The Machine's Child (Company) (40 page)

Joseph smiled, an ironic and mirthless smile that twisted into his beard.

“Hello there,
pendejo,
” he said, and without haste he began to walk toward Alec.

Neither of them was prepared for what happened next, however.

“Doctor Ruy!”
howled Nicholas, seizing control. He drew the cutlass and charged Joseph, who stopped smiling and halted in his advance.

“Wait a minute,” he said, and winked out. Nicholas skidded to a stop and swung about, snarling.

“Where art thou,” he shouted, hoarse with rage, “devil from Hell?”

“
Who
did you call me?” inquired a voice from the foretop. They
looked up, Nicholas and Edward and Alec, and beheld Joseph staring down in consternation.

“Devil,” Nicholas said through his teeth. “Come down, thou coward, and be cut to pieces an I cannot kill thee.”

“No,” said Joseph. “The other thing you called me! What did you say my name was?”

“Doctor Ruy Anzolabejar,” said Nicholas, sheathing the cutlass and starting up the fore shrouds after him. “Or it may be Lucifer, or it may be Legion. Wilt thou live still with thy head off?”

Nicholas, wait,
said Alec.
He’s an immortal! Do you want to get us killed? We have to explain—

“How the hell do you know that name?” Joseph said. “And why are you speaking Tudor English?”

Nicholas laughed, pausing in his climb up the shrouds to stare at him. His pupils were black and enormous.

“Oh, Doctor Ruy,” he said, shaking his head. “Hast thou forgotten
my
name?”

“Well, it can’t be Nicholas Harpole,” said Joseph, backing rapidly into the upper shrouds. “Because he’s dead!”

“Ay, and haunting thee,” Nicholas said, pulling himself nimbly over the futtock shrouds and seating himself on the foretop. Withdrawing the flintlock pistol from his belt, he took careful aim and fired at Joseph, who winked out and promptly reappeared across from him on the main top.

“Say, you don’t seem to have brought your powder horn with you, Nicholas,” remarked Joseph, grinning. “And you can only fire those old babies once without reloading, you know.”

Nicholas shrugged and thrust it back into his belt. He turned and began to work his way out along the yard, footing it carefully across the stirrups.

Stop him!
cried Alec, pulled stumbling along.

You damned lunatic!
Edward fought for control, without success.

“So anyway,” Joseph continued, “I need to get this cleared up before I kill you. Who are you really? If you actually are Nicholas Harpole, you’re looking pretty good for a pile of cinders.”

Nicholas didn’t deign to answer, edging out to the end of the yard. At
this moment they heard a crash from below, and a desperate pounding, but neither man dared take his eyes off the other.

“Of course, it wasn’t really the fire did you in,” Joseph said. “It was the kegs of gunpowder. Remember that? Tied around your chest, a little friendly push to send you off to Hell? And I thought it did. I mean, it really blew, I watched your liver and probably half your spinal column go flying—SHIT!”

This remark was occasioned by the fact that Nicholas, clinging to the yard, had managed at last to exert his physical will on the ship’s rigging system. With a low metallic scream the whole spar was turning ponderously, a half-rotation as though to catch the wind, enabling him to ride it around to the point of the main yard, to which he leaped and clung, glaring in triumph at Joseph.

“Nice jumping, Quasimodo,” Joseph said, scrambling to his feet and edging out along the opposite arm. “So you’ve been cyborged, or you wouldn’t have been able to control the rigging like that. And that would mean you’re really Alec Checkerfield, AKA his lordship the seventh earl of Finsbury, right? So, why are you claiming to be the guy who wrecked my daughter’s life, back in 1555?”

“Thou liest,” Nicholas said, coming rapidly after him. “Thou art Father of Lies, but never her father.”

“No, only the guy who gave her eternal life, okay?” Joseph shouted. “And with immortals, that counts for something. Not that I was a very good father, I have to admit. I didn’t see what was coming when she fell for you!”

“Thou whoreson pander,
thou
madest the match,” Nicholas said, coming faster now. “Bid a little virgin girl beguile thine enemy, so thou mightst work thy treasons unobserved!”

You fool, what does that matter now?
Edward fought again for control and was cast off with a force that made him see stars.

Joseph came to the end of the yard and paused there, looking around, squinting in the growing light from the east. Winking out was beginning to be difficult, tired as he was. Cursing, he hung by his hands a moment and then launched himself at the main shrouds, where he caught hold and began to scramble his way down.

“You got any more of those pistols, Nicholas or Alec or whoever you
are?” he called out, as Nicholas came after him hand-over-hand. “I’ll bet if I can get to one before you do, I can blow you right back to wherever you’ve been all this time. Only problem is, could I be sure you’d stay there?”

Nick, let’s be reasonable about this, man! It’s not his fault you died, after all—
said Alec, but he might have been pleading with a stone wall.

The pounding from within the ship was louder now, frenzied as they both neared the deck. Abruptly it fell silent.

“Was that her?” Joseph turned an outraged face up to Nicholas. “Have you got her locked up in there? Has she finally had enough of you? You never loved her. You’re using her to find out about the Silence, aren’t you? That’s really why you took her from Options Research, isn’t it? It’s
your
fault she wound up in that place! Did you like seeing what you’d done to her?”

Nicholas halted at that, looked down into Joseph’s eyes with an expression so like Budu’s that all Joseph’s fury evaporated in panic terror. Just as Nicholas thrust out an arm, grabbing for his throat, Joseph let go the ratlines and jumped the rest of the way, landing on the deck with a hollow
boom.

Then he had to run, for Nicholas leaped down after him, and he sprinted for the quarterdeck with Nicholas in hot pursuit. He had just time to rattle futilely at the door of the saloon before he had to dart away again, around the mizzenmast and back along the deck toward the bow, barely ahead of Nicholas. Nicholas had drawn the cutlass as he chased him and raised it for a head-cut, slashing it through the air so that on two occasions it actually did come uncomfortably close to Joseph’s neck gimbal, and this plus the very real horror he felt at the idea of a New Enforcer on the loose now decided Joseph that the game had gone on long enough.

He was as close to collapse from exhaustion as an immortal can be, after the night he’d had, but he summoned a last burst of speed and sprang up on the foredeck, and from there over the starboard rail into the bowsprit netting.

Nicholas vaulted after him and came to the rail, glaring down, for he had heard no splash; but Joseph was not there under the bowsprit, where he had expected to see him. Joseph was behind him, having scrambled back
around on the port side. He grabbed up one of the decorative belaying pins upon which Alec had insisted when the ship had been designed. Joseph had to spring into the air to club Nicholas with it, but he managed to connect with a crack that echoed across the water. Nicholas toppled forward, unconscious. So, unfortunately, did Alec and Edward, obliged to share Nicholas’s concussion.

“Damn,” gasped Joseph, clutching his side with one hand. He staggered and sat down heavily.

“Now, the only reason I haven’t killed you yet,” a voice was saying as Alec opened his eyes and groaned, “is because I want some answers first.”

The sense of something-being-horribly-wrong was a lot stronger now than it had been the last time he had awakened, with very good reason. His hands were tightly bound behind his back and secured to his belt; moreover he was hanging upside down, having been trussed around the ankles with a clewline and hauled up to dangle in midair. Joseph was sitting on the deck with the other end of the clewline in his hand, watching him.

“How’s it going, big boy?” he said. “Actually that’s a rhetorical question, because I don’t give a rat’s ass. Here come the real questions, okay? Number one: Where’s Mendoza?”

“Piss off!” said Alec, and Joseph grinned.

“Wrong answer,” he said, and let go the clewline so that Alec plummeted toward the deck. He caught it again, just before Alec’s head hit wood.

“Next time I won’t grab it so fast,” Joseph said. “It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me where she is. I’ll find her if I have to take this ship apart. So, let’s move on to question number two: Just exactly what are you, Nicholas? Give me the specs on the New Enforcer.”

“I’d be happy to explain at some length,” said his prisoner, “in any other position. If I lose consciousness, threats shan’t avail you much, I’m afraid.”

Joseph sighed.

“Okay, who the hell is
that
? How many of you are in there?” His face darkened. “Have you developed a multiple personality disorder or something?
Oh my God, you have, haven’t you? You’ve figured out yet another way to make my baby miserable, you son of a bitch!” And he bared his teeth and gave the clewline a jerk, so that Edward felt as though his shoulders would dislocate, but he endured it and said:

“No, no, nothing like that at all! You’re quite correct: the Company had a hand in my making. Our making, I should say. I wonder if you can guess the rest of it?”

“I wonder how hard your head is in relation to that deck?” growled Joseph. “But okay. Some kind of serial immortality? The Company maybe experimenting, with memory transferred from body to body? Huh.” He looked impressed in spite of himself. “Well, it obviously works. So you must be some kind of clone, then, right? Produced from Nicholas? But—”

“You’ll have to excuse him, I’m afraid,” said Edward with his most temporizing smile, though the effect was slightly lessened by the fact that he was hanging upside down. “He really does hate you with quite an irrational passion. And poor Nicholas is, after all, the product of an ignorant and superstitious age, with an accordingly limited capacity for any understanding of science—”

He grimaced and shut his eyes for a moment, fighting back Nicholas’s attempt to break free, but Alec more or less sat on Nicholas for him. Joseph watched closely. Edward drew breath, opened his eyes, and continued: “I beg your pardon. The vertigo does make it difficult to give you the answers you need. And in any case, sir, neither you nor I have any reason to be at odds with each other. If you’d just let me down—”

“Like hell I will,” Joseph said, scowling as he stepped close to stare at him. “I know who you are, now. You’re that Brit secret agent who got himself shot to death in Los Angeles, aren’t you? Edward something?”

“Commander Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, late of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, at your service, sir,” Edward said, politely enough under the circumstances. “And not quite as dead as you’d think.”

“Too bad,” said Joseph tightly. “Mendoza went nuts and killed six mortals because of you. And, you know what else? You got my best friend killed.”

“I should be sorry to think so, sir, but I don’t recall—”

“No, you don’t recall! You were able to do it from your goddam grave, okay? Lewis found your daguerreotype portrait. He realized you were
something weird. He became obsessed with you.” Joseph gulped for breath. “The Company found out he knew too much, and they screwed him. He’s someplace as bad as Options Research, if he’s even still alive. That’s your fault!”

“Then allow me to make amends, sir,” said Edward in a reasonable voice. He was beginning to realize in horror that his captor hadn’t quite got both oars in the water, and negotiation might be futile. “If you were to release me, I might be able to rescue the fellow. After all, I rescued my wife from a similar—”

“She’s not your wife!” Joseph said, yanking on the line nearly hard enough to dislocate Edward’s ankles, too. In his momentary agony and chagrin at having picked the wrong thing to say, Edward lost control and Nicholas surged to the fore.

“Ay, devil, my bride and my flesh,” Nicholas said, grinning. “Sealed to me of her own will in despite of all thou couldst do, in a holy bond—”

“In an unholy bond,” Joseph snarled. “What’s she known from the day she met you but grief? It wasn’t enough you broke her heart getting yourself burned, no. You had to come back and drive her crazy! And you taught her to kill mortals, which is something you’re really good at, too, isn’t it? It’s what you were made for, huh, Mr. New Enforcer? Only the Company designed
you
to kill innocents. Like in Mars Two!”

But Nicholas had stopped listening to him and was laughing in his throat, teeth clenched as he concentrated with a glittering stare on the main yard immediately above Joseph. As Joseph ranted on, he got it to release. With a clinking
whoosh
it came plummeting down, and Joseph had just time to register what was happening before he leaped clear, letting go the clewline as he did so.

Nicholas was able to writhe as he fell and land on one shoulder, with a grunt of pain. As he lay there gasping, Alec grabbed control.

“Look, man, I never wanted to kill anybody,” he yelled. “Nobody told me what I was! I didn’t find out the Company’d been running my life until a couple of years ago.”

“Ha. Alec Checkerfield, I presume? You know, pal, I believe you,” wheezed Joseph, tottering over to the cutlass and picking it up. He sighted along its blade at Alec. “The way the Company jerks its people around. But you’re pure poison and you never should have existed in the first
place, and I’ll be doing everybody, and I mean everybody, a favor by running you through with your very own authentic pirate cutlass. Jesus, Alec, why pirates?”

“No! Please, not now, not like this, my life will have been for nothing!” Alec cried from his heart, squirming backward. “How am I ever going to make up for what I did?”

“You can die and leave Mendoza in peace, how about that?” Joseph offered, making an experimental lunge with the blade.