by Tom Holt
Maurice nodded. “All right,” he said. “I want full coverage. Stories, pictures, angles—”
“Well of course you do. Can I go now?”
“Also,” he said firmly, “there’s the nameless dread aspect. What really goes on inside the dark towers of GorgorSoft? Make it sound like they’re up to something sinister and horrible in there.”
“Of course they’re up to something sinister and horrible. They’re goblins.”
“Something goblins would consider sinister and horrible.”
Stephanoriel frowned. He liked it when she did that. It made her look not-ravishingly-beautiful, just for a moment; you could almost believe she wasn’t an elf. “What, for crying out loud? They’re stockpiling toothbrushes and bath salts? Blast caused by accident in top-secret deodorant research?”
Maurice shook his head. “Steady on,” he said, “we don’t want to spark off a riot. You’ll think of something.”
She shrugged, then nodded. “Leave it with me,” she said. “Just a moment. GorgorSoft isn’t a part of MordaKorp, is it?”
Maurice grinned. “Not yet.”
“Ah.”
“Got there in the end,” Maurice said. “Now go away.”
An elf, yes, but she was a damn good reporter. Horror Blaze At Doomsday Plant: the perfect headline. He knew he didn’t have to read the rest of her copy – it’d be just fine – but he did anyway. And stopped. And frowned. And lifted the phone.
“Get her in here now,” he barked.
She arrived ten minutes later, looking slightly singed and grubby; it suited her. “Now what?”
He pointed to the relevant paragraph. “What’s all this?”
“What’s all—Oh, that.” She smiled and sat down. “Exactly what you wanted,” she said. “Happy?”
“You’ve made it up, though. Haven’t you?”
Something dangerously resembling humility flickered across her face. “Actually, no,” she said. “That bit’s – well, you know. Practically the T word.”
Maurice pursed his lips. “Fearlessly heroic goblin firefighters were unable to enter the top-secret sealed lab on the seventh floor, believed to be where the blaze started. That’s true?”
“About them not being able to get in there? Yes, actually. Not that they tried too hard – they were having too much fun smashing windows. Anyhow, there wasn’t much point. The head geek told them, don’t bother with that, there’s no one in there and besides, it’s one-hundred-per-cent fireproof.”
“I see. I don’t suppose you’ve got any idea what’s in there?”
“The fire chief did ask. The geek said, Nothing much, just a load of old cardboard boxes.”
“Right. And in your view, it’s perfectly normal to build a sealed, fireproof facility and use it to store old boxes in.”
“Well, I—” She paused. “Yes, that is a bit odd, isn’t it? Mind you, Gorgor’s off his rocker anyhow; he’s well known for it. Always doing crazy stuff.”
“He’s always doing crazy stuff,” Maurice repeated slowly. “You mean, the CEO of a vast and powerful corporation with links to pro-dwarf extremist groups habitually acts in a deranged manner and you haven’t got me the story?”
She blinked at that. “Links to—?”
“Oh grow up,” Maurice snapped. “Everybody’s got links to everything – first rule of journalism. Presumably some prodwarf nutter’s got GorgorSoft Portals 6 on his laptop somewhere. That’s a link. Seriously, though. Why haven’t you done anything on this? It’s a story. A real one.”
She proceeded to say the unthinkable. “You’re right.”
“It could be huge. We can crucify him. And Mordak hates him, so it’s wonderful.” He hesitated. “Mordak does hate him, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, I should think so. He’s rich and successful, and Mordak failed to buy him out eighteen months ago. You know, that’s weird. Why haven’t we gone for him before? Correction: why hasn’t Mordak ordered you to get him? Doesn’t make sense.”
Maurice thought about that. “I guess I’d better check with Upstairs before we print anything,” he said. “But don’t let that stop you doing the story. Soon as it’s been cleared, I want to get right into it.”
“Sure.” She stood up. “It’ll be strange, though, doing a real story.”
“Don’t get used to it,” Maurice replied. “This time next week we’ll be back to making stuff up.”
She walked to the door, hesitated. “Of course, if you’re into multiverse theory—”
“What?”
“Multiverse theory. Oh, do excuse me. For a moment there, I thought I was talking to an elf.”
(There you go. A rather nice compliment all bundled up with an insult. Elves.)
“Thank you,” Maurice said. “What the hell is multiverse theory?”
She told him. He looked at her. “That’s just silly,” he said.
“There’s definitely something nasty in there,” she reported back. “They’ve got an elf in charge of R and D, so I asked around. Turns out he works for GorgorSoft because no elven corporation’s prepared to touch him with a ten-foot pole. A morbidly unhealthy interest in metaphysics, is how his old tutor described him. Coming from an elf, that’s bad.”
Maurice tapped his fingers on the desktop, which made her scowl at him. “We need to get inside,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a fortress. Everything else is a heap of smouldering ashes, but the paint on the door of the top-secret bit hasn’t even bubbled.”
“Good-quality paint?”
“It’s on the seventh floor.”
Maurice thought about that. “Ah.”
“I talked to an elf in the fire department,” she went on. “As far as he can tell, the seventh floor is what’s holding the rest of the building up. All of it.”
“That’s—”
“Yes. There’s clearly something seriously weird going on over there.” She hesitated and bit her lip. “You know, we ought to tell someone.”
“That’s the general idea,” Maurice said gently. “We’re a news paper. Telling people things is definitely part of our remit.”
“No.” She glared at him. “Not like that. We should go to the proper authorities.”
Maurice stared at her for a moment, then burst out laughing. He stopped when he was sure she was about to hit him. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just, I don’t think you quite understand the realpolitik of the Coalition. It means, basically, goblins in charge.” He hesitated, as an image of Glorfangel’s smile flitted through his head, but he let it go. “In which case, the proper authorities—”
“Would be the goblin military. Yes, fine.” She scowled horribly, but it was herself she was angry with. “Bad idea.”
“And if you go to your lot,” he went on, as kindly as he could, “and if they were to take you seriously—”
“Which they wouldn’t. They’re a snotty, toffee-nosed lot in Elf Intelligence.”
“Um. Anyway, just suppose the elves decided to take it into their own hands. Unilateral use of force against a goblin corporation. That’d be the end of the Coalition, and we’d be at war again. A bit of a high price to pay for a story.” A thought struck him. “Do we have any idea what caused the fire in the first place?”
That earned him the oh-come-on look. “GorgorSoft Consumer Electronics,” she said. “We’re talking about an enterprise which places goblins and electricity in close proximity on a regular basis. The question should therefore be: how come it lasted as long as it did.”
“Yes, but you said yourself, there’s elves working there. In charge of R and D, you said. Therefore, I’m assuming there wasn’t the usual cheerful goblin attitude to health and safety. You know what your lot’s like when it comes to regulations.”
“Valid point.” She lifted her head and looked at him with – well, it was as close as an elf could come to respect: roughly as close as Sydney is to Newfoundland, but on the same planet. “I’ll see what I can find out. The very fact
they spent all that money making sure it was fireproof—”
Maurice hadn’t thought of that, but he smirked in such a way as to imply that he had. One advantage of working closely with elves—
With one particular elf—
“We need to get inside,” he heard himself say, though his mind was suddenly occupied with other thoughts. “That’s where the story is. We need to get in there and see for ourselves.”
She gave him a startled look. “Steady on,” she said. “It’s just a story.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” The sudden passion in his voice was fuelled by other, more complex emotions, but hopefully she hadn’t realised that. “This one’s different. It’s a real story. Also, it’s one we’ll be allowed to tell. Better still, if we tell it, Mordak will love us to bits and pieces. This could be our big chance, don’t you see?”
“Yes, but—” She was looking at him oddly. “You’re talking as though we have to prove something to somebody; you know, actual unassailable facts, evidence, that sort of thing. Whereas all we really need to do is make up something nasty and print it. Job done.”
Which was, of course, perfectly true. But deep inside his head, a little voice was telling him there was another way, a better way: the way we do it back home—
“Sure,” he said. “We make something up, we print it, people read it. And then what? They forget all about it. After all, it’s just news.” He was talking to her, but also to another elf he’d met recently, one whose philosophy of journalism had also been somewhat at odds with his own. “But if we write a story with evidence, a story that might even be at least partially true…” He paused. “True news,” he said, with a touch of awe in his voice. “An entirely new and different approach to the newspaper business.”
She was frowning, but not sneering. That suited her, too. “You think people’d go for it?”
“No idea.” He shrugged. “Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But it’s got to be worth a try. And we couldn’t have a better opportunity to try it out, don’t you think? A genuine shock-horror story about one of the proprietor’s main business rivals. It’s beautiful.”
“Even so. Sending round a bunch of goblins to burgle the place… they’re bound to get caught by the security guards, and then there’ll be a bloodbath, for sure. True, they’re only goblins, but—”
“Who said anything about sending goblins?”
Later, thinking back, he was almost certain that the words came out before he thought the thought, as if someone else hiding inside his body had said them. But, when he heard them, his immediate reaction was: yes, right, go for it.
“You what?”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” he said cheerfully. “We can’t send goblins, they’d make a total mess of it and start killing people, and then we wouldn’t get the story.”
“But you said—”
“So what we need,” he went blithely on, “is a reporter who isn’t a goblin. Fortuitously, we happen to have one on the staff. And a very good reporter she is too.”
“Have you gone stark raving mad?
Coincidentally, a question he was asking himself at that very moment. His answer was a qualified no; he had a feeling he wasn’t in total control of himself, almost as if something or someone else was prompting his actions, but that wasn’t the same as being crazy. Actually, he couldn’t remember ever feeling saner in his life. Admittedly, there were some distinctly odd and disturbing things going on inside his head, all of them to do with her, but that was different, and he’d deal with them later, when he had five minutes. Right now, though, he knew what had to be done. Unfortunately, he realised, he didn’t have a clue how to do it. “You’re an elf,” he said. “You’re smart, and you people keep telling the rest of us how you know everything. What’s the best way to break into a high-security building?”
She was thinking, a symphony in compressed eyebrows and high cheekbones. Later, he had to tell himself, not now. What she was thinking, he had no idea. He was, therefore, surprised on a number of levels when she suddenly grinned at him.
“With a clipboard,” she said.
The clipboard was for him – also the tape measure, the gadget with buttons (later she told him it was the remote from a TV that had packed up eighteen months earlier), the video camera and the black attaché case. All she needed, she told him, was a set of fake ID, a haughty expression and pointed ears.
“Agent Tintaviel,” she snapped at the security guard, a short, massive-necked goblin with the biggest tusks Maurice had ever seen. “Specialist Cooper.” Maurice nodded and tried to look like a Specialist, whatever that was. “And this,” she went on, with a respectful gesture towards a particular patch of thin air, “is Chief Director Gr’zog. We need access to the damage zone.” She waved a plastic wallet under the goblin’s snout. It contained an out-of-date Moviezone season ticket, but her thumb was strategically placed. “It’s all been cleared with Division,” she said briskly, “but you’ll need to file a PZ88C with Area.”
The goblin stayed firmly in front of the door. “Hang on,” he said.
She sighed perfectly. “What?”
“You said there’s three of you.”
“Yes. Well?”
“But there’s only two.”
She gave him the Look. “Chief Director Gr’zog is on a need-to-see basis,” she snapped. “Now, if you don’t mind, we’re on a schedule.”
But the security guard didn’t move. Instead, he wrinkled his flat, scallop-shell nostrils and sniffed. “And a need-to-smell basis too, of course,” she added quickly, but it was obvious she’d got it wrong and they were maybe half a second away from disaster. So Maurice hit him over the head with the clipboard, which, being goblin-made out of ten-gauge sheet iron, got the job done just fine.
“I can’t believe I just did that,” Maurice said, looking down at the sleeping guard.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” she said, stepping over him. “We’re going to be in so much trouble.”
“No we’re not,” Maurice replied crisply. “Think goblin. It’s exactly what a senior goblin officer would’ve done. Come on, will you? This isn’t exactly a happy place.”
The door they were facing was massive. Maurice had read about it in the file; it was made out of some weird stuff mined from a shooting star that had landed somewhere in the Ice Country, and it was reckoned to be proof against anything known to goblin science. But it had a handle, and when Maurice turned it, the door swung open. “Need-to-see basis, for crying out loud,” he muttered, closing the door after her. “That’s the trouble with you people. Always got to be clever.”
“Think goblin,” she repeated, mimicking his accent into a whine. “You know perfectly well, all task forces have to be headed by a senior goblin. We haven’t got a senior goblin. So—’
They were in a long, white corridor. She tried to overtake him, but Maurice quickened his pace. “And you know perfectly well that goblins go by scent more than eyesight. What you should’ve done was say need-to-smell first, and then we’d have had no bother at all. Next time—”
“There isn’t going to be a next time. And whether or not there’ll be a this time is still pretty moot.”
They’d reached the end of the corridor, a white door in a white wall. They stopped and looked at it. After about twelve seconds, she said, “Well?”
“After you.”
“Why?”
“You’re an elf. You have a significantly higher pain threshold and redundant cardio-pulmonary systems enabling you to sustain high levels of physical trauma without sustaining debilitating shock and injury.”
“You mean you’re scared.”
“Yes.”
“Fine.” She glared at him, opened the door and went through. “Oh wow.”
“What?”
“You want to see this.”
Shivering a little, he followed her, and found himself in a huge vaulted chamber, lit by fluorescent tubes running horizontally al
ong the bare white walls. He saw a ring of desks and monitors, like settlers’ wagons drawn into a circle, surrounding a shimmering glass jar that was somehow very difficult to see. And inside the jar—
At exactly the same time as Maurice opened the door, in exactly the same place, but at ninety-one degrees to that time and place in the D axis, the man in the jar lifted his head and thought, Gosh, a human male entity and a female entity, not quite human. Presumably, she must be one of the Elder race whose existence I deduced just now. Good heavens. And I was right about the ears.
—In which case, this must be somewhere in the Third age, because here we’ve got humans and the Elder folk apparently acting in harmony, or at least together, so presumably they’ve reached their uneasy rapprochement with the short, grumpy lot with the teeth and formed an alliance against the short, grumpy lot with the beards, assuming I was right about the beards, though surely it stands to reason, because it must be really tricky shaving in the dark. In which case—
The two entities were approaching his jar, and he thought, Oh snot, they’ve come to wipe my memory again, which is a real nuisance, because in about an hour’s time I should be ready to prove the existence of the Higgs-Sauron. Oh well. Never mind.
“Hello?” he said.
“It’s talking,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Maurice whispered back. “And it’s not an it. He’s human.”
“Shh.”
Nobody shushes like an elf. They have the upper lips for it. Maurice listened, but he couldn’t hear anything.
But maybe she could. “Say again?”
The man’s mouth moved. No sound.
“Yes, hello to you too,” she said. “What are you doing in there?”
“You can hear him?”
“Yes, of course. Can’t you?”
Maurice shrugged. He’d always known that there was more to elf ears than simply a convenient spike for cleaning under your fingernails with. “What’s he saying?”
“Hello.”
“Ah, right,” he whispered, and waved at the man, who waved back.
“Yes, hello to you too,” said the female entity. “What are you doing in there?”