Strings by Dave Duncan Page A

horizontal, and then straightened. Cedric’s stomach stayed at floor level, and the percy was accelerating again even before it was upright.
    “Knuckles, we read you.” That must be Glee Club.
    The room next door—where Cedric now found himself—was dark, but vision enhancement had clicked in for him. It gave false color images, so that the terrified face above the heap of bedclothes was bright pink and the teeth in her mouth were red. He could not hear the woman’s screams as his percy raced across the room toward her and impacted the wall beside the bed. He hoped she would have the sense to get out of the way quickly.
    “Glee Club, I have picked up Sprout.”
    “Report Sprout’s condition, Knuckles.”
    “Okay so far. Virgo intacta , I should think. But the natives are restless.”
    That was putting it mildly. Cedric’s percy was backing up again, almost as far as his own room. It stopped just short of the aperture rimmed by twisted pipes squirting water and clouds of steam. Why could there not have been hot supplies like that when Cedric was having his shower? If things got much more exciting, he was going to need another shower very shortly. Fortunately, his brain did not seem to be accepting any of this as real.
    Then he was being accelerated again for another attack on the wall by the bed. My Life as the Human Hammer , or The School of Hard Knocks . The pink-faced woman had dived for the floor on the far side and disappeared. How long would it be, Cedric wondered, before the attackers in the corridor came— impact! —came in through the doors?
    “Angel, this is Glee Club. Do you read?”
    “Glee Club, this is Angel. We have a fix on Knuckles. There’s a swarm of hornets around, though.”
    Suddenly Cedric recalled Bagshaw’s remark that these percies would survive a fall of twelve stories. No—the equipment would survive more than that. The occupant might survive twelve stories. How unfortunate that Cedric’s room was on the sixteenth floor.
    Impact! again…
    Bagshaw’s strategy was fairly obvious, although Cedric was having trouble keeping his mind on logic. The enemy was out in the corridor with a fusion cannon, and the good guys did not have the armor to face that. So he had scattered his troops—Cedric going one way, an empty percy in the opposite direction, and a third straight up. It would take the baddies a few minutes to work out which thimble hid the pea.
    “Angel, give me an ETA.”
    A searing white flame filled the bedroom. Cedric saw the bed sheets turn purple and burst into brown flames even before his video overloaded and the percy was lifted by the blast and rammed bodily into the wall it had been about to strike again. The woman would have been charred instantly, he thought as the wall collapsed, spilling him through into a third room and burying another bed in an avalanche of concrete. He could not see if there had been anyone in it.
    Please, God? People are dying here, God.
    This was no holo drama. This was real, squalid murder. He was rolling…
    The vision enhancement had returned. The ceiling was a very pretty green. He was lying on his back, and half the vids had gone dark.
    “Ced—Sprout? You okay?”
    “Sprout fine,” Cedric said weakly. He really did not believe that all this was happening, but that had been Bagshaw’s voice, so somehow the bull had survived the explosion, too.
    And so had Cedric’s percy. The vids flickered on again—most of them—and it swung up to a vertical position. He discovered a curious salt taste in his mouth. That distracted him for a moment, until the door of the room crashed down before him and he was out in the bright lights again, hurtling along the corridor, swaying mightily and gathering speed all the way. It was a very long corridor. There were men behind him—at least three of them, all wearing much the same sort of armored suit as Bagshaw—and they were crouched over something that Cedric was certain was a fusion cannon. Clearly