John Brunner – Jagged Orbit

(And at appropriate points during the sequence, for the survivors doom. A javelined table-leg, one of the long-ago originals. Chunk of marble. Chunk of concrete. The Blazer lit the room but only slashed across the almutilated face of the red-green dial and severed its single hand. The whip from a spot closer to the cabiaimed not at anyone but at the racked weapons themselves, bringing them down in a tremendous clatMikki grabbed for a laser-gun but the plastic insuof the power-pack designed to last thirteen months precisely gave way and she jumped back screaming with her arm seared to the elbow, shedding great sheets of flayed skin. Madison finished her with the other table-leg almost casually. Remaining, Putzi, abandoning any attempt to arm himself.)

Suddenly, for the last time, the sequence of dazzling time-snippets steadied. A bare room with a wall missing. A stone-and-sand garden beyond. A group of thoughtsilent watchers. A mat of plaited reeds occupying the center of the floor. Advancing from the far corner a man naked but for a loincloth.

“Ohhh.!”

The sound of her own voice snatched Lyla from the unreal to the real. There was nausea in her belly and sweat on every inch of her skin and a wish to flee and hide in every fiber of mind and body. That wasn’t fear, or rage, or anything so clean and normal. That wasn’t lust. That was the pure naked unqualified desire to kill, dedication to death, a holy quest for the ending of a human life.

She looked for Madison and saw a machine: black steel limbs ending in cruel knives. Opposed to him merely a man, foolish, stupid, doomed. A leg bent, just enough, an arm reached out to take a grip, and crash.

Lyla doubled over and vomited between her feet. Detachedly she told herself that Madison had thrown Putzi through the window from which he had torn away the drapes. Detachedly she heard someone scream, “Christ, we’re forty-five stories high!” Detachedly she deduced that there was panic, because there were more screams and the sound of running feet and then in this room silence, though music was still playing elsewhere. Overhead no more dancing. She figured out that she was alone but for Madison and two or three other people too lost in syke-induced fantasy to notice anything as unas a death.

But she sat with her head between her knees while the nausea passed off, thinking of Dan.

Eventually she looked up and she was right. Madiwas standing beside the smashed window over which, automatically, steel shutters had slammed in reto the glass breaking. But not soon enough to halt Putzi’s flight to the street. The knee was rigidly at attention, shoulders back, eyes fixed on nowhere.

Moving very carefully to avoid her own vomit, Lyla got up and stiffly hobbled towards him. There had been enough drug in the dose she had accidentally swallowed to induce the muscular spasms she usually gave way to and she had resisted them; she felt as though she had been systematically beaten over every centimeter of her body.

Mortally terrified, yet somehow driven, she aphim and said timidly, “Harry?”

He moved in response; she flinched and he caught the motion and said, “Don’t worry, you’re not on my target list for this assignment.”

What? She shook her head in bewilderment. Foggily: He is crazy maybe, but it’s more likely to be the sibyl-pill. But I never heard of it doing this to anyone, man or woman. What did happen to him? He beat eight men and a vicious woman single-handed and there are bodies and wounds to prove the fact. He won.

“You won,” she said.

Not looking directly at her, but towards a point in space somewhere over her left shoulder, he answered without moving anything but his lips. “Even at this relalate stage it was possible for an unarmed man of sufficient determination to overcome considerable oppoIt was not until after the Gottschalk coup of 2015 and the concomitant introduction of System C integrated weaponry that hand-to-hand combat became effectively pointless.”

Dazed, Lyla shook her head. “2015?” she repeated foolishly. “But, Harry, it’s only the summer of 2014 now.”

Ignoring her, reciting as tonelessly as a cheap autohe said, “The equipment of individuals with armament adequate to level a medium-sized city nonedid not immediately put an end to such combats. For a while an attempt was made to codify human beon a basis analogous to the legendary Code of Chivalry; however, this represented such a radical reof current psychological trends that-“