“Cuthbert! No!” cried Bajwa.
The Met officers and firearms specialists, still in TotalCamou, backed away ominously, a set of receding floating guns, and Astrid knew she was in gravest danger. The other Royal Parks constables, some of whom Astrid knew well—fat Jenkins and young Hopper and the jokester Sergeant Raheem—seemed either confused or paralyzed with fear. They remained rooted along the bushes.
The doctor, instinctively, had dropped to all fours. He was a picture of appalling befuddlement, crawling toward his wayward patient, then stopping, looking back like an impatient pony, and cantering back toward Astrid.
No one, not even registered law enforcement, took stands against the Watch, and its SCARE units possessed an especially fearsome reputation for outrages against civil decency. Their favorite quarry were British republicans and followers of Anonymous UK, and their pop-up prisons ended up securing the bodies of “terrorists” as often as live prisoners. Indeed, anyone they killed was, ipso facto, a terrorist.
“Behind me,” Astrid said to the doctor, struggling to get herself in front of both the doctor and Cuthbert. She plunged her hand into her trouser pocket. She clutched her neuralzinger. Still loaded with nonlethal gangliatoxic rounds, she remembered.
Before Astrid expected, one of the Watchmen hurled himself forward. He stabbed out at her with his pike’s searing red tip, stretching his arm so far he became unbalanced. The pike hit the pavement beside her foot with a chittering zhe-zheeng! A fist-size divot of pavement concrete spurted up. The missile hit one of the sheepish Met officers in the knee, and he fell hard, moaning.
“It begins,” said St. Cuthbert. “It begins.”
Astrid stepped back. She knew now that the Watchmen were trying to kill her—to kill them all, probably. She drew her neuralzinger, gripping it tentatively with just her one hand.
“Please. Move back,” she said to the Watchmen. “Please. Please. Let’s all kotch a bit.”
But then her pistol went off. It kicked back and up, almost flying from her hand. She’d pulled the trigger all right, but it hardly felt willed. The living gangliatoxin’s visible gray net grew as wide as a shark’s mouth before hitting its target. It stuck to the one Watchman’s armor, a dull shroud now silvering with white sparkles. There was a second’s pause, and everyone assembled stood dumbly, petrified; then the victim staggered over in mortal agony. He screeched through his helmet’s speaker as his brain opened millions of pain receptors.
“Jesus fuck,” cried Bajwa. “Inspector, you didn’t have to—”
“You fooking bitch!” shouted the other Watchman with a neuralpike. “Now you’re dead, you slag.”
The frightcopter, humming above, descended abruptly. It thudded upon the pavement, its feathery rotor blades folding up and inward. When this happened, the other Watchman with a pike, and the one still fussing with his pop-up prison, retreated a few steps toward the compacted frightcopter, which sat like an enormous black scarab, ticking with heat, its two giant neural cannons slowly gliding toward Astrid. It presented an implacable, story-ending foe, and Astrid knew it.
“Listen! I’m sorry!” she hollered. She crouched down, pulling the doctor to the pavement. “Get down,” she whispered to Bajwa. “Down! Crawl toward the copter!” She did feel sorry; hurting anyone felt repugnant to her, but she also needed to stall them. “I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t . . .”
Astrid motioned to St. Cuthbert and the other constables and Met officers. “Get down!” She glared at the frightcopter with steely anger.
But now the other SCARE pikeman, bolstered by Astrid’s proximity, was barreling heedlessly toward her and the doctor, his weapon’s tip fully charged. This time, a hunkered Astrid held her neuralzinger with both hands, like the trainer she was, and took down the pikeman.
The Met officers, who had switched off their TotalCamou for safety, began scampering toward Astrid and Bajwa, too. The parks constables started to make more tentative, parallel moves on St. Cuthbert.
“She’s bloody off her chump!” one of the Met officers screamed. “I tell you, she’ll kill us all!”
There was a shrill zhinging! sound as the grounded frightcopter fired its neural cannons. First, for a fraction of a second, white tracer laser-lines landed on St. Cuthbert and just above Astrid’s head.
“No!” screamed the doctor.