Jinx On a Terran Inheritance

by Brian Daley

  "Alacrity, do you see this? Terran fiber paper. And two-dee photographs. And old-style molecular memory strands."

  Alacrity began rummaging too. He held up a couple of spools. "Induction-copy records, old ones. Whatever's on them, somebody got his brain sucked out like through a straw and had it set down. And headboarder testimony. I don't think there's any way to fake these things. This is it, m'friend: your Terran Inheritance."

  Floyt started pouring through more of the stuff while Alacrity tried his comset. Floyt scanned 3-Ds and notarized documents authenticated by complex chemical coding, and official depositions and oaths of allegiance that the Custodians had required of each new member of the Camarilla who'd come into it over the years.

  "I'm not getting anything," Alacrity said. "I'm gonna run get Janusz and Notch, and leave signs for the kids when they follow along. You start figuring out which of this mess is the most important, okay?" He glanced at his proteus again. "We're right up against the deadline; we're over it. And I didn't like that explosion before." He stopped as he was about to leave. "Oh, and don't shoot me by mistake when I come back, all right? Thanks."

  He left, and Floyt went back to the evidence, examining it worriedly. But his misgivings began to fall away. Any one or even several of the pieces of evidence might be subject to dispute, but taken as a whole, the cache was overwhelming, as close to conclusive as it was possible to come. Floyt disencumbered himself of his shockgun and began culling out the best.

  He discovered one more Custodian, collapsed beside a burn drum, out cold. Near him was a complicated instrument panel. Floyt examined it for a few moments, using knowledge acquired at the complex, and concluded that he'd found the Custodians' main destruct mechanism. He dragged the Custodian away from it just to be safe. It was then he heard the scrape of a shoe behind him.

  He wasn't the same man who'd left Earth, and even that Hobart Floyt hadn't been a slug. He lunged sideways and the butt of the shockgun only struck him a grazing blow; his attacker couldn't figure out how to release its safety, or Floyt would've been down for good. The weapon swung again; Floyt, rolling from it, trying to protect his head, avoided most of the impact but still saw whirling lights. He hunched into the shelter of a shelf stack, bringing his feet and free hand up to protect himself, trying for his revolver at the same time.

  The boy was another, younger version of the Custodians, not even of age yet, by most reckonings. His lower face was swathed in layers of some shiny fabric, taped tight, a make-do filter mask of some kind that obviously sufficed. Floyt wondered for an instant if the boy was in some sealed-off area of the catacombs when the burning started. Obviously he didn't know the entry code to the cache; he'd tried to force the lock and it didn't work, then Floyt and Alacrity showed up to blow the doors.

  The boy plainly knew the destruct code, though; he'd dropped the shockgun and was working away at the panel. It was alive with flashing symbols.

  Floyt sat up, wobbling, drawing back the hammer of the Webley, trying to focus his eyes. "Stop … stop … "

  The boy ignored him; he aimed, using both hands. "Son, don't make me shoot you."

  The boy gave him a quick, hating glare, and mocked him with the muffled word "Son." Then he was back at work, racing to blow the evidence and the cache and the whole underground area to nothingness.

  Floyt thought hard, almost pulling the trigger. But the boy was only ten or so, younger than the youngest of the alley runners.

  Floyt threw the pistol at the boy, hard, then dove for his shockgun, yanking back the charge level from lethal to stun. The instrument panel was glowing and beeping, ready for an ultimate command. The revolver missed the boy but cracked the panel and made him flinch from it. Floyt had the shockgun up, but the last Custodian's finger was going for a touchpad …

  The second tremor-detonation shook the corridors just as Alacrity reached the other end of the T's crossarm, this time a more violent quaking, though the tunnel corridor showed no cracks. He agonized for a moment, then went on with what he was doing.

  At the other extreme of the cross corridor there was no cache. Instead Alacrity came out onto a balcony looking down into a domed treasure chamber.

  The dome, a meter thick, was of some transparent stuff. The treasure was more art from many worlds, set out for viewing and enjoying, and piratical heaps of conventional riches: gemstones and ingots and bars, crafted pieces, bolts of exotic fabrics. Down on the dome's floor, Alacrity saw without being able to hear, Janusz and Notch were in a hostile tableau, yelling at one another. Victoria was with them. All three wore protective masks.

  Alacrity tried the door of the place, a big servo-operated valve of the same transparent stuff, but it wouldn't open. He pounded on it with his fist, barely evoking a sound from it. He was about to search around for the lock signal when the tableau broke.

  Janusz and Notch had been squared off, hands close to their-weapons. Victoria reached out and grabbed Janusz's shoulder, swinging him toward her, apparently hollering at him. Notch seemed about to pull a weapon, but hesitated; Alacrity could see that Victoria was right in his line of fire.

  Alacrity had pulled his own gun, but dismissed the idea of trying to shoot through the dome. Whatever the transparent substance was, it would very likely send the blast back into his face.

  Though they were masked, Alacrity thought Janusz and Victoria were arguing bitterly. She yanked his arm, seeming to shout something, and he lost that icy control of his. Janusz pulled free, pushing her away. Victoria went off balance and fell against a pedastel, overturning a statuette that crashed to the floor and shattered.

  Notch leapt like an angry devil, swinging his doubled fists down across the back of Janusz's head and neck. Janusz went down and Notch kicked him, drawing a pistol and bringing it to bear.

  Alacrity was howling, pounding on the dome with the butt of his pistol, making no sound that penetrated. He expected to see Janusz shot to bits. But Notch stopped instead and looked to Victoria, who was gesturing weakly from where she lay on the floor. The way Alacrity read the dumb-show, she'd been injured—her head, likely.

  Notch wavered for second. Victoria said something else, and the alley runner let Janusz be, ran to kneel by her.

  As Alacrity looked on, she stroked Notch's cheek—then moved the barrel of his weapon aside as he froze, the muzzle of her pistol under his chin. Janusz was coming back to his senses, shaking his head. He saw Victoria gently disarming Notch, apparently talking calmingly to him. The gang leader was slowly, unwillingly giving up his hold on the gun.

  Janusz gathered himself. Alacrity saw Victoria take notice and snap an aside at him, probably an order to stay out of it. But Janusz, eyes wild behind his eyepieces, launched himself, moving very fast. Notch sensed it, ignored Victoria's pistol and began to turn, bringing up his own.

  Janusz hit him with a body block, knocking them both away from the woman. As Notch went down he was trying to draw a bead on Janusz, but Janusz drew as he fell, hitting Notch once while he was in the air and again from a semiprone position. The scatterbeams charred Notch's body and set his clothing aflame in hideous swaths. Notch's pistol discharged into the air.

  Janusz scrambled up to regard his kill. By then Victoria was ranting at him, her sights fixed on his back. Janusz pivoted on her with his own weapon raised; their eyes met over gun barrels.

  Alacrity had backed away from the door of the dome, to shoot at it at an angle. It was dangerously close range; he held the Captain's sidearm extended as far as he could, turning away a little and shielding his face with his left forearm and hand. He fired twice, the pistol's handshield protecting his gunhand, his clothing and hair warming, exposed skin seared by the backwash. The sounds battered him.

  He hadn't even singed the dome.

  He gaped, disbelieving, then looked inside. Victoria and Janusz had noticed him. They looked back to one another and slowly lowered their weapons.

  Fortunately, Alacrity hadn't damaged the door mechanism. When the two opene
d it from inside, he said, "What happened? What's wrong with you two?"

  "Notch wanted it all," Janusz said in monotone.

  "Never mind that now," Victoria said. "Alacrity, did you find the evidence?"

  "Oh, did we! Ho's pulling it together now. Did you feel those tremors? What's going on?" As the words tumbled out of him, he was chewing over what he'd seen, debating whether is was safe to put his own gun away. The truce between Janusz and Victoria had been pushed to the breaking point.

  "A spaceship showed up outside after you went below," Victoria told him. "It came juicing over the hills and attacked my boat, made a hit on the first pass."

  "What ship? From where?"

  She shook her head. "We don't know. Whoever it was had overlooked the Harpy and the Stray, though, at least on that first run. Corva and Heart and Tilla gave it a couple of good volleys and went off after it. I managed to land on the grounds, but the spaceboat's useless now. The others were going to come back once they've made sure there's no more danger. We have to wrap things up quickly."

  "It is my belief that Notch was in on this somehow," Janusz added. "He seemed to be expecting something, and he was upset by the appearance of Astraea Imprimatur and the Harpy. But he made his play nonetheless."

  Victoria glowered at him, but didn't contradict him. Alacrity shook himself. "Victoria, Ho's in the evidence cache, at the opposite end of this corridor. Janusz, I think we'd better hide what's left of Notch." The body was still sending up clouds of smoke; he was glad he was wearing a mask.

  Janusz nodded. "I'm sorry for what happened," he told Victoria. "The boy left me no choice."

  She inspected him coldly. "You brought it on. You welcomed it. I was right about you from the start."

  Notch's alley gangsters bought the story of their leader's having been killed by fire from a dying guard. They'd already learned how tough the clones were to kill. More, they were tense and anxious to be away, shaken by the battle. Loyalty to Notch suddenly ran a distant third behind getting the wealth they'd been promised and escaping the combat zone before something else happened. The raid was only thirty-two minutes old.

  The alley runners had assembled cargo-moving equipment, loading boxes, and cases onto surface-effect handtrucks and pallet jacks. Floyt set aside his preoccupation and turned from the body of the young Custodian who'd almost entered the destruct code. There was a numb satisfaction that he'd managed to stop the boy with the shockgun rather than a bullet. But it had been so close, so close. Floyt was still sweating at the gamble he'd taken, wondering if he'd ever have the nerve to do a thing like that again.

  He sorted through material that had kept the Camarilla in uneasy equilibrium for two centuries. "This appears to be an original compact or agreement of the first Camarillans," he said, showing Alacrity a document. "It's printed on natural Spican tissue-parchment; aged in a way that, I think, it would be impossible to fake."

  Teams of alley runners were hauling the strange booty back to the drillhole. The adults pitched in, to hasten things. Floyt showed Alacrity a tube of memory rolls. "There's more, see? Centuries' worth. We've got all the evidence we need."

  "But not all the time," Janusz interrupted, throwing another case of data onto a pallet. They'd stripped the room in a matter of minutes; the cache of primary data was smaller than many personal libraries Alacrity had seen. "Move quickly!" Janusz finished.

  Jumpily eager kids took that as the signal to get going to the drillhole with the pallet jack. Off they rushed, leaving Floyt, Alacrity, Janusz, and Victoria alone in the denuded room. Only a few boxes were left, and some odds and ends, along with the unconscious Custodian boy and his elder.

  "We should make a last sweep through the place," Floyt said dubiously. "There might be other caches."

  "We've got what we came for," Alacrity stated. "This had to be it. If we don't get moving right now those kids are liable to take off for the skyline without us, or heist the evidence with the notion they can sell it off or something."

  They took up the few remaining containers and loaded them with the last of the evidence. Alacrity found some current read-files, folders of Parish Ink and Paper material rather than primary evidence, but he tucked them into a box anyway, on general principles. They set off, lugging the boxes.

  At the intersection of the T, they came across two abandoned pallet hacks, the one that had just left the cache and another, empty one that had been returning for a last load. All four adults had their weapons out, alert to danger, but saw and heard no signs of violence.

  There was a sound to one side, in the direction of the treasure room. Gun barrels swung that way and one of Notch's kids, one of the ones who'd rushed off with the last load, came at them out of the drifting knockout smoke. She was holding gems and small bars of natural gold. Her eyes were huge behind the eyepieces of her mask.

  "Look! Look at what Gippo found! There's a whole room of it back there!"

  Janusz said, "We have no time for that now. You can all come back later if you wish, but you have a job to do first."

  He went to take the plunder away from her, but she skittered back, dropping finger-size gold bars to produce her gun. "Not likely, old meat! Your highbreeds do what you want with your bloody trashpaper; we're working for ourselves now. And we're taking the moving rigs."

  Janusz's posture said he was considering summary action but, perhaps with Notch's death in mind, he relaxed. "You may take the empty one. The other is ours."

  She grabbed the control handle and steered it off to the treasure room, the pallet jack floating along behind her easily. Alacrity picked up one of the little gold bars, looked it over thoughtfully, and put it in his pocket. The four crowded everything onto the other jack. "You just can't find reliable help anymore," Alacrity observed.

  "We really have no more need of them, if it comes to that," Victoria said. "What I'm worried about is that other ship."

  "And the other estates getting involved, and the tribes, and who knows who else," Floyt extended the list.

  They barged along, holding the precariously balanced material in place, Alacrity and Janusz doing the main pushing and pulling. Floyt and Victoria assisted, doing convoy duty and doubling back every now and again to shag some item or other that had fallen off the pile.

  When they reached the drillhole, no one else was around. Handtrucks and other pallet jacks had been abandoned in the preliminary unloading stages. It was quiet, and the smoke seemed to be thinning.

  "Gold rush madness," Alacrity said. "They're probably all back scrabbling around in the treasure room. This is a good time to exfiltrate. Those kids'll have more money than they can use anyway; it's not like we're stiffing them."

  He went to the power lift the alley runners had set up. It was a circular platform, narrow diameter, attached to the hoist cable. Taking a box of evidence with him, he got on.

  "I'll make sure everything's okay, then you can send up the rest. I'll tap the hole three times with this." He unlimbered his gun then hit a switch on a cable fitting and was hauled upward, passing through the green smoke, up into clear air. He still wondered why the smoke was not escaping through the drillhole.

  The upper level was empty too. He shoved the box of data aside onto the floor as soon as he came chest-level with it, scanning quickly in all directions. Outside a nearby window he could see that the blankets of sealant had been burned and rent by blasts, so that the remains were only shreds in the wind. The upper level was free of the gas.

  He holstered his gun and dipped his head as he stripped off the sweaty, smelly mask, wondering if he'd be able to contact the Harpy or Stray now. He no sooner shucked the mask than he felt a gun at his temple, another at his back, and hands grabbing his shoulders, tangling in his hair to hold him immobile, clapping over his mouth to silence him. He was disarmed.

  Something sharp and cold traced along his cheek, drawing blood, as he was held fast. "Hello, baby." It moved into his angle of vision, a jeweled metal fingernail sheath.

&nb
sp; Oh, fuck! he tried to say, but it came out muffled.

  There were Lamia crewpeople around the drillhole, and Constance had a thermobeam handgun close by his head. She was wearing her regatta outfit. "Who else is down there?"

  The hands came away from his face, a little. "Snow White and the Brotherhood of Mineworkers," he said. So, the Lamia had been a diversion, to draw away the Harpy and Stray while this landing party sneaked in.

  She tapped him hard on the bridge of the nose with her gun barrel, while other hands rifled his pockets. "What are you after, down there?"

  "I'm telling you, there's enough here for everybody. Stay calm, Constance; you can have as much as you want."

  "There isn't that much." Someone had found the finger-bar of gold and handed it to her. "So, this is it? How much more is there? Who else is down there?"

  "If you'd be reasonable for a second, we can make a deal here."

  One of her goons gave him a clout on the ear. "I knew you and the others hadn't left. Those cowards at the compounds—all they wanted to do was save their precious skins. I want your ass, and that little worm Floyt's," she said with a delicate frisson of anticipation. "It would take plenty to buy you out now, cutie."

  There was still no activity below, Alacrity not yet having given the all's-clear. Lamia crewmembers covered the drillhole. Alacrity doubted those below had heard anything going on above through the narrow hole.

  Constance gave his box of evidence a kick, sending it sliding. "And I don't mean a pile of memorabilia!" She flicked the thermobeam at it offhandedly. A reel of tape ran molten.

  Alacrity drew a deep breath, looking at the box, thinking most vividly about one of Floyt's Earth stories. Don't throw me in that briar patch!

  "Hey, watch it!" he yelped, trying to break loose. "Leave that stuff alone; it's important! You don't underst—"

  Somebody hit him hard on the side of the neck and he rocked. "I can do whatever I want," she warned archly. "Now tell me what I want to know, or I'll do this—" She lit up a roll of memory lozenges with the beamer. "Or this—" A folder flared up, the wrong one, curling into ash and sending up gray flakes. Alacrity wondered if honest people had this kind of problem.