The Machine's Child (Company) (48 page)

“So it would,” Edward said. He sat to pull on the boots that went with his subsuit. “But I expect you’ll see to disabling the electronics where necessary, won’t you? Which ought to render the mortal cyborg harmless without resorting to anything unpleasant. Then a swift search and plunder, if we’re lucky. Are you game, my dear?”

“Yes, señor,” Mendoza said. Rising to his feet, Edward pulled her close and kissed her, hard. He set her back at arms’length.

“With any luck we’ll be back aboard before sunset and sailing free, with all this wretched business behind us. Will you trust me, then?”

“Always,” she said, as though it were absurd even to ask.

“That’s my girl,” he said, with a tight smile. “Let’s be on our way.”

They moved out together, over the side and into the water, escorted by
the dolphins. Once they waded ashore, Mendoza followed like Edward’s shadow. They vanished into the first willow thicket and came silently around the western rock.

I see it.
Alec pointed at the domed base.

No battlements? No watchmen?
Nicholas frowned.

How’s the surveillance, Captain, sir?

Lie low there! The camera’s just about to sweep yer way.

Edward signaled to Mendoza. They flattened themselves among the willows, and waited patiently while an unseen eye studied their hiding place without finding them.

It’s moved on. Go,
the Captain said at last.

How long do we have before the next sweep?
Edward said, splashing forward across the murky lagoon. Mendoza came after him, scanning as they went.

Twenty-eight minutes. More’n enough time. Bloody Hell, this place is wide open! Careful of the water, though, I’m reading some damned big fish.

Edward grinned mirthlessly and waded on. They scrambled out of the lagoon and ran on down the beach, increasing their speed, so that when they came to the estuary mouth they were nearly flying. They crossed half of it in one leap and easily forded the rest of the way, coming ashore on hands and knees. Mendoza turned and stared back at the lagoon. Edward went sprinting on, and after a second’s hesitation she followed him.

The last stream was narrow and they bounded across, moving in unison. They fled into the shadows of a stand of alders and leaned there, breathing hard, as Edward checked the disrupter pistol against water damage. Assured that it was unharmed, he holstered it again and inquired with his eyes whether Mendoza was ready. She nodded. They turned together and made the final assault, charging up the hill toward the windowless dome.

In a very short time they reached the top, and flattened themselves against the dome’s gentle curve. Edward was drawing out the disrupter pistol when he saw Mendoza lift her head with an expression of astonishment. She looked at him, tilting her head toward the dome, and held out both hands palm up in a what-do-you-make-of-this gesture. He set his ear against the wall and listened intently. Faintly he made out laughter; then a voice lifted in conversation.

He raised his eyebrows at her. She signed
Two?

He shrugged. Taking a firm grip on the pistol, he advanced along the wall to the leveled space.

It was clear this was a shuttle pad. All dust or loose earth had been scoured away by the wash of air from repeated landings and takeoffs, leaving bare rock exposed, and there were tiny bits of workplace debris scattered here and there: broken bolt heads, crate fragments, anything that might be kicked out or dropped when unloading cargo. And there in the dome’s side was the door, a cargo hatch certainly, of plain roll-down steel sheeting. On its corrugated surface were crudely spray-painted the letters AO.

We made it, Captain sir! We’re at the door,
Alec said.

You know what to do next, son.

But it was Edward who leaned to the via panel and withdrew the lead from the torque, and with no hesitation selected the correct port. He plugged it in. They heard the click as the lock disengaged. They waited for a guarding reaction. There was none. The door rolled up an inch, and moving together Edward and Mendoza caught it and hoisted it upward about a half meter. Almost too quickly to be seen, then, Mendoza threw herself under the door and rolled inward, seeming to flow like liquid. Edward halted, startled. A moment later her hand appeared in the opening, beckoning him in. He dropped, rolled, and came up on his feet in the half-darkness, glaring around. Beside him, Alec and Nicholas blinked.

They stood with Mendoza in what was clearly a storage area. There were crates stacked floor to ceiling: empty ones neatly nested by the door, those yet unbroached piled farther in. Before them a small servounit, bearing some resemblance to Flint or Billy Bones without a skull, was busily engaged in extracting a canister from an opened crate. As they watched, it plugged the canister into a valve crusted with some kind of orange powder. The canister had a symbol on its side: a crossed spoon and fork. The servounit took no notice of them.

It’s got no brain to spare to see ye,
the Captain transmitted.

Edward nodded, looking past it into the room. There was no other entrance or exit apparent to the eye. Mendoza prowled along the wall, scanning. At last she bent and inspected a grating set in the wall at floor level,
and rising she gestured toward it. Edward came close and stared. It was the entrance to a maintenance crawlway.

That guy’s been
sealed
in here,
said Alec in horror.

Like a holy anchorite,
said Nicholas, shuddering.

I’m afraid his meditations are about to be disturbed,
Edward said. He found the via lock port, and a moment later the grate clicked and fell outward. Mendoza caught it, setting it carefully to one side. She lay down and writhed in through the opening. Edward almost stopped her, reaching out instinctively.

No! She’s the immortal one, remember? You let her draw the fire, if there is any. She can dodge it, even in there. You’d only get yerself killed.

Edward grimaced. He crouched by the crawlway, peering in after Mendoza, and watched as she proceeded her body’s length to another grating. She set her face close to it, listening intently. Even Edward could hear, quite clearly now, a man saying in a pleasant voice:

“Ohh! That’s a nice one, too. You can never have too many of those, you know.”

She reached back her hand and gestured that Edward should give her something. After a moment’s hesitation he crawled after her and laid the disrupter pistol in her palm. Her fingers closed on it. She reached up with her free hand and unfastened the catches that held the grate in place.

She wouldn’t kill him, would she?
Alec said, looking unhappy.

She would, for you,
Edward said.
If it was necessary. Another of her gifts you find distasteful, is it?

Who taught her to kill but thee?
Nicholas muttered.

Shut up and let the lady work!

Mendoza, meanwhile, had lifted the grate and set it aside. As she peered through, her eyes widened in astonishment.

Immediately before her was dark, though light streamed through a doorway just across from the access grate. In the lit room beyond, a man was standing on a stripe of yellow carpet, holding a tumbler of some bright blue beverage and smiling as he talked to the thin air.

“That’s from me,” he was saying proudly. “You know, you can never have too many bath things, either. I always think, anyway.”

Mendoza scanned the entire base but read no other occupants in any
of the rooms. The mortal man was pale and thin, possibly delusional, certainly unarmed. Deciding that she could deal with any threat he represented, she pushed herself out into the room. Edward and the others followed closely.

Ancilla was distracted from her contemplation of the garden by abnormal life-readings within her assigned area. She turned in time to see the woman and the tall man slithering in through Loading Access Crawl A, like nothing so much as a pair of snakes in their scaled rubbery armor. The woman had a weapon and was looking at her David.

Ancilla rose in fury. Her hair stood up around her head in a halo of energy as she prepared to defend David. Then the tall man turned his bright eyes in her direction,
and saw her!

She stopped, unbelieving, for none of her programming had prepared her for this anomaly; still less for what happened next. The tall man had a golden snake coiled about his neck, which lifted its head and saw her, too. It flowed down from his neck and changed, grew, towered. She found herself staring in horror at a third intruder. This was a big, powerful-looking man in a three-piece suit, with a wild black beard and hair. His face was wicked, clever, charming.

He looked her up and down and stepped toward her, chuckling. She couldn’t look away from his sea-colored eyes.

“Well, now, dearie, yer just a tiny thing, ain’t you? We’ll have no trouble out of the likes of you,” he said. The vibration of his baritone made her feel faint.

“I’ll kill them if they hurt David!” she said.

“Aw, now, darling, that ain’t likely,” he said, moving closer still, backing her to the wall. “No reason there should be any nasty business unless you warn yer David, see? My little ones ain’t here to do him any harm. But if he tries to stop ’em, well, I reckon it’s hail and farewell to poor David, aye. That’s a disrupter pistol my girl’s got, in case you ain’t noticed.”

“Please don’t hurt him,” Ancilla said. “Please! Alternatives! Negotiate!”

“To be sure, miss. To be sure. You and me will manage this together, all friendly-like.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “You control yer boy’s optical input, don’t you? Well then. You just make certain he can’t see
nothing but that there party he’s having such a lovely time at. Why make him all worried and fretful? It’s only until my kiddies get what they’re after, anyhow.”

“Will they go away then?” she asked.

“Certain they will,” he pledged. “You’ve got my word on it for an honest seaman, darling. Here now! I know yer programming, I do, you don’t care a brass farthing about that there ice locker. Dear little David’s life support, that’s all they wrote you to think was important. Ain’t it? Say it with me now: David must be happy and safe . . .”

“David must be happy and safe,” Ancilla said obediently, and as they went through the command together she blocked all David’s visual input from his actual surroundings. Yes, he would be happier, he mustn’t be needlessly frightened after all, this was her
job,
of course, and really what did she care about that Alpha-Omega thing?

So in David’s world a certain level of gray cold reality was stripped away, and it became a brighter, happier place. The laughter of his coworkers came in with auditory enhancement. Enhanced were the balloons and the pretty little baby things mounting in a heap at Leslie’s feet. Though, of course, Brandi was rather officiously making an effort to pick them all up and organize them, noting gifts and givers on a jotpad, as though anyone had asked
her
to take charge . . .

Timidly Ancilla leaned up and kissed the stranger, who laughed in his throat and opened her mouth with his own; but it was raw white power, not tongues, that caressed.

Mendoza saw none of this, of course, watching David carefully. Alec stared at the Captain for a moment, and then looked away with a gulp of embarrassment.

Mendoza considered David in the room starkly empty of anything but his computer console, considered the clearly visible plug in the back of his neck, considered the yellow stripe of carpet from which he was careful never to move. She put her head on one side and smiled; walked forward into the lighted room boldly, though still keeping the pistol trained on him. Edward followed her lead.

David, holding a murmured conversation with the air, looked straight through them.

“I mean, who does she think she is?” he was saying softly, indignantly. “Nobody said anything about playing word games at this party. I’m not good at word games! Neither is Leslie, really. And don’t you think prizes are a little, well,
competitive
?”

He was silent a moment, sipping at his blue drink. As Mendoza and Edward slipped past him, he began to nod as if in agreement. Mendoza looked at a sealed entry port in the wall, shaped like a tall oval. On its panel was a polished brass plate with letters engraved in somber Roman characters:
AO
.

“See, that’s just what I thought, too,” David whispered earnestly.

Mendoza pointed at the door, grinning. Edward took her gloved hand and kissed it.

“Yes. Yes,” said David in tones of mild outrage. “You’re right, of course.”

They advanced on the doorway and Edward found the via panel. He bypassed the keypad with his lead, and there was a soft hiss and a flow of curling vapor all along the door as the seal gave.

“What?” said David in a louder voice. “Oh. That’s cute, look at that! Isn’t that clever?”

Edward and Mendoza looked at each other. They clasped hands in a gesture of victory, and stepped together across the threshold. Their breath puffed out in frost-clouds
.

Edward’s first thought was of Easter Sunday. This was because his immediate visual impression reminded him of a panoramic Easter egg he had been given as a child, into which he had peered and wished himself without success: tiny claustrophobic world of tenderest pastel colors, with a flowering meadow and domed clouds that extended to forced-perspective infinity, in the soft light coming through the white sugar dome.

Too, there was something solemn and cathedral-like in the place where they now stood, where silvered arches rose out of glowing clouds of frost to the curved ceiling. The walls were lined with racks of gleaming tubes that evoked organ pipes, winking racks of lit candles, the severe symmetry of rows of pews.

Mendoza stood frowning, turning her head slowly as she scanned.

Hundreds and hundreds,
said Alec in horror.
Where do we even start?