Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail (18 page)

Ching looked at me, scared and confused. “What will we do?”

I peered back out the door and saw perhaps a dozen agents, lined up on both sides of the catwalk about ten meters on either side of the temporary bridge. I had never seen TMS monitors armed with anything more lethal than a night stick, but these held very familiar-looking laser weapons.

I turned back to Ching and lowered my voice. “Now, listen carefully. I’m going to try and bluff us out of here with Hocrow’s name. At the very least that should get us taken to her.” I turned and looked at the remaining Opposition members in the room. Most had their hoods off and defeat registered all over their faces and in their mannerisms. They were sheep who’d do what they were told, like good little children, now that they’d been caught.

“Thirty seconds!”

“Damn!” I swore. “No, that Hocrow thing won’t work except as a diversion. She’s got to be behind this, at least partly. That means I’m no longer useful to her. We’ll get psyched with the sheep. We’ve got to escape.”

“Twenty seconds!”

“Escape?
How?”
Ching’s whole expression showed that the very concept was alien to her. On Medusa, you were raised from birth to believe that there was no escape.

“I’m going to get one of those guns, then go over the rail into the sewer. Follow me if you want, but it’s gonna be rough.”

“Ten seconds!”

“But—where can we go?”

“Only one place. It’s that or the Goodtime Girls, love. Ready?”

She nodded.

“Come out
now!”

I walked out, hands above my head, and Ching followed. The rest of the cell walked behind us, looking very dejected. I could now see the others who’d gone before us lined up on both sides, and I couldn’t help but be disgusted at the sight. Not a single weapon was aimed at them; in fact, nobody was even looking at them.’ Yet there they stood, hands meekly over heads, waiting for the rest of the sheep. Well, by God, they had one rabid dog in this bunch. Still, I couldn’t believe that these were the shock troops of a real rebellion. If they had any guts or weren’t so completely conditioned by their society, they could have easily taken all those TMS agents and their weapons.
Escape? Where?
Rule one: first escape, then go where they aren’t.

Thanks to the illuminated stripes on its top, you could see a pretty long ways up and down the pipe, and the dozen TMS agents were all I saw. Only two on each side held laser weapons, short rifles from the looks of them.

“Get over against the wall with your traitorous friends!” snapped the laser-armed woman closest to me.

“Hey! I’m with Major Hocrow—I’m her inside man!” I protested.

“Major Hocrow is under arrest, just like you,” the monitor snapped back. “You’ll meet her in traitor’s hell!”

Oho!
Well, that was interesting. At least it meant that Hocrow was either being done in by a subordinate who was walking into her job or she really was with the Opposition and was one of those who ran cover for us. I would never know which, but the comment removed any last doubts I had about what I was going to do. There was no reprieve, and, once out of here, no chance at all.

I walked on past the monitor with the nasty tone, who, I saw, was no longer even looking at us but idly holding the rifle while gazing at the people coming behind us. I was about the same size as the monitor, but I had several advantages, not the least of which was that I wasn’t conditioned by Medusa and I knew how to use that fancy rifle.

I whirled, pushed, and knocked her head into the rail, then reached out and grabbed the rifle from her loose grip as she struck.

In one motion I ducked, came up with the rifle, using it to push Ching on past, then opened fire on the line of monitors across from me. The beam, set to kill, sliced through them all pretty neatly, leaving just one weapon and four unarmed monitors at my back.

Men and women screamed at the violence that was not and had never been a part of their lives. I grabbed the groggy monitor I’d pushed into the rail in a hammer grip and, using her as a shield, started firing at the others.

I still would have failed, though, if three of the sheep still pressed against the wall hadn’t made a split-second decision and rushed out. The officer holding the laser rifle on the far end was pushed into the muck, toppling nicely over the rail. The other three monitors, looking not just stunned but actually stricken, had eyes only for my rifle—and they stood still as stone.

“Thanks!” I called out to the three who’d come to my aid. “I couldn’t have done it without you!” One of them waved, and I looked over at Ching. “You all right?”

“You—you
killed
them!”

“It’s my job. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Right now we have to get out of here—fast.” I looked up and down at the Opposition members, some of whom still had their hands over then- heads. I could sympathize, sort of. What they’d just seen was impossible, and that’s why it’d worked. The monitors were simply too self-assured and too relaxed, too confident that the sheep would all be meek. They reacted very slowly, and, amateurishly, they had their rifles on narrow-beam kill, which allowed me to get that whole neat row with a single shot. Even the monitors were products of Medusa, conditioned to certain kinds of behavior and confident in their total mastery over the common herd.

I pushed my prisoner into the others and freed myself of any physical restrictions. The monitor rubbed her head and looked at me with a mixture of fear and confusion. “You better let us have that! There is no escape. Your entire organization is broken.”

I smiled at her, which confused her all the more. “Okay, you Opposition members, listen up!” I yelled. “They’re picking up our people all over the city, maybe all over the planet. You have only three choices. You can kill yourselves, go with the monitors, or come with me!”

“Come with you? Where?” somebody yelled back nervously.

“Outside! In the bush and the wild! It’s the only place to run!”

That suggestion stopped them for a moment. I let them mull over the implications, but only for a short period. We had to move fast, before we were missed. This group of monitors was the usual bunch of egomaniacal incompetents, but TMS had much better than these, and it wouldn’t take very long for their best to set out after us. I wanted to be long gone by then. “Anybody here know where the sewers dump outside the city and how to get there from here?”

“I know ‘em pretty well,” one of the three who’d pushed at the right moment called back. “I think I can get us out of here.”

“Who’s coming? I have to know now!”

It didn’t surprise me that only the three who’d showed any guts wanted to come. Counting Ching, who was still looking pretty scared and confused herself, and me, that was five out of almost sixty. Some rebels!

“You three come up with me!” I called, then turned to Ching. “Coming?”

She was frightened and shocked, but she nodded affirmatively. “I go with you.”

“Good girl!” I looked at the three. All were women, and one was familiar. “Well! Morphy! I
thought
you’d have the guts!”

Our demanding shift supervisor looked sheepish. “You knew?”

“Almost from the start. Introductions later, though.” I flicked the rifle field to wide scan. “This won’t hurt anybody,” I said loud enough for all to hear, “just knock you out for a couple of minutes. I gotta say, though, that you deserve what you’re going to get from TMS.” I looked around. “Last chance.” Nobody moved.

I fired first at the side with the monitors, then turned as the others on the other side screamed once more and started to panic. They all dropped in their tracks, although they were going to be a pain to crawl over on the catwalk.

I looked at them, feeling oddly confident and solid with the rifle in my hand. Four women and me. That could make the wild easier to take, that was for sure.

“C’mon, tribe!” I said, and we started picking our way through the unconscious bodies toward the clear area of the tunnel.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Wild Ones

When we’d gotten pretty far from the fallen crowd, I stopped and turned to them. I had had the foresight to pick up the other rifle as we’d moved by the dead monitor on the end, as well as a power pack from the monitor’s belt, but the charges were still limited and I was pretty sure I was the only one who knew how to fire the things.

“Okay—now things get messy,” I told them. “They’ll have squads all through this tunnel, and we’re going to have to crawl in the muck below the catwalks and keep very still when they pass near so they go right on past. Understand?”

They nodded. I looked at the one who had said she knew the sewage system, a very attractive women perhaps in her early twenties. “You said you knew these sewers. Can we get near a train at the exit point?”

She looked startled. “I thought you said we were going out with the garbage.”

“Argue later. But for the record, now that we’ve said that it’s exactly where they’ll look for us. Remember, they’ve got all sorts of scanners in these tunnels, too, and they’ll all be looking for us. I’ve looked at their regular locations, though, which depend on the power cables, and they’re all located above the catwalks. If we’re quiet enough, and careful enough, they won’t see us down in the muck below. They have fixed focal lengths, so anything below the catwalks is a blur. Let’s move—you lead. Morphy, you know what I’m thinking?”

She nodded. “Let’s try it.”

“Okay. Follow the leader, no talking unless I tell you. Let’s go, gang—over and into the muck.” One by one they complied, although not without some real hesitation. The stuff was really awful, thicker than I would have thought and close to waist-deep.

I couldn’t resist thinking we were in deep shit, but it was the only oddball thought I allowed myself and it was too literally true to be funny. I had deliberately returned along the route we’d taken from the café, on the theory that those monitoring devices might still be out of commission, but I couldn’t depend on it. This mission would be played by ear, and first we had to get to an exit point—a long, long way in the sewage.

The next several hours were nervous ones, although my hopes that the initial escape route was still blocked were borne out. Several times we stood right under squads of TMS herding Opposition members to exit points, and several more times we huddled in the stinking muck as small, very efficient armed patrols double-timed above us. We were all pretty well covered with the stuff and slipping and sliding as we moved, and it was clear we couldn’t keep this up indefinitely.

So far we’d been extremely lucky. My escape was still something of a miracle, but it simply proved that when you have even one potential wolf you don’t send sheep out to capture other sheep, even if the sheep you send are arrogant bastards. After the initial escape, we were protected by the flaw in their visual monitoring system and the very complexity of master sewage drains under a city of close to 350,000. There were probably a couple of thousand kilometers of drainage tunnels under the city, and TMS simply couldn’t cover more than a fraction of that with its personnel. They had to wait for us to make a mistake, to betray our position, so they could concentrate their forces in that area.

I was proud of all four of my companions, who held together under some of the worst conditions I could think of, not only physically but mentally, knowing that just one little mistake would betray us to these overhead monitors. The monitors, I was sure, were all staffed by real live people as well as by the computers.

Finally, I had to ask the one who was supposed to know the tunnels if she really did. Frankly, none of us could take much more of this, and, sooner or later, we would certainly be found. “How much farther to the trains?”

“At the rate we’re going, maybe an hour more,” she whispered.

I didn’t like the sound of that. “How long to any kind of exit near the city border?”

She thought a moment. “From the sector numbers at the last junction, maybe ten minutes to a drainage outlet. But there’ll be an energy barrier there.”

“I’ll chance it. We can’t take much more of this. Lead on.”

She shrugged.

What seemed like an hour later we came close to the outlet. I could hear the thing rushing .like a falls, and we were now waist high in sewage, which was developing a fairly strong current. There were no catwalks in the direction of the outlet, so there would be maybe thirty meters when we’d be fully exposed. There would certainly be a visual monitor up there, if only as a final check on animal entry should the energy barriers fail.

I tried to angle myself as best I could to see what the outlet looked like, but all I could see was the sewage dropping into some sort of sludge pool below and the unmistakable light purple of an energy barrier. “I wonder if that barrier is beyond the drop,” I said aloud. “If it is, we might be able to go over the falls and then, beneath the surface, under the barrier. Do you know how much of a drop it is?”

She shook her head from side to side. “It varies. This plant is located in an old stone quarry. It might not be much of a drop but the holding pool could be fifty meters deep.”