Peter Hamilton - Great North Road

When she looked around the muggy cabin she saw Ravi looking at her with an unnervingly calm expression. She shuffled her way around to him.

“Thank you again,” the craggy old pilot said.

“Least I could do.” She glanced back at the gurney. “So what now? You’re proper military; what’s our best tactical plan?”

“It’s going to finish what it just started. I would. Without fuel we’re totally screwed. That and the comm rockets. It’ll keep going after them until it succeeds, and when it does, we’re all dead. Our biggest disadvantage is that none of our weapons work against it. How do you stop something you can’t kill or even injure.”

“You’re wrong,” Elston said without turning around. “We do have a weapon that will be utterly lethal to that son-of-a-bitch.” With that he began to pull his outer gauntlets back on in fast angry motions. “And I’m going to get it, and I will have no hesitation using it on that bastard. If HDA want a living specimen they can come here and collect one for themselves. Because that is now one dead monster walking.” He stomped into the door chamber.

Angela exhaled lightly. She looked down at Ravi and flexed her fingers, feeling the mild tingle of her dark weapons. “So if I had a weapon that would kill it, what would I do?”

“There’s only one option left,” the pilot said knowingly. “You have to go on the offensive. Like you did before…”

Angela gave him a tight smile. “Yeah.” The trouble was, she hadn’t exactly been on the offensive.

After the shock of finding the bodies of the three Norths and Suski in the mansion’s lounge, Angela hung on to the door frame for grim life while her nerves steadied fractionally. There was a psycho lose in the mansion, and like the light none of the alarms were working. She peered out into the long central corridor. Without ringlight, the only illumination was that provided by the overspill from the lounge lights. She looked up and down the corridor. Five meters away, the door to Bartram’s bedroom was opening silently.

The sight of it was all Angela needed to clear her mind and focus . All that mattered now was survival. Cost irrelevant. She activated the dark weapons in her hands and felt eight sharp pricks of pain when the sharp little talons punctured her skin as they rose up from the cy-tech fronds that had twined along her finger bones. Blood began to drip down, adding to the lake of gore around her feet.

There was so much she’d never be able to keep her balance, she realized. She hurried out into the corridor, her feet slapping against the clean marble, gaining traction.

Bartram’s door swung right back. A humanoid monster was standing there. Time halted as she stared at the impossibility. It was her own height, though considerably bulkier, with a skin she would always recall as resembling leather turned to stone. Behind it, revealed in the faint wash of light from the lounge, she saw the bodies of Mariangela, Coi, and Bartram. Butchered by the same blades that were now rising up in front of her, the hands of the monster. That motion broke the spell.

She assumed a combat crouch, just as some long-forgotten instructor had taught her and Shasta decades ago during one of their foolish fads. Studying the monster’s movements, waiting for the telltale shift that would illustrate its attack.

For some reason it didn’t attempt a lunge or swipe with those horrific blades that were poised ready to administer her death. Instead, its head tilted to one side, and it issued the wistful sigh of a thwarted lover, as if it was surprised and gladdened to see her.

Angela jumped, turning sideways as she went, assuming a Soaring Leopard posture. Ducking under the raised arm to unexpectedly jab both sets of fingers into its torso. And trigger—

The cy-tech that had been implanted in New Tokyo, and stimulated by the activants behind Maslen’s café, had spent the intervening weeks growing inside her, its quasi-life cells enveloping her ulnae in a sheath of synthetic cells that had been faithfully copied from electric eels. Semi-organic conductor threads had sprouted from them into her hands up to the talon buds in each fingertip.

Five thousand volts slammed into the monster with a blinding violet-white flash. It went flying backward along the seventh floor’s wide central corridor, landing in the long grisly slick of blood and skidding farther until it smacked into the wall.

Angela didn’t even see the final impact; she was already sprinting for the stairs. The world had gone mad, imploded on her. But that didn’t matter, the transfer had gone through. Rebka would get the genetic treatment. Nothing else mattered. A hysterical laugh bubbled out of her rigid throat. Not even alien killer monsters .

All she had to do was keep alive, stay ahead of the authorities. Nobody was going to believe her when it came to tonight’s events. She couldn’t explain them fully unless she told them why she was really here—and that could never happen. Nothing could risk Rebka’s treatment. Nothing at all. Her own life was expendable at this point.

She took the stairs three at a time. Couldn’t hear anything moving behind her. Not yet. Maybe the charge had killed it? Somehow she knew she hadn’t.

There was a bag in her room, one she casually kept packed, one that had items to help any emergency dash to safety. She reached the sixth floor and had a millisecond debate with herself—if she could afford the time to retrieve it. The monster would be after her, she never doubted that for an instant. But she needed the things in that bag if she was to stand any chance of getting away clean.

Angela went for the bag.

Inside the biolab’s door chamber, Angela ordered her e-i to switch on the identity code in her solid memory cache. She put the little block on a shelf and deactivated her bodymesh’s link to the convoy’s net. Not that the net was much use in the bedlam of the lightning storm.

She stepped out into the turmoil of the blizzard. Sirius in its weakened state still hadn’t penetrated the cloud, leaving the canyon immersed in a thick gloaming. Gravel-sized snowflakes assailed her parka and quilted trousers, crackling against her helmet. As she looked around she could see the white headlight beams pointing ineffectually into the storm, blurring into a haze just a few meters outside the pathetic protective ring the vehicles had once again contracted into.

Atyeo and Garrick still lay on the ground beside biolab-1, with the snow already starting to accumulate along one side of their corpses where the wind blew unceasingly. Most of the hose was already submerged under small ripple-like drifts, while the frozen extinguisher foam looked like another serrated ice ridge—just one more piece of the tormented landscape. None of the remote guns were moving now, leaving the convoy effectively defenseless against the monster. Though in truth, they always had been, she thought.

Angela set off between Tropics-3 and -2. The side windows on both vehicles were covered with pale sheets of ice, fluorescing slightly from the inside lights. Their windshield wipers were still churning away in pained judders, but all they cleared now was ever-smaller triangles. At this rate the windshields would be covered in another half hour.

Nobody saw her, not even when another crazy lightning ball streaked through the turgid clouds far above, throwing down a brighter illumination. She walked unchallenged into the canyon’s arctic emptiness where the monster awaited. The solitude was almost refreshing, as was the lack of worry. Her decision had been made, the demon would be faced.