The Invisible City

by Brian K. Lowe

  "They'll kill me! They'll throw me over the side like they did Porky!"

  "They killed Porky?" Timash demanded.

  Wince nodded rapidly. "They musta! He was in it with 'em…"

  Confusion to the enemy, I thought. "Listen to me, Wince. If they catch you, they'll toss you overboard. But what do you think the gang inside would do if I told them you were a spy?"

  Even in the dim light I could see his face pale. We towered over him.

  "You can't! That—that's your job…you gotta protect us! The captain said so!" He was trembling, almost crying.

  I laughed softly. "The captain's the one they're planning to kill, Wince… Do you think she's going to care what happens to you?" I stole a meaningful glance toward the door to the Hold. "If I go back in there, the boys are going to throw you off the ship—one piece at a time."

  Timash bared his teeth. That was enough.

  "All right! They're gonna do it tonight! Midnight! Just don't tell 'em I told you!"

  "Who?"

  "Durrn! Durrn and Garm and some of the others! Maybe six, eight at most. Please don't tell 'em I told you."

  I ignored the little traitor. Turning to Timash, I said:

  "Stay here with him to make sure he doesn't leave. I've go to warn Maire and Harros. If they see she's on guard, they'll abort the plan and we can figure out what to do before they try again."

  Knowing Timash, he would have argued if I gave him the time, so I did not. The fastest way reach Maire's cabin was not the way Garm had taken me, but across the deck. I climbed the nearest ladder so fast in the scant light of the ship's lamps it was a wonder I didn't dash my brains out on the ceiling.

  Even that seemed bright in comparison to the deck, where the stars and moon were blanked out by a thick layer of upper level clouds. The lamps here were few and far between, but since I had never walked the deck at night before I did not know if it was because they were designed that way, or if the assassins—mutineers, really—had turned them off. I made what haste I could in the dark, relying on my ears and my mind to detect any lookouts left to deal with unwitting witnesses.

  I was at the foot of the stairs leading to the afterdeck when I heard a faint sound behind me. I froze, but it was not repeated. I put my foot on the step—and was suddenly struck from behind!

  Some inner sense warned me at the last instant, and I ducked, taking an otherwise fatal blow on my shoulder. Blindly I rushed my opponent, but he sidestepped, tripping me up. Off-balance, I whirled and my spine slammed into the railing. My head snapped backward and encountered nothing—the force field had been turned off! Nothing but the railing kept me from following Porky those last five thousand feet to the ground.

  Before I could clear my head, two hands grabbed me by the throat, cutting off my air and bending me back over the edge.

  "I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but that damned ape of yours would never leave you alone! Farewell, Charles!"

  The fingers tightened around my windpipe—the fingers of a man who knew my real name—and who spoke English!

  39. Mutiny!

  I knew that whispered voice—through the blood roaring in my ears, I knew it, but its low hiss disguised it and the onrushing darkness of death threatened to crash down on me in a wave so high that no other thought could be entertained but to focus on the glimmering, flickering candlelight that was my own mortality.

  With desperate strength I struck back, but my foeman was no spindly Vulsteen or strength-deprived Nuum, but a creature with arms as powerful as those of any rower on this ship and fingers that choked away my air and my life. Low on my throat, they triggered my gag reflex over and over, what oxygen had been trapped inside me bursting against my blocked windpipe like an insane case of hiccups. I was convulsing with each aborted breath; the blackness of the night actually brightening as purple and blue inexorably filled my eyes with visions of asphyxiation. Still I beat fruitlessly against his body and arms, but with each passing second my blows were fading…

  And then he was gone.

  For long moments, retching and gasping, I could do nothing, and still the roaring in ears would not stop—but that was not what I heard. Gulping down the last remnants of my bile with all the precious air I could swallow, I looked up in time to see to see a snarling Timash charging—

  —Harros!

  His own lips drew back in feral anger as he climbed to his feet, braced against the wall of the aft compartments. His eyes glistened in the intermittent moonlight like a cat's. He sidestepped Timash's rush quicker than I had ever seen him move. Timash slammed into the wall and bounced back, stunned. Following up the advantage, Harros' hand flashed out in a chopping motion, and my anthropoid friend dropped to the deck.

  My attacker stepped around the prone body at his feet almost with a dancer's delicacy. “That was easier than I thought. If I’d known he was that fragile, Charles, I would have killed you a long time ago.”

  Nothing about him reflected the man I remembered. Before he had loomed, almost too big a man for his own body, bulling his way along by sheer size. Now he radiated a cold confidence that made him appear more compact and sure. Every move was measured. I knew he had been sent to kill me before he said another word.

  He wasn't a Nuum—and he wasn't Thoran. He was like me. He was from Earth.

  Even with his face wreathed in shadow, I could see the curved white line of his teeth.

  "Very good, Charles. How satisfying to know that all that time they put into making me up didn't go to waste." He would not let my questions reach my tongue. "Oh, yes, they made me up all right. After you sent the last of the time cops running back to the 23rd century with their tails between their legs, the department knew they had someone extraordinary on their hands. They spent fifty years getting me right—six generations of clones cultivated to create the best assassin who ever lived. Me."

  "Someone will hear the noise and come to investigate," I blurted. It wasn't what I had intended to say. That seemed to confuse him.

  "Well." He cocked his head to one side mockingly. "I don't hear anyone. Could it have something to do with the mutiny? I made a deal with them: I left the captain's cabin unlocked, and they left you to me. And before you ask—" he rushed on, "I can trust them. My fathers' pride and joy was my telepathic ability. I expect I'm the strongest telepath on the planet."

  That explained my attack of telepathic virus: Harros had tried to kill me from a distance. He had nearly succeeded, if not for the reasons he expected.

  "And since our brain structures are so similar," he continued, "I can read your mind even though these other simpletons can't." Suddenly he was right in front of me. "I also have faster reflexes, greater strength, and far better night vision than you."

  "And a bigger mouth to go with it," Timash rumbled. Harros spun just in time to intercept a massive paw with his chin. He fell back against me, twisted, and seized my face in one hand.

  The world exploded in smells of color and shapes of sound. Far away all the voices I had ever heard in my life twirled away down a drain. Scenes from my childhood burst like balloons before my eyes. My mother and my father towered far overhead, but when they looked down each wore Harros' face.

  "I told you to play nice," Mother/Harros scolded. "You wouldn't stay in your own time, and now you must be punished."

  "What's that you've been playing with?" Father/Harros asked sternly. "Good heavens, who ever gave a database like that to a moron like you? That's like giving a loaded gun to a five-year-old. I'll have to take it away from you. You can have it back when you're older. Oh, wait, you're not going to get any older!" I shrank back from their titanic laughter, retreated into the far back closet of my own mind.

  "No, no, Charles," Mother/Harros tutted. She reached down with fingers the size of sofas. "Come along, it's—it's—"

  And suddenly she was screaming and he was screaming and Harros was screaming and a faint, cold, and familiar fuzziness was rising at the fringes of my mind. I threw all my en
ergy into rebuilding my mental blocks so fast that my knees buckled, but the fuzziness melted away.

  Timash helped me to my feet. Harros lay dead on the deck.

  "He grabbed you, and then he just started screaming…"

  "It was the virus," I choked out. "He activated it. It almost killed us both." I pointed to the stairs. "Maire's cabin—that's where they'll be. Once they kill her the rest of us are finished." Leaning heavily on my hairy friend, I directed him to the captain's cabin, where he had never been. I chafed at our progress, but I was still too unsteady to mount the stairs and my directions might not be good enough to send him ahead by himself.

  Before climbing up to the last level, we peeked through the trapdoor. Another mutineer stood outside of Maire's cabin. Timash set me aside and finished climbing the ladder alone.

  "Hey, buddy," I heard him greet the startled sailor. "Is this where I join up?" There was a sudden shuffling, abruptly ended, and then the luckless sentry slid head-first down the ladder. I stepped over him on my way up.

  A small test proved Maire's cabin door was unlocked. We looked at each other, girding our courage. Barehanded, we were about to burst into a room whose layout only I knew, holding an unknown number of armed and hostile killers, to rescue a woman who in all probability had already had her throat slit. Timash grinned.

  "Uncle Balu is gonna love this story."

  And we went.

  At the last instant, my normally phantasmal sense of survival erected a frantic barricade in my forebrain, and instead of crashing through, I inched the door open until I could peek inside. My eyes flew wide.

  "My God," I whispered. "It's just like the Vulsteen."

  Only in this case, it was but four against one: Maire had them outnumbered. Backed against the far wall, her sword waving tauntingly at the quartet of savages arrayed before her, her torn nightshirt told the story: She was a beautiful woman, and they had planned to take her by surprise in her sleep. They carried no sidearms—they had wanted her alive. The blood on her shirt and on one man's tunic revealed the outcome of that scheme.

  I slammed the door open wide. All of them jumped, but Maire held the advantage of facing the sound; when the others instinctively glanced backward she reduced their numbers to three.

  Rage darkened Durrn's normally ruddy face. "Take them!" he screamed at the others. "They're just rowers! They're unarmed!"

  He was right, and his men knew they had us as they rushed the door and we fell back into the corridor, but in the moment that they came through the door and tried to change direction to follow us, they found we had not run far. In those close quarters we were on top of them before they could bring their swords to bear, and seconds later we were both armed and running to Maire's aid.

  She needed none. Durrn's anger and strength availed him nothing in the use of the Nuum sword, at which she was clearly his master. But she could not press in close to finish him, and only belatedly I saw that some of the blood on her nightshirt was her own.

  "Keryl," she panted. "Block that tapestry!" I looked, but I didn't know which one she meant, and Durrn took his opportunity to break free and run. Flinging aside one of the hangings, he banged the wall and it opened for him. He vanished through the hidden door and we heard him bolt it from the other side.

  "That was supposed to be my escape route if I ever needed it," Maire explained wryly, dropping her sword. She put a hand to her side and hissed.

  "Let me look at that," I ordered, but as I gently peeled the material away I realized that under her nightshirt she wore nothing. Embarrassed, I froze.

  "Well, hurry up. We've got to get after him."

  I could not move, but once again Timash came to my rescue.

  "Let me do it, Keryl. My mother's a doctor, after all." I backed up and turned away as he lifted the nightshirt. I heard Maire whisper a question to him and he answered in the same tone.

  "Great," she said aloud. "I've been stabbed, my crew's in mutiny, and he's shy."

  "It doesn't look bad," Timash reported. "Just a scrape along the ribs. I'll slap some plasm on it and you'll be good as new."

  "Thank God," Maire replied from behind my back. "If I had to depend on Dr. Do-nothing I could bleed to death."

  "We're wasting time," I snapped, though I refused to turn about. "Where will Durrn go? Are there any weapons he can get to?"

  She did not answer for a few moments—I almost turned to see what was the matter—and when she spoke, her voice was uncertain.

  "No—they can't use energy weapons on a sky-barge. It could interfere with the anti-gravity fields. Uh—he may go down to the generator bay, try to hold the ship hostage until we agree to let him out somewhere. I don't know—ouch—it may depend on how many of the crew he has with him."

  "Not as many as he had when he started," Timash muttered. "All done. You can get dressed now."

  I was about to object—although I did not want Maire running about the ship in her present state of dishabille, we hardly had time to choose outfits—when she announced herself ready. She had tucked her nightshirt into a pair of trousers and grabbed her sword once more. Barefoot, she was ready to take back what was hers.

  "Out the front way," she directed. "He could be waiting for us in the passage through the bulkheads. I could open it, but there's not much light in there."

  I followed her down the ladder as swiftly as caution allowed.

  "Where are we headed?"

  "To the anti-gravity generator bay. It's the most likely place to run, and it's all the way on the other side of the ship. If he's hiding out anywhere else, we'll see him on the way." By unspoken agreement, we hurried our steps, sacrificing stealth for speed.

  "What do we do if we find him?" Timash queried, rather unnecessarily, it seemed to me in light of the night's events.

  "Then it's going to be him and me."

  We opened the last hatchway and emerged into the night.

  "Or…maybe not…"

  Maire's words trailed away as we stood on the afterdeck bathed in the light of the ship's full complement of floodlights—floodlights glinting off the barrels of a dozen guns Durrn, Garm, and their followers were pointing unwaveringly in our direction.

  The captain of the Dark Lady recovered quickly.

  "You can't use those, Durrn. You know that as well as I do."

  Durrn shrugged. "Way I see it, it really makes no difference. Die now, die later… dead's dead and that's an end to drinkin'." He assumed a mournful air. The penalty for mutiny was, naturally, death. The more things change, the more they stay the same. "Of course," Durrn resumed, "there might be a way out of this."

  "I'm listening."

  "Lay down your weapons and surrender, and we won't shoot you."

  Maire, bless her, smiled as if she really were enjoying herself.

  "And then what? We retire to my cabin so you can pick up where you left off? No, thanks."

  "No, that wouldn't work," Durrn sighed. "We'd have to tie you up so tight it'd defeat the whole purpose. But look at it this way: If we start shooting, everybody on this boat dies. If you surrender, the rest of your crew and the rowers—don't."

  From where I stood two paces behind her, I felt the tremor in Maire's thoughts. Gathered in a ragged bunch ten feet from the bottom of the steps, the mutineers were probably too far away to notice it, and even in the bright glare she did not evince the slightest outer twinge.

  "Go to hell."

  "Wait…!" Backing up, I held out a hand as if to ward off her words. All eyes turned to me. "You don't have the right!"

  "Keryl—!"

  "You don't have the right!" I screamed again, and rushed at her—then past her straight into the crowd of mutineers!

  I should have died then, even with the grace of the single instant when the mob was caught off-guard—too astonished to use the guns they had never really wanted to fire—before I was among them. What I had hoped to accomplish heaven only knew, but at that moment the doors behind the mutineers burst open and Skull an
d the rowers flooded the deck!

  Instantly guns and swords were reduced to nothing but clubs. Borne down to the deck, I flailed with fists and feet, kicking and punching at anything that moved. Friend and foe were indistinguishable from where I lay, only a morass of shadowy bodies kicking and punching and falling on me in return.

  The ending was as inevitable as the sunrise. Outnumbering their former masters five-to-one, bodies hardened by months and years of labor and hardship and the whip, the rowers literally tore the mutineers to pieces. I learned later that, thinking quickly, Timash had seized Maire when she would have plunged into the fighting and both restrained and shielded her until the tumult was spent. Had he not, I am certain she would have suffered Durrn and Garm's fate.

  When it was done, Skull himself helped me to my feet. "They locked the crew away, but they didn't bother with us." He shivered involuntarily in a sudden gust of wind. "With all the noise topside, I snuck up here to see what was going on. The idea of Durrn as captain… I grabbed as many of the boys as could help and waited for a chance."

  I wrapped my arms around myself; it was getting cold. "I'm sure the captain will take this all into account. Something can be done."

  He looked at me strangely, as if he were going to say something, then paused, looking into the sky.

  "Storm coming."

  I nodded. "It's getting cold."

  "No, you don't understand. They've cut the force field! If that storm hits us without it, we could all go over the edge!" I turned to hail Maire, but Skull was ahead of me. "Brants! Go below and free the crew! Hanick! Check the field generators! Captain—" Maire had arrived, her face saying she didn't need to be told what he knew. "Who's your field tech?" He jabbed a thumb at the mess he and the others had left. "Tell me it wasn't one of them."

  "It's not," she answered curtly. "It's me."

  I blinked. She had not lied about that, in any case.

  "They've cut the shields," Skull said. "I've got a man checking the generators. We need them up fast—there's a storm coming."