“Ugh!” exclaimed Rith, blinking and backing away, her mouth pulled down and tears running. “I think I prefer the bloodsuckers.”
Lyssa’s glowing wraith appeared in the deep twilight. She looked wan, weary, her spectral light pallid. Even so, again she led them through the night and toward the center of the Drasp, where they hoped to find Horax’s lair. And on this night the bloodsucking insects bit neither man nor horse nor mule, though Rith, well protected, would break into sneezing fits now and then.
Once again the way was difficult, and often the steeds and Foxes needed rest. And Lyssa’s pale glow seemed to be fading, as if she were a flame ever so slowly going out.
And when dawn came, wan Lyssa vanished.
On the next evening as darkness fell, again Lyssa appeared, yet this night she was haggard, weak, her light but a feeble glow.
“What is it, my love?” asked Arik. “You are so faint, so pale and worn. What’s happening?”
Kane, the warrior-healer looked long at Lyssa. “Arik, she appears to be . . . dying. Perhaps if I lay hands on her, I can tell what’s the matter.”
Yet Lyssa would not suffer Kane to come near, signaling,
But a faint memory nibbled at the fringes of Rith’s mind. All of a sudden she smacked herself in the forehead. “Of course! I am so stupid.”
“What?” said Arik.
“She needs sustenance,” answered Rith, “else she will fade, vanish altogether.”
“And what do ghosts subsist on?” asked Kane.
“Life force,” said Rith. “She needs life force in order to keep from fading entirely away—not just any life force: it must be human, or perhaps humanlike, for human is what Lyssa is —was, and the farther away from human they are, though a spirit can drain them, the less life force they yield.”
“Humanlike?” asked Kane.
“Something near,” said Rith. “Udanan legends tell of near-humans—monkeys, forest apes, and not quite human savages—yielding up vital lifeforce to keep waning spirits ‘alive.’”
“And how does she gain this life force?” asked Arik.
“We merely need to get near her and she will take what she needs.”
Arik held out his hands in a beseeching gesture. “Lyssa, I love you, and I will not see you die.”
“Lyssa”—Rith’s voice was filled with urgency—”we need you. We cannot make our way through this mire without you to guide us. Else we will never find Horax’s hold.”
“Or kill the bastard and rescue Ky,” added Kane.
“Or recover the red gem,” said Rith.
Arik clenched his fists and held them tightly against his chest. “Love, take a small portion from each of us. Surely we will survive.” He looked at Rith for confirmation.
Rith nodded. “Yes. When we rest it will return.”
“You must,” declared Arik, “otherwise the mission will fail.”
Lyssa gazed long at the three of them. Finally she signaled,
“Oh yes, of that I am sure.”
Rith took a deep breath. “We will surround and approach you. When you feel refreshed, signal, and we will withdraw.”
Reluctantly Lyssa agreed, and the trio took up equidistant positions about her and slowly approached. When they were within three paces, each felt a faint dizziness and Rith commanded them to stop. And they stood and watched as Lyssa’s aura grew brighter.
Finally Lyssa gestured, and they backed away wearily, feeling faint, as if from the loss of blood.
Arik looked at Lyssa, luminous now. “How do you feel?”
“Your own life force was very low,” said Rith.
Kane lay hands upon warrior and bard. Then he said, “She took a deal from each of us, yet not overmuch. We will be slowed on this night’s journey, though.”
Lyssa’s face fell and she began to gesture.
“Nonsense!” barked Kane. Then more calmly—”Listen. You were indeed very weak, hence needed much restoration. But if you take just a bit from each of us daily, say, just before dawn, you should never again fall so low. And we will recover before the sun sets and you reappear.”
Again Lyssa started to protest, but both Rith and Arik interrupted, telling her to heed Kane “for he is the healer and knows.” At last, reluctantly, she agreed.
Refreshed, Lyssa led them northeasterly through the mire, tendrils streaming, fading, and on this night, too, the trip was arduous, made more so by the weakened state of the trio. Just before dawn, again Lyssa took a smattering of life force from each, her luminance growing bright again.
She vanished as the sun rose.
Weary and hungry, Kane, Arik, and Rith looked for some high ground on which to camp. At last to the left Rith spied the beginning of a slope upward. They rode to it and found solid ground rising beneath the animals’ hooves. Upslope they fared and came to the crest of a wooded hill. “This looks suitable,” declared Kane. “I say we camp here.” But as he was dismounting, Kane paused, then swung his leg back over the steed and stood full upright in the stirrups.
“Arik, Rith,” he called, pointing to the right. “There, in the near distance. See?”
Their gazes followed the line of Kane’s outstretched hand.
Perhaps a mile away and glimpsed through the trees stood the stones of a tall dark tower.
38
Desperate Measures
(Coburn Facility)
Doctor Stein strode to Toni Adkins and stopped.
She looked up at him. “Well . . . ?”
“Without a complete workup I can only speculate, but my preliminary diagnosis is Arthur Coburn’s death was secondary to gross skeletal muscle contractions.”
“Muscle contractions?” blurted Mark Perry. “But I thought he had a broken back. And what about the blood?”
Stein looked at Perry in disgust. “The contractions were incredibly severe; that’s what broke his back, Mark. He severed his own spinal cord. Even if he hadn’t, he would have died of massive shock.”
“And the blood?”
“Concomitant hematoma with attendant severe abrasions. The contractions ruptured vessels in his eyes, nose, lips. Likely all the vessels in his lower torso were breached as well, and when his spinal column snapped, it punched out through his back, and blood from ruptured vessels was literally ejected.” Stein paused, then added, “He virtually ripped himself in two.”
“Lord God,” murmured Toni.
“God had nothing to do with it,” gritted Mark. “Instead it was Satan Avery.”
“Doctor Stein!” called one of the medtechs, Grace Willoby. “We need you over here, stat.”
Hissing air through his teeth, Stein strode to the witch’s cradles, Toni, Mark, and Timothy following after. “What is it?” demanded Stein.
It’s Alice Maxon, Doctor,” replied Grace. “Her temperature has taken a nose-dive—ninety-five Fahrenheit and falling.”
“Have you checked the instruments?”
“Yes, sir. When we first noticed it, she was at ninety-seven. We’ve replaced the sensor twice, and each time it read lower.”
“Here, let me look.” Stein moved in behind Alice’s cradle and keyed the compad. Frowning, he keyed in a different code.
Toni asked, “Isn’t it the same as when the Foxes were riding through the cold rain—chill fluids and control of the internal thermostat?”
Stein did not answer, and after a moment of silence Grace said, “It’s faster than that. And I think she’s actually losing energy. Why, we don’t know.”
Toni lifted her comband. “John, are you there?”
“Greyson here, Toni.”
“Is there a change in Alice Maxon’s mental pattern?”
There was a pause, then—”Not that I can tell. But I’m no expert at reading these things, nor at reading this console for that matter.”
“Thank you, John. Toni out.”
Toni keyed off her comband then looked at the medtechs. “I need someone who knows that console to relieve Doctor Greyson.”
Alvin Johnston looked at Grace, then Stein, and finally at Toni. “It’s my console where he’s sitting.”
“Then hop to, Alvin. We need you there more than here.”
Timothy shifted aside to let Alvin leave, then stepped back into position to watch Stein at work. Moments passed, and Drew Meyer, who had slipped unnoticed into the control center, said softly in Timothy’s ear, “It was a power surge.”
Timothy turned. “The board?”
“Yes. And looking at the schematic of the voltage regulators, the only way it could have happened is if Avery himself sent a transient pulse through.”
“He can do that?”
“He has complete control of those circuits.”
“Damn!” Timothy looked across the rig at Toni. Then he said to Drew, “Come on. Let’s break the bad news.”
As they made their way around to Toni, Timothy’s eye was drawn to the empty cradle, and something elusive nibbled at the corner of his mind. But before he could catch it—”Hey, you’ve stopped it, Doctor Stein,” crowed Grace. “Her temperature is coming back.”
There was a collective sigh of relief all ’round. Then Toni asked, “What was the problem, Henry? And how did you reverse it?”
Stein glanced over at Toni, and suppressed rage lurked behind his eyes. “I don’t know what was the matter,” he snapped. “It reversed by itself. I had nothing to do with it at all.” Stein turned back to the rig and keyed in more codes.
By this time, Timothy and Drew had reached Toni’s side, and Timothy touched her on the arm. When she turned to him, he canted his head toward Drew and said, “It’s as we suspected, Toni: the plug-in was blown by a power surge where no power surge should be, through circuits controlled completely by Avery.”
Toni cocked an eyebrow at Drew, and the balding physicist nodded.
“Uh-oh,” said one of the medtechs monitoring another of the witch’s cradles. “Doctor Stein, the temp is dropping on my guy. It’s Caine Easley.”
Quickly medtechs keyed codes on the other cradles. “Here, too,” said a medtech. “Eric Flannery.”
“Meredith Rodgers is also losing energy,” said another.
“Hiroko Kikiro is holding steady,” reported a fourth medtech.
Stein stepped back and surveyed the row of cradles.
“Alice Maxon is continuing to rise,” said Grace.
“Blast it, Henry, what the hell is going on?” demanded Toni.
Stein looked at her, frustration in his eyes. “I don’t know!” he bit out.
“Well goddamn it, use that vaunted intellect of yours and find out!”
Stein gritted his teeth and clenched a fist, and in the same moment, one of the medtechs—Ramon Diaz—called out, “It’s waste! A urinary temp dump. My guy is peeing a steady stream, and Avery is pumping in cold fluid to replace the warm my guy is losing. And his metabolic rate is down, too. At least that’s what’s happening to Caine Easley.”
Quickly, the other medtechs verified that that was what was happening to Meredith Rodgers and Eric Flannery, too.
And Grace, moving up and down the line, added, “Lord, look at those met rates. They are really losing heat.”
“All right,” snapped Stein. “Ellery, Margo, get to the medcenter and bring back the following: I want every one of these people rigged with a glucose drip. Also get me five power therms, and several vials of thymium and almium. Hypos. And I need . . .”
As Stein barked out orders, Toni turned to Meyer. “Drew, we’ve got to see what’s happening to these people—to the Black Foxes—in VR. Assemble a team and do whatever it takes to get the holo working.”
Drew nodded and set out for the lab.
As the physicist strode away, again Timothy’s eye was drawn to the empty cradle, and once more an elusive thought niggled at him, but this time, with a sharp indrawn breath, he caught it. “Toni!” he spun to face her. “There’s another way we might get in contact with Avery.”
Her eyes widened. “Well . . . ?”
“Look, if we could somehow defeat Avery’s hemisynch—”
“But the alpha team would die,” interjected Toni.
“No, no. I don’t mean defeat their hemisynchs, but instead I’m talking about the hemi on the empty rig. . . .” Timothy paused in excited thought.
Toni glanced at the cradle where Arthur Coburn had died. “Go on.”
“Well, okay, here’s the deal: if we could defeat the hemisynch, so that a person can remain awake and aware, and suit him up and plug him in, then, if Avery, um, accepts him, he can log in as superuser and tell Avery to free the alpha team.”
“My god, Timothy, that’s brilliant.”
“I don’t think it’ll work,” said Doctor Stein, who had come upon them unawares.
Toni turned and looked at him. “Why not, Henry?”
“Isn’t Avery programmed to wait for full sync before pulling someone into VR?”
Timothy nodded. “Yes, but, if we can fake it . . .”
The doors banged open and a woman in a yellow rain suit and wearing a hard hat strode in, escorted by Chief Cardington.
“Kat!” cried Toni. She glanced at the clock and her heart fell. Forty-eight minutes to go.
Kat Lawrence removed her helmet and clicked off its light, then ran a hand through her hair. She was a redhead this week. She was perhaps five foot seven, and fair skinned, and somewhere in her middle thirties. As she walked toward Toni, Kat pulled the small black unlit synthbac cigarillo from the corner of her mouth and said, “All right, Toni, I’ve got an Astro two-fifty sitting outside on my rig, and a crew in a van behind it. Where do you want this mojo plugged in?”
“Anywhere it’ll work, Kat.” Toni turned to Michael Phelan sitting at a console. “Michael, show her to the turbogen room. And find Al Hawkins. He’s got a team somewhere in the building shutting down all nonessential power.”
Chief Cardington said, “Al is on three. I’ll send one of my men to get him.”
“Have him meet us at the turbogen,” said Michael.
“Kat, Al is our chief powertech,” said Toni. “He can show you where all the bells and whistles are.” She pointed at the doomsday clock. “And Kat, hurry, we’ve only got forty-seven minutes left.”
“Impossible,” snorted Stein. “I don’t care how good this woman is, that’s not enough time.”
Kat Lawrence jammed the cigarillo into the corner of her mouth and synced her watch to the clock, then fixed Stein with a steely blue-grey stare. “As the old saying goes, the improbable we do immediately, the impossible takes a bit longer, but not if some asshole is blocking the way,” and she pushed past Stein and called out, “Come on, Mikey, lead me to the power room. Let’s go light some fires.” Michael Phelan’s face split in a wide grin and he leaped forward in pursuit.
As Kat swept from the room, Ellery Pierce and Margo Watson came in wheeling a gurney laded with gear—IV rigs, power therms, fluid-filled bottles, vials, and other such—and they pushed it toward the witch’s cradles. As if it were a parade, behind them came John Greyson, sweating and puffing and rolling a cart of instruments, Drew Meyer and Sheila Baxter and Billy Clay following, wheeling instruments of their own; this quartet headed for the defunct holo.
As Stein moved toward the VR rigs, Timothy stepped to Meyer and paced alongside him. “Tell me, Drew, can a spare turbogenerator be plugged into the building in less than forty-five minutes?”
Breathing heavily and without stopping, Drew replied, “Unlikely.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Because it’s a major undertaking.” Drew reached the holo and whee
led his instrument about and began flicking on switches. Sheila and Billy did likewise.
“Well, Kat Lawrence arrived, and she’s got a spare turbogen on her truck.”
“Look,” said Drew, pausing a moment. “If it was a simple jacking in, sure. It could be done. I don’t suppose you know whether she brought one with its own fuel supply.”
Timothy shrugged. “All I know is that it’s an Astro two-fifty.”
Drew shook his head. “No fuel. She’ll have to rig it to our H2.”
Timothy sighed. “Second question. Can a hemisynch helmet be rigged to fool Avery?”
Drew pondered a moment. “Probably. But it’d take some sophisticated design work.”
“How soon could it be done?”
“Hmm, six months or so.”
“Not in”—Timothy glanced at the doomsday clock—”oh, say, thirty, forty minutes, eh?”
Drew’s instrument beeped. “Not a prayer,” he said, turning his attention to the control panel.
Timothy walked to Toni. She stood watching as Stein’s medtech team quickly arranged the IV rigs. Beside her stood Greyson, the philosopher dabbing at his forehead with a kerchief and muttering something about “dragging a ton up the steps.”
“We don’t have a prayer,” said Timothy.
“In what?” asked Toni, not looking away from the activity.
“My plan to contact Avery from the inside.”
“Oh?” Toni turned and faced him.
“Drew says that it’s highly unlikely that Kat can get the turbogen up and running in time. And he says that we can’t rig a hemisynch helmet to fool Avery without six months of design work. Our chances of solving this technically are on par with the proverbial snowball’s chances in hell.”
Toni’s face fell, and she turned back to watch the medtechs.
Timothy added, “We’ll just have to hope the Black Foxes can get to endgame and win.”
Suddenly Toni whirled. “Wait a minute, Timothy. We might not be able to solve this technically, but what about solving it, uh, psychologically?”
Timothy looked at her in puzzlement. “You’re the psychiatric specialist here, Toni. You’ve left me in the dirt. What are you saying?”
Shadowtrap: A Black Foxes Adventure Page 33