The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [97]
“I’ve got a gun right here,” Gonzales bargained hopefully.
Hickok chuckled. “Aw, come on, Fred.”
“If you want these cyberweapons,” said Wimberley, putting his boot on the case, “then you’re gonna have to take them away from me.”
Blood rushed hotly to Van’s face. “You don’t think I could do that?”
Wimberley laughed in scorn. “Let me put you in touch with reality! I’m not some make-believe warfighter, like you are. I enlisted, dude. I am tomorrow’s cyber-military. You’re just some flabby-ass civilian professor from some failed telecom company. Plus, you’re ten years older than me. So if you attempt to confiscate my weapons here, I will kick your fat ass right up between your shoulders.”
“You are out of your mind,” Van told him. “You’re some nutcase punk who called himself ‘Bionic Ninja.’ I outweigh you by fifty pounds. Plus, this is my house!”
Wimberley turned to Gonzales. “The hippie here is hallucinating. I think maybe you’d better just shoot these guys.”
Gonzales snorted. He thumb-jacked the magazine out of his pistol and threw it to Hickok. Hickok, ever-alert, snatched the bullet clip right out of midair.
Gonzales sat down cozily in Van’s magnesium chair. “Do I look that stupid?” he announced. “One bullet, two bullets, that’s not even gonna slow this dude here down. Because, boys, this dude here is Air Force Special Operations, just like me. Mike Hickok and me, we are always ‘The First Ones There’!”
Hickok burst into laughter. He sat on Van’s stained and ragged couch, with a loud thrum of broken springs. “Aw, come on, Fred, this is D.C., man. This is some guy’s apartment!”
Gonzales put both his elbows on his knees. “The way I see it, these candy-ass computer geeks have got a score to settle.”
“You’re right,” Van said. The words startled him as they hit his own ears, but then he realized that he meant them. Rage rumbled through his chest like a rolling cannonball. He was in deadly earnest.
Hickok coughed into his fist. “Van, sit down. Let ’em both go. It’s all some big mistake.”
“Your friend Fred here can go if he wants,” Van said. “I didn’t build him that O’Dwyer pistol. That intrusion case though. That tool case is mine.”
Wimberley took off his black-rimmed glasses and set them on a table at the foot of Van’s lamp. “I can see that I’ve got to kick this guy’s ass now,” he announced. He put one fist inside another and loudly cracked his knuckles. “This won’t take long.” He looked at Hickok and Gonzales. “I just don’t want to see you two snake-eater boys start crying about this, or anything.”
“Are we gonna cry, Mike?” Gonzales asked Hickok.
“You ever see me cry, Fred? We were in Bosnia damn Herzegovina.” Hickok’s face was alight with a greed for battle. “My cybergeek is gonna wipe the floor with your cybergeek.”
“No way, homey.”
“Yes way. Because he is smarter, man. My computer geek is like ten times smarter than your geek.”
Gonzales barked with laughter. “What the hell difference does his brain make?”
Van took his glasses off and set them aside. He tried to stare into Wimberley’s eyes. Without his glasses, the enemy’s eyes were two distant brown blurs.
Wimberley’s first swing was a contemptuous slap. The slap was a spiritual experience. In one Zen instant, it found the black fury that lived within Van and brought it to roaring life.
Van lunged forward. The flying impact of his body knocked Wimberley straight backward and into the magnesium chair. Gonzales leapt free of it, hunched and dodging, and the beautiful chair went legs-up and buckled, with an expensive crunch.
Van was suddenly gasping for air. Something had plunged deep into his gut. It was Wimberley’s boot. The kid scrambled nimbly back to his feet. Quick, hot impacts. One in the eye. One in the forehead.
Van got a clawing hand into his enemy’s collar and slung him headlong into the room’s single lamp. The lamp tumbled and the room went dark.
Van clenched his fists and swung at empty air. Suddenly the enemy was on his back, leaping on him from behind. Van stumbled backward, smashing his assailant against the wall. Wimberley