The Centauri Device (7 page)

'Oh' — drawing the syllable right out and clicking her tongue with huge enjoyment — 'oh, but you've done it now. If only you'd been a bit sensible about it all, lad. I could have saved you all this — '

She took his arm in a steely possessive grip. The Fleet executioners shifted unobtrusively into a pattern of maximum security, placing themselves on likely lines of fire, their hard eyes flickering to and fro across Truck before going to sweep the misty intersection at the end of the block, the slick, damp rooftops. The sleet fell faster, soft and wet. 'You and I are going to have a quiet talk, laddie, somewhere nice and dry.' She laughed. 'A quiet talk!' she repeated loudly, grinning round at the marksmen.

Abruptly, one of them let out a high-pitched cry, raucous and mechanical. He fluttered his fingers rapidly in front of his eyes to adjust the polarization of his contact lenses, and began firing off his weapon. Bolts flared up into the sleet, vanished utterly. At the intersection, gray shapes shifted jerkily in the murk.

General Gaw shoved Truck powerfully away from her and screamed, 'Get him back in there, Nodes, get him back — !' She seated the yellow helmet like a bulbous growth on her head, spun away. 'Well talk later, Truck, when I've squashed these rats.'

As she vanished into the gloom a great, groaning concussion shook the street, filling the air with bits of floating paper and plastic and dust.

Under the Snort with the King of the Moment

For an instant, the sleet fell as mud, bellying like a curtain in a storm wind as the wave front of the explosion pushed it down the conduit of the street. Track staggered back toward the doors of West Central with his knees quivering and his hair wrapped round his face (the cilia of some wet friendly animal, tickling his eyes and filling his mouth). Above him, the concrete symbol of hinterland justice broke up into powder and stones and fell like a waterfall, the globes shattered, the balance dropping away, the grasping hand dissolved.

'Sodding hell!'

He stared up at it, terrified,

Lumps of it bruised his shoulders, beat him coughing to the floor. Nodes dragged him into the lobby, pushed him headlong into the cool plastic floor where he lay trying to ignore his soaking wet trousers. Something burned its way through the glass and battered itself into a glowing smear on the further wall, hissing furiously. The drunken spacer surfaced from some maudlin contemplation of his confinement, stared wildly about him. He shouted, 'Christ, skipper, Number Five's dropped its load again!' blinked enormously, and rolled under his bench.

Truck twisted round to get a look at the street. Visibility was a dead loss. Engines raced as the Fleet tried to get its vehicles out from under; patched with a dermatitis of half-melted sleet, they maneuvered in blunt confusion, booming and roaring. General Gaw was invisible in the murk, but he could hear her voice raised in anger. Slow red bolides arced through the weather to a common vanishing point, and the reaction rifles coughed and choked like sick old men.

'Who the hell is that out there?' he demanded of Nodes.

The IWG man gave it consideration, his tired eyes resting on the commotion outside. 'I'd say that's a politically naïve question even from you,' he decided. His hands discovered a small Chambers pistol in one of his pockets. He pointed it at Track. 'I think we'd be safer away from here, don't you, John?'

As they backed cautiously out of the lobby, the spacer stirred beneath his bench. Down in the abused recesses of his skull some vestige of a martial emotion prodded his bruised brain.

He raised a wavering contralto and, after a couple of false starts, assayed a passage from the Finnsburg fragment:

' "Each man made his private piece with Reagan/And, at a signal, released/Heat seekers, side winders, desiccant, decorticant, defoliant;/They ran out their salvaged disrupter grids,/Swallowed their anti-sympathy pills,/Hoping for a sight of the enemy." '

His delivery was round and
tremolando
; he drew great sobbing breaths between the lines and beat out the intervals with his horny hand. Pleased with the acoustics of West Central, he began on 'Salute the Fleet!' — guttered into a gloomy silence three bars in.

'God bless you, bos'n,' he called after Truck. He belched, gazed disconsolately round the flickering, vacant lobby. 'You're a sterner man than I am!'

Later, Truck said, 'I think we're — ' But then, he owed IWG nothing. He shuffled along, feeling dismal and exposed, while Nodes pursued a steadily downward course, into the chilly and echoic deep-detention levels where nobody had bothered to plaster the walls. Every three or four minutes, a fresh explosion — perceptible here only as a sustained vibration in the soles of the feet — shook the peripheries of the building.

Condensation dripped from the expansion joints in the ceilings, growing milky nubs of mineral, and seeped across the sour untreated floors. It was a warren of right angles: clusters of small-bore pipes followed the passages, faithfully, like giant circuitry; dust furred the ventilators. Peculiar underground winds whistled aimlessly in the stairwells. Nodes avoided the elevators, 'in case of power failure, John.'

'Look, I think we're being followed,' Truck admitted finally. The soft whisper of feet — receding feathery echoes, hesitant, spasmodic — had unnerved him.

The warren opened out into an underground motor pool, a wistful gray light leaking down its access ramp. It was empty but for a few Port Authority five-tonners, jacked up and incomplete. Old rags and bits of paper blew around the oily floor and mere were little mounds of dust in the corners.

'That would be a pity, John,' said Nodes absently, working his way round the walls, inspecting each vehicle in turn. He stopped, rubbed at a smear of oil on his gun hand with his other thumb (the Chambers threatened erratically: a support pier; a pile of sixty-inch wheels; and a notice which read DISCIPLINARY ACTION WILL BE TAKEN AGAINST OFFICERS CAUGHT — the rest was grimy and illegible). 'None of these work, you see.'

He stared up the ramp. 'You may not be much use to the General in other hands. In those circumstances, I suspect you would be a definite danger to security.'

'
What
other hands? Come on, Nodes!'

'Frankly, John, I have orders to kill you if that looks likely.' Nodes's eyes became interested in the stairwell that had dropped them into the pool. Truck backed off rapidly; he didn't know whether it was fear or repugnance; he felt entitled to either, but outrage looked like eclipsing them both.

'I've had it with you, Nodes! I'm sick of being "John"! I'm sick of being
it
!' He waved his arms about. Evaporating sweat chilled his skin. 'My God, you lot crawl out of your holes and turn the entire Galaxy into an asylum. Whose hands?' He wiped the hair out of his eyes. 'And as for General bleeding Gaw's bleeding "sentient bomb" — '

Nodes swung on him, alert and tense. The old-animal eyes focused properly on Truck for the first time since he had entered the interrogation cell.

'Don't go on,' he said quietly. 'That is information classified above my level, and I'm not prepared to hear it.' He made a most human gesture with his free hand. 'You can only damage us both by giving information I'm not cleared to hear. I suggest we — '

A scrape of bootsoles like the sound of bandages tearing.

A shadowy figure in the stairwell.

Nodes turned far too late.

His Chambers blew a pit in the concrete at his feet; splashback set his trouser-legs on fire.

He tangoed back, trying to shake both legs at once, looking horrified. Fizzing and moaning like an angry cat — like Tiny Skeffern's Fender — a five millimeter shell took him full in the chest and began to burn its way in. He fell on his back, crying 'Shoot! Oh, shoot!' trying to get a final desperate message to his fingers. The figure on the stairwell cackled softly, its feet scraping like torn cloth, like butter muslin, faint destroyed, on it came.

Nodes emptied the reaction pistol at the ceiling, attempting to get Truck. Down on one knee over the maimed ribcage, choking on the stink and smoke, Truck took it gently away from him and tossed it across the garage. It clattered and rang. Nodes groaned, put his fingers in the soft wet edge of his atrocious wound. 'I have an odd blood-group, Mary,' he said clearly. 'Oh Jesus Mother Christ.'

'You needn't have done that,' accused Truck, getting reluctantly to his feet 'I swear you all take pleasure from it.'

The King chuckled faintly. He was wearing a white leather jumpsuit of peculiar cut, tight round the crotch and armpits, hanging loosely off his old frame elsewhere. His hands were quite steady, puncture marks standing up among the hairs on their backs, sore scarlet against the gray junk grime deep in the very cells of his wrinkled pachydermic skin.

'Ingenuousness spoils the Moment, Captain Truck,' he whispered. 'It can't be your cynical amorality they all want you for. Are you out of your wits?'

He scuttled off like a lizard surprised on a warm brick, over to a dark corner, where he scrabbled in the dust on the floor. A section of the wall above him creaked and slid away. His decaying voice rattled across the garage to John Truck (puzzled and hurt and never noted for his eager intellect), two sticks rubbing in a dry wind:

'I prepared long ago for some much eventuality — I sensed a similar Moment whispering back to me across the years — H-lines alive with meaningless programs. Escape all situations. Everything comes to me beneath the rocket-mail pits, Captain — I — ' He raised his voice. 'Come! Come in, now, my friends! You are back in the domain of the King, and you can come to no more harm!'

And he vanished inside.

From the stairwell came a timid susurrus of movement. White faces peeped into the motor pool, retreated, tasting the air this way and that. Giggling and murmuring in hushed but rising tones, joking at last, their confidence growing by the second, the King's guests issued from their brief captivity in the West Central warren, their gauzy sleeves fluttering nervously at every disturbance of the air.

Truck stood like a mad stone over the fuming corpse, and they fled past him, giving him not a second glance, their lips parted, their eyes bright. The longest-running party in the history of the universe disappeared into the earth. He stared inarticulately after it. He thrust his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders.

Other, harsher footsteps rang in the corridors above — other voices, mechanical and raucous. He shook his head over the dead man. He ran.

The party having streamed on ahead of him, bent on the bright lights and the delicacies of the cutting-room floor (among which, presumably, might be numbered one hundred Denebian mainliners sweating out their unnamed obligation to the King), Chalice Veronica was alone behind his secret door. His reptilian, scrawny hand urged Truck through the gap; he cocked his head and listened; he threw the steel lever that fastened the bolthole.

'Run for it, Captain!' he hissed. 'The invading faction has been embarrassed; they are preparing a final stand.' And he made off down a low, ill-lighted tunnel. Crouching and lurching, scraping the top of his head on ancient stinking brick, his feet reluctant in two inches of evil water, Truck followed.

They had made perhaps four hundred yards from the motor pool when the floor sank a foot and the bolthole cleared its throat behind them with a vast, bellowing cough. Dust stormed about them, the lights went out, and they clung together in the dark, staggering about to keep their balance like practitioners of a strange vice. Locked in that unpleasant embrace, the King's sour old junk-breath in his nostrils, Truck felt the earth creep and shift in the dark. He was deafened, there was foul grit in his eyes and in his mouth.

After millennia, or perhaps seconds, the subsidence stabilized. Track disengaged himself from the King's arms, spat, and rubbed his eyes.

'The whole bloody Snort's come down on top of ns,' he suggested.

Veronica bared his yellow teeth in the gloom.

'I don't think so, Captain. But someone — inadvertently, perhaps — has made sure that West Central won't hold spacers for some time to come, and we seem to be safe for the Moment. Look!'

At the further end of the tunnel, a blue light glowed. They walked toward it, brushing ineffectively at the filth on their clothes.

'If s a pusher's Galaxy, Captain Truck,' said the King complacently, eating white iced cakes and applying the traditional tourniquet to his upper arm with a stained silk necktie four centuries old.

The Party ebbed and flowed desultorily around them like a thick, landlocked sea as they sat in quaint inflatable chairs (vinyl gone yellow as a junkie's face with age, its transparency clouded) beneath the Renfield Street silos.

'Each in our own way, IWG and UASR, myself, even poor mad Grishkin and the masters of his idiotic religion, we keep people from remembering that they hurt, or that they are made puzzled and miserable by the immensity of the Galaxy, the irreversibility of their own humanity. It isn't a state that can last of course — ' He snickered at himself, licked pale crumbs from his blue, anoxic lips. 'Still, we never close, Captain. We make you feel nice.'

Fat worms of cable ran the floor of the abandoned cistern — one of the four that served Veronica's trade — to power the drying plants and chemical vats; and batteries of floodlights slung fifty feet up in a network of girders poured out a devastating heat. The King's court moved slowly and amiably, drenched with warmth, sleepy with it; the party had become introspective, like a frog in the sun.

'A pusher's market, and you're a prime commodity now. Alice Gaw needs you, so the Arabs must have you — oh, yes! Don't avoid the issue, Captain! Why else would Gadaffi ben Barka, nobody's fool and an astute commando, lead an absurd strike on an obsolete prison in a cold country? He's innovative, but not given to adventures.'

Truck was appalled by the speed of the King's intelligence operation. Eighteen hours had passed since the escape from West Central, and he had slept most of them away. Now he sucked on a knickerbocker glory, sweating a little, and meditated on price — the King being the King and information being another pusher's market.