Amaguq Tower
City of Old Chicago
Old Earth
Sol System
Audrey O’Hanrahan set her half empty coffee cup on the small table, rose, and walked to the balcony’s rail.
It was a breezy day, but at least April’s late-season cold snaps were a thing of the past, and she enjoyed the way the breeze caressed her hair. She stood for several minutes, savoring the sensation and watching the always busy and sometimes frenetic traffic that poured through the huge city on so many different levels. And by so many different avenues and methods. Tubeways, air cars, slidewalks—she could even see a few genuine pedestrians here and there, along with what seemed like an army of joggers.
She didn’t count the joggers as pedestrians. O’Hanrahan kept herself in excellent physical condition, but she did her exercising in private. There was no reason to inflect her sweat and grunts upon others, after all. She viewed public jogging as a mild form of narcissism.
When she’d first started coming to Old Chicago, before she’d acquired her apartment here in Amaguq Tower, she’d paid the upcharge to get rooms that overlooked Lake Michigan, since that was the view everyone recommended. And, indeed, it was always pleasant to gaze over the huge expanse of Old Earth’s fourth largest lake, especially in summer when it was dotted with sailboats. And sometimes, it was spectacular—especially when one of the big storms rolled in.
But after a few visits, she’d started finding the view a bit boring. It was like visiting the Grand Canyon, which she’d also done…once. The first fifteen minutes were incredible; the next fifteen, were…interesting. And after that… Well, before long even the most spectacular vista got pretty dull if it was completely static.
Lake Michigan was never completely static, of course, since there were always waves. But waves didn’t begin to compete with the frenzy of human-generated urban traffic. So she’d saved some money by buying an apartment that overlooked the city itself when the time came for her to establish a permanent address in the capital. She had not, of course, saved the additional money she could have by buying an interior apartment, with no external balcony and no direct view at all. People could say whatever they wanted about smartwalls being “just as good” as a direct view, but Audrey O’Hanrahan wasn’t one of them. And some hardships were unacceptable, especially given the income stream her site generated. The O’Hanrahan Report was the most widely watched investigative news site in much of the Solarian League, including here on Old Earth itself, with literally billions of subscribers. She’d worked hard to accomplish that. The assistance provided by her Alignment contacts had helped, of course, but most of it was the product of her own skill, her own talent, her own dogged, unyielding persistence, and her genuine passion for uncovering the truth.
Even if there were certain truths not even the O’Hanrahan Report could share.
That was the other reason she’d chosen Amaguq. According to the tower’s website, it was named after Jacques Amaguq, a famous first century PD political leader from Old Terra’s northern hemisphere, whose last name had meant “Father Wolf” in one of the ancient tongues of his ancestors. But O’Hanrahan had done a little extra research, and while all of that was true as far as it went, it struck her as utterly appropriate for her to find a home in a tower which was also named for the trickster god of the Inuit.
Normally, she would have spent at least a half-hour on her balcony, enough for two full cups of coffee. But today she cut it short after only ten minutes, before she’d finished even one. She had a script to write, and, as often happened, she’d discovered when she woke up that morning that the piece had mostly written itself while she was sleeping. So she wanted to get it recorded for posterity before she forgot anything.
For the vast majority of people, the verb “to write” actually meant to dictate to a voice recognition program. It usually meant that for O’Hanrahan, as well, but not when she had the luxury of a comfortable work environment and no deadline pressure. In those cases, she preferred to use old-fashioned methods. She was firmly convinced, whatever the neurologists said, that she thought better if her fingers were engaged as well as her brain. So, whenever possible, she used the keyboard.
She wasn’t a complete throwback, however. She was quite happy with a virtual keyboard and harbored no need to damage her fingertips by beating them against hard, material keys. She’d once known a novelist who insisted upon using an archaic mechanical keyboard, and she’d wondered how much medical attention the silly woman required when she was finished with an entire book.
She settled at her desk, called up her keyboard, and began to type.
Catherine Montaigne’s “spontaneous decision” to attend the galactic convention of the Anti-Slavery League in Old Chicago is a shrewd move. Not simply for her, but for the Manticoran government and the entire Grand Alliance. Of course, both the Star Empire and Montaigne herself will indignantly deny that her trip to Old Terra has any official sanction. It is, they will insist, no more than a private citizen’s continuation of her long-standing commitment to and leadership role in the fight against genetic slavery.
It is a shrewd move precisely because no one can effectively challenge that indignation. Catherine Montaigne does have an impeccable record, stretching back for decades, as one of the Anti-Slavery League’s central leaders, and she is perhaps its best known and most eloquent public spokesperson. And although she is no longer an exile from the Star Empire and has even become politically respectable once more, neither she nor her Liberal Party are part of Prime Minister Grantville’s Government. Indeed, officially they are still the “Loyal Opposition.”
Of course, that label can be misleading. It definitely is when it comes to Manticore’s foreign policy. On those issues, the Liberals are now in practice part of an informal “grand coalition.” While they continue their policy of disagreement with Grantville’s Centrists on a number of domestic issues—issues Montaigne never hesitates to put forward—those issues are not central to the Star Empire’s political life. Nor will they be, so long as the conflict with the Solarian League remains officially unsettled.
Which is what makes Montaigne’s presence here in the Sol System particularly interesting. She has not presented any sort of ambassadorial credentials to the Provisional Government, and she is not here to attend the Constitutional Convention. Not officially, at least. And it’s unlikely that she will personally attend any of its proceedings. But her mere presence on Old Terra reminds the population of the Sol System and the entire Solarian League that Manticore’s track record in interactions with the independent star nations of the Fringe and even with the Frontier Security “protectorates” of the Verge is far better than the League’s. That is true diplomatically, economically, and—most strikingly of all—in its handling of slavery and the slave trade, and much the same can be said for the Star Empire’s one-time foe and now ally, the Republic of Haven.
To be blunt, the history of the Solarian League and genetic slavery stinks to high heaven. The League may well have outlawed the slave trade and the institution of genetic slavery itself, but that splendid official position is actually a fig leaf—and a threadbare one, at that. A longstanding, central feature of the general corruption of the League’s officials and bureaucracies has been their studious avoidance of any investigation of the activities of any of the giant transstellar corporations doing business in the Solarian League. That same avoidance has applied to Manpower Incorporated and the transstellars associated with it…and to any effective enforcement of the laws against slavery and the slave trade. Our bureaucratic overlords’ eyes were averted—but their palms were always outstretched.
It is not a popular position—not yet, at least—but in this reporter’s opinion, the Grand Alliance’s demand that the Solarian League summon a special convention and write a new Constitution that will prevent the reemergence of the politically unaccountable bureaucracy which gave us the Mandarins and their disastrous policies is not simply justified, but very much in the League’s own interests. Lack of accountability always engenders corruption. And corruption always engenders the abuse of power that allows barbarisms like the genetic slave trade to flourish and, in the flourishing, stain every citizen of the League with blood guilt for one of the vilest institutions in the long, dark history of human cruelty and corruption.
The central task of the Constitutional Convention will be to prevent that corruption’s regeneration, and this reporter is confident that as a part of that task, its delegates will find themselves compelled to grapple specifically with slavery and the slave trade. I doubt if one could find a single delegate to that convention who would say otherwise, and the vast majority of them will be sincere in their determination. In a very real sense, the slave trade—an execrable evil in its own right—is also a focal point, a lens, the personification of what that corruption allows. And, should any of the convention delegates even consider not grappling specifically with the slave trade, Catherine Montaigne’s presence within a few kilometers of their deliberations should certainly stiffen their spines.
And so it ought to.
It is awkward, to put it mildly, to denounce the Grand Alliance for its autocratic demand that we rewrite our most fundamental law, or for its purported brutality during the conquest of Mesa, when the people denouncing them belong to a polity whose autocratic behavior and brutality toward the immense populations of the Verge at the behest of giant transstellars has been at least as bad. It seems…unlikely that the Grand Alliance—or Catherine Montaigne—will allow the Constitutional Convention or the League at large to forget that, and well they should not.
Speaking of the Grand Alliance’s purported brutality in the Mesa System, this reporter has recently come into possession of information which at the very least casts doubt on Admiral Gold Peak’s Tenth Fleet’s responsibility for the nuclear bombardment that blotted away millions of lives. As the O’Hanrahan Report’s listeners will be aware, I was on Mesa at the time of that bombardment. And as those same listeners will be aware, I have persistently questioned the narrative of Manticoran and Havenite imperialism as the driver of the war between the Grand Alliance and the Solarian League. Despite that, the initial evidence—or what seemed to be evidence—of the Grand Alliance’s culpability in the Mesa Atrocity appeared overwhelming at the time. The new information which has come into my possession strongly counters that “evidence” of the Grand Alliance’s responsibility, however. I intend to return to Mesa soon in order to investigate—
She paused. She hadn’t actually made up her mind whether or not she was going to visit Mesa again, and her new “information” hadn’t come from any Mesan source. What one of her many contacts within the Solarian military had actually provided to her was the analysis of the Mesa bombardment being advanced by Admiral Kingsford’s new director of the Office of Naval Intelligence. The analysis was purely informal, with no official sanction or imprimatur, but given Dr. Gannon’s apparent influence with the Chief of Naval Operations, it had to be taken very seriously.
And O’Hanrahan’s problem was that she was almost certain Gannon was correct.
She’d never believed the Audubon Ballroom was responsible for the “terrorist” campaign which had preceded Tenth Fleet’s arrival in Mesa. Her Alignment superiors wouldn’t have sent her to cover it—wouldn’t have known in advance that it was about to happen and would need to be covered—if the Alignment itself hadn’t been involved. And, if she’d had any doubts about that, the way in which her Mesan itinerary had been shaped had resolved them. Besides, she had extensive contacts inside Mesa’s intelligence agencies, which meant she’d known the Ballroom simply didn’t have the resources in-system to carry out a campaign on that scale. A single incident like Green Pines…maybe. Her internal jury was still out on that one. She was willing to accept the possibility Ballroom terrorists might have been able to get their hands on one or two nuclear devices, and it was possible Green Pines had been their handiwork. Indeed, might well have provided the inspiration—and pretext—for the series of…copycat attacks she’d been sent to report.
But even accepting the possibility that the Ballroom had been involved in Green Pines, she’d never believed Gold Peak had ordered the nuclear strikes after her arrival. There’d been no logical reason for her to do it. The only theory anyone could give for why she might have ordered them was that the woman was a homicidal maniac. Or, at least, someone unable to control a ferocious temper under stress.
But nothing in the Manticoran admiral’s history—O’Hanrahan had investigated her background—supported that notion. The woman who was Empress Elizabeth’s first cousin, fourth in line for the Manticoran throne, wasn’t going to murder millions of civilians and hand that sort of spiked club to the Grand Alliance’s Solarian foes on a whim. And mere “stress” was…unlikely, to say the least, to change that. Besides, Gold Peak hadn’t been under any stress. Her Tenth Fleet had already conquered Mesa. What was left of Mesa’s government had been flat on its back, waving its paws in the air in abject submission. If there’d been a less stressful conquest of a star nation in the entire history of galactic warfare, O’Hanrahan had been unable to find it.
And if it hadn’t been the Ballroom, and it hadn’t been Tenth Fleet, that left only the Grand Alliance’s explanation—that it had been O’Hanrahan’s own Alignment. That explanation made far more sense than any other. So much sense that, in the end, O’Hanrahan had accepted it herself…privately of course.
She hadn’t in the beginning, and not simply because she hadn’t wanted to, for a lot of reasons, including the obscene death toll. She’d realized even then that that part of her response had been emotional, but it also hadn’t been the only reason she’d rejected the entire notion. Just as in Gold Peak’s case, she’d been unable to see any logical reason or motive for the Alignment. Why would it do something that savage?
She’d known for decades—had understood when she joined the Alignment as a teenager—that its leaders were capable of ruthlessness. But the leaders of every serious struggle in history had, of necessity, been ruthless. The Alignment’s leaders were no different from dozens of examples she could have picked. The leaders of the democratic nations which had fought and defeated fascist tyrants a couple of centuries before the Diaspora, for example. They hadn’t hesitated to subject their enemies to mass aerial bombardment—including incendiary raids and the very first use of nuclear weapons—that took more than two million lives at a time when there’d been little more than two billion humans in existence.
Once, there’d been no way to systematically address those problems. But that had ceased to be true centuries ago, given the steady development of genetic and biological science since the Diaspora, and that failure was no longer excusable. Limitations of the human genome were now enforced by nothing more than superstition, political misconduct, and cultural inertia. That was to say, by the very same factors which in the Ante Diaspora era had produced witch hunts, religious wars, pogroms—all manner of bestial conduct.
But while she could and did accept the ruthlessness that her cause at times found necessary, the operative word was necessary. The end, the objective—the purpose—must justify the ruthlessness. It must be worth the price that was paid, and it must never be paid casually. It must be justified morally, not simply pragmatically. And when the price was human lives, it must be paid only when there was no other option, no other coin by which the future could be purchased.
And the reason she’d found it so hard, initially, to accept the Alignment’s responsibility for the nuclear strikes was that she’d been able to see no coherent motive. It had seemed like butchery for its own sake. Try though she might, she’d been unable to see any other motive—far less any other justification. That was something she’d never before seen from the leaders of her movement, and so she had been unable to believe that it had been them. Indeed, it might have been more accurate to say that she had refused to believe it had been them.
Until now.
No one had briefed her on any measures that might have been established to evacuate the Alignment’s cadre from Mesa, yet she’d always understood—anyone in the Alignment’s inner layers understood, simply by virtue of being very intelligent, if nothing else—that measures like that had to be in place. If there was one thing in which the Alignment believed, it was being prepared, and sooner or later it would almost inevitably be forced to evacuate Mesa. As an independent star nation, Mesa had never fallen under the protection of the Solarian League, and the misbehavior of its corporate leadership—especially Manpower’s, although Manpower was scarcely alone—must eventually trigger nemesis. And if someone like, oh, the Grand Alliance, came along and conquered Mesa, the Alignment could never risk allowing its leadership to fall into the conquerors’ hands. So, obviously, there must be a plan to extract that cadre safely and ahead of time.
And if Gannon was correct…if his theory that the retaliation had come so swiftly and powerfully that the Alignment had been caught off guard and only half prepared was accurate…
Even that couldn’t explain or justify the Beowulf Strike, though.
The murder of over forty million civilians? Civilians who’d posed no threat to the evacuation of Mesa or to the Alignment itself. How in God’s name did something like that fit into the Alignment’s purpose and goals?
She didn’t know the answers to those questions. What had happened on Mesa, yes. She could, now, accept that as the Alignment’s handiwork. But Beowulf…that was hard. Indeed, she still didn’t accept the Alignment’s responsibility for that. The Grand Alliance might have assigned responsibility to the Alignment, and she could readily understand why it had, given everything else its members had endured. But the fact that the Alliance genuinely believed that didn’t mean it was necessarily correct. God knew there were enough corrupt bureaucrats and transstellars with the reach to execute an atrocity like that because of their fury at Beowulf for supporting Manticore and the Grand Alliance from the outset. Indeed, she could have rattled off a list of over a dozen suspects, beginning with Volkhart Kalokainos at Kalokainos Shipping and extending through any one of the other shipping lines who’d suffered catastrophic losses as the Grand Alliance shut down the Solarian League’s interstellar life’s blood.
She suspected that one reason she found it so easy to construct that list was the very fact that she found it so impossible to construct an acceptable reason for the Alignment to have committed that atrocity. But that was no longer impossible where the Mesa Atrocity was concerned.
Yet she had to walk a very fine line here. On the one hand, maintaining—no, enhancing—her reputation as the galaxy’s most reliable and incorruptible investigative reporter would be enormously beneficial to the Alignment, especially in the long run. On the other hand, how did she do that without persuading the galaxy that her Alignment was, indeed, an organization of savage mass murderers?
And little though she cared to admit it, even to herself, how did she do that when deep in the core of her own heart and soul she was still horrified by the sheer scale of what had happened on Mesa? However thoroughly she might grasp the pragmatic necessity of withdrawing their cadre to safety, how did the Alignment’s leadership—how did any of the Alignment’s members—square the moral balance of so many million deaths? Especially when she was still unable, desperately as she wanted to, to be positive her Alignment wasn’t responsible for what had happened in Beowulf.
She sat, gazing at what she’d already written, for at least five minutes, then drew a deep breath.
She wasn’t ready to tackle that particular problem. Not until she was certain in her own mind both of the accuracy of Gannon’s analysis…and that she, Audrey O’Hanrahan, could accept that her Alignment had acted in accordance with its own purpose and standards. She wasn’t certain of either of those, yet. And until she was…
She erased her final paragraph, deleted any mention of new information about Mesa, and finished with a short conclusion regarding Montaigne’s likely behavior in the near future.
That done, she sent the piece off and headed for her bedroom to dress.
Delegates to the Constitutional Convention were still arriving from the Solarian League’s more distant star systems. Size-wise, the League had much in common with a dinosaur, or perhaps an Old Earth blue whale. Even with hyper-bridges, it had taken literally months for even fast courier boats to reach some of those systems with news of the League’s surrender. Then they’d had to select delegates—and hadn’t that been a dogfight in some of them?—and then send the delegates back on the same months-long trip. It was actually remarkable that they’d been able to assemble enough of them for a quorum in “only” four months, and they still weren’t prepared to start any serious constitution writing. They were, however, ready to at least approve—or reject, of course, politicians being politicians—the procedural guidelines the Provisional Government had proposed, and the Convention’s first official session was scheduled for early afternoon. She wanted to be there when it convened. Actually, she wanted to get there before it convened in order to interview several of the more important delegates.
✧ ✧ ✧
Getting dressed was the source of some impatience and even more irritation.
When she’d returned to Old Chicago from Mesa, her handlers had informed her through one of their circuitous channels that they wanted her to employ the services of Whiting Security. They’d been quite emphatic about it.
Personally, she thought they were spooking at shadows. The Mesa-based transstellars she’d spent so many years infuriating had been routed, and with Attorney General Rorendaal and Simeon Gaddis breathing down their necks, the Solarian League’s once-powerful bureaucracies had much greater worries than her. Oh, she probably still irritated the hell out of them, but they had far more pressing problems than her. With the Grand Alliance’s intelligence agencies systematically dismantling the Mesan transstellars and Gaddis and Rorendaal turning over one rock after another, public exposés by one Audrey O’Hanrahan were far down their threat lists. She wasn’t used to playing second-violin when it came to her work as an investigative journalist. But that was the way it was, at least for now, so it seemed…unlikely, to put it mildly, that anyone would waste resources on her assassination at a moment like this.
But her handlers had insisted. And while they issued such specific marching orders only rarely, they were very firm when they did—to the point of being obdurate.
So, good soldier that she was, she put on the protective garments Whiting had provided for her to wear whenever she went out in public.
That took a bit of time.
The “blazer” wasn’t all that bad, actually. Not surprisingly, since it had to have cost a fortune. Its antiballistic smart fabric, guaranteed to stop anything short of heavy, military-grade pulser fire, was almost infinitely programmable for both color and cut. Loading the pattern for a tailored, single breasted jacket suitable for the day’s cool temperatures and perfectly coordinated with her chosen pantsuit did take a little time, but it wasn’t particularly difficult.
She could not say the same for the ridiculously elaborate contraption—why not just call it a chastity belt and be done with it?—she had to fit onto her abdomen underneath the “blazer.” Adjusting that was aggravatingly awkward, to say the least. It was also uncomfortable.
And it made her look fat.
Eventually, though, she was equipped and sallied out of her apartment. To discover that her Whiting bodyguard had been standing right outside the door, waiting for her. For how long? She wondered, but she didn’t ask.
She’d told the security service—rather firmly—that she did not need anyone guarding her apartment around the clock. They’d argued. She’d insisted. In the end, they’d given in…except that they hadn’t. Instead, they’d “reached an understanding” with the tower’s management to station someone permanently in the lift concourse for her floor. Officially, she didn’t know anything about that, but she was one of the Solarian Leagues’ star investigative reporters. On the other hand, she was under orders to use their services, so she couldn’t kick them the hell out of her life. In fact, she couldn’t even argue with them about it, because anyone who knew her knew she wouldn’t have argued; she would just have fired them.
So they pretended they weren’t watching her all night, and she pretended she didn’t know they were doing it.
Sometimes she hated being a good soldier.
At least Michael Anderle, the bodyguard assigned for her close protection, had a sense of humor. And he might have been specifically ordered from Central Casting for the role of Intimidating Bodyguard. From his physical appearance and coloring, Anderle was of Samoan or some other Pacific island ancestry. He was also about two meters tall and must have weighed a hundred and sixty-five kilos, very little of which looked to be fat.
Well, if worse came to worst and she had a fainting spell, he could easily stuff her into a pocket and carry her home.
“I’m headed for League Plaza,” she said, and he nodded.
“We have an air car waiting.”
✧ ✧ ✧
O’Hanrahan would have been more inclined to call the large, heavily armored “air car” a pocket assault shuttle. But she refrained from wisecracks during the fifteen-minute flight to League Plaza. In her now-considerable experience with security services, she’d found that they had a sense of humor very like that of a sea urchin. That was to say, none at all.
The “Plaza” was actually an entire complex centered around Assembly Hall—a gorgeous, snowflake-shaped edifice of crystoplast, genuine marble, and polished alloy, set like a perfect, star-shaped gem into a spectacular park directly across League Avenue from George Benton Tower. It was far shorter than the tower—no more than sixty-five stories to the very top of its central spire—but it was perfectly integrated into the Plaza’s landscaped grounds, statuary, walkways, and magnificent water features. And those landscaped grounds covered over fifteen square kilometers of Old Chicago, the most expensive real estate in the entire Solarian League.
Not even Audrey O’Hanrahan, who’d seen Assembly Hall more times than she could count, was immune to the Plaza’s spectacular beauty. Built on what had been the western fringe of Old Chicago, following the Final War and the formal proclamation of the Solarian League, it had been intended from the outset as a fitting home for the capitol of the largest, wealthiest star nation in human history, and its designers had succeeded in their purpose. The Chamber of Stars at Assembly Hall’s very heart was familiar to every Solarian schoolchild from HD and civics classes, but there was a difference between images, however spectacular, and the reality of thirteen centuries of governance. Of history. Of achievement and outreach.
Thirteen centuries which made what the League had eventually become even more contemptible, she thought, as the air car settled toward one of the Plaza’s parking decks.
No, not contemptible. Pathetic.
She wondered how successful the Constitutional Convention would be in reclaiming the League’s original soul. It was inevitable that it meet here, in the emblem of what the League had been and must become again, but its task was daunting. Of course, it was also—
“Got a problem, Michael,” the driver said.
“What kind of problem?”
“Wave off from the parking deck.” The driver tapped his earbud and shrugged. “Apparently some big muckety-muck just landed early and his security’s squatting on our pad.”
“Crap.”
Anderle punched up a navigation app on his uni-link and scowled at it. Then it was his turn to shrug.
“Okay, if we can’t land there, drop us at the Thurston-Holmes landing stage, instead.”
“You got it.”
The air car climbed slightly as it banked away, slotting into a different approach lane, and Anderle grimaced a bit apologetically at O’Hanrahan.
“Sorry about this, ma’am. I’m afraid we’ve got about a three-hundred-meter walk from the landing stage.”
“I’m fairly sure I can hobble that far, even in my frail condition,” she said dryly, and he snorted.
“Oh, I know.” He’d been her bodyguard for more than a week now, which meant he knew just how briskly she would walk those three hundred meters. “It’s just that it’s all in the open and its sort of breezy out there today.”
“Well, this is Old Chicago,” she reminded him. She rather doubted that breeze had anything to do with his unhappiness, but she womanfully resisted the temptation to twit him about it. It was his job to worry about assassins, however silly it might be.
They disembarked, and the air car lifted away as they headed for the stairs to ground level. O’Hanrahan avoided the escalator and trotted briskly down the steps, confident that Anderle would have no problem keeping up with her. He might weigh three times what she did, but he was an athletic behemoth, and his strides were twice as long.
At the bottom of the stairs, she turned to her left, headed for the nearest slidewalk. It was about thirty meters away, and she reached into her pocket for her tablet and punched up the list of questions she intended to put to her prey once she had it properly cornered. She probably shouldn’t think of her interviewees as “prey,” she reminded herself, but she was pretty sure that was how they thought of themselves once she was finished with them. She certainly hoped it was, anyway!
Her lips twitched at the familiar thought as she scrolled through the questions. Now, should she start with—
A hydraulic-powered clamp closed on the back of her neck.
Her eyes flew wide as Anderle’s hand drove her down to her knees—that hurt—and then flung her to the ground behind him. Impact drove the breath from her as she landed—hard—and the back of her head hit the ceramacrete. What the hell—?
Something whined. The sound was high-pitched and shrill, and for a moment, she couldn’t place it. Then, as she stared up at Anderle’s back, she saw his body being jolted by something—several times. Pulsers. That whine was pulser fire!
Her eyes flicked down, seeking its source, and saw a man and a woman advancing towards them. The man was in the lead, with a pulser in a two-handed grip. A pulser aimed at her!
The barrel looked as big as an old-fashioned drainpipe. Even as she thought that, a corner of her brain told her the thought was ridiculous. Pulser apertures were measured in a handful of millimeters. It couldn’t possibly be as enormous as it looked!
But she had only a brief glimpse of it before Anderle went to one knee, interposing his huge body between her and the man trying to shoot her. Her bodyguard was jolted again, but now he was firing back. An instant later, she saw her would-be assailant stagger back into her field of vision. Blood pulsed from a wound in his chest—no, it was spilling down from his neck.
Behind him, the woman stepped to the side, looking for an angle from which she could shoot O’Hanrahan. Her pulser came up—
—and shot her accomplice in the back.
The man crumpled instantly as the wild shot took him down. O’Hanrahan had studied enough carnage in her journalistic career to know that sort of thing wasn’t uncommon in close-quarter fights. But it wasn’t going to save her, because the woman’s nerves seemed to have settled. The pulser came to bear on O’Hanrahan, and an instant later, a hyper-velocity butcher knife sliced her right cheek apart. Blood flew everywhere, and her hand moved instinctively to cover the shredded flesh which had been her face.
Anderle tried to interpose himself again, but he’d been hit several times himself, and the damage slowed him. The woman fired again before he could shield O’Hanrahan.
She screamed as the first dart tore into her. Another hit her, and then a third, but all things considered, she was incredibly lucky. The killer’s fire had gone wide again, ripping into O’Hanrahan’s left leg. That was the good news. The bad news was that the darts came in at an acute angle, shredding flesh and shattering bone…and that the other woman was still shooting.
At that point, Audrey O’Hanrahan’s world went mercifully black.