Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus)

by Robert McCarroll

  Errol shook his head. "It was a poor choice of words, sir."

  "Do you understand why you're here?"

  "It's a mandatory. requirement of the prison diversion program."

  "And?"

  "And I attacked Ed."

  "About that," Lindenbaum said. "In preparation for these sessions, I went through all of the information we had to help paint a better picture of the young men I'll be talking to. The general consensus is that you're reserved and overly polite. Yet, you've had two strong emotional outbursts in the past month in somewhat public circumstances. Both were precipitated by commentary regarding your parents."

  "Yes, sir," Errol said.

  "What is it about people talking about your parents that makes you so angry?"

  "I don't think I know."

  "Are you sure? There has to be something about the topic that causes the anger to start building up. I know you have a good deal of personal discipline, just from your record. It can't be a small amount of anger if you're going to knock another young man to the floor and start to pummel him."

  "Everyone talks about my parents as if they were evil people. They never hurt anyone, not seriously." Errol shook his head. "Everyone talks as if there was nothing good about them. They never..." Errol blinked in surprise as he started to tear up. He looked away from Doctor Lindenbaum. "I don't want to talk about them."

  "All right then. How about a more academic topic?"

  "Like what?"

  "I'm afraid it was a bad pun. Do you know who's paying for your schooling?"

  "Some sort of scholarship. I'm good so long as my grades don't slip."

  "Who told you that?"

  "My grandfather. He also told me that his standards were more stringent than the scholarship's, so I shouldn't worry about what the paper said."

  "Is he prone to misleading you?"

  "No!" Errol said. He forced himself to calm down. "He has... bent the truth when it was in my best interests before."

  "You're not on a scholarship," Lindenbaum said. "Your tuition was pre-paid by a trust your parents set up."

  "I thought you were changing the topic."

  "I bent the truth," Lindenbaum said. "I never met your parents, but it's clear they cared what became of you."

  "They wanted-" Errol cut himself off.

  "Is there something I'm missing?"

  "I'd rather not talk about my parents," Errol said.

  Southport had once been a suburb of New Port Arthur, but the growth of the latter had absorbed it into the city. Most of the light industry had shuttered its doors, and the housing had shifted to solidly lower-class neighborhoods. The construction of Riverside had accelerated the ongoing decline. The core of older single-family homes was ringed by near-identical units built in the postwar optimism. The vibrancy that had built Southport was long gone. Only inertia kept the dilapidated houses from completely falling in on themselves. Few of the residents had any real motivation to keep the properties up as the surrounding blight negated any improvements they could made. In the postwar periphery, the numbered grid of streets broke down, leaving curving avenues with colorful names like Merriweather Lane.

  Phyllis Beddle was one of the few residents of Merriweather Lane to put any effort into her house. The pink facade was in desperate need of a new coat of paint, and the rain gutters were clogged, but the door was bright white. The lawn was tidy and rows of tulips would sprout when the weather warned up a little more. Two square hedges framed the walkway. Esposito pulled into the driveway, having traded his vandalized car for an unmarked cruiser from the motor pool.

  "Don't have much on Sam Beddle," Esposito said. "Not known to be a member of a gang, but the school he went to was rife with them. It's unlikely he doesn't know any, even if he hasn't joined."

  "I'm still an observer," Razordemon said. "Until you say otherwise."

  "Phyllis Beddle is sixty-three. She does not have a record, and appears to be retired."

  "On what?"

  "Municipal pension. She worked as a clerk in city hall from the moment she got out of high school until she had enough service credit to leave. Never promoted, never transferred."

  "How do you know that?"

  "I have friends in the bureaucracy, they knew her."

  "Did they know her grandson?"

  "Just that she was disappointed in him." Esposito stepped out of the car and walked up towards the front door. He heard something heavy land on the grass between the house and the garage. Stepping back, he looked into the gap. Still slightly crouched from having hopped out the window, Sam Beddle looked like a deer in the headlights. He was dressed in a white T-shirt, baggy jeans, and overpriced boots. His hair was shorn within a few millimeters of his scalp, and he was trying and failing to cultivate a mustache. His thin build made his round head look slightly oversized. His dark complexion was free of scars or tattoos.

  "Metro PD," Esposito called out.

  Beddle broke into a run.

  His loose raincoat trailing behind him almost like a cape, Esposito easily vaulted the short fence to the back yard. With a sound like a cross between a pop and a thunderclap, where there was once one Beddle, there were now two. The sound repeated again and again. Soon there was a brood of Beddles, then a bevy. The dozen or so Sams broke apart, each running in a different direction. Esposito swore, picked one Sam out of the pack, and chased him.

  While Esposito's oversized coat might not have been the best attire for running, it was less of an impediment than Sam's pants. The ill-fitting jeans slipped, and Sam fought to hike the waistband up to a more appropriate height. As he struggled with his trousers, he stumbled on an empty trash can and took a tumble onto a lawn. Esposito was on him before he could stand, applying handcuffs with practiced efficiency.

  "Why'd you run, Beddle?" Esposito asked. Razordemon casually walked up as Esposito hauled the handcuffed man up to his knees. Beddle strained for a moment, an expression not unlike constipation crossing his face.

  "I'm a copy!" he cried out. A moment later, he was sobbing uncontrollably. "I'm gonna die!" he said in a tone not unlike a whine.

  "What makes you say that?" Razordemon asked, kneeling beside Sam.

  "I can't split," Sam said. "Only the real Sammy can split. That means I'm a copy, and copies die after a few minutes."

  "Are you sure?"

  Sammy nodded, tears streaming down his cheeks. "Pop, oblivion."

  "How did you not know you were a copy?"

  "When we split, it's a perfect copy. I even remember splitting. I don't wanna die!"

  "If you're a perfect copy," Razordemon said, "You know everything the original Sammy knows, right?" Sam nodded. "Then you could tell us where the Lucid Blue is coming from, right?"

  "Why should I snitch?"

  "What could they possibly do to you?" Razordemon asked. "Plus. he condemned you to die to make his getaway, what do you owe him?"

  A confused Sam looked up at Razordemon. "I guess..." he said, tears still filling his eyes. "The guy you want-" With the thunderclap of a collapsing vacuum, Sam vanished. Esposito's cuffs fell to the grass.

  "Son of a bitch," Esposito said.

  "At least we're on the right track," Razordemon said.

  "We just had the bad luck of stumbling onto Sammy while he was using. What sort of power is duplication anyway?"

  "Rare."

  "I'll see about running down his likely hiding places," Esposito said. "Sammy Sham does not strike me as a criminal mastermind. I'm going to start with interviewing the grandmother."

  Part 7

  Ed tapped his fingers on his knee as he floated in the middle of the living room. Lazar sat slouched at the end of the couch, looking quite bored. Gabe and Kevan were at the kitchen table, having another discussion about vecto
r physics that didn't seem to be going anywhere.

  "You know the worst part about this program?" Ed asked.

  "Having to live with you?" Lazar asked.

  "The boredom. I'm bored out of my mind at school. I can't do anything about it because it hurts me here. Then I have to come back here and sit around while red struggles to get that a force at an angle is equivalent to two forces of smaller magnitude at right angles to each other. What is so hard to grasp?"

  "Says the guy who isn't even touching the floor," Kevan said. "These angles are what are supposed to keep me in the air, I don't want to get it wrong."

  "Like you're going to have time to work out the math mid-air. It's all guesswork and instinct."

  "You stay out of this," Gabe said. "He's made a lot of progress."

  "Whatever." Ed lay down over the couch. "I thought we were supposed to do something with these afternoons."

  "When Razordemon gets back, he will have something for you to do," Gabe said. "Patience is a virtue."

  Ed sighed.

  "Man, whining all the time isn't going to earn you the chance to do something interesting," Lazar said. "If you keep complaining, Gabe's going to have you do chores."

  Ed's further complaints were cut short by Razordemon's arrival. Errol meekly followed him inside. "Hey, just the man we've been waiting for," Ed said. Razordemon tossed a tin to Ed. Ed lowered himself to the couch and sat up.

  "They check out, anyone on the team may make use of the voice modulators."

  Ed applied one of the modulators to the front of his throat. "Do I have to turn this thing on?" he asked, his voice a few octaves lower. A broad grin crossed his face. "I sound good now."

  "Can we petition for Ed to leave it on so we don't have to hear his normal voice?" Lazar asked.

  "Watch it, that's the sort of chatter that got him in trouble," Razordemon said.

  "Go easy on him," Ed said. "We've been trading jabs for years."

  "One day he'll realize I mean it," Lazar said.

  "Suit up," Razordemon said. "We're going on a field trip." Errol took a step towards the stairs, but Razordemon caught his sleeve. "You may want to get your armor out of the back of the van first."

  "Has it been approved, sir?" Errol asked.

  "No. We have, however, disabled those systems which are unacceptable."

  "Like what, sir?"

  "The built-in weapons, for one."

  "I wasn't aware there were any," Errol said.

  "They've been rendered inoperable at the moment," Razordemon said.

  "Sir, I swear, I told you everything I knew about the armor."

  "I have given you the benefit of the doubt, as there is no evidence you've used it previously. If I'd thought you were trying to hide something from me, you would not be here right now."

  "Now, go get suited up."

  Errol collected his suitcase from the back of the van and hurried upstairs. Razordemon slumped against the wall.

  "You're looking... what's the word... exasperated?" Gabe said.

  "No," Razordemon said. "Just a lot of things to keep track of."

  "You're lying to me boy, I hate it when people lie to me."

  "This might be a conversation better suited for a time when there isn't a good chance of being eavesdropped on."

  "So where are you taking them?"

  "Westbrook Training Center," Razordemon said. "We're still doing evaluations."

  "Oh, that should be a fun drive," Gabe said, sarcastically. "These four, in a van for forty-five minutes."

  "Change your mind already?"

  "No, I still think you have a good shot at pulling this off. But you also know they're going to bicker until you're on your last nerve."

  Razordemon sighed.

  The Shining Future Arch was a kludge of a bridge. It had a road deck suspended from an arch which was itself strung up by a set of suspension cables. It ended up with the highest tower-to-span ratio of any bridge in the world because the design had changed several times during construction. The kludge didn't stop there. Both Forty-First Street and Interstate Forty-Six crossed the river over the Shining Future Arch. Instead of cleanly feeding the interstate and letting the street level traffic take an onramp, it fed from Forty-First Street with the interstate traffic merging into it. Hearing that traffic was backed up on the Shining Future Arch was akin to hearing that there were clouds in the sky.

  The arch proper was made from stainless steel, the light reflecting off it induced more irritation than inspiration in the drivers. The towers were clad in pale granite which looked white in the right light. Razordemon tapped his fingers against the wheel of the van as he waited for the traffic to budge. Everything in the westbound lanes had come to a complete stop. Across the Jersey barrier, eastbound was still moving along.

  "Sooo..." Ed said. "Who's for taking the First Street bridge instead?"

  "Too late," Kevan said, "We're parked in."

  "Any idea what the holdup is?" Ed asked.

  "Well it's the Shining Future, it could be-" Razordemon was interrupted by a fireball up ahead. The front end of a pickup lifted high enough in the air to be visible over the traffic before crashing down on its tires. The wave of panic that swept through the jam was palpable. Some drivers attempted to back out of the bridge, but only succeeded in wedging their vehicles between other cars or against the rails. Most simply abandoned their cars and ran. More than a few failed to shift into park, letting their abandoned vehicles roll until they crashed into others, adding to the chaos. Razordemon shut off the engine and hopped out. Running against the crowd was futile, so he ran over the tops of the cars instead, trying to get closer to whatever was going on.

  "Should we be doing something?" Ed asked.

  "We are supposed to be helping the heroes," Kevan said.

  "He didn't exactly leave any instructions," Lazar said.

  Errol extracted his bow from its case. "A better justification can be made for lending a hand."

  "Have you got any non-lethal arrows for that thing?" Ed asked.

  Errol picked up the quiver and extracted two arrows. The heads fitted to each were cylindrical, one had two metal prongs sticking out of the end, the other was flat. "Electroshock and concussion. Shouldn't hurt anyone who's healthy." He stuck them back in place and slung the quiver over his shoulder.

  "Well, I'm not exactly armed," Ed said.

  "You can always look for injured civilians," Lazar said.

  "Right," Kevan said, "Let's go."

  As the four were climbing out of the van, Razordemon was closing in on the epicenter of the incident. Several demolished and charred vehicles marked the forward edge of the jam. Three young men were visible. Two lounged against the hood of a Lexus whose entire back end had been burned out, the third was strutting about the open pavement. All three were wearing white and blue. The blue head covering, bright white shirt, and blue pants were as sure a sign of their gang affiliation as the tattoos the most heavily muscled of the three had. The big guy pointed his beer bottle at Razordemon.

  "Luka, look, we got us some tights."

  The one who'd been strutting turned towards Razordemon. "Jackpot," Luka said, pounding a fist into his palm. He pushed his hands forward and threw a ball of fire at Razordemon. The veteran hero easily dodged the shot. It exploded against the abandoned car behind him in a conflagration that quickly burned itself out. As he moved, Razordemon produced two slivers of metal which he threw at the two spectators. The bottles in their hands shattered, spilling the malt on their pants. The skinny one turned to the big guy.

  "Markus, he broke my forty."

  Luka fired off a string of rapid blasts of flame, forcing Razordemon to keep moving. Markus stood and threw the neck of the broken bottle to the pavement. "Luka ain't gettin
' all the fun with this one." He pulled from his pocket a pair of injector pens that had been filled with a translucent blue fluid. "Shoot it, Happy." Markus jabbed the other pen into his thigh and pressed the plunger. He let out a slight moan.

  Happy looked at the injector hesitantly. "What about what happened with Paint?" Happy asked.