The Pure Cold Light

by Gregory Frost

  The first shot cracked the air.

  Chapter Fourteen: Tunneling Out

  The sound of the shot rebounded like hammer blows.

  The non leaped sideways, landing on legs that no longer supported him, but the shots kept coming. He started to crumple, was hit again, the bullets ‘thwack-thwack-thwacking’ like rivets, jumping his body as if with current. The firing ceased but the echoes had not died out entirely when the non flopped over on his side. His outstretched arm clutched the gun as if in a salute. He lay still afterward.

  Across the room to the right, one hulking bullgod stood in an open doorway. He, too, had one of the black weapons. Lyell recognized him as the one who had escorted her into ICS-IV. He moved awkwardly into the room. He limped, and his right heel left bloody imprints.

  He waved the gun. “Toog it off my duty officer. Don’t even know where Tackler got it—same place as the nons, huh? Dead now, anyway.”

  Lurching around the triangular desk, he all but fell into Chikako Peat’s chair, which squealed under him. He placed the gun on the desk and pushed it aside before making hesitant eye contact with Lyell. Then the bank of monitors caught his attention. “Real hell everywhere. Nobody knows who’s in the soup and who ain’t, so we’re taking out everybody what’s loose, and so are they. There’s all that gas, too.” He sneaked a shy glance at Lyell again. “You okay, though. That’s what counts.”

  “We wouldn’t be, without you,” she agreed, having no idea what should be done with this gentle monster.

  Peat stepped in. She asked, “Are you trained on the system? Can you work it until SC sends reinforcements? I…have to get these two people to safety.” The bullgod tried to stand, but Peat pushed him back in the chair. “You’ve saved her life. But you’re too hurt to keep up, and others might follow the same trail as he did.”

  “That’s right,” Lyell agreed. She kept the desk between them, but touched his huge hand beside the gun. “You can protect us better from here.”

  He flushed at her touch, which highlighted the white scars like erratic warpaint across his cheeks. Nervously, he shifted. “I know how to work this stuff, is simple.” He picked up the handset as if to show it off.

  “You see? You are the right person to take charge,” Peat said, as though someone had argued otherwise. She leaned down, cupped his jowl, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered, and stared into his startled blue eyes.

  “I never…nobody ever—”

  “Hush,” she said. She squeezed the muscles beneath his collar. Then she joined Lyell, taking hold of Angel and helping him steer toward the exit.

  Peat muttered, “With any luck, he might buy us a few extra minutes.”

  “We’re going to need ’em all,” Lyell said, glancing remorsefully back at the bull. She waved a final time.

  Angel looked from one to the other of the two women supporting him, and managed to ask, “What is going on?”

  ***

  Lyell held out little hope of getting through the checkpoint. She anticipated there might be dozens, even hundreds, of uniformed Philadelphia Security Force officers at the end of the tunnel and waiting for the signal to pour in. Conceivably, even Mingo might be on hand. It all depended on how he had organized them. What she and Peat had going for them was the LifeMask they’d taken from the twitchers’ lounge—the one Angel now wore. It showed an Ethiop-black face, a fringe of gray hair. The features bore an unsettling resemblance to her father.

  Troops had not been stationed at the checkpoint. No more than a handful of extra guards had been called in, as well as a small medical unit.

  Most of the surviving ICS-IV staff milled around in the area outside the gateway, where they fell prey to different teams of interviewers. One large contingent was from, of all places, the Alien News Network. Between these competing factions, the area outside the checkpoint was utter chaos.

  A young PSF guard came rushing up as the trio neared the tunnel mouth. He grabbed hold of Angel, bearing his weight. “Are you all right?” he asked the two women. Before they could answer, three female medical personnel in uniforms closed in around the guard and Angel. Lyell thought they looked young enough to be students. Avoiding the worst of the melee, the group shouldered Angel behind other guards, where they had three cots set up. A few black bodybags lay beyond the cots, reminders of the carnage at the far end of the tunnel.

  Staff members recognized the principal and surrounded her; their excited chatter alerted the news teams, who, having used up most of the survivors on hand, scrambled into the throng. Lyell heard one of the doctors call out, “Does anyone know this man’s blood type?” She glanced at her own shoulder, where his spilled blood had soaked into her jacket. She was thinking of Nebergall.

  The young guard returned. He patted her back. “You’re fine,” he said, as if her condition had been in doubt. He started back to his post by the gate, but she grabbed him.

  “Isn’t anyone going in to clean this mess up?” She gestured at the tunnel.

  “As I understand it, they’ve already gone.”

  She looked at Chikako Peat, who was trying to hear what he said over four or five other opposing conversations. “We didn’t pass anyone in there,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t,” he replied, pleased to share his inside knowledge. “They went in the front, down the skyway and through the gates.” He must have read her incredulity, because he shook his head doubtfully and added, “I know—you’d think the tunnel would be the safer route, easier to control. Hell, that’s the contingency plan I was trained for. But some polished-ass Scumber volunteered the company’s anti-terrorist SWAT team to handle it.” Conspiratorially, he leaned closer to her. “Don’t tell these cam crews, but frankly that’s okay by us.”

  Lyell turned and wedged her way through the ICSS people to Chikako Peat’s side. She related what he’d said. “I’m convinced,” said Peat. “At least we got out in time.”

  “Not enough. We have to get him out of here. Mingo won’t waste two minutes once he figures out who’s missing. Look at how far they’ve gone. You think they’ll worry about a little thing like executing him in full view of a crowd? They’ll take the crowd out, too.”

  “Why? Who would go to such lengths?”

  “I wish I knew all that. Just like I wish we’d put that damned mask of his on someone else’s body, not that I think Mingo’s fool enough to have fallen for it.”

  “Just a minute,” Peat snapped at one of the staff people who was tugging at her. To Lyell she whispered, “Didn’t you bring some form of clearance for him? They’re not going to let him in, you know.”

  “I didn’t know they were going to take out the school, remember? I wasn’t prescient enough to come packing extra biocards.”

  “Can’t you get him something now?”

  “Eventually, but not now. Not in time.”

  The ANN crew suddenly turned and splashed light across both of them. Somebody in the ICSS group had pointed out Chikako. The staffers close in, and Lyell tried to edge into their ranks. Chuck Soderburn, one of their more familiar reporters, came in chatty.

  “Hello, there,” he said, “You ladies are the most recent escapees from the hell we used to call Inner City School Number Four. What was it like?”

  Peat stared icily at him and at the camera hovering at the end of its thick cable behind him.

  Undaunted, he said, “You’re shaken, of course. I see they’re working on someone who was wounded. Was he shot by the student terrorists? How many were there?”

  “Chuck,” said Lyell, “you have no idea.” She pushed past him. She did not desire to be recorded.

  Soderburn watched in dismay as she escaped. Quickly, instinctively, he closed in on Chikako. “And you would be?…”

  “Looking for work,” Peat replied. She took a step to the side but he wasn’t letting any more fish get away.

  The hovercam operator snaked the digital camera right up beside Soderburn’s ear. The interviewer chuc
kled mechanically, then said, “You’re the school’s principal. Tell the world now, did you experience the evil, extra-terrestrial hive mind controlling your attackers?”

  Peat stared smolderingly into the floating lens, then at the reporter. “Part company now,” she said, “or the world gets a provocative look up your lower intestines.” She made a move toward the hovercam and it dodged back like a cobra. The operator withdrew it and himself beyond her reach.

  Behind her, Chuck cried, “But don’t you want to get on TV? Everybody wants to get on TV. Where’s your sense of warhol?!”

  She didn’t immediately spot Lyell, and her staffers stuck to her, unshakeable. At least they offered her a wall of defense against the other interview teams.

  ***

  The doctors had given Angel various atomizer injections and dressed his wound. By the time Lyell reached him, they had also removed his LifeMask and discovered the hardware glued to his skull.

  She knelt beside the low cot, all thoughts directed toward protecting him. He seemed strangely unprepared to protect himself. In light of the fact that he had dispensed with the first two assassins, she was at a loss to explain why she felt this.

  His eyes had gone glassy, and she supposed he’d been given a site-targeting sedative.

  One of the medical staff came up, and asked, “Are you a co-worker?”

  She nodded, then gestured over her shoulder at Peat. “That’s the principal.”

  “Your friend’s going to be okay. His wound was clean. I don’t expect any complications, but to tell you the truth, the tissue sampler’s gone wacky all of a sudden and—”

  “Can he be moved?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t, unless you have to, for a couple hours.”

  “We have to.”

  “He’ll be kind of loose, if you know what I mean.”

  “I wish … do you know anything about crabs?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This kind.” She pointed at the skullcap electronics.

  “What, bypasses? Yes, I was going to ask you about that. He must’ve been in some other accident not so very long ago, right? Certainly, we use them. You know—car accidents, things like that. All the time. I just assumed that was why he’d been assigned a bottom-rung job. No offense.”

  “How do you take them off?”

  “There’s a small circuit at the back that can be unplugged with a digikey—any standard one, really, should do it. It’s not something you want to do casually, though. Depending on the type of dam—” She had eased Angel’s head to the side, where a small display of red LED numbers indicated neuronal activity. “That’s odd. This one doesn’t have that circuit.”

  “How surprising,” Lyell said, not surprised at all.

  The doctor said, “It’s going to be bolted to the skull, that’s standard. Hang on a minute, let me check with a technician, he’ll know more,” and wandered off to find one of her colleagues.

  “Excuse me,” a male voice said from behind Lyell. She glanced up at a tall, thin man with sandy hair and a light mustache. He sported a spongy, white “ruff” collar of the sort that had caught on lately with the corporate set. From the look on his face, the collar might have been a few sizes too small. “This man here,” he said, “is he going to make it?”

  “Do you know him?” asked Lyell.

  The man bobbed his head. “I’m kind of in charge of him.”

  Feigning ignorance, she asked, “School official?” She glanced askance for Chikako Peat in the crowd.

  “No, actually, I’m with ScumberCorp. Ton Gansevoort, Human Resources.” He held out a green dialer-card. She took it and read his name. “Mr. Rueda here is a—well, I guess you’d say he’s a former employee of sorts. We—the company, that is—got him this teaching post so he could keep working, and I’ve been keeping tabs on him since … that is—”

  “Does the head of HR usually handle that kind of thing?” She got to her feet.

  They traded looks for a minute. Clearly, he didn’t know where to draw the line on what he should say, and was uncomfortable about deciding. She guessed that the ground he stood on wasn’t too solid.

  “Doctor?” he asked.

  “Yes?” she lied.

  “Truthfully, no, I don’t. He’s kind of a special case, and I’ve been worried that something might happen to him. When I heard about the riot, I ran right here.”

  “I’m impressed—I don’t often see such concern between corporate strata. But I was wondering; you see, I was just examining the cranial bypass unit to make sure it hadn’t been damaged or displaced when he fell, and I discovered that there’s no obvious digikey release on it. How does it come off?”

  His mouth hung open. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “Mr. Gansevoort, I have to tell you that he may have suffered brain damage beyond what this simple bypass covers. My colleague over here, Dr. Peat, wants very much to get him up into our clinic in the towers, away from this chaos, but he lacks the clearance. We really don’t want to put him in one of those Undercity chop shops—”

  “Oh, clearance is no problem. I can get us emergency pedicab routing if you need it.”

  “That would help.” She gestured to Peat, who nakedly sized up Gansevoort as she approached.

  Lyell introduced them, slipping his green business card into her hand.

  He gawked at Peat. Lyell thought him the most transparent man she’d ever seen. “You’re a doctor?” he asked her.

  Without missing a beat, she replied, “I was at a cocktail party when the word came. Naturally, neither of us wasted a moment hurrying here. Do I need a surgical gown in order to work?”

  “Yes, I was just explaining to Mr. Gansevoort about Angel Rueda’s brain damage,” Lyell said, “and he tells me he has clearance to pass him through the checkpoint.”

  “How considerate of you. We should get him up right away. Is he awake?”

  Lyell crouched beside him and whispered to him. His eyes shifted, focused approximately on her, then beyond her. “Hello, Gansevoort,” he said. With Lyell’s help, he sat up.

  “How’s the head?” Gansevoort asked.

  “My arm is much better.” He pointed to the sodden dressing on his shoulder.

  Gansevoort eyed him with obvious misgiving.

  Peat said, “It’s just the sedatives. He’s still a little muzzy.”

  Once on his feet, Angel shuffled along, supported by Lyell and Gansevoort. The real doctor came running back, but Peat stopped her. “SC’s taking over responsibility for him,” she explained. “They insist he be moved to their facilities, so you’ve one less problem to worry about.” She flashed the green card. “I’ll see you’re commended.”

  “I didn’t realize,” said the doctor, her glance flicking briefly to Lyell. “I thought he was just another teacher.”

  “No, not quite.” She dodged another news crew and caught up with the other three in time to slide through the gate on Gansevoort’s corporate clearance.

  ***

  Once through the checkpoint, the biggest factor in the trio’s favor was Mingo’s procrastination. He would stall until the last possible minute any incursion into ICS-IV.

  Gansevoort proved to be a compulsive talker. While they rode an escalator and then boarded a pedicab—the women seated side by side across from the other two—he babbled at a neurotic clip about the prestige he’d acquired as a result of this assignment, all the while adjusting and readjusting the inflated white collar.

  “Aren’t there supposed to be studs in the front of that thing?” Peat asked him at one point.

  He flushed with embarrassment and said, “I haven’t had time to pick out a set of studs. I know that’s where all the prestige is with these collars—the personalized studs.” Then he blurted, “I never would have bothered with a … a fashion statement, before this. The CEOs selected me personally.”

  “You met them?” asked Lyell, incredulous.

  “Yeah. Angel, he got shunted down from SC�
��s Procellarum facility. Mingo says—”

  “Mingo.” The two women traded wary glances.

  “You know him?” he asked.

  “It’s an odd name,” Lyell replied.

  “Yeah, he’s a troubleshooter for the company. Efficiency expert.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He says, since Angel was hurt through no fault of his own while working for the company, we owe him special consideration. It’s our duty to see that he has work, no matter how menial. That’s why I went down to the checkpoint. A week ago, I wouldn’t have bothered—I was closed off, sealed up; everything happened to everybody else and none of it affected me.”

  “That’s easy to slip into. Most people—”

  “Sure is. There are damn few people as concerned as Mingo. The thing is, he has the freedom to act. Why, the other day, he delivered food to some of those box-dwellers down in SC Plaza. The CEOs let him do it. I mean, this is a whole side of ScumberCorp I’d never seen before.”

  “No, I shouldn’t think so,” Lyell said. She glanced past him thoughtfully. The pedicab driver, seated in a nearly reclining posture, pedaled steadily, as if hauling their combined weight took no effort. He had a TV screen on his left handlebar, bringing in perfect images of some idiot sitcom that he somehow managed to keep track of while weaving in and out of the taxi lanes. He squawked with laughter at some joke. He must have sensed her watching, and turned to share his grin with her. She smiled in reply, then leaned closer to Peat. She whispered, “Keep him occupied a few minutes.”

  “I’d rather switch him off,” muttered Chikako Peat.

  Lyell turned to the side. She took her personal phone out of her belt bag and placed a call to Nebergall.

  The phone—an earpiece and throat mike, linked with a satellite feed into the phonet. She could speak into it and be heard almost without moving her lips. Nebergall had custom-fitted the phone with an illegal microcircuit that automatically tumbled the net’s ESN, allowing her call to pass through, effectively, without a location-tag: the call that never was. The compact-sized case it fit into contained the call-buttons.