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32.
Rory took her into a tavern that smelled of beer and cigarette smoke. She liked the twang of country rock that echoed among dingy old speakers set in the ceiling corners. She liked the dim lighting, the neon signs all around, the lazy way men and women sitting back on bar stools watched a pool game in progress. The four pool players moved about the green felt almost as if it were a femtoworld all its own, with its perfectly shaped and symmetrically colored balls. They were playing straight pool, which was about as eventful as Sunday softball at a neighborhood park. She found it relaxing. Then, to her surprise, just as Rory handed her a cool mug dripping with beer suds, several familiar faces walked in. Several wore sunglasses and hip attire. They were her friends the techs and programmers from Wally's shop. They all grinned and high-fived and got beers.
Several of the young men stood in a circle, grinning, and as Tedda worked her way through the crowd, she noticed that they sidled off to a side corridor near the bathrooms. For a moment it looked as though they were going to share some illicit drugs, and they waited each time a local patron excused himself to wade through. Then she saw their grins, and the bar lights glistening on their smooth young faces, and neon reflections glittering in the black planes of their sunglasses. Dominica was among them, laughing and clapping. One of them, Jakko, had a stack of Monopol Dollars he was handing out. "Just printed it all up this afternoon," he said with faux gangster cynicism. They pressed a wad of M$10s into her hand, a thousand monopols worth. She rolled the money up and stuck it in her pocket with a guilty feeling. "Relax," someone said, "this whole thing is only a game."
Wally leaned his big frame sideways through the crowd and said with serious mien: "Hey, listen, this is as real as our own world. If you cut these people, they bleed. Bleed enough and they die. If they cut you, you bleed."
"Easy," Jakko said, "we're just kidding around."
"Play money makes one feel strange," a woman quant said.
"It's real to them, play money to us," Jakko said. He looked to Tedda like a natural born card sharp.
Feeling giddy from their beers, they headed to the downtown area. There, billboards loomed, here and there above the skyline, in appropriate colors: Green Line, Red Line, Blue Line, Yellow Line. That made it look a bit more like a game town rather than the very real, bustling city it seemed to be.
The rain let up, and a warm dry wind blew through the streets. Papers twirled like dead brush, rolling down the drying sidewalks. Ripples moved across puddles. Wally explained: "This is actually a sort of desert city, a Las Vegas by the sea, if you will. A San Diego with the sea before its face, and mountains and deserts at its back. As on much of the California coast, mornings and evenings the wind comes in from the sea bringing a thick marine layer with drizzle. As the day warms up, the wind turns, and warm dry air pushes in from the desert."
"So there is ocean nearby?" Dominica asked.
A female software engineer said: "We should come by day next time, and bring our swim suits."
"That's right," Wally said as he lumbered along, still carrying a beer mug he'd abducted under his coat, "There is ocean to the north and east, desert out on the west and south."
"Do they have any other towns or cities?" Jakko asked.
A young woman tech said: "I still think we made all this up, and it seems a bit silly to ask what they have."
Wally glowered: "They are as real as we are."
A male quant who looked very professorial said: "Get it through your heads. This is a real world. It's a miniature, contained universe. We didn't create it. We just pinched it off from our own when we compressed its fundamental forces. It's an incredibly miniaturized slice formerly of our own universe, with its subatomic particles jammed way closer together."
"But is it a universe, or just a piece of one?" a male tech asked.
The quant replied: "There is a new theory that if you inject enough new Go matter—that's the subquark stuff—or energy into a femtoworld, it will go critical. It could blow up and annihilate a huge chunk of the parent world."
"Oh the hell with all the details," Jakko said. "Let's party and have fun!"
They let out a group cheer as they walked down a dark, deserted back alley, and Tedda heard a crash of shattering glass as Wally discarded his empty beer mug. Several of the men lined up to pee on a dingy brick wall, the backside of a factory with broken windows and bent security mesh on them. Several of the women lined up afterward and did the same, proving that women can do everything men can—if they handle the plumbing a bit differently. Tedda was more demure and squatted in a dark corner between a wall and a wire fence, feeling cool air moving below her, only to scream and jump up when fronds of long wet grass rubbed against her fanny. Everyone laughed.
They entered into the bright center of a cosmopolitan city that was not at war and obviously was a center of artistic and musical accomplishment. Greenish copper mansard roofs reminded Tedda of Belle Epoque Paris (Paris being in the West Gotha sphere of influence) and the custard walls of buildings reminded her of baroque Germany. After all, Tedda thought, this place was driven by rules the Bit Cave had culled from the best of their own world. She had a different sense of what would happen if this place went critical. The explosion the quant had mentioned was possible—something like matter and antimatter annihilating each other—but Tedda had a different idea. She didn't know why. Had she been a quant in a previous incarnation?
They rode together on the marvelous monorails and trolleys and elevated trains that rumbled through every section of the city. It was basically the same system they'd enjoyed on their game boards above in the macroverse, but more complex. It wasn't just a square like on the game board, but a complex of whorls and loops that ran through the city at street level, at fifth story level, through the skyscrapers at tenth story level.
Along the way, a new friend attached herself to them. She introduced herself as Hadley—an athletic, brisk figure, an attractive woman with sandy straight hair dangling around a pleasantly oval face. She wore a long Hadley came out of nowhere and seemed to know a lot about these visitors to this world. When Wally tried to brush her off, she showed him a small gold badge. Wally backed away. Hadley gravitated toward Tedda, oddly enough. Hadley's wiry figure moved inside a mannish wheat-colored pants suit with white shirt and desert tie. She wore a moss-green brimmed hat, and Tedda almost felt her making advances, almost imagined her having a small mustache pressed tight against the rim of her upper lip. "Do you recognize me?" Hadley purred as she pressed close to Tedda, who backed away. "I know about you," Hadley said quietly so only Tedda could hear.
"What do you want? Who are you?" Tedda asked.
"Transit police." Hadley rocked on her heels while gripping her thumbs in a pair of suspenders. Her head bobbed left and right with the moss-green hat on it. "I'm the law around here, and I need to keep up with what's going on."
Jakko laughed as he held up a wad of money. "Can we offer you something to get lost?"
Hadley's black-gloved hand swept backhand, knocking the money out of Jakko's hand. On the return arc, her palm slapped his face. Money twirled gaily as the train rattled on. Behind them, M$10 bills filled the air over a grassy baseball park.
Hadley said: "Attempting to bribe a police officer can be a felony. I'm going to assume that was less than a grand, and I'll let you go with a verbal warning regarding an attempted misdemeanor. Do I make myself clear?"
Jakko's sunglasses hung around his neck, and he stood with one hand on his cheek and a shocked expression.
"That'll teach you to be a wise ass," Wally growled. The others laughed.
Hadley waggled a finger, then took Tedda aside. "You don't know who I am, do you?"
Tedda shook her head. She shrank back, feeling the woman's steely grip on her upper arm. Her thumb dug into a nerve point there, just enough to cause a moment of pain. "Ouch!" Tedda said. Still Hadley hung on, now massaging the nerve point to ease the pain. "I care about you!" the female detective muttered with gritted teeth and impassioned eyes. Tedda pulled back and shook the hand away. There was something deeply disturbing, almost passionate in the way the woman was trying to insinuate herself, almost (though Tedda pushed the very thought away) sexual, seductive, forceful, intrusive—and pathetic.
The train rolled into a brightly lit station. "Come on," Jakko said, "let's get off this damned thing." His sunglasses were back on his nose, covering his ego-wounded eyes. The happy go lucky Jakko laugh was absent.
They all got off, while a crowd of locals of all ages and descriptions got on—well-dressed, orderly, without the hunger and anxiety of crowds in the Gothas East or West. Tedda felt Wally pulling her away by the back of her jacket as she locked eyes with Detective Hadley. Hadley made no move toward her, but leaned back against the train window and rested her arms—in surrender? Exhaustion?—on the metal hand rails under the windows. A crowd of party-goers from the bar district and the ball park blended together, packing the car with bodies, banner, twirling spinners, and Tedda lost sight of the woman. Wally pulled hard, and Tedda fell backward into his arms just as the doors closed. The train let off a warning squawk, oily smelling vapor rose from underneath as the air brakes loosened and the engine kicked in, and the train sped off down the track like a row of red books standing on edge. Tedda untangled herself from Wally's massive arms and stood dusting herself off.
Monopol City—its heart, its throbbing music, its celebrating nightlifers, its elegant parks with their paths and fountains, its bustling avenues and swarming boulevards—took them in its arms. This was no toy town patterned on a cardboard game board. This was a powerful and cultured city in many ways superior to the thin gruel of perpetually war-drained West Gotha. This was how life could be in peacetime, in a world dominated by common sense and decency, without the all-pervading fatherland secret police and uniformed thugs on every street corner. Why not, instead, have a poet or a minstrel on every corner, and health care for all, rather than the endless blood sacrifice of the military? Just walking in a place like this made so much more sense than the dreary atmosphere of the Gothas.
Tedda felt intimidated and alarmed. She felt exposed and overwhelmed. Wally seemed to sense her discomfiture, and quietly put his large hand on her shoulder. She bet he could feel her trembling. She wrapped her own arms around her upper torso and shivered in her jacket. She felt some sense of safety in numbers as the Gotha invaders paraded happily down the wide sidewalks, watched by men and women sipping demitasse and listening to violin music at sidewalk cafes (a Jakko touch, perhaps; for all his gaucherie, he had a flair for the absurdly elegant). The tone changed just as quickly, putting them into the throbbing, screaming midst of a throng of samba dancers with all the urgency and abandon of three a.m. in Rio during Carneval. The Gothaneros joined in, forming a conga line, and Tedda suddenly laughed, joining them. She felt a quant man's stiff fingers on her hips, and held the bony hips of one of Jakko's fellow code boys as they swung left and right through shifting arrays of masks and laughter.
Some number of beers and dances and bratwursts and potty stops later, Tedda found herself drowsing with a smile on her face in the back of a taxi that smelled of leather coats, spilled champagne, and ground-in mustard. She heard the continuing laughter and music, and the comments of her fellow Gothans, through the haze of her intoxication. Wally sat on her right, Jakko on her left.
"She's coming around," Jakko said. "Hey, Tedda, welcome to Monopol City."
"Just in time to get back home with us," Wally growled.
She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Her head felt muzzy. Someone offered her a small flask of brandy, from which she took a fiery sip that made her cough. For a moment, the inside of her nose burned like the Schwartzwald on fire. Someone else handed her a thermos of black coffee, from whose lukewarm depths she drank thirstily until her ears whistled like caffeine steamboats.
"What's going on?" she said weakly, handing the thermos back over the seat.
"We're almost there."
"You were going to run off with two tango dancers," Jakko said. "We had to pay them the rest of this fake shit money to make them go away."
Wally growled: "Couldn't afford to get separated. We theorize there is a limit to how long a person can say down here before they start getting absorbed into their Go-plane."
Jakko nodded. "You get your Go-dots sucked down into theirs, and you become part of their landscape. I wouldn't like that."
"You'd lose your whole world," Tedda whispered. She wasn't sure if that fear were really true. Now why did she think that? Was she really a quant, as she suspected? Why had they filled her with drugs and made her forget so much?
"Watch out," Wally said suddenly.
The taxi slowed, and the one behind nearly hit them. Tires squealed as the three baby-blue Monopol City Cabs slowed and then stopped.
Tedda saw where Wally pointed: the door in the wall leading up to the Gotha world stood open. In fact, it leaned slightly as if its hinges had been forced.
The street was empty except for a large gray truck parked about two blocks away. The truck looked dark and abandoned for the night, like all else on the street, slumbering in its own shadows.
Wally seemed like a changed man. "Everybody out," he barked. As he stepped from the cab, he had a black automatic pistol in one hand and a small radio in the other. "Secure the door!" he shouted. Two techs dropped their pretensions at innocence and raced to the door brandishing weapons. That left Tedda and a half dozen others milling about on the opposite sidewalk. Wally waved to the taxis, which Tedda quickly surmised were driven not by locals but by West Gotha agents. The three drivers lined their cars up in a barricade line at the curb outside the door. Wally held the middle of the street like a giant anchor while waving directions. He ordered his five men—the two techs, the three drivers—into defensive positions behind the cars.
Wally turned to the civilians, Tedda and Jakko among them. "We can't stay here any longer than we have to. For the moment, cluster over here and stay in the shadows. I'll call you once we've secured the doorway back to our world." So saying, he strode across the street with his gun aimed squarely at the doorway. He shouted to his men: "Cover me while I go in and clean it up."
Out of the corner of her eye, Tedda saw Jakko looking scared and pale as a ghost. Beyond him, down the sidewalk, she saw a figure in a long coat approaching, hands I pockets. It was Hadley.
Hadley pointed silently to Tedda and flicked her left index finger for Tedda to come toward her. Hadley's right arm was out now, in the dark at her side, and Tedda could almost swear she saw a miniature assault rifle in Hadley's hand.
"There's that Monopol cop again," Jakko muttered. Someone else muttered: "What does she want?" Another said: "Do you think the city cops busted our people?" Someone else said: "More likely East Gotha." Someone said angrily: "You think she's an East Gotha spy?" Someone else grumbled: "I'll bet they drilled down into the city here and put their own agents on the streets."
So it went, and the possibilities opened up before Tedda's eyes. She saw Hadley beckoning to her, while Hadley glanced often at the open door across the street and hung back into the shadows. Hadley's eyes were wide with anticipation, as if something were about to happen. But what, Tedda wondered. Was Hadley in on something, or just aware of it and trying to save her?
Tedda's attention focused on the door, from which a wan yellow stairwell light fell innocently out onto the sidewalk. She heard a shout, then gun shots. She heard a rapid succession of popping noises.
Wally staggered out, clutching his mid section and looking down at the growing reddish black stain on his torso. "They shot him," one of the agents behind the car yelled. "Stick with me—let's take them out before they close the doorway and we're stuck here forever!"
Three of the surviving five men took positions and carefully, professionally, worked their way closer. Covering each other, they waited while the other two climbed into the rearmost taxi and backed out of sight.
"What are they up to?" Jakko said, shivering as he held himself in his arms.
"Going to get help?" someone guessed, but someone else said "From where?" and a third person said: "I'll be our side has some kind of secret office here in the city." A fourth said: "Then the other side probably does too." Someone else said: "Maybe that's what all the drilling we heard was all about."
Through all of this, Wally's body lay in the street.
Tedda heard the whisper of an approaching motor. The next thing that happened was over in seconds. The taxi came scooting down the sidewalk. It slowed as it approached the door. It came so close that its handles scraped the wall and trailed showers of sparks. The car blocked the doorway and both men inside unleashed a blinding wall of machine gun fire that must be tearing up the stairwell and anyone in it. The man in back changed to a grenade launcher and unleashed several deafening concussion grenades. The car lurched forward several feet and stopped. Its two occupants jumped out holding assault rifles. Meanwhile, the other three agents joined them as all five rushed into the teeming smoke. Tedda heard more gunshots. The doorway was so heavy with gunsmoke that Tedda couldn't see inside. Even across the street, several of the waiting tech workers coughed.
Where are the local police? Tedda wondered. Why were there no passing cars, no shocked pedestrians, so wailing sirens? Then she remembered that, for all of its sophistication, this was still a construct world. Surely they had set up rules for police and emergency crews, but perhaps someone had gotten into the guts of the game and turned off the switches, counters, flags, whatever that drove that part of the generating code. But that didn't make much sense either—this wasn't a virtual world, driven by executing computer code, even free-wheeling compilers that generated reality on the fly. This was a solid, created construct whose creation rules winked out in favor of realtime execution rules just like in the real world. Once set in motion, this world just kept on rolling according to the inverted pyramid of simple rules. First atom hydrogen, one proton, one electron; second atom helium two protons, two electrons; and those alone constituted a vast percentage of the entire universe. Same thing with numbers: 1, 2, 3… from such simple building blocks, and the simple rules governing their separation and interaction, all quickly and easily evolved into unthinkably complex rule sets for a world.
When the smoke cleared, Tedda saw several more bodies lying twisted like dead fish in the street. Tedda and her companions shrank back against the shadowy wall behind them as the magnitude of their side's defeat became evident. From the inside of their own stairway came several lumbering towbots—humans inside robotic armor derived from and originally designed to function as factory towmotors, but quickly drafted into further service as fighting machines. The human stayed inside, like the squishy oyster body in its shell. The human, so the joke went, was the good jelly at the center of the fritter doughnut. And, it now seemed apparent, these were East Gotha donuts. Tedda could see no other explanation.
Hadley came at a dead run, gun in hand, coat tails flapping.
Tedda's companions screamed and dove out of the way. Hadley flung herself through the air and tackled Tedda, driving her down and further along the sidewalk.
Just then, the three large tankbots across the street opened fire and started raking the sidewalk with bullets. Tedda heard the screams of dying techs and quants fading as bullets bounced and rattled all around. Hadley had the strength of several men as she dragged Tedda further along the sidewalk, through a row of bushes, through a hole in a wire fence, and into the darkness and safety of a brickyard. "You'll be safe here for now," Hadley breathed. "They're operating out of that truck down the street." She opened the clip in her assault rifle, checked it, and clicked it shut. "I'll be back for you. Stay put." Hadley crawled back out through the fence, through the bushes, out onto the sidewalk. "If I don't make it, head for the city. My people will find you in the Green Station."
"Hadley!" Tedda called out after her. She had a million questions. But the long-coated female soldier was already running at a crouch through the rubble and drifting smoke. Tedda pressed her face against the fence, but ventured no further, while watching for her rescuer to safely make it.
Across the street, the three lumbering tankbots were busy with some task of their own, whose reason soon became apparent. No! Tedda thought as she saw that they were getting ready to dynamite the doorway back 'upstairs' (metaphorically) to West Gotha.
Hadley vanished into night and fog.
At the same time, one of the tankbots let out a shout and pointed after Hadley. While two of them continued about the business of unpacking boxes of explosives and stringing electrical fuze cables, the third tankbot started lumbering down the street after Hadley. The operator inside, invisible to Tedda except for a faint smudge of face visible in neon blue light inside the helmet-cab, had his guns up and was ready to fire. Tankbots had multiple arms, some symmetrically paired left/right, others just appliances on some part of the body. This one had twin gatling guns, one on each forearm of its firing limbs. Already, the gun tubes were turning with an audible whine, and twirling as coolant air surged among the independent gun barrels. The tankbot released several test bursts, and amber rivers of fire spewed like firehouses along the street. Then the shooting stopped. The tankbot must have received orders not to shoot for fear of hitting the truck.
The truck's lights came on and its engine fired up. Tedda heard the ratcheting sound of its mechanical brakes being released, and saw a gout of diesel exhaust as the vehicle bucked into motion. It was a tall, narrow deuce and a half with a high box in the rear, with an odd roof—not rounded but pitched. The front wheels turned and the truck bucked again. It was clear he wanted to turn around and head up the street—perhaps to pick up the drivers inside the tankbots and then roar out of sight as their handiwork played out and the doorway exploded in ruins.
In the reddish light of the truck's taillights, Tedda saw the lean figure of Hadley, coat flapping, as she ran by the cab and unloaded a burst of fire into the cab. Tedda saw the driver's head slam against the shattered window, and then glass and head hung out of the window in a gout of gore. Hadley laid down a chatter of rounds into the front wheel, which went flat and the truck pitched slightly forward to the left. Shots erupted from the passenger side, missing Hadley entirely as she ran at a crouch back to the rear. She shed her long coat as she did so, exposing a plain inner tunic of dark green wool covered with crisscross leather bandoliers and pouches. Without stopping, she chattered up the rear wheels, which puffed gray smoke and dropped several inches flat onto the rims, so that the entire vehicle rocked.
Tedda saw the rear panels swing open. She caught a glimpse of an electronic maze lit by myriad green and red lights inside. She saw the massive shape of a fourth tankbot waiting to be lowered on its hydraulic tailgate lift. She saw several shadowy technicians with guns in the truck. They looked down left and right, searching for their assailant. The tankbot's face burst into blue light. Tedda could make out the pale, underwater, almost fish-skinned face of the operator, who frantically ran through his pre-ops check even as the tail lift whined and the tankbot slowly sank toward street level.
At that moment, Tedda saw a shape under the truck. An arm hooked out. An object sailed upward, making a backward arc, bounced into the truck while its pin sailed away, and rolled down the slight incline toward the banks of winking lights. Tedda heard the shouts of men jumping from the truck. Just as the grenade blew, the new tankbot touched ground. The roof was blown off the truck, and its equipment was shredded by steel shrapnel. The explosion blew the top of the tankbot off from behind. It was amputated from the chest up. The upper half of the operator was gone from the waist up, and his lower half lay draped over the yawning opening of its insides, bent at the knees, with the belted trousers hanging outside, still full of leg meat and some amount of intestine hanging down like coils of sausage to the ground. Tedda had never seen such gruesome violence, and right now she was too numb and overwhelmed to reflect on it. The technicians who had jumped from the truck turned and tried to fire under the truck aimlessly, but a steady chatter of fire from under the truck cut them down quickly, one by one. The tankbot down the street was tracking the muzzle flashes from Hadley's gun, and started laying down sheets of fire. Tedda thought she saw Hadley roll over and take cover behind the truck's massive wheels. Tedda crawled forward, keeping behind a concrete block wall inside the bushes but outside the chain link fence. She squatted behind the wall, carefully peering out of the bushes and down the sidewalk toward Hadley's position.
Then the explosion in the stairwell rocked the street. Luckily, much of the blast was contained inside the stairwell. Still, the noise was deafening. Tedda fell down and smacked her chin on the concrete sidewalk. The shockwave buckled the street and the sidewalks as if someone had yanked on a carpet with both hands. Debris collapsed inside the shaft and the lights went out. Dust roiled outward in total darkness. The air was filled with a singed, bitter smell.
As smoke and dust drifted down the street and started to clear, Tedda saw a startling sight. One by one, the two tankbots by the building disintegrated. They seemed to turn into a thousand mosaic pieces that fell to ground like snowflakes and then even those winked out of existence. The tankbot down the street did the same. The bodies in the street disappeared, including that of Wally. The broken tankbot behind the ruptured truck chassis winked away along with its dead operator.
Tedda rose to her feet, staggering as she headed down the street. She stepped over the bodies of her dead companions—some of whom vanished while others remained. She heard weak cries from Tedda, and focused on getting to her.
As she approached the truck, or what was left of it—cab blown off, middle of cargo area buckled so that the rear end with its eight huge tires seemed to point upward slightly—she saw Hadley crawl out from behind the tires. She was clearly wounded.
Tedda rushed to her side and helped her up. Tedda stripped away the tangled leather bandoliers and made Hadley lean against the big tires. "Where are you hurt?"
"Here, I think." Hadley pressed her hand to her side. When she briefly took her hand away, her palm was black (a trick of the light, making red seem black). "Here too," Hadley said, putting her other hand over the same shoulder. "I got it in the left side and left shoulder."
"How long can we afford to be stuck down here?" Tedda asked.
"Don't worry about it," Hadley said. To Tedda's startled look, Hadley blinked with great soulful eyes. "You're covered."
Tedda gave the shoulder and the side a cursory look. "The shoulder wound is just nicked bone. The other one is internal, and could be serious."
"Ouch!" Hadley cried. "Ouch! Dammit! Hooh!"
"Let me take you to the Green Station," Tedda said.
Hadley nodded. "Good plan, but I can't walk far." Already, she slumped down, her butt riding down over the tire until she was seated with her back to the wheel. Her head slumped to one side. Her eyes were open, and she used her good right hand to point up the street.
Tedda knew what to do. She ran up the street toward the still-smoking ruin. The massive building stood erect—a great shadow of brownish brick. The force of the explosion must have pointed up the stairwell. Tedda wondered if the pressure had erupted into the femtoworld above, or even destroyed the Bit Cave and that whole building with its lobby entrance. Or perhaps the entire explosion, on this femto scale, had been so minute that it seemed like a momentary pin light, inaudible in the West Gotha world.
No time to ponder much. An attacker staggered out of the shadows on the sidewalk about 50 feet head, dragging an assault rifle. Along the way, Tedda saw an East Gotha assault micro much like Hadley's lying in the street. She scooped it up as she ran, figured out the mechanism along the way, released the safety. Meanwhile the other had spotted her, and swung around into hip firing position. A burst of bullets flew wildly through the air, missing Tedda though she could hear them singing in the wind near her ears like mosquitoes. She dropped to one knee, took aim, and put a brace of bullets through the person's midsection. He crumbled into dust as he fell.
Another rule, she thought. Jumping into one of the abandoned taxis and starting its engine, she asked herself: How do I know that?
As she drove up the street, bouncing from the sidewalk into the street, she realized: the drugs are wearing off.
It was an exhilarating realization. Bit by bit, in faint echoes and hollow visions, the puzzle of her lost memories, her vanished past, began to reassemble itself.
Principal in that array of tantalizing glimpses was the image of her lover's face, her husband's, that of Alton Hedrock. She drove down to the truck, got out, and walked around to Hadley's side. The woman sat weak and slumped from loss of blood, but as she looked up into Tedda's eyes, Tedda knew the truth.
Tedda knelt beside the dying woman and held her hands. "You're from him, aren't you?"
Hadley nodded. "He loves you."
"He's a scoundrel."
"Yes, but the two of you made a deal to save the world. He loved you that much, to betray his own side."
"And you?" Tedda asked. She sat beside Hadley and cradled her head.
"You know what I am," Hadley said. "I am a rule."
"What's going on?" Tedda asked as gently as possible. She stroked Hadley's hair.
Hadley coughed, spitting up blood. "They kept you, brought you, as bait to draw out Hedrock. They're on to the whole thing."
"Who is?"
"The Moss syndicate that runs the Gotha world." Hadley coughed again, and more blood came up. She was weakening.
"You mean both sides of the Gotha equation?"
Hadley nodded. "East and West. People die for the fatherland myth, and the corporation gets richer." She choked a bit, more on body fluids than emotions. "It's a huge betrayal, and you and Hedrock were going to" (she paused) "save the world" (another pause) "but—"
Tedda hugged her close and said: "But what?"
Hadley took a breath and let out a long shuddering gasp. She looked up into Tedda's eyes as if she wanted to tell her something important, but was only able to utter a rattling sound from the throat. Her eyes glazed over and she slumped against Tedda's breast. Tedda felt the dead weight of her and felt a wave of pity. She started to hug the body close and grieve over it, but the body suddenly became light and fell apart into a million mosaic pieces of stained glass and then dust that vanished. Nothing was left. Only a faint breeze briefly spun on the street and made sand dust rise in a funnel before that died down. Several yards up the street, Hadley's discarded coat collapsed on itself and vanished. Only the assault micro was real. Tedda picked the gun up in one flowing, exhausted motion as she headed back to the taxi for her drive to Green Station.
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