Strings

by Dave Duncan

  Angel turned out to be a rackety Sikorsky of incredible antiquity. It set down right in a public square to pick up Cedric and Bagshaw, then took off again as calm as milk, woof…woof…woof into the dawn sky. It was only after they had cleared the tops of the nearby towers that someone opened fire. None of the occupants seemed very worried by that.

  The interior was dark and empty and stank of oil. The pilot and his buddy jabbered into mikes and crouched over controls, with vague red lights flickering over their faces as though they were demons from the pit. Cedric’s percy had been laid flat across the floor like a coffin, and Bagshaw helped him out of it. He was soaked, with his clothes clammy on his skin, but it was only sweat—his pants were no wetter than his poncho. He sat on a bench and leaned back against an icy window and tried not to shake. He felt sick.

  Something went by at high speed, and the helicopter rocked in its wake. The pilot made a joke, but Cedric thought that the other two did not find it funny. Then other fast things roared by, and those were apparently goodies, and everyone relaxed.

  He was still clutching his little bag of coins. It was all he had left. It held sanity. It held his childhood. It held all his memories—of Christmas parties with Victor playing Santa Claus, of camping trips and rafting and hikes, and himself lasering. He had recorded most of the coins himself, with his own camera, but he had traded with the others, too. There were lots of his favorite shows and dramas in there also, but the commercial stuff was not really important. It was the personal stuff, the junk that no one else would care about—that was what mattered. The images might be out of focus, or the world tilted, or everyone unrecognizable under masks and goggles in the outdoor shots. So what? That was life. Now he had been pitched without warning into a madness of death and terror. Sanity and happiness and love had disappeared from the world, and all he had to hang on to—all he had to remember them by—was that little bag of coins.

  Then he realized that he was grieving for Meadowdale, and he felt ashamed. He was a man now, out in the world at last. That was what he had wanted, was it not? He was going to be a ranger like his father. He just had not expected the world to get quite so rough quite so soon, that was all.

  Bagshaw had stripped off his armor, down to his underwear. He was just as sweaty as Cedric, and he had pulled a blanket over his shoulders. From nowhere that Cedric could see, he produced two cans of beer.

  Beer at that time of day? Cedric accepted one and drank greedily. The ranch hands had slipped him beer a few times, but he had never cared for the taste much. Until now. It went down good. How many people had died? The sky was still brightening slowly, and a fine rain was falling, smoking off the rotor edges. Towers and streets rolled by below.

  “You said twelve stories.” Cedric had not meant to talk, and he wondered why his mouth had spoken without warning him it was going to.

  Bagshaw was not as sassy as he had been. He sat morosely on the bench, hunched under his blanket. He was immensely thick all over, like a weight lifter. Despite his globular belly, he probably carried more muscle than flab. The dermsym ended in a ragged edge at the top of his chest, yet as far as Cedric had been able to see, the man was completely hairless even where he had skin.

  “I said twelve for that make of percy. Mine is a bull suit. They’re better, but they do take practice.” He drank, then wiped his lips. “I knew I could do forty-five meters in a bull suit. That wasn’t much more than forty-five.”

  “The hell it wasn’t.”

  Bagshaw shrugged. “The tricky part was catching you. There’s no routine for that.”

  Cedric shuddered convulsively. “No routine…that was you?”

  Thick lips parted in a leer. “Just me—my eye, my judgment. Glad I got it right? You’d not have been very interesting after the first bounce.” He held out his arms, which were turning bruise colors. “I never caught anything going quite that fast, though.” The waldoes had not shielded him totally.

  “But you faked me!” Cedric said. “You slowed it down until I got to the window, and then you stopped it. I thought it wasn’t going to happen. Then you went and did it to me anyway.”

  Bagshaw turned to study him for a moment. “I had to. First, I had to get ready. Second, a percy couldn’t jump the ledge. If you’d hit the sill at speed, you’d have come out spinning, cart-wheeling all over the sky.”

  Cedric grunted and looked away.

  The flight continued. The sky grew paler yet, sick-looking. They were flying over patchy woodland and gullies, for Nauc was a conglomeration of many cities, not yet continuous. Here and there Cedric noticed buildings being thrown up in haste. Despite the falling population, the whole world was in a building frenzy.

  “You never went over a hundred,” Bagshaw said softly.

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve got a real slow heartbeat at the best of times, but even coming down the sky, it never went over one hundred. A guy could brag about that a little, I guess.”

  Cedric shivered in early morning chill and reaction.

  “How many deaths?” he asked. “How many died?”

  “I don’t know. We didn’t start it.”

  “Just to kill me? Just to spite Gran and get on the evening news?”

  Bagshaw shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe they didn’t even know who you were. Just knew there was a big force on their turf, thought they could scare us into surrendering. Then they’d have taken us apart and decided who we were and what use we might be.”

  Cedric shivered again.

  “It wasn’t your fault, lad.”

  For a while Cedric just watched the condensation collecting on his beer can. He knew that Bagshaw was watching him.

  “No. It wasn’t my fault,” he said finally.

  “You saying it was mine?”

  Of course it was. Bagshaw had invaded enemy territory with an unnecessary show of strength. He had wasted endless time in taunting Cedric for his own amusement. He had told him to shave and shower when they should have been streaking out like scared trout. He had damned nearly advertised for trouble.

  “Who’s going to ask?”

  Bagshaw shrugged. “Just the Institute.”

  “No cops? The city? State?”

  Bagshaw looked at him as though he were trying to be funny. “You’ve got a patron! Probably the best there is! You’ll die of old age before any cop gets to lay a finger on you. That’s what lawyers are for.”

  “So a guy works for the Institute, he can get away with anything?”

  “Hell, no! The Institute sees to that itself.”

  Ah! “And who files the report on what happened tonight?”

  Without taking his veiled gaze off Cedric, Bagshaw tilted his head back, trying for a last drop of beer. Then he crumpled the can. “I do. You can file one, too, if you want.”

  “Or countersign yours?”

  Bagshaw began to look thoughtful. “You may get asked to…this time.”

  “I could offer?”

  The bull head seemed to hunker down into the blanket, as though smelling a threat, and Cedric had a momentary vision of something massive pawing the ground.

  “You want to ask for a replacement?”

  “Would I get one?”

  The reply was grudging. “You might.”

  Cedric pushed harder. “After tonight, you mean?”

  Even more reluctantly, Bagshaw nodded. “After tonight. And if BEST files a complaint, then you will be asked for a report, I guess.”

  But if BEST complained, then the Institute would close ranks around its own—like little-boy gangs, like the bunkhouses at Meadowdale, each one a separate gang. This was the same, but bigger. And it was not little-boy stuff. It was death, caused by arrogance and rank stupidity.

  Gangs had rules, and the first one was always loyalty. But loyalty was a dangerous emotion. It could be turned.

  Cedric drained his beer can, too. “No. I’ll sign yours,” he said. “Your report. Put in all the lies you want. Say anything you nee
d to cover your precious ass, any crap at all. I’ll sign it for you, whatever you’ve said.”

  Bagshaw bared his teeth. After a minute he said, “You can’t back out once you sign.”

  “I know that.” Cedric returned his stare, not caring if he seemed petulant or unmanly.

  “Bastard!” Bagshaw said very softly. “Bad as your bitch of a grandmother.”

  Cedric felt a little better.

  “Frigging young bastard! It must run in your bastard family!”

  Whatever Bagshaw might make of the rest of his career, from that moment on he would always wonder if he owed his success to Hubbard Cedric Dickson. Nothing could ever hurt worse than that.

  6

  Nauc, April 7

  DAWN WAS BREAKING, and Eccles Pandora Pendor had not been to bed at all. Negotiating, waiting for messages, wheedling and bullying, she had had a busy night. Even had there been a break, she would not have been able to sleep—not when she was poised on the lip of the biggest story in the history of investigative reporting. Hell, it was the biggest story in the history of the human race, and she was going to break it.

  A stone ax with blood on it: Cave Men in Space.

  Finding that she fretted too much in her office, she had withdrawn instead to her retreat on the eighty-third floor, to spend the night pacing and worrying.

  Her apartment was a shimmering cavern of crystal and chrome, all angles and shiny white. The design was the latest and trendiest. To be honest, it gave her the pukes, but she redecorated every three months on principle, so this would soon be gone. Many a girl spent a fortune keeping her body youthful and then gave away her age by going for obsolete decor. Men detected discrepancies. Staying young was a total commitment.

  Now and then her pacing would take her past a mirror, and she would pause to inspect her appearance. She was very pleased with her new face. She did not look a day over twenty, and the scars had all gone now, except for a couple inside her mouth, which she could barely feel with her tongue. Even those were fading.

  The creep Wilkins had demanded ten million hectos. In official terms, that was exactly one billion dollars. Of course, a billion was not what it used to be, but even a media giant like WSHB could not throw that kind of change around lightly. Although Pandora had a hefty slush fund to call on, hefty was not omnipotent. Approval for expenditure on that scale had to come from higher up, and that meant politics. Frazer Franklin had friends who wanted him to get all the breaks, of course, old has-been though he was—Pandora almost laughed aloud every time she saw that scalp transplant of his. It was going to be as bald as its predecessor in another month or two.

  So she had been ramming through an emergency appropriation at the same time as she had been trying to confirm the story and also out-circle the office sharks. Even securing the data was proving to be tricky. She had told Wilkins that he would have to transmit the evidence to her on approval, and he had laughed in her new face—quite rightly so, of course. Getting more serious then, she had suggested that he forget his job, hop the lev, and nip down to Nauc with the coin. He had laughed even harder at that, claiming that then he would be cut up instead of cut out. He might have had a point there—WSHB’s accountants would go a long way to save ten million hectos.

  And she had no reliable rats in Cainsville. She doubted that anyone else did, either. Rats did not survive long in the Institute. They just vanished. So, even, did moles. Merely sending a man up there to contact Wilkins had required a good excuse, which had taken time to find. But ten million hectos needed verification of product.

  And time was precious. If 4-I made an announcement first, then Pandora’s scoop would be dead as the Ides of March.

  Of course, the Institute had its own time problems, which was why it had made no announcement yet. The missing explorers had been transmensed to Nile on April first, appropriately. They had planned to overnight until the next window, on the fifth. That was when they had come back dead. Today was the seventh already, and the next window must be due on the ninth, or there-abouts.

  She was certain that the Institute would prefer not to issue a statement until it had collected a lot more data, probably not until it had overnighted another team, and that meant the thirteenth at the earliest, if the period was exactly four days. Before then, 4-I would make nothing public—unless it learned about the leak. In that case it would move at once to preempt her and publish its own version.

  Pure luck had put Pandora within reach of Wilkins’s call. WSHB had a thousand such moles spotted around the world. Nine-tenths of them would never turn up as much as a borscht recipe in their lives, but once in a while a code would twitch in as a mole suddenly decided to rat. Then System would alert the senior news exec within reach. Normally that would have been Frazer Thin-on-top Frankie, but just by chance old F.F. had been interviewing a would-be starlet that afternoon, and the interview had already progressed to the point where F.F. had not been accepting calls. Thus Destiny had laid her hand on Pandora’s shoulder instead. Poor Frankie had apparently had a disappointing day all around—he had not even given the lad a training contract. He played dirty even with kids.

  So pure luck had taken a hand, but so had virtue, because Pandora’s section had been working on an Institute story for months. She had ample background ready to go. The media all took shots at 4-I quite regularly, of course, and had done so for years. Old Mother Hubbard always survived somehow, but now she was at the end of her string. There was no doubt that China was about to recognize the World Chamber. China was still the largest nation-state, the only one of any real size whose government had not collapsed into impotency under its debt load.

  If China backed the Chamber, then the long fight would be over, and the U.N. would cease to exist at all. The Institute operated on a United Nations charter, and Hubbard herself was a long-time political crony of Hastings, the S.G. In fact they had been paired once. He had pulled strings to win her appointment as director, and a few years later she had done the same for him. In their case, bedfellows had made very effective politics.

  It was all very profound. It meant that Hubbard was going down the sewer very soon, and WSHB was certainly prepared to help all it could. Curiously, this Cave Men in Space story might be enough all by itself. It might even reverse the expected flow of events: Old Mother Hubbard would fall, dragging down Hastings and the U.N. with her, and China would move even faster to throw its weight behind the Chamber. Speaker Cheung would certainly call a world election to confirm his hegemony. It was all very strong stuff, and sweet little Eccles Pandora was going to be a prime mover.

  Klaus had called from Cainsville just after midnight. He had contacted Wilkins. He had viewed the coin. And yes, it was everything that Wilkins had promised. Anything could be a fake, of course, but Deputy Director Devlin had been reeling around having apoplectic fits, his language on the subject of incompetence being hot enough to melt the rest of the polar ice caps. That alone, Klaus had suggested, might be worth a lot of money.

  Klaus had a good reputation in WSHB. Armed with his report, Pandora had bearded the senior lions, rousing them from their beds—or others’ beds in a few cases—until she had her approval. Ten million hectobucks had flowed electronically from one account to another, then another and another, destined to rest at last in one belonging to Wilkins Jules Smuts.

  But what was Klaus doing now? Hours had gone by. Had the Institute’s goons discovered the plot? Had Wilkins panicked and pulled out, or perhaps raised his price? Pandora’s pacing grew faster, although she was bone weary. She began to spend less time on planning and more on just worrying. Her old, old bunion operation began to complain, and she promised herself new feet if this deal worked out.

  Ping! said the com. “Secured message, code Honeysuckle Thunderbolt.”

  Klaus at last! Pandora made one more quick check that her hair was in place and had not turned white. “Code Naples Octave, accept and record.”

  The panel became a window into a grubby little cubicle, with
solid, scruffy, dependable little Kubik Klaus sitting in it. She wanted to give him a hug. She might just give him more than that when he got back. He was smiling broadly and holding up a coin.

  “What kept you?” she demanded.

  He pulled a face. “Our friend had started celebrating already.”

  “You had to dry him out?”

  “Cool him down. He’s a plugin freak.”

  Ugh! Pandora prided herself on being broad-minded, but there were a few vices she preferred not to think about.

  “But the deal’s made now, the money spent. So I have a question, sweet lady. Do you still want me to bring this to you, or do you need it zapped?”

  Now there was an almost irresistible temptation. Klaus could transmit the entire coin in compressed format to Nauc, and the evidence would be in Pandora’s hands within seconds. Unfortunately, that way was risky. Their override codes would mask conversations—or so she certainly hoped—but a data transmission needed higher bands, and the legendary 4-I Security would certainly be alert for any attempt to zap data out of Cainsville. Its monitors would detect the sending, and very likely could do so in time to block it.

  There was one entrance to Cainsville, so it was said, and a million exits. Wilkins and Klaus might find themselves on Nile, being thumped with stone axes like the previous explorers, or perhaps somewhere even nastier, breathing the unbreathable. Pandora did not care a fig what happened to Wilkins, but she rather enjoyed Klaus once in a while. More important, she wanted that evidence intact.

  “Bring it!”

  He nodded in obvious relief and vanished before she could change her mind.

  Finally Pandora could relax. The deed was done, the booty on its way, and dawn breaking. Today was going to be busy but joyful. The viewing, cutting, editing, blocking—and above all, the rescheduling. She would be co-copting everyone down to the garage flunkies, graciously acknowledging congratulations from members of the board, bumping Furless Frankie right off prime time…