“Stop, you’re making us allergic!” Festina and I shouted in unison. The Muscle only watched, as if he’d be ever-so-fascinated to see what happened next.
Mouth turned to see what hit him—no sign of pain, just pure dumb wonderment. His cheek billowed smoke; the hair on his left temple disappeared under the smear of acid like a magic trick, and blood spilled down as skin corroded away. He lifted his hand toward his face, as if he were curious to touch the goo that was eating him alive. The hand got as high as his chin. Then Mouth slumped with barely a sound, crumpled into a smoking heap.
We held our breaths, waiting. Me thinking that if the androids turned my way, I couldn’t dodge or hobble out of range. But the magic words had once again frozen robot fingers on their jelly guns. Some other time, I’d have to decide if I felt guilty for not speaking sooner.
“Idiot,” the Muscle said, staring at the steaming Mouth with no apparent emotion. “What did he expect?” Muscle looked our direction as if he wanted us to agree with him. “The man thought everything in the world would just fall together to make him a hero. As if that was the whole point of the universe, to glorify him. What can you do with someone like that?”
Right there at the end, Muscle’s voice had a teeny catch in it. Not enough to make me think kindly of him, but still a slight trace of humanity.
“I don’t suppose you’re going to call an ambulance,” Festina said to Muscle.
“We have higher priorities.”
He drew his stun-gun and aimed at the Mouth. Mouth was still breathing, but dabs of acid had already begun to polka-dot his throat. Soon some droplet would eat through his windpipe…or jugular vein, or carotid artery, or some other indispensable piece of anatomy. I wondered if I should say a quick prayer; but Festina opened her mouth first, offering a prayer of her own.
“Hey,” she said to the dying man. Her voice was soft and gentle. “This is what ‘expendable’ means.”
Muscle pulled the trigger, and his stun-pistol went whir. As far as I could tell, nothing changed—Mouth had already drifted away into unconsciousness. But I guess the Muscle wanted to make some kind of gesture.
Festina and I had a hard time getting through the hole into the next room, but Muscle didn’t offer to untie our hands or feet. He just waited on the far side, his eyes moving constantly, trying to watch us and the darkness looming deep beyond the torch-wand’s light. Any fool could see that was impossible; soon, he was concentrating on what lay ahead, ignoring two hobbled women except for the occasional glance back in our direction.
He missed Festina edging toward the dying Mouth. She’d gone through the hole ahead of me, and when I saw what she planned to do, I made an extra great fuss clattering my way over the rubble. The Muscle rolled his eyes, peeved at the clunky-chunky old broad…which meant he missed Festina maneuvering the plastic strap that bound her ankles, touching it against a blob of smoking acid that was chewing through the Mouth’s throat.
Some of the goo came off onto the plastic. Straightaway, Festina edged back again. By the time Muscle looked in her direction, there was nothing to see.
Seconds later, Festina returned the favor for me by setting up another distraction—she shuffled over to one of the androids that ambushed us. It happened to be a hand-somish African man, tall, dressed in white-on-white clothing: Oolom colors of mourning, exactly what the Dignity Memorial robots wore when they emptied the mass grave. I guessed this artificial man had been down here ever since that day; Iranu senior programmed these two to stay behind as guards. Now they were working for Maya, just as all the others had been.
Probably, none of the robots had left Great St. Caspian after bringing out the corpses. They’d been shipped to the nearest handy holding area, that bunker by Lake Vascho; and they’d stayed there till Maya and Iranu junior reactivated them years later.
Question: how many more androids did Maya have down here in this bunker? One or two at most; if too many robots had stayed behind after clearing out the mass grave, someone would have noticed. Maybe the androids in this room were the only ones in the whole bunker, and there’d be clear sailing from now on.
Ever the optimist, our Faye.
But Festina had caught Muscle’s attention as she strayed too close to the pseudo-African man. “Get away from that! “the Muscle snapped.
“I’m just making sure it’s shut down.”
“And it never crossed your mind to grab its weapon.” The Muscle lunged across the room and seized her by the arm. “Don’t underestimate me, Admiral. I’m not my partner.”
“It was worth a try,” Festina said, shuffling away from the robot again. She didn’t even look at me; she obviously had full confidence that while she kept Muscle busy, I’d pressed my plastic leg irons against Mouth’s acid blobs.
Festina was right. Tiny wisps of smoke were curling up from the plastic, as corrosive goo ate through the strap binding my ankles. In the dim light, I hoped Muscle wouldn’t notice.
“Let’s move,” he said. Festina and I hobbled after him like good little captives…trying not to smile at the thought of kicking Muscle’s teeth out when the acid freed our feet.
The room we’d entered was almost empty—blank granite walls, with the usual rusty lumps junked about the floor. All the easier to notice the one thing that hadn’t moldered into anonymity: a palm-sized keypad embedded on the far wall. Sixteen white plastic push-buttons in a four-by-four grid. To my eye, it didn’t look modern, or even human— he buttons were too finicky small to be convenient for Homo sap fingers, and labeled with odd squiggles that didn’t look like any language I recognized. But if this was original Greenstrider technology, it was miraculously well preserved.
The Muscle peered at the pad. “What do you want to bet,” he said, “if you key in the right sequence, one of these walls has a hidden door.”
Neither Festina nor I bothered to answer. Obviously, this bunker was like the one in Mummichog; some hunk of wall was actually nano, ready to open for anyone who knew the right code. The door probably still worked too—if this bunker had enough self-maintenance capabilities to keep the keypad in good shape, important things like doors would stay in decent repair too.
The Muscle looked at me. “I don’t suppose Xé told you the right key sequence.”
I shook my head. “This wasn’t Xé’s bunker; it belonged to the Peacock, her out-and-out enemy. Xé wouldn’t know the codes.”
“Pity.” The Muscle looked at the keypad again. “If I had enough time and the right equipment, I could crack this baby. But I’m not carrying tools for being delicate, so we’ll do this the messy way.”
He strode back across the room and wrenched a jelly gun from one of the robots. “You might want to stand clear,” he told us, taking aim on the keypad. Festina and I beetled away, as far as we could get from the pad…which was the opposite side of the room and still not far enough for my liking.
“This is a military base,” I reminded the Muscle. “If you spew acid all over a security pad, don’t you think you might set off some defense mechanism? Like an explosion that’ll roast all three of us?”
“The defense mechanisms are thousands of years old,” Muscle answered. “They’re bound to be dust by now.”
“Oh sure, bound to be,” Festina said. Out the side of her mouth, she whispered, “Get ready with another death certificate.”
I whispered back, “Let’s hope we don’t need three.”
The Muscle fired. His first shot was low: acid wad smacking the wall a handbreadth beneath the keypad. Some of the spatter glooped upward, but only a bit; the rest just hung from the granite, a few jelly drops plopping down to the floor.
Two seconds for the gun to repressurize, then Muscle fired again. This time he’d corrected his aim bang on—a gooey blob struck the keypad dead center, splotching thickly over the press-buttons. I could hear sizzle all the way across the room: buttons melting like wax, the metal container dissolving in heat shimmer.
For half a minute, nothin
g happened. Then an entire section of wall suddenly turned from stone to molasses, a thick fluid of nanites dribbling to the floor. The fluid was runny granite gray, with the slimy texture of raw egg-white gushing over the ground. Nano sludge.
In the gap where the nanites had been, there was now a dark passageway leading forward.
Muscle stepped back as the egg-whitey juice trickled toward him. “Admiral,” he said, waving the jelly gun toward Festina, “if you’d be so good as to go to the doorway. Just to check what happens.”
“You want to see if the sludge attacks me.”
The Muscle smiled. “Exactly. It’s wicked-looking stuff.”
Festina hesitated. Muscle gestured with the gun again, the smile gone from his face. Before either of them did something daft confrontational, I hopped forward myself, slopping into the slushy gray gumbo spreading across the floor. Nice puppies, I thought to the nanites, don’t hurt your old Mom-Faye. With Xé gone, the nanites didn’t answer…but they didn’t attack either. No dissolving my boots or climbing up my legs. Festina moved a second later, following in my gooey wake; with nothing more than sodden shoes, we both made it to the doorway.
“Happy?” I asked the Muscle.
He waited another full minute, giving the sludge time to take action. What scared me wasn’t the chance of nanites attacking…the problem was Muscle staring so precious keenly at my feet. By now, the acid from Mouth’s throat had eaten clean through the strap holding my ankles; if Muscle had good eyes, he might notice. Lucky for me, he kept well back, staying out of the nanite pool. And there wasn’t much light on my legs—Muscle still had the torch-wand rigged to his own arm, and its glow scarcely reached as far as me. I kept my feet tight together, looked chump-helpless, and hoped that would be good enough.
It was. The Muscle didn’t notice the corroded split in my ankle strap; and after a minute, he accepted that the sludge wasn’t going to turn homicidal. Delicate as a bird, he tiptoed through the pool and joined us staring into the passageway forward.
I could have kicked him that very second—broken his knee or swept his feet out from under him. But I couldn’t guarantee I’d take him straight out of the fight, and he had that jelly gun in his hand. Better to wait for a sure thing…especially if I could coordinate an attack with Festina.
Patience. Why do so many things demand goddamned patience?
“On we go,” Muscle said. He waved the jelly gun to show who was boss, then led the way forward.
The corridor was only a dozen meters long. Then we came to the bottomless pit.
Oh, all right…it wasn’t honest-to-God bottomless. But it had to be at least ten stories deep, because torchlight didn’t reach the pit’s floor. Ten stories was still plenty enough that I didn’t want to take the dive; and diving was clearly what the Greenstriders had in mind when they built this place. A long stone bridge led forward across the pit, like a drawbridge across a moat. At the far side of the bridge sat another blank granite wall with another entry-code keypad.
Simple arrangement: to move forward you had to cross a narrow bridge over a fatal drop. In Greenstrider days I bet there were gun slits on the far side, ready to strafe unfriendlies if they tried to charge forward. Once you were on the bridge, you were bare-ass exposed…and the way across was only wide enough for attackers to dash up single file.
Cute little killing ground. If the defenders on the far side didn’t like you, either you got shot or you fell.
Or you turned back the instant you realized that going forward was utterly nuts.
“End of the line,” I said, slipping back into the corridor. “If Maya’s holed up across the bridge, it’ll take an army to pry her out.”
“Not so fast,” Muscle told me. “First of all, we don’t know Maya’s here—she may be holed up in some other hiding place. Second, there’s not much chance the old Greenstrider defenses are still operational. Sure, this would have been a death trap three thousand years ago; but everything’s rusted, hasn’t it?”
“Not the prison that held Xé captive,” Festina pointed out. “That was built by the Peacock, with self-repair mechanisms far beyond human capabilities. And this whole bunker belonged to the Peacock too. A lot of the equipment must have been standard Greenstrider stuff, but some had to be made by the Peacock himself. Those keypads, for example—not a speck of age on them. For all we know, the Peacock built automatic shrap-guns to cover this bridge; if we try to cross, we’ll be shredded.”
“That’s a possibility,” the Muscle admitted. “But I refuse to retreat without testing the theory.” He gave Festina an ugly smile. “Tell me, Admiral: what’s standard navy policy when you think something might be lethal but you can’t be sure?”
She stared back at him evenly. “Send in an Explorer.”
The Muscle waved his gun toward the bridge. “You’re on.”
I said, “Stop.”
They both looked at me. “Are you volunteering to go instead?” Muscle asked.
“I’m serving as a member of the Vigil,” I replied. “And our job is to prevent people from getting carried away with their own momentum.” I turned to the Muscle. “What do you think you’ll accomplish, sending Festina across the bridge?”
“I’ll find out if any defense mechanisms are active.”
“But why bother?” I asked. “Where’s the gain? Do you really think there’s anything down here that will help you?”
“You said there might be high-tech—”
I interrupted him. “I was leading you on, so you wouldn’t muck about with my brain. Buying time till you made a mistake.”
“Still,” he said, trying to look unflappable, “there might be useful things down here. You mentioned weapons—”
“Which are dick-useless, you know that. If you find a lethal weapon down here, or even plans for a lethal weapon, you can’t take it home to Admiralty headquarters. The League won’t let you carry killing devices across interstellar space. You knew that, but you ignored it, because you wanted to believe you could squeak out of the mess you were in. Grasping at straws, sacrificing your partner for some false hope…”
“I think,” he said clamp-jawed, “you’re trying to make me angry. You want me to do something rash.”
“You’ve already done something rash, you chump! The three times you came to kidnap me. Did it ever occur to you to work within the system? You could have flashed your credentials at our government, and said, ‘Top admirals are interested in this case, we’d like to get in on it.’ Most politicians would be flattered. ‘Ooo, the Admiralty is interested in little old Demoth, let’s keep these guys in the loop.’ You would have been part of every investigation team; you’d get up-to-the-minute reports, invitations to planning sessions, tactical operations, the works. But no. You have some witless notion that acting like a lone wolf is more efficient or smart or sexy than playing with the team. What crap! What pathetic macho crap!” I took a deep breath. “Do you know the only hightech artifact we’ve seen since we got here? A keypad that can last three thousand years. And you turned that to slag. Brilliant thinking, you mook.”
He took an angry step toward me. I don’t know whether he intended to hit me, shoot me, or just scream in my face. It didn’t matter—he’d come into kicking range.
Festina snapped his knee, while I knocked the jelly gun out of his hand. After that, it was as easy as stamping grapes.
We freed our hands the same way we’d freed our feet: picked up the jelly gun, shot a blob against the wall, and warily dabbed our plastic wrist ties against the smallest drop of acid we could find. Both Festina and I managed the trick without burning ourselves—something of a miracle considering we were doing all this with hands behind our backs, and me half-shaky from pure relief.
As we stood around after, rubbing the pins-and-needles tingle out of our fingers, Festina said, “All right. We head back, smash the jamming machine, and call for help, right?”
“We may need to get closer to the surface,” I told her. “M
y link-seed might not have enough radio power to transmit through all this rock.”
“Closer to the surface is good.” She scooped up the jelly gun and tucked it under her belt. “I’ll be delighted to put more distance between us and this death trap. If someone wants to know what’s on the other side of the bridge, maybe we can reprogram those androids from Lake Vascho. Let them lead the charge.”
Festina bent to pick up the Muscle—he was unconscious with a broken jaw, but generally intact thanks to our ladylike restraint. I put my hand on her shoulder, and said, “This time let me carry the body.”
“Oh sure, take my fun.”
She unstrapped the torch-wand from Muscle’s arm and held it as I hefted the man up. Once more, I thanked Our Blessed Mother Mary for Demoth’s .78 gravity; the dip-shit was heavy enough as it was. When I had him in a secure grip, I waddled with him down the corridor, Festina keeping pace beside me…
…till we reached a dead end. A blank wall of granite where there should have been a doorway to the next room.
“Oh shit,” I whispered.
“Don’t say that!” Festina snapped.
“The nanite sludge…it flowed back into place.”
“I can see that.” Festina held the torch close to the wall, running it around the edges of the doorway to look for a gap. I couldn’t see the skimpiest irregularity—the door had neatly fused itself to the surrounding rock.
And Muscle had melted the control panel on the other side. Even if rescuers thought to search for us down here, they couldn’t break through with anything less than a laser cutter or high explosives.
“But this wall is made of nanites, right?” Festina said. “And in Mummichog, we could just push through.”
“That was when Xé inhabited the world-soul,” I told her. “Things are always easier if you have friends in high places.”
Vigilant Page 34