Warren Murphy: Dying Space

Verbanic was digging with his hands, shoveling away armfuls of festering decay.

And the new microfilm tapes, coded in binomial sequences. New, strange information once stored in the LC 111, now a part of the creature that created itself from a single directive programmed into its manmade intelligence. A single voice, a command overriding all others: SURVIVE.

It creaked in its deep grave, shifting its weight onto its lower limbs. High above, Lew Verbanic dug frantically, moving aside earth with a discarded box as sweat poured down his face and darkened the back of his uniform. SURVIVE. "I see something!" Verbanic shouted.

"W-what?" Gonzalez inched toward his partner. Spinning effortlessly through the debris, whole now, rising toward the light by its own momentum. SURVIVE.

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"It's . . ." Verbanic's eyes opened wide as he saw the spinning metal thing nearing the surface.

"What is it, Lew? Lew?"

"My God," Verbanic whispered.

"My God." The words entered the thing's aural transceivers. They were fuzzy and faraway-sounding, but they triggered a series of circuits that flashed to life:

NEED . . . INCOMPLETE . . . LIFE FORM PRESENT . . . IMMEDIATE . . . NEED . . . SURVIVE . .. SURVIVE . . .

One by one the hundreds of thousands of minuscule tapes began to wind and thread. The orbital receivers rolled upward, registering a life form the memory banks identified as Human, Adult Male.

UTILI7.ATION OF LIFE FORM NECESSARY . . . PROTECTIVE OUTER COVERING MANDATORY FOR ASSIMILATION . . . SURVIVE . . . SURVIVE ...

"Get out, Marco," Verbanic said evenly, backing slowly away from the smoking crater at the center of the rubbish mound.

Gonzalez was crying. "Lew . . . Lew . . ."

"Get out. Now!" he commanded.

They were the last words Lew Verbanic spoke. In a fraction of a second, a metallic hand shot out of the hole and clutched Verbanic's ankle as he tried to run. He screamed as the bone in his leg pulverized to dust inside the flesh. Still screaming, he was spun in the air like a limp rag while the metallic creature rose from the crater in the mountain of trash.

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Gonzalez watched the scene with horrified, immobile fascination, weeping. Strings of spittle dribbled through the gap left by his missing teeth and down his chin.

The thing holding Verbanic stepped onto the crest of the hill, looldng, in the deceptive light of the moon, like an ancient conquering knight. Verbanic remained in the thing's right hand, his leg twisted unnaturally at the ankle, his foot stationary as the rest of him looped again and again in the air. Verbanic's wails keened grotesquely in the night. Even at a distance, Gonzalez could see the bulging whites of his eyes, terrified and pleading for death.

Then the creature's left hand rose slowly upward to catch Verbanic by the neck. Lew's head snapped back with a force that sent a splash of blood arcing from his mouth to the ground. Then j he lay still, pulled taut between the creature's two arms, a trophy of war. \

Gonzalez stood rooted to the spot where he ; stood. The metallic thing threw Verbanic's body j on the ground, where it bounced down the : mound of rubble to lie sprawling on the earth below.

Gonzalez wanted to run, but he was unable to move. Creaking and trembling, the thing walked toward him. \

Gonzalez whispered, "Please." But the metal monster kept moving closer. Drained of will, Gon- j zalez fell to his knees and buried his face in his hands.

The night was silent except for the sound of Gonzalez's uncontrollable weeping. Then the

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scream of splintering metal sliced through the air. He opened his hands. The thing was at the garbage truck, tearing off one of its front fenders. For a moment, Gonzalez thought the thing hadn't seen him. Then it turned around, a small pile of bolts in one metallic hand, and focused its luminescent eye-orbs directly at him.

What the creature did next filled Gonzalez with bewilderment. Taking one bolt at a time, the thing lifted each bolt to its face and began screwing them into itself. Its movements were slow and deliberate, and it never shifted its position or its unblinking gaze.

"What are you?" Gonzalez whispered, the loathing thick in his voice.

The creature's jaw worked silently, like a mechanical toy's.

"What are you?" Gonzalez repeated, screaming it this time. His senses were returning. It was too late to save Verbanic, he noted unhappily, but maybe he could save himself.

Beside the spot where he knelt lay a rock the size of his hand. Slowly he crept his fingers toward the rock until they were entwined around it. Then, as swiftly as he had ever moved in his life, he ran toward the creature, the rock held high overhead for attack.

The thing watched him without expression. It exhibited no intention to run or fight. Just as Gonzalez reached the thing, it flashed out a hand and sent the rock spinning out of sight.

"Madre Dio," Gonzalez said, cowering, but still the creature made no move toward him. Instead, it continued to screw bolts into its face. Another,

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and then the last, between the metallic ridge of a nose and the place where a lip would have been on a human. It began to hum, flat and tinny, like synthetic music. Then the sound modulated wildly up and down, from ultrasonic shrieks to low rumbles like gears grinding.

It opened its mouth again.

This time it spoke.

"Hello is all right," it said.

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CHAPTER TWO

His name was Remo and he was catching bullets.

He was catching them in his palms the way some people with very fast reflexes could catch flies. Bullets came at you a lot faster than flies did, but the principle was the same. See them. Slap them down at a 90 degree angle at exactly the speed they're traveling. Smack them from below with a high bounce to cool them off.

Catching them was the easy part. Anyone who could move his arm at 870 feet per second could catch the bullet from a .38 Colt Special. It was seeing them, without seeing the motion of the trigger that released them, that made the exercise interesting, especially since the light wzzz sound produced in the bullet's wake came after the bullet itself. Rely on the sound, kid, and you're one dead assassin, Remo reminded himself.

He held five in his right hand now, their gray

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metal melted smoothly toward their charred rims. There were three bullets in his left hand.

Chiun was right. Remo did favor his right hand. That would have to be corrected.

Damn it, Chiun was always right, Remo said to himself as he flicked one of the bullets upward on his fingernail. It embedded itself in the plaster of the ceiling.

"Oh, hell," he said aloud. Now he only had seven bullets. And he had forgotten whether the one in the ceiling had come from his right or left hand.

Chiun. Eighty-year-old men were supposed to be senile and doddering. That's what all the magazines and TV commercials said. Hadn't Chiun ever heard about irregularity? Or dentures, or tired blood? Didn't he know there were such things as arteriosclerosis and arthritis and gout and plain old age?

Of course not. All Chiun knew was how to kill people and how to be a pain in the ass to Remo.

Fifty bullets. That was what the old man wanted. "Boom droppings," he called them, as if Remo were in this ghetto hellhole on pigeon patrol instead of real business.

"Real business, pah," Chiun had said when Remo's assignment came in. "Unwashed amateurs with boom shooters."

"Guns, not boom shooters," Remo corrected. "And they kill people."

"Slow people."

"Maybe. Still, I'm supposed to stop them."

"You will never stop them," Chiun argued. "Louts with boom shooters are like fruitflies. No

sooner does one send them into the void, than a whole new generation appears to take their places."