Transmaniacon (5 page)

There was scarcely enough room to wriggle upward. He braced himself against the sides and moved upward and around a corner to the right. The trip was long and arduous and for an undisciplined man the pitch-black shaft would have been too close to maneuver within. But Ben was used to it. He had been a burglar for nine years. He had memorized the route before they set out--their employer had provided the blueprints-- and he hardly thought about it as he negotiated the turns on knees and elbows. He breathed raggedly, occasionally slipping on his own sweat. He was crawling horizontally now; the going was easier.

As he rounded a corner, the echoing maze of ventilation shafts carried the sounds of the party crowd to him, petulant revelers fast becoming a brawling mob. He heard shrieks of fury, unpent hostility, and what sounded like Fuller's laughter, cackling above it all.

Up ahead he saw a slatted light. He wormed forward more urgently. Things were moving along a bit too quickly and he had to hurry to retain his edge. The drones would be distracted by the disruptions; they probably hadn't discovered that someone had thrown off the euphonium effects. Ben knew, however, that if they thought to run a check they'd be notified of his trespass of the vents. Hopefully, they were occupied trying to quiet the mob. He smiled. He could almost hear the euphonium as they increased its acoustic density. They had made the mistake of supposing that more wood might drown the fire; the euphonium could be used against itself, one knew the right “tune” to play. The mob roared louder as the euphonium pressure further aggravated erupting hostility.

He achieved the down-grate, worked rapidly with the tools, lifted it noiselessly, set it aside, and slid silently downward to drop like a cat to the floor. He crouched, looking around.

Across the room, above a steel door, a camera mounted in the wall had fixed on him, a red light blinked at its base. He cursed, sprinted left to the far wall, ignoring shelves of inexplicable equipment shiny with spines and tubes, and pressed the hidden studs set into the synthawood panelling. He waited, glancing uneasily over his shoulder at the camera which had swiveled to watch him. He wondered again how his employer had got the directions for opening the wall safe and the plans for the ventilator shafts. A section of wall hushed aside, a small, elliptical, gray metal bar, no bigger than a cigarette case, rested in a styrofoam molding. Ben snatched up the oval, tucked it in his belt-pouch, ignored a sudden strident alarm bell, and calmly departed the way he had come.

Ten minutes later, as he emerged from the hallucinogen sauna, the chaos in the ballroom was at a fever pitch. And over it all, Chaldin's face snickered impishly.

There were Fuller and the others, waiting, while behind them the colors of the surging crowd melded into a polychromatic blur. The revelers slapped at one another, shouting, tossing drinks and glasses taken from dispensers, surrounded the security drones and banged on their metal cases. The powerful drone-cybers disengaged themselves from their attackers with gentle shoves of their utility extensions and pressed through, spraying calm-gas too haphazardly for it to be effective.

The Transmaniacon biker with the skull-face was straddling the back of a primitivist woman on all fours, slapping her buttocks brutally and laughing. He was drunk. Ben dragged the biker off the woman and shoved him toward Fuller, who caught him and held him until he stopped thrashing. The guy had no refinement.

“Okay, okay,” the man said. Fuller released him, but the biker eyed Ben spitefully, zipping up his leather coat.

Solemnly, but with exultation lighting his eyes, Fuller drew out an ancient but perfectly functional .44 magnum pistol fitted with a silencer. With his other hand he put his sunglasses over his eyes; the mirror-lenses flashed. Fuller turned the gun toward Ben.

Ben drew back, stiffening, reaching for the needler hidden under his arm. But Fuller had already pulled the trigger. He shot over Ben's shoulder. Ben turned in time to see Lady Hann fold in the middle and sag to the floor, dropping the thin glass dagger she'd intended for Ben's back. Fuller had blown the shiny top out of her skull, and she died with an expression of peevish animosity.

She seemed only faintly annoyed to be dead.

The euphonium was cranked up full, its saccharin strains pleading for order.

They turned and began to maneuver through the periphery of the roiling mob, Fuller shooting from the hip where necessary. Ben used his needler's tight microwave beam selectively, stabbing into the legs of those bunched angrily in their way, defusing embryonic pocket-riots that seemed about to turn against them.

The eight naked women and men comprising the Siamese octuplet blocked the way in a panicky knot. Behind them was the exit station, port dilated so the security drones could get in and out quickly.

Fuller's pistol hissed and pink flesh parted in two places, bridges of human flesh shattered, gouting thickly while the severed ends—four people flesh-linked here and four there—snapped back and forth in wild disorientation, slipping on their own blood, falling. “Away! Off me!” screamed a blonde woman with a bloody nose and a black eye as she tore her grafted side free of the man beside her and began the tiresome business of bleeding to death in a writhing heap on the self-cleaning perma-polish floor.

Two security drones were on to them, closing in twenty feet behind.

Ben took a last look around. A primitivist man, his implanted wolf-fur matted with sweat, had somehow caught hold of a passing ephemeralist, punctured her protective gel-bubble, and now was savaging her throat with his teeth; the man clothed in living birds was flailing on his back at the birds which had turned on him and were pecking at his eyes; a tall, skeletal transvestite with a blond wig, violet eye shadow, silver lip gloss and a pin-curled blond beard was smothering the young man wearing the skin of a young girl—smothering him with the breasts of the skin.

Ben leapt over a writhing octuplet duo and dodged into the exit. His companions crowded after him, the door shut, the chamber sank. The door opened and Ben crouched with needler ready. But the hall was empty except for a waiting taxi-globe. He climbed inside the taxi, and when the others had joined him they were whisked down the tunnel and out of the palace, into the glass tubeway. A sense of weightlessness, then crushing gravity, then normal gravity—and a bump. They were back in the hangar. They climbed out of the globe and into their fly-car.

Fuller awakened the nulgrav generator and the fly rose upward, shot over the other grotesque vehicles, and sped straight for a blank metal wall. Ben was about to grab the control stick when wall exploded outward in splintered fragments and they were propelled out into the desert night.

Ben sank back into his seat and took a dozen deep breaths; he distributed placidity to his extremities, slowed his pulse, and swallowed.

“Jeezis,” the skull-faced man said. Ben glanced at him; the man's makeup was sweat-smeared and had dripped into a comical distortion that gave him the appearance of a half-rotted jack-o'-lantern.

Gloria crouched beside Ben, staring wearily into the stars, the landscape rushing by beneath them like a moonlit waterfall. Ben noticed she was tapping her fingers and swaying, and he said, leaning close to her so she could hear him, “You can take the rock 'n' roll cusps out now.” She and the others removed the cusps and tucked them into their pockets.

“What song was it?” Ben asked, mostly for an excuse to speak to her. “That last one?”

“
Sympathy for The Devil,
” she replied, stretching. “By the Rolling Stones.”

“I'm not much up on the history of music. Never heard of them.”

She shrugged and went to lie down in the rear cabin.

Ben churned with suspicions. Trying to sound indifferent, he asked, “How did our friend set up the escape route, Fuller? That taxi--if he could penetrate the place to get us out of there like that why didn't he just steal the damn thing himself?”

Fuller ignored the question. “Did you get it?”

Ben hesitated. Then he patted the bulge at his belt. “Yes.” He said at last. “They're going to follow us, you know.”

“No, they won't.” Fuller said with funereal serenity.

Ben gazed at him, perplexed.

And then he understood.

Comprehension became apprehension. He looked over his shoulder, out a small side-window, at the palace hanging in the air behind them like a magnified atom. From here the corruscating involution was luminous violet and the red spiral marking the palace itself, rocketing within the tubeways, was turning a corner, caroming into a straight stretch, cutting another corner, slicing straight up like a roller coaster peaking its highest—

—That's when the explosion came, flinging fragments of fifty-foot-thick transparent plasglass to spin like falling stars, down into the darkness. The explosive charge had been set at the apex of the palace tubeway's steepest climb, leaving a gap from which the palace at last ended its endless circuit, fired like a bullet up and out, joyously freed into a heavy headwind imposing stress it was not built to take. It came apart neatly.

Nosing downward, the palace fragmented into spirals and gleaming shards, trailing bright smokes and distant shrieks. The tubeway suddenly lost the nulgrav support which had been generated by the interminable transit of the palace within it; now empty it tumbled close behind. The palace's lights extinguished a moment before it entered the darkness of the chasm, so Ben did not see its impact. But he heard it, even from inside the fly-car. The air rang and reverberated for several minutes.

“They're all dead,” Gloria murmured, gazing out the back window. “All of them!” she repeated, more astonished than remorseful.

Teeth grating, striving for control, Ben asked, “Who set that charge?”

Fuller ignored him and stared ahead, into night.

It was then that Ben knew he would not surrender what he had stolen to the man who paid him to steal it.

Using two fingers of his right hand, working out of sight below the control panel, Ben set his needler on
lethal.

When Fuller turned, to speak to the others in the rear of the fly-car, Ben fired point blank at the back of his head.

Fuller slumped forward. Before he'd struck the control panel Ben cut the cabin lights. The sudden darkness was diluted only by the faint starlight. There were hoarse shouts from the rear cabin; someone had seen Fuller fall, and Ben could hear them slowly working their way forward. He ducked under the shelf of the control panel, plucked out his penlight and switched it on. The panel had no lower casing; its wires and circuitry were exposed. He reached up, hesitated, then yanked the automatic homing device from its socket and smashed it against the bulkhead.

Ben was pitched back suddenly against the frame of the control panel as the fly-car dropped like a stone. He had banged his head, he was dizzy, and Fuller's body was flopped half onto him. With a groan he fought off dizziness and G-force, shoved Fuller aside, flicked the control to manual, and manipulated the steering stick, which he could see outlined dimly against the star-speckled windshield. The car pulled out of its dive, whined, and leveled off. But he could not be sure of their altitude; they might smack into a mesa at any instant. For all he knew they could be three feet off the ground. He pulled himself onto a chair and listened. He could no longer hear the bikers approaching. Apparently they'd been thrown by the sudden dive. He made a quick decision and set the dials.

In seconds, the nulgrav car settled to earth. Outside, a sliver of the moon shone over squat pines and uneven outcroppings of rock.

A noise from the rear: They were coming. He reached under the panel, pulled a solid-state component from its socket, slipped it into his waistband, grabbed an overhead beam and swung feet first to slip down the hatch that had opened automatically when they had landed.

On the ground below he stumbled on a rock, swore, scrabbled on hands and knees out from under the car, his palms scraped by the coarse desert sands. Finally he stood and turned to face the fly-car as the cabin lights were switched on. He shuddered. The light glowing from the simulated fly's eye seemed to give insectoid life to the machine.

He drew his needler and leveled it at the hatch. And waited.

Ben's eyes adjusted rapidly, and he could make out three figures crawling stealthily toward him. He switched on his penlight and aimed the needler.

The bikers blinked in the small, intense light. “Stand up, slow and smooth,” Ben said.

They looked at the gun, then at each other. They stood, brushing sand off their knees.

“Fuller's dead and I've got a piece of the steering mechanism,” Ben said. “That thing won't move without it, and even if it would you don't know how to fly it--the autopilot is gone. But I know how to fly it--manually.” He spoke rapidly. “We're out in the middle of nowhere. So before we go any place you're going to have to come to an understanding with me. I'm not going back to the man who set us up.”

“If you don't,” said the taller of the two men, “he'll set the pigs on you. He'll tell 'em you blew up the palace and he'll show 'em those pictures he took of you at work.”

“I don't care. I'm not going to turn the exciter over to him. I don't like kill people pointlessly. And I don't trust him. Besides, I've got plans for it myself. If what I've got in mind pans out the opinions of the local police won't count for bad credit.”

“So what do you want to do?” asked Gloria, tonelessly.

Before Ben could answer, the shorter man blurted, “He
killed
... Carl? ...
Carl?”

“I killed Fuller the Slayer.” Ben said. “It's about time someone did.”

“You wasted
Carl!”
the stumpy thug screamed, his voice pitched high in disbelief, his face grotesquely contorted. Then the face was lost in the darkness as he charged forward, fumbling in his coat for his pistol.