Sea of Silver Light (37 page)

She realized she was clutching at the lighter and pulled it out of her thin garment. It was useless, but even so she was desperate to hear a voice, any voice. She suddenly couldn't imagine what danger she had thought so great that she had avoided using it before.

"Hello, M–Martine, a–a–anyone?" Fear was taking her breath; she could barely speak. "Is someone listening? Please, answer me?" Silence—even the spectral searchers had fallen still. As she tried the command sequence again, all Renie could see was swirling mist, gray tree-shadows. "Martine? I heard you before—can you hear me now?"

The voice that came back was diminished but surprisingly clear, so much so that Renie felt a moment of pointless hope, as though her friends might only be a few meters distant, might suddenly come rushing out of the fog to rescue her.
"Renie? Is that you? Renie? We hear you. Talk to us."

"Jesus Mercy," Renie said quietly. "It's you, Martine." She struggled for composure—it was almost certain her friends could do nothing for her now. She must tell them what she could, tell them what she had seen and experienced, "We never left the mountain," she began. "We woke up and you were gone. We're in what must be the White Ocean the others talked about. But I've lost !Xabbu and Sam and now I'm lost, too."

". . .
Can't understand you very well,"
Martine replied.
"Where are you exactly?"

She was nowhere. She was in the realms of terror. She had to force herself to remember what she had thought about so long. "I think . . . oh, God, I think we're in the heart of the system." The tears started again. "But I'm in trouble—bad trouble. . . !"

Something crackled in the branches behind her. Renie leaped in startled terror and dropped the lighter.

Second:

"Boys and girls come out to play.

The moon is shining as bright as day.

Leave your supper and leave your sleep,

And join your playfellows in the street."

-Traditional

CHAPTER 11

NETFEED/NEWS: Club Patrons Get Mother Goosed

(visual: advertisement for Limousine)

VO: Visitors to the virtual adults-only club Limousine got a surprise when service was interrupted for almost an hour by what some users suggest was a disguised or artificial voice reciting nursery rhymes.

(visual: anonymated Limousine customer)

CUSTOMER: "Yeah, it sounds funny, but really it was pretty gruesome. I mean, it didn't sound . . . normal."

VO: Happy Juggler, the corporation that owns Limousine and several other online clubs, call it "just the most recent in a series of irritating pranks."

(visual: Jean-Pierre Michaux, HJN Corporation spokesperson)

MICHAUX: "It prevented us delivering service in our most productive time slots, and also, let's face it, half our users are fathers and even some mothers who've finally put the kids to bed and are hoping for a little diversion and relaxation. Nobody in that situation wants to have to sit and listen to more damn nursery rhymes."

Jeremiah stacked the last vacuum bag and stood surveying his handiwork. It wasn't quite a kitchen—who was he fooling, it was nothing like a kitchen—but it would have to do. Piles of cans, boxes, and bags of rations, several plastic jugs of water, the single working portable halogen ring he'd salvaged from one of the upstairs common rooms, a kettle, and about three weeks' supply—if they were stingy with it—of perhaps the most precious commodity of all, instant coffee. Trapped in the underground base without any of the real stuff, he had long since taught himself to drink the self-heating swill without gagging, and had even begun to look forward to his morning cup. Now he was even more anxious to preserve a few last rituals of normality.

He squinted at his makeshift larder, which filled most of an upright metal cabinet. All in all, it would serve. And if they were to be trapped down in this lowest level so long the coffee ran out, well, then perhaps the thugs upstairs wouldn't seem such a bad alternative.

He couldn't even make himself smile. He checked the batteries in his flashlight, firmed up the corners of one of his stacks, and stood.

Good Lord, I am a walking stereotype. Under siege, fighting for our lives, and who promptly takes over the kitchen as mother-elect?

He made his way around the circular walkway to the control consoles where Del Ray sat frowning at the screen like a literary critic forced to review cheap genre fiction. Long Joseph lurked sullenly behind him, two squeeze bottles of wine sitting on the table. Jeremiah felt a moment of actual pity for the man. If Jeremiah himself was feeling miserable about having to ration several weeks' worth of coffee, imagine how Joseph must feel about having to make a day's worth or less of his usual poison last for God alone knew how long?

"How is it going?" he asked.

Del Ray shrugged. "I can't get the security monitors to work. They should, but they don't. I warned you, this is not really my area of expertise. How's your end?"

"As good as it's going to get." Jeremiah pulled out one of the swivel chairs and sat down. "I wish we'd had that old fellow Singh get those cameras all running when we had the chance. But who knew we'd need them?"

"Maybe your friend Sellars will call back," said Del Ray, but he didn't sound like he believed it. He pushed one of the buttons on the console, then gave it a frustrated whack. "Maybe he can do something about this disaster."

"My Renie was here, she would have that wired up before you can jump and turn around," Long Joseph said suddenly. "She know all that stuff. Has a degree from the university and all."

Del Ray glowered, but it quirked unexpectedly into a tiny smile. "Yes, she would. And she'd get a lot of pleasure cleaning up the mess I've made with it and telling me about it."

"She would. She is one smart girl. Ought to be, with all that money for her education."

Del Ray's smile widened a bit as he met Jeremiah's gaze.
Education she paid for herself, if I remember correctly,
Jeremiah thought. He remembered Renie talking about her years of bondage to the university dining hall.

"Hang on a moment," he said, turning to Joseph. "Did I hear correctly? Were you bragging about Renie?"

"What do you mean, bragging?" Joseph asked suspiciously.

"I mean, acting like you're actually proud of her?"

The older man scowled. "Proud of her? 'Course I am proud of her. She is a smart girl, like her mama was."

Jeremiah almost shook his head in wonderment. He wondered if the man had ever said anything like that when Renie was around to hear it, instead of waiting until she was encased in plasmodal gel in the depths of a fibramic casket. Somehow he doubted it.

"Damn." Del Ray pushed his chair back from the console. "I give up. I can't fix it. This waiting is making me crazy. I thought that at least if we could see what they're doing up there, instead of just sitting here. . . ."

"You don't want all those cameras," Joseph growled. "That will do no good against bad men like those. I told you, we should be finding guns to shoot those piglockers with."

Jeremiah grunted in exasperation. "There
aren't
any guns. You know that already. Nobody's going to decommission a military base and leave the guns lying around."

Joseph hooked a thumb toward Del Ray, who was slumped in his chair, staring up at the ceiling of the vast underground chamber as though trying to do the work of the inactive monitors by himself. "
He
have a gun. I told you, you should give that gun to me. You didn't see him, waving it around, all in a fright, hand so sweaty I thought he might shoot my head off just by accident."

"Not this again," Jeremiah moaned.

"I'm just telling you! I don't think this mother's boy ever fired a gun at all! I was in the Defense Force, you know."

"Oh, yes," said Del Ray, eyes still closed, "I'm sure you shot a lot of other people's chickens after you and your mates had downed a few." He rubbed at his face. "Even if it wasn't hand-coded for me, you'd be the
last
person I'd. . . . "

The sudden silence was strange. Jeremiah was just about to ask Del Ray if he was all right when the young man abruptly sat upright in his chair, eyes wide.

"Oh my God," he said. "Oh my God!"

"What is it?" Jeremiah asked.

"The gun!" Del Ray grabbed at his hair as though he would pull it from his scalp. "The gun! It's in my jacket pocket!"

"So?"

"I left it upstairs! When I was stacking water bottles yesterday. I was hot. I took the damn thing off, then when I got downstairs you asked me about the cameras, and . . . shit!" He stood up, his hand still on his head as though he was afraid it might otherwise tumble from his shoulders.

"See. . . ?" Joseph began, unable to disguise his pleased tone, but Jeremiah rounded on him.

"Don't say anything." He turned back to Del Ray. "Where is it? The kitchen?"

Del Ray nodded miserably.

"Do we really need it?" Jeremiah looked around. "I mean, once they are down here, is it any real use to us?"

"Is it any real use?" Del Ray stared at him. "What if they get in here? Are we going to throw bags of flour at them? We need every advantage we have. I have to go get it."

"You can't. We closed off the elevator—shut those armored security doors like Sellars told us to do. There's no other way up. And we are not going to take the chance of opening them again."

Del Ray stood looking at the floor for a moment, then straightened, some of the panic suddenly gone from his face. "Hold on. I don't think I left it in the kitchen after all. I think I just left it outside the elevator on the top floor of our part of the base. I stored most of the water bottles and the extra generator up there, and I think that's where I took my jacket off."

"I will get it," said Long Joseph brightly, but both men turned on him.

"Shut up."

"Yes, shut up, Joseph."

Del Ray started off toward the stairs. "It's too bad we had to seal off the elevator at both ends—it would be nice if we could keep it to use just down here for dragging stuff up and down."

"Too noisy," Jeremiah called after him. "If we are lucky, they won't even know there are more rooms down here." He suddenly realized how loud his voice was.

Too noisy, you say, and listen to you! What if they're up there with stethoscopes or something, listening to the floor, looking for us. . . .

The idea of the faceless mercenaries—Jeremiah alone of the three had not seen them—crawling along the floor, tapping on the concrete like woodpeckers, was deeply disturbing.

We don't even know they're inside,
he told himself.
Maybe they can't get through that big front door, like a bank's vault. It took Renie and her hacker friends at least this long to get it open.

Still, the vision would not go away. He looked at Joseph, who was sucking a measured amount of Mountain Rose with a face full of wounded dignity, and decided he had better find something with which to keep himself occupied.

Del Ray had levered open the console and its array of security monitors, revealing a mare's nest of cables that looked like something from an ancient telephone switchboard. Jeremiah sat in the chair the younger man had vacated and meditatively flicked switches. The console had power—all the monitor screens had little red lights glowing beneath them—but the screens themselves were blackly empty.

Joseph was right. If Renie was here she'd have this running in a few minutes.

He tugged at the bundle of cables. All but a few were connected. He took one of those that wasn't and tried it in a few of the open slots, but nothing changed. A second provided nothing different, but as he pulled up the third another came tangled with it, and as it brushed something in the board, the screens momentarily hiccuped with light, then went black again.

Excited, Jeremiah pulled the end of the trailing cable free and began to touch it to the open connections in succession. Suddenly the monitors jumped into life again. Jeremiah attached the cable, warm with pride. Now they could see outside their bunker. They were no longer forced to wait blindly.

Before he could tell Long Joseph of his triumph, something caught Jeremiah's attention. One of the monitors displayed a rectangle of trees and scrub brush, framed by blackness. Puzzled, he stared at it for long moments before he realized what he was seeing.

It was the base's massive front gate, seen from a camera just inside. The gate was open.

Three loud cracks came from somewhere above Jeremiah's head. Long Joseph leaped up, swearing, so startled that he dropped his squeeze bottle of wine to the floor. Jeremiah's skin turned cold.

"Del Ray!" he shouted. "Del Ray, is that you?"

For once Joseph kept his mouth shut as they both listened. Nothing came to them but the echo of Jeremiah's own voice.

"Is he shooting that gun?" asked Joseph in a hoarse, nervous whisper. "Or someone shooting at him?"