Safe House (2000)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 10 Clancy

  Laurent sighed, looked toward the closed front door, which led into Maj's work space. She was elsewhere, he knew. He thought he would invite her in when she was free. But then the idea of what she might think when she looked in here, after being so used to the sumptuous spaces she routinely moved through, began to chill him a little. She would be polite about it. But he knew she would be thinking how poor it all looked, how barren. She would know it wasn't his fault...but she would still think that. And he had been embarrassed enough lately.

  No, let it wait awhile, let him find time to do some more work. There was likely to be too much time to work anyway, for a while, until they found his father.

  If they found his father...

  He turned around, then, and made the image. The tall man in the worn dark coat.... Popi never had a coat that wasn't a little too short for him in the sleeves. He just had unusually long arms and wrists and hands, and they never failed to hang out of the State coats, which were made to averages and not for individuals. Tall and blond, a little hawkish looking, the high cheekbones and the long nose reinforcing the look--but the glasses always adding that last touch of owl, turning the hawk-expression friendly and quizzical. There he was--his father. Laurent turned.

  The figure standing there was incomplete--it had no face.

  I'm forgetting already, Laurent thought, in rising panie. It's only been a couple of days...! "I won't! I won't forget!" he shouted. "Go away!"

  When he looked again, the figure was gone.

  He stood there, breathing hard, feeling silly for having overreacted. Finally Laurent let out a long breath, a sigh, and reached down to the table, to the note--turned it over.

  The other side was blank.

  He let it fall.

  Laurent got up, then, and turned to the shelf by the window, where he had placed one thing which did not exist in the real apartment. It was a model of an Arbalest fighter--an icon leading to Maj's fighter in her Cluster Rangers account. She had, she said, put the "training wheels" on it for him, so that he could fly it with minimum experience, inside her own simming space.

  Laurent decided not to wait. She'll understand, he thought, and went over to pick up the model of the fighter. I really need a break, something to take my mind off...

  Say it. Off the fear. That your father will never come back, never get out. That they have him in some dark place, and they're doing to him what they did to Piedern's father two years ago, when they caught him handling foreign publications. But what they do this time will be worse, much worse, because your father was one of the special ones...and he turned on them. They never forgive that. Never.

  Laurent took in a long breath, let it go. Took another breath.

  All right, he thought. Let's get a grip, here. Let's go somewhere that the dark is friendly, just for a little while. I won't stay long. I promised I wouldn't overdo it--and Mrs. Green will probably have dinner ready in a little while...it would be rude to be late.

  He put the model of the Arbalest down on the shelf again and stood there touching it. "Guest ingress," he said.

  Laurent vanished, leaving the model there by itself, the one black thing in the white room.

  7

  Elsewhere, another room was very small and dark. It had been a coal bin, once, in the cellar of this house, in a time when people still used coal for heating in the cities; its walls were all black with soot, and a few forgotten lumps of coal still lay around on the rammed dirt of the floor. The coal cellar had just one way to the outside, a pair of metal doors at a forty-five degree angle to the stucco of the building. The doors' hinges were long since rusted shut, as was the padlock through the old hasp, connecting them. They had been painted over, for good measure, some time in the last decade, with (in a gesture of optimism) a rustproofing paint. Plainly, from its external appearance, no one could possibly be in here...which made it an excellent place to hide.

  Armin Darenko sat as comfortably as he could, leaning against the sooty wall, concentrating on the tiny line of light that came to him through those old doors, from a not-quite-painted-over crack on the right-hand side of one of them. He had come in a couple of days ago, in the dead of night, through the tunnel in the middle of the floor. His clean clothes were down in that tunnel, now, so as not to become smirched with soot that would draw attention to him when it was time to leave. He knew that time would come in the next few days--his friends were working for him, out there. But that did not stop him from being very afraid, as he sat here, and his mind ran in frightened circles like a rat in a particularly inhumane Skinner box, always looking for the cheese and never finding it, and being shocked again and again by the same fear.

  He sighed, took a deep breath, and tried, for the thousandth time, to break the cycle. Laurent was safe. Of that much he was sure. Laurent was in Alexandria, with the Greens, and was almost certainly coping splendidly. His son had all his mother's old toughness, that ability to deal with what was happening around her and not be more trouble to others than necessary. And he was carrying the silent little helpers which would keep him healthy, protect him by brute force from passing infections against which he might not have been inoculated, keep his system chemistry in kilter, and otherwise make themselves useful. Very useful indeed they would be, some day, when they were in the right hands and turned loose to help a suffering world. For the moment, though, Laurent was their unwitting custodian, and in a safe place...so the two things about which Armin Darenko had been more concerned than about anything else in the world were now where he did not need to worry about them. Now Armin was free to concentrate on getting himself out of here.

  Getting in had been easy enough, for a man who for a long, long time had been idly considering that there might come a day the events of which called for a sudden departure. Escapes planned at the last moment rarely do well, he knew. So quietly Armin had begun, about twenty years ago, keeping his ears open for information which might come in handy eventually. And sure enough, it came. When the governments started changing over with more than the usual speed, rumors started turning up here and there about tunnels under the city. Some of them were just that, rumors--but occasionally they were true. This particular network of tunnels, which apparently went right back to the bad old Ceaucescu days, was one of the true ones. They did not lead anywhere really useful--just from cellar to cellar of some of the houses in this part of town--but that fact in itself made them useful, since tunnels which actually led directly to escape would have been found long since and filled in, or blown up. Right now a simple place to hide was all that Armin could want in the world.

  He had enough food and water to keep him going for a couple of days yet, and a cache under a rock in the nearby park where he could, with the greatest caution and in the dark of night, slip out and get more, if he needed it. He was intent on not going out if he could avoid it, though--not until he heard, on the tiny radio he was carrying, the coded news from the people who had agreed to help get him out. Armin had risked enough going out to the lakes, three days ago, to leave the false trail that he much hoped would concentrate the authorities' search in that direction. It was too much to hope that they would keep looking there for long, after they found no sign of him in the space of a couple or a few days. They were not stupid people. But even a couple of days' distraction would allow the friends who were helping him here to complete their own plans. With luck, in a couple of days, maybe less, he would go to join Laurent.

  And then the world would have to be started all over again, for both of them. He knew the medical community in the States would welcome him. So would others...and this time he would have to be more careful than he had been here. It was not as if there were not cruel, venal, and evil people in the United States, just as well as here; people who would see, in the delicate and intelligent little machines he had created, a weapon instead of a tool. He would have to work with Martin, and with Martin's friends at Net Force and elsewhere in the intelligence and scientific communities, to find ways to control h
is creations so that they could not be modified for deadly purposes.

  He sighed, alone there in the darkness, and knew that it would be an uphill fight, if indeed this purpose could be achieved at all. There was no putting the genic back in the bottle, as the old story had it. It was out, now--out walking around the world in his son's body. Soon enough it would be in the lab, being studied by other scientists. And after that...

  Armin felt around him in the darkness for the plastic bottle of springwater, took a swig, sealed it, and put it aside again. At least he had left no working prototypes here. What hurt him most now was the price he suspected that some of the people who had been working with him must be paying. But there comes a time when one must, however reluctantly, weigh lives in one's hand--one's own life, as well as those of others--and decide whether sparing two lives, or five or ten, here and now, is worth losing thousands, perhaps millions, later on. For Armin was not so naive as to think his invention would stay inside his country's borders if he completed it and turned it over to the government. Cluj desperately needed hard currency. He would sell the microps to anyone who would pay him. Terrorists, intelligence organizations, criminals, common murderers, other countries with better intentions would all pay well for them. And chaos would ensue. Soon the negative uses would proliferate, outnumbering the positive ones. No one would know whether anything they ate or drank was normal food, or something that could take them apart from the inside--either slowly, molecule by molecule, or very quickly indeed.

  Armin's only consolation was that he had managed to destroy all the locally held records about the section of coding which told the microps how to "breed," how to reproduce themselves from raw materials, protein chains and mineral ions, inside their host. He had destroyed not only the code, before he left, but all his notes, and as many of his associates' notes as possible. Not all of them had been accessible...but he had made sure that it would take a long, long while before anyone remaining behind here would be able to retro-engineer the microps from the bits and pieces which were all that remained when he left the laboratory for the last time the other night, having that afternoon sent his son off, ostensibly to visit the vampire's castle.

  Half his work was done. Now all that remained was to get himself to safety as well. The quiet people who had slowly let him know that they would help him were now busy out there--he would hear from them soon. Most of his time he now spent listening to the little radio on its earphone, amusing himself by judging the tenor of the search for him by the increasing or decreasing shrillness of the announcements about him during the "crime bulletins." The rest of the time, he spent thinking about new microps designs, taking refuge in the sweet orderliness of the molecular-level world, where structure and symmetry reigned....

  ...And about his son. Safe, thank God, he thought; safe....

  In the darkness he closed his eyes.

  The darkness sang to him, and Laurent streaked out through it, laughing. Maj had been right about the Arbalest. It needed very little expertise in handling, in this mode--a normal joystick was enough. "Right now you're going to be flying it for pleasure, not mastery," she had said, having handed him the icon. "So there's no harm in letting the game module 'read your mind' a little. But don't overdo it. And I wouldn't go in the main game, if I were you. The Archon's people are still drifting around there trying to make trouble, some of them...and if you get my fighter shot up, we're going to have words."

  But she had also shown him how to return instantly from the Cluster Rangers game to her own simming space...and Laurent had not been able to resist. Maj's re-created space, though full of stars and matching the Cluster Rangers space closely in terms of astrography and physical laws--this being important for the high-G work--still did not have that subtle, sublime look-and-feel that the original had. He craved the sound of the stars singing, and he was going to have just a little of it, on his own, before coming back to mundane life again.

  Listen to me, he thought as he flew up and over the curve of Dolorosa, into that spectacular view. "Mundane," I am calling her life, after only, what? A day and a half of it? Two days. And a life that any of the other kids at school would kill for--I don't care how high up in the government their parents are. Look at me! I'm becoming jaded. Decadent.

  He laughed for sheer pleasure as the great arm of the Galaxy spread itself out before him, the sound of it shimmering silvery against the ship's skin, tingling all through him. This is what virtually should be like, Laurent thought, tumbling the Arbalest in its yaw axis so that it turned to face the view of the great heart of the Seraphim Cluster, all those burning jewels spilled out across the night, flaring and fading, flaring and fading again. You would never have thought the stars could have so many colors, he thought. He knew the stellar types, but the prosaic letters and numbers did not even hint at this wild treasury of shades and brilliances, set dazzling in the darkness.

  It is enough to turn me into an astronomer, Laurent thought. And a big shiver went through him, hot and cold at once, and then another one, so that he was surprised for a moment, and checked the ship's controls to see if something was wrong with the suit conditioning system, or the cockpit's own environmental controls. But all the lights were green, so that Laurent laughed again, at himself this time. He tumbled the ship once more to get one last look at that huge arm of the Galaxy, lying draped over a third of the sky, like a blazing banner spread out on some impossible wind--

  "Niko?"

  Uh-oh, he thought, and tumbled the ship one more time, getting a fix on Maj's hangar and heading for it. "Coming--"

  It was Maj's mother, outside the virtual space. It amused Laurent that her family all seemed to leave the option open to talk to each other from inside or outside their various virtualities, no matter what they were doing. "Do you eat lamb, honey?"

  "Lamb? Yes!"

  "Oh, good," she said, invisible but amused. "An enthusiast. Garlic?"

  "We all have to eat garlic," Laurent said. "It is required. It keeps the Transylvanians away."

  "Mmm, no comment," Maj's mother said. "If I didn't know better, I would have believed you about the cows, too. Are you going to be in there much longer?"

  "I am coming out now," Laurent said. He was landing the Arbalest in Maj's hangar even as he spoke--which was just as well, since the light over one of the hangar's pedestrian doors started flashing, indicating that someone wanted to come in.

  "Good," Maj's mother said. "Because the Muffin is giving me grief at the moment that you are not available to be played with."

  "Oh. I will be right out."

  The hangar ceiling was almost finished shutting, and the huge space began to repressurize.

  "'Niko," said Maj's voice in the middle of the air, suggesting that the Muffin was indeed within range, "what are you doing in there?"

  "Just letting the air back in."

  The process finished as he got down onto the floor again. The flashing light over the door turned green, and the door opened. Maj came strolling across the syncrete as Laurent went through the walk-around, which Maj told him was traditional among pilots, to make sure that nothing had fallen off their craft--or if it had, to find what it was so that someone else could be charged for it.

  "And where have you been?" she said, trying to sound severe.

  "Flying," he said. "I finished with my work space for today...." He sighed a little. "It will take a while to get it the way I want it."

  "You didn't take it out in the real game, did you?" She looked at him narrowly.

  "Well," he said. "Yes."

  "Oh, come on, Laurent," she said. "I promised I would make sure you didn't overdo it. And what if the Archon had come along with one of his fleets?"

  "But the Archon was blown up. In the Big Bang."

  Maj blew out an annoyed breath. "You know they'll just clone him from the bits and pieces." she said. "In fact, there are probably clones sitting around on Darkworld right now waiting to be uncanned and reprogrammed. He could have turned up the
next day!"

  "But he did not. And besides, you said it would have been tactically unwise." He grinned at her.

  "Space lawyer," Maj said. "Come on, lose the suit. I hear that Mom is going to make her famous impaled lamb chops with garlic stuck all through them."

  Laurent concentrated and vanished the suit. "What does it mean," he said as they walked back to the door to Maj's space, "when you try to make something in the work space, and it fails?"

  "It's just incomplete visualization," Maj said. "All kinds of reasons for that. In your case, you're still getting used to the hardware-software interface...failures are common." She looked around her at the soft evening light coming through the high windows in her own work space as they stepped through the door. "You should have seen how long it took me to get this right. The lighting, the synchronization to local time. The sounds, the smells..." She looked at the floor with amusement. "And the carpet kept changing color. It drove me crazy until I found out why it did that. I'd stolen the 'template' from a carpet company ad online...and every time they changed the ad, the rug changed, too...."

  "But there is no rug here."

  "No, I got rid of it." She smiled a rather embarrassed smile. "See, I didn't find out what I was doing wrong until much later. I vanished the carpet and put in hardwood flooring...and then found out. But look, Laurent, really, your dad said that he didn't want you to spend too much time Netside, and I--"

  The door on the other side of the work space opened, and a tall, gangly young man wearing fluorescent floppy clothes and a marked resemblance to Maj's father looked in. "Maj, is your friend--Oh, here he is. Hi there."

  "Laurent, this is the famous Rick you keep hearing about," Maj said. "The phantom stranger."

  "When I'm home all the time, she complains," Rick said, coming over to shake Laurent's hand. "When I'm not home all the time, she complains. Let me give you advice--don't have any sisters."