The Madness of Kings

by Gene Doucette

  “Right, all right, kill the buzz, pollie,” the one called Cheeks said. She grabbed Baby by the elbow dragged the two of them away from the door.

  “Is there anyone else inside?” the captain asked.

  “Just us,” Baby said. “And my heavy as fuck credit purse, so you better be nicer to me.”

  “Shut up,” Llotho said. He stuck his head inside and looked around. “It’s empty. And no driver.”

  “Of course not, officer rude,” Baby said. “It’s an app-exo.”

  He looked at Quibb, who shook his head.

  “There’s no such thing,” Llotho said.

  “Wrong to you, bitches,” Baby said.

  “It’s new,” Cheeks said. Of the two of them, she seemed to have a dim appreciation of how to talk to people without sounding like a privileged asshole. “Proto-something.”

  “Prototype,” Quibb said. “It’s not street legal.”

  “We didn’t use the street!” Baby said, entirely missing the point.

  “Are we in trouble?” Cheeks asked.

  “That all depends, Quibb said. “It sounds like you didn’t expect to land here. Where did you expect to land?”

  Getting to the shuttle was probably the most disorienting experience of Makk’s life. In a world that made sense—one on a planet with its own gravity and all that—one went out to the surface in order to catch a vehicle whose function was to fly somewhere. One did not go down, and yet that’s precisely what they did.

  After formally arresting Kev and debating whether or not to cuff him on the spot—he decided not to—they called Jig into the room and notified him that they would be leaving. The butler bowed a couple of times, and then went and fetched Exty Demara.

  “Time to go?” she asked in a perky/friendly tone that seemed incredibly out of place under the circumstances.

  “I’m afraid so,” Kev said.

  “Nobody looks happy,” she said. “Guess it didn’t go well.”

  “It wasn’t a social call,” Makk said.

  “Sure. All right, follow me.”

  “Hang on,” Elicasta said. She slipped her headgear back on, and told it to wake up. Her blue light flickered to life. “Is this okay?”

  “I’m good with it,” Exty said. “You want me to call out the sights? We almost never get new people up here.”

  “Just get us to the shuttle,” Makk growled. He wasn’t looking, but thought ‘Casta probably didn’t like this answer very much. But given they were about two hours from having a rather loud fight with one another, Makk didn’t care all that much what she thought of his response.

  Exty led them further into the mansion, resisting the urge to point out various sights. They went past ballrooms, dining rooms, a couple of sitting rooms, bedrooms, and at least one sauna, before reaching a spiral staircase that only led down.

  “I said the shuttle,” Makk said. “Where are we going?”

  “To the shuttle,” Exty said. “Calm down, detective. Things are a little different up here.”

  She led them down four levels beneath the surface, coming to a stop at the doors of an elevator.

  Curiously, the elevator looked round.

  “This will take you the rest of the way,” Exty said. “Have a safe journey.”

  “Thank you, Exty,” Kev said.

  She kissed him on the cheek. “See you soon,” she muttered, before turning to the rest of them. “Elicasta, loved meeting you! Too bad we couldn’t hang for longer. I’ll look for your Streamcast.”

  “Thank you, Exty,” ‘Casta said, considerably more muted in her enthusiasm. “Hope I can come back sometime.”

  “And grumpy Detective Stidgeon,” Exty said. “You and I, we’ll definitely meet again.”

  “Will we.”

  “I can feel it. Five be with you and all.”

  She held open the door of the round elevator, and in they went. The floor of the interior was flat, but the walls were curved. It felt like standing inside a ball.

  “Are we bouncing down to the surface?” Makk asked as the door slid closed behind him.

  “This is to make the pole shift safer, and less nauseating,” Kev said. “It mostly works.”

  “Pole shift,” Makk repeated.

  “Imagine digging a hole through the center of Dib. Assuming there wasn’t a molten core. At just past center you would no longer be digging down in the direction of gravity, but digging up. In the same way, there’s a layer of zero gravity at the core of the Lys platform, pulling downward on both sides. Here it comes.”

  Kev grabbed a handrail, so Makk and Elicasta did the same. Suddenly, it felt like they were being thrown sideways, and for a quarter of a second Makk’s feet weren’t touching the floor. Then everything went back to normal again, except that now the elevator was clearly going up.

  “One more time, what was that?” Makk asked.

  “We turned,” Elicasta said. “We’re upside down now.”

  “That depends on one’s definition of up and down, Ms. Sangristy,” Kev said.

  Makk didn’t care to redefine up and down. He didn’t enjoy having it adjusted around him, certainly, and hoped to never experience that again.

  The elevator took them to the surface of the other side, where a shuttle was waiting for them.

  This part of the plan made Makk a little uncomfortable. Getting up by way of the Tether was a well-established approach to reaching Lys, but the private shuttle was a different matter completely. One of the things he asked Quibb about was who hired the shuttle, and would it be possible for the C.A.’s office to vet the driver, because otherwise they were relying on whoever Ba-Ugna Kev employed for the job.

  “Are you worried he’s going to splashdown in the Norton with you aboard?” Quibb asked.

  “It’s a concern,” Makk said.

  It wasn’t resolved to Makk’s satisfaction, but then nearly nothing about this round-trip was resolved to his satisfaction, so to that extent he was used to it.

  The shuttle felt like a regular widewagon, with one or two extra amenities inside. Like a bar. They climbed in, and Makk messaged Llotho to expect them shortly. That the message went through at all was something he probably needed someone like Ba-Ugna Kev to explain.

  Kev examined the bottles with disdain before pulling out one containing water.

  “Reentry always dehydrates me,” he said. “Is this either of your first times?”

  “I’ve never done anything like this before,” Elicasta said.

  “I have experience dropping out of the sky,” Makk said. “But not from this height.”

  The driver, who introduced herself as Akh-Muh-Vatj, told them to buckle in. “No cabin null-grav,” she said. “You’ll feel us fall out of the grip of the station, hit zero at the horizon, and then feel it again as the planet pulls us in. Best not to float away in the middle, yah? And if you gotta be sick, there are bags in the flap on the door. Also, try and hold it when we’re at zero, or it won’t go nowhere.”

  “Thank you, Akh-Muh-Vatj,” Makk said. “That’s the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s also the most terrible thing you ever seen,” she said.

  “Is it too late to take the Tether down instead?” Makk asked.

  “Come on,” Elicasta said with a thin smile, clutching his arm. “It’s an adventure.”

  “Here we go,” the driver said, and there they went. The shuttle lifted off the surface of Lys gently, but that was the last gentle thing to happen for a while.

  They shot up at a forty-five degree angle, reaching at least two G’s. Then they hit the horizon Akh-Muh-Vatj warned them about. She cut the engines, and they went from being propelled backwards with twice the force of Dib’s gravitational pull, to almost nothing. Worse, the shuttle twisted so that it was upside-down in respect to its prior orientation.

  Akh-Muh-Vatj got the nose of the ship in line with a particular azimuth and kicked up the engines again.

  “Yes,” Makk said, “an adventure. Pract
ically floating to the surface.”

  Makk could see Geo just disappearing over the horizon. Had they headed straight down, they’d probably end up on the coast of Unak.

  Akh-Muh-Vatj was gunning the engines to catch up to the continent before it spun away underneath them. Makk wondered at what point it made more sense to go the other way around to reach Inimata instead. It would probably put them in the air over Wivvol—a definite negative for a number of reasons, one being that they had their own space program and another being that Wivvol was run by crazy people.

  Things got a lot smoother once they made it out of the upper atmosphere. In fact, it felt a lot like being in a regular aero-car, only the car was moving about ten times faster than it should be.

  He decided right then that regular aero-cars weren’t so bad after all.

  They rode down mostly in silence. Either Kev had sobered up to the idea that he was about to be taken to a jail cell—however briefly—or he was wary of revisiting their earlier conversation with Elicasta’s gear active and the driver in earshot. ‘Casta, whose hand on Makk’s arm kept clenching at odd moments, was no doubt working through the best way to convince Makk to let her destroy his career.

  Makk mostly just wanted to feel a planet under his feet again.

  Velon shortly came into view. By his watch it had taken them a little less than twenty minutes to get this far from the planet-facing surface of Lys, which seemed hardly possible regardless of their current speed.

  The airport was coming up on the left. It sat at the edge of the city near the southern coast, so regular wingplanes could descend without passing directly over Velon. (It also kept the planes away from the Tether. The fear that one might hit it on a foggy night was ingrained deeply in every Velonian.)

  Akh-Muh-Vatj didn’t appear to be heading toward the airfield.

  “Hey,” Makk said. “Shouldn’t you be breaking left?”

  “it’s fine,” she said.

  “What do you mean it’s fine. I can see the airport, and it isn’t in the direction you’re heading.”

  “It’s fine. I gotta burn off some momentum. Let me fly.”

  Kev looked out the window, then at Makk.

  “This isn’t right,” Kev said. “I’ve made this approach before.”

  “Akh-Muh-Vatj,” Makk said. “Where are you putting us down?”

  “I told you, it’s fine.”

  “Are you crossing us, Ba-Ugna?” Makk asked.

  “I’m not, I swear to you. I’m good to my word.”

  Makk drew his gun, and pointed it at the driver’s head.

  “I’m going to ask you again,” he said. “Where are you putting us down?”

  “What are you crazy?” she exclaimed. “Charter’s not for the airport. Get that out of my face unless you just learned how to pilot. I’ll put us down where I’ve been hired to put us down; yell at the people on the ground. I go where I’m paid.”

  “The flight plan is wrong,” Makk said.

  “That is not my problem. Like I said, take it up with the ground when you get there.”

  “Where are we landing, if not the airport pad,” Kev asked.

  “Aux pad seventeen,” Akh-Muh-Vatj said.

  “Which is where?”

  “I’d give you the coordinates, but I have to pay attention or we’re not landing anywhere in one piece. Just relax, these errors happen all the time. You land, you hire a car, it takes you where you need to go.”

  “A private pad?” Makk asked.

  The driver shrugged.

  Elicasta had been looking out the window the whole time, while muttering to her rig.

  “We just sailed over the city,” she said. “Heading north, other side of Norg Hill. I’m looking for markers, may be able to pin the property. Looks like a long cab ride back.”

  “There’s no public airfield directly north of Norg Hill,” Kev said. “If this is a private pad, I hope you have more than the gun in your hand, detective.”

  “Yeah, I got a repeating pulse cannon in my shoe. What are we talking about?”

  “Orsinate is on the other side of Palavin quarter.”

  “I know. I’ve driven through it a few times. So what?”

  The north end of Palavin was also the city limits, Orsinate, an ugly township with little going for it other than cheap real estate, was on the other side. About three quarters of the town was industrial buildout for companies that needed proximate access to Inimata but found that not paying exorbitantly for the privilege was in their best interests.

  “There’s a server farm in Orsinate,” Kev said. “I assume you know what that is.”

  “What kind of server farm?” Elicasta asked.

  “The kind you’re thinking of,” Kev said. “Storage for data from liquid quantum computing stations. It’s fusion powered and on an independent loop, which is for the best because otherwise it would drain the city. It’s the sort of place that needs to exist in order to make virtual currency feasible. I think he has about fifteen of them, but this one was the first.”

  “Please tell me we’re not talking about Calcut Linus,” Makk said.

  “The facility’s mostly dark, but…yes, right over there. The cooling tower is lit.”

  He pointed out the window at something that looked like a lighthouse in need of a coastline. They were circling it.

  Makk’s voicer thrummed. It was Captain Llotho.

  “Makk, where the hell are you?” he asked.

  “Somewhere in Orsinate,” Makk said. “I think we’re in trouble.”

  “I think you’re right. We’ve got a couple of party girls on the landing pad here, said they were on their way to a private party. Guess who’s throwing it?”

  “Calcut Linus.”

  “None other. They’re a little hazy on the party’s location.”

  “So am I. Like I said, Orsinate. Activate the beacon in my voicer and send everyone you have.” He looked at Elicasta. “Are you active right now?”

  “Recording, not Streaming.”

  “Go live,” he said, “right now.”

  “If I keep live Streaming snuff risk vids, they’re gonna start expecting it all the time,” she said.

  “’Casta…”

  “Kidding. Gimme a sec.”

  “Yordon,” Makk said, “Jump on ‘Casta’s feed for updates. We have to go.”

  The ship curled around the cooling tower five or six times on its way to a lit landing pad. He could see a wall about fifty maders in one direction and a series of low, flat buildings in the other direction. A tent was set up next to the landing pad that hid the identities of whoever was waiting for them.

  Elicasta began her preamble.

  “Hey babes, it’s your girl Elicasta, live and in trouble! I’m here with everyone’s favorite homicide detective, Makk Stidgeon, and none other than the most wanted man in Velon county himself, Ba-Ugna Kev!”

  Makk became acutely aware that he was now on vid, being Streamed to however many millions Elicasta’s sub base was up to now. He couldn’t decide if the anxiety of being on optical was worse than the anxiety of being about to die.

  Kev didn’t look any more comfortable even though he had a lot more experience with the Stream.

  “How’d I end up here?” she asked. “More story than time, real, we’re already cutting to the next scene. The exo we’re in’s been rerouted to a Stream farm in Orsinate, my loves. We’re splashing a bad sitch, and your girl might not make it out.”

  She slapped the side of her rig, which was apparently where the mute button was hidden.

  “What’s the name of this place?” she asked Ba-Ugna.

  “B-Mark Farm,” Kev said.

  She hit the mute button again.

  “Any subs out there with a setup fronting B-Mark Farm, come on by. Your girl could use some eyewits…I think I lost it.”

  “Lost what?” Makk asked.

  “My connect to the Stream.”

  “We’re touching down,” Kev said. He was look
ing at the walls surrounding them.

  The ship rocked as it made contact with the pad. Makk shifted to the side window to see who was waiting for them beneath the tent.

  It was Calcut all right, standing there with the kind of smug expression you could practically feel even at a distance. Behind him was the two guys Makk remembered not-fondly as breaking a couple of his ribs and another four goons who looked like they were produced in the same factory. There was also a limousine and a widewagon parked under the tent.

  It didn’t look like there were any other people in the facility. Either server farms didn’t need a lot of employees, or Calcut had cleared the place out ahead of time.

  As soon as the landing runners touched the ground, a red locked light went on over the door.

  “Please do not attempt to exit the vehicle until the light has gone out,” Akh-Muh-Vatj said, an evidently rote spiel that seemed oddly out-of-place since none of them had any intention of exiting the exo-vehicle. “The cooling will take about a minute.”

  “How long will it take to get us back in the air again?” Makk asked.

  “It’s a one-way trip, mister. My night is over.”

  “Our lives are about to be over,” Makk said.

  “My feed’s definitely cut,” Elicasta said.

  Makk turned to look; her blue light was still on.

  “Your rig thinks you’re still broadcasting,” he said.

  “It’s not getting out. A suppressor must have kicked in as soon as we dropped below the wall. I’m getting blowback.”

  “Does that mean your subs aren’t seeing this right now?” Makk asked, because he didn’t understand the words she was using.

  “That’s what it means.”

  Kev pointed to the edge of the wall. There was razor wire along the top, which Makk recognized easily enough. Ba-Ugna appeared to find something else interesting.

  “Security measure,” he said. “Those ports at the top disrupt all airwire in or out. Calcut wants to make sure nobody on the Stream can port in directly. I’m guessing the farm is hardlined to an underground cable leading to a transmit station.”

  Makk was a little curious about why all of that had to be so, because he wasn’t at all clear on what the facility did or what could be so valuable about it that it needed a ten mader wall with razor wire and airwire disruption technology. He also knew he wasn’t likely to have the time to ask anyone for more details.