The Graveyard Game (Company)

by Kage Baker

  “Me either,” Joseph said.

  “But it will,” Victor mused. “Giving us seventy-four years to prepare ourselves. I can’t say I find the prospect of my own death that alarming. I certainly merit capital punishment, several times over, and if you knew the details of my very unpleasant career, you’d agree with me. But Lewis was a gentleman, and he didn’t deserve what they did to him.” He looked at Joseph with his pale catlike eyes. “Neither did poor old Kalugin. I begin to suspect that even our father wasn’t as bad as he seemed, set beside the monsters who created him.”

  Joseph lay his head back on the pillow, exhausted. “But what do we do?”

  “I must go on playing the game for another few decades. I haven’t much choice,” Victor told him. “You, however, now have a certain freedom denied the rest of us. If you’re a clever fellow—and your history persuades me you’re very clever indeed—you’ll put it to good use. You can go wherever you wish. Set traps for guilty parties. Pursue the truth. I strongly recommend that you begin in San Francisco.”

  “San Francisco, huh?” Joseph narrowed his eyes.

  Victor got up and went to the door. He paused there a moment. “And you might want to take a shovel with you.”

  Latif disconnected the diagnostic apparatus. “See? Not a damned thing wrong anymore,” he told Joseph. “I told you.”

  “My nose hurts,” Joseph complained.

  “Psychosomatic. So you weigh an ounce less than you used to. Big Brother won’t be in your head, either. No more worrying about making the Company suspicious over those embarrassing little power surges that happen too often.”

  “Nobody seems to suspect the bunch of you,” Joseph grumbled, rising from the chair.

  “There’s a power station across the street.” Latif bared his teeth in a smile. “Neat, huh? All kinds of interference, and there’s nothing anybody can do, so it’s ignored. Not that anybody would question Suleyman, anyway.”

  “People have questioned me,” Suleyman told him, watching from the sidelines. “Nobody’s untouchable, son. Never forget that.”

  “I’d like to see Dr. Zeus try to double-cross you!” Latif said.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Suleyman and Joseph at the same time.

  Latif shrugged and went to the weapons cabinet, where he drew out a high-speed ballistic handgun and checked it. “Ready when you are,” he told Joseph. “Bunny-slope setting, okay?”

  Joseph poised on one of a number of blue circles painted on the floor. Latif took careful aim and fired at him point-blank from a distance of three meters.

  Joseph was gone, of course, before the bullet reached him, having winked out to one of the other circles. Latif whirled, though still moving at mere mortal speed, and fired again; Joseph was gone to another circle. His choice of circles was random. Another shot, and another circle, and so on, until the clip was empty.

  “Normal response time, normal readout,” Suleyman said. “Next level.”

  Latif reloaded. Joseph took his position on the first circle again, and the game resumed, but with the difference that Latif was now moving at Joseph’s speed. The game was over in a few seconds, and Joseph was still unharmed.

  “Normal response time, normal readout,” repeated Suleyman. “This seems as good a time as any to tell you about the coup attempt. Next level.”

  “Excuse me?” Joseph looked up from watching Latif’s trigger finger. Latif fired anyway, and the game began again, at the same speed, with the variation that Latif was now attempting to anticipate Joseph’s next position rather than the one he happened to be occupying at that particular millisecond.

  “Normal response time, normal readout. Yes, you remember I mentioned things were getting a little edgy up there? It seems the Plague Club made a premature bid for power. Either that or someone in the ruling cabal finally took notice of my warnings and mounted an operation against them,” Suleyman said. “Next level.”

  Latif reloaded, grinning. The next level was like the previous one, only faster, and utilizing the circles that had been painted on the walls and ceiling also.

  “Really?” Joseph said, panting slightly.

  “Normal, normal. Yes. Most of the Company personnel will never hear about it, but all the executive operatives had to be informed. Perhaps I should say explained to; we couldn’t help but notice something was going on. Normal, normal. Next level.” Any mortal in the room at this moment would have thought Suleyman was talking to himself, as the other two immortals were moving far too quickly to be seen. Of course, no mortal could have heard what Suleyman was saying over the roar of continuous gunfire.

  Suleyman continued: “Quite a few executive assignments of long standing have been unexpectedly reshuffled. One hundred and six operatives of differing grades have been transferred to numbered sites over a period of six weeks. There have been some promotions. There have been three outright arrests, which as you know is extremely rare.”

  The noise stopped suddenly, and two figures became visible through the clearing gun smoke.

  “Damn, this gun’s melted,” said Latif. Suleyman looked at him in mild reproach.

  “So who got arrested?” gasped Joseph, leaning forward and bracing his hands on his knees.

  “Nobody you know. They were, however, very high in the Plague Club cabal, subordinates only to Labienus. He didn’t get arrested, which I find interesting.” Suleyman took the ruined gun from Latif and examined it thoughtfully. “An intercabal purge to free himself of anyone still loyal to Budu, perhaps. Of the operatives who were sent to numbered sites, about half were known members of the Plague Club. Of course, many weren’t. Lewis, for example. I’m certain he was never a member. You—” Suleyman sighted along the barrel. “You, I’m giving the benefit of the doubt.” He tossed the warped thing away in disgust.

  “Thanks so much,” Joseph said, mopping his face with a towel.

  “You’re welcome. And I received a commendation from our masters, in appreciation of my dogged attempts to warn them of this possibility, and their assurances that it has been dealt with. They continue to depend on my unshakable integrity and loyalty. Isn’t that nice?”

  Joseph rolled his eyes. “If they’re throwing around words like loyalty, things must have got pretty shaky up there.”

  “So I guess it will quiet down, now,” said Latif.

  Suleyman and Joseph looked at each other.

  “Maybe,” said Suleyman. They walked together out of the diagnostic room. He drew a deep breath. “So, Joseph. You tested out fit and fine. You’re completely recovered and ready to be cut loose. You understand.”

  “I guess.” Joseph sighed and flexed his shoulders.

  “You are the security risk from hell, man,” Latif said.

  “He knows that, son. My people have too much at stake. There are mortals who would lose their lives. There are immortals who would lose more. We haven’t seen Joseph, haven’t heard from him, have no idea what became of him. He is lost and will stay lost. It shouldn’t be too hard for a man of his experience.”

  “I owe you, Suleyman—” Joseph began, but Suleyman held up his hand.

  “In return, he will forget anything he saw concerning my immunization program.” He looked at Joseph sternly. “To each his own rebellion.”

  “And if you tell anybody about the program,” added Latif, “it won’t matter how lost you are—I will come after you and I will find you, man.”

  That evening a solitary traveler slipped out of a side gate and made his way to a public transport stand. A ticket was purchased, in cash, for the coast. At Casablanca the traveler got out and moved through the darkness to the waterfront, where great cargo ships waited for morning. He found the one he wanted. No mortal security guard saw him run aboard, quicker than a rat and quieter.

  The traveler found his way among the shipping containers, seeking one with a broken seal, inching between the stacks in the darkness. When he found the container he needed, he prized it open and slithered in, clambering up
through boxes of electronic equipment to the top, where there was a comfortable clearance between the roof of the container and his face. The traveler stretched out and sighed, feeling secure.

  No mortal would have been able to bear a stateroom like that, but it had its advantages. Cargo ships were not subjected to the same rigorous security measures air transports were. They were too useful for smuggling, for one thing. The official argument was that terrorists always took planes. In any case the cargo ships traveled so slowly that no mortal who had places to go and things to do would choose one as a method of transport.

  Joseph, of course, wasn’t mortal, even if he felt not quite as immortal as he had been.

  He closed his eyes and set his internal clocks, factoring in emergency protocols. He began to breathe very slowly, and more slowly still. Gradually he slipped into a voluntary fugue state. He was only dimly aware, hours later, when the ship backed ponderously from her berth and made her way out into the Atlantic. By the time she was well out to sea, he had shut down entirely. He rested, waiting, dreaming.

  He didn’t dream particularly well. The great voice was booming in the darkness, impressively echoing and quite unmistakable. “And when he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the tabernacle, the souls of them that were killed for the word of God, and for the testimony they had, and they cried with a loud voice saying: how long tarriest thou Lord holy and true, to judge and to avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth? And long white garments were given unto every one of them!”

  “Don’t you tell me about John of Patmos,” Joseph heard himself growling. “I knew the guy, okay?”

  But the speaker rose from his table and stood, lit only by the single candle that had enabled him to read, and the light fell on the long folds of the scholar’s black robe and on the face. The eyes above the wide cheekbones were shadowed, but a spark glinted there, and light glinted on the teeth.

  “And it was said unto them that they should rest for a little season until the number of their fellows, and brethren, and of them that should be killed as they were, were fulfilled!” shouted Nicholas Harpole, holding out his hands as though he were about to present Joseph with something. So eloquent was his gesture, so well acted, that Joseph stepped forward half against his will to see what it was, though he knew there was nothing there.

  But there was something in his hands, after all: a sheet of mirrored glass. Joseph looked at himself and saw a snarling dog face, foam dripping from the jaws. And more: stretching into the darkness behind him, a vaulted bunker with row upon row of open coffins, each containing a figure robed in white. There were too many to count, but Joseph could see the two in the foreground with perfect clarity. Mendoza and Lewis, too pale, too still.

  “You bastard,” Joseph wept. At least he was weeping inside; the dog’s face showed no emotion. “They’re your victims, you know that? You got them both. Couldn’t stay dead, could you? Reached out of your grave and made them love you, and it destroyed them. Age after age, you come back.” Joseph reeled, trying to think what else had happened, what else he had said and done, in that prison cell so long ago.

  Chortling, he drew back his fist, ready to deliver a sound right hook to Nicholas’s jaw. Up he soared, into midair, laughing to himself, but he connected with nothing. After a moment’s breathless pause he looked down to find himself hurtling into a red canyon with a tiny ribbon of blue water winding through it, far below.

  Down he tumbled, thinking in resignation that this too was déjà vu. Then, crash, he’d made a hole in the ground just his own size and shape, and he knew that the big Englishman would be looking down from his great height at the puff of rising dust and sneering.

  And in fact that was what he was doing, as Joseph saw when he dragged himself out of the hole. Sneering down from horseback, no less, as though he wasn’t tall enough already, and resplendent in a fine tailored Victorian traveling ensemble.

  He made a covert gesture, and Joseph tensed, thinking he was going to draw a hidden weapon. Instead he produced a shovel out of nowhere, and threw it at Joseph’s feet. Joseph jumped backward.

  “Seek for thy noble father in the dust, Hamlet,” said Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax contemptuously, and, turning his horse’s head, he galloped away.

  “You think you’re so smart,” Joseph shouted after him. “You quoted it wrong, big shot!”

  He turned and looked over his shoulder to avoid falling into the hole again, but to his amazement he saw that the hole had changed: it was no longer the size and shape of his own body but much bigger, as though it had been made by his father.

  San Francisco

  THE CARGO VESSEL Hanjin maneuvered slowly into Island Creek Channel and moored there, dropping anchor. Her captain went ashore to register her arrival with the proper authorities. Her crew were showering, sprucing up for a night on the town.

  Joseph, deep in the hold, woke in darkness and listened a long while. He heard the crew leave, all but the night watch. He heard the great city grow quiet as the hours went by. When he judged the time to be right, he crawled from his hiding place and crept up on deck, avoiding the surveillance cameras that swept back and forth relentlessly.

  Watching for the proper moment, he dropped over the side and swam ashore. He made his way to Third Street and trudged along it, passing the big ballpark, squelching all the way up to Market. Here he paused a moment before turning left and walking up Market as far as Grant. At Grant he turned right and went into Chinatown.

  He walked more slowly now, scanning as he went. He disabled the security system of a small grocery store, broke in, and loaded the pockets of his long coat with fruit, protein bars, bottles of water, and herbal tea. He hurried on from there and sought out an apartment building, an older and less desirable one. Half its units were presently vacant, its security systems offline. It still took five minutes’ work to persuade the elevator to take him up to the eighth floor, which was completely without tenants.

  He broke into one unit and settled himself on the floor, where he gorged on what he’d stolen from the market. His body received it gratefully. He was overwhelmed with the need for real sleep, now, and sprawled in a strategically chosen corner near a window and let himself rest.

  It was late afternoon when he awoke. It was later by the time he finally got the elevator down to the street and exited from the building by a service door.

  He did not go to Sacramento yet. He walked back to Market Street instead, through the going-home crowds, pacing up its length until he found a major department store. He went in, found a holomap of the store, noted where the hardware and sporting goods departments were, noted moreover what kind of security system protected the store. Then he left and went down to stroll along the Embarcadero, a grubby little man in a long coat.

  When it grew dark, he went quietly to the back door of a restaurant and disabled its security system. The cook, bending over the oven to take out a pan of rolls, felt a faint chill. He looked around to see where the draft came from and saw, to his astonishment, that an entire casserole of lasagna had vanished. So had two loaves of fresh-baked bread.

  A mile away, Joseph leaned back against a pier piling and ate, watching the lights of Oakland glitter across the water. When he finished, he buried the evidence of his meal and waited until the crowds all went home, the floaters, the cyclists, the performance artists. He waited until the lights in the towers began to wink out. Then he walked back up Market Street and stole a truck.

  A City Parks and Recreation Department agvan, to be precise, from a transit yard south of Market. The yard wasn’t locked. No point, when vehicles were capable of floating over fences. Car theft was virtually unknown in the twenty-third century anyway, thanks to alarms that could not be disabled by the most determined mortal. Five minutes after Joseph strolled into the transit yard, he was piloting the agvan around the corner of Market and Second to the main entrance of the department store.

  No subtle cyborg tricks on the lock this time. He just broke and e
ntered, and went into hyperfunction as soon as he heard the faint high scream of the alarm. The security cameras saw no more than a blur racing up and down the fire stairs and through the departments he needed. Rapidly, things began to appear in the back of the van as though teleported there: three cases of high-energy bars, a crate of bottled water, two tarpaulins, an electronics tool kit, picks and shovels, a sleeping bag, clothing, and, last but not least, a sixty-gallon fusion trash receptacle.

  Long before the security officer staggered out to see what was going on, the agvan was roaring away down Grant Avenue.

  Joseph slowed as he turned left onto Sacramento, up one of the desperately steep hills that made motoring so memorable in the days of manual transmissions. He climbed slowly, scanning as he went, and passed Waverly Place. On the right-hand side of the street he found what he had been seeking. He had to get out and stare, though, peering through the fence. Why couldn’t he be wrong about his worst fears once in a while?

  There was no house at that location, above Waverly Place. There was a tiny fenced park, walled around by towering buildings. What Joseph had been seeking registered as ten feet down, under the neat flowerbeds and pristine lawn.

  He got the simple lock open and went right to work, draping the fence with tarpaulins to mask his activities. He brought out the tools and the trash receptacle. He walked the length of the little park, scanning again, moving his head this way and that as though listening for something. When he had it pinpointed, he began to dig, quickly.

  The first shovel broke after half an hour, when he’d gone down six feet. Then there was a hard impacted layer, clay and ash, tumbled bricks; he used a pick to get through that. It was the stratum from the 1906 earthquake, the truth buried so far under the pretty flowers, the past that the present was built on. When Joseph brought up a piece of human skull, one eye socket hooked on the business end of the pick, he stopped and went in with another shovel, more carefully.