Logan Trilogy by William F Nolan, George Clayton Johnson Read Free Book Online Page B

hundred compartments in one insane instant. Molly screamed. Steel tore like paper. Fourteen thousand men, women and children mixed their atoms with the sea in the first chaotic shock.
    Molly absorbed the blow. Pressures equalized; bulkheads strained, tore, accepted the load, howled as the ocean tide—tons bent them inward. Automatic valves closed; hatches slammed. In twelve seconds she was a jumbled conglomerate of corpses, of flooded compartments and corridors, of machinery, jackstraw-heaped. But she held.
    Some of her compartments retained air—and against these watertight chambers the sea gnawed with a patient gnawing that would never stop until Molly was completely dead.
    She had begun her long war with the sea.
    The mazecar slotted into Molly. The seats unlocked.
     
    "Exit, please."
    Jessica didn't resist as Logan guided her through the hatch.
    The platform, buried in greenback fathoms, creaked and shifted, shifted and creaked beneath them.
    The great surging skin of the Pacific pressured in against the bubbleglass. The air held an odor of iron and age, a smell of medicated wounds. A dull booming, far off. Echoes. Silence.
    Why here, under the sea? wondered Logan. Who was the next contact?
    The girl looked vacant, dead. Hatred burned in Jessica, deeply, but the will to resist had left her.
    "All right," said Logan. "So I've got a DS Gun. And, back in my unit, I've got a black tunic to match it.
    But now I'm a runner. Just as you are."
    "Sandmen don't run," she said flatly.
    "And Sandmen don't eat. And Sandmen don't breathe. And Sandmen don't get tired. Well, I'm tired.
    I'm tired and I'm hungry and I'm sick of being jumped and kicked at and hated."
    She looked at him coldly. "You're a monster. You've chased and killed people like my brother, whose only sin was wanting to live another day."
    "I didn't kill your brother."
    "Maybe not, but you would have. You'd have put a homer in him and been proud of yourself for doing it."
    He had no answer.
    Jess drew in a ragged breath. "Damn you!" she flared. "You DS live by pain, by hurting and wounding and killing. You destroy in the name of mass survival and you never think about the sick wrongness of it, the horror of it…You enjoy using the Gun and you burn with it and you terrorize with it! Damn your kind and damn your system! You're a foul, rotten—"
    Logan slapped her hard across the cheek to stop the words which cut him like stones.
    She put up a shaking hand to the drop of blood at the corner of her mouth.
    Her flower was charcoal.
     
    "It's changed," said Logan. "You're on black." His hand automatically drifted toward the warm pearl handle of the Gun.
    The girl looked at him in horror.
    Logan hesitated.
    He had taken on the shape and coloration and mental attitudes of a runner, and it was impossible for him to know where the dividing line really was.
    In that suspended moment, Jessica wheeled off down the long platform,.
    "Jess!"
    The girl ran.
    She ran as a deer in panic runs, heedlessly, blindly, driven forward by the desire to put distance between herself and the hunter. A spiral of metal steps carried her upward; her feet rattled against metal cleats, leaving an echo path for Logan to follow.
    She pounded along a narrow culture corridor lined with flashing sea life. Squid and porpoise and eel, shark and barracuda and the trunkback turtle marked her passage. Ahead of her the corridor dead-ended at a tall durasteel door controlled by a bar of chilled iron. Jess threw herself at the bar, tugging, dragging her body's weight against it.
    The bar moved slightly.
    A dry-grass hiss, a rush of heat and, just one inch from Jessica's head, an armored steg harpoon buried itself in the steel door.
    "Wait up there, girl! Open that hatch, and the sea will take us both."
    Standing wide-legged, holding a primed steglauncher in two bloated hands, was an incredible figure.
    Hormones had gone wild in him; a rampaging thyroid had built a giant. His bristled head brushed the corridor