The Machine's Child (Company)

by Kage Baker

  He was as close to collapse from exhaustion as an immortal can be, after the night he’d had, but he summoned a last burst of speed and sprang up on the foredeck, and from there over the starboard rail into the bowsprit netting.

  Nicholas vaulted after him and came to the rail, glaring down, for he had heard no splash; but Joseph was not there under the bowsprit, where he had expected to see him. Joseph was behind him, having scrambled back around on the port side. He grabbed up one of the decorative belaying pins upon which Alec had insisted when the ship had been designed. Joseph had to spring into the air to club Nicholas with it, but he managed to connect with a crack that echoed across the water. Nicholas toppled forward, unconscious. So, unfortunately, did Alec and Edward, obliged to share Nicholas’s concussion.

  “Damn,” gasped Joseph, clutching his side with one hand. He staggered and sat down heavily.

  “Now, the only reason I haven’t killed you yet,” a voice was saying as Alec opened his eyes and groaned, “is because I want some answers first.”

  The sense of something-being-horribly-wrong was a lot stronger now than it had been the last time he had awakened, with very good reason. His hands were tightly bound behind his back and secured to his belt; moreover he was hanging upside down, having been trussed around the ankles with a clewline and hauled up to dangle in midair. Joseph was sitting on the deck with the other end of the clewline in his hand, watching him.

  “How’s it going, big boy?” he said. “Actually that’s a rhetorical question, because I don’t give a rat’s ass. Here come the real questions, okay? Number one: Where’s Mendoza?”

  “Piss off!” said Alec, and Joseph grinned.

  “Wrong answer,” he said, and let go the clewline so that Alec plummeted toward the deck. He caught it again, just before Alec’s head hit wood.

  “Next time I won’t grab it so fast,” Joseph said. “It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me where she is. I’ll find her if I have to take this ship apart. So, let’s move on to question number two: Just exactly what are you, Nicholas? Give me the specs on the New Enforcer.”

  “I’d be happy to explain at some length,” said his prisoner, “in any other position. If I lose consciousness, threats shan’t avail you much, I’m afraid.”

  Joseph sighed.

  “Okay, who the hell is that? How many of you are in there?” His face darkened. “Have you developed a multiple personality disorder or something? Oh my God, you have, haven’t you? You’ve figured out yet another way to make my baby miserable, you son of a bitch!” And he bared his teeth and gave the clewline a jerk, so that Edward felt as though his shoulders would dislocate, but he endured it and said:

  “No, no, nothing like that at all! You’re quite correct: the Company had a hand in my making. Our making, I should say. I wonder if you can guess the rest of it?”

  “I wonder how hard your head is in relation to that deck?” growled Joseph. “But okay. Some kind of serial immortality? The Company maybe experimenting, with memory transferred from body to body? Huh.” He looked impressed in spite of himself. “Well, it obviously works. So you must be some kind of clone, then, right? Produced from Nicholas? But—”

  “You’ll have to excuse him, I’m afraid,” said Edward with his most temporizing smile, though the effect was slightly lessened by the fact that he was hanging upside down. “He really does hate you with quite an irrational passion. And poor Nicholas is, after all, the product of an ignorant and superstitious age, with an accordingly limited capacity for any understanding of science—”

  He grimaced and shut his eyes for a moment, fighting back Nicholas’s attempt to break free, but Alec more or less sat on Nicholas for him. Joseph watched closely. Edward drew breath, opened his eyes, and continued: “I beg your pardon. The vertigo does make it difficult to give you the answers you need. And in any case, sir, neither you nor I have any reason to be at odds with each other. If you’d just let me down—”

  “Like hell I will,” Joseph said, scowling as he stepped close to stare at him. “I know who you are, now. You’re that Brit secret agent who got himself shot to death in Los Angeles, aren’t you? Edward something?”

  “Commander Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, late of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, at your service, sir,” Edward said, politely enough under the circumstances. “And not quite as dead as you’d think.”

  “Too bad,” said Joseph tightly. “Mendoza went nuts and killed six mortals because of you. And, you know what else? You got my best friend killed.”

  “I should be sorry to think so, sir, but I don’t recall—”

  “No, you don’t recall! You were able to do it from your goddam grave, okay? Lewis found your daguerreotype portrait. He realized you were something weird. He became obsessed with you.” Joseph gulped for breath. “The Company found out he knew too much, and they screwed him. He’s someplace as bad as Options Research, if he’s even still alive. That’s your fault!”

  “Then allow me to make amends, sir,” said Edward in a reasonable voice. He was beginning to realize in horror that his captor hadn’t quite got both oars in the water, and negotiation might be futile. “If you were to release me, I might be able to rescue the fellow. After all, I rescued my wife from a similar—”

  “She’s not your wife!” Joseph said, yanking on the line nearly hard enough to dislocate Edward’s ankles, too. In his momentary agony and chagrin at having picked the wrong thing to say, Edward lost control and Nicholas surged to the fore.

  “Ay, devil, my bride and my flesh,” Nicholas said, grinning. “Sealed to me of her own will in despite of all thou couldst do, in a holy bond—”

  “In an unholy bond,” Joseph snarled. “What’s she known from the day she met you but grief? It wasn’t enough you broke her heart getting yourself burned, no. You had to come back and drive her crazy! And you taught her to kill mortals, which is something you’re really good at, too, isn’t it? It’s what you were made for, huh, Mr. New Enforcer? Only the Company designed you to kill innocents. Like in Mars Two!”

  But Nicholas had stopped listening to him and was laughing in his throat, teeth clenched as he concentrated with a glittering stare on the main yard immediately above Joseph. As Joseph ranted on, he got it to release. With a clinking whoosh it came plummeting down, and Joseph had just time to register what was happening before he leaped clear, letting go the clewline as he did so.

  Nicholas was able to writhe as he fell and land on one shoulder, with a grunt of pain. As he lay there gasping, Alec grabbed control.

  “Look, man, I never wanted to kill anybody,” he yelled. “Nobody told me what I was! I didn’t find out the Company’d been running my life until a couple of years ago.”

  “Ha. Alec Checkerfield, I presume? You know, pal, I believe you,” wheezed Joseph, tottering over to the cutlass and picking it up. He sighted along its blade at Alec. “The way the Company jerks its people around. But you’re pure poison and you never should have existed in the first place, and I’ll be doing everybody, and I mean everybody, a favor by running you through with your very own authentic pirate cutlass. Jesus, Alec, why pirates?”

  “No! Please, not now, not like this, my life will have been for nothing!” Alec cried from his heart, squirming backward. “How am I ever going to make up for what I did?”

  “You can die and leave Mendoza in peace, how about that?” Joseph offered, making an experimental lunge with the blade.

  “You don’t understand!” Alec said. “I know I’m a shracking monster, but I love her. I’ve been taking care of her, she’s been happy! Doesn’t that mean anything to you, if you love her, too? For the first time in her life, she’s not a slave! And she loves me.”

  “Says you,” Joseph told him wearily, pacing toward him with the cutlass. “The really awful part is, no matter how many times I kill you, the Company’ll just bring you back again, won’t they? But you won’t get her again, punk. Think about that while you’re regrowing in your jar—”

&nb
sp; At this moment the forward hatch exploded upward in a mass of fragments and splinters, glinting in the first light of the sun. Mendoza rose through it, eyes ablaze with fury. Her white silk was torn and trailing after her journey through the emergency access crawlspace in the bulkheads, and she was armed with the first weapon that had come to hand in Alec’s weapons locker, which happened to be a double-barreled speargun. From the hatchway after her came snaking grapevines, waving and crawling toward the morning light.

  Joseph, regaining his feet after leaping back from the explosion, stared at her. Then he drew a long breath, and exhaled.

  “Mendoza,” he said pleasantly. “Baby. Nice to see you again, kid. You know, and I mean this sincerely, you look great—”

  She leveled the speargun at him and fired.

  “Okay, so you’re a little sore at me,” he said from the foretop, as the head of a spear plunked into the rail immediately behind where he’d been standing a split second earlier. Looking up and fixing him with a black glare, she backed toward Alec. She knelt to unpinion him with one hand, keeping the speargun trained on Joseph. The vines began to scale the foremast in an aggressive kind of way.

  “So I was about to kill the boyfriend. I’m sorry, okay? But I’ve been kind of worried. I thought maybe you were hurt, or something. I mean, you never called. You never wrote.”

  “Why the hell should I?” she said. “I haven’t the slightest idea who you are.”

  “What?” Joseph peered down at her, as she freed Alec’s hands and moved to untie his ankles. “What do you mean, you don’t know who I am?” He leaned forward to scan her, so far he nearly fell from his perch on the foretop. “You’ve known me since you were four years old!”

  “Stay up there,” she ordered, keeping the gun trained on him. “I’ve never seen you before in my life, but I’d be delighted to pin you to that mast.”

  But Joseph was still scanning, looking distressed.

  “You’ve been damaged!” he said. “Somebody’s rebuilt you, and they didn’t do it to specs—and there’s some kind of block on your memory.”

  Mendoza ignored Joseph, lifting Alec into a sitting position, and as he hissed in pain and clutched at his left arm she scanned him. Then she looked up at Joseph with a murderous expression.

  “You’ve broken his shoulder! Severe concussion, scalp laceration, multiple sprains and contusions . . . little man, I’ll kill you.”

  She aimed the speargun and fired again, just as the first green tendril groped at Joseph’s ankle. Joseph avoided the spear by throwing himself sideways, which carried him off the foretop into midair. He twisted to land on his feet and fell and rolled, springing up again in a crouch.

  “Nice shot, but you don’t have any other spears in that gun, do you?”

  “No, but I can club you with it,” she said, rotating it swiftly in her hand. “And if you come any closer to him, I will.”

  “Mendoza, honey, you wouldn’t do that,” he said coaxingly, stepping over the sprawling vines. “And anyway, I’m not after that big loser now. Trust me! All I want to do is have a look at that block on your memory, okay? I can fix it. You’ll be good as new, little girl. Come on, you can’t be comfortable like that—”

  He was advancing on her steadily, one hand stretched out in a placatory gesture, and she was trembling as she gripped the speargun.

  “What are you, crazy?” Alec said hoarsely, struggling to get between them. “Stop it! You know where she was. You know what happened there! Do you want her to remember that?”

  Joseph stopped, staring at Alec. He was just opening his mouth to speak when earsplitting Klaxons sounded, causing sleepers across the bay in Port Royal to sit up in their beds and wonder if Judgment Day had come. It was still ten years away, however. The Klaxons, warbling down into a sort of electronic growl of rage, were merely the Captain signaling that he had at last remodulated around the jammed signal and was very much back online.

  From all parts of the ship came the sound of locks snapping, drives powering up, and a clashing noise that grew louder, resolving into the scuttling approach of Billy Bones, Flint, Coxinga, and Bully Hayes. The servounits emerged from the saloon and advanced on Joseph menacingly, chattering like so many giant steel crabs.

  “Whoops,” said Joseph, and turned and ran. He vaulted over the rail with all four of them still in hot pursuit. Landing neatly in his stolen boat, he cast off, bent to the oars, and rowed away like mad.

  Before he had got well clear, however, he saw with horror that gun-ports were opening out in the formidable side of the Captain Morgan, and the mouths of what could only be laser cannon were emerging. They swiveled to aim, and fired in unison, but he had already plunged into the water and was diving down for dear life. The laser broadside vaporized both his boat and the sea chest containing his signal monitor.

  Peering up from below, Joseph saw four black shapes diving toward him. They nipped at his desperately kicking heels all the way back to Port Royal, and squealed insults at him as he waded ashore.

  THE EVENING OF THAT SAME DAY, 1682 AD

  Mrs. Ansolabehere was not disposed to be charitable when Dr. Ansolabehere finally returned. This in spite of the fact that his face was gray with fatigue, his clothing ruined, his hat lost, his beady little eyes sunk back in his head. Smiling and curtseying to a departing customer, she swept down on him where he stood swaying in the doorway and frog-marched him back to the kitchen, where she boxed his ears soundly.

  “Where hast thou been, sir?” she hissed. “Art thou drunk? Art thou mad? And wherever is Captain Marley’s horse?”

  He stood there in stupefaction a moment, clutching his ears. Then he began to glare resentfully, and without a word he strode over to the bar and helped himself to an onion bottle of rum. As she looked on unbelieving he extracted the cork with his teeth, spat it across the room, and drank half the rum as though it were water.

  “What, husband!” she said.

  “I’ll tell you what, wife,” he said, wiping his chin. “The horse is dead. I’m mad, all right, and I’m going to be drunk pretty damned fast, for all the good it’ll do me. What else? Oh, where’ve I been? Well, that’s a long story, and I don’t feel like telling it right now.”

  She just stared at him. He scowled at her and drank down the rest of the rum. Then he helped himself to two more bottles and marched out the back door.

  She never set eyes on him again.

  MOUNT TAMALPAIS, 2322 AD

  The giant under the mountain was aware when the outer threshold was crossed. He withdrew his attention from the Company files through which he had been cruising, relentlessly as a shark, and focused on the tunnel. After a millisecond’s analysis of the approaching footsteps’rhythm he relaxed. He rose from the console, looming in a shapeless robe made from blankets, and watched as Joseph came tottering down the aisle between the vaults.

  “Son,” he said.

  “I’m back,” Joseph replied. “How’s it going, Father?”

  They considered each other. It had been nearly twenty years since Joseph had seen Budu, though of course from Budu’s point of view it had been no more than a few days. Joseph thought Budu looked great. Budu thought Joseph looked as though he’d been through a wringer.

  “You failed to recapture your daughter,” Budu stated.

  “Yeah,” Joseph agreed. He sank down and stretched out on the stone floor, folding his hands on his chest.

  “It doesn’t matter. She might have been useful, but we won’t need her for victory. While she’s with that boy, the Company can’t use her either. I’ve been finding out a lot about him. Interesting.”

  “Uh-huh.” Joseph closed his eyes. Budu inhaled the scent of rank exhaustion and alcohol, and grimaced, but kept annoyance out of his voice as he said:

  “You look tired, son. You’ll need to rest for a few days. Restore yourself to optimum physical status. I have work for you to do.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ll begin by completing the correcti
ve surgery on my right arm.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then you’ll go out again. I have a list of things to be stolen. It may take you years to get everything. You must also seek out a certain man and speak to him. You’ll need to prepare carefully for this, and exert your powers of influence. He’s necessary to our plan.”

  “Okay. How’s the plan going?” Joseph opened his eyes again.

  “Completed.” Budu smiled in a fashion that would have terrified anybody but Joseph. The blue light glinted on his teeth, his eyes. “All potential elements in place. We’ll bring the masters down with one strike. I know the hour and the location. You have only to wind the clock, son.”

  “Sure. Sure, I can do that.” Joseph yawned. “So what about this guy I’m supposed to talk to?”

  “A unique case, son. A living riddle. Immortal, but not one of us. A Company stockholder, but not one of them. Lord and master in his own place, and yet Dr. Zeus has his name on the list for removal in the last hour.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s been a necessary compromise. They required his existence, and yet he should never have been born.”

  “Huh! Like Nicholas Edward Alec Harpole Finsbury whatever . . .” Joseph’s eyes were closing.

  “You didn’t kill him,” Budu said, watching Joseph. Joseph opened his eyes and looked up at the towering blue-lit figure that studied him.

  “Uh . . . no, as a matter of fact. I didn’t.”

  “Why had he taken your daughter?” said Budu, in the tone of one who is about to announce a checkmate.

  “Because . . . he loves her. Her really does love her, after all.” Joseph’s eyes were exhausted, bewildered. “Can you beat that?”