Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [4]
And suddenly, her Nanny is behind her. And suddenly, she’s lifted in her arms. A second-long, eternity-worth hug—and she is passed along, into a soldier’s arms. They plunge into the transport tubes—a snake of ferrofluid armor, flying at a breakneck speed, turning at the junctures, hugging the tight curves. And she is passed from arms to arms inside the flying column, surfing forward—faster, faster!
She has forgotten how to breathe. She doesn’t need to yet. Between two breaths, she’s coming out at the other end into a spaceport vault, and—
Flash!
Their escape shuttle explodes in its docking sheath. A gust of air, pulling—but the breach seals shut. Magnetorheological material streams out, freezing solid in the castle’s emergency magnetic field. A breath of air brings a sweetish taste into her mouth. A voice inside her head: You’re underwater! An osmosis mask forms out of her collar, covering her face. She didn’t know she was capable of that. Wow, just imagine, and….
She doesn’t know yet that tiny nanobots are busy cleansing blood of paralytic gas.
Too late. Above them, knights in shining armor are already flying out of the upper passages, in an attack formation—like a cobra poised with hood spread out. It strikes. Defenders rise to meet them in the air, the ferrofluid dark against the multispeckled shine of diamond nanorods—their flexible emergency protection suits matched up against full battle armor.
Plasma jets crisscross the vault—the enemies have brought some heavy plasma guns, yet the defensive weaponry in the walls is conspicuously silent. One man in dark explodes in a fireball. The shock wave slams the girl against a wall. She hunkers down, sucking on her broken tooth.
A flock of crows in a thunderstorm above her head—dark crows armed with Dragonclaws. Her Nanny in the air, every finger wearing a waveguide tube of weapon-grade laser—a deadly harness over each hand. She dances in her flight with all her body, with her hands, her mudras drawing curtains of invisible sharp light. The girl can’t see them, but she knows they are there—oh how do they cut through shining armor! Oh how flexible her Nanny’s fingers are! She’s not afraid to turn them on herself in her complex maneuvers, adjusting their power gain in milliseconds.
She is good. No one can match her, either side. She cuts the space around her in intersecting foliations, anticipating the reflection angles off the nanodiamond armor—a dance in three dimensions on magnetic wings. She flips and rolls in complicated curves—topologist of death, computing Hamiltonian potentials of evasion. She is good.
Not good enough.
A stream of plasma gushes out of the transport tube they came through, spewing bodies out—their rearguard, still flying through the tube. More enemies come out after them, overwhelming the girl’s bodyguards with high precision fire—before the plasma trail they’re flying through has even had a chance to cool. The warrior elite, they’re almost a match for Nanny. Not a single hair has been singed on the girl’s head.
A bubble of life surrounds her, invisible, where neither friend nor foe dares aim a weapon. The enemy is closing, unstoppable. It’s obvious they want the girl alive.
And now, she is really afraid.
It is the other side of fairy tales—the horror stories of what evil wizards do to their captives, the experiments performed on their minds. She’d be a feeling, suffering “undead,” her mind in pieces, literally—if she was lucky.
If she had her blueberries.
With a terrifying elegance, her mental link is snapped; she hears other voices in her head—brain hackers. She is totally cut off. The color black is leaching from the air, precipitating on the floor—in broken, mangled bodies, each covered with diamond dust.
It’s so hard to reach for someone in this whirlwind.
Nanny turns. Their eyes meet in a stroboscopic contact. A moment’s hesitation. Then, one killer glove moves gently, like to brush her hair.
THE GIRL’S CONSCIOUSNESS COLLAPSED JUST LIKE A HOUSE