Unencumbered, Rhyme raced around the Web of Shadows with a haste that bordered on zaniness, bouncing and leaping as much as running, often zig-zagging in a pattern that would make no sense to anybody but herself… and possibly to Webmistress.
Rhyme had internalized everything she’d seen since entering the place: the way the rooms were arranged along the corridors, the locations of power junctions, computer terminals, and security and surveillance systems. Seeing walls blown out and guts exposed had been helpful there…Webmistress’s standards of modesty were higher for her headquarters than they were for her body.
Using the picture in her head, her massive intellect and her off-kilter intuition she extrapolated the information she needed. Largely avoiding detection, she’d broken into an armory, used a bazooka-like experimental plasma thrower she found there to break out of it into an adjoining corridor, where she made her way to a machine shop. She blasted a hole in the wall, found a large mallet with a head of hard rubber, blasted an exit hole in the far side, and discarded the energy weapon.
Webmistress couldn’t help spotting the explosions, and Rhyme made no attempt to hide herself while she was in the rooms. Her minions were already swarming in Rhyme’s general direction when she left the armory, and when Webmistress saw her leaving the shop she started to close the trap.
That was also the point where Rhyme abandoned all sense of stealth, singing loudly and off-key as she skipped and danced down the hallway:
“There once was a farmer who took a young miss in back of the barn where he gave her a — lecture on horses and eggs and told her that she had such beautiful — manners that suited a girl of her charms, a girl that he wanted to take in his — washing and ironing and then if she did they could get married and raise lots of…”
She sang louder and louder as the sound of heavy feet stomping in unison came closer and closer, her voice reaching a crescendo as she pirouetted past a corner, the mallet swinging out to catch the first of Webmistress’s conditioned lackeys in the face. The others quickly leveled their weapons… handheld energy rifles… at her, but they were slow to actually act on their own with a woman in their sights.
“…sweet vi-o-lence!” she sang as she lashed out again and again, smashing the hammer into heads, kneecaps, groins, and other soft and/or fragile places. “Sweeter than the roses, covered all over from head to toe, covered with sweet vi-o-lence!”
“You continue to disappoint me, Rhyme,” Webmistress said over the intercom when Rhyme was finished, standing panting and caked with blood.
“Well, it wasn’t my first choice, but The Beatles are still under copyright,” Rhyme said, shining a gore-slicked grin up at where she knew the nearest camera was hidden.
“You’ve had the run of my base for almost ten minutes, and what have you done? Loot a tool shop, bust down three walls…”
“Hey, give me credit… I think I at least dented the fourth,” Rhyme said. Another, larger group was coming up the side hallway, and more were emerging from before and behind her. She was soon surrounded on three sides by Webmistress’s mooks. “Eat your heart out, Hex Kittens. Actually, that’s not a bad idea, the next time I catch up to that paper tiger…”
“Your last words and you spend them raving nonsensically,” Webmistress said. “Assuming a trip through the fusion reactor’s enough to kill you, I’ll put a memorial plaque at the top of the waste chute that says you died as you lived.”
“Actually, there is one more thing I’d like to say,” Rhyme said.
“I’m not interested in hearing it,” Webmistress said.
“I wasn’t going to say it to you,” Rhyme said, and she whistled a set of three tones… a perfect imitation of the command code Webmistress had used earlier to make her “boys” tune out her voice. The thugs’s faces went slack and blank. Before Webmistress could register what exactly had happened, Rhyme hefted her mallet and began singing—and swinging—again. “The girl told the farmer that he’d better stop and she called her father and he called a — taxi and got there before very long ’cause someone was doing his little girl…”
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