Engineman - Eric Brown [169]
I stretch the torso over each shoulder and let go with a snap. Then I pull on the zippered head; my own bulges between the ears like a big egg. Mickey's never been so tall.
"You weren't kidding, were you?"
"Eh?" I'm having difficulty with the zipper.
"You aren't armed."
"Told you so."
"Then how the hell do you hope to kill the killer?"
I give her a big smile before fastening the zipper. "An old African custom," I say. "I'll think him dead." Which isn't that far off the mark, minus the ethnic bit.
"Okay, just one more thing," she says. "You gotta walk like the real Mickey. Like this."
I stare at her through the gauze where Mickey's tonsils should be. She's strutting up and down the corridor, waving her arms, twitching her ass. If only Massingberd could see us now.
"Your turn, Manchester."
So I strut my stuff before her, elbows working invisible bellows. "Point your boots! Swing your tail! This has to be perfect, Manchester. If this bastard so much as suspects..."
She doesn't have to finish that line.
"Fine. You got it. Now where you want to go first?"
The thought of parading myself out there like a sitting duck - or rather mouse - gives me the heebies.
I quit wriggling and squat on my heels. The suit is tight and uncomfortable, squashing me short. "First, before I start risking my life - 'cos I don't want to be found dead in this fucking thing - first I want to know more about the killer. Like how he managed to waste an entire security team and blow the defence system?"
I keep a probe out for the killer. I have a range of just over a kilometre, though it's getting weak by then. We're quite alone at present.
"The security unit? The killer sprayed them with Procyon animalcules. They reduced the unit to slush one hour before the fireworks began."
"Yech! And the mechanical defences? The 'bots?"
"Deactivated beforehand. That should have set off an alarm in computer control, but that'd been fixed too."
"Whoever the killer is, he sure knows his stuff. Could it be someone who works here?"
She shrugs. "Why not? We employ nearly twenty thousand permanent staff."
"Most of them evacuated with the trippers? So that leaves only the dozen workers holed up in the dorms."
"Plus the killer."
I think about it. "Has there been any shooting since the dozen staff made it to safety?"
"No..." Da Cruz is getting my drift.
"So perhaps, just perhaps, the killer is a worker. He or she hides with the others after the firing's through - providing an alibi."
"You think that likely?"
"At the moment anything's possible," I say.
Da Cruz pushes herself from the wall with a practised rubber bounce. "Any more questions?"
"Yeah... how come a girl as young as you gets to be the Director of an outfit as big as this?"
That stops her in her tracks.
"How do you know how old I am?"
"I'm well informed," I tell her. "Well?"
She shrugs. "I work hard."
"You must be very talented."
She's suddenly uncomfortable, under the Minnie suit. I read that she was a solitary kid, bullied at school, whose only way of showing them was to succeed. But there's still something lacking, I read. Success isn't all.
I have the almost irresistible urge to go in there and help her out, ever so gently. But I restrain myself. This is neither the time nor the place - and there's work to be done. Besides, I'm getting to the stage where I need real love, love that isn't forced.
"Lead the way," I say.
"Where to?"
"The workers' dorm, or thereabouts. I can do my stuff at long range."
She regards me. "Okay. You ready?"
We cake-walk into the open, beneath the arching crystal dome, along with a hundred other cartoon characters. They're operating with an attention to duty that could be mistaken for macabre celebration of the surrounding carnage.
The fear I feel at our vulnerability is soon replaced by horror. Gobbets of human flesh occupy parks and gardens, tree-lined