Point of Impact

5

Toni smiled at the UPS man as he left — he was late today — then took the latest packages into the garage. Alex had told her she could have half the workbench, though she only needed maybe a quarter of it, and she had already started putting her stuff there. So far, she had the magnifying lamp set up, the alcohol burner and wax cauldron, a couple tubes of lampblack oil paint, and some rags and cleaning supplies. There wasn’t really much else left she needed. The new packages should have the pin vises, some assorted sewing needles, lens paper, lanolin hand cleaner, and a couple of X-Acto knives and some blades. Plus the jeweler’s special wax and some polishing compound. She already had some fake-ivory slabs, some old piano keys, and some little rectangles of micarta, which looked like real ivory but was much harder. She didn’t need the heavy-duty saws and buffing wheels, Alex had a Dremel tool that would work for polishing small stuff. And while the stereomicroscope like the one her teacher used was really neat, she couldn’t justify spending eight or nine hundred dollars on it — not unless she got to the point where she was selling pieces, which would probably not ever happen — especially given she wasn’t sure she even wanted to try that.

Toni had never thought of herself as having much artistic talent. She’d done okay in art courses in school, could draw a little, but according to Bob Hergert’s on-line VR class, while being a world-class artist wouldn’t hurt, it wasn’t absolutely necessary. Given the wonders of the modem computer age, there was a lot technique could do to make up for talent. And given what she’d learned so far, you’d be able to fool a lot of people into thinking you knew what you were doing when you didn’t.

She opened the packages, removed the tools and supplies, and set them out. Being pregnant wasn’t at all like she’d thought it was going to be. Sure, she’d heard about morning sickness and mood swings, but the reality of those things was something else. And it wasn’t as if she were really a whale, not at five months, but she’d always been in shape, her belly flat and tight, her muscles firm, and having to lie around and watch herself balloon up was, well, it was scary. Having something to do that needed concentration and skill, like scrimshaw, might be just the ticket to help her get past this. The morning sickness — which lasted almost all day and any time she was around any food more spicy than dry soda crackers — had finally stopped. Supposedly, the hormone swings got better after the sixth month.

Supposedly.

She had some ideas of what she might like to try first, and for that she needed to go back to her computer. There were lots of places to find pictures in the public domain, and if those weren’t good enough, lots of places where you could license an image for personal use for a small fee. Later on, if she got better at it, she could try some freehand drawings of her own, but at first, she wanted to keep it simple.

Toni looked at her comer of the workbench. The rest of it was covered with Alex’s tools and car parts, all laid out neatly. He was much more orderly than she was about such things. So far, her investment in scrimshaw supplies had run less than what it cost Alex for a good set of wrenches. If it turned out to be a total waste of her time, at least she wouldn’t be out much money.

She sighed. Before she sat down at the computer and went shopping on-line, she needed to go pee again. And that, she understood, was not going to get better as her pregnancy progressed. She sure hoped having Alex’s son was worth all this aggravation.

John Howard bent from the waist and tightened the laces on his cross-trainers, finishing with the double-loop runner’s knot that theoretically kept the laces from coming untied. Finished, he straightened, bent backward and stretched his abdominals, then shook his arms back and forth to loosen them.

Normally, he ran at the base or around the Net Force compound, but today he felt like taking a tour of his own neighborhood. It was warm for early October, and muggy, so he wore running shorts and a tank top, though he did have a fanny pack holding his virgil, his ID, and a small handgun — a little Seecamp.380 double-action auto. The tiny pistol made the Walther PPK look like a giant, it only weighed maybe eleven or twelve ounces and was awfully convenient if you were wearing summer clothes or workout gear. True, the.380 wasn’t exactly an elephant-stopper; the gun didn’t have any sights, liked only one brand of ammo, and it tended to bang your trigger finger pretty good when it recoiled. No way it compared with his primary side arm, the Phillips & Rogers Medusa, but it did fulfill the first rule of a gunfight: Bring a gun. Point it at somebody in your face with a knife or a broken bottle and pull the trigger four or five times, and it certainly would offer them major incentive to back off. With the fanny pack strapped on tightly enough so it wouldn’t bounce around much, it was doable. He used to carry a little can of pepper spray to discourage loose dogs, but realized that if he stopped running and said “Bad dog! Go lie down!” in a loud voice, the dog would stop, frown, and leave. At least they had so far.

A bit more limber, Howard started to jog up the street.

The leaves were falling — they’d all be down by Halloween, first good wind that came along any time now would finish ’em — and while the sun was warm, there was that subtle difference between spring and fall, that sense of impending winter.

He passed old man Carlson working in his yard, using the blower to herd leaves into piles. The old man, eighty if he was a day, smiled and waved. Carlson was a tanned, leathery old bird who was the ultimate Orioles fan. He’d retired after forty years with the Post Office, and there wasn’t a street in the district he couldn’t locate for you.

Howard reached the corner and turned right, planning to loop in and out of the cul-de-sacs that fed the main road through the neighborhood, staying on the sidewalk and ducking low, overhanging trees.

Tyrone had called today from his class trip to Canada. He was going to be gone for another ten days, two weeks in all, on a visit for his international relations class, something new at his school. Howard thought it was a good idea, getting to know other cultures. Better than learning it the Army’s way. He smiled, remembering the old slogan his first top kick had posted over his desk when he’d first joined up: “Join the Army and See the World! Travel to exotic, unusual locales! Learn about other cultures! Meet diverse and interesting people — and kill them.”

He picked his pace up a little, stretching out, getting into a longer stride and rhythm. Just inside his breath, barely.

The scars were formed up pretty good where he’d had surgery after the shooting in Alaska. Pretty much nothing hurt most of the time — well, no more than usual after he worked out — but the memories hadn’t faded at all. Being out in the middle of nowhere, exchanging gunfire with some real bad men, giving better than he’d gotten, but almost dying — those kinds of memories didn’t go away in a few months. Every firefight — and he hadn’t had that many — was as clear in his mind as the day or night it had happened. The thought that he might have bled to death in the woods and been eaten by scavengers wasn’t so horrifying in itself. Hell, he was a professional soldier, getting killed went with the territory. But dying and leaving his son, just hitting his teens on his way to manhood, that bothered Howard more than it ever had. All it took was a real possibility he might actually buy the farm. Before, he’d been lucky. Never made it to a real war, and when he finally started seeing some action in Net Force, the bullets had zipped here and there, missing him. Julio had taken a round in the leg during the recovery of the stolen plutonium from the sons-of-whoever. Some of his troops had eaten frags from a mine or bullets from the mad Russian’s hit man, Ruzhyó, the former Spetsnaz killer. Intellectually, he knew it was just chance and maybe a little skill that he’d never gotten hit; emotionally, he’d felt invulnerable, at least to a degree. Like God was watching over him because he was worthy. Yeah. Until that long shot in the darkness had plowed into him. A round from a handgun at rifle distance had killed that feeling of being bulletproof, oh, yes, indeed, it had.

Even Achilles had his heel, and waking up in a hospital full of tubes did make a guy stop and consider the idea he wasn’t gonna live forever.

And while he wasn’t afraid to go into battle — at least he didn’t think so — he didn’t want to die and leave his wife and son. They had become more precious to him when he’d realized he might lose them. He believed in the Kingdom of Heaven, and he tried to live his life in a moral and upright manner, but going there wasn’t at the top of his to-do list for this year.

He opened up a little more on the run, starting to breathe through his mouth more heavily now, as he looped into the next street over from his and headed for the circle at the end.

He remembered another joke his father had told him:

“So the preacher stands up in front of the congregation and says, ‘How many of you want to go to Heaven?’

“And all the hands in the church except Brother Brown’s go up.

“And the preacher looks at Brother Brown, who was known to drink a little even of a Sunday morning, and he says, ‘Brother Brown! Don’t you want to go to Heaven when you die?’

“And Brother Brown says, ‘When I die? Well, sure, Reverend.’

“And the preacher says, ‘Then, how come you didn’t raise your hand?’

“And Brother Brown says, ‘Well, I thought you was gettin’ up a busload to go now.’ ”

He looped around the circle and headed back up toward the main street. A toy poodle in a fenced yard raced back and forth inside, barking wildly at him. Fish bait, his Daddy would call it. A waste of dog space.

He could, Howard knew, become an armchair general, an REMF who directed operations at a distance. Net Force would prefer it that way, and probably nobody would think less of him for it, not those who had been on ops with him before, anyway. But sending a man somewhere he wasn’t willing to go himself didn’t seem right, never had.

That left the other option, which was to retire. He could muster out with his current rank of general, draw a fair retirement, and get a job consulting somewhere, teaching, whatever. Probably do better moneywise than he was doing now. And be a lot more certain of being around when his son graduated from high school, from college, got married, and brought home grandchildren. Sure that was ten, fifteen years away, maybe, but he didn’t want to miss it. And he didn’t want to leave Nadine. If something happened to him, he’d always told her to remarry, find a good man, because she was too precious to waste away alone. And he meant it, too, but on a real, deep level, he had to admit to himself that the idea of Nadine laughing and loving another man wasn’t at the top of his list of fun thoughts, either.

But he was a soldier. A professional warrior. This was what he did, who he was, and he liked it.

So he had to puzzle this out. It was important. Not easy, maybe, but something he had to do.

He picked up his pace again, now close to top speed for his run. He tried to get in four miles a session, at least four or five times a week, and while he was past the days when he could run’em in five or even six minutes a mile, he could still manage six and a half or seven minutes.

That is, if he didn’t get to thinking so hard he forget to keep the speed up.

Run, John. Think later.

Tad Bershaw drove back to the beach house, poking along, in no hurry now. He had made his deliveries, collected the money, and decided what the hell and taken the purple cap half an hour ago. It would be another few minutes before it started to come on full force, but even now he was getting patterns, geometric overlays of complicated, pulsing grids on everything. That was from the psychedelic components of the drug. It made driving real interesting.

Bobby was cagey about his chem, he never told anybody exactly what was in it, but Bershaw had sampled enough illegal stuff over the years to have some pragmatic knowledge about such things.

There was some kind of MDMA/Ecstasy analog in the Hammer’s alloy, with maybe a bit of mescaline; the body rushes got pretty intense an hour or so in, and just breathing was orgasmic when it got to circulating.

His experiences were not based on any formal knowledge of chemistry, but he knew it when he felt it. Though it didn’t really matter, he had poked at it mentally a few times, what he thought Bobby had created. The psychedelics—entheogens, Bobby called those — for sure. That would be the MDMA, mescaline, or LSD, or maybe even some psilocybin from magic mushrooms. Maybe all four. That gave you that sense of being in contact with your inner self and loving the world and all, entactogenesis and empathogenesis, Bobby called them. Also picked up the sensory input, made everything feel really, really intense.

It had smart drugs in it, he knew that, because he was quicker, sharper, able to make choices better when the Hammer was at full pound, no question. He didn’t know much about nootropics, stuff like deprynl, adrafinil, pro-vigil, shit like that, but Bobby did, and he knew how to tweak’em for an immediate response.

For sure it had some kind of speed — cylert, ritalin, dex, maybe; some tranq to balance it so you got the fast mind but not bad jitters. It definitely had painkiller in it, or a way to kick in the body’s own opiates, and Tad guessed some kind of animal tranq and steroid mix, though he didn’t see how those would do much in the short run. And something like Viagra was in it, too, because it gave you a hard-on that wouldn’t quit. The Zee-ster once took six women to bed while tripping, and none of them could walk the next day. Supposedly made women horny, too.

Past that, Bobby definitely had some secret ingredients about which Tad knew zip. He knew what they did to him, but not why or how.

The total combination was synergistic — that meant more than the sum of its parts — and the bottom line was, it didn’t really matter how it did what it did, only that it did do it.

There was a bright flash of orange to Bershaw’s left but, when he glanced over that way, no cause for it. He grinned. Yeah, he was coming on. Hallucinations, real hallucinations you could talk to and have them answer back, he’d never had those while riding the Hammer, but light flashes, visual distortions, little shifts in reality, those were par for the course. Your motor ran at full speed, no governor and no idle.

He took a deep breath, and chills frosted him all over, despite the still-warm late afternoon Santa Ana wind blowing in through the open window.

Hoo, what a rush!

Seventeen times he had swung Thor’s hammer, and not once a bad trip. One in five or so went bonkers, like the guy in the casino. Something in their body chemistry maybe, or the way their brains were hardwired, Bobby didn’t know which, but whatever it was, Tad didn’t have it. Seventeen times he had become more than he was, practically turned into a superhuman. Stronger, faster, smarter, pain-free, fatigue-free, a guy who could walk into the local kung fu school and kick its collective ass.

And, oh, yeah, there was the sex, though that never seemed to call to him much. Yeah, he got the iron woody and all, but he never seemed to have time to put it into anybody, too much else to do to lie down and be still… or relatively still.

Though right at the moment, he felt pretty mellow, the desire to shuck the car and get physical was ahead, he knew. Maybe he’d go for a walk on the beach after it got dark. Or a swim. He was usually a crappy swimmer, but once he’d swum out half a mile or so and back without any problem with the riptide or anything. He’d been looking for a shark; he’d had a kitchen knife in his hand, and he wanted to see if he could take a shark out with it. Hadn’t found one, which was probably good. Away from the Hammer, you knew you had limits. Swinging it, you didn’t. But hell, maybe he could have sliced Jaws up into cat food. Who could say?

Another rush enveloped him, and he was glad the house wasn’t too far away. It wasn’t that he couldn’t maintain control enough to drive during the early stages of the trip ’cause he could, but it took too much effort, and he didn’t want to waste effort on piddly shit. He would get home, shuck the car, and go outside. After all, outside was only a bigger inside, right?

He grinned. It was like the time he realized that chocolate wasn’t the opposite of vanilla. They were just two different flavors. That had hit him like the secret of the universe. Shit, for all anybody knew, that was the secret of the universe.