the spider-god that had looked so much like a baby to begin with, and then its aura whiffed
out. The thing’s flesh went with it. For a moment there was nothing where it had been but
an empty shirt tucked into an empty pair of bluejeans. Then the clothes collapsed.
“Kill her!” Sayre screamed, reaching for his own gun.“Kill that bitch! ”
Susannah rolled away from the spider crouched on the body of its rapidly deflating mother,
raking at the helmet she was wearing even as she tumbled off the side of the bed. There was
a moment of excruciating pain when she thought it wasn’t going to come away and then
she hit the floor, free of it. It hung over the side of the bed, fringed with her hair. The
spider-thing, momentarily pulled off its roost when its mother’s body jerked, chittered angrily.
Susannah rolled beneath the bed as a series of gunshots went off above her. She heard a
loudSPROINK as one of the slugs hit a spring. She saw the rathead nurse’s feet and hairy
lower legs and put a bullet into one of her knees. The nurse gave a scream, turned, and
began to limp away, squalling.
Sayre leaned forward, pointing the gun at the makeshift double bed just beyond Mia’s
deflating body. There were already three smoking, smoldering holes in the groundsheet.
Before he could add a fourth, one of the spider’s legs caressed his cheek, tearing open the
mask he wore and revealing the hairy cheek beneath. Sayre recoiled, crying out. The spider
turned to him and made a mewling noise. The white thing high on its back—a node with a
human face—glared, as if to warn Sayre away from its meal. Then it turned back to the
woman, who was really not recognizable as a woman any longer; she looked like the ruins
of some incredibly ancient mummy which had now turned to rags and powder.
“I say, thisis a bit confusing,” the robot with the incubator remarked. “Shall I retire?
Perhaps I might return when matters have clarified somewhat.”
Susannah reversed direction, rolling out from beneath the bed. She saw that two of the low
men had taken to their heels. Jey, the hawkman, didn’t seem to be able to make up his mind.
Stay or go? Susannah made it up for him, putting a single shot into the sleek brown head.
Blood and feathers flew.
Susannah got up as well as she could, gripping the side of the bed for balance, holding
Scowther’s gun out in front of her. She had gotten four. The rathead nurse and one other
had run. Sayre had dropped his gun and was trying to hide behind the robot with the
incubator.
Susannah shot the two remaining vampires and the low man with the bulldog face. That
one—Haber—hadn’t forgotten Susannah; he’d been holding his ground and waiting for a
clear shot. She got hers first and watched him fall backward with deep satisfaction. Haber,
she thought, had been the most dangerous.
“Madam, I wonder if you could tell me—” began the robot, and Susannah put two quick
shots into its steel face, darkening the blue electric eyes. This trick she had learned from
Eddie. A gigantic siren immediately went off. Susannah felt that if she listened to it long,
she would be deafened.
“I HAVE BEEN BLINDED BY GUNFIRE!” the robot bellowed, still in its absurd
would-you-like-another-
cup-of-tea-madam accent.“VISION ZERO, I NEED HELP, CODE 7, I SAY, HELP! ”
Sayre stepped away from it, hands held high. Susannah couldn’t hear him over the siren
and the robot’s blatting, but she could read the words as they came off the bastard’s lips:I
surrender, will you accept my parole?
She smiled at this amusing idea, unaware that she smiled. It was without humor and
without mercy and meant only one thing: she wished she could get him to lick her stumps,
as he had forced Mia to lick his boots. But there wasn’t time enough. He saw his doom in
her grin and turned to run and Susannah shot him twice in the back of the head—once for
Mia, once for Pere Callahan. Sayre’s skull shattered in a fury of blood and brains. He
grabbed the wall, scrabbled at a shelf loaded with equipment and supplies, and then went
down dead.
Susannah now took aim at the spider-god. The tiny white human head on its black and
bristly back turned to look at her. The blue eyes, so uncannily like Roland’s, blazed.
No, you cannot! Youmustnot! For I am the King’s only son!
I can’t?she sent back, leveling the automatic.Oh, sugar, you are just…so…WRONG!
But before she could pull the trigger, there was a gunshot from behind her. A slug burned
across the side of her neck. Susannah reacted instantly, turning and throwing herself
sideways into the aisle. One of the low men who’d run had had a change of heart and come
back. Susannah put two bullets into his chest and made him mortally sorry.
She turned, eager for more—yes, this was what she wanted, what she had been made for,
and she’d always revere Roland for showing her—but the others were either dead or fled.
The spider raced down the side of its birthbed on its many legs, leaving the papier-mâché
corpse of its mother behind. It turned its white infant’s head briefly toward her.
You’d do well to let me pass, Blackie, or—
She fired at it, but stumbled over the hawkman’s outstretched hand as she did. The bullet
that would have killed the abomination went a little awry, clipping off one of its eight hairy legs instead. A yellowish-red fluid, more like pus than blood, poured from the place where
the leg had joined the body. The thing screamed at her in pain and surprise. The audible
portion of that scream was hard to hear over the endless cycling blat of the robot’s siren,
but she heard it in her head loud and clear.
I’ll pay you back for that! My father and I,we’llpay you back! Make you cry for death, so
we will!
You ain’t gonna have a chance, sugar,Susannah sent back, trying to project all the
confidence she possibly could, not wanting the thing to know what she believed: that
Scowther’s automatic might have been shot dry. She aimed with a deliberation that was
unnecessary, and the spider scuttled rapidly away from her, darting first behind the
endlessly sirening robot and then through a dark doorway.
All right. Not great, not the best solution by any means, but she was still alive, and that
much was grand.
And the fact that all of sai Sayre’s crew were dead or run off? That wasn’t bad, either.
Susannah tossed Scowther’s gun aside and selected another, this one a Walther PPK. She
took it from the docker’s clutch Straw had been wearing, then rummaged in his pockets,
where she found half a dozen extra clips. She briefly considered adding the vampire’s
electric sword to her armory and decided to leave it where it was. Better the tools you knew
than those you didn’t.
She tried to get in touch with Jake, couldn’t hear herself think, and turned to the
robot.“Hey, big boy! Shut off that damn sireen, what do you say? ”
She had no idea if it would work, but it did. The silence was immediate and wonderful,
with the sensuous texture of moiré silk. Silence might be useful. If there was a
counterattack, she’d hear them coming. And the dirty truth? Shehoped for a
counterattack,wanted them to come, and never mind whether that made sense or not. She
had a gun and her blood was up. That was all that mattered.
(Jake! Jake, do you hear me, kiddo? If you hear, answer your big sis!)
Nothing. Not even that rattle of distant gunfire. He was out of t—
Then, a single word—wasit a word?
(wimeweh)
More important, was itJake ?
She didn’t know for sure, but she thought yes. And the word seemed familiar to her,
somehow.
Susannah gathered her concentration, meaning to call louder this time, and then a queer
idea came to her, one too strong to be called intuition. Jake was trying to be quiet. He
was…hiding? Maybe getting ready to spring an ambush? The idea sounded crazy, but
maybehis blood was up, too. She didn’t know, but thought he’d either sent her that one odd
word
(wimeweh)
on purpose, or it had slipped out. Either way, it might be better to let him roll his own oats for awhile.
“I say, I have been blinded by gunfire!” the robot insisted. Its voice was still loud, but had dropped to a range at least approaching normal. “I can’t see a bloody thing and I have this
incubator—”
“Drop it,” Susannah said.
“But—”
“Dropit, Chumley.”
“I beg pawdon, madam, but my name is Nigel the Butler and I really can’t—”
Susannah had been hauling herself closer during this little exchange—you didn’t forget