Out Through the Attic (8 page)

I was off and running.

My PD usage leveled off, but it didn’t go away. It couldn’t. I needed to keep an edge, just a hint of godhood in my own mind to pull it all off, and I couldn’t afford a breakdown. I took the stuff like clockwork, every six hours, just the right amount. At the rate I was consuming it, that last delivery, my only stash, would last quite a while.

The parties, however, came to an end.

I set aside two bags of gold and then threw the Queen’s money around like candy at a parade. I had a crew, a director, actors … everything I needed. We started production in record time and hit it full steam with a vengeance.

I must admit, I was surprised that the Queen’s people didn’t check in on me more often. The gaunt elf showed up from time to time, making sure everything was going as planned. He even watched some of the dailies to ensure that the script was what they expected. But his appearances were few and far between. I suppose the Queen figured I was too hooked on PD, too scared of poverty and too terrified of her to run a double-cross. Or maybe she had bigger fish to fry. I didn’t care.

I had a mission.

I hired a marketing firm to litter the city with advertisements. We billed it as
The King: The Truth
. It took us six months to finish production, and when the movie was in the can we sent a copy up to the Palace for approval. I received a reply from the Queen that same afternoon. The message simply read, “
We approve.
”

I scheduled the premier and sent invitations to everyone in the movie industry. I had the marketing firm advertise that there would be snippets of the film running in every theater in the kingdom.

On the morning of the premier, I got up bright and early and put together the best costume of my career. It was a variation of King Hoffer in his golden years, the schtupping years, taken from what I remembered of my first movie. It seemed appropriate. The clothing was plainer than a King would wear, but there was no doubt that I looked like a grizzled, stooped, old man.

I’d done everything I could to make sure that the entire kingdom would be in front of a silver screen that day. And it worked.

On the morning of the premier, the streets were mostly empty. I know, because I snuck out of my house, made my way to the zeppelin terminal and left town.

O O O

I’d chartered an express zeppelin bound for Wendy’s hometown, and when I touched down I bought a fast steam carriage, paying in gold. No names were exchanged. Like a whirlwind I’d kicked in her mother’s door, gathered up my family, and with the simple phrase “We have to leave,” we packed their bags and rushed out.

Wendy never said a word.

She heard the urgency in my voice, saw the fear in my eyes. I have no doubt she knew or at least suspected what was going on. She still trusted me, after all those years of failure.

I drove further and further north. The silence inside the steam carriage was oppressive, but I thanked the heavens for it. I didn’t want to explain it all to them. Couldn’t.

We crossed one border and then another. Darkness settled in, and I found myself wondering how the premier had gone, what the Queen was doing to find me.

It was after midnight when I finally pulled into a zeppelin terminal with flights bound for distant lands. I gathered them up and we picked a spot in the terminal where we were out of sight. Keeping only a handful for myself, I gave Wendy both bags of gold and told her buy tickets for herself and our daughters, told her to get as far away from me as possible. The girls were tucked away in a corner, fast asleep, and I watched over them as Wendy got the tickets. When she returned, she finally looked at me, the obvious question clear in her eyes.

I grasped her shoulders gently, feeling an ocean of emotions welling up inside.

“This is the way it’s got to be, Wendy. My life for you and the kids.” I squeezed. “You’ve got to stay safe, anyplace the Queen can’t reach you. Hide. Change your names. Forget you ever knew me. If she gets her hands on you …” my voice trailed off and I shook my head, trying not to think what the Queen would do to them. “If they get you, my entire life will have been in vain. Getting you out of here is the only thing that can save me.” Tears slid down my cheeks and into my beard. “I’m
so
sorry, Wendy.”

She grasped my hand, tenderly, forgiving. She took in a breath to speak.

“Don’t,” I said. “You can never forgive me for this, for what I did to your life … to theirs. Ever.” I looked at our daughters, sleeping peacefully. I’d never felt so much guilt in my life. “I took what was perfect and dropped it into a meat grinder.” I gripped her hand tightly, staring fiercely into her eyes. “Promise you’ll never, ever forgive me for this.”

“I …” she hesitated.

“Promise!” I almost shouted, and my tears were rivers.

“I promise, Cornelius.”

I nodded once, and with that I walked away.

O O O

I take two blasts from my sniffer. It’s empty. At last. I close my eyes as the PD works its fire through my body. I smile, feeling like a god, knowing it’s for the last time.

“That was four months ago,” I say, looking at the six faces staring down the bar at me. I trace another
W
in the whisky. “I’ve been on the run since then. Living in dive bars and back alleys. Every now and again I would let someone recognize me. I left a trail of sightings in my wake, figuring that if the Queen was hot on my trail, she wouldn’t be as interested in finding Wendy or the kids.”

“So how’d they find you?” the grouchy one asks. “Seems to me you could have stayed ahead of them forever.” He looks at over his shoulder at the trolls and realizes they haven’t taken their eyes off me this entire time. His voice has softened a bit. Not out of sympathy, though. We all know I don’t deserve a shred of it. It’s more out of pity. Pity for a wreck of a dwarf who had everything and pissed it away.

“They didn’t,” I reply with a grin.

“Then how—” Grouchy starts.

Through a laugh I say, “I told them where I’d be.”

Six mouths drop open.

“But—” the MD starts.

“I’m tired, boys.” I let out a long sigh, and it turns into another coughing fit. “I sent one last copturier to the Queen. Yesterday. I was even rude about it. I told her she was the dirtiest whore to ever grace the surface of the earth.” Grouchy laughs at that one, and there’s a glint in his eye, like I’ve earned just the tiniest bit of respect. “I’m done running,” I add.

“They’re going to kill you,” the MD says, he sounds confused, and he’s got genuine concern in his voice. I don’t deserve it, but I’m grateful.

“That’s the plan,” I say quietly, more to myself than to any of them. My whisky glass has been filled again. I turn slowly, toast the two trolls and wink at them. One of them lurches up, but the other reaches out his clockwork gauntlet, holding his partner in place. I toss the whisky back and slam the glass down. It’s the sound of finality, a crack of doom long overdue.

I stand, pull my tattered coat off the stool and shrug skinny shoulders into it.

“What are you doing?” one of them asks.

I reach into my jacket and pull out a pouch with my last fifty in coin. I toss it on the bar with a jingle. I toss the sniffer after it, and the thing lands on the pouch with a single clink of metal on metal. I figure it’ll make one hell of a tip. I look at myself in the mirror behind the bar and straighten my collar.

Grouchy is right.

I do look like shit.

“Boys,” I say slowly, “it’s time to pay the tab.”

17

Rudy, port shield’s gonna glitch! One more blammo and boss-man will need to dopple me!”

17’s fingers danced over the nav-console, causing the heavily modified transport
The Baboushka
to heave violently to starboard. It nosed towards the Korami space station, only a glimmering speck in the ship’s main view screen. His fingers danced more, and the heavily laden cargo-carrier slid to the right, going into a tight spiral towards Korami. His eyes flicked to a side-screen showing what was aft, and
The Baboushka
lurched as several blasts from one of the fighters on his tail hit the rear deflector. A stream of blaster fire dotted past him in the front view-screen, sailing away into space as he maneuvered out of its path with another violent turn.

“Port shield stabilized,” Rudy said, his high-pitched, artificial voice sounding very much like a small, overly happy boy. “Getting to work on the aft shield, chief.”

17 reversed the spiraling decent towards Korami as two more streams of blaster-fire traced past his view screens. “Gotta trim these assholes, Rudy. Dump juice to the gravplates and switch all ergs to the forward array on my mark!”

“Wilco, chief … on your mark.”

“NOW!” 17’s fingers hit a maneuvering macro and the star field spun wildly, shifting 180 degrees in the blink of an eye. Simma Prime—the cosmop world he’d just left—and also one of his solemn charges—flashed in the view screen, then there was nothing but stars as his HUD acquired rapidly shifting target locks on the inbound fighters coming straight towards his cockpit.

17’s senses blurred for a few seconds as his mass, caught by its own inertia, struggled to rip itself free from the ship’s gravity field and fling him around inside the cockpit. The HUD locked onto three small planetary corsairs whose rate of gain doubled then tripled as
The Baboushka’s
drive took a bite out of the space behind the ship and started a rapid deceleration.

17 hit two more macros, popping open the missile-bays dotting the nose of the ship and spewing a hailstorm of guided missiles while turrets above the command deck erupted in a blaze of intense red and green pulsar fire.

All three fighters opened up on
The Baboushka
’s inbound missiles, but it was too little too late. 17 watched with a satisfied grin as their blaster-fire caught only a handful of the missiles locked onto them. The dimmers on his screen dulled the flowering explosions, and the remainder of his volley, along with his pulsar fire, hit home. All three corsairs blossomed simultaneously in magnificent explosions. His drive-system had finally stopped his momentum, and the ship began accelerating towards the expanding field of debris. He made a quick course correction, veering off to starboard and heading out towards deeper space beyond the gravity well of Simma Prime.

Rudy spat out the coordinates for home and 17 hit the shift generator.

O O O

“Prime, I’m not sure I approve of 17’s behavior …” 2 said sourly as he powered down the replication console and stepped out of the holoterm. “… or his
appearance
.”

The faint blue cylinder displaying bio-readings, cranial pressure, inputs, outputs, theta waves, REM sequences and other miscellaneous data pertaining to 22 flickered out of existence. Prime could now clearly see 22 suspended in the support-tank that held it.

‘It’ would soon be a ‘him,’
Prime thought.

Prime and 2 were identical in appearance, save for a “2” tattooed on 2’s neck. Bulging, red environment suits—minus helmets and gloves—encased their considerable girth. In the event of an emergency depressurization, temporary force fields would enshroud their heads and hands, allowing them to get to a pressurized chamber within the station or a storage locker where standard equipment could be found.

Both men had thick, white flowing hair and long white beards.

The thickening, pasty body of 22, suspended in the tank before them, twitched once within the synthiotic fluid. The shroud of filaments feeding its tissues from head to toe undulated in smooth waves. The filaments sustained its life and connected countless data-feeds, making it look like a giant, translucent cocoon waiting to be split open by the new life within. There were still a few days until its birth, so no hair had yet formed across a ruddy, bulging epidermis.

“You’re just jealous, 2,” Prime accused, but there was no malice in his voice. He tried not to smile as he pushed spectacles back from the tip of his rosy, bulbous nose to rest more usefully on its bridge. He examined some logistical data on a holopad held in the pudgy fingers of his other hand. Based on the numbers, he was convinced that they would need one more clone to make this year’s deliveries to two more of Earth’s latest colony worlds.

“I most certainly am
not
,” 2 said defensively.

Humanity’s obsession with reaching the stars had borne fruit and given rise a population explosion across the stars. Prime was able to keep up with need, albeit barely, in no small part due to the advent of clones. His maintenance and support personnel had clone tanks of their own to fashion new workers and administrators as needed to keep up with humanity’s expansion.

Prime pressed his fingers into a sequence of displayed commands suspended in the holopad field to request maintenance on the next tank to be filled. Keeping his eyes on the current logistical data—data that didn’t take into account the additional clone—he addressed 2 with a fatherly tone. “I know that deep down you always wanted to be a rabble-rouser.” Prime was certain this wasn’t the case, but it was fun to yank 2’s chain. “You take this job way too seriously, you know. We’re supposed to be
jolly
.”

Prime added the new clone to the data, ran through all the numbers again, and saw that with the advent of an additional carrier they would meet quota. They’d never missed a delivery in the fifteen-hundred years he’d run the operation, and they never would, not on his watch anyway.

“But sir …” 2 started, his rosy cheeks going crimson more with frustration than traditional cheeriness. “I just don’t …” He turned his back on Prime and stared out through one of the clear shielding panels that separated them from the cold vacuum of space. The main-sequence star that held them in its grasp burned a bluish hole in the black of space.

SW3
, Prime’s one and only space station, maintained a 1200 AU orbit around
Dhruva Tara
, also known as Polaris and more formally referred to as UMi A. The station lay cradled in a static, oppositional orbit from UMi B—Polaris’ sister star. Even with the best image enhancing satellites, neither Earth nor any of its colonies would ever be able to detect the station in the bright halo of Ursae Minoris.