SLEDGEHAMMER

By

Robert B. Schofield

     The spreading red stain spread across the J-boy's silk-Lycra shirt, growing in pulses with each spasm of the glob of muscle, bone, and skin that used to be his chest and heart.  The pretty youth stared down, mouth open, eyes wide.  His hand fell from the data card he had just handed me.  Clouded eyes rolled back, a moment of pleading anguish flashed by, and he collapsed to the floor of the Phunktech Bar.

  "Shit!" I said, turning.  But Redeye was already moving, charging through the crowd toward the man at the bar who held what looked like a tonfa by the grip, rifle style.  I picked out three others, one at the front door and two at the back, clearing an area for themselves, a personal combat zone.  Definite pros.

Redeye couldn't get to them all, and the ones by the doors had already maneuvered out of my line of fire.  My hand cannon would blast through the foamcrete pillars eventually, but not before they'd get several clean shots at Redeye.

I shoved the data card into my left cargo pocket and grabbed one of the five pitted spheres I was carrying there.  The orbs would pass for a golf balls in anything up to a level III security check.  The style wasn’t right though, I didn’t look like a golfer.  And I knew I’d hate using the thing.  Redeye would hate it worse.

I lobbed the ball gently -– had to be less than 2.24 meters per second -- into the center of the crowd, and instinctively grabbed my ears.

That wouldn't help, of course, but the thought of six hundred and twenty decibels of white noise, five times the threshold of pain, made me do it anyway.

The world went silent.  My bones scraped against the insides of my body as if razor blades were being dragged up and down the length of each and every one.  I shuddered, and blinked -- shuddered again.  When I opened my eyes I saw the crowd of glittering Phunktech partypunks drop to the floor en masse.  A girl with feline makeup slumped over a table to my left, blood streaming from her ears.  The DJ fell sideways out of his neon lined booth behind her, red smearing his temples as well.  One of the bartenders almost made it to the alarm button, but not quite.  Blood trailed across the top of the synth-onyx bar.

I looked for the pros, realizing I'd drawn my Sikes-Fairbairn and pocket greaser.  Instinct.  They were all still standing.  So was Redeye, although he was squeezing his head between his hands, looking at the floor.  He let out a growl, or it might have been a howl; I only caught the end of it, when my audio damping plugs kicked off.  Redeye had the same models as me, Kambiyasha-Hoch's, top of the line.  But enhanced hearing was one of his less prominent genetic mods.  One of the men by the back door walked forward, his hand raised in a gesture of peace.  Sure.  He mumbled something which was drowned out by the ringing buzz in my ears.  He reached to his mouth, and I aimed my greaser.  He had a feather mike attached to his mirrored sunglasses.  They all did.  He touched the mike and I heard, "That was great," clear as a bell.  He was smiling, still holding up a hand.

I scanned quickly, front door, bar, back door, pausing only briefly at the one with his hand up.  Redeye had regained some of his composure.  He shook his head, causing waves to flow down the mane that trailed down his back.

"Slater, behind, seven o'clock," I called to Redeye.  My voice reverberated in my head, sounding like I was yelling into one of the city sewer vents outside the toxic waste plant we sometimes used for target practice.

Redeye steadied himself and nodded.

"You’ve got the wrong idea," Sunglasses said.  "PYT stole from The Man, so he had to pay.  You're just clean buyers.  No problem.  Actually, we got an invite for you.  Come meet The Man.  Big Job.  Big Bucks.  Whad'ya say?"

"What man?"

"The Music Man," Sunglasses said, smiling.

Music Man.  Hot new Crimelord.  Blackmarket audio and sonics, the latest tech on the streets.  Redeye and I were on the low side of the learning curve, and didn't much like it.  We were too used to being state-of-the-art, the bleeding edge.

     "If you didn't want us, why waste him here, now?"  I pointed at the kid lying at my feet with his chest leaking across the floor, pooling in the cusp of a teener's spiked shoulderpad.

"Demo," Sunglasses said, still smiling.

*

 They were nice about it.  They told us to follow them, if we wanted to, our choice.  The way they said it made it clear that if we didn't we were total dumbasses.  Redeye didn’t mention the sonic grenade.  He just gave me one look, his inch long canines dragging down his bottom lip and his eyes more red than usual, as he climbed onto his Thunderbolt.  I'd promised Redeye when I’d bought the grenades I'd only use them in extreme emergencies.  That was thirty-six hours ago.

I swung a leg over my KS2000 as Redeye fired up his machine.  His big V-twin engine drowned out my own bike's high-pitched whine.  We rode fast behind the Beat Boy's vehicle, much faster than we usually could through the sweaty, nighttime streets of the city.  They were driving a Mercedes flatbed with a Kevlar tarp and a bulldozer plow welded over the grill.  They barely slowed at intersections.  Once they smashed a sidewalk Sake cart causing Redeye and I to weave out from behind them into oncoming traffic.  Headlights barreled toward us and I saw Redeye flip the ‘unlock’ on his Thermite missiles, but we were able to swerve back before the oncoming armored limo reached us.

We drove to Hightower and pulled around back.  They parked the flatbed in the receiving dock and we pulled into a bike cage.  The freight elevator had more security cameras and detection gear than most bank lobbies.  All our normal stuff showed up, even the sonic grenades, but the Beat Boys OK’d it and we walked in to meet the Music Man fully loaded.

He was small, and pale, with long dreadlocks.  He was sitting on a couch with a girl on either side.  The girls looked like twins, probably just good mod-jobs.  They had keyboards tattooed on their arms and legs, one set on each side.  They looked more like room decor, poised as they were, than real live women.

The Music Man stood when we entered and smiled, flashing perfect white teeth.

"Mr. Slater, and Mr. Redeye.  How nice to meet you."

"Just Redeye."

He nodded.  "Your reputation precedes you.  I hear you're the best."  I scanned the room for auto-targeting weapons.  None were obvious, maybe behind the guitar wall sculpture over the couch.  "Or rather, you were the best," he continued, "until three days ago."

Three days ago they announced the Scotus-I.  3-D diamond circuitry constructed layer by layer from microwave-heated methane, glass channels, holographic data decks.  Not a free flowing electron in the whole goddamn computer.  It made our method of destruction obsolete overnight.

"Have a seat, please."  He motioned to a smaller couch and chair across from him.  Redeye and I walked over and sat.

"So, you get paid to wipe out corporate mainframes?"

"Not just the mainframes," I said.  "We take out the datacenter, and related functions; backups, storage, network, and disaster recovery, otherwise we infect it.  But we're on hiatus at the moment, staffing problems."  Widget ended up with a 7.62mm hole in his head two months ago.

"You looking to hire?"  It didn't seem likely.  The underworld rarely used us, generally not dealing in merchandise in competition with the corporate mainstream.

"Not really," the Music Man said, sitting again.  He rested his hands on two perfect female thighs.  Flesh keyboards.  They looked like they’d be fun to play.  "I have no competitors plans I wish to postpone at the moment, at least not by your methods."  He smiled again.  "No, I brought you here to help you, not to hire you.  That data card you bought from Georgie is full of intel from my labs."  I saw Redeye out of the corner of my eye stiffen.  He could be across the three meters separating us from our host, and have the small man's throat sucking air without the need of oral intake in two seconds.  That is, assuming he cleared the distance before a sonic blast wave crushed us both to piles of jelly like Georgie's chest.

"Don't worry," he continued, with a wave of his hand.  "I'm not angry with you, just the security guard unwise enough to allow his sexual pleasures to overtake his sense of loyalty."  Redeye relaxed, a little.

"I'd like to offer you two the opportunity to save yourselves some time and money.  With that data you've purchased, a fully staffed lab, and about six months, you might be able to come up with this."  He pointed to the wall on our left.  A panel slid away revealing a weapon in an alcove.  I stood up and he motioned approval.  I walked over and looked at the thing.  It was short and squat, about the size of an old thump gun.  I saw liquid chemical explosive cells in a short clip for power, probably Astrolite or some Hydrazine compound.  In theory, one could produce a few million volts per shot.  I looked in the barrel to check the caliber and it was solid.

"This a mock-up?"

"No, it's the real thing."

"What's it shoot?"  I knew the answer as soon as the question left my mouth.

"Sound," he said.  Of course.  "With pre-programmed, or dynamic scanning of resonating frequencies.  It's nearly one thousand times more powerful than that sound stick you saw used on Georgie at the bar."

"Powerful enough to...."

"Smash diamonds."

A sonic sledgehammer.

"It's currently for sale, to the highest bidder.  Shall we start at five million?"

"Sorry, that's not the way it works.  You give us the weapon, for free, and we'll do a hit for you half price.  If you don't need a hit, sell the job to someone else."

He leaned forward on the couch, his eyebrows climbing.

"Think of it as your final development cost,” I said.  “Expert field testing.  Hey, it doesn't matter anyway.  I told you we're out of commission until we beef up our staff.  But I'll warn you, sell that thing to some amateur team, have them blow the first job using your new toy, and your rep's shot.  You'll never sell another gun."

"Interesting.  I'll consider your advice, gentlemen."

He'd better.  That's the way it worked.  Guess he was just as new in our area of business as we were in his.  "When do you think your team might be up to par?" he asked, stroking smooth female skin.

"I can't say.  We're not actively recruiting."

"How many more people do you need?"

"At least one.  Maybe more.  We've had up to five.  It depends on the job.  We'll let you know when we're back in business."

*

The Music Man didn't want to wait.  He called the next day.  I used the route scrambler with signal encryption all the way up to ten.  The gear was left over from Widget.  He didn't need it now.

  "I'm sending someone over.  I've got a job for you," he said.

"We prefer to select our own team members."  I had to remember he had significant weight in the underworld.  Otherwise, I’d have just hung up on him.

"You'll be pleased."

"Hmm."

"And I think you'll like the job.  It's Schmidt-Melton Ltd.  Nona Bonds works for them."

My mouth went dry.  "Who did you say?"

He laughed.  "Yes, you heard me.  Nona Bonds."

"How do you know about her?"

"A man in my position knows, or can find out, many things."  He paused.  "I want my weapon on the market, Mr. Slater."

“It’s just Slater.”  It was my turn to pause.  "So what's Nona got to do with it?" I finally asked.

"Do you want payback?  Nona is currently Executive Assistant to the president of the company, Edward Melton.  She’s also having an affair with him."

I told him to send his man over.  If he could make it to the house, we'd interview him.  I told Redeye about the call.  Redeye went outside to wait.  I gathered a selection of guns; my Assault-76, a .45, two greasers, and a combat slug thrower I'd been balancing at my weapons bench.  I looked at the BASHER, Broad Area Selective High Energy Radiator, snuggled in its padded case.  It could blow the silicone brains out of any computer.  Any computer except a Scotus-I, I corrected myself.  Then I grabbed ammo and headed out for the range.

When life got too bad, when it felt like a ton of shit was falling on my head and might never stop, when memories were too painful, I had my own method of dealing with it.  I went to the shooting range.  Let Redeye deal with the slag on his way over.  If he could make it through the microwave field and land mines surrounding our farm, and make it past Redeye, he might be worth

adding to our team.

  As I squeezed off rounds at the range at the back of our farm I thought about Nona.

     She was supposed to be the one: real, true, perfect love.  She was studying for a degree in structural computer design, I was studying various things: philosophy, history, chemistry, several IS disciplines, operating systems, quantum phase design, nerve programming.  We were a matched pair.  We could spend the evening talking, or walking and holding hands.  When we were together the rest of the world didn't matter.

She was beautiful, and passionate, with flowing blond hair, and deep, deep green eyes.  We experimented with erotic pleasure.  She was fiery, and full of lust.

But things changed, slowly at first.  She forgot to call when she was going to be late.  She was too tired to walk, or talk.  "They're really piling on the work this term, you know," she'd say.  It was her final semester and she was working on a big project, validation of some experimental computer chip design long since forgotten.  There was a guy in her work group, Andy Gravis, the son of a hotshot corporate exec.  I was suspicious.  I followed her one night.  She said she had to work late at the lab.  I found her drinking laced Cappuccinos at the Runcible Spoon with Andy.

We got in a fight that night.  She said it was nothing, said she'd finished early and was just discussing the project.  Things were different after that.  We made up for her final month at school.  When she graduated, we celebrated wildly.  Then, a week later, she left.  No warning, no talking, not even a goodbye, just one short note.  "I'll always remember you.  Love and happiness forever, Nona."

All that had been before the military.  When I thought about it, and forced myself to be honest, I knew I'd joined because of her, to escape the pain, to replace it with numbing steel, orders, and discipline.

Did I want “payback”?  What did that mean?  I knew I wanted to see Nona.

I rolled over to reload my .45 and there was Redeye walking toward me with someone in black.  The figure was smaller than Redeye, not unusual, wearing a loose fitting Gi wrapped at the ankles and wrists.  A black hood with a slit for the eyes covered the guy’s head.  A Ninja.  Great.

"Made it in," Redeye said, shaking his head.  "Came up behind me, I didn't even know."  There was a strange expression on Redeye's face, a mixture of confusion, awe, respect.

"Let's go back to the house and talk," I said.

Redeye sat in one corner.  I sat at my weapons bench.  We put Bruce Lee in Widget's old chair.

"Look,” I said, “first thing is we're a team.  No secrets, so lose the mask."

An arm swept up, whipping off the black hood in one smooth motion.  Long, silky hair cascaded down around a sleek face.  She was beautiful.

Redeye and I looked at each other.  I had nothing against working with women.  There'd been some damn good ones in my unit in Zaire, but we'd never had one on our team.  I figured Redeye felt the same way.  We knew each other pretty well.  We’d been friends a long time, before his Lion-Hunter Special genetic mods.  I tried to ignore it, conduct an interview, background, experience, weapons knowledge, computer system knowledge, any training in or around corporate security procedures.  She was qualified, but I kept catching myself staring at her.  I was a sucker for a pretty face.

She had high cheekbones, a firm mouth, with thin lips, dark eyes and jet-black hair.  She was mostly Asian, but there was a hint of something else in her history.  There was confidence in her voice, and self-assurance in her manner.

  "Why do you want to work with us?" I asked.

"I am indebted to Music Man.  I do this for him."

"But if we hire you, you're working for us -- with us -- not him, right?"

"Yes."

"OK.  Let's go back to the mockup and see what you can do inside a building."

What she could do was amazing.  She moved without being seen.  We started her at one end of our corporate data center mockup and, I swear, I don't know how she got past the pressure pads, motion sensors, photoelectric eyes, auto-targeting rifle, and the hair trigger machine gun port.

"OK, how'd you do it?" I asked.

"True Ninjitsu is the art of invisibility."

Invisibility my ass.

“You’ve got a one shot trial," I told her, after talking to Redeye.  "We do the Music Man's hit, and see from there."

"Yes," she said, nodding once.

I had three concerns.  First, we wouldn't be using our normal style.  Our most efficient hits ran with a tech hacking the security controls before going in.  Then I'd wipe the big machines while Redeye took care of disaster recovery.  Our new plan had Taishia circumventing security, then turning

off the gadgets from the inside.

My second concern was about the gun.  The range was zero.  Not short, zero.  To obliterate a diamond the end of the gun had to be in physical contact with it.  Somewhere in the guts of the Scotus-I sat a diamond that had to be destroyed to call the job a success, but we didn't even know where it was.  I imagined a flawless entry followed by swinging the computer cabinet doors open to reveal a mass of glass, crystals, mirrors, and holoplates, and not being able to find the main diamond.  We considered buying a Scotus-I for ourselves, but the twenty-five billion price tag went beyond even our budget.  I really wanted to see one in real life, but the best we could do was to buy a service engineer's manuals off the net.  RTFM: Read The Fucking Manual.

  My third concern for the mission was about Taishia herself.  She was affecting my concentration.  I kept picturing her face beneath that black hood and thinking how I’d rather know her non-professionally.  Know her physically.  Taste her lips.  But, I knew myself well enough to know that it was probably just my way to avoid thinking about Nona.

  We trained hard the next week.  We fixed the mockup to match Schmidt-Melton's datacenter and we trained sixteen hours a day.  I found out how Tiashia became invisible.  She had a premotor cortex intercept that gave her reflexes like a cobra jacked on adrenaline.  She had a sensory boost pac, hyped up higher than any I'd ever seen.  And, she really was a Ninja; traced her lineage all the way back to twelfth century feudal Japan, Iga province.

  We staked the place out for three days before the hit.  Schmidt-Melton had a twenty story glass and marble cube near the edge of town.  There was an open air cafe fifty meters down and across the street.  Taishia and I became regulars there for three days.  As I sat with Taishia I thought about Nona somewhere in that polished marble block of power and technology.  She'd been in town this whole time and I'd never known it.  Or maybe she’d left and come back.  Did it matter?  She was gone, let it go.  Should I try to talk to her, or just forget it?  Be content with this hit, somehow letting that constitute a nebulous payback?  I still didn’t know what that meant.  But, I did know that I wanted to know why she’d left.

  When I wasn’t being sullen thinking about Nona, I talked to Taishia, and found that I liked her, a lot.  The boyfriend role was especially nice, soothing.  Unfortunately, it was just part of the job.

  The day of the hit we parked our van a block away in an alley across from the cafe.  It was just past midnight.

"Redeye, give me some Hydro."

He looked at me.  "You don't need it, man.  You're building up a resistance."

"Who the hell are you to talk.  Remember, I knew you before the fangs and mane and pointy ear job."  He gave me a test tube.  I popped the top and downed it in one gulp.  This was New Hydro, cranked up Epiandrohydrosterone.  Taishia looked at me from behind her mask with her hyped up, neurally boosted, reflex-jacked senses, and I glared back.

“You don’t approve?” I asked.

“It killed my brother,” she replied.  That was all.  Then she nodded once, an ‘it’s your life’ nod, then jumped out of the van and vanished into the darkness.

Four minutes and thirty seconds later exactly, she signaled, and Redeye and I hit the building like a freight train.  We barreled through the front door with our full combat load.  I had the sledgehammer slung over my back and was holding the BASHER under my right arm.  A one hundred and fifty million volt directed electromagnetic pulse was still the best destroyer of general electronics, including any security Taishia might have missed.  Taishia had already taken out the two front guards.

"Fail-safe lock on the datacenter door tripped," she said without apology.  Acceptable.  She’d had a helluva lot to do.  The BASHER wouldn't do any good against the fail-safe lock.  It couldn't budge five inch thick reinforced steel dead-bolts.

"We'll use the det-cord loop.  Click it from here in thirty seconds," I said, handing her the remote.  Redeye and I went down the frozen escalator steps three at a time, rounded the corner, and sprinted down the hall, identical to the one we'd been through in our mockup a hundred times.  When we reached the datacenter doors Redeye already had a four foot loop of det-cord ready.  He twirled it once over his head, flipped it around, and stuck it to the wall encircling the sign that said, "Information is our strategic advantage."  We backed up and I counted, "Four, three, two, one."

The explosion blew a neat circle through the door.  Redeye ran down and dove through.  I followed, more slowly, the BASHER under my arm primed and ready.  Redeye was at the service engineer's console feeding a checksum worm to the disaster recovery vaulting program.  Schmidt-Melton outsourced to an

off-site vaulting service for their DR storage.  The data backups and updates were transmitted automatically, nearly continuously.  Our worm, inserted into the transmission stream disguised as an update request, contained a recursive loop buried in an algorithm designed by a dozen Singaporean mainframes.  It would wipe the entire vault in twenty minutes and report success to all further update requests while storing digital hack garbage in the files.

"Done," Redeye said.  I thumbed the BASHER's selector switch and started taking out equipment.  Boxes exploded: routers, storage, data silos.  The air filled with smoke and ozone.  Redeye must have turned off the fire control system because nothing dumped from the ceiling or squirted out of the floor.

Then I saw it, at the back of the datacenter, in an area all its own, a pillar half a meter in diameter and two meters tall with a radiating gemstone emblem etched in its gunmetal gray case.  The Scotus-I diamond computer.  Half a dozen boxes surrounded it, support units, protocol converters, power supplies, lasers.  The BASHER would take care of most of them.  I blanketed the area with three good shots, then set a Thermite grenade on the laser generator, pulled the pin and turned away.  Light flared as the grenade began melting through the machine.  It wouldn't stop until it hit bedrock.  I unslung the sonic sledgehammer and opened the holostore’s cabinet door.  It was filled with glass.  I jammed the sledge into it and let loose a shockwave equal to the blast-force of a twenty kiloton nuke.  There wasn’t enough left inside the cabinet for dust to fall from the cracks.

All that remained was to get the main brain, the pure carbon lattice mind of the man-made laser powered god.  Although the system was now useless, it was necessary.  Corporate management understood the power to destroy a diamond.

I swung open the door on the main cylinder and looked inside.  The mounting frame where the diamond should have been was empty.

I swore, and informed Redeye.  "Go back upstairs and tell Taishia," I said.  “I'll check the commo lab and receiving bay."

"OK, but we're out of here in ten."

"Right," I replied.

The lab and prep station was attached to the datacenter, but we hadn't bothered reconstructing them in our mockup.  I went to the lab door and kicked it in.  As I entered, a light flicked on.

"Looking for this?"  It was Nona.  She held the mounting panel and diamond.

     "How..." I began.

"I have friends.  They told me you'd be here tonight."

My head was fuzzy; smoke, ozone, blasted computer fragments, Hydro letdown.  Here stood Nona, holding the one thing I needed at the moment.

"Why... did you leave?" I asked.  I stared at the diamond.  It seemed to be glowing, emanating an inner radiance of its own.

I had to be out in nine minutes.

She sighed.  "It was a mistake."  Her hair was different, short and straight, much darker.  "I loved you," she said.

"Then, why?"

"I never told you.  I should have.  I was pregnant."

Five years ago.  A five year old child.  My head was swimming.

"Mine?"

"Of course.”  She gave a wrinkled frown.

“Boy or girl?

She paused.  "I couldn't have a baby.  My life, my career plans..."

I would have been a father.  I let that sink in for a moment as I looked at her.  How different it all could have been.  She hadn't even told me.  I wiped sweat from my palms.  I was still holding the sledgehammer.  The sweat made the grip slippery.  Did I want payback?  I aimed the sledgehammer at her.

“We could be together again," she said.

“How?”

Eight minutes left.

Billion dollar machines lay smoking in the next room.  It would be so easy.  So easy.  Just a small pull of the trigger.  My life would have been different, but would it have been better?

"Nona, we have to live with our choices," I said.

"Is there just one try in life?" she asked.

Just one try.  I had my answer, she’d done it for her career, left, taken it all away, love, life, maybe a family.   She wanted the corporate fast track.  The signs had been there back in school, Andy, for one.  An Eliza4 program could analyze why, give a million reasons; childhood, parents, society.

It didn’t matter.  I realized that things had turned out the way they did just because we were different.  She’d done what she had, and gotten what she’d wanted.  Let her have it.

We were on our own paths.  She wanted corporate life.  I wrecked corporate datacenters.

Seven minutes to go.

"Give me the diamond, Nona," I said.

She hesitated.  "Come here, hold me."

One last time.  I took a step forward, and saw Nona glance at her watch.  Why had she done that?  I stiffened.

"Give me the diamond, now," I said, pulling the gun in tight against my shoulder.

She sighed.  “No making up this time?  Okay, but let me keep this.”  She waved the diamond in the air.  “Your job’s done, a successful hit.  At least let me have credit for saving the core.”

“No,” I answered.

  She stared into my eyes and I saw sadness.  I eased my grip on the sledgehammer.  Nona’s look changed.

“I tried to be nice,” she said.

I started to reach for the diamond and realized that I was frozen in place.  A neural paralyzer.  I hadn’t expected it from her.  She was really that different?

Six minutes to go.

Nona walked out from the table she’d been standing behind.  "I did love you,” she said.  “But you were right.  We have to live with our choices.  And I need this.”  She waved the diamond again.  “And now I need to turn you in.”

How could I have once loved her so much?

“You’re quite infamous, you know,” Nona said.  “I'll at least get a promotion, maybe even a reward."  She shrugged.  “I’m sorry.”

Then I saw a flash.  It was Taishia.  I felt my hands come free.  She had disabled the paralyzer somehow.  My finger was on the sledgehammer’s trigger.  One slight turn and a squeeze and it would all be over.  Payback.  Was that what I wanted?  I remained stiff.

Nona walked over to me.  She reached up to touch my face.  The thought of it made me want to puke.

Her hand came up, reached toward me, and I moved.  I swung the butt of the sledgehammer up and caught her under the chin.  Her head snapped back, eyes rolled, and she dropped like a meal sack off a ration truck.

Five minutes to go.

I looked around and saw Taishia, only because she allowed me to.  She was looking at Nona motionless on the floor.  She looked up at me.  Should I kill Nona?

"Thanks," I said.

Taishia nodded.  I grabbed the diamond and ran back into the datacenter.  I tossed the jewel to the ground and rested the sonic sledgehammer on it.  I felt the diamond twisting beneath the barrel, rocking back and forth.  I pulled the trigger and blasted the diamond to dust.

  We made it outside just as Redeye was looking at his watch for the final time.  He couldn't have waited any longer.  When he saw us he squeezed the clicker and flames blew out the basement floor windows of the datacenter.

It was a directed blast.  Nona would live.

  On the way out of town I caught Taishia looking at me.  How much of the conversation had she overheard?  I looked back at her, not knowing what to say.  We stared at each other for a while.  Finally, Taishia pulled her mask off, leaned over, and kissed me.  I put my arm around her.

We rode back to the farm that way.

The End