Geosynchron (4 page)

"Hey! Wake up!"

The voice emanates from a spot perhaps five meters in front of him.
It is a familiar, if not a particularly welcome, voice. The last time
Natch heard that voice, it was accompanied by the pungent smell of
garlic. "I'm not asleep," he tells Frederic Patel.

"Aren't you going to take off that fucking blindfold already?" says
Frederic, irritated. "You're not going to just sit there in the dark forever, are you?"

"I might."

The younger Patel brother lets out a rasping sigh that makes
Natch think of a serrated blade sawing through tree trunks. He decides
to take off the blindfold, if only to hasten Frederic's departure. He
wriggles his right arm free of the rope, reaches for the blindfold, and
yanks it off his face.

Natch's initial impressions were correct. He is sitting in the
middle of a large, circular chamber with a radius of perhaps thirty
meters. Next to him sits a skeletal side table topped with a plate, a
sandwich, and a large jug of water. A rather prosaic white ceramic tile
coats the floor from wall to wall. The edges of the room are shrouded
in shadow, but he can faintly make out a door on the opposite wall.
The whole chamber is contained inside a dome of solid concrete that
also reaches a height of about thirty meters, putting Natch in the
nucleus of a perfect hemisphere.

Frederic Patel stands a short distance away, arms folded over his
barrel chest. Short, stout Frederic Patel, with jowls like a bulldog's and
the temperament to match. "You've been sitting there for hours," complains the engineer. "Aren't you hungry or thirsty?"

"No," replies Natch.

A minute drifts by. The impatient tapping of Frederic's right foot
is causing a rather comical rippling of flesh along one fat thigh. The
entrepreneur gets the feeling that Patel is expecting some kind of
petulant outburst. Natch is happy to disappoint him.

"Well?" barks Frederic. "Don't you want to know where you are?
How you got here?"

"No," says Natch.

Frederic's infuriated sigh fills the dome. "You are such a pain in the ass.
Listen, do me a favor, huh? Eat that bloody sandwich so Petrucio doesn't
yell at me." The tapping speeds up until the younger Patel brother's foot
is a blur of angry motion. After another twenty seconds of silence, a florid
Frederic throws his hands up in the air and stomps off. "Suit yourself."
Natch can hear the sound of angry footsteps as Patel retreats through some
second doorway behind him, beyond his peripheral vision.

The entrepreneur stares at the sandwich for a good ten minutes,
then frees his trembling left hand and takes a hold of it. Crusty sourdough bread, seasoned faux pork, an assortment of peppers, lettuce so
crisp it crinkles under his fingers. Natch takes a single bite and lets the
flavors mix on his tongue, then swallows. The sandwich is more tantalizing than anything he has eaten in weeks, but he wasn't lying to
Frederic. He's not hungry.

Instead he gazes up at the pockmarked concrete of the dome, trying
to pick out clues to his location. The Patels' business is based out of Sao
Paulo, if Natch remembers correctly. A bustling yet ancient city, full of
ghosts. He has no reason to think that Frederic and Petrucio would take
him anywhere else. Then again ... he has no reason to think they
would put him in a hoverbird, drag him to some empty chamber, and tie him to a chair in the first place. He remembers the black code dart
in his leg that Petrucio put there after a long and wearying battle of
MultiReal choice cycles. Clearly there is some connection between that
dart and Natch's winding up here. But ... what?

Don't think, he tells himself. You'll know soon enough. Or you won't.

Petrucio Patel walks into the room several hours later, as thin and
dapper as his brother is squat and slovenly. Petrucio is dressed, as
always, in a slick brown suit that would look perfectly at home in a
corporate board meeting or the sales office of a luxury hoverbird manufacturer. He stops in approximately the same spot as Frederic and
regards Natch with a suspicious gaze, noting that the entrepreneur has
made no move to untie his legs from the chair. "What are we going to
do with you?" he says, giving an almost playful tug at his mustache.

Natch shrugs. "I don't know."

"You don't know, huh? You wouldn't say that if you knew some of
the things Frederic's been suggesting. He wants to start testing
weapons on you." The dry humor never sits far beneath the surface of
Petrucio's voice, and today is no exception.

"Frederic doesn't scare me," says Natch.

"No, I suppose not. You've got MultiReal! Why would you be
afraid of anyone?" Petrucio takes a step closer and crouches down on
his haunches. Natch expects the mocking stare of the hyena in
Petrucio's eyes, but he doesn't expect to see another emotion that is
almost ... pitying. "All right, Natch. You don't really want to sit in
this chair all day, do you? Go ahead, then. Activate MultiReal. Catch
me in a choice cycle loop and make me untie you."

Natch's thoughts drift back to that MultiReal conflict in the Tul
Jabbor Complex. Petrucio firing a dart at him, Natch dodging, over
and over again. Possibility stacked on top of possibility, will versus
will, until Natch abruptly found himself out of choice cycles. He
remembers the bite of the black code dart in the back of his leg as he
jumped onto Brone's waiting hoverbird.

"This isn't like the Tul Jabbor Complex," growls Natch, suddenly
irritated at Petrucio's mockery. "The only reason you were able to hit
me with that dart was because Jara fucked with the program behind
my back. It's not like that anymore. I've moved the databases."

"Yes, you sure have." Petrucio drawls the words in childish
singsong. His face remains cool and collected. "I don't have access to
MultiReal at all. Frederic and I haven't been able to open the program
in MindSpace for a week. So go ahead. I'm defenseless. Find that possibility where you humiliate me, where you make me fall on my face
right here in front of you. Come on, I'm waiting." He points to his
nose, and then to the floor.

Bait, thinks Natch. I'm being thrown bait. Obviously Petrucio is
doing his best to provoke him, to goad him into a rash decisionsomething to which Natch is admittedly all too vulnerable. Yet what
does he possibly have to fear from the Patel Brothers? He has faced
down ten thousand Defense and Wellness Council black code darts and
emerged without a scratch. He has used the power of MultiReal to
bend the will of Speaker Khann Frejohr. Why should he be intimidated by a chair, a rope, and a smirk? Why not take the bait and find
out what's behind Petrucio's smugness?

Natch gives his internal system a silent command to activate
MultiReal.

Within the flicker of an instant, Natch can feel his previous ennui
retreating before the dazzle of MultiReal. He can sense the infinite
probability of the multiverse unfolding before him. Anything he can
imagine, any combination of event and happenstance-it all lies
sprawled before him, no more than a mathematical progression of
muscle movements away. He can sense potential realities ranging from
the vindictive to the comical to the absurd-realities where Natch
hurls insults or oozes flatteries or utters nonsense syllables. All he
needs now is to use the power of MultiReal to latch on to Petrucio's
neural interfaces. And then the pas de deux will begin: Natch's mind leaping with possibilities, Petrucio's mind twirling in unwitting
response, over and over again in the space between frozen seconds. At
the Tul Jabbor Complex, when Petrucio had his own version of MultiReal, he could choose realities of his own; here he will be helpless as a
marionette, victim to Natch's manipulation of his own subconscious.
When Natch finds the one potential reality that suits his purposes, he
will close the choice cycle, and for that instant the world will conform
to his desires. Petrucio will follow through with the possibility Natch
has selected for him, powerless to do otherwise.

Natch lunges for Petrucio's neural interfaces with a mental reflex
that feels like throwing a lasso.

And finds nothing.

It is as if Natch has attempted to engage in a tete-a-tete with the
slab of domed concrete above him. MultiReal has called out, but
Petrucio's mental facilities are not responding.

The panic must be visible in his eyes, because after a few seconds a
wry smile creeps up one side of Petrucio's face. It is not a cruel smile
or a malicious smile so much as an amused one. He straightens up and
smoothes the wrinkles from his designer slacks with a brisk flick of the
wrist.

"I thought so," says Petrucio. "Frederic and I aren't afraid of your
MultiReal tricks. They won't work in this place." He gestures at the
shadowy apex of the dome above him. "You might as well conserve
your energy, Natch. You're not going anywhere."

And within a few seconds, he is gone, leaving Natch alone with the
gloom and the darkness.

3

At first it was nothing more than an occlusion of the stars, one of the
million bits of detritus covering the Earth like an aura. Satellites functioning and not, metal garbage from ancient construction, dead space
elevators. But unlike the rest of the rubbish, this occlusion was
expanding in that telltale pattern that indicated an approaching vector.
A ship. It was an ugly bastard, too, mottled gray and brown, with guns
protruding on all sides. Big enough to transport half a dozen hoverbirds, agile enough to conduct military exercises-but not quite fast
enough to avoid detection. By the time the ship extended its grappling
gear to make the hookup with the Orbital Detention and Rehabilitation Facility, Twelfth Meridian, the unconnectibles were ready for it.

Quell had been kneeling behind an unlabeled crate on the dock
with dartrifle in hand for over ten minutes. Something must have staggered into that crate and died months ago, by the smell of it. He was
just about to make for another spot when a finger tapped him on the
shoulder. "What now?" he grunted.

"You're sure it's Islanders on this one?" said Plithy, his voice
squeaky with nerves. Quell turned to face the boy and noticed that the
cartridge of black code darts on his gun was loaded crookedly and
primed for a misfire.

"Course I'm not sure," said Quell. "You got the same information I did."

"And what if the information's wrong? What if they get the jump
on us, like last time?" Plithy craned his scrawny neck towards the
opposite side of the dock, where the connectibles were hunkered down
awaiting the same ship. Every once in a while, Quell caught the glint
of an overhead light bouncing off the barrel of one of their dartguns.
There were only about twenty meters separating the two teams; it
would be difficult to miss at such close range.

Quell shrugged. "Stick to the plan, and you'll be fine. I'm the one
who should be worrying."

"But-"

The Islander made a strangled noise of frustration. "Just be quiet
and get back in position. And for the last time-" He grabbed Plithy's
dartgun and snapped the misloaded cartridge into place with a single
aggravated motion. The boy shut up and retreated to some crack or
crevice outside Quell's view. Wisest thing he's done all day.

He could hardly blame Plithy for his jangly nerves. The boy was
only sixteen, much too young to be worrying about black code darts.
Even for someone of Quell's age and experience, it wasn't easy, racing
to the dock at a moment's notice with weapon in hand, never sure who
would emerge from the airlock. Sometimes the ships carried connectible prisoners; sometimes they carried unconnectible prisoners.
The information was sketchy and of unknown provenance. Your job
was twofold: shepherd the unconnectibles to the unconnectible level of
the prison before the enemy captured them, and capture as many connectibles as possible before they escaped to the connectible level of the
prison. If you had accurate information and brought the right number
of troops, the job was pretty straightforward. Otherwise you had a long
and messy dartgun battle on your hands.