41.
I walked out of the server room through the hallway door, letting it groan and shut behind me with the mechanical whine of a hinge. Now I was back to nearly where I’d started from, the lobby ahead. I saw the door to the power room just a few yards down the hall, and was on my way toward it when it groaned open, the Terminator staggering out, murder in his eyes.
Then he looked at me.
“Hey, military guy,” I said, pausing as he dragged himself into my path, “I don’t want to fight you. And I damned sure don’t want to have to kill you.”
The shadow effect smoked off his shoulders, and I had a bad feeling he was about to go blurry with speed. “You don’t have to worry about killing me. But fighting …” And he put up his dukes.
“You’re awfully arrogant for a guy who got his ass launched back on Interstate 94,” I said, settling into a defensive stance of my own. “If you hadn’t put lives at risk, or if I was the kind of cold psycho the press seems to think I am, you’d be a dead man already.”
He twitched, just slightly. “Enough talk. Now—”
“I don’t think there’s been enough talk yet.” A female voice came echoing down the hall, and Eilish stepped out of the lobby, Harry a couple steps behind her. “Let’s keep talking, darling. Let’s just talk and talk and talk until we can’t chatter any more.”
The Terminator stood there, stiff, for just a moment, and then he seemed to relax an iota. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, like she was an officer he had to obey.
“You all right?” Harry asked, hustling over to me. He tugged on my sleeve, which was a little tattered from fighting and getting hit and beatings and whatnot. Also, bloody from lots of punching, and maybe a little from being punched.
“I’m fine-ish,” I said, feeling the sting of a thousand aches. Going through a wall didn’t come without some costs to your bone structure, but nothing major was broken, and hopefully if we could get out of here I’d have a chance to heal. “Cops on the way?”
Harry shook his head. “Cassidy’s got them chasing about ten different leads right now. We’ve got ten minutes or so to get clear.” He looked at me a second longer than he needed to, then switched his attention to the Terminator. “Still … might want to ask your questions so we can get going.”
“Not a bad point,” I said, and walked over to the Terminator, who strained a little, looking like he wanted to hit me.
“Uh uh,” Eilish said when his fist twitched. “No hitting, now, my dear.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the Terminator said, his voiced clipped in that stiff, military way.
“Who are you?” I asked, looking the Terminator right in the eyes.
He stiffened to attention. “Lt. Colonel Warren Quincy, formerly United States Marine Corps.”
“And now?” I asked.
“Would you kindly answer all her questions?” Eilish asked.
He looked at me, then dropped to at ease, hands behind his back. “I work for a special operations group within the Department of Defense, reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” He twitched slightly. “Until recently.”
I exchanged a look with Harry, and he nodded. This sounded important. “What do you mean ‘until recently’?”
“I am currently on detached duty to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Warren Quincy said, “to aid in their apprehension … of you.” And he looked right at me.
“No surprises so far,” I said. “Who ordered you to come after me?”
“The Director of the FBI,” Quincy said.
I raised an eyebrow at that. But then, I’d watched the last FBI Director get murdered in front of me, so I supposed it was no huge surprise that this one might be antsy, thinking it was a vendetta against the office. It wasn’t; I hadn’t even killed the last guy (much as I might have wanted to when I was working for him). “That’s … interesting,” I said. “Maybe this one thinks he’s pursuing justice.”
“She,” Quincy corrected.
“What do ye think of her?” Eilish asked, probably detecting the same reserve in Quincy’s reply as I did.
“I think she’s a stuffed shirt pencil-pushing lawyer who’s probably never been in the field a day in her life,” Quincy said, staring straight ahead, stiff as a board. “If she heard the sound of gunfire she’d think it was fireworks in the distance.”
“So you’re just after me?” I asked, trying to wrap this up. “And you work alone?”
“I work alone,” he said, staring right at me, like a caged tiger, “and you are my sole mission.”
“Lovely,” Eilish said, “well … feels like we should be getting along, now.” She clapped Quincy on the shoulder. “You stay here, darling. Wait for the cops. Go ahead and forget I was ever here, or that she was—actually, just forget everything that happened since you took this mission. It was all a distant dream; you don’t have any idea at all how this happened, how you ended up here. It’s a big mystery. All right?” And she smiled at him.
“All right,” he said.
“Go ahead and sit down right here and wait for the police,” she said, and he did just that as I started past him.
“They’re not going to stop until they catch you,” he said, calling after me as I went by. “They know you killed Harmon. They want this settled.” He turned his head. “My orders said dead or alive, but I just wanted to beat you. You’re a fellow warrior to me; I’ve seen what you’ve done over the years and it’s beautiful work. But these are soft people, the ones who sent me, people who don’t understand fighting, don’t understand war. You’re a murderer to them. They won’t be as merciful next time.”
I looked down at him. “Thank you, Warren.”
He looked right back, and beneath Eilish’s control, I almost felt like he was saluting me … and warning me. “Ma’am.”
I walked on by, and Harry fell into step behind me, Eilish a few behind us. “Did Cassidy erase the surveillance footage here?”
“Yep,” Harry said. “And without any affirmative witnesses—”
“This won’t be provable as a metahuman incident,” I said, smiling that Harry got what I was driving at immediately. That’d be an insurance payout for Deltan Data Systems, and it meant my conscience could rest easy about all the property damage I’d done here. Hell, with one of their people caught at the scene, maybe the government would get involved and throw in some hush money.
The van was waiting in the parking lot, and Harry slid open the door for me as I stepped up, cringing at a couple of my lesser-realized pains that adrenaline had wallpapered over during the fight. Cassidy was waiting inside, face in a tight moue, watching me.
“You got him?” she asked. “I couldn’t see on the feed. Which is erased now, by the way.”
“I got him,” I said, and she slumped back in her seat as I slid in next to her and fastened my seatbelt. Eilish and Harry loaded up in the front, and then we were on our way, before the first siren even reached my ears.