The Sons of Heaven (54 page)

“It’s charging up,” he said. “We’ll have to take out this wall. I’m not reading any refrigeration units behind it. Limpets, here and here.”

“You got ‘em.” Latif and Sarai slapped the bombs in place and were gone, and Suleyman was gone, and a second later there was a puff and a flash and a gaping hole in the wall. Before the last bit of debris had fallen they were inside.

What they saw, by infrared, surprised them.

They had broken through into what appeared to be spartan living quarters: a food preparation area, an open lavatory, an entertainment console. It might have been a prison cell. There was a table and a chair and a bed, and in the bed a thin pale mortal was just struggling to sit up and pull off a sleep mask.

Their view of the bed, however, was blocked by the apparition. It hung in midair, scowling at them ferociously and gnashing its sharp teeth: a lavender shark with pale blue fins. “Go away,” it ordered in the voice of a furious woman. “Get out of here, or I’ll bite you!”

“This is original,” observed Sarai. As they stood gaping at it, it melted, transformed. It became a balloony purple octopus, writhing its tentacles.

“Go away
now,”
it cried. For good measure it changed again. Now it was a bright red lobster two meters tall, clacking its claws at them.

“What are you?” wondered Suleyman.

“They’re, uh, the monsters from Totter Dan’s Undersea Adventure,” Latif said.

“Who’s that?” asked the mortal in the bed, managing to get his sleep mask off at last. He stared at the blown wall open to the night, the three figures silhouetted against the moonlight, and rubbed his eyes.

“Leave him alone,” screamed the lobster, morphing now into a woman in a rather dowdy-looking robe. “Please go!” The mortal was groping frantically in a drawer at the side of his bed. He had pulled something out and was reaching up with it when Latif shot it out of his hand. He yelped and cowered back in his blankets.

“No!” the woman implored. “Don’t hurt him.” From the rubble behind
them something came clattering: another servounit, a dog-sized thing waving manipulative members in a menacing fashion. Sarai kicked it away and it lay on its back in a corner, traction treads racing futilely. “Please!” Weeping now, the woman opened her robe and displayed her naked body. “Would you go away if I made you happy? I’ll do anything you want. Just please don’t hurt my David.”

“You’re an AI, aren’t you?” guessed Suleyman. “You’re supposed to monitor life support for the mortal.”

“Ancilla, make them go away!” the mortal told her.

“I’m trying,” she replied, as the first of Suleyman’s team came through the wall. They stopped and stared.

“Through there,” Suleyman told them, pointing into the depths of the dome’s interior. “The storage area’s got a vacuum seal.”

“Is that what you want?” Ancilla peered into Suleyman’s face. “You want something from the alcove, like those other people? Take it! Take whatever you want and go. I can fix it so he won’t even notice anything’s missing. Just let my David alone.”

“We won’t hurt David,” Suleyman told her, “but we can’t leave him here. We’re taking everything that’s stored in that alcove, and closing this station down. David’s going home to Time Forward with us. He’ll be all right.”

“But—I wasn’t notified,” Ancilla said doubtfully.

“What?” The mortal emerged from under the covers. “What’d he say, Ancilla?”

“The Company’s evacuating this base!” Suleyman raised his voice slightly. “Consider this your notification.” He lowered his voice and looked at Ancilla. “Has he got any personal effects he’ll want to bring?” he asked, indicating the mortal with a jerk of his thumb.

“What?” The mortal sat up, swung his feet over the side of the bed. “Don’t bother talking to her. She’s not real. I’m real! What do you mean, the Company’s evacuating me?”

Suleyman looked around Ancilla at the mortal. There was a rush of cold air as the alcove was opened, and a clinking and thumping from the darkness as Suleyman’s team immediately set to loading the contents of Alpha-Omega into the transport units. “An emergency situation has developed, sir,” Suleyman told the mortal. “Your location is no longer secure.”

“Oh!” The mortal cringed. “Then you’ve got to save what’s in the recesses beyond the Portal.” He got up hurriedly and groped around in the darkness. “Ancilla! Where are my clothes?”

Smoothly, without a wasted movement, Alpha-Omega was divested of its treasure in surprisingly little time considering the months of effort that had gone into finding it. When the mortal man had dressed himself and found both shoes, and fussed with a bag of toilet necessaries, and downloaded his Totter Dan games into a transfer unit, the last of the silver tubes was on its way down to the transports.

“What about your AI’s program?” inquired Suleyman, examining the console.

“What?” David peered at him. “Oh. Leave it here. I won’t need that thing if I’m going home.”

“You’re a real little pig, aren’t you?” said Sarai in disgust.

“No!” Ancilla’s eyes widened. She turned to Suleyman. “No, I have to look after David. You understand, don’t you?”

“Latif, escort him to the shuttle,” Suleyman ordered. Latif drew his pistol and David scurried ahead of him, out through the loading dock. “I’m sorry,” Suleyman told Ancilla. “We don’t have time. We’ll take good care of him, I promise you.”

He turned from her and strode out to the waiting transport. Sarai lingered a moment to say: “You hang in there, dearie. Somebody’ll be back.” She turned and ran after Suleyman.

They powered up, the five ships, they rose and turned, and disappeared through a blaze of red light with a
boom
that echoed across the dark water. For a few minutes there was breathless silence; then the night noises returned, the frogs and insects cautiously resumed their songs.

The white moonlight streamed in through the broken wall of Alpha-Omega, and through the phantom woman who wept in its ruins.

“This isn’t London,” said David Reed, staring around in horror at the city lit by sunset, under the dreadfully wide sky. “It’s foreign! And it’s hot. Why am I here?”

“Change of plan, dearie,” said the black lady, with a white smile that made him very uncomfortable. “Pick up your feet now. Quick. We want to get you stashed away safe.”

“But—” David protested, and she slapped him quite hard on his behind. With a yelp he started forward, and she grabbed his arm and drew him along with her, inexorably propelling him down the narrow street. He didn’t much
like the look of it. It was what would be called an alley in any civilized country, with high white windowless walls to either side and a high wall at the end.

He looked about fearfully for piles of donkey flop or dirty merchants with moth-eaten rugs, which he supposed were everywhere in these unpleasant substandard countries, but there weren’t any. Only the clean silent street and the soldiers jogging along behind them, each one bearing on his or her shoulders a refrigeration unit. As they neared the end of the street David looked expectantly for the doorway or turning they’d take next, but to his consternation there didn’t appear to be any turning.

He gasped and tried to stop before they ran smack into the wall, but the black lady bore him on. The wall seemed to pull back, and a stairway opened at their feet, leading down to a doorway that was even now opening on darkness.

Stumbling, unwilling, he descended the stair and the next minute or so was a long nightmare of steps turning and going down, turning and going down, with the soldiers thundering behind him so that there was no stopping, even if the mean lady had been willing to listen to his protests.

Finally they stopped descending, and the lady pulled him off into an alcove at the side. The soldiers ran on past them, down a corridor leading into a big vaulted room. David mustered his indignation to demand: “I want to talk to your supervisor!”

“Sorry, honey, he’s busy,” said the lady, as a doorway opened in the alcove. She shoved him through and he found himself in a room not unlike the one he’d left. Bed, commode, sink. He turned around to ask her for his bag, but she had already tossed it in after him and slammed the door.

David stood gaping a moment before he bent and picked up his bag. At least those nasty people had gone. He sat down on the bed, trembling and wheezing from the run, and rummaged in his bag for his medication. There was no sipper bottle beside his bed, and he had to go to the sink and fill a little chlorilar cup with water before he could take his pills. And the water tasted funny, and he spilled some of it on himself. Really, this was very annoying. He made a mental note to speak sharply about it to whoever brought him his breakfast.

Feeling the need to work off his anger, he pulled out his Totter Dan unit and looked around for the entertainment console.

There wasn’t one.

David Reed cried out, a high-pitched squeal of horror and disbelief. Rising to his feet again he proceeded to search the room. Wall to wall, like a mime
flattening his palms against the unyielding surfaces, he sought desperately for a port, a screen, a buttonball, anything with function! Nothing. Nothing under his bed either, or behind the commode, or in the door. Nothing at the sink, though he poked the Totter Dan lead into every hole he found there. “Ancilla,” he screamed. “Where is it? Hook me up!”

No soothing voice, no comforting illusion rushing to his assistance. Failing to appreciate the irony of this, he collapsed on his bed and sobbed in terror. Lots of time passed.

After a while he curled into fetal position and emptied his mind of thought. As ever, it didn’t take him long.

Racing back along the corridor, Sarai spotted Latif running from the opposite direction. They met, crashing into each other. He grabbed her and swept her back in a kiss. They wrestled together a long moment before they broke for air at last.

“Secured!” Latif announced, and Sarai shouted with laughter. Hand in hand they ran back along the corridor, and a moment later emerged, by veiled and uncertain ways, in Suleyman’s receiving room.

Suleyman was sitting at a low table, sipping tea and studying a sheaf of printouts. He did not look up as they came in.

“The jewels are in the jewel box,” said Sarai. “And the piggy’s in the pen. What on earth’s wrong?”

Suleyman spread the papers out across the table. They were still images, taken at several angles from surveillance camera feed, of a room. It was not an empty room. “These came in while we were at Alpha-Omega,” he said. “From the Preservancy Conference Center on Santa Catalina Island.”

“Victor sent them, then,” Latif said, coming around the table to peer at the images.

“I don’t think so,” Suleyman told him. Latif looked more closely. He uttered something profane. Suleyman continued: “Though the possibility exists that he arranged the transmission in advance.”

“Do we have anybody else out there?” asked Latif in a slightly shaky voice. “Who might have sent these, I mean?”

Suleyman nodded. “She didn’t send them, though. She’s at a secured location, monitoring the mortals’ transmissions.” He stroked his beard, regarding a particular image. “I’ve been running a forensic reconstruction on the rest of them. That one,” he added, pointing, “is almost certainly Nennius.”

Sarai leaned forward, her gaze hard and hungry. She stared at the image a long moment before grinning ferociously. “Well,” she said. “Some justice. How nice! What about the others?”

“Are they all in Labienus’s camp?” inquired Latif, reaching for the tea and taking a gulp.

“No,” replied Suleyman. He pointed to another image. “There’s a ninety-nine point nine percent probability that one’s Aegeus. And that would be Ereshkigal next to him.”

“So.” Latif jumped to his feet and began to pace. “If Victor did what it looks like he did—then both the Masters and the Plague Club are out of the race.”

“Possibly,” said Suleyman. “Their leaders, at least.”

“Which means we can get to the Command Center without having to fight anybody but the mortal troops.”

“Possibly,” said Suleyman.

“Which means we win!”

“Possibly.”

“Somebody sometime’s going to have to go into that room and clean things up,” observed Sarai. “To retrieve Victor, at least.”

“Better sooner than later, too. Son, we’ll need hazmat units,” Suleyman said.

“On it,” Latif told him, and was gone from the room. Sarai looked after him.

“He’s a good son,” she said.

“He is.” Suleyman had another sip of tea. “Victor was a good son, too.”

“Was he one of yours?” Sarai turned to him, surprised.

“No,” Suleyman said. “Someone else’s son. I would have been proud to call him mine, though.”

Sarai nodded, looking at the terrible pictures. “I never had many recruits,” she said. “And I haven’t kept track of them. Maybe just as well. Too painful.”

He sighed. They could hear, from the courtyard, the bustle as the shuttles were refueled and the troops loaded, and somewhere Yusuf patiently explaining to a trio of Peace Officers that, yes, there had been a fire, but the household had got it out swiftly. The lord of the house would be glad to meet them on Monday to make a full report. Suleyman raised his eyebrows.

“I ought to make Latif go out to apologize,” he said. He gazed for a moment at the shatrang set displayed in a corner of the room, the old work of art in ivory and ebony. “Tell me something,” he said. “Do you really think Alec Checkerfield is dead?”

Sarai flinched. “What’s that got to do with anything? But he’s not in this world,” she said quietly. “I tell you I’d know.”

“You think so?” Suleyman turned down his empty tea glass. “I wonder.” Latif came stalking back, eyes glittering. “Hazmat units loaded and we’re ready to go on your order.”

“Mm.” Suleyman rose to his feet. He walked across the room to the shatrang game and moved one of the pieces. Then he turned back to Latif and Sarai. “Armageddon calls. Let’s go, children.”

The Captain steers through Eternity, moors off a convenient headland of Time.

A vast shimmering coalesces into something solid and visible. The island emerges from the mists. The masts and spars of the
Captain Morgan
emerge, too, and the green trees of the garden, and the outline of the high house. Night is fading away into morning here, whenever this is.