Jak Koke - Clockwork asylum

"Burnout, my friend, you do not know Mercury in the way I do. I have fought alongside him, I know his strengths and his weaknesses. I was there when he succumbed to the seductive power of the Dragon Heart and claimed it for himself. I knew then that he could never be trusted to carry the Heart to Thayla. Without that his life is forfeit to my goal."

"How do we defeat him?"

"Whenever you have faced him, you have confronted his strength. As much as I dislike the idea, it's time to confront him where he is the weakest."

"And just where would that be? As far as I can tell, Ryan Mercury doesn't have any weaknesses."

"In the sprawl named Washington FDC there lives a woman named Nadja Daviar. She is Mercury's one weakness. If you have her, then you have him."

Burnout's laughter carried in the night air, and all around the Bison the woods were deathly still. "Deal!"

Ryan woke from a nightmare, cold sweat streaming down his face, soaking his shirt and the cushion of the Mistral's passenger seat beneath him. He straightened up, then leaned forward and put his head against his knees.

His mind refused to let go of the dream. The pouring rain back at the top of Pony Mountain. The dense forest lit by flashes of lightning, shaken by thunder. Ryan fought Burnout again, but this time, the cyberzombie had gone down before his onslaught.

In his battle rage, Ryan lifted the metal body over his head and threw it against the trunk of the tree. Instead of feeling relief, the sound of Burnout's spine cracking had brought horror, and he'd rushed to the man's side, turned him over, and screamed.

It was Miranda's face looking back up at him.

Ryan screamed, a high-pitched wail that had become the sound of the engines as his subconscious reluctantly released its hold on his mind. Don't need an interpreter to divine the meaning behind that one, thought Ryan.

Ryan sat up in the Mistral's dark cabin, making the deja vu landing back into National Airport in FDC. He blinked away the tears and rubbed sleep from his eyes. Everything was set for keeping track of Burnout. Jane had put together a small group consisting of two mages and a samurai.

Ryan had left the note on the Bison as a last-second whim, a bit of psychological warfare to throw Burnout off balance.

Miranda's death was hitting him harder than it should, he knew that. Runs like this were dangerous and sometimes people died. Maybe I'm going soft. Regardless, he wanted out now. Dunkelzahn's mission would have to take a back seat to Ryan's persecution of Damien Knight.

Dhin's drowsy voice filtered through the cabin. "We'll be on the ground in five."

Ryan nodded. Readied his gear as they landed. The trip from the airport to the mansion was made in a haze. Ryan was dimly aware of the limo ride and of the smell of cherry blossoms, but everything else was clouded by a distant fog.

It wasn't until Nadja stood before him on the mansion steps, her hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, her soft cotton robe pulled snugly about her, that Ryan came back to reality. He tried to ask her about the meeting he had arranged with her and Carla Brooks and Jane-in-the-box.

"Shh," she said. "Tomorrow." Then she took him by the hand and led him into the house, upstairs to the bedroom and beyond into the master bath.

A huge tub full of steaming water waited for him, and as she stripped his clothes from his body, he thought of Pony Mountain in the hard wash of the rain.

Nadja dropped her robe, revealing her tightly muscled stomach, her hardening brown nipples. She gazed into his eyes and led him into the hot water.

As the heat robbed the strength from his muscles, easing the knots even as it stung his crudely bandaged wounds, Nadja kissed him softly. His forehead, his neck, his eyes, his lips.

She kissed him to hardness, and in the lazy liquid, she wrapped herself around him.

With a tenderness he'd never known, she made love to him. Carrying him to sweet oblivion. He let himself forget about Miranda, about Burnout. About Damien Knight. His cares and worries melted into the embrace with the woman he loved, giving him a measure of peace he'd seldom known.

After, he slept without dreams for the first time in his life. 22 August 2057

In the first gray light of the morning, Burnout belly-crawled through the boggy field at the end of the Missoula International Airport. The sound of VTOL transports screamed through the sky overhead as he moved toward the perimeter fencing.

Behind him, the abandoned Ford Bison slowly slipped beneath the surface of the swamp.

It had been a long and difficult drive from Pony Mountain in the dark. The distance was only about two hundred and fifty klicks, but the terrain was mountainous and extremely rugged. They'd come south on the eastern side of the Swan Mountains, then over the pass to the outskirts of Missoula, using abandoned and washed-out roads where people hadn't driven in over a decade.

As they'd approached civilization, Burnout had used the Bison's on-board telecom to call the airfield and get a rundown of all departing suborbitals bound for the FDC sprawl. Armed with that information, he and Lethe had managed to get to the far end of the strip, courtesy of Burnout's still functional GPS.

Now, he was moving silently toward the small guard post. The station was a crude corrugated steel structure, roughly the size of a small storage shed. It looked like an ancient outhouse, and the only thing that belied the image was the small satellite dish mounted on the roof.

The soft twang of some country singer filtered through the open windows, lilting about lost loves, dearly departed dogs, and missing money. One guard was a dwarf with a huge paunch, seated with his feet up on the desk, snoring loudly, almost in rhythm to the slide guitar. The other guard was a young human with Amerind features who took furtive drinks from a bottle inside a paper sack and kept paging through a Playtrog magazine.

Burnout scanned for cameras and stationary or track-mounted drones, but could find none.

"There are two watcher spirits," Lethe said. "But they won't see us."

"Good." Burnout moved up to the window in silence. He slipped inside, and with the butt of his Predator hit the human's temple, sending the body flying. The guard crashed into the metal wall, his magazine fluttering to the floor. As the man sank into unconsciousness, a small trickle of blood seeped from the side of his head.

The sleeping guard woke, but it was too late. Burnout had lifted him up by the neck and removed his Colt Man-hunter. "Help me and you won't die."

The dwarf's eyes snapped open and filled with horror. Burnout could see the wheels turning behind them. The dwarf nodded.

Holding the guard, Burnout took a quick inventory. The desk, which was cluttered with hardcopy reports and candy wrappers, also held a small cyberdeck. That would be useful. Burnout turned. Something was nagging at him, and it took him a moment to place it.

He looked behind him, found the small radio on the big filing cabinet, just above him. Whining steel guitars and slow country vocals. With a quick swipe of his hand, the radio sailed across the room, shattering against the door frame.

The night went silent.

"Never could stomach that drek." He set the dwarf back in his chair, but didn't let go of his neck. "Now, tell me about runway security."

The guard shivered. "I can't."

Burnout just tightened his grip. "You can tell, or I can find it on the cyberdeck after you're dead."

"Ack!" the dwarf choked. "All right, I'll tell you."

"Each corp has twenty people on the tarmac, but most of them watch the baggage. We don't get much traffic here, and it's mostly tribal."

"Good, come with me, and if you make noise, you die."