“I didn’t shoot anybody!” Jessica exclaimed. “I was kidnapped.”
“That would take time to explain, and they might not believe you. The Chinese security services had also infiltrated New Frontiers, so they would likely know about you and be interested as well,” Alpha said. “You would be imprisoned and interrogated, almost certainly.”
Smoke looked at her, nodding his head. “She’s right,” he said. “It’s better if you stay here.”
Jessica groaned and leaned forward to put her head on the table.
“I hate to interrupt,” Alpha said. “But the woman Murnaballa is approaching. She is likely the delegate you requested.”
“Right,” Smoke said. “Murn.” He frowned. “They would send her.” He stood up, looking down at Jessica. “You should hear this.”
“Fuck off,” she said, from under her folded arms. But she sat up and glared at him. “You dragged me into this.”
“Blame Silver,” he said. “I saved you from a prison cell.”
“What the fuck is this place?” she said, voice dripping with acid. “It’s just nicer.”
“Yes,” he said. “It is nicer. Cling to that.”
He turned and went to the door. Jessica heard him opening it, and greeting the woman who entered. Jessica couldn’t help herself, some combination of ingrained manners and curiosity roused her. She stood and walked into the open seating area.
“Murnaballa,” Smoke said, “this is Jessica. She is from the thread I most recently returned from.” He paused. “She can understand what you say but can’t speak Talush.” He smiled at her. “Please, let’s sit down. Be at ease.”
The young blonde’s eyes went wide when she looked at Jessica. “She looks like you called me a vampire or a zombie,” he said.
He inclined his head to her, raising a finger to the young woman. “Nobody’s ever come from other threads.” He looked at her. “You’re unique.”
Jessica pondered this, while she looked Murnaballa over. The woman was young, early twenties at best. Long, blonde curls fell past her shoulders. She wore a light blue gown with a black band at the collar. Jessica watched as she presented Smoke with a wand of polished black wood, wrapped with a silver cord and tipped with a silver finial.
“A token of my authority to delegate,” she said. Jessica jerked as she realized she could understand the young woman’s speech. Smoke took the wand and looked at it, frowning.
“This implies some sort of tradition of negotiation,” he said, raising an eyebrow to Murn. “We both know the Center doesn’t have any such tradition.”
Murn looked flustered, Jessica thought, looking from Smoke to her. “I…” she sighed. “They gave me this.”
“It has no mechanisms,” Alpha said quietly in her ear. Smoke nodded. “Wooden shaft, coiled with decorative wire and a polished sphere of metal. It’s just window dressing.”
“Why do they play these games?” Smoke asked Murn, tossing the stick onto the low table between them. He sighed. “Let’s begin again,” he smiled. “You’re here to negotiate.”
Murn glanced at Jessica. “Should she be here?” She turned hastily to Jessica. “I mean no offense, Lady.”
“I’m not offended. Please relax about it,” Jessica said, trying to keep her frustration out of her voice. “I’ll just be over here, listening. Ignore me.”
Murn nodded, and smiled shyly at her. Then she took a deep breath. “The Center is open to negotiate with you,” she said. “They wish to know more of your plans.”
Smoke considered this. “This place is thick with plans,” he said. “Mine are plain enough. I’m going to get to the bottom of this Tangle. The women Silver and Gold are at the center of this, so I’m looking for them.”
Murn shook her head. “I don’t know who that is,” she said, plainly confused, Jessica thought.
Smoke held up a finger. “I know you don’t,” he said. “So you’ll have to convey that to them when you leave here.” He looked at her. “There isn’t much to negotiate. I found an active Mind, and contacted it. This was the Work, but they got more than they bargained for, didn’t they?”
Murn looked confused. “I will tell them,” she said. “But surely there must be something more you desire.” She leaned forward slightly, looking at him expectantly.
Jessica watched, impassive, but inwardly rolled her eyes. This girl was swimming in a deep ocean, she thought, and she doesn’t know it.
But Smoke smiled kindly at her. “I desire a completion, Murnaballa.” He held his hands together, fingers interlaced. “There is a knot in the universe, and the more we look at it, the more convinced we are that it’s dangerous. It’s a threat. To the Center, to the world-threads that are caught up in it, and maybe to all of them.” He sighed. “Your masters could help me,” he said, “but they choose to resist.”
“They are wise,” Murn said. “Surely they know this.”
“If they do,” he said, “they are too timid. This needs resolution. They’ve known about this for a long, long time.”
Murn was silent. She glanced at Jessica. “What we spoke of before…” she said quietly. “This place is screened from them?”
“Yes,” Smoke said, nodding emphatically. “They can’t hear what you say.”
She let out a shuddering sigh. “I don’t know why they picked me for this,” she said. “Grandmother said to find out what you wanted.”
I have a good idea why they picked you, girlie, Jessica thought to herself.
Murn looked up at him, her eyes glistening with barely restrained tears. “I really don’t know what they want.”
“They want me dead,” Smoke told her. “They want control back, so they can continue their ineffectual study of the universe.” He made a flat, chopping gesture with one hand. “I want something different.”
“Can they kill you?” she asked, hand to her mouth. She was clearly horrified at the thought, Jessica noted. Maybe this is more than just a crush.
“If they could,” Smoke said absently, “I’d be dead already.” He looked at Jessica. “We both would. I don’t think that’s what they want.”
“So what should I say?” Murn asked. “They’re going to be waiting for me.”
“Tell them to come here themselves,” he said. He smiled at her. “I’m sorry for dragging you into this. Tell them to come tomorrow. We can do this face to face.”
Chapter Ten
“Alert! Intrusion!” Alpha blared in his mind, fetching Smoke up out of a deep sleep. “Wake up, Smoke. Wake up, Smoke. Wake up, Smoke.” Alpha sounded very far away, and choppy. Then, silence. Smoke rolled out of bed and ran for the main room. As he reached it the front door flew open with a crash, and was filled with a rush of bodies. Four, maybe five males. And moving fast, Smoke noted dispassionately. Behind them was the Boy, his skinny frame outlined against the dim glow of the moonlight behind him.
Smoke was aware, as he watched the intruders fan out, that Jessica was screaming somewhere in the house behind him. He felt thick and mazed, and realized there was a metallic buzzing in his mind, where Alpha’s presence could usually be felt. Alpha was gone, then, dead or blocked from reaching him. Damn.
A man rushed him, face snarling, hands outstretched to grab him. Not a Seeker, Smoke thought, noting his blue coverall. Support staff, then. With a sweep of his right arm he blocked both of the man’s arms, then spun on his toes and delivered a vicious chop to the side of the man’s neck, just under his jaw. The man crashed to the floor and did not move again.
The others paused, briefly. Smoke moved. He feinted towards the one on his right, just two steps to get them moving, then lunged to his left with a leaping knee kick to that man’s face. He connected squarely, patella directly to the man’s nose, and Smoke came down on top of him, and rolled off him next to the dining table. The man’s face bloomed with blood as he clapped his hands over his smashed nose and curled into a ball.
Smoke came up, grabbing the back of one of the dining table chairs. He h
oisted it and tossed it at the Boy, who was still in the doorway. He didn’t watch where it landed. One of the remaining three invaders, a burly woman with short red hair and a bulbous nose, was charging, head down like an animal. Smoke centered himself, just as his instructors had taught him so long ago, sidestepped her, grabbing two fistfuls of her coverall as she passed, turned with her momentum and threw her into the dining table. She caught the lip of the table on her throat and promptly sat down, hands to her neck. She coughed and blood spilled from her lips down her chest. She looked wide-eyed at Smoke. His nose crinkled. She was dead and didn’t know it yet.
He turned to the last one, a skinny man who had hung back, letting the others take the fight to him. The man on the floor whose face he had smashed with his knee was keening a cry that threatened to rise into a shriek. Smoke watched the skinny man warily as he unlooped a length of chain from around his waist and began to swing it, pendulum fashion. It had a weight of something heavy on one end. He swung it faster and faster in a circle.
Smoke smiled to himself. Chain weapons were silly, his teacher, Shona, had said, sneering derisively at the idea. Unwieldy and apt to knock you on the head, she’d said, before showing them common defenses. Where had this idiot even gotten such a thing? He had no time to think about it, as he stepped into range, hands up to protect his face.
The man swung, and Smoke ducked, the chain whirring over his head. He jammed his right forearm up, to take the next revolution of the chain, feeling it begin to wrap around his wrist. He jabbed with his left, nose, nose, throat. The man recoiled from the jabs, and Smoke jerked his right arm down, pulling the man off balance. Smoke kicked, lashing out with his bare foot to the man’s exposed knee, catching it perfectly, arch to the side of the joint. Smoke felt the man’s knee crunch through his foot and he went down with a yelp, clutching his knee to his chest.
Smoke turned to the Boy, who had been watching from the entryway. He shook his little bald head at Smoke. “Well done,” he said mildly. “But these unfortunates have not had your training, have they?”
“I’d hoped the chair broke your neck,” Smoke said. “I’m sorry I missed.”
The Boy smiled. “Lucky, I guess.” He looked up at Smoke. “Just us then.”
“Just us,” Smoke said. Jessica was, where? But he had no time, as the Boy leapt at him, quick as a striking snake. Flat-footed, Smoke thought from somewhere deep inside his mind marveling at the Boy’s speed, he sprang from flat feet.
The Boy’s skinny body flew like a missile, arcing through the air almost to the ceiling, his left foot leading, right tucked up underneath him, form perfect. Smoke threw up his right, still trailing the chain wrapped around it, and blocked the Boy’s kick. Smoke felt the side of his face explode in a blast of pain as the Boy landed a backhanded fist as he passed. Smoke staggered back, and the Boy was on him.
It was like fighting Shona, he thought, scrambling backwards out of the reach of the Boy’s barrage of kicks, punches and precise, chopping blocks. But Shona wasn’t child-sized, and Shona didn’t sport a broad grin while she attacked you. Smoke was trained, and had fought for his life before on several worlds, but he’d never been dismantled so quickly. The Boy was a blur of hands, feet, elbows and knees.
Smoke blocked and scrambled further backwards. To block the Boy, he had to lean forward to protect his knees. This meant his face was forward, which got him smacked hard on the mouth. He stepped back again, and tripped over the prone form of the redheaded woman. He fell hard against the low table he’d talked with Murn over the day before.
The spindly table collapsed, and the Boy was on him. Skinny hands sought his throat, and he slapped them way, so they went for his eyes. He grabbed the Boy’s skinny wrists, and started to push them down, and wound up staring into the grinning Boy’s face. The Boy snapped at him, teeth clacking together a finger’s breadth from his nose, and then the Boy arched his skinny back like a spring and smashed his forehead into Smoke’s face. Smoke’s vision exploded into a thousand shards, and he sagged back.
He came to as the Boy’s small hands were closing around his throat. He gasped and choked, reaching for the Boy’s eyes, but he reared back, just out of reach. He flailed hands grasping at the ruined table, looking for anything he use as a weapon. His fingers closed on something thin, but with some heft to it. The wand, and its polished orb of silver metal. He swung it up with all his remaining strength, and felt a bright flash as it connected with the Boy’s temple, an electric smell of ozone and a pulse like a thousand suns behind his eyes. He blacked out.
“Smoke,” Alpha said in his ear, “wake up.”
He groaned, swallowing painfully. He was lying on his back in the sitting area of his apartment. Somewhere there was a beach, and a hut where he could lie down and listen to the ocean. He yearned for that hut, but knew it was a memory. Alpha was here. “What happened?” he croaked.
“They jammed me, basically,” Alpha said. “They used that damn stick as an antenna for some pulses of microwave energy. It blanked my sensors in here.” Alpha sounded chagrinned. “We’ve got to go. This place isn’t safe for us anymore.”
“No shit,” Smoke said, massaging his throat. He sat up and looked around. There was a pile of bodies in the doorway, at least four. “Wait,” he said. “There weren’t that many of them that I fought, were there?” He tried to recall the details of the fight, but it was a haze of fists and kicks and the Boy’s smiling face, teeth clacking at him as the damned imp tried to bite off his nose.
“No, these came afterwards and I got them, once you shorted out the jam on the Boy’s head,” Alpha said. “That was clever.”
“Unintended,” he said, getting gingerly to his feet. He looked around. There were only the dead here it seemed. He looked down at the redheaded woman who stared up at him, eyes open and accusing, blood caked on her mouth and neck. Sorry, Lady, he thought grimly. You hurried me. He looked up sharply. “Jessica?”
“Taken,” Alpha said. “There was another team that came in the back. They took her while you were fighting these.”
“Shit!” Smoke said, remembering her screams. “Do we still have infrastructure control?”
“We do,” Alpha said. “But I’m under sustained attack from several quarters. We can’t stay here. If they jam me again, they might kill you next time. We’ve got to go.”
“Can you tell where they took her?” He asked, visions of rescue flashing through his mind.
“She’s held in a central room of the Library,” Alpha said. “But you can’t get in there without killing a lot of people.”
Smoke considered it. “We could do that, you know.” It was true, he thought, looking at the bodies Alpha had left in the entryway. Alpha could kill with a thought—at least here at the Center she could.
“These are your friends, Smoke,” Alpha said. “We can’t murder dozens of them.”
“I grew up here,” Smoke said. “That’s my weakness.”
“And they’re exploiting it,” Alpha said. “We can’t take the fight to them. I’ve been getting negotiation offers for the past five minutes.”
“Negotiation?” He felt light-headed. Excess hormonal surge burning off, he knew. Fight or flight reaction comedown. He shook his head. “What do they want?”
“They’re outside,” Alpha said. “Let’s hear it from them.”
Smoke looked around at the pile of bodies, those Alpha had killed bore no wounds, while his three were lifeless, bloody heaps. He supposed the two he’d wounded were carried away. “What about the Boy? I smacked him pretty hard with that thing.”
“They took him, and it,” Alpha said. “But he’s alive. He’s outside with Grandmother.”
“I suppose I should get dressed then,” Smoke said. “Can’t negotiate in my underwear.”
He dressed hurriedly in the half-light, pulling on loose trousers and a tunic. It was almost dawn, gray twilight creeping over the domes of the Center, as he stepped outside.
There, on the lawn,
two figures. “They’re alone, right?” he asked Alpha. “No snipers?”
“Nothing like that,” she said. “You’re safe, and I’m on watch. We have a truce.”
He stepped onto the lawn. The grass was cool under his feet.
“I’d rather hoped I smashed your skinny head in,” Smoke said to the Boy. “No such luck I see.”
“It was clever,” the Boy said. “But not as clever as I was getting the probe into your quarters.”
“You were in on this?” Smoke asked Grandmother. “I would have thought it beneath you.”
She shrugged. “He brought us this fait accompli, as they say. It was too late for me to stop.” She grimaced. “I wouldn’t have done things this way, but our ends are the same. We seek to preserve the Work.”
“I finished your work,” Smoke retorted. “I found the damn Mind and even brought it back. You just don’t like how that turned out.”
“No,” Grandmother said, “we do not.” She made a wide gesture, encompassing everything around them. “But the Work is not complete. We haven’t been able to complete it, since you block us.”
“What you mean is,” Smoke said, “I haven’t turned Alpha over to you for your experiments. Your…” he dug for the word, “vivisection.”
The Boy nodded. “That thing is dangerous, Tarlannan.” He pointed at him. “You know this.”
“Tarl is dead,” Smoke said. “And I don’t know anything except that I can’t trust you further than I can throw you. Which isn’t very far, as it turns out.” He rubbed his neck with one hand. “You tried to bite my nose off.”
The Boy shrugged. “Don’t play games with me, child,” he sneered. “You make me regret bringing you here in the first place.”
“Ah, but if you hadn’t you’d still be stumbling around cataloging the Tangle,” Smoke said. “I brought the prize home, and you don’t like it.”
“This is no game,” Grandmother snapped at them. “The fate of the Tapestry hangs on this. We need a truce. You know what the Tangle means?”
“I think I do. And we have a truce,” Smoke said, echoing Alpha. “But you want to bring Alpha to the dreamers, and I can’t allow that.”
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