Moonsteed

by Manda Benson

  “Ah yes, Blake’s descendant. It will be interesting to see how much this will take.”

  “I was made to be incorruptible!”

  “There’s no such thing as incorruptible!”

  “Jananin Blake was pure logic. I am her heir. You might as well kill me now, for all you’ll get from me.”

  “Jananin Blake may have been lots of things, most of which we’ll never know. She was rational, I’ll give you that. And she became that through hard-earned experience, not because of the genetics she was born with. Jananin Blake was not incorruptible. She was flesh and blood like everyone else. You see this god phenomenon with everyone whose name has outlived them. They become more than mortal. People think they’re flawless, and uphold them as role-models. Everyone reacts uproariously when someone claims that Churchill made racist comments, or Thatcher took bribes, or Blake was corruptible. Behind all the mudslinging there has to be a husk of truth somewhere. Everyone cracks if you know where to put the exact right amount of pressure.”

  “Not Blake!” Verity burst out. This was her genetic grandmother, the paragon she’d been measured against every time she’d floundered in her childhood and in her training. She’d always had to be better than just Zeta Verity. She’d always had to be Jananin Blake’s blood: Blake the scientist and the master of iaido, Blake the all-seeing, the rational, the incorruptible. Verity had no excuse to be anything less. After all, she was Blake’s descendant.

  Farron spun back to face her. “If Jananin Blake was incorruptible, why did she never kill Pilgrennon?”

  “Why would she kill Pilgrennon?”

  “She hated him. Surely you must know that.”

  “Because if he hadn’t done his experiments, Blake would never have been able to destroy the old order and the Meritocracy would never have come about.”

  “Bullshit! He’d already done his experiments. That was the reason she hated him. Anything beyond that could have happened regardless. She swore to kill him, and she didn’t do it. And you want to know why she didn’t do it? Because she didn’t have the guts. A sword is made of steel, but it can only cut as far as the hand that wields it is prepared to take it.”

  Farron leaned back on his heels and sighed. Verity didn’t know what to think. That wasn’t what she’d been told. Was he lying, trying something outlandish he knew she wouldn’t trust in order to confuse her?

  “Anyway, I’ve given you my explanation. It would only be polite for you to return the favor, starting with the name of the Magnolia Order official who sent you here.”

  That was confidential information, information Verity had sworn to do her best to protect. Immediately, she started counting backward from a hundred, but Farron’s probing thoughts were already pressing down on her own, forcing her mind down the exact synaptic paths she did not want him to operate.

  “It starts with a T, unless I’m very much mistaken. Taka... Taka...”

  Verity forced irrelevant memories to the front of her mind. The image that had disturbed her so much for so long of the disemboweled robber as life seeped away from his face, the sensation of Vladimir’s tongue back on the yacht, anything to back-foot him and jolt his concentration out of focus.

  Farron roared with laughter, tipping back his head and exposing the dark fillings in his upper molars to Verity’s view from the lower seated position the chair had her gripped in. “You think you’re incorruptible, you think you deserve to be called Jananin Blake’s heir? You’re just like all the rest of them! You think your disgusting memories will shock me? When I’ve plumbed the depths of the human psyche in forcing information from the minds of psychopaths, murderers, child molesters?” His hands landed on the arms of the chair again, and he thrust his face into hers, his voice lowering to a growl. “You will have to try harder than that.”

  In the instant of disconcertion, the name involuntarily surfaced in Verity’s awareness.

  Farron snapped his fingers. “Takahashi,” he shouted, and withdrew. “Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  Verity stared at him. How was it possible for him to simply wring it out of her like that? How could he do that? Why couldn’t she stop him?

  “Oh, poor Verity!” Farron held up his hands in a beseeching sort of posture. “Hemorrhaging information you promised them you’d keep safe. Now what’s his first name? He is a him.” His eyes widened, his teeth bared and his forehead creasing under the multitude of implants. Verity tried at once to stop herself from thinking of the name, Takahashi--what was it? “Oh, you can’t remember. Never mind, I’m sure it will come back to you eventually.”

  He leaned back down over her, his eyes locking on hers, and Verity fought against the feelings he elicited in her. It was a struggle to get her mouth to form the word, “Bleed-back.”

  “Bleed-back?”

  She held him back long enough for the thought to take logical form. “From all the psychopaths, murderers and child molesters. It’s got into you. It’s given you a piece of each of them. Piece by piece, that’s driven you insane.”

  Farron dipped his chin and raised his eyes to her whimsically. “Oh, you don’t really think that. I know all you’re really thinking about is what happened back in the corridor, before you’d worked out what I was up to.”

  She said nothing. All of her concentration was occupied in trying to stay in control. Farron moved his face closer to hers.

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t dare. I’ll bite you.”

  “You won’t.”

  Verity squeezed her eyes shut as his lips met hers. She tried to be as a stone, unmoved by his touch, but she could not do it. She wanted to clamp down her teeth hard and bite through his tongue when he thrust it into her mouth, but she couldn’t move the muscles that would do it. She wanted him dominating her like this, although it made no sense. He was dangerous, unpredictable, sexy, utterly engrossing and addictive. She wanted to know exactly what he could do to her.

  Lloyd pulled away abruptly, leaving every nerve in her singing like a tuning fork.

  “Ah well, enough playing around. Time to get down to business. On to level two.” He’d gone over to a table, and he was already upending a bottle, filling another syringe.

  “Level two?” said Verity, confused.

  “That was level one.”

  A dim hope kindled in Verity. She must have resisted sufficiently to move on to level two. If that was the case, perhaps there was the chance the people who genetically engineered her had been right, and she could keep resisting him.

  Farron must have sensed this. “Nil desperandum. If you don’t yield to level two, there are another three levels of it. And if you won’t yield to all five levels of the chair, there is always the table.”

  A cold thrill crawled up Verity’s spine and over her scalp. Maybe it was bleed-back from him. Maybe it was just the way he’d said the word. “You think a discussion about dining furniture’s going to frighten me?”

  Farron chuckled. “There’s a lot of guff and bravado about you, Verity.” He tapped the side of his head with his middle finger. “Only, I know what’s happening up here.”

  “Then what happens if I won’t yield to the table?”

  He closed his eyes and exhaled through his nose. There was something smug and arrogant in his demeanor. “There are twelve levels of the table. No one has ever got past six.”

  Verity stared at the syringe in his hand as he adjusted the plunger, squeezing out the tiny bubble of air trapped where the needle connected. A thin strand of fluid plumed from the point, dispersing in the air before it could reach the floor.

  “I’m not like other people,” she said.

  “We shall see.”

  A great thump rattled through the corridor and shook the floor, and Farron leapt back from the chair. Broken glass jangled on the floor. A hot draught and a stench of burnt plastic ripped into the room. Before Verity had worked out what had happened, Farron let off a yell and was out the door behind the chai
r, in the corridor where Verity heard men’s voices.

  He’d run off--some crisis was taking place and he’d not even thought to release her from the chair. “Lloyd, you coward!” Verity wriggled and pulled against the restraints, but she couldn’t get free, and she couldn’t move her head. With her vision limited to the motions her eyes were capable of, she could see the syringe lying on the floor where he’d dropped it. Flames licked behind the hole where the window had been in the far door, and already she could feel the fierce heat radiating from the corridor on the exposed skin of her face. Verity fought against the chair’s grip to no avail. She thought of the flames coming closer, the heat growing worse...she did not want to die this way! She looked frantically to the things on the bench, the swords she couldn’t reach, the bag and the computer with Anthony’s ghost on it.

  “Anthony!”

  Was he aware of any of this? That computer had no other input peripherals, so far as Verity was aware. Did he know what approached? The computer lay on the bench, inert, its blank screen reflecting the flicker of flames.

  A barking, roaring sound made her start. Was the fire getting worse? The flames behind the door faltered, and the noise came again. The flames guttered under a torrent of white air, falling back.

  Someone threw open the door, and the shape of a man emerged from the smoke, a tall, broad-framed, plump man, carrying a heavy red cylinder with a black nozzle.

  “Vladimir!”

  “In Soviet Russia,” he shouted over the roar of the fire extinguisher, “hydrogen blows up you!”

  Chapter 14

  “What did you do?”

  Vladimir dumped the fire extinguisher and the helmets on the floor as he hurried over. “There was a depressurization system in one of the labs coming off the main supercritical supply pipe.” He fumbled with stiff fingers at the straps holding Verity’s wrists down. “Looks like they need hydrogen gas for some kind of research. I dismantled the safety valve and left the tap running, so it backfilled the room with hydrogen. It must have made a spark when one of them came looking for me and opened the door.”

  Verity ripped the collar away from her neck as soon as her hands were free. When she got up, an aching weight deadened her arms and legs, and the room swam a little. She felt like she had after drinking the wine on Anthony’s yacht. She synced herself to Anthony’s computer before shoving it back into the bag and pulling it up onto her shoulders.

  “What’s happened? What did he do?” Anthony demanded.

  Verity gathered up her katana and wakizashi. Vladimir caught her elbow as the room began to slide sideways. “Are you all right?”

  “He injected me with something.”

  “What? Verity, what did he inject you with?”

  “I don’t know. Sodium something. He was going to inject me with something else, but Vladimir caused an explosion and he dropped it.” Her gaze dropped to the syringe on the floor. She held on to Vladimir, her helmet clutched under her free arm as he hauled her and the fire extinguisher through the door Farron had left by.

  “Are you sure he didn’t inject you with anything else?”

  “No, I don’t remember another one.”

  “How far did he get?”

  “He just made me answer some questions. He said something about moving on to level two.”

  “You’re sure?”

  The corridor was stiflingly hot, obscured by a haze of smoke. “I don’t know.”

  “Verity, you have to be sure! If we go back to the Magnolia Order and we tell them not what happened, but what Farron wants us to think happened, we will only make things even worse.”

  “Verity, please stop talking,” said Vladimir. “You’re not making any sense and someone might hear us. Can you remember the way out of here?”

  Verity blinked and shook her head. Concentrate. These effects must be from the drug, or the smoke, or both. “The Commodore,” she remembered. “We have to help Commodore Smith!”

  “Okay,” said Vladimir in a calm voice. “Can you think of the way back to the room where we saw him?”

  The corridors seemed different in the smoke, and the fires were still burning. It dawned on Verity that at any minute the power supply to the underground base might be cut off, leaving them to struggle in darkness. She could sense an ANT signal, but it wasn’t the same ANT as the one in the main base and it wouldn’t respond to her thought-prompts.

  “I’m not sure,” she said at length. “Anthony, do you know?”

  “I can only sense what you sense. I’ve no idea where I am.”

  Vladimir cleared his throat. “Okay. Let’s keep going this way and hope we see something that nudges one of our memories.”

  As they continued, both of them started to cough. They reached a junction where the corridor joined another.

  Verity frowned. This was familiar. “It’s this way, I think.”

  Not much farther they came to one of the laboratory doors. “Through here.” Vladimir pushed open the door, which led to the fetus room. The explosion had caved in the far wall, toppling most of the artificial uteri. The fetuses lay among the shards of their tanks in puddles of spilt amniotic fluid, most of them not moving, some of the bigger ones wheezing or squeaking faintly with lungs unprepared for the air outside. Flames danced on the wet floor near where the wall had collapsed. The air had a thick acrid stench, and neither of them could speak without coughing.

  Vladimir put his foot on one of the smaller dead fetuses, and bent over and tore the arm off it.

  “What are you doing? Don’t be disgusting.”

  “I’m getting evidence to take back! There’s DNA in its cells that will prove they’ve been doing illegal genetic manipulation.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Vladimir wrapped the bloody morsel in a paper tissue and stuffed it in the front pocket of Verity’s bag.

  “Ugh,” thought Anthony.

  “Quite.”

  They crossed the room and went out the far door, and through the corridor to the room with the chairs in it. Commodore Smith was still strapped to his chair at the front of the room, sedated and apparently oblivious to the smoke. Verity and Vladimir unfastened the straps, but the Commodore’s head lollopped to one side when Verity freed it from the restraint and pulled off the goggles.

  “Commodore Smith! Wake up!”

  Vladimir tapped the Commodore’s cheek with the flat of his fingers. The man murmured and his eyelids fluttered slightly.

  “Come on.” Verity pulled his arm over her shoulder and turned away, hoisting him up from the chair. “Sir, can you hear me? Sir, we’re in danger and you need to stand up. Help me carry him, Vladimir.”

  As Vladimir tucked himself under the Commodore’s other arm and they maneuvered him about to face the door, the lights in the room went out. “Shit!” said Verity.

  “Let’s use the lights on our helmets,” Vladimir said.

  Of course. Why hadn’t she thought of that? “Gimme my helmet.”

  Vladimir handed it over. She put it on and switched on the lamp as they hauled the Commodore back through the corridor and across the smoke-filled fetus room, the dead fetuses and broken glass macabre and gruesome in the light their helmets cast. Smith made hardly any effort to support himself or walk, and the exertion forced Verity to breathe in far more of the filthy air than she would like. Vladimir vented the fire extinguisher but it no longer had the pressure it’d had earlier, and the white gas dribbled from it rather than blasting back the flames. By the time they got out of the room she coughed uncontrollably. They reached the end of the complex at last and were out in the base of the lift shaft. The ventilation had concentrated the smoke here, and it funneled up the shaft like a chimney. They dragged the Commodore into the lift and Vladimir hit the panel that would send it up to the surface.

  The lift rose, its metal panels rattling unsteadily. The air grew cleaner higher up, but still Verity could not stop coughing. Smith seemed to have recovered partially from his sedation, and he choked fe
ebly, eyes streaming. As they got off the lift and onto the ice of the surface, Verity slid him off her shoulder and pulled her helmet off, coughing and pulling in great draughts of freezing air that left her throat raw, feeling as though she’d never be able to oust the suffocating itch from her lungs.

  Vladimir stood with his hands on his knees, coughing and hawking up phlegm that froze as soon as it hit the ice. Verity at last managed to quell the coughing and take an uninterrupted breath in. “We can’t leave hi--” She pointed to the Commodore where he lay on the ice, but the effort of speaking brought on more coughing.

  Vladimir nodded. They pulled Smith back up to his feet and started toward the base. Every so often one of them would have to stop, racked by coughing, but gradually the burning in her throat began to subside. Verity could sense the base’s ANT, but it wouldn’t respond to her. She must have been removed from the personnel list. Somehow it felt like a personal rejection.

  They reached one of the rear entrances, and Verity had to use the override switch on it so they could get in. They deposited Smith on the floor as soon as they had the door shut. He wheezed and coughed feebly, his arms and legs making sluggish, uncoordinated movements. Verity was afraid he would choke, unable to clear his lungs under the effects of the sedation, but she couldn’t think of what to do to help him. They would just have to leave him here and hope someone would find him and he would be all right.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Vladimir said.

  “No.” Verity bent over and coughed hard, so hard her vision went dark for a moment and her stomach heaved. “I’ve to kill Farron, like I told the Magnolia Order I would.”

  “Oh don’t be ridiculous,” said Vladimir. “What chance do we stand against him in this state?”

  “He’s right, Verity,” Anthony thought. “You’ve got your evidence. You’ve destroyed his work. If what you say is correct, he’s failed to brainwash you. You’re uncontaminated and you have everything the Magnolia Order needs to incriminate him. Let’s not risk it any more by going looking for him and giving him the chance to take that back from us. It’s not like there’s anywhere he can hide out here, or anything he can use to defend himself. He’s stuck here as a sitting duck until the Meritocracy’s big guns turn up.”