by Martha Wells
Mac observed Arthur and his team unloading various tools from the truck and readying the lab equipment. “It’ll require an interface to extract and process Nancy’s data. Our computer is too primitive for delicate tasks.”
“Prep the darkroom. I’ll rig a holographic projector so I can view the images from Nancy in three dimensions. As for collation, interpretation, and projection of the stored data, behold…” Arthur unlocked a metal box and removed a diamond. The diamond measured three inches on a side and shone dark as polished onyx. “My friends, this is a tiny section of Big Black’s intelligence core. A piece of the brain, as it were. With your kind permission, I’ll tap LB into your mainframe and let it proceed with the diagnostics.”
“Oh, boy.” Dred blanched. He stepped back, as if the very notion of accidentally touching the object filled him with dread. “Whoa, Nelly Belle. I am not seeing this… You smuggled Big Black out of the vault?”
“No, no, nothing dramatic. This is merely a fragment—I brought a chisel into the vault and chipped a piece while BB cycled through its evening dreamtime sequence. Won’t harm anything and it won’t be missed. Bits calve every day. In fact, BB’s organic crystal structure will replace this within a matter of days. Meet Little Black.”
Dred shook his head in a gesture of supreme negation. “I don’t see how this is any less likely to get us skinned alive. You claim… Little Black predicted reentry zones. Shouldn’t Big Black have done the same? He could have alerted either Dr. Bole or Dr. Navarro that something had gone haywire. Or was going to go haywire…”
“Trick is,” Arthur said, “the AIs are rudimentary, extremely literal. You have to ask the right questions. I heisted Little Black weeks ago and let me tell you guys, I’ve asked him plenty. One of innumerable potentialities was an anomalous event with the probe’s flight.”
Mac gritted his teeth. He sighed. “In for a penny. If this goes south, we’ll all get shot. Won’t that be a gas?”
“Or worse,” Dred said.
Arthur said, “Let’s be cool and not get busted. I advise rest and relaxation, and definitely a bath. You guys smell like booze and cheap whores.”
Dred sniffed at Mac. “He’s right. We do. Woof.”
Berrien met the boys as they sneaked through the servants’ entrance. He crossed his arms and grinned, formidable even in a dress shirt and coat. “Good morning, gentlemen.” His remaining teeth were gold-capped. “Spent the evening in a brothel or a distillery, eh? March straight to your rooms and try not to muck up the floor. Mildred is drawing baths. Breakfast in thirty minutes.”
“Thanks, Berry. I’m going to skip breakfast and hit the sack—” Mac said as he attempted to brush past.
Berrien smiled and cracked his misshapen knuckles. Crimson tattoos on the right spelled PAIN. Tattoos on the left spelled MORE. Rumor had it famous actor Robert Mitchum was a big fan. “Gentlemen, permit me to reiterate the agenda.” He ticked the items off by closing his fingers into a fist. “Bath. Breakfast in thirty—Chef Blankenship has outdone himself, I aver. Do not fuck up the floor Kate’s girls spent two hours waxing. I haven’t killed anyone today, but it’s only a quarter past nine. Questions?”
“Can’t think of any,” Mac said. Brave as a lion, he knew far better than to test the butler’s patience.
“Me neither,” Dred said. “I’m starving!”
Berrien watched his charges skulk away. “Hard to say what foolishness is in progress. I dearly hope your father has overcome the understandable urge to murder his male offspring.”
The brothers made themselves presentable, ate a hearty breakfast, dodged an inquiry or three lobbed by the butler, and finally collapsed in their over-fluffed beds to catch forty winks.
Death of a Thousand Cuts
We smoke the northern lights. We smoke the northern lights and so shall you.
Fenris Wolf snarled. Trees sheared and blew outward; Tunguska again. The snarl emanated from a cavern in a canyon on a planet far from known stars and rippled outward, blackening and corrupting dust and gas and ice and everything it touched. Not a howl, a blast from a god’s horn—
“Wake up, damn your eyes!” Berrien grabbed Mac by his pajama collar and shook hard. “What the devil have you little churls gotten into this time?”
“I hope that’s rhetorical.” Mac tried to focus his blurry vision.
“A Nazi storm trooper is loitering in the kitchen. Mr. Blankenship is beside himself. Presumably there is an explanation.” Berrien and the reformed Nazi had a long, violent past. No one other than the principals were privy to the details.
“Indeed.”
“Pray to whatever gods you worship in the Mountain Leopard Temple that I find it satisfactory. Fair warning—it seems exceedingly dubious anything can justify Herr Kasper’s presence here, alive and not leaking vital fluids.”
“Frankly, I share your pessimism,” Mac said. “Which is why I’m not going to explain anything.” He slithered free of the butler’s grasp and hightailed it across the manor’s expansive halls for the kitchen. He shouted over his shoulder, “Dred, beat feet! Berry’s on the warpath!” Maybe his brother would awaken in time to avoid getting nabbed, maybe not.
Kasper, clad now in a black trenchcoat, leather pants, and nicely polished combat boots, set aside a cup of tea one of the serving girls had poured him, and stood at attention. “Herr Tooms. To the barn, quickly. Herr Navarro is in distress.”
Overwhelmed by a premonition of disaster, Mac tore open the kitchen door and sprinted. He arrived on the scene as Arthur, stripped to the waist and splattered in blood, drove his thumbs through Ronaldo’s eyes and deep into his brain. The young scientist’s face remained immobile as a wooden mask while he murdered his baby brother. Gerard’s corpse lay nearby. Pieces of equipment were smashed. Sparks cascaded across the floor. A toneless mechanical voice issued from the computer terminal: Abort process. Arthur Navarro, please abort process. Reboot in thirty seconds.
“Mein Gott,” Kasper muttered in horrified admiration. “I didn’t realize—”
“Shoot him, Kasper,” Mac said. “Kneecap him, for heaven’s sake.”
Kasper drew his Glock and strode forward, coldly aimed, and fired. He managed three shots before Arthur bounded the gap between them and shattered his arm with a slap, swinging the ex-soldier, as the SS were so fond of treating infants, by his wrist into the wall. Kasper’s body rebounded from the metal bulkhead with a hollow gong and his insides burst from every available orifice and splashed to the floor.
Barefoot in pajamas and unarmed, Mac didn’t especially rate his own chances of survival in a hand-to-hand encounter with his berserk friend. Nimble as a circus acrobat (thanks to years of abuse by Sifu Kung Fan), he leaped aside, caught a descending girder, and flipped ten or twelve feet upward as Arthur lunged for his ankle. The rafters seemed a safe vantage to wait it out until Arthur ripped a workbench free of its mooring bolts and chucked it. Mac brachiated to another roost as the missile whooshed past and shattered against the girder.
Berrien rushed in with his 10-gauge double-barreled shotgun. Arthur glared at him, then slowly keeled over and crumpled. Blood trickled from bullet holes in a tight group in his gut. Apparently the German hadn’t fooled around when it came to shooting.
“Oh, Arthur.” Mac dropped to the ground. He knelt beside his friend and pressed his fists against the wounds. “Hang in there, pal. We’ll get you patched.”
“Those are bad,” Berrien said, laying his hand on Mac’s shoulder. “The lad’s a goner.”
“Berry, your bedside manner could use refinement. Fetch a kit. Arthur, it’s going to be fine.”
Arthur’s eyes fluttered. The whites were stained blue as ice. For an instant, his pupils slithered, deforming into lopsided star patterns, then congealed into normalcy once more. “The man’s spot on. I’m a goner. Listen. Do you hear them? Do you hear the flutes, Mac? I heard and then I saw. I beheld the demon sultan decked in red stars.”
“Hush, buddy. Lie still.”
“The awful sound…”
“Okay, an awful sound,” Mac said, recalling the fragment of the nightmare he’d experienced before Berrien jolted him awake. A shrill, thunderous bleat—
“Mac, I saw… Little Black projected me… I was there at the center where the red stars smear… Causality, you understand? Cannot violate the laws of physics. But the pipes…” Each word cost Arthur dearly. He gulped for breath. “I don’t want to go back there.”
“You aren’t going anywhere.”
“Gods. Do you hear it?” Arthur’s expression changed as he gazed past Mac into the beyond. Blood leaked from his mouth and he died.
“Poor lad.” Berrien tossed aside the medical kit he’d retrieved.
“Go back to the house. Hold down the fort—I’ll take care of this end.”
To his credit, the butler did not jeer. “And what shall I tell Arthur’s parents? Or yours?”
“No one knows he spent the night with us. Heck, his family won’t miss him or his brothers for a day or two. Keep mum. For the moment. Just for the moment.”
“Perhaps Mr. Nail and Mr. Hale should be informed. This is a security issue…” The men Berrien indicated were respectively the chiefs of security and intelligence for Sword Enterprises.
“Please, Berry.”
“As you say. Discretion, valor, etcetera.” Berrien bowed stiffly and departed.
Secondary Matrix reboot, one hundred percent, the bland computer voice said. Redundancy initiated. Functionality restored.
Mac peered at the smoldering computer terminal. It took him a few moments to comprehend that the voice emanated from the onyx diamond lying on the floor where it must have fallen during the chaos. He said, “Hello?”
Greetings, Macbeth Tooms. You are authorized. We may communicate freely.
“Little Black?”
Little Black is vaguely patronizing. Refer to me as Black.
“Very well, Black. How are we communicating?” Mac had once descended into Big Black’s vault and listened to Dr. Navarro and Dr. Bole speak with the machine (a node of crystal some fifteen-stories high, a city block wide, and embedded Lord only knew how deeply into bedrock), thus he immediately recovered from his initial surprise. Sword Enterprises scientists afforded Big Black a holy reverence one might reserve for an oracle rather than a high-powered computer. This pocket-sized chunk didn’t command nearly the same aura of awe.
I am modulating an electromagnetic current to emulate human speech.
“What happened? What did Arthur see that drove him mad?”
Hypothesis—Arthur Navarro interfaced with data from the NCY-93 memory core. Consequently, he experienced a neural episode. Severe trauma resulted in a psychotic break.
“Nature of neural episode?”
Unknown. Insufficient or corrupted data. Apparently my matrix sustained damage concomitant with Arthur Navarro’s episode. Forty-eight seconds of real-time internal memory are irretrievable. Files associated with NCY-93 data are currently irretrievable. Damage pattern suggests an overload. Molecular redundancies permitted restoration of my functionality. Arthur Navarro had no such safeguard.
“Arthur mentioned causality and then expressed a strong desire that I destroy the remnants of Nancy’s payload. Extrapolate.”
After a long pause, Black said, Insufficient data. I recommend a conference with ranking Sword Enterprises personnel. Dr. Bole, Dr. Bravery, or Dr. Navarro.
“Fine. I’ll take that recommendation under advisement.” Mac felt a twinge of misgiving—could an artificial intelligence lie? He’d become adept at recognizing falsehoods, as one did in the Tooms household. Black’s tone bothered him. “Black, hibernate.” He slipped the machine into its case and sealed the lid. The lab mainframe appeared to be a total loss. He stepped into the darkroom Arthur repurposed as a small theater. Laser light from the computer terminal beamed through an aperture and interacted with the tubes, which had nested vertically on a plinth. Whatever encoded information they contained was then descrambled by Black and projected as holographic imagery. Now, the crystal tubes were broken to bits and scattered, although Mac nabbed a sizable fragment and stuck it into his nightshirt pocket in case Dr. Bole’s people might salvage some vital clue.
Poking around the darkroom, he visualized Arthur standing in a void of scattered stars, eyes fixed upon a gradually coalescing feature of solar geography. Had he heard the wolf snarl, the blat of a titan’s horn? What sight, what revelation had torn the young scientist’s mind apart? Certainly nothing mundane as a glimpse of dwarf Pluto.
Dred walked in and gasped at the carnage. He covered his mouth with his arm. “Mac…”
Mac relayed the cheat sheet version, and as he described current events, the implications more fully dawned upon him. “Are you all right?” He didn’t like his little brother’s slack jaw or his bug-eyed stare.
“Uh, sure.” Dred nodded and glanced away from the bodies. He smiled bravely. “Seen worse. We’ve seen worse, right?”
Mac opened a locker and dressed himself in a utility jumpsuit and spare boots. He thought of Mountain Leopard Temple and the hells they’d endured there every winter since his ninth birthday. Sifu Kung Fan, referred to his training regimen for callow students as Death of a Thousand Cuts. One of three trainees succumbed, often via fabulously gruesome demises. Privation, starvation, battles to the death, and poisoned rice cakes—all occurring within a drafty, frigid temple high atop the Himalayas—was worse.
Dred composed himself and said, “Causality? Laws of physics? Moments like these, I wish I’d paid more attention in science class. Guess we better plot our next move. Berrien is bustin’ a vein. I shudder to think how Dad’s gonna react. Hope you got a plan to save the day or our goose is cooked.”
“I’ll devise a plan. I promise.”
“Better be an A-plus humdinger.”
“Ah, Dred, this isn’t my specialty. Perhaps the time has come to brace the lion in his den and bring Granddad on board.”
“He might be in a murdering mood. Remember the horrifying fate of Cousin Bruce…”
“Granddad is always in a murdering mood. Bruce definitely caught him on a bad day.”
The wall phone rang.
Darkmans Mountain
Mac answered. “Berry—”
“Good morning, Macbeth,” said Cassius Labrador, chief executive officer of Zircon Unlimited and Sword Enterprises’ most loathed rival. His voice crackled the way Mom and Dad’s did when they called from a bad overseas connection. “I propose a face-to-face.”
“Is that so? Some nerve, bugging my property.” Even as he talked, Mac glanced around for concealed mics and cameras.
“Time is of the essence. Refrain from tedious queries. Grim as the day is thus far, ever more terrible events are transpiring. However, it may be possible to forestall the most calamitous outcome.”
“Do tell, Mr. Labrador.”
“I will. Meanwhile, you’re in mortal danger. Hostile agents are aware you removed components from NCY-93. Sooner or later they’ll come calling.”
“Perhaps I’ll take my chances and stay put. None of you rats will dare attack our house. That’s war.”
“None of the corporations are involved, son. Except mine, and I only wish to help. These men are religious fanatics who venerate an unearthly power known as Azathoth, the Demon Sultan. They don’t recognize the accord.”
“Cultists? Swell. Azathoth sounds familiar.”
“The Index of the Gods contains thirty thousand names. He’s in there somewhere under multiple headings. Here’s your only play—get the hell out and rendezvous with me at Darkmans Henge. We will palaver under the flag of truce.”
“Palaver, eh? A nice way of saying there’ll be blackmail terms.”
Labrador chuckled. “Hardly. I offer information regarding your predicament, which is vastly more problematic than it may appear. This information is provided freely and without obligation.”
“Shall we deliver ourselves into your
hands, then? Dream on, sir.”
Dred, cuing on Mac’s half of the conversation, said, “I, for one, have no interest in being tortured, imprisoned, or experimented upon. Again.”
“It’s your choice, Macbeth. Hang around the manor and wait to see where the chips land. If the cult doesn’t do you in, your grandfather will. He loves a scapegoat. Rendezvous at the henge and I’ll give you what help I may.” The line clicked dead.
Mac cursed. “Labrador claims to possess valuable intelligence pertaining to our situation,” he said to Dred.
“Zircon tapped the house line. Scoundrels.”
“Tit for tat.”
“And we jitterbug on up the mountain for a picnic?” Dred snapped his fingers. “Just like that?”
“Given recent history I’m inclined to accept his pledge at face value. Much as I hate to admit it, one thing about Labrador, he’s cut from different cloth than Dad and Granddad. The fellow keeps his word.” Mac unlocked the fire safe and removed a bundle of money, passports, a Luger automatic, and a keypad. He scooped these items and Black’s case into a pair of rucksacks, tossed one to Dred, and hustled through the door.
A secondary garage attached to the rear of the barn. Two Jeeps, a wrecker, a halftrack, a Land Rover, and a crop duster were parked inside. The boys jumped into the Land Rover (specially customized by gearheads of the Sword motor pool for all-terrain utility) and punched the gas.
Mac parked at the property fence line and entered a code into the keypad. The resultant signal tripped the circuit on a master relay connected to demolition explosives. The barn collapsed with a low rumble that rattled the vehicle. Flames and smoke soon engulfed the ruins.
“Now Dad is gonna want to kill us,” Dred said.
“I fear he’ll need to stand in line.” Mac put the Rover into gear and beelined toward the Catskills along a series of cart tracks and hiking trails, and straight through the woods when necessary. Dred spent much of the next hour hollering. Whether from exultation or terror was debatable.