steps onto a small platform where there was a door in the pylon wall. The illuminated sign above it said:

  EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY

  USE PHONE TO SUMMON ASSISTANCE

  If only! The phone was on the wall right beside the door. As I contemplated the useless instrument in bemusement, a single small Ivanov stun-dart smacked into it and rattled onto the platform.

  Wonderful. Brown Fleece was back in the game, probably shooting from the median catwalk, daring me to make a run for it.

  What an idiot. If he hadn't given himself away, I might have dashed right across his field of fire. I tried without success to spot him in the blowing snow and steam clouds outside the pylon archway, but I figured that the dumb xeno couldn't be very far away. And his pal—

  A magnum flechette hummed past my head like a wasp. Its trajectory indicated that Black Leather was firing from the same lane divider I was parked on. A sudden gust of wind tore the mist and I saw him, his body eerily illuminated by the lights of cars passing on either side. He was no more than twenty-five meters away, with his carbine stock against his cheek.

  I was a sitting duck.

  "The next dart will take you down, Frost!" he shouted. "Get up! On your feet! Now!"

  Why didn't he just nail me where I was?

  ... Because he was afraid that I'd convulse as the magnum load of toxin hit me, fall under the wheels of a car and be injured or killed. The earlier wild firing had been a panic response. Leather definitely intended to herd me onto the road shoulder, where Brown Fleece would drop me safely with the Ivanov.

  An idea.

  I turned away from Black Leather, ignoring his shouts, and studied the oncoming traffic in the express lane. A Volkswagen Lady Bug trundled past, followed by one of those ass-dragger Maseratis—scant shelter for a cowering fugitive. Behind the Italian car came an enormous black Dodge Bighorn sport utility vehicle with chrome rollbars and noseguards and great deep-tread balloon tires. It was the kind of transport that intrepid wilderness travelers favor for jaunts to Hudson Bay or the Canadian tundra. Silly role-players used them for city commuting.

  "Stand up, Frost!" Black Leather yelled. He sent another flechette over my head, missing me by a whisker. "On your feet, dammit!"

  Instead, I began to squirm and moan as though I'd been nicked, crumpling onto the wet pavement. The Maserati passed by. As the lumbering SUV drew even with me, I rolled sideways beneath it, caught hold of an ice-encrusted shock absorber inside the monstrous right front wheel, hooked one leg over a transmission bracket and hoisted myself off the ground.

  Screamed my lungs out. Then shut up abruptly.

  I could hear the two Haluk demiclones bellowing incomprehensibly at each other in their own language. Would the ruse work? Only if Fleece, over on the catwalk and hopefully closer to me than Leather, took the bait.

  Someone came running, splashing through snow saturated with meltwater. Legs clad in sodden suit trousers trotted along the shoulder, close beside the slow-moving juggernaut. Brown Fleece shouted: "One does not see him! Perhaps he is beneath, being dragged by the blah!"

  Oh, yeah! I let go and fell unharmed between the four great wheels. Lay still a moment, then rolled quickly onto the shoulder as the big black SUV moved on. It was no trick at all avoiding the Toyota estate wagon creeping along behind it. Brown Fleece hadn't seen me. He was still scuttling along, Ivanov in hand, trying to peer under the chassis of the Dodge behemoth.

  Black Leather did spot me and yelled a sharp warning to his buddy.

  Too late. I tackled Fleece. We both went down hard, less than half a meter from the stream of traffic. The stun-pistol flew from his hand and disappeared among the cars. We wrestled on the shoulder pavement for a few moment before he managed to slither out of my grasp. He bounced to his feet, leaving me sprawled in the slush, and fetched me a nasty kick in the head. When he tried to stomp my face I seized his foot in midair with both hands, twisted viciously, and felt a satisfying crackle of anklebones. He howled and fell.

  Fleece rolled in the direction of the guardrail, trying to rise in spite of his injured ankle, roaring with pain and rage. I lay much closer to the express lane traffic. I was having trouble standing myself. I'd bashed both knees badly during the tackle, and the kick in the head had rattled my neurons.

  Fleece made a flying leap, knocked me onto my back, straddled my body, pinned my right arm, and began to batter my face with both fists. Spiking him in the kidney with my left mid-knuckle didn't do him much harm; the fleece jacket was excellent padding. I bucked up my hips, throwing him unexpectedly forward and forcing him to brace himself against falling by extending his arms. Then I caught him in the crotch and squeezed his genitals with all my strength. He screamed and writhed sideways into the express lane, clutching himself, just as a big Daimler towncar cruised sedately by.

  Both left wheels went over his neck. The towncar deviated not a millimeter from its computerized vector. Its cocooned occupants might not even have seen what had happened. They would have felt only a minimal double bump.

  In the stormy sky to the southwest a small constellation of fuzzy blue lights was intermittently visible, flying at a low altitude.

  Chapter 5

  I was dazed, hurting, soaked, and half frozen. My face was one huge bruise, my hands were flayed, and the rest of me felt like it'd been stomped by Cape buffalo.

  With difficulty, I pulled Brown Fleece back onto the shoulder and .crouched beside him. Blood leaked from his mouth. His head was impossibly twisted to one side, the jaw dislocated and the windpipe crushed. The pupils of his eyes were totally dilated, and a growing stench indicated that his sphincters had relaxed. When I thought to check his mangled throat for a pulse, I couldn't find any. The alien spirit that had animated his humanoid flesh had fled.

  ... But the unknown man whose DNA had been stolen to disguise Fleece was probably still alive, floating comatose in a dystasis tank on an exotic world, forced to share his genes again and again in order to create more perfidious replicas of himself.

  I felt no sense of triumph at Brown Fleece's demise. Instead, there was a flashback. To the last time I'd killed Haluk who masqueraded as human beings.

  On the planet Dagasatt, I'd found hundreds of demiclone subjects in paired tanks in a secret laboratory. Many of the Haluk floaters were already transformed into perfect human replicas, while the pathetic human templates had partially morphed into Haluk form, a side effect of the genen procedure that precluded rejection of their DNA by the alien receptors.

  I shot each demiclone in the head. It was not a part of my life I was proud of, but I had no regrets, either.

  Before I could rescue the captive human templates on Dagasatt, alien gunships arrived and leveled the facility with heavy blasters. I escaped the holocaust; but I still walked through that damned laboratory in my nightmares, staring in disbelief at the paired tanks with their Halukoid humans and humanoid Haluk ...

&nb
sp; Enough. It was time to deal with the nightmare at hand.

  For the first time, I realized that the alien I had nicknamed Black Leather was no longer shooting at me. The reason why was sporadically visible up in the snowy air. The blue pulsing lights were mounted on a squadron of cop-hoppers coming out from the Highroad Authority barracks in Pickering. My surviving assailant now had other things on his mind besides the capture of Asahel Frost. He was probably hotfooting it back along the median catwalk to his limousine. If he had any brains at all, he'd already disposed of his Allenby stun-carbine through one of the drainage openings in the road shoulder.

  The eastbound lanes of cars were finally beginning to accelerate slightly. Their dark-tinted side windows hid the occupants from my sight. Were the riders gaping at the scene beside the road as they glided by? Or had they done the sensible thing and activated their windows' projection option, substituting images of some pleasant landscape for the tedious reality of a creeping mass of vehicles bogged down on a stormy night?

  The fuzzy blue lights in the sky came closer.

  The cops were going to nab me.

  Black Leather would reach his limo safely, escape the traffic jam, and vanish into the unmonitored maze of country lanes around the Kawartha Lakes. Meanwhile, the Highroad Authority would haul me off to the nearest Justice Center. A media circus would strike up the band as I attempted to explain my abduction, my great escape, and my subsequent lethal brawl with a well-dressed individual—undoubtedly possessed of impeccable credentials—whose true nature and motivation I didn't dare reveal.

  Perhaps the police would believe I had acted in self-defense. Or they might just charge me with manslaughter.

  I waited numbly for spotlights to stab down from the hoppers. Nothing happened. Four aircraft sailed over the pylon and continued moving in the direction of the distant accident scene.

  I couldn't believe my luck. If the woman with the shattered windshield or any of the other motorists had reported shooting on the highroad, the news apparently had not yet been passed on by dispatchers to the cops in the air.

  Time to hit the trail, buckaroo.

  Adrenaline generated during the fight still kept me warm, but every bone in my body seemed to be aching, particularly my skull. I got up and started for the pylon platform, only to stop short as I realized what I was leaving behind: the only existing tangible evidence of a Haluk masquerading as a human being, evidence that had eluded me and my investigators for over three years. If I abandoned the demiclone corpse, it would almost certainly be taken to the closest county morgue. Brown Fleece's alien confederates would retrieve his remains with laughable ease.

  That wasn't going to happen if I could prevent it.

  I unzipped my anorak and rumbled for my pocket phone. Punched up the code that would connect me to the computer of my private hopper. I could program it to come and get me once I got down off the highroad. Even a few hundred meters away from the pylon the airspace would be unrestricted.

  The phone said, We are sorry. The code you have entered is temporarily ex-operational.

  Rats! The damned Haluk must have sabotaged it, perhaps to make sure I didn't use the aircraft to escape their dragnet. My car was probably ex-op, too.

  Right. So I entered the personal code of my friend and associate Karl Nazarian.

  Karl was a charter Rampart Starcorp stakeholder and its first security chief at the operating HQ on the planet Seriphos in the Perseus Spur. My father made the huge mistake of putting him out to pasture after long years of service, installing a hotshot named Oliver Schneider in his place. Schneider sold out to Galapharma and became their main mole inside Rampart.

  I came along and drafted Karl Nazarian to assist in the search for my missing sister Eve. The veteran security man helped make that operation a success, and continued the good work in subsequent covert actions that culminated in the capture of the material witness Schneider and the indictment of Galapharma. Since then Karl had shared my private investigations of the Haluk.

  When Rampart became an Amalgamated Concern and I agreed to become Acting Chief Legal Officer, I saw to it that Karl was appointed Vice President for Special—i.e., spooky—Projects, a post that Simon had originally dragooned me into accepting. Karl reported only to me. During the pretrial phase of the Galapharma case, he supervised "discoveries" for my cadre of legal eagles, helping to organize—and edit—ultrasensitive pieces of evidence. When that work was done, he and his small staff of trustworthy cronies occupied themselves gathering information about the shady machinations of the big businesses that called themselves the Haluk Consortium. Not that I was in a position to do anything with the intelligence during the trial, other than pass on the juicier bits to Ef Sontag.

  Karl was the only person I would have trusted to do the delicate psychotronic interrogation of Lorne Buchanan. I'd confided my early hopes for the Barky Hunt to him, too. And now I desperately needed his help again.

  "Nazarian here." The gnarled face, like a topographic map of Armenia divided by a rocky cleaver of a nose, gazed at me from the phone screen. "Good God, Helly, you look like a drowned rat. A thoroughly buggered-up drowned rat."

  "I feel even worse. I'm sitting on the shoulder of the Ottawa Highroad in a snowstorm, next to the corpse of a Haluk demiclone."

  "That's fantastic! You're certain it's a Haluk?"

  "Absolutely. The demi's mine if I can sneak him out of here before the county mounties spot us. It could happen any minute. Can you come and do an evac in your hopper? Mine's ex-op."

  A shocked silence, then: "I'm not in Toronto Conurb. I'm nearly 1,200 kilometers away, out in the Kenora at Kingfisher Lodge."

  I knew what that had to mean. "Oh, shit—not Dan!"

  "I'm afraid so. Your brother flew the coop a couple of hours ago. He had help. Four of the six guards are dead. The survivors can't tell us much. The lodge just wasn't secured for a massive armed assault. An BMP blast took out the sensors and the rest of the electronics. A single large hopper carrying a dozen bandits did the job in less than ten minutes."

  "Karl, there's a good chance that Dan didn't escape. He might have been kidnapped by Haluk."

  "Christ!"

  "My sister Beth could also be in danger. The aliens might try to nab her, too. She'll need round-the-clock security."

  "I'll get InSec over to her place immediately. What kind of a cluster-fuck have we got going here?"

  "The situation is even worse than you might think. Earlier this evening two Haluk demiclones snatched me. Bold as brass. The bastards took me right off the Underground Path in the midst of the Friday night crush. They talked to each other about some plan involving Dan and maybe Beth. I couldn't make any sense of it. My knowledge of the Haluk language is too rusty. I managed to get out of their limousine when the Ottawa Highroad shut down with a multicar accident. One of the alien goons is with me here, stone cold dead on the tarmac. The other one skipped out."

  "Oh, boy. More demiclone operatives! Just what we were afraid those blue bastards would do—"

  "Listen, Karl. You know how vital it is for us to hang on to this corpse and get it to Bea Mangan for a genetic assay. But I can't use regular Rampart Security for transport. There's no way I could explain this situation to them. And if we're caught with the stiff, Rampart itself could face criminal charges. I killed the Haluk accidentally, in self-defense, but body-snatching is a felony, and interfering with the scene of a fatality could lead to a charge of obstruction of justice, at the very least. You got any thoughts?"

  "You say you want to take the body to Mangan right away?"

  "I'll check with her first, but I know she won't have any scruples about cooperating. This is the break we've been waiting for. The smoking gun that proves the Haluk are infiltrating humanity."

  "Then call Bea herself for a lift," Karl advised. "Her place in Fenelon Falls is—what?—only fifty klicks or so north of the highroad. She's sure to have a hopper at her disposal. Or her husband Charlie will."

  "Da
mn. I should have thought of that. The Haluk punched out my lights and I'm kinda nebular at the moment."

  "Is there anything else I can do to help?"

  I tried to think. It wasn't easy. "Cover me with Sean Callahan at Rampart Tower InSec. Just before the Haluk grabbed me down on the Path I phoned Sean and asked for help. He sent a situation team, but too late to do any good. Tell him I'm with you—that my emergency turned out to be a false alarm. He'll be suspicious, but there's nothing we can do about that."

  "Listen, Helly, if you can't reach Bea Mangan, call me again. I'll get to you, but it could take a while."

  "Let's hope it doesn't come to that. I think you should return to Toronto as soon as possible. We'd better meet at Bea's place. I don't want to go back to my apartment just yet. Haluk might have the place staked out. Hasta luego." I ended the call.

  The cold was beginning to get to me. My hood had come off again and melting snow ran from my hair into my two blackened eyes. I wiped them, cringing at the pain, pulled the hood up, and summoned Mangan's personal code from the dex. The phone buzzed.

  "Pick it up," I prayed. "Please, Bea." I stared at the small blank screen, shivering hard now, and waited. After five buzzes a robot voice asked me if I wished to continue my attempt to reach Beatrice Mangan directly, or if I wished to go to voice mail and leave a message. I told it, "Try again." The robot hadn't said she was unavailable; for some reason she just wasn't choosing to answer. Busy people did that all the time.

  The buzzes resumed, and every five seconds the artificial voice cut in again. I kept saying, "Try again," and watched the display that said stand by for connection. Snowflakes fell on me and the demiclone corpse, coating us with tiny points of light that sparkled in the sweeping car headlights.