"Why are you telling me this?"
The tall Elite said quietly, "You are who I think you are, no matter what Biotech says. At least one officer of the PKF whom I have been able to find knows your people, knows them well, from before the Troubles. His name, as I say, is Mohammed Vance--and I've sent for him. He will be here the day after tomorrow."
The door unrolled behind Garon with efficient mechanical finality.
Three hours later a black Peaceforcer whom Trent had not seen before came to get him. He carried an unholstered needler, and spoke in a grumbling complaint of a voice, with a distinctly American accent. "Your attorney is here."
Trent sat in the center of the cell floor, looking up at him. "It's late."
"No shit?" The Peaceforcer tossed a snakechain on the floor in front of Trent, waited just a moment and then said, "If you're not on your feet with the chain around your wrists in two seconds flat, kid, I'm going to lock you back up again and your lawyer can damn well come back in the morning."
"Look at me, getting to my feet," Trent observed. He picked up the snakechain and stood slowly, stretching, getting the kinks out of his muscles.
The Peaceforcer had stepped back into the corridor, well out of range. He was not exactly pointing the weapon at Trent. "Come on, kid, let's go."
Trent wrapped the snake around one wrist until it came into contact with itself, then held the other wrist next to the first and waited while the snake got a good grip. He stepped out into the short corridor, moving slowly. The corridor's glowpaint was turned down to one-third normal intensity, and the gray ferrocrete walls seemed particularly grim. The Peaceforcer followed Trent at a distance of five paces.
They passed through the visual check station that separated the cells from the visitors' areas and the holding pens, went through one sparsely populated area where a pair of night operators sat on the other side of a glassite wall, sitting at their terminals and watching the prisoner with the armed escort. The Peaceforcer took Trent right up to the door of the conference room where Trent had, earlier that day, met with Beth; made Trent stand to one side and without taking his eyes off Trent palmed the pressure pad next to the door and waited while his palmprint was examined.
The door curled open.
There was a woman sitting at the conference table, dressed in a conservative black businessperson's suit, hair swept up into a tight bun that was, Trent thought distantly, quite attractive. As Trent stared at her, Denice Castanaveras fixed glittering green eyes on the Peaceforcer and said quite calmly, "Officer Markson, please come in here."
The muscles around the black Peaceforcer's eyes relaxed suddenly and completely, and without hesitation he stepped forward into the conference room, into a thin stream of liquid that struck him on the side of his neck. Jimmy Ramirez stepped forward, caught the Peaceforcer as he fell, and dragged him forward through the closing door.
Trent stood blankly with his wrists snaked together on the other side of the closed door.
The door opened again a second later, and Jimmy Ramirez, standing in the doorway, said, "Why are you just standing there? We're here to rescue you!"
Trent stepped inside the conference room, looking around at Denice, at Jimmy with Trent's squirt gun in his hand, at the body of the Peaceforcer on the floor.
Quite calmly, he said, "What?"
There was a moment of silence.
Denice said, "We're here to--"
Jimmy said, "They're gonna brain-drain you--"
"What are you doing?"
There was another flat moment of total silence. Denice looked at Jimmy, and then at Trent, and said, slowly, as though speaking to someone who might not be too quick on the uptake, "We came to get you out. We told them Jimmy was your lawyer and we came to rescue you."
Trent stared at them. His dawning expression of utter horror must have gotten through to them. Trent said desperately, "You're what?"
Denice and Jimmy glanced at each other again. "Rescuing you."
"I don't want to be rescued." Trent felt sheer hysteria bubbling up. "That's what I have an attorney for!"
"For tonight," said Jimmy Ramirez seriously, "I'm your attorney. And we're getting you out now."
Trent looked back and forth between them, then down at the still body of the Peaceforcer on the floor. "Oh, Lord, Lord, please no. You can't be doing this. Do you know what you're doing?" The deep, hidden anger flared suddenly, broke free for just an instant. He shouted at them and could not hide the fury in his voice. "I was two to one to walk on this. Until you broke in here they had nothing." He screamed the word. "Nothing!"
Jimmy Ramirez froze. "Are you sure?"
Denice said, "Oh, no."
Trent took a long, shaking breath. "Did either of you talk to Beth?"
Denice said quickly, "There was no chance. Booker Jamethon got your file for us; it said you were going to be brain-drained. It said Mohammed Vance was coming."
"Brain-drain requires a court order, and then that can be appealed. The appeal process can take up to nine goddamn months. The last time Mohammed Vance saw me, if he ever did, I was eleven years old. He's going to do what, identify me today?" Trent glanced down at the snakechain on his wrists. "Oh, my God. I'm fucked." He looked back up at them. "I'm totally fucked. The snakechain has to come off. Everything's blown now."
"Wait, wait." Denice Castanaveras thought furiously. "We can just leave. Wait until Officer Markson wakes up, tell him we were never here, have him walk you back to your cell, and Jimmy and I just leave."
Trent shook his head slowly, in sheer amazement. "No. How can you be so stupid? It won't work. You don't understand, either of you. We are three floors down in the PKF Detention Center in the middle of Capitol City. You've been holographed eight or nine times in the course of getting here. Every checkpoint you went through choked on your ID, it had to. Denice, you worked people as you went?"
"How else could we have gotten this far?"
Trent said softly, "You've left a trail a blind man could follow. Tomorrow the PKF is going to go through its morning reports, and there's going to be a chain of seven or eight stations where Denice Daimara and Jimmy Ramirez failed admittance. So, how does it happen, that somebody who fails admittance at the first stop point even makes it to the second? All points goes out for both of you, they drag in the watch officers and interrogate them and suddenly it becomes clear that none of these Peaceforcers remember things the way they happened. You left them a damn calling card, Denice."
Denice had gone white. Jimmy Ramirez looked grim.
Trent found his breath coming quickly, and with a conscious effort stilled himself. "I appreciate what you tried to do, but you've really, really shot everything to hell." He stood silently, thinking, and then said, "And it looks like you get to rescue me as soon as I'm done rescuing you. Jimmy, help me get the Peaceforcer's thumbprint on the snake, and let's go."
Trent took the Peaceforcer's needler, gave it to Jimmy, and took his squirt gun for himself. They left the Peaceforcer lying flat on his back by the door to the conference room, and without hurrying the three of them walked down the corridor to the nearly-empty operations room Trent had seen on his way there.
Trent, in his prisoner's jumpsuit, stood well away from the glassite door while Denice rapped on the transparent sheeting. He saw little of what happened, as one of the two operators inside, a young man perhaps twenty-five years old, in black civilian clothing of a cut similar to the uniform of a Peaceforcer Elite, stood up and palmed the pressure pad to open the door, even as the woman in the room with him said something that was plainly an objection.
Trent watched Denice in the doorway and even so did not see it clearly. Denice seemed to place one hand on the man's breastbone, and touch his ankle with just the big toe of her right foot. The man went crashing backward ten meters directly into a long row of terminals.
The woman sitting at her desk touched one stud, and the alarms went off.
Jimmy stood with the needler pressed against
the side of the woman's neck while Trent worked at the terminal. Denice was out in the corridor, eyes completely closed, watching with other senses as the Peaceforcers on duty roused themselves.
The shrilling of the alarms was getting on Trent's nerves.
The system was familiar to Trent. The hardware was identical to the equipment Department Five used, and Trent had written software for them. He knew the protocols intimately; the software the PKF used conformed to the interface the PKF had been using since before Trent's birth, essentially unchanged for over twenty years. He punched for a command prompt, requested Outside Resources, and punched in for 115005-TRNT.
The field glowed up at Trent, Password?
"Warped bastards," Trent muttered. He turned to the frightened young man in the pseudo-PKF uniform, sitting in front of another terminal nursing a broken arm. "What's the outside access password?"
The man started to say something, and the woman at the desk said sharply, "Shut up!"
From out in the corridor Denice said softly, "It's éveil. Hurry, Trent."
Trent punched in éveil and struck the Enter key.
The terminal said Waiting--Connected--Password?
Denice ducked back inside, followed closely by the sound of buzzing sonics. "Jimmy! Company!"
Trent typed, Crime Pays.
At point blank range Jimmy Ramirez shot the woman in the neck with the needler and threw the needler to Denice. Denice plucked the needler out of the air one-handed, eyes still closed, stuck just her hand outside the door frame and fanned the corridor with it. The buzzing of the stunners stopped abruptly, and when Trent had time to look he saw that he was alone in the op room except for the frightened young man and the unconscious woman, her neck bleeding badly where Jimmy had shot her.
Boss!
Out of the corner of his eye Trent saw Jimmy appear in the doorway, with an autoshot cradled in his arms. "It's going up, man. We gotta move!"
"Hang in there. I won't be long."
Hi, Johnny.
I've been worried, Boss.
They took my traceset, Johnny, I couldn't get to you. You know where I am?
Capitol City, Boss. PKF Boards.
"Trent!" There was the first touch of hysteria in Jimmy's voice.
"Hang on!" Trent yelled back. Johnny, can you find any pictures of Denice, or Jimmy, or me, any mention of us in the PKF Boards, and erase them?
I think so, Boss. It'll take some time to check.
Take it. Johnny, how badly can you damage the Boards you have access to?
From this location? With the security clearances this location has? You must be kidding.
Bad?
They won't know what hit them, Boss. Want me to take it all down?
"As your attorney," shouted Jimmy, "I advise you to move, damn it!"
Johnny?
Yes?
I'm coming to get you. If I don't make it there, melt the Image coprocessor and go replicant.
There was another round of buzzing, which ceased abruptly.
I don't want to be a replicant AI, Boss.
Don't argue, Johnny. If I'm not there within three hours, you're on your own.
Trent? Denice's thoughts touched his, tinged with panic. They're coming from the level above us, at least fifteen Peaceforcers and they're all armed. Masers, Trent, and I can't stop all of them. We have three floors to go before we even make it to the surface; we have to go. Now.
Boss ... Boss, are you there?
In the abrupt silence Trent looked around at the nearly empty operations room, at the frightened, staring young man. He could not have put a word to how he felt; it seemed to him that he stood at a juncture, a myriad of paths falling away from that moment, from him; that he had reached a place that was both departure and homecoming all in one. He was distantly aware of Jimmy Ramirez, felt the hot touch of Denice's thoughts hovering at the edge of his mind, and he felt suddenly, in that instant, very calm and fine, as though he had, at long last, reached the destination and the purpose for which he had always been meant.
Denice screamed, "Trent!"
Trent typed, Trash the place.
He turned and ran.
The Long Run
* * *
2069 Gregorian
If you can keep your head while all those about you are losing theirs, then perhaps you have misunderstood the situation.
--Graffiti on the side of the Flushing Street Temple of Eris in New York
* * *
9.
Emile Garon's apartment sat on the southern tip of what had once been Franklin D. Roosevelt Island. The island had been renamed Moreau Island a scant five years ago, when Capitol City had reached out to encompass the island. The name was in honor of the memory of Jules Moreau, the Frenchman who had, with then-Secretary General Sarah Almundsen, guided the United Nations into the Unification War.
In 2069 Moreau Island was home to more than 20,000 of the most powerful men and women in the Unification: Unification Councilors, PKF Elite, and other high officials of the Unification.
Emile Garon was roused from sleep by the insistent shrieking of his terminal.
He sat up in bed. A bright red image, floating off somewhere in the back of his skull, read 4:25 a.m.
"Command," he said in a voice that was still gravelly with sleep, "answer."
From the shoulders up, the bright, solid image of PKF Elite Commander Christine Mirabeau appeared at the foot of Emile Garon's bed. One of the few female Elite, she was a pleasant and gracious woman, built like a tank, and every bit as unshakeable.
"Emile?"
He said wearily, "Yes?"
Commander Mirabeau did not hurry. "Congratulations, Emile. Your young man, with aid from another young man and a young woman, has broken out of the Detention Center. One civilian is severely injured, and five PKF. Two thirds of the PKF Boards in Manhattan are out of commission, and more are going down at every moment."
Garon stared stupidly at the holo. He barely got the word out. "Congratulations?"
"It seems," she said without inflection, "that you were correct."
It was a nightmare run down gray ferrocrete corridors, up three separate flights of stairs. Trent took the lead, and Denice covered their backs; Jimmy did not even protest at being put in the middle.
It took, in total, less than four minutes.
It seemed like an eternity.
They held running battles with Peaceforcers twice; the second time there was an Elite in the group.
The Peace Keeping Force Detention Center is near the center of that heavily guarded enclave of the Unification known as Capitol City.
Capitol City is the core of the Patrol Sectors--the place from which the world is putatively run. It is one of the smaller cities on Earth; its heavily-guarded south border begins at 34th Street, and reaches north to 72nd. Its west boundary is Park Avenue; its east is the East River. It includes both Belmont and Moreau Islands, in the East River, but not Grand Central Station; Capitol City's designers had recognized that the mandatory identity checks that occur when passing from Manhattan into Capitol City would have been impossible had Grand Central Station been included within Capitol City's borders.
Capitol City is laid out, perhaps by accident, in a fashion that nearly corresponds to the real power structure of the Unification. The offices of the Secretary General are at the south end of Capitol City, near the small collection of buildings that were once all that existed of the United Nations in America; they are surrounded to the north in a loose semi-circle by the offices of the elected Unification Councilors. Between them, in the center of Capitol City, are the Ministry of Population Control and the United Nations Peace Keeping Force; with the possible exception of the Secretary General and his webdancers, they are the two most powerful forces within the Unification. Together they occupy fully one quarter of the ground space in Capitol City, and two of Capitol City's three spacescrapers; fully forty percent of the personnel within Capitol City work for either the PKF or the
Ministry of Population Control. To the north of the Peaceforcers and the babychasers are the Prosecutor General's offices and the courts; to the north of that are Space Force, the Bureaus of Traffic Enforcement and Education, Biotech and Health.
It is usually quiet in the early hours before dawn in Capitol City. The Unification rules one world and part of another, and it is never so still, even in the dead of night, as in any city that has not tied itself so tightly to the concerns of humans in other time zones. Nonetheless, if it never achieves true tranquility, there is rarely anything exciting happening in Capitol City in the small hours of the morning.
Or in most of the rest of the day, for that matter. It was newsdancer Terry Shawmac who once wrote that the most amazing accomplishment of the Unification was that it had turned Capitol City, and in the process most of the rest of Manhattan, into a place that was both safe and dull.
The offices of the United Nations Peace Keeping Forces were heirs to what was, in 2069, a fact of life of thirty years' standing. "You just don't expect that sort of thing here in the City," one British Peaceforcer said the next day to a newsdancer from the Electronic Times. "It was like the tour of duty I had in the Fringe; people running and screaming everywhere, gunfire in the corridors--" The newsdancer kept the holocams on her; the Peaceforcer was visibly disturbed. "It reminded me of the things my Dad used to tell me about, about all the rebellions following the Unification. That's what we all thought was happening, you know. Johnny Rebs or Erisian Claw--a bloody rebellion starting in the middle of Capitol City." In response to a question from the newsdancer she said with obvious sarcasm, "Sure I believe what I've been told. Three kids had a firefight with twenty-odd PKF, wounded thirteen of them including an Elite." The holocams stayed on her, and after a moment the woman snorted. "And one of them had a squirt gun. Right."
Tuesday morning, August 13th, less than an hour before dawn, Trent and Denice ran across the dew-dampened grass outside the PKF Detention Center. They carried Jimmy Ramirez between them, running away from the reception area they had barreled their way through, away from the fading sound of the screaming and the shouts, toward the line of cars and cabs hovering next to the slidewalk. Half a dozen spyeyes littered the grass; Johnny Johnny had taken them down.
The Long Run Page 10