Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (39 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
That's okay, to be hurt inside. You can cry if you want."
His look of puzzlement half died as he pressed his lips together and shook his head. "My father said to be brave
and not to cry. He said it would upset Dorothy."
"1 see. Then, perhaps, you could cry here, and we will not let it upset Dorothy." His determination to be brave slammed down on the rising fear 1 sensed in him. He shunted his fear away and concentrated on
what I was going to say. Like a good little soldier, he was determined to do what his father had told him to do. "Mickey, your father will not be coming back."
Anguish shot through the child like lightning and immediately slaved itself to a rising sense of self-doubt in the boy. His mouth dropped open in what would have been a prelude to an outcry, but he held himself
back. 1 could feel the emotional riptide pulling him one way and another, then I found the thing creating it and immediately acted to shield Mickey from his own worst fears.
"No, Mickey, your father is not going away because of something you did. He would like nothing better than to be here right now. He loves you very much and, were it in his power, he would be here with you.
The fact is, though, he cannot."
"Why?"
The quavering tone in Mickey's voice told me that his self-doubt had not been vanquished. I dropped
down into a squat and rested both of my hands on his right knee. "Mickey, your father knew that in the time you were taken away from him that you were hurt."
"I am all better."
"Yes, Mickey, you are better. You had your physical ills healed, and your father was happy for that. He remembered how you were and was very proud of how you managed all alone to go through what healed
you. He was proud and he was happy because you became more than he ever hoped you would. But, at
the same time, he was sad."
"Why?" I hesitated, as faint chords started to resonate through me. I felt outrage at the way Pygmalion had manipulated the boy. His body had been healed and brought forward to adulthood, then changed and
modified, yet the boy had not been intellectually made into a man. Pygmalion used Mickey's innocence to
manufacture a killing machine that did not have to wrestle with the morality of what it did because it had not matured enough to understand that much of right and wrong.
1 suddenly realized two things. The first was that Fiddleback had manipulated me as much as Pygmalion had Mickey. Fiddleback had just taken longer and been more careful so 1 never realized that what 1 knew as
existence was not normal. I, too, had been playing games in accepting roles and eliminating targets. 1 had avoided moral conundrums by holding myself to a different standard: I did what my master asked because that was right in my mind. Mickey had done the same, with Pygmalion using his lack of sophistication as a
shortcut to the same ends that Fiddleback had achieved with me through a lifelong program.
The second thing I discovered in that moment was that the missing piece of me had been compassion. 1 had
never known it, nor had I needed it in my time before Coyote so radically changed my life. Even since the transformation, 1 had not been compassionate. Any act of kindness I performed had come out of my need to
enhance my power base. When, so long ago, I forced Rock Pell to give money to the family that had harbored me after my escape from the Reapers, I had done so to dominate him, not to be kind to them. The job offers for this operation, while generous, had been to further my ends.
Coyote, my predecessor, had always asked those he helped to "pay forward." He made them look at helping others for totally selfless reasons. He had done the same
with all those he had aided. Finally, in order to position me to be able to take down Fiddleback and now
Pygmalion, he had committed the ultimate act of compassion and allowed himself to be killed so 1 could give life to so many others.
"Mickey, while Pygmalion took away your problems, he also stole your childhood. You may not understand it now, or for years to come, but he took from you something that no one can replace. That made your father
sad, and it made him angry. It made him determined to fight so Pygmalion could never do that to anyone else.
"Your father fought long and hard to stop Pygmalion. Your father helped save many others, but he could not save himself. Still, he hurt Pygmalion. He slowed Pygmalion down."
Little-boy eyes looked out from the man's face. "He did not stop Pygmalion."
"He did not. Your father was hurt, badly hurt." I saw puzzlement in Mickey's eyes. "Pygmalion's creatures play rough."
The boy-man snapped his right arm out faster than a striking snake and withdrew it in an eyeblink. "I can play rough."
1 smothered the part of me that wanted to welcome Mickey as a full ally and shook my head. "I know, but now is not the time to play rough, Mickey. Your father would not have wanted it, nor do 1.1 do, on the other hand, need your help."
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Micke
y looked up expectantly, his eyes bright.
"Mr. Crowley and I are going to go on a trip. We want to find the place where Pygmalion took you."
"The bad place."
"The bad place, yes."
Mickey nodded. "It is a long way away."
"I know, but we think we know a shortcut. I need you to
tell me if we are right or not, okay?"
"Yes."
I gave him an open smile. "Mickey, some people may not understand why we are trying to find
Pygmalion. They may try to hurt us."
"They will play rough."
"Yes." I looked at him, seeing the killing machine I might have once become, and I shivered. "You can protect yourself, but don't hurt them. Don't break them. Do you understand?"
He nodded his head solemnly. "My father said 1 was a big boy now and had to act like one."
"Good," I said in a convincing tone. Mickey clearly had no idea that big boys play with guns and play plenty rough. As I looked at his naive smile and felt the willingness to please roll off him like the scent of fresh-baked bread filling a kitchen, I had no desire to enlighten him. Pygmalion had stolen his physical
youth, and I was not going to antique his spirit.
1 didn't know if that was compassion, but I knew there wasn't a Dark Lord in existence that wouldn't have missed the chance to add to Mickey's misery. I assumed that as long as what I did was the exact opposite
of what a Dark Lord would do, I could not be going far wrong.
I felt the void in my soul close. I smiled at Mickey. "C'mon, let's get some supplies together and then we'll be off."
"To the bad place."
"Right, once really quick now, and then, very soon, again..."
Mickey's eyes narrowed. "We will make everyone good?"
The idea of making a Dark Lord good struck me as likely as Dan Quayle staging a Nixonesque political
resurrection. "We'll do our best, Mickey."
If not, we'll
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make
a Dark Lord dead and that, in my book, is good in and of itself.
Dark Conspiracy 3-30.jpg
Crowley and I both realized that the most difficult part of the penetration of the secret construction site would be keeping Mickey in line. Five-year-olds are not known for their attention span. Had Crowley and I been
alone, we would have just become two workers at the site and entered it along with everyone else. While
Mickey might have passed for an adult worker because of his size, his wide-eyed wonderment and propensity to giggle would betray him in an instant.
The plan we decided to adopt was as outrageous as it was daring. Using Sin's knowledge of Build-more and
his connections with people who could manufacture Build-more identification cards, we produced one for me that billed me as Simon "Mike" Michaels from the Auditing and Fiscal Procurement Department. Sin said project managers considered AFP the corporate equivalent of the IRS, and would sooner give lepers full body massages than stay in my presence overlong.
For Mickey and Crowley, we came up with another set of identities. Mickey was to play Mickey, a retarded
young man who had the mind of a 5-year-old. Crowley became Damien Collins, the trustee of a substantial
trust fund settled upon the boy by his father's family. Each of them
were given visitor badges, and Mickey had a nametag that read "Hello, I'm Mickey!" on the lapel of his blue suit jacket. We swapped the Heidi Stiletto for a more benign design featuring a cartoon mouse that
both pleased Mickey and made it much easier for him to remember his new role.
By the time we had obtained our IDs, changed clothes and gotten a little sleep, Jytte had pinpointed the
construction site as being just a little south and east of Skull Mountain in the Nevada desert. That placed it within the old Department of Energy test site for underground nuclear explosions. I doubted that they
were using one of the holes blown by a nuke for their facility, but the location doubtlessly cut down on
the number of casual visitors.
We took the Lorica CV-27 Peregrine from Phoenix all the way to Las Vegas, then rented a Range Rover
II and headed north on 1-95. Forty miles out of Indian Springs, we turned off north and rumbled over 15
miles of twisty mountain roads to the little hamlet of Mercury. The Rover handled the road fine, but I
knew our journey had been made much easier because the roadway had clearly been enlarged very
recently.
Mercury should have been a ghost town. Most of the buildings dated from before the last century, back
when silver mining provided the wealth that drove the community. When the mines in the area played
out, it had begun to die, only to spring up again in the post-Depression era as a winter haven for those
who did not like the idea of shoveling snow. Newer buildings outnumbered old, but their condition was
little better than those built before the 20th century.
The nuclear tests in middle of the last century all but killed it off again, leaving only the stubborn or foolhardy to reside there. With the construction project, though, a new prosperity hit the area. Mercury
became a boomtown