Aces High

_"Put a lock on the door," Black said. "And call the Astronomer."

"Lord Amun has already been called," Hubbard said, and tapped his head.

Black returned to his car and started driving back to Jokertown again. "We'll get your unit," Black said. "Then we'll get you to the cop shop for your report."

Carroll looked at him. "Who was that guy, Lieutenant?"

"A specialist in mental cases and jokers."

"That lady might do him some harm."

"He'll be safer than either of us."

Black pulled up behind Carroll's cruiser. He got out and opened the trunk, taking out Carroll's coat and hat. He gave them to the young officer. Then he took out a flute-NYPD for an i

"It was lucky you were around, Lou."

"Yeah. It sure was."

Black shot Carroll four times in the chest with his own gun, then, after the officer was on the ground, shot him twice more in the head. He wiped his prints off the gun and tossed it to the ground, then took the Coke bottle and got back in his car. Maybe, with the spilled rum, it would look as if Carroll had stopped to hassle a wino and the drunk had gotten the drop on him.

The car smelled like cheeseburgers. Black was reminded he hadn't had supper.

The bag lady had ignored the bed and gone to sleep in a corner of the room. Her bags were piled in front and atop her like a bulwark. Hubbard sat on a stool, watching her intently.

His crooked smile had frozen into an unpleasant parody of itself. Pain throbbed in his brain. The effort of reading her, mind was costing him.

No turning back, he thought. He had to see this through. His failure with Captain McPherson had cost him in the Order and in Amun's esteem; and when Black had shown up with the bag lady, Hubbard realized this was the chance to win back his place. Hubbard had lied to Black when he told the detective he had alerted Amun.

There was power here. Perhaps enough to power the Shakti device. And if the Shakti device were powered by the bag thing, then Amun was no longer necessary.

The bag thing could eat people, Hubbard knew. Perhaps it could eat even Amun. Hubbard thought of the fire at the old temple, Amun striding through the flames with his disciples at his back, ignoring Hubbard's screams.

Yes, Hubbard thought. This would be worth the risk. Detective Second Grade Harry Matthias, known in the Order as Judas, sat on the bed, his chin in his hands. He shrugged.

"She's not an ace. Neither is whatever she's got in the bag."

Hubbard spoke to him mentally. I sense two minds. One is hers-it is disordered. I can't touch it. The other is in the bag-it's in touch with her, somehow.. there's an empathic binding. The other mind also seems to be damaged. 16 as if it's adapted to her.

Judas stood. He was flushed with anger. "Why in God's name don't we just take the damn bag?" He went for the bag lady with his hands clawed.

Hubbard felt an electric snap of awareness in his mind. The bag lady was awake. Through his mental link with Judas he felt the man hesitate at the sudden malevolence in the old woman's eyes. Judas reached for the bag.

The bag reached for Judas.

A blackness faster than thought rose into the room. Judas vanished into it. Hubbard stared at the empty space. In his mind, the woman's honed madness danced.

Judas shivered and his lips were blue. Christmas tinsel hung in his hair. A piece of sticky cardboard was stuck to the bottom of one shoe. His gun had been twisted into a sine wave. He shivered and his lips were blue. He'd been transported to a dumpster on Christopher Street and had ceased to exist for about twenty minutes. He'd taken a cab back.

Power, Hubbard thought. Incredible power. The bag thing warps space-time somehow.

"Why garbage?" Judas said. "Why shitpiles? And look at my gun.. . " He became aware of the cardboard, and tried to pull it off his shoe. It came free with a sticky noise.

"She's fixated on garbage, I guess," Hubbard said. "And it seems to twist inanimated objects, sometimes. I could sense that it's broken-maybe that's a problem with it."

He had to figure out some way to subdue the bag lady. Waiting till she'd gone to sleep didn't work-she'd woken up at the first threatening move from Judas. He wondered vaguely about poison gas, and then an idea struck him.

"Do you have access to a tranquilizer gun at the precinct house?"

Judas shook his head. "No. I think maybe the fire department has some, in case they have to deal with escaped animals."

The idea crystallized in Hubbard's mind. "I want you and Black to steal me one."

He'd have Black actually do the shooting-if the bag thing retaliated, it would attack Black. And then with the bag lady put to sleep, Hubbard would take the device…

And then it would be Hubbard's turn. He could take all the time he needed, playing with the bag lady's mind, and she would have enough in her brain left to know what was happening to her. Oh, yes.

He could test the power of the captured device on people he grabbed right off the street. And after that, maybe it would be Amuns turn.

He licked his lips. He could hardly wait.

The legions of the night seemed endless in number. The android's abstract knowledge of the New York underclass, the fact that there were thousands of people who drifted among the glass towers and solid brownstones in an existence almost as remote from the buildings' inhabitants as that of denizens of Mars… The abstract, digitized facts were not, somehow, adequate to describe the reality, the clusters of men who passed bottles around ash-can fires, the dispossessed whose eyes reflected flashing Christmas lights while they lived behind walls of cardboard, the insane who hugged themselves in alleyways or subway entrances, chanting the litany of the mad. It was as if a spell of evil had fallen on the city, that part of the population had been subjected to war or devastation, made homeless refugees, while the others had been enchanted so as not to see them.

The android found two dead, the last of their warmth gone from them. He left these in their newspaper coffins and went on. He found others who were dying or ill and took them to hospitals. Others ran from him. Some pretended to gaze at the bag lady's picture, cocking the Polaroid up to look at the picture in the light of a trash-can fire, and then asked for money in return for relating a sighting that was obviously false. The task, he thought, was almost hopeless.

He kept on.

Black and Hubbard waited outside the bag lady's locked room. Black was sucking on his rum-and-Coke flute. "Dreams, man. Incredible dreams. Jesus. Monsters like you wouldn't believelion bodies, human faces, eagle wings, every damn thing you could think of-and they were all hungry, and they all wanted to eat me. And then there was this giant thing behind them, just a shadow, like, and then… Jesus." He gave a nervous grin and wiped his forehead. "I. still break out into a sweat thinking about it. And then I realized that all the monsters were co

"Your dreaming mind had touched TIAMAT"

"Yeah. That's what Matthias-Judas-told me when he recruited me. Somehow he sensed TIAMAT was getting to me."

Hubbard gri