Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 (8 page)
Read Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 03 Online
Authors: Evil Triumphant
1 looked over at Bat. "We may need some roustabouts. Colonel Asano and the IDC will provide security for our beachhead, but I may need some people to keep peace inside the camp."
Bat nodded.
"Lilith, see of you can get me booked on a radio talk show or something in Phoenix within the week.
Make it a 'Michael Loring of Lorica Industries announces an expansion...' kind of thing. 1 can use it to
get the word out so Hal will have recruits when he's ready to process them. Match, I'll want you with me
as someone who has already signed up so you can let folks on the street know this is a good deal in their own language."
"Word up, Caineman."
Lilith smiled at Natch and added, "Consider it done, Mr. Loring."
Tadd Farber raised his hand. "What about us?"
I frowned for a second. "I was hoping you could consent to Mickey offering what he could to both the PsyOps group and the scouts." When I did not see the questioning look in his eyes go away, I continued.
"Hal has two children who could probably benefit from being looked after by your daughter during the recruitment drive."
Tadd nodded solemnly. "Fine, that's fine. They'll do that. The kids would like that. What about me?"
"You?" I hesitated. "You have done quite a great deal, Mr. Farber. You... your... Letting Mickey help us is enough."
"No, Mr. Loring." He shook his head. "I guess you don't understand. I'm not so good with words. I have to
do something. I have to."
I tried to give him an understanding smile. "You have been through a great deal, Mr. Farber..."
"Yeah, sure, but what is it in comparison to what he did to my Mickey?" The man's thin eyebrows almost touched in the middle of his frown. "You don't understand because you don't know what it's like. All of you here, you talk about evil things out there. You know what you are facing. You know what you want
to do. You know how you will do it. You are ready to do it. Well... I don't know about that."
Tadd thumped himself on the chest with a fist. "What I know about is being afraid. I know about being afraid of not knowing why wherever I stand is bottom. I know about being afraid everyone has forgotten
me, and I know about being afraid someone will remember me. I know that alii know is fear, and now I
see you and hear you talking about things that don't make sense in the real world, but, damn, they explain a lot of my fear."
He pointed at the Yidam and then at Vetha. "You wanna know why I'm not going crazy with two
creature-feature monsters here? Something that's real isn't as scary as something that isn't real. Here, for the first time, I know what the source of my fear is, and that means I can take responsibility for it.
Responsibility isn't something I've handled for far too long."
Tadd hugged his daughter with his left arm and rested his right hand on Mickey's shoulder. "This guy called Pygmalion hurt my son. If I leave it up to you to fix that, I'll be no better off. I won't know how to face a problem myself, and if I can't, then I can't teach my kids to do that. If they don't learn it, they can't teach it, and we'll all go to hell in a handbasket." He looked at Vetha. "I gather that's what your master would love."
His gaze came back to me. "Last time I did work, it
took more sweat than thinking. Whatever you got, I'll do it."
Hal reached across the table and offered Tadd his hand. "He's with me."
"So be it." I smiled and stood. "Pack your things this evening because we leave for Phoenix at midnight.
Catch a nap here, because I expect it to be a working flight. When we hit the ground in the desert, I want us running, and I want Pygmalion running scared."
Dark Conspiracy 3-8.jpg
A week after the return from Japan, 1 stood in my office on top of the Lorica Industries corporate citadel.
Looking west, I saw the dying sun impale itself on the towers of City Center. The massive photovoltaic
cell ocean that covered Phoenix gleamed a glossy black, except where sunlight reflected up in blood.
Surrounding the city, linking the seven corporate complexes with the City Center hub, the magnetic
levitation line that Fiddleback had used as a dimensional gate to invade the city stood tall and looked
quite benign.
A B B YY.c
From s
omewhere in my memory a line from a song bubbled up about a desert being an ocean with it
s life
underground. Lots an
d lots of life lurked beneath the black cell ocean that covered the city's lower reaches. Down there, where the sun never hit the ground, the denizens endured a hot, gritty existence in a land that remained perpetually in night. They called it Eclipse, and, as befits living creatures in the desert, everything down there had spines, fangs or a poison sting to ensure survival.
I turned away from the cityscape and looked at Nero Loring. "You're certain we won't have to recreate the maglev circuit to bring Fiddleback into our staging
area?"
The small, balding man in shirtsleeves nodded emphatically. "We built the maglev train because we
needed it. The dimensional gateway material was worked in covertly through the efforts of the creature
that pretended to be my daughter. It is really just basic circuitry, though it is weird."
From the table before him he picked up a three-foot-long section of fiber-optic cable slightly thicker than his thumb. "Had I known what was really being done, I could have laid out the dimensional gate easily.
This fiber-optic cable can be manufactured with the circuitry already burned into it. All we need to do is lay it out, hitch up some lasers to power it, set coordinates through a computer, and we're done."
I felt a shiver run down my spine. "That seems too easy."
Nero shrugged. "Manufacturing the cable is, to be certain, easy. You're still going to need your
construction folks to clear a space for it. They're also going to have to make sure you have a stable area for your computer control and laser hookups. That should not take that much time, actually, and that, too, is an easy part of the operation."
I nodded and walked over to the table where the cable had pinned down some blueprints and several
messy piles of notes. "The tough part is finding a place from which we can harvest the energy necessary to power the gate. The one here required everything Phoenix could put out and one of the seasonal
lightning storms."
"Two 'AA' batteries will not be sufficient, 1 fear." Loring slipped one set of plans from the bottom of a pile and slapped it down on top of the whole confused mess. "Windmills are fairly inexpensive, in terms of
labor, to set up. We can also use some solar technology, but that will be tougher to build. Given that
Fiddleback will prove a lot of mindless workers, we can actually consider things like diverting a river or creating a crude dam, but installing turbines to make use of the hydroelectric power created will not be
simple."
I frowned with irritation. "Well, we knew that power would be the key problem. Not having to worry
about building a circuit means we can devote more of our resources to setting up power stations. Still, the proto-dimension that is likely to be very generous with extra energy is unlikely to be all that habitable, and that means transporting energy across the dimensional barrier."
Nero blinked a couple of times. "True, though hydroelectric might be the way to go. I will start a survey of out-of-service power plants from which, if needed, we might be able to borrow turbines."
A B B YY.c
I patte
d him on the shoulder. "Good. Speaking of surveys, how goes the effort to locate Ryuhito?"
His frown did not instantly reassure me. "It is going, but not as well as I might have hoped. The EEGs the Japanese supplied me were sleeping EEGs. This means I can only detect Ryuhito when he is asleep. If
that Mickey Farber's description of Pygmalion's headquarters is true, we can infer a faster timeflow than there is here. In that case, Ryuhito's sleep periods will be shorter than normal."
"Leaving you to find a needle in a haystack."
"Not quite that bad. Once the scanners have a probable match, 1 will double-check it, then work with Crowley to convert my coordinates into something he can use to scout things out." Nero smiled
confidently. "And the Japanese have begun to assemble the computer equipment we are likely to need to build our
\
controller. Because the last one employed slices from my daughter's brain to control it, we're working
with a parallel processor design that may turn out to be rather revolutionary. We're using a software
model to project a cognitive network and then burning boards and chips to approximate that template."
"That is perfect." Because the previous unit had been damaged and dismantled after Fiddleback's attempt to enter Phoenix, the computer to replace it had to be built from scratch. Not only did we not know how
Fiddleback had managed to build the machine, but we never even considered using the chip substitute
that worked naturally for the Dark Lord.
A knocking on the office door brought me around to face the door. Sinclair opened it and walked
through. "Hope I'm not interrupting, but I thought you'd want the news straight away. Good or bad first?"
"Good, I guess," I answered as I turned one of the wingback chairs near my desk around.
1 sat, and Sin appropriated the other chair. He nodded at Nero, and they exchanged greetings. I sensed a
great deal of friendliness between them, which I put down to their having
a
mutual enemy in Sin's father, Darius MacNeal. I was pleased they liked each other because they would have to work more closely
together than any other members of my team. Nero Loring would plan our assault base, and Sin would
coordinate the forces that would make it a reality.
Sin settled himself in the chair and kept a blue leather binder in the lap of his green-and-yellow checked golfing slacks. "Good news is that I just finished talking with the chief financial officer for Decca Construction. We've got an agreement to provide equipment and supervision for most of the stuff we
need done. I'm
meeting Scott at the Tournament Player's Club for 18 holes tonight, and we'll ice the details then. Getting Decca is a real coup because they're the aces at doing high-tech work well and quickly. Moreover, they've worked with the Japanese on some international projects and have experience in working in isolated
locations."
I smiled. "Well, then, if we have them, our problem with construction expertise is over. That was
very
good
news. So good, in fact, that I'm afraid to ask about the bad just in case it matches up."