“Stevie … oh my God … Stevie,” Jessie moaned, her hands cupped to her mouth.
There was stark terror in the woman’s voice: an emotion that translated in any language. Daufin pivoted from the window, walked to Jessie, and knelt down in front of her. “Listen to me!” Daufin said urgently. Looked at the others, her eyes blazing. “All of you listen! Stinger would never let them go! They’re worth more of a bounty to him!”
“So that’s it.” Rhodes let the rifle rest at his side. He felt a hundred years old. “Stinger’s won.”
53
One Way
“NO!” DAUFIN SAID FIERCELY. “Stinger has not won!” She peered into Jessie’s eyes. “I won’t let Stinger win. Not now. Not ever.” Jessie didn’t speak, but she wanted desperately to believe.
Daufin stood up. “The process of systems checks will have already begun, all regulated by machines. There’ll be other duties, like the freezing of sleep tubes for his prisoners. Stinger will be busy monitoring the machines; the procedure should take between twenty to thirty Earth minutes. When the force field is turned off, the engines will start to energize. I calculate another fifteen to twenty minutes for the power system to reach lift-off capacity. So: I have roughly thirty-five to fifty minutes to breach Stinger’s ship, find the prisoners, and get them out.”
Rhodes stared at her with utter disbelief. “No way.”
“One way: through the tunnels. I’ve got to find the entrance nearest Stinger’s ship. I presume that would be somewhere across the bridge.”
With an effort, Jessie spoke. “Even … if you could get them out … what about Stevie? How are we going to get Stevie back?”
“Find the pod. Take it from Stinger. As I’ve said, I’ve been aboard a Stinger’s ship twice before, and I know how the systems work. I can enter the navigational quadrants for my world into the guidance mechanism, put everything on automatic, place my pod in a sleep tube, and meld into it before the freezing process is finished. When I enter the pod, Stevie will be freed.”
“But still in the pyramid,” Tom said. “And how are you going to find the pod and those three people inside that thing? It must be huge!”
“I know from experience where the prisoners are being held: level three, where the cages are. The pod will be close to Stinger.”
“So you find Stinger and you find the pod, is that what you mean?” Rhodes asked. He raised his eyebrows. “Have you considered that Stinger wants you to come after them?”
“Yes. I won’t disappoint.”
“That’s crazy!” Rhodes insisted. “Maybe you’re some kind of firebrand on your world, but on this one you’re just a little girl! First thing, you’d have to get through the tunnels—and my guess is that Stinger’s got replicants in there waiting for you; and secondly, you’d have to kill Stinger to take the ship. How are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I’ve never seen a Stinger killed before.”
“Great!” Rhodes frowned and shook his head. “We don’t have a chance, folks.”
“I didn’t say that Stinger couldn’t be killed,” Daufin continued, and the strength of her voice revitalized Jessie’s waning hope. “Stinger must have a vulnerable spot, just like every other creature. If Stinger were invulnerable, there’d be no need for the replicants.”
“A vulnerable spot,” Rhodes repeated quietly. “Right. Well, I wouldn’t go down into those tunnels without a grenade launcher and a few dozen napalm bombs. It’d be suicide.”
“I’m willing to risk it.” Tom grasped the rifle and retrieved it from the other man. His face was pale and sweating, his lips a tight gray line. “I’m going with Daufin.”
“And get yourself killed? Forget it!”
Jessie reached up and took Daufin’s hand. Little waves of static electricity flowed between them. “Tell me the truth: can we get Stevie out of there?”
“We can try. I want to go home as badly as you want Stevie. If my tribe doesn’t fight, they’ll die. If the House of Fists returns here, your Earth will die. Neither of us has a choice.”
Jessie nodded, and looked at Tom. “I’m going too.” She stood up.
Before Tom or Rhodes could respond, the door opened and Gunniston came in. With him this time were Rick Jurado and Pequin. Rick’s face was streaked with dust and grime and his swollen ankle was bound up as tight as he could stand with a strip of sheet from the Smart Dollar. He had come out amid the houses at the end of Oakley Street in time to hear Stinger’s message, had checked with Mendoza and his grandmother, and then snagged Gunniston and Pequin. He nodded a greeting at Zarra, relieved to see his friend was still alive, then directed his attention to the colonel. Underneath the dust, Rick’s skin had bleached a couple of shades but his eyes were hard and determined. “That thing’s got my sister! What are we going to do about it, man?”
“Nothing,” Rhodes said. “I’m sorry, but there’s no—”
“Yes there is!” Rick had shouted it. “I’m not letting that bastard take Miranda!”
“We’re going into the ship and get them back,” Jessie told him. “Tom, Daufin, and me.”
“Dream on.” Rhodes wiped sweat out of his eyes. “You go into those tunnels, there’s no way anybody’s coming back again. Hell, even if you did get to the ship, what would you use for weapons? Maybe you could round up a few more guns, okay, but I don’t think bullets are going to do Stinger much harm.”
“We need electric lights.” Daufin was aware of time ticking away. “Strong ones.”
Tom said, “We could take some of the lamps off the walls and figure a way to carry them. Maybe wire three or four of them together. Plus we’ve got that.” He motioned at the bull’s-eye lantern.
“We’ve got a whole lot more.” Rick turned to Pequin. “You hung around with Sonny Crowfield, didn’t you? Did you know about the arsenal?”
“What arsenal?”
“Don’t play dumb, man! I found all those guns and shit in Crowfield’s closet! What was he about to try?”
Pequin started to deny it again, but he knew Rick would see the lie. “Sonny … was gonna start a war with the ’Gades. Gonna make it look like the ’Gades were burnin’ down houses in Bordertown.”
“But they weren’t?”
“No. I was with him when he set the fires.” Pequin shrugged. “We wanted some action, that’s all.”
“I want to know about the dynamite.”
Pequin stared at the floor. He could smell the blood that was spattered over the front of Rick’s shirt. “Sonny, me and Paco LeGrande went over the fence into the mine, couple of months ago. Just screwin’ around. We found the shed where they used to keep the dynamite. We thought the place was just full of empty boxes at first, but Paco stepped on a loose board and his foot went through. We found the sticks in the dirt underneath, so we put ’em in a box and brought ’em out.”
“To do what? Blow up somebody’s house over here?”
“No.” Pequin smiled sheepishly, showing his silver tooth. “To blow this place up, when the war started.”
“There are five sticks of dynamite—with caps and fuses—in Sonny Crowfield’s house over in Bordertown,” Rick said to Colonel Rhodes. “And more guns and ammo too. Sonny’s one of those things now: there’s a hole in the floor, and how far down it goes I don’t know.”
“Where is this house?” Daufin asked.
“On Third Street.” Like she would really know where that was, he thought. “Right next to where the spaceship’s sitting.”
“That would be the nearest way into the ship, with the least distance of tunnel to go through,” she said. “Dy-na-mite.” Her memory found the definition: an explosive compound usually formed into a cylinder and detonated by lighting a fuse. “What does it look like?”
“Like a ticket to hell, if you ain’t careful,” Curt replied. He drew on his cigarette and held it up. “Kinda like that, only bigger. Meaner too.” He crushed the butt out on the floor. “You got capped and fused dy
namite lyin’ around untended for God knows how long, you’re askin’ to get blown to smithereens.”
“Some of the sticks looked burned,” Rick said. “Like they’d been lit before but hadn’t gone off.”
“Duds. A dud sometimes don’t stay a dud, though. You can’t tell about dynamite—especially not that cheap shit ol’ man Preston shipped in. That stuff might go if you looked at it cross-eyed, or then again you might burn it with a flamethrower and it’d just sit there and sputter.”
Daufin didn’t follow most of what the man had said, but she knew even a crude explosive might be useful. “We’ll need rope,” she said to Rick.
“We can get plenty of that at the hardware store. And there’s wire to tie the lamps together too.”
“Then that’s where we should go first.” Tom moved to the wall and lifted one of the battery lamps off its hook. “Get ourselves organized and go from there.”
“You mean get yourselves screwed up and slaughtered!” The power of Rhodes’s shout silenced everyone. “My God, you’re going at this thing like scouts on a field trip!” He advanced on Tom Hammond and gripped the rifle. “What are you going to do when something with metal claws comes out of the ground and grabs your gun? Or your throat? You’ll wind up either getting slashed to pieces or blowing everybody else up! Will that get Stevie back for you?” He glared at Daufin. “Will that get you home?”
“Man, if you haven’t got any balls just stay here!” Rick told him.
“You’ll be the first to get your balls torn off,” Rhodes said. He held Rick’s stare for a couple of seconds, and then he pulled at the rifle. Tom resisted him. The colonel’s face was gray, his eyes deep-sunken, but there was still a lot of strength in his grip and some of his fire had returned. “First,” he said, “you need a leader.”
“I can lead them,” Daufin asserted.
“Not in the body of a little girl, you can’t. Not in a body you don’t own. Maybe you know a hell of a lot I don’t, but flesh is flesh and if it gets flayed off there’ll be nothing for Stevie to come back to.” He pulled harder at the rifle. “Give it to me. With the lights and the dynamite, we might have a chance. Might, I said.” Fear of those tunnels and the things that would be waiting in them clawed at his stomach, but Daufin was right: they had to try. “I’ll lead you.”
Gunniston said instantly, “I’m going too, sir.”
“Negative. If I don’t come out, you’ll be needed to brief Colonel Buckner. You’re staying here.” The other man started to protest. “That’s an order,” Rhodes emphasized, and Gunniston remained silent.
Tom gave up the rifle. “All right.” Rhodes looked around at the others. “If Daufin’s right about the time factor, we’ve got to get moving. Who else is going besides Jessie and Rick?”
Bobby Clay Clemmons backed against the wall. Zarra started to speak, but Rick cut him short: “You’re staying. You take care of Paloma, understand?” He waited until Zarra nodded.
“Mr. Lockett?” Rhodes asked. On the floor, Curt had taken a picture out of his pants pocket, unfolded it, and now stared fixedly at the girl’s face. He didn’t answer Rhodes, and a shadow lay across his eyes.
“That’s it, then. We need to round up some more lamps and flashlights. Let’s get to it,” he said, before good sense could overrule his decision.
Curt stayed where he was as the others left. Rick paused to untie the strip of sheet, draw it as tightly as he could bear, and then knot it again. The pain was a deep, pulsing ache but no bones had been broken. He said, “You’re Cody Lockett’s father?”
“Yeah.” Curt refolded the photograph and put it away. “Cody’s my son.”
“We’ll get him out of there. Him and my sister both.” Rick saw the hogleg Colt on the table and picked it up. “This yours?”
“Yes.”
“Mind if I take it?”
Curt said, “Lordy, Lordy, Lordy,” and fresh sweat sparkled on his face. He closed his eyes for a few seconds; when he opened them, the same old world was still there, and he thought he could feel it spinning on its axis like a runaway carnival ride. He had a thirst like a chunk of sun lodged down his throat. He stood up, a sneer warping his mouth. “The day I let a wetback kid do my job is the day I’m not fit to be pissed on,” he said, and his hand closed around the Colt.
54
The Cage
CODY HEARD MIRANDA MOAN. She was coming to, and Cody crawled across the leathery floor to her.
“My head … my head,” she whispered, pressing her hand against the blue bruise and knot on her forehead above her left eye. Her eyelids fluttered, and she tried to open them but they were just too heavy.
“She gonna be all right?”
Cody glanced over at Sarge, who sat about five feet away with his arms locked around his knees. Sarge’s face had taken on a chalky cast in the violet glow of the cage’s bars. “I don’t know,” Cody said. “She took a pretty hard knock.” She was still moaning, her voice softer as she drifted off again. Cody had spat up a little blood, and he was breathing in gasps around the pain of a broken rib, but otherwise he was okay. He was more mad than scared, and his muscles were pumped full of adrenaline. Miranda lay still again. Cody checked her pulse for the sixth or seventh time; it felt a little slow to him, but at least it was strong. She was a lot tougher than she looked.
Cody stood up, holding his side, and made another circle of their cage. It was a cone about fifteen feet around, with bars of purple light. He’d already tested the bars by kicking at them, and the sole of his boot had been burned almost clean through, fiery speckles of melting rubber shearing off and those bits exploding again as they went into the bars. What those beams would do to flesh he didn’t want to know. The entire cage was suspended about three feet off the floor, which was made of interlocked black scales.
He didn’t know what he’d expected the inside of the spaceship to look like—maybe full of high-tech, polished chrome gizmos that whirred with mysterious purpose; but this place smelled like an overflowed cesspool and puddles of ooze shimmered on the floor. Pipes that looked as if they were made of diseased dinosaur bones hung from the ceiling and snaked along the walls, and from them came a rushing, thrumming sound of something liquid passing through. The musty air was so cold and damp that Cody could see his breath, but the chill had sharpened his senses. The impression he got of the spaceship was that it was not a marvel of alien technology, but rather the inside of a medieval castle that lacked heat, electricity, and sanitation. Slime festooned the bony pipes, and when it dripped, it made slithering sounds on the floor. One thing he thought he’d seen but couldn’t be sure of: not only were the floor’s scales absorbing the ooze, but every so often they seemed to swell an inch or two upward and deflate again, as if they were alive and breathing.
Cody stopped his circling. He stood close to the bars but could feel no sensation of heat; the beams burned with a cold fire. On the chamber’s floor was a small black pyramid about the size of a shoebox. He’d seen Stinger’s boot touch that pyramid when his head was dangling down and the thing’s arm was about to crush him. The pyramid had glowed from within with dim violet light. There’d been a droning noise, and the next thing he knew he and Miranda were being dumped onto a black dish that turned out to be the cage’s floor. As the cage’s bars had illuminated, the cage itself had ascended.
Later—and how much later Cody didn’t know because his brain was still jammed up—a creature with Mack Cade’s face and the head and shoulders of a dog growing from its chest had entered the chamber carrying another body. Cody had watched as the creature’s boot had touched the pyramid. The violet light had come on, the cage had begun to settle, and when it reached the floor the beams had extinguished. Then Sarge Dennison had been added to the cage, the creature had touched the pyramid once more, and the bars had flickered to life. Again the cage rose off the floor, and Stinger had looked at Sarge and asked his name, just as he’d asked Cody what the girl’s name was. It had taken Sarge a few seconds t
o even understand what the question was, but finally he’d stuttered his name out and Stinger had left—but not before Cody had seen the black sphere gripped between the dog’s jaws.
He stared at the small pyramid, now dark. An on-off switch, Cody assumed. Touching it would lower the cage and turn off the bars. But it was three feet below them and at least another three feet beyond the cage’s edge. Way too far to reach, even if he could get his arm between the bars without burning it off up to the elbow. Still … that was the only way out he could see, and he didn’t know what Stinger had planned for them but he figured it wouldn’t be pleasant.
He dug into his pocket and came up with a dime, four pennies, and his lighter. How much pressure was needed to trip the switch? The weight of the lighter hitting it might be enough-—but he quickly dismissed that idea, because if the lighter was punctured, the fluid would explode all over the cage. He put the lighter back in his pocket, lay down on his stomach, and stretched his flattened hand toward the bars edge-on while his thumb trapped the coins. The space between the bars was wide enough to accept his hand, and he kept gliding his wrist through, grateful for his slim build. The pain in his ribs flared up again; when he gasped for breath, the movement made his arm drift a fraction to the right.
The hair on his forearm crisped, burning away with faint crackling noises. Cody held himself as still as he could, but the effort was making his arm shake. Now his palm was sweating. He tried to get the coins in position to flick them at the small pyramid, and he promptly lost the dime and one of the pennies, which fell straight down to the floor. His hand was cramping, and he had no time to aim: he flung both coins out with a snap of his wrist, saw one hit beyond the pyramid and the other to the left.
“Shit!” he said, and pulled his arm and hand back through the bars. All the hair up to the middle of his forearm had been burned away, but his skin was untouched. Another fraction of an inch, though, and the cage would smell of burned meat. His arm was trembling right down into the shoulder socket, and he saw that tripping that switch was pretty much hopeless. He crawled away from the edge and sat back on his haunches, rubbing his shoulder. He looked up; overhead eight feet or so the violet beams merged together at the top of the cage, and the mechanism that hoisted the cage was somewhere above that. His gaze returned to the small pyramid on the floor. “Got to be some way to reach it,” he said.
The Monster Novels: Stinger, the Wolf's Hour, and Mine Page 48