Cyber Way

by Alan Dean Foster

  And in the center of the web, manipulating the Mandlebrot patterns of the universe and electrotactile Endless Snakes and me and thee and your Uncle Charlie, what? Something vast and unconcerned, cosmically indifferent? And why not? Since when does an operator worry about

  his bytes? He doesn’t empathize with his database; he just switches it on and off.

  He woke up drenched in sweat, the cot creaking beneath him.

  CHAPTER 19

  On a hill north of Cameron, Yistin Gaggii greeted the sun as it sucked the chill from the morning air on the Moenkopi Plateau. Four-legged shapes watched him emerge from the motor home. They had not slept because they did not need sleep. They had difficulty merely comprehending the idea.

  Gaggii had not slept either. The night had been spent in preparation. He stretched and inhaled deeply, feeling no different save for a tingle of anticipation.

  The track that led down into the little valley was narrow and treacherous, but the motor home would make it. He had come this way before. Without a word to the unblinking canine faces surrounding him, he turned and reentered his vehicle. The engine started smoothly.

  Moody woke from a dream not of vast emptinesses between the stars or rainbow threads and tentacles of unfathomable purpose, but of fishing from the back of a flat-bottomed boat moored to the mucky basement of a cypress tree. The sun was warm and damp on Florida Bay and the solar cooler in the bow was stuffed with sandwiches and cold beer. It was the best of all possible worlds.

  When wakefulness came, he resented it deeply.

  The room was full of talk. Ooljee was sitting on the edge of his cot, trying to rub the sleep from his eyes. He saw his partner eyeing him.

  “You have not missed anything. Yet.”

  Moody nodded, rose, and checked the location of his fly and his pistol. A partition had been erected to separate the temporary sleeping quarters from the rest of the room. Inspection introduced them to a dozen newcomers; a couple of techies, university security people, NDPS officers. He looked for Grayhills, didn’t see her.

  People were clustering around an elderly guard. He was leaning against a wall for support. Someone thrust a cup of coffee into his hands and he drank gratefully. His hands were shaking and some of the brown liquid slopped over the sides, staining his uniform.

  Moody fought his way forward, undiplomatically nudging people aside, and spoke to the NDPS officer nearest the trembling guard. The corporal looked alert and competent. “What happened?”

  The younger man nodded at the senior. “This guy just came in. He was patrolling the tunnel when he was attacked. He says.” There was doubt in the young man’s voice.

  Ooljee confronted the elderly paladin. “Was it by any chance a tall, hatchet-faced man about my age?”

  The guard was too shaken to speak, so the corporal replied for him. “He claims it was mah-ih.”

  Ooljee stared at the trembling oldster. “He says he was attacked by a coyote!”

  The corporal nodded. “Says it went right for him and he had to shoot it. Three shots and it kept coming, but his taser put it down.”

  “Coyotes keep their distance from people.” Ooljee was studying the elderly guard’s face. “They’ll come right up to a house looking for a dog or cat to snatch, but they avoid human beings. Unless this one was rabid.”

  “Oh, it was rabid, all right.” Everyone looked at the

  guard. “Crazy for sure.” He drained the last of the coffee. “Did you check for that?” Ooljee asked him.

  The man straightened, not trembling as badly now. “I was a cop in a Flag for thirty years. I’ve worked security here for the last four. I know ninlocos and sneak thieves and purse snatchers. I’m not a veterinarian.”

  “I thought all the entrances to the tunnel were sealed,” Moody said.

  One of the onlookers spoke up. “A coyote might find a way in that a human would overlook.”

  “That’s right,” commented a techie. “No matter how often we spray, we still have trouble with rodents in the conduits. A coyote that managed to find a way in could make a living in that tunnel.”

  This wasn’t what they’d been expecting. Moody thought furiously. If it was just a burrowing coyote…

  “Somebody find Samantha Grayhills, the lady who came with us, and get her down here. If she’s sleeping somewhere, wake her up.” A guard tech swiveled in his seat and picked up a phone.

  “Maybe someone ought to have a look at this coyote,” the corporal suggested.

  “Maybe we ought to stay right here.” Ooljee was staring intently at the wall of monitors. “If our friend Gaggii had a diversion in mind, this might be it.”

  “You think maybe he shoved that coyote in there?” Moody mulled the idea over. “How could he do that without showing up on vid or setting off an alarm?”

  “I do not know.”

  “None of the alarms were tripped,” said one of the monitor operators. “Not one. Anyone entering the tunnel would have been seen.”

  There were three operators, two men and a woman, seated at the monitor bank. Moody regarded each in turn.

  “Nobody went out for a sandwich or anything?” If anyone had, he didn’t expect the guilty party to confess to it.

  He’d been through this sort of thing before, in Tampa. Leaving one’s post while on duty could result in swift termination of one’s job.

  The corporal wouldn’t give up. “You don’t think we should go and check the carcass?”

  “Leave it,” snapped Moody. “If it’s just a dead coyote it’s a matter for the custodial staff, not us. If it’s something else, you don’t want to go running after it.” His eyes narrowed as he studied the guard. “You said you fired three rounds at it before you used your taser?”

  The guard looked up at him. “That’s right.”

  “Any of them hit?”

  “Couldn’t say. I didn’t take the time to find out. I had three shells in my gun and I used them all. I might’ve hit it, maybe not. But the taser stopped it cold. It ought to, as many volts as that thing puts out, and it was set to deliver full charge.”

  That was when the graduate student came running in. She rested one palm on her sternum as though it could somehow pump extra air to her lungs. Her expression was wild.

  “I think—I think somebody better come with me.”

  The corporal tried to calm her. “What’s the matter, miss?”

  She was trying to speak and swallow at the same time.

  “I—found a man near where I was working. I think he’s dead.”

  The corporal glanced at Moody. “Want to check this out?”

  Moody ignored the sarcasm. “Be right behind you. Oh, and can my friend and I get a couple of those tasers?”

  The tiny armory was opened and weapons removed from their chargers. Thus additionally armed, the three officers followed the student to an elevator.

  “You sure he’s dead?” the NDPS man asked the girl as they descended.

  “I think so. I’m pretty sure.”

  Moody thought she was handling herself well. Where the devil was Grayhills?

  They found the corpse of the security guard outside a maintenance alcove on the lowest level of the complex. As the graduate student simultaneously hung back and tried to see, the three officers clustered around the body. Moody was “pretty sure” he was dead, too. His head lay bent at an unnatural angle and his throat had been tom out. Ooljee bent to examine the wound, cursing softly in Navaho, while Moody held tight to the taser. He didn’t like tight places and he didn’t like being below ground.

  Ooljee carefully pried the gun from the dead man’s fingers and removed the clip. He held it up so everyone could see. “Empty. Barrel’s still hot.” He eyed the shadows and the dark places between pipes and tubes uneasily. “This didn’t do him any good.”

  “Any ideas?” Moody asked the corporal.

  “The guard said he was attacked by a coyote. What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”
The detective looked over at his partner. “How in hades do coyotes fit into this?”

  “Who can say?” Ooljee straightened. “According to legend, all things, all creatures, have some power and can be controlled with the right chant. If this was done by a coyote, then something new has been added to the equation.”

  “Are you trying to tell me,” Moody sputtered, “that our buddy Gaggii has learned how to hypnotize a bunch of coyotes into doing his dirty work for him?”

  “We do not yet know for certain that Gaggii is involved in this.” Ooljee gestured at the body. “But I believe I can be excused for thinking of him whenever anything unnatural happens, and this is certainly unnatural. Draw your own suppositions from what you see, my friend. All I am saying is that someone who can produce a manifestation of Endless

  Snake”—the corporal looked at him sharply— “might not find it impossible to manipulate a few animals.”

  “Yeah. But that snake-thing wasn’t a real animal. It was a manifestation, like you said. Something from out of the web. Maybe our ‘coyotes’ are more closely related to it than to Lassie. And if that’s the case, maybe it’s why this works on them”—he held up the taser—“and bullets don’t.”

  Ooljee considered. “Our guns were useless against the snake-thing. Shells passed right through it.” He drew his own taser, eyed it thoughtfully.

  “This delivers a violent electric charge. Enough to kill a real coyote—or disrupt a circumscribed electromagnetic field?” He looked at the corporal. “I think it would be a good idea to issue tasers to all your people.”

  At that moment the howling began, a single high-pitched, mournful wail ending in laughter. It sounded like a human trying to imitate a coyote, which is just what a coyote sounds like.

  The song was picked up by another throat, then another, and another, until the depths of the complex resounded with the diabolic chorus. The four humans drew together for protection, the terrified graduate student huddling close to Moody’s protective bulk.

  “He’s inside the building,” Moody insisted, trying to see everywhere at once. “I don’t give a hound’s dump what anybody says about monitors and alarms, he’s in here somewhere.”

  “Who is?” The corporal studiously avoided looking at the body at their feet.

  “The guy we’re after. Gaggii.” He glanced at his partner. “The web was right. This was where he was headed all along. He just took his time getting here.” The awful howling echoed around them. “That’s a helluva noise for a ‘circumscribed electrical field’ to make.”

  “Maybe it is not him.” The corporal sounded more hopeful than convinced.

  “Sure,” said Moody tersely as they moved in a body toward the elevator. “A pack of rabid coyotes having nothing better to do just decided to invade the only particle accelerator in Northern Arizona and rip out the throats of the people working there. Or maybe they want to enroll.”

  “Coyotes,” Ooljee pointed out, “are very unpredictable.”

  Moody shot him a look. “So is Navaho humor.” He was greatly relieved when they finally reached the elevator.

  The door slid aside. The girl moved to enter, stopped and screamed. There followed a mad moment of intense confusion, panic, and firing. But the guard had told the truth. The tasers worked. When hit with them, the canine shapes vanished in showers of coruscating sparks.

  The howling reverberated throughout the complex, wild and unabated.

  Ooljee looked at his partner as the four humans crowded into the elevator. “Did you see their eyes?”

  Moody studied the ceiling. He was breathing hard. “Man, all I saw were their teeth.”

  “They were not natural. They glowed. There was something there besides coyote life.”

  “What is it?” The poor graduate student held her fingers steepled below her lips. “What’s going on?”

  “A bad dream,” Moody told her.

  The howling was as loud at ground level as it had been below. Security was beset by confusion if not outright panic as techies and officers bustled about, wondering what to do.

  The arrivals from the basement tried to fill them in. Tasers were issued to as many people as possible, with explanations being put off for another time. Nonessential personnel were evacuated from the building.

  Samantha Grayhills was there to greet them. While Ooljee tried to explain what was happening, Moody stalked over

  to the monitor wall and addressed the operator in charge.

  “Anybody sees our man, they shoot him on sight, understand? That’s the order. We’ve got another murder victim downstairs and we can’t play games, no matter how much I’d like to question him.”

  The operator was a solid, prosaic woman in her forties, but she looked shaken. “Can you tell us what is going on? Has every coyote on the plateau gone crazy?”

  “I don’t think these coyotes are from around here.” Moody left her more confused than ever.

  Ooljee had overheard. As Moody rejoined him he said, “You may be more right than you realize. They are yei-tsos. Evil beings. They do not even die like coyotes.” Moody gazed at the corridor. People were rushing to and fro, some of them to take up assigned positions, others hurrying to get out of the building.

  “Whatever they are, he’s controlling them somehow. We’re not gonna find out how until we find him.”

  “Yei-tsos.” Samantha Grayhills said the word several times, as if repetition might add reality, might make it a part of the real world.

  Behind them the monitor operations supervisor uttered an exclamation of disbelief. Moody rushed to lean over her shoulder.

  “What now?”

  “Look at this! This is crazy.” Techies and security personnel crowded around.

  The accelerator was coming on line.

  One of the techs mirrored her astonishment. “There aren’t any experiments scheduled until next week.”

  Moody ignored him. “Can you shut it down from up here? Can you turn it off?”

  “This is Security, not Engineering, but—”

  Moody, Ooljee and Grayhills were already on their way out the door. Central Engineering was a short sprint down a side corridor. The skeleton operations crew on duly there was careening toward panic.

  Telltales and readouts glowed like ornaments at Christmas time. Every screen in the room was brazen with stats that refused to be ignored. Techies fumbled with spinners and boards like clumsy children suddenly handed complex puzzles.

  A tall woman in her fifties fluttered from one station to the next, waving her arms wildly like a sandhill crane in the throes of its mating dance.

  “Don’t give me that,” she was shouting at a harried member of her staff. “You can’t power that up without going through here!” Turning, she noted the arrivals from Security. “Do you people have any idea what is happening to my accelerator?” Moody recognized her tone, familiar to him from endless wiretap transcriptions.

  “Just an idea,” Ooljee told her.

  “Well, you have to stop it. Now. Immediately.”

  “You can’t?” Moody asked her.

  She started to snap at him, then caught herself. Maybe it was his attitude, maybe his size. “What do you think we’ve been trying to do?” A hand flailed in the direction of the nearest console and its baffled operator. “Everything is powering up, nothing is shutting off, and our backups and fail-safes might as well be out for repair. And what is that noise outside?” Even within the room the invaders’ eerie chorus made itself known, though it was in danger of being drowned out by the rising whine of machinery coming on line.

  “He is using the web.” Ooljee glanced through the window at the corridor beyond. “That must be how he is bypassing this place.”

  “So we can’t stop him?”

  Grayhills stepped forward. “Apparently not from running the accelerator, but I don’t see anything to keep us from pulling the plug.”

  The chief engineer glanced sharply at her. “Don’t you think we’ve tried that?�
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  Grayhills stood her ground. “Sometimes a switch isn’t the best way to deactivate a recalcitrant device.”

  Moody and Ooljee left in a hurry, gathering up the NDPS corporal and two plainclothes on the way. Grayhills eyed the engineer.

  “What’s your current study setup?”

  The woman hesitated, then replied laconically, “We’ve been working with Z-particle collisions, but that was two weeks ago.” She forced herself to look back at the screens. “Why would anyone want to take control of the unit? There’s nothing on line, no experiment to run.”

  “Maybe the man we suspect of causing this has another use for some runaway protons.”

  The engineer shook her head violently. “A Moebial toroid accelerator doesn’t work like that. You don’t just fire it up and dispense protons like candy!” Her nails dug into her palms. “All this can do is ruin some very expensive machinery.”

  “I don’t think that’s what he has in mind.” Grayhills studied a readout.

  “Then what does he have in mind?”

  “I wish I knew. I wish I knew,” she muttered.

  “Outside, by the south end of employee parking!” The corporal led the way as they exited the building. One of his men jogged anxiously alongside.

  “Sir, if we’re gonna disconnect lines, we ought to have somebody from APS do it. They’ll have a truck and authorization.”

  Moody glared back at him. “Son, we can’t wait for the local utility company to show. Our job right now is to keep the man we’re after from making use of this facility.” He looked at the corporal. “I’ll take full responsibility.”

  “You can’t,” the younger man declared. “You’re from out of state.”

  “When your boss wakes up, tell him I insisted. Tell him I threatened you, if you want. It’ll get y’all off the hook.”