Скотт Вестерфельд - Specials

BIOWARFARE FILTER MASK, USED

Biowarfare? Used? Tally quickly dropped the mask on the shelf beside her. She saw Shay watching, the shoulders of her suit moving.

Very funny, Shay-la, she thought.

Biological warfare had been one of the Rusties' more brilliant ideas: engineering bacteria and viruses to kill each other. It was about the stupidest kind of weapon you could make, because once the bugs were finished with your enemies, they usually came for you. In fact, the whole Rusty culture had been undone by one artificial oil-eating bacterium.

Tally hoped that whoever ran this museum hadn't left any civilization-ending bugs around.

She crossed the floor, took Shay's shoulder, and hissed, "Cute."

"Yeah, you should have seen your face. Actually, I should have seen your face. Stupid sneak suits."

"Find anything?"

Shay held up a shiny tubelike object. "This should do the job. The label says it works." She slipped it into one of her sneak-suit pouches.

"So what's all that other stuff for?"

"To throw them off the scent. If we only steal one thing, they might figure out what we want it for."

"Oh," Tally whispered. Shay might be making stupid jokes, but her mind was still icy.

"Take these." Shay shoved an armful of objects at her and went back to puzzling over the shelves.

Tally looked down at the jumble of equipment, wondering if any of it was infected with Tally-eating bacteria. She slipped a few pieces that would fit into the sneak suit's carrying pouches.

The largest object looked like some kind of rifle, with a thick barrel and long-range optics. Tally peered down its sight and saw Shay's silhouette in miniature, crosshairs marking where the bullets would hit if she squeezed the trigger. She felt a moment of disgust. The weapon was designed to make any average person into a killing machine, and life and death seemed like a lot to risk on a slip of some random's finger.

Her nerves were jumping. Shay had already found what they needed. It was time to get out of here.

Then Tally realized what was making her nervous. She smelled something through the sneak suit's filter, something human. She took a step toward Shay…

The lights overhead began to flicker, bright white chasing away the room's orange glow, and footsteps clanged from the ladder rungs. Someone was climbing toward the museum.

Shay crouched, rolling onto the lowest shelf beside her, stretching across the jumble of tools. Tally looked around frantically for a place to hide, then wedged herself into a corner where two shelves didn't quite meet, the rifle hidden behind her. Her sneak suit's scales writhed, trying to fade into the shadows.

Across the room, Shay's suit was sprouting jagged lines to break up her outline. By the time the light steadied overhead, she was almost invisible.

But Tally was not. She looked down at herself. Sneak suits were designed for hiding in complex environments— jungles and forests and battle-wrecked cities, not in the corners of brightly lit rooms.

But it was too late to find another spot.

A man was stepping off the ladder.

He wasn't very scary.

He seemed to be an average late pretty, with the same gray hair and wrinkled hands as Tally's great-grandfathers. His face showed the usual signs of life-extension treatments: crinkly skin around the eyes, and veiny hands.

But he didn't seem calm or wise to Tally, the way crumblies had before she'd become a Special—just old. She realized that she could knock him cold without regret if she had to.

More nervous-making than the crumbly were the three little hovercams that floated above his head. They shadowed him as he strode unseeing past Tally toward one of the shelves. He reached to take something down, and the cameras shifted in the air, zipping in closer, like a rapt audience watching a magician's every movement, always staying focused on his hands. He ignored the cameras, as if he was used to their attentions.

Of course, Tally thought. The hovercams were part of the building's security system, but they weren't looking for intruders. They were designed to watch the staff, making sure nobody snuck off with any of the horrible old weapons stored here. They glided smoothly over his head, watching everything this historian—or museum curator, or whatever he was—did here in the Armory.

Tally relaxed a little. Some crumbly boffin who himself was under guard was a lot less threatening than the squad of Specials she'd been expecting.

He handled the objects delicately, and the care he took with them made her vaguely nauseous, as if he saw them as valuable works of art instead of killing machines.

Then suddenly the crumbly froze, a frown on his face. He checked a glowing palmbook in his hand, then started sifting through the objects one by one…

He'd noticed something missing.

Tally wondered if it was the rifle poking into her back. But it couldn't be: Shay had taken the weapon from the other side of the museum.

But then he picked up the biowarfare filter mask. Tally swallowed—she'd put it back in the wrong place.

His eyes slowly swept the room.

Somehow, he didn't see Tally wedged into her corner. The sneak suit must have melded her outline into the shadows on the wall, like an insect against a tree limb.

He carried the mask over to where Shay was hidden, his knees centimeters from her face. Tally was certain he'd notice all the objects she'd borrowed, but once the crumbly had put the mask back in its proper place, he nodded and turned around, a satisfied expression on his face.

Tally breathed a slow sigh of relief.

Then she saw the hovercam staring down at her.

It still floated just above the crumbly's head, but its little lens was no longer watching him. Either Tally's imagination was running wild, or it was pointed straight at her, slowly focusing and refocusing.

The crumbly walked back to where he'd started, but the camera stayed where it was, no longer interested in him. It drifted closer to Tally flitting back and forth, like some hummingbird unsure about a flower. The old man didn't notice its nervous little dance, but Tally's heart was pounding, her vision blurring as she struggled not to breathe.

The camera flew still closer, and past its flitting eye Tally saw Shay's form shifting. She'd also seen the little hovercam—things were about to get very tricky.

The camera stared at Tally, still unsure. Was it smart enough to know about sneak suits? Would it just chalk her up to a smudge on its lens?

Apparently, Shay wasn't waiting to find out. Her suit's camouflage had changed into the sleek black of armor. She pulled herself silently out into the open, pointed at the camera, and drew her finger across her throat.

Tally knew what she had to do.

In a single motion, she whipped the rifle from behind her back. It struck the hovercam with a crack, sending it flying across the museum, past the astonished crumbly's head, and careening into a wall. It dropped to the floor, stone-cold dead.

Instantly, a screaming alarm filled the room.

Shay burst into motion, running toward the ladder. Tally squeezed out of her corner and followed, ignoring the astonished crumbly's cries. But as Shay jumped for the ladder, a metal sheath snapped shut around it. She bounced back with a hollow clang, her suit cycling through a sequence of random colors from the impact.

Tally swept her eyes around the museum—there was no other way out.

One of the two remaining hovercams buzzed straight up to her face, and she smashed it with another blow from the rifle butt. She swung at the other one, but it shot away into a corner of the ceiling, like a nervous housefly trying not to get swatted.

"What are you doing here?" the crumbly shouted.