“You just shot my daughter and now you want to lecture me on politics?” If Jay could have got his hands on that thick throat, he would gladly have strangled the man.
“Shut up and listen. The Lord’s True Path has shown itself incapable of sustaining a modern economy—or even a Medieval one. While their moral principles are sound, they apply them too rigidly. This country is going to the dogs. The South American Alliance is psyching itself up to invade us. Did you know that? Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, countries we wouldn’t have stooped to wipe our boots on a few years ago, are seriously thinking about ‘restoring democracy’ to their neighbor. How do you like the indignity of that? They’re gambling on our nuclear arsenal being so run down and neglected that we couldn’t strike back. And they’re not so wrong. I have people everywhere, you understand, and I know what’s going on.”
“Will you get to the fucking point?”
“I said shut up and listen.” He fired his weapon and Jay’s world exploded into pain—hot, searing pain that shook his body and blinded him with jagged lightning. He heard the coffee service crash to the floor, felt his body fall against the chair and table. He found himself on the floor at Cara’s feet, gasping for breath, tensing against the unbearable, scorching pain, not daring to believe it had stopped.
“Get up,” Duvalle said. “Come on, get up.”
Jay hurried to obey. The churchman was watching him, still covering him with the gun. He waved it towards the chair and Jay climbed into it, limbs trembling.
“What the hell was that?” Jay said, but, of course, he knew.
“I like to think of it as a foretaste of what you atheists are in for on Judgment Day. The Korean police use it, I believe. Don’t ask me how it works. Now, where was I?”
Jay noticed his trousers were wet and hoped it was just spilled coffee. He clenched his teeth against the slowly-subsiding pain. Duvalle relaxed into his armchair. He looked solid and heavy and completely confident in his domination of Jay.
“Ah yes, the South American Alliance, waiting down there, ready to pounce. And what they’re waiting for has something to do with what Polanski is planning. He’s made several trips across the border in the past few years—probably several more than we’re aware of. And now we have their fleets on maneuvers in the Atlantic and the Pacific. A very unlikely coincidence, don’t you think?”
To Jay it sounded like paranoid ravings from a man who had spent too many years scheming and conniving in secret and now saw plots everywhere he looked. Besides, an invasion from the south to restore democracy sounded like a pretty good idea. Maybe he would have to revise his opinion of Polanski upward by a notch or two.
“Why don’t you just go to the Government with all this?” Jay asked. His limbs felt weak and his chest felt as if someone large had been sitting on it. He should probably find a doctor, he thought, or at least lie down for a week.
“People who can deny the evidence of a crumbling economy and a population on the edge of uprising are hardly likely to listen to evidence of a foreign invasion. You fail to grasp the essential nature of the Lord’s True Path Party. God has given them this country. He gave them the Adjustment to cleanse the nation of sin. He speaks directly to the President and directs his domestic and foreign policies. The party is not prepared to accept that the God who did all this for them would abandon them now and let their Paradise on Earth be destroyed. That would imply that they had lost His favor. It would mean He had turned His smile away from them despite all their devotion, and had bestowed His grace upon the idolaters from the south and the atheists and doubters within their gates.”
“I thought you were supposed to be one of the believers.”
“Oh, I am. Don’t mistake me. But the Measurers of the Temple are rather pragmatic. We believe that God helps those who help themselves.”
Jay certainly didn’t want to argue theology with this man, but he needed time to get over that damned pain ray he’d been zapped with, and he needed time to work out what to do next. “You know that’s not actually in the Bible, don’t you?”
“You’ve got a smart mouth, Chief Inspector. If you want a real Bible quote, how about this one? Suffer the little children … something, something.” He swung his gun towards Cara.
Jay was on his feet and standing between them in a moment. “All right, all right. You’ve got my full attention. Tell me what you want.”
Duvalle shook his head in bewilderment; real or feigned, Jay could not tell. “You know, I’ve often wondered what it is that makes a godless man behave with moral integrity. I mean, what’s in it for him? Just look at you now, ready to take another taste of hellfire to spare your daughter pain. Just like a regular Christian father.”
The weakness and trembling was seeping back into Jay’s body as the adrenaline surge faded. He sat down again and gave in to his weariness. “Can we stop playing games now?”
Duvalle rested the gun in his lap and sat back. “Of course. How rude of me.” Jay closed his eyes as the man continued. “You will go to Polanski’s nest in the Shanty. You will kill him. You will bring back proof of his death. I will then hand you your daughter. If you can free your … What should we call her? Whore? Fornicator? Jezebel? Never mind. If you can free her, then by all means do so. But, remember, this pretty little lady is counting on you coming back for her.”
“You think killing Polanski will make everything all right again?”
“It will help.”
“And what makes you think Polanski’s people will let me get close to him?”
“Don’t worry. That’s all taken care of.”
“I’ll need a gun.” And if you hand me one now, I’ll shoot you where you sit, you evil bastard.
“All taken care of.” He made no movement but the library door opened and two armed men came in. Jay rose on wobbly legs. “You’ve got twenty-four hours, Chief Inspector. Try not to be late.”
Chapter 17: Convergence
Sandra had to admit that Matthew and his team worked hard and fast. It was only early afternoon and the basic structure of the lob site was already in place.
She had taken over the assembly of the computer systems that constituted the control desk, and that too was coming along nicely. Of course, there had been a few unpleasant surprises when she booted up the systems and took a look inside. The basic field generation circuits were making so much high frequency electronic noise that it was no wonder the lobs had been dangerously inaccurate. It was probably because of the cheap and ancient parts that had been used to construct the systems, so there wasn’t much she could do about it except try to use software filters to tame the worst of it. The motley collection of old fusion generators was certainly putting out enough power for a lob into deep time, but that too was dirty. She should strip down the generators, replace the most decayed parts and tune each one. As it stood, the power spiked unpredictably to levels she wouldn’t trust to keep a probe in one piece let alone a human being.
But that would not be a problem. No-one was doing a long lob with this equipment. Not if she could help it.
Polanski looked in once to see how things were getting on, but he didn’t speak and he didn’t appear again. She doubted that he had any clue as to what progress was being made, but the general air of industry and order must have been reassuring enough.
One of the fusion generators, number seven in the array, was making a loud hum—nothing too serious, she decided, probably a fractionally misaligned magnetic field. But she made a point of clucking over it, taking off a side panel and shaking her head. In the end, Matthew came over and asked her what the problem was.
“I don’t know. I don’t like the readings from this one. It’s pretty unstable.”
Matthew looked concerned. “It’s always made that noise. I thought it was just a bit of field misalignment.”
“Did you look inside?”
“Focus fusion isn’t really my thing. I looked, but I didn’t touch anything. I’d probably have made it worse.”
>
Which was just what Sandra was hoping to hear. “Second generation Indian crap. This model was always dodgy. I should take it apart. If it’s the primary laser, we could be in big trouble.”
“We don’t have time. That could take a day all on its own.”
She put on a worried face. “How long’s it been making that noise?”
“Since we got it. Months now. We’ve used it on eight different lobs.”
“Well, I suppose it only has to last for one more.”
She went back to the control desk, leaving Matthew anxiously studying the suspect generator. She needed maybe a couple more hours to sort out the software and set up the parameters for the lob. The power train was all in place, the displacement field coils were almost set up, and some preliminary calibration work was already underway. She smiled to think of what her university’s health and safety people would think of the spider web of wiring and jerry-rigged equipment, or the workers clambering around inside that live, high-voltage junk pile.
To do the lob properly should take weeks. Not just weeks of careful construction, but of careful calibration and testing. Doing it this way was suicide.
But then, that seemed to be what Polanski wanted.
-oOo-
The van pulled up in a rough neighborhood of abandoned industrial buildings and empty lots. Two men got out of the back with Jay. They were Duvalle’s men but they were dressed in the brown shirts and long coats of the Sons of Joshua militia. Jay had been held in a scruffy house by other men for hours while Duvalle’s people made their arrangements. Now he was painfully aware that his twenty-four hour allotment had shrunk to something less than twenty and Cara was still back there at Duvalle’s mansion.
“There’s the Shanty,” one of the men said, pointing across a rubble-strewn expanse of concrete to where a chain-link fence rose high into the gray DC sky. Beyond the fences was an insane tumble of shacks and lean-tos that might have been dropped from a plane for all the order and solidity they had. Windows, roughly cut into plywood walls, faced them through the fence.
“This way,” said the man and pushed Jay towards a low office block with no glass in its windows and a sign outside so faded it was impossible to read. It was dark when they went inside but Jay’s captors seemed to know the layout. They took him to an office door, one of the few still hanging, and unlocked it. Inside was a small room with a rectangular hole in the middle of its concrete floor.
“Down there,” the man said.
Jay saw there were wooden steps leading down into subterranean darkness. He hesitated, not trusting the deep blackness below, or the two thugs behind him.
“It’s just a tunnel,” his guard said and flicked on a flashlight. “Go on.”
Jay counted twenty-five steps before his feet touched the dirt floor of the tunnel. The ground was squishy and wet and he heard things slither and scramble through the muck. His guard’s flashlight barely lit up more than three meters ahead but even that was enough to convince Jay this was not a safe place to be. He studied the rough-hewn ceiling for signs of imminent collapse and found far too many of them.
“Keep moving,” the guard said, shoving him forward. “This place gives me the creeps.”
In all, they walked maybe forty or fifty paces through the dark, damp tunnel, driving a small army of rats and other, less savory creatures, ahead of them. At the other end of the tunnel was another staircase. They emerged through a trap door into a wooden box barely large enough for the three of them to stand in. It was lit only by the gaps in its ill-fitting joints and panels.
“You know what you got to do?” one of Jay’s guards asked him.
He nodded. Realizing the man probably couldn’t see him well enough to tell, he added, “Yeah.”
The guard unlocked the only door and they stepped out into a small alley, a shoulder-wide gap between sagging, teetering shanties. Sheets of decayed polythene flapped in a breeze ripe with the smell of raw sewage. Jay gagged and the man behind him sniggered.
“Welcome to the Shit Hole,” the guard said.
“Dear God,” Jay could hardly believe the squalor of the place. “Why doesn’t the city do something about this?”
“They did,” the guard said. “Didn’t you see the big fence around the place?” He turned to share a grin with his companion then turned back to Jay, all business. “Head that way. Once we get out into the street, we’ll turn left. You go right. Remember the route?”
“It’s in my commplant.”
“In your what?”
“Yes, I remember the route.”
“Then let’s go.” He handed Jay a small, snub-nosed revolver. Jay checked the safety, checked that the six chambers were all full and pushed it into his pocket. With a gun like that, you’d need to be standing right in front of someone in order to hit them.
They squeezed their way along the alley and came out into a broader street that had people in it and even a couple of cyclists. The group turned left. The fake Sons of Joshua had their riot sticks in hand and held Jay firmly between them. It took a moment for the people on the street to start noticing the trio, but soon every eye was on them.
“Hey, what’d he do?” an old man shouted from his perch on a wooden chair beside a furnished hole between two multicolored, board-built homes.
“Stay out of it, Granddad. This is a dangerous terrorist.”
On cue, Jay shook off the fake SOBs, turned on his heel and ran back up the street. Behind him, he heard them shouting. Then he heard them shooting. People screamed and yelled and ran for cover. He wanted to duck down and hide too. He didn’t trust Duvalle’s men not to shoot him in the back. After a minute, the shooting stopped and he glanced over his shoulder. The fake SOBs were chasing him now but they’d given him a thirty meter lead and he knew they’d let him keep it until they pretended to give up and let him escape. He switched his commplant to aug, and green arrows marked his route along the ground. He felt tired and was already struggling for breath. Duvalle’s pain ray had left him weak and aching, but he kept running. There was no other choice.
-oOo-
The software was running and the generators were as steady as they’d ever be. The capacitors weren’t charged but that wouldn’t matter. On her display, every circuit check she ran came up green.
“I’m going to run the generators up to twenty-five percent,” she called. “Everybody off the rig. All non-essential crew please leave the room.”
Matthew came to stand beside her. People downed tools and most of them shuffled out through the door, glad of a break. She waited until they were all clear then stood back to give Matthew access to the controls.
“Why don’t you do the honors?” she said.
Looking sheepish, he pushed the slider across to the twenty-five percent mark. Immediately the generators began to respond. The power climbed steadily, the status indicators for the various subsystems lit up in green and held steady. The hum of the reactors rose as tens of megawatts of power became available. He turned to Sandra with a grin. Everything was going great.
Then an alarm sounded. On the displays, a schematic of the generator array popped up with one generator flashing red, the words “Overload Imminent” flashing with it. Matthew gawped at the message, open-mouthed.
“It’s number seven!” Sandra shouted over the racket. “Evacuate the building! The fusion reactor’s going to blow!”
Already scared, the people remaining in the room panicked and ran for the door.
“But I don’t understand,” Matthew said, no doubt because in all his years working on displacement field rigs, he’d never heard of such a thing. Focus fusion reactors were one of the safest electricity generating technologies ever invented. They just didn’t blow up.
“It’s the magnetic containment bottle,” Sandra shouted, talking nonsense. “It’s causing a flux buildup in the reactor chamber.” She grabbed him by the shoulders. “Get out of here now. There’s one thing I can try. Maybe there’s still hope.” She shoved Ma
tthew towards the door. For a couple of paces, he stumbled uncertainly, then he ran. Turning back to the desk, she hit the “Lob” button and a timer sprang to life. Ten seconds, nine …
She grabbed the length of angle iron she had stashed beside the console, then ran to the platform above the displacement field coils and leapt up onto it.
In a few seconds the power of the perfectly stable generators would surge through the coils and the field would bloom, throwing her out of spacetime and back through the pseudospatial void.
She had no suit on, no air to breathe, and only her stupid cotton dress to insulate her from the cold. She breathed out as hard as she could, emptying her lungs so that the vacuum would not force them to decompress explosively. She bent her knees, screwed her eyes shut, and buried her face in her hands.
-oOo-
Jay rounded a corner into a long street of mud and shanties. There were few people about. But up ahead, where the green arrows of his augmented reality route-finder turned to point at Polanski’s headquarters, two men sitting quietly with machine guns on their laps stood up as he raced towards them. They half-raised their weapons, not sure how to respond. He slowed down and put his hands up. Behind him, he heard the two fake SOBs clatter round the corner, shouting for him to stop.
Now Polanski’s guards knew what to do. They aimed their weapons past Jay at his pursuers. Jay threw himself to the ground just as the fake SOBs fired at the guards. The guards ran for cover, firing back, and the SOBs beat a quick retreat into the nearest side street. Hearing the shots, more armed men came rushing out of Polanski’s HQ, they exchanged shouted questions and answers with the first guards and set of after the fake SOBs.
True Path Page 16
