Among the Powers (23 page)

Or were they just stupid and unimaginative?
Endless life and unimaginable power did not make a fool any less a
fool. Some people did not seem to learn from experience, most
particularly when they did all they could to limit their
experiences to the familiar.

He hated to think that his companions were
all fools. On the other hand, he knew from his centuries of
wandering among the people of Denner’s Wreck that a large
percentage of the human race was made up of fools, and there was no
reason his little clique should be any different.

For that matter, wasn’t he as big a fool as
the rest? He was just as much a captive as the others. He mulled
that over silently.

“Brenner, why didn’t you see all these
things waiting for us?” Lady Sunlight demanded, waving at the
surrounding plastic.

“
I
don’t know,” Brenner replied
bitterly, staring down at his clasped hands. “Thaddeus must have
hidden them pretty well. Maybe he sabotaged some of my defensive
systems, broke in and fed them false reports that the exit was
still clear. I spotted all the stuff he had waiting outside my
other tunnels easily enough.”

“He probably meant you to,” Sheila said from
the other side of the little transport.

“In fact,” Rawl said, leaning back againt
the yellow plastic wall, “the entire attack may have been a feint,
a trick, a means of herding us out through that tunnel to where he
could capture us alive and undamaged.”

Brenner looked up. “Do you think so?”

Rawl shrugged. “Who knows? It could have
been.” He did not think Thaddeus was inherently any less a fool
than most of the others, but he knew that he could be very clever
indeed in pursuing his foolish goals. Thaddeus was crazy, but he
was not stupid.

“What does he want with us?” Lady Sunlight
asked.

“How should I know?” Brenner answered
angrily.

“Hostages,” Rawl muttered softly, so softly
the others did not hear him.

Lady Sunlight started to reply to Brenner’s
outburst, blaming him further for his ignorance, but then she saw
the expression on his face and thought better of it. She looked
away, in the direction of the other transport, the one that held
her pet and various devices. Silence fell, as all four contemplated
their unhappy situation.

Thaddeus’s machines had stripped them of all
their equipment except what was actually built into them. Lady
Sunlight had given up her pet, a feelie vine, three small creatures
she had had tucked away, and six small floaters. Sheila had had
only a single floater; her airskiff did not fit through the tunnel
and had been left behind.

Rawl had resisted briefly, taking out three
minor machines from Thaddeus’s arsenal, and had had forty-two
floaters immobilized by suppressor fields, and four creatures
captured alive. Several other small creatures from Rawl’s menagerie
had escaped safely into the woods surrounding the exit from the
tunnel, and three had died making the attempt, fried by Thaddeus’s
weapons. One, a modified ferret, had last been seen being pursued
by an artificial predator Thaddeus had designed and grown himself,
working mostly from feline genes.

Brenner had had nothing at all for Thaddeus
to confiscate. All his external devices had been built into the
High Castle, or had been left behind in his hurried departure.

Of course, they all still carried symbiotes
and a variety of internal machinery. Thaddeus had not tried to do
anything about that. In fact, the transport that they had been
forced to board was not even shielded against most communications
frequencies; Rawl discovered, after the brief spurt of conversation
triggered by Lady Sunlight’s outburst, that he was able to contact
the mother ship and inquire after the other immortals.

None of the other captives had thought to
try that, so far as he could see.

No one was reported dead, Rawl learned. That
was some comfort, but Khalid, O, and Aulden were missing, all three
last heard from in the vicinity of Fortress Holding. Geste and Imp
were aboard the Skyland, of all places, and had been going from
hold to hold recently, and were now apparently headed for the High
Castle; Rawl suspected that this meant they were aware of what was
happening and were coming to lend what aid they could.

He smiled wryly to himself. They were
already too late. The High Castle was gone. Once Thaddeus had his
captives and booty out, Mother said, he had nuked the place. Rawl
hesitated for an instant, and then decided against telling Brenner
and Sheila and Sunlight that. They were disheartened enough
already.

Still, Geste and Imp and the Skyler would
find nothing but radioactive rubble.

At least they were trying, though. What were
all the others doing?

Nothing, apparently. They were just going
about their business.

Rawl did not like that. If the Skyler and
her party knew what was happening, they would surely have told
everyone. Why weren’t the others doing anything to stop
Thaddeus?

He knew that he could not manage a proper
holographic transmission with just his internal systems, but with
Mother to relay Rawl thought he could get a message of some sort
out, either audio or data feed. He tried to put a call through to
Isabelle.

He was cut off, not by static, but by the
sudden dead silence of an electromagnetic barrier effect.

“No, no, Rawl,” Thaddeus’s voice said,
startling the other captives. “I can’t have you spreading wild
rumors.”

“Rawl?” Lady Sunlight said, puzzled. The
other two looked at him, surprised but silent.

“Rumors?” Rawl asked.

“Certainly. Just rumors. What else could it
be?” Thaddeus laughed unpleasantly.

Rawl wished, briefly, that Thaddeus had come
out in person to oversee their capture. That would have given them
a better shot at escape or at doing some serious damage, since
Thaddeus’s forces would have had to put some effort into defending
their master.

Of course, Thaddeus would never have been
that stupid.

A moment later the yellow plastic walls
opened suddenly, shrinking down into themselves. The transport
dissolved until nothing remained but the two simple benches, facing
each other in the center of a moderately-large chamber.

The walls were drab gray; no music played,
and the place smelled of oil and metal.

Sheila and Rawl quickly took in their new
surroundings; Brenner looked around slowly but without real
interest, and Lady Sunlight glanced back and forth wildly.

“Where are our things?” she demanded.

Thaddeus appeared suddenly, standing before
them a centimeter or two off the floor. Rawl looked at the
brown-garbed figure and realized it was not tall enough; he would
have assumed it to be a transmitted image in any case, and Thaddeus
gave that away by reducing his size to one more normal for a human
being than his actual 2.9 meters.

“What things?” the image said, smiling.

“You know what things!” Lady Sunlight
spat.

“You mean this?” The image held up Lady
Sunlight’s golden-furred pet, its neck clutched in one huge hand.
The little animal was kicking and scratching desperately, unable to
breathe. As it had been bred without claws, its struggles did no
good at all.

“Let him go!” Lady Sunlight shrieked.

Thaddeus smiled and squeezed harder.

The animal gasped once and went limp.
Thaddeus squeezed harder, then released the creature. It fell and
lay still. Rawl noticed that Thaddeus had carefully dropped it
inside the transmission area, so that his captives would be able to
see for themselves that it was really dead.

“Vicious bastard,” Brenner muttered.

“Really, Thaddeus,” Sheila said, “is this
necessary?”

“Maybe not,” the image replied, “but I’m
enjoying it. I’m really enjoying seeing you smug little fools
realize who is actually in charge here.”

Rawl watched intently, suddenly aware that
something was wrong here. Would the real Thaddeus have casually
handled Sunlight’s pet so directly? He had no way of knowing what
the little animal was capable of, and for as long as Rawl had known
him, Thaddeus had never taken an unnecessary risk.

This, then, was not the real Thaddeus, or
perhaps it was not the real pet.

An android, perhaps? A clone?

It didn’t really matter, though.

“Stinking son of a bitch,” Brenner said.
“Where’s the joy in strangling little animals?”

“Oh, there’s joy enough,” Thaddeus replied.
“There’s a feeling of power to it, feeling that little bit of life
squirming in your hand, and then feeling it break and die. The best
part, though, is watching you people while I do it. You all thought
you were as good as me—as good as me, hell, you thought you were
better. You think I didn’t know what you felt? You were all basking
in that glow of power over me, knowing that you could turn me over
to the rebels on Alpha Imperium at any time, knowing you could put
an end to a life that’s lasted longer than any of you. You all
thought you were better than me because you’d never been defeated
the way I was—but none of you ever
tried
. None of you could
do any better.
I’m
the conqueror here, and now you
have
been defeated. Like it? Like the feeling?
Do
you
?”

“No,” Sheila said. “We don’t. We never
gloated over your defeat, Thaddeus.”

“No? Then why didn’t you turn me in?”

No one answered.

“
Why
?” he screamed.

“I don’t know,” Sheila shouted back.

“We felt sorry for you,” Lady Sunlight said
before Rawl and Sheila could stop her.

“You
pitied
me? Well, pity
yourselves, now, you sanctimonious little idiots!”

Something flashed in the chamber that held
them, and Rawl felt his skin crawling and drying. His internal
systems began reporting damage. They had been bombarded with a
short burst of high-intensity radiations of various
kinds—ultraviolet, narrow-band gamma rays, and others, all designed
to kill off tailored microbes, but which incidentally damaged human
tissue, several kinds of symbiote, and electromagnetic data
storage.

He looked down at his hands; the skin was
reddening already. He would have a ferocious sunburn in minutes,
and his symbiotes were too badly hurt to repair it quickly. His
skull-liner had lost large chunks of memory. Some of the
independent intelligences that roamed in his body had died, he was
sure.

So much for any attempts to fight their way
out. They were at Thaddeus’s mercy.

“Take off your clothes,” Thaddeus
ordered.

“Why?” Lady Sunlight asked. “Why should we?”
She was once again on the verge of tears.

“Because I’ll kill you if you don’t,”
Thaddeus began. “I’ll kill you slowly...” Then he stopped and
reconsidered. “No,” he said. “No, I won’t kill you. I don’t want to
make threats I won’t keep, and I have no intention of killing you
yet. No, if you don’t take your clothes off, I’ll take them off for
you, and my machines won’t be gentle about it.”

Rawl was already peeling off his own
garments, and the others reluctantly followed his example.

By the time they were all naked a gleaming
silver machine had rolled into the room and stood before them. Rawl
studied it in wry amusement. Thaddeus was not only one of the
oldest people alive, but one of the most old-fashioned. Nobody else
still used wheeled machines; they were too limited in what terrain
they could travel on. Thaddeus did not entirely trust antigravity.
It had been around for more than four thousand years, but to
Thaddeus it was still too new to be used extensively.

“Hello,” he said to the machine, testing out
its capabilities.

It did not reply. Thaddeus’s image turned
away from his intent inspection of Lady Sunlight and said, “It
can’t hear you. None of my mobile machines can. I programmed them
all to block out your voices, to treat them as unprocessable
background noise. You aren’t going to get out of here with their
help, any of you.”

Rawl shrugged. “I didn’t expect to,” he said
truthfully. He had known that Thaddeus would have taken precautions
against anything of the sort. He had not guessed what form the
precautions would take, though; coding their voiceprints to be
inaudible was, like many of Thaddeus’s methods, unusually simple
and clever, taking an indirect route to the desired result. Most
people would have simply ordered the machines not to take orders
from anyone else, but Thaddeus realized that there were ways around
that sort of blanket command.

And there was an added psychological
dimension, as well; these machines would not only not obey the
captives, but would refuse to even acknowledge their existence
except as objects. Thaddeus was doing his best to depersonalize his
prisoners. He had stripped away their defenses, their machines,
their creatures, their clothes, even the voices they used to give
orders. Even their health, something they had all taken for granted
for centuries, had been disrupted by the radiation burst; they
would all be in mild pain for hours, maybe days, before their skin
healed and their symbiotes regenerated.

Rawl almost admired the paranoid
completeness of it all.

“Come along,” Thaddeus said. “The machine
will lead you to your cell. The others are waiting.”

“Others?” As usual, it was Lady Sunlight who
rose to the bait.

“Aulden, Khalid, and O,” Rawl said, taking
away a little of Thaddeus’s control.

The image frowned. “How did... oh, I see. Of
course. Yes, it’s Aulden and Khalid and O. Now, come along. Your
chains are waiting.”

“Chains,” Brenner spat. “Thaddeus, you...
you...” He could not find the words he needed. As a metal arm
reached out toward him he stepped forward, following the
machine.

The arms reached out for the others, and
they all obeyed, allowing themselves to be herded toward an open
door.