Strings by Dave Duncan Page B

they had just fired it into his original room. At the moment they were turning it to point at him.
    The carpet was still smoldering from the first blast. Burned blotches scarred the walls at regular intervals, as though the plasma had rippled from side to side. Doors were opening, frightened guests coming out to see what was happening. All of them managed to leap back to safety in time, before he ran them down. The noise should have been shattering. There should have been screaming and explosions and sirens, but he could hear nothing at all from outside. Life seemed strangely peaceful around Cedric. Maybe his hearing had failed, or his brain.
    The voices on the network were chattering, but he did not register what was being said. He was amazed at how time seemed to have slowed down, or his own thought processes speeded up, because years were going by while his percy raced along that corridor and the enemy did whatever they were doing to ready that gun.
    And then the percy swerved, cannoned off a wall, and impacted another door, stumbling through into a stairwell. The corridor flamed white behind him, and half the vids winked off and then came on again. His ears popped. There was a strong smell of sweat, but so far only sweat. There had been people…
    Oh, God! There had been people—doors open, people looking out.
    He had thought that the percy would head downward; he had not even known that a percy could climb stairs, but this one could, jolting Cedric up and down like a maraca. One floor up it grabbed the doorhandle in its claw. Then it soared out into another bright corridor and headed back in the direction it had come.
    A door just ahead of him burst open, erupting smoke and an armored man whose feet did not quite touch the floor. He raced along the corridor—not floating, but running like a skater, and gathering speed rapidly.
    “Sprout, that’s me ahead of you.”
    “Read you, Knuckles.” Had that been his own voice? So calm? Cedric decided that he must be in shock. Shrieking hysterics would be the correct reaction.
    The armored man was still accelerating. Cedric’s percy seemed to be slowing, and he felt a sudden terror that it might have been damaged, that he would be left behind. Where was the enemy? Bagshaw had come up through the ceiling, of course. How had he kept control of so much equipment? How many innocent people had died?
    “Sprout, we’ll have to do something unorthodox here. Better keep your eyes closed for a while.”
    “Screw you,” Cedric said—but quietly, and surprisingly matter-of-factly.
    Bagshaw, far ahead now, reached the end of the corridor without breaking stride and then leaped upward. He threw out arms and legs to strike the window spread-eagled. Frame and glass and drapes and man vanished into darkness, leaving a rectangular black hole where there had not been one previously.
    Seventeen floors, or somewhere between fifty and sixty meters—exact measurement did not matter much, did it?—Cedric wanted to scream. He opened his mouth to scream, but all he heard was his own voice dryly ordering his percy to stop. Vaguely he saw that armored figures had appeared in the distance behind him, visible in his mirror, and they had their cannon with them. His percy was losing speed, but he did not think it was obeying his commands, and the black rectangle was pouring itself straight at him, growing larger and larger, but more and more slowly. There was absolutely nothing more he could do. Bagshaw had the con—if Bagshaw was still alive—or else the machine was damaged and out of control. Cedric was immobilized in a traveling coffin, and the black space grew larger and larger, but slower and slower. He could not guess what the final result was going to be.
    The pitch fell short. The percy reached the window just as it ran out of velocity and came to a complete stop. Relief! For a moment Cedric stared out at the lights of the city, a forest of towers still bright against a first faint light