Authors: Patricia A. McKillip
The hand gripping the door eased a fraction. Aaron glanced back at him. The shadows had drained color from his eyes; they looked almost black. He made another sound. Jase moved toward him, said very softly, “Can you fly a cruiser?” He had to repeat the question before Aaron gave him a faint nod. His face was chalky with the struggle to keep himself still, listening.
“The Hub-dock is above the computer room, just across the hall. There’s a ladder in the ceiling. I’ll drop it for you from here. Get up there and warm the engines.”
“N—”
“I’m going to put the Hub on defense. That means anything that moves, that the Hub-computer can’t identify by voice and code, will be destroyed. You’re not on record. You’d have a better chance against Terra than against the Hub-defense. Terra will be dead in sixty seconds.”
Aaron’s lips parted. He took in air and managed an entire sentence. “You’ll be alone.”
“I need to change the docking challenges since we’re on alert, and you can’t be down here when the Hub goes on defense. I’ll be with you in two minutes.” He waited. “Mr. Fisher. You’re standing in the doorway with the light behind you. Do you want her to kill you?”
Aaron’s hand slid down. He turned finally. He looked, Jase thought, as if he had just been beaten for no reason. “No.” His voice shook. “I should have asked her.”
“What?”
“Her name. Michele Viridian. But with a rose you never ask.”
“Mr. Fisher. Go.”
He nodded, his face growing private again. Jase pressed a dusty button on his desk, saw the ladder descend swiftly, noiselessly, in the shadowy room across the hall. Aaron checked the hall. Nothing moved. Jase stood in the doorway, guarded him with a stunner until he had disappeared up into the dock.
The Hub was soundless. He strained to hear footsteps, heard nothing. Nothing moved. He went back to his desk, touched a com-light.
“Get me Nilson,” he said softly.
“Here, sir,” Nils said instantly. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. Nils, cancel bring Michele, we’re flying out.”
“Good. I couldn’t find her anyway.”
“I’m putting the Hub on defense, after I follow general alert procedure. Then I’m out of here. Meet me at Maindock.”
“Yes, sir.”
He switched to voice command. A hundred years’ worth of docking challenges had been programmed into the system: famous names, mathematical equations, quotations from old literature, videos, song lyrics, riddles and poems, phrases of obscure origin and more obscure meaning. Fifty choices appeared on-screen. He gave his name and ID code, but it was his voice pattern, inimitable as the signature of an earthquake, that was crucial. Then he gave the code that signaled all docked cruisers to log the new challenges into their systems for a forty-eight-hour alert period. He was about to read the first challenge on the list—“Oh, to be in England now that spring is here”—when he sensed movement in front of him. He raised his eyes, his throat going dry.
It was just the Magician. He had actually loosed a sigh of relief when the fact struck him.
He breathed, “Mr. Restak, what the bloody blue blazes are you doing here?”
“Terra brought me,” the Magician said, so calmly that for a moment that words made perfect sense. Then they made no sense whatsoever, and Jase moved his foot to push the door-shield switch on the floor. But the Magician was standing in the doorway, and bewildered as he was, Jase had no inclination to fry him.
“Come in, Mr. Restak.”
He shook his head. Jase lost his temper.
“Mr. Restak, are you out of your mind? How did you get in here?”
“Terra let me in.”
“When?”
“Just before she melted the transport door shut.”
“Why?”
The Magician didn’t answer. The expression was fading slowly from his face. His eyes widened; he looked vulnerable, absorbed, as if he were dreaming awake. The soft purple Jase had seen in Terra’s visions enveloped him in a gentle haze, and Jase remembered then how he had stood in the Infirmary, gazing up at Terra, the whole time, while everyone else watched the Dream Machine.
He felt his skin prickle with shock. He heard his own voice from a distance. “Mr. Restak. If you don’t move out of the doorway I will kill you. I’m going to activate the shield.”
“Killing me,” the Magician said, “is not in the vision.”
Jase shot his stunner at an angle from beneath his desk, and like a hand, it swept the Magician out of the doorway. “God in Heaven,” Jase said incredulously, and activated the door-shield.
It exploded in a dazzle of light. He flung himself backward, momentarily blinded. The soft bulk of the air-chair toppled over him, hampering his movements, like an awkward lover’s embrace. Then it bore down on him, refusing to move at all. He strained against it, astonished, swearing. Then his sight cleared. He stared into a laser-rifle. Terra Viridian crouched over the chair, her eyes riveting him as much as the rifle. The Magician, weeping blood from one eye, sat on the overturned chair, pinning Jase down. His hands were poised over Jase’s keyboard.
“Right,” he said, no longer dreaming. “What we need now is a little Bach.”
The Magician stumbled back down the transport passage a few minutes later in a dreamlike haze of amethyst and blood. The fused and shattered bodies of the robot squad lay like broken dolls along the track. The security cameras, a dozen eyes of the hundred-eyed watcher, the Hub-computer, had been blinded by Terra. The Magician had no idea where she was. She had found him; she had given him no choices. She had shown him the way through the maze of the Underworld, her mind a thread he had followed. Now she had vanished again, moving secretly before him or behind him, somewhere along his impossible path to the
Flying Wail
. He had played music for his freedom; what he needed now was an idiot’s luck.
“Fool’s Run,” he whispered. His head throbbed; blood kept falling into his eye. His throat burned with thirst. He saw the red sun, then, casting a bloody light across an alien world. The vision is light. God, he thought feverishly, philosophically, we drink in light like air. How would we mutate, what thirsts would we develop under a dying sun?
His footsteps rang hollowly down the passage. He had left Chief Klyos bound and gagged, but how long would he stay that way? Having freed himself, or been freed, what would he do?
Warn the docks.
The Magician increased his pace. The spoke from the Rings to the Hub seemed endless. He ran expecting to be killed at every step, expecting a fallen robot to move, turn toward him, eject light like a dying breath. But this was a wasteland, a blasted desert of fused wires, melted circuitry; nothing was aware of him. Phrases of music he had played after he had tracked down all the tones and half-tones the vast computer contained gave him a rhythm to run by.
It will work, he thought, amazed at his own genius. It will work. If only they don’t kill me first. Or Terra. If only…
Sparks sheared the shadows behind the vacant transport cars. He slowed, uncertain. Then, with a shrug at destiny, he moved forward, the aura dissipating, until he was simply a wounded survivor of a mechanical carnage, desperately seeking his own kind.
The transport door opened with a rend of metal. The Magician continued doggedly toward it. The tech crew, faces hooded against hot metal, stared at him blindly. A small army of guards leaped past him into the transport cars. Others caught at him, not roughly but with authority.
He felt a rifle behind his ear. Someone touched his face.
“It’s one of the musicians.”
Don’t shoot the piano player, he thought madly. A finger probed around his eye and he jerked.
“What happened? What’s going on back there?”
“Someone was shooting at me. I took a dive into a wall.”
“Is Klyos alive?”
“I saw him alive.”
“What were you doing in there?”
“He asked to see me; I never did find out why.” He started to shake suddenly, realistically.
“Where’s a medic station? I can’t stand blood.”
“Let’s go!” A voice yelled from the transport cars, and he stood alone suddenly, outside the tunnel, the cars already streaking away, the tech crew ignoring him, picking up their tools. He took a step. One of the hooded figures turned toward him.
“Magician!” It pointed. “Medic down that hall. Suggest you stay in your quarters.”
He walked until he was out of sight. Then he ran.
Jase, buried under the air-chair, his mouth full of fabric, struggled to free his hands from the Magician’s body-wire. Bach, he thought furiously. Bach. Goddamn musicians—He saw a boot out of the corner of his eye and stopped moving. He stopped breathing. He heard a muttered word. Then the air-chair rolled off his back; hands untwisted the wire around his wrists. Turning his head painfully, he saw a grey uniform with the thin gold piping down a seam that said: Earth.
Aaron. He made a muffled protest. Aaron freed his feet, pulled the wire and fabric away from his mouth. He felt at Jase a moment.
“You hurt?”
“No,” Jase said sourly. He sat up. “What the devil are you doing back down here? You might have been killed.”
“I took a chance. You’re not hurt?”
“No.” He got to his feet, leaned over the desk, but there was nothing much left of his com-system. Aaron was still staring at him.
“She didn’t kill you.”
“Do I look dead?”
But Aaron’s attention had left him abruptly. He was gazing down at the fine, colored wire in his hand. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Jase touched dead lights at random; nothing responded.
“They may be still in the Hub, hiding. Let’s—”
“They?” Aaron said sharply.
“That crazy musician—”
“Michele?”
“No, the Magician. Restak. We can still get to Maindock. I could put the Hub on defense, but—” He rubbed one ankle, thinking furiously. Aaron put the wire on the desk.
“The Magician.”
“He reprogrammed the docking challenges. My voice command: no override.”
“The Magician did.”
“He’s taking Terra out. But not if we have a chance to get to Maindock first. I’ll have Nils put the Hub on defense when he gets in here, just in—”
“The Magician in the band?”
“Mr. Fisher, does your brain always work this fast?”
Aaron took his eyes off the wire. He looked stunned again, his eyes pained, shocked. Jase said tautly, “Now what?”
“We’ve been friends for years. He wouldn’t—he—that makes no sense… Unless he’s doing it for Michele. But even so—”
“Mr. Fisher,” Jase said, rounding the desk, “you can stand here and speculate until doomsday if you want, or you can come with me and get some answers. If they have left the Hub, they’re on their way to the
Flying Wail
, and we’ve got to intercept it before it gets out.”
“You’ve got half the Underworld fleet in Maindock,” Aaron said bewilderedly. “The
Flying Wail
is fast, but she can’t outrun them all.”
Jase felt the blood wash into his face. “The Underworld fleet couldn’t outrun a flying bathtub right now. He’s got them trapped. All of them. Everyone but us. Let’s go!”
The Magician crossed the dock area quickly, unobtrusively, keeping his eyes off the cruisers around him, the dock crew, the men and women in the control deck above the dock who seemed, at his single, brief glance, to be unconcernedly going about their duties. The Flying Wail was open, fore and aft. The Queen of Hearts was carrying cube-cases up the main hatch. The Nebraskan and the Scholar were pushing the piano up the aft-hatch ramp. For a moment he felt an icy, wrenching spasm of terror. They’d arouse suspicion if they tried to leave surrounded by equipment; they’d never get it packed in two minutes; if they did get it packed, if they did leave, he’d have most of Nova with him, and how could he explain… They’d never forgive him for taking them; Quasar would never forgive him for leaving her behind…
“Don’t look back,” the Scholar had said. He left his fear behind him like something palpable—his body or his shadow—and picked up a cube-case as he reached the
Flying Wail
.
Michele met him coming down the ramp again. Her face looked odd without paint, smaller, younger. She stopped him, a hand on his shoulder, frowning at the cut on his face. He shook his head quickly.
“Never mind that. Get the cubes inside. We’re taking off.”
“Now?” Her eyes went wide suddenly, Terra’s eyes, seeing into him. “Magic-Man,” she whispered. “What have you done?”
He dumped the cube-case in her arms. “Fast,” he said, and she turned. On the aft-hatch ramp, the piano was jammed at an awkward angle, half in, half out of the hatch. The Nebraskan heaved; the piano rolled through. The Magician followed them up, brought the ramp up and closed the hatch.
Terra, he thought. The name was a pulse in his brain. Where? Where? Anywhere.
Everywhere. He had tied Klyos up and she was gone. Just gone. But she was attached to his mind like the tail of a comet; she must know where he would go. She’s on the dock. She’s inside the
Flying Wail
. She must be.
Don’t look back.
He moved to the bridge. Quasar was there, painting her nails, and he smiled in relief. She glanced at him, brooded a moment at the state of his face and said mordantly, “It’s not a color I would have chosen.”
Michele came in with a cube-case. “That’s it,” she said. He sealed the cruiser, his hands chilly, shaking, and stepped around her cube-cases to the controls. Michele watched him, motionless, still clutching the last case. He said, “Sit down. The Nebraskan can get those.”
She sat in the navigator’s chair. Quasar’s brush stilled abruptly. “Magic-Man, are we leaving? But our clothes, everything—”
“You want them,” he said, “you go get them.”
She was silent. The engines rumbled.
There was a surprised shout from the tail of the cruiser. The Magician wondered if they had found Terra. The receiver crackled instantly.
“
Flying Wail
, this is Maindock. You’re not scheduled to depart until seven hundred hours GTT.”
“Maindock, this is Restak,” the Magician said glibly. “We misjudged our performance schedule. We’re due at Rimrock earlier than we thought. We’re not used to off-world time. Request permission to leave.”