Beyond World's End

by Mercedes Lackey

  As far as he had been able to tell from Jeanette's notes and what he'd gotten from the Survivors back at Threshold before he'd used them up, the younger you were, the higher the initial dose, the better chance you had of surviving exposure to T-Stroke and developing the Talents that Robert Lintel needed. He didn't have any more time to mess around handing out free samples to dozens of people to get one or two Survivors. He needed broad-based success—and fast.

  "Okay, you! Sabatini! Is this everyone?" he barked.

  "Everyone in the building, sir," Sabatini said. Robert had brought the cream of his surviving security troops here with him. The eight of them were loyal—and smart enough to know that they were implicated in everything Threshold had done so far. They needed Robert's protection—and Robert needed what these children could provide.

  "We've got all the exits sealed. Nobody goes in or out," Sabatini said.

  "Good." Street hookers and runaways were no match for trained professionals. His men had taken the place over before half of them realized they were being invaded, and within minutes his operatives had searched the whole building and rounded all of the squatters up and brought them here.

  The funny thing was, not one of them had fought back. Robert had seen this kind of behavior before. Most people took a certain amount of time to work themselves up to physical resistance in a traumatic situation. Often the difference between the amateur and the professional was their quickness off the starting blocks, not their martial arts skill. The amateur might be just as proficient as the professional, but it took him longer to make up his mind that the situation required violence. And that was the difference between success and failure. So to keep any would-be heroes off balance, Robert'd had his prisoners slapped around a little once he'd gained control of the squat, just to drive home who was boss now. The children huddled together like a pack of orphaned kittens, wearing lace and leather, lipstick and sequins, the tawdry finery of a pack of Lost Boys and Girls who would never live to reach Neverland. They'd seen the uniforms and the guns, collected a few bruises, and now not one of them was willing to do so much as complain, no matter what he did to them.

  They might get their spunk back in a few hours, but by then it would be far too late. In fact, it was too late right about . . .

  "Now. Start dosing them."

  Angel and Sabatini shouldered through the circle of huddled children. Of the twenty-four men who'd been in Central Park last night, only these eight remained, but that was more than enough for his purposes. In fact, when he got what he wanted here, they'd be disposable, too.

  Robert had brought one of those pressure injectors with him from the lab, and all the T-6/157 he could find. Even after the random doses they'd put out on the streets over the last two days, there were several kilos left—more than enough to build an army with. As Angel held a gun to their heads, Sabatini injected the street kids one by one with a double dose of T-Stroke. Most of them didn't even make it into a sitting position before passing out.

  Robert smiled his approval as the last of the street kids dropped unconscious to the ground.

  "Sir?" Elkanah asked. "What do we do with the ones that go crazy? If we put them out on the street, they might lead someone back here."

  "Put them down in the basement." On his earlier reconnoitre of the building, Robert had seen that the steps to the cellar were gone. Anyone thrown down there—assuming they survived the eighteen-foot drop—would have no way of getting back out again. "Put the dead ones down there, too. They might as well have some company."

  Sabatini was sorting the limp bodies now. Two thirds of the kids were still alive. So I was right about younger subjects surviving better. All to the good. There'll be no lack of subjects. Thousands of kids vanish every year, Robert thought.

  Almost as soon as the dead bodies were cleared away, the Screamers started to awaken. They were harder to dispose of than he'd expected; supernatural strength seemed to go hand-in-hand with violent psychosis, and his operatives had to play rough. Fortunately only five of the surviving subjects needed that treatment, and with the doors between the kitchen and the front room shut, he couldn't even hear them screaming once they'd been dumped in the basement.

  And if their presence lured that pointy-eared claim-jumper Aerune back again, that was all to the good. A steel knife through the gut should settle him down and make him see reason.

  Soon, the Survivors started to rouse, staring around themselves with wide, disbelieving eyes. There was a skinny blonde brat who seemed to be their leader. She glared at Lintel in terrified defiance, her mascara running down her painted cheeks in thick black streaks.

  It doesn't get any better than this, Robert thought gloatingly. This was always the best part, watching someone who was too terrified of him to run away. Campbell had been an exemplary employee in many respects, but she'd never been properly afraid of him. Maybe he'd look her up and change that, once he had this situation squared away to his liking. He looked around for some place to sit, found nothing, and resigned himself to standing. He wouldn't be here for more than a few hours, anyway.

  After that, he'd be taking the war to the enemy.

  "Now—" he said, smiling predatorially at the Survivors. "This is what I want you to do. . . ."

  * * *

  Ria hadn't slept all night, and neither had a lot of people in the West Coast offices. She'd dragged Jonathan out of bed with her midnight phone call, but Ria was too angry about her discovery to care: she wanted action and she wanted it now.

  Jonathan delivered, gods bless him. It hadn't taken him long to get the first of the answers she wanted, and the more she found out about Threshold Labs, the worse things sounded. The company had been draining even more money from LlewellCo than she'd realized at first glance, its depredations carefully camouflaged by the bright boys and girls in Oversight and Accounting.

  And as for what Threshold had done with all that LlewellCo cash . . .

  "Since when does a pharmaceutical company need a private army?" she demanded into the telephone. "These invoices are ludicrous! We've been shovelling money at them for five years and all we've gotten have been glowing promises—I want to know exactly what Threshold's been doing with its time and my money and I want to know yesterday."

  Baker and Hardesty were behind this. Only someone high up in LlewellCo could have covered things up for this long. Well, the two of them were going to be looking for new jobs by the time the sun set in California, Ria vowed.

  As for Threshold's CEO, Robert Lintel . . .

  Jonathan's people in Computer Security had gotten into the Threshold computers without trouble—no surprise, as most of them were former outlaw hackers, working for LlewellCo as an alternative to jail. According to what they'd pulled out of the files so far—the data would take weeks to sift thoroughly—Lintel had been running a black books research program for almost as long as he'd been running Threshold, something about triggering psychic powers in humans through the use of psychotropic drug cocktails.

  And it looks like he got far enough with it to go to field trials. I am going to crucify him for this—and anyone else I can get my hands on!

  She paced furiously, but she knew there was no point in coming down on Threshold until she had absolute proof. It would be too easy for them to start dumping records at the first sign of discovery—although, to Ria's fury, someone seemed to have anticipated her there as well.

  Lintel certainly hadn't been doing the research himself—not with nothing more than a Harvard MBA—but whoever the production-end brains of the outfit had been, he or she seemed to have jumped ship, because there was no evidence of him or his research notes anywhere in the Threshold mainframe. If Mr. X had gone to that much trouble to remove all trace of his former employment, it was probably because he was on the run. Which meant that he was out of the picture for the moment, and out of reach.

  But I'll find you, wherever you are. And when I do, you'll wish you'd gone down with Threshold!

  She glan
ced at her watch, then over at the man sitting silently on the couch. Logan looked like some kind of hyperrealistic sculpture of a sleeping man, not that he was asleep. From time to time she surprised him watching her, as if he were quietly assessing the situation. She wasn't sure why she'd kept him with her, but now she was glad she had.

  "I'm going downtown to break into a lab," she said. "I own it, but that probably won't count for much just at the moment. I'll need some serious backup."

  "How serious?" Logan asked. He got to his feet and stretched, working out the kinks of a long sleepless night.

  "They won't have tanks," she thought, thinking back to the scene in the Park. "Aside from that, assume the worst."

  While the team was assembled, Ria went off to change. This assault would require armor of a different sort.

  * * *

  They arrived at Threshold just after the morning shift. The Guardians still had the key-card someone had dropped in Central Park, but Ria didn't need it. She went in through the front door.

  "Good morning. I'm Ria Llewellyn. I own this company. If you want to have a job by tonight, you'll keep your hands off that phone and buzz us through," she said, her voice dangerous.

  The receptionist took one look at Ria and the five men with her and pressed the button. Ria went directly to the top floor, and forced her way past a second receptionist and Lintel's private secretary.

  But all for nothing. Lintel wasn't there. And from the look of the place, he wasn't coming back.

  Ria swore feelingly. She'd been sure she'd get here in time to nail the slimy bastard. Lintel had too much invested in Threshold to just go slinking off leaving his turf undefended!

  "Ma'am?"

  The bodyguard she'd posted outside the door to watch the secretary came inside, dragging someone by the scruff of the neck. The victim was wearing a white lab coat, and looked absolutely terrified.

  "I caught him coming out of the elevator, heading for Lintel's office. When he saw me he tried to bolt."

  "Bring him over here," Ria said, leaning back against Lintel's desk. Because she thought she'd be facing a corporate raider this morning, she'd dressed to match: a dark green Dior skirted suit with matching pumps. Dagger optional.

  It didn't take much in the way of Talent to read the man's mind. His name was Beirkoff, and he'd been one of the group in Central Park last night. He'd also been Lintel's inside man on the black budget op that Lintel had been running, and now that he realized Lintel was gone, Beirkoff knew he'd been cut off and left to twist in the wind. He'd be willing to do anything to save his skin.

  "Lose something?" Ria asked mockingly. "Your safety net, perhaps?" Beirkoff's face went grey, and for a moment, the bodyguard's fist in his collar was the only thing holding him up. The details of the project flashed through his mind—an underground testing lab, some cells, too many people dead. . . .

  "Mr. Beirkoff, you have exactly one chance to save your life and your freedom," Ria said, getting to her feet and leaning toward him. "Take me down to the Black Labs and tell me everything you know about T-6/157."

  * * *

  There was a slot for a key-card on the inside wall of the Executive Elevator, and three unmarked buttons below it. Ria'd found the card in Lintel's desk, once she'd broken the lock. Beirkoff slid it into place and pressed the third button.

  Beirkoff hadn't been good at forming coherent sentences, but Ria'd had no trouble getting most of the story by skimming the surface of his thoughts. Unfortunately, he had no idea what had happened after Eric had vanished from the Park, nor what Lintel might be up to right now. Lintel had sent him home for the night, and when he'd come back this morning, he'd walked straight into Ria.

  The level the elevator opened onto showed every sign of having been hastily vacated. Doors stood open, files lay on the floor.

  "Search it," Ria said crisply. Sorcerous telepathy wasn't admissible in court, and even direct testimony wouldn't really hold up well against a high-priced lawyer. She needed hard evidence to hang Lintel with.

  She got it when Beirkoff took her down to the holding cells. A man in a white lab coat—Beirkoff's thoughts identified him as Dr. Ramchandra, the only other on-the-books Threshold employee with Black Level clearance—lay dead in the hallway, shot neatly through the chest. Beirkoff was horrified, and Ria suspected that he'd never seen anyone freshly dead before. Like so many yuppies, his only encounters with death were via the media, or perhaps the sanitized and beautified body of a friend or relative after the mortuary professionals had made it acceptable. Ria thought back to the battle in Griffith Park. She'd seen violent death in every possible aspect. Bored with his horror, she moved on.

  All of the cells were full, and all of the occupants were dead as well. They looked like the mummies from the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was hard to believe they'd ever been human.

  "They were the ones who survived," Beirkoff said from behind her in a shaken voice. "If the stuff didn't kill them on the first shot and you gave them a second dose, it was like they just . . . burned out."

  "There's no one here," Logan said, coming back down the hall. He glanced at Ramchandra's body and then back at Ria, his expression unchanging. "But there's a lab back there that looks like somebody used it to cook up a major batch of something that isn't there now."

  "Campbell did the cooking," Beirkoff said, recovering more by the minute. "She got the stuff as far as field trials and then she took off. But Mr. Lintel made sure she made up a big batch before she split."

  And Campbell was the only one who knew the recipe, though any competent chemist could probably reconstruct it from a large enough sample, Ria read in his mind. Campbell. Jeanette Campbell. I'll remember that name. Someday soon, Jeanette Campbell, you and I are going to have a short but interesting talk.

  It was time to call the cops and bust this situation wide open. A part of her couldn't help noting that this whole thing was going to be a media bonus for LlewellCo—valiant chairwoman discovers illegal research going on in one of her subsidiaries, does a Bernstein and Woodward, and turns the results over to the cops. She'd be a Movie of the Week for sure. She'd also be tied up in red tape and meetings for the next year, and Ria had other things to do just at the moment. She turned to Lintel's flunky.

  "Listen to me, Beirkoff. You'd like to stay out of prison, right?"

  Beirkoff nodded, obviously more terrified right now of Ria than of the dead body lying on the floor or the wrath of the absent Robert Lintel.

  "You have exactly one hope of doing that. You are going to call the cops and report what you found here, and tell them the following story: You came to me with your suspicions. I sent you down here with a security team and orders to notify the authorities if you found anything. I wasn't here today. In fact, I've never been here at all. There will be a lawyer here in an hour to handle LlewellCo's involvement, but you won't wait for him. You're going to give the police full cooperation.

  "Play it this way and you come out smelling like a rose. Cross me, and I guarantee that LlewellCo—and I personally—will do everything in our power to make the brief remainder of your sordid existence a living hell."

  "Yes, sir! Yes, ma'am! I mean—yes. I can do that," Beirkoff babbled.

  "Good. I'm out of here. The rest of you, stay here and keep Mr. Beirkoff honest."

  * * *

  When she stepped out on the street again, the contrast was as great as if she'd stepped through a Portal into Underhill. It was one of those bright winter days that sometimes came in December, the kind that made you think that New York was a nice place to be after all.

  But right now it wasn't a nice place for somebody. Because somewhere out there right now, Robert Lintel was trying to turn ordinary humans into mages using a drug that had a one hundred percent net fatality rate.

  And he and Eric were on a collision course.

  * * *

  Eric drew himself up and did his level best to channel Dharinel in a bad mood. The elven mage didn'
t suffer fools gladly at the best of times, and that damn-your-eyes arrogance was the only thing that would save Eric now.

  "It took you long enough to get here!" he snarled at the gnomish Unseleighe lackey in his best imitation of a pissed-off elven noble, leaking a little magic past his shields to reinforce the effect. "Take me to your Lord—at once, do you hear!"

  And they said spending all that time at RenFaires would never be good for anything. . . .

  "Yes, High Lord. Urla hears and obeys. At once, High Lord!" The creature knelt, pulling the cap from its head and kneading it between enormous gnarled hands. Its wetness left brownish smears on Urla's skin. Eric had a sick feeling that he knew what it had been soaked with. Blood.

  Not one of the good guys. That's for sure.

  But for once Faire shtick wasn't just a way of amusing travelers and filling his pockets. This time he was playing for his life. His bluff had worked so far—it was a safe bet that any of the Lesser creatures he encountered would owe fealty to some High Lord or another, and even the Unseleighe Lords followed certain rules—which was more than Eric could say for this Urla. He knew that Lady Day would find him eventually, no matter where he went in Underhill. But until she did, Eric was more or less trapped here, though rather less than more.

  "Get up—get up!" he said haughtily, waving the hand that didn't hold his flute. "I don't have time for this nonsense!"

  The redcap crawled backward submissively before springing to its feet. Bowing and gesturing, it began to lead Eric through the forest. He took the time to take his flute apart and put it back in its case in his messenger bag before following. He didn't know what he might encounter along the way, and he didn't want to lose the instrument.

  Urla led him onward through the empty forest until they came to an enormous tree. Its trunk was easily thirty feet around, and like many trees this old and large, its lower trunk was hollow. Eric followed Urla through the gap in the trunk, and when they came out the other side, the forest was gone.