by Lee Bond
“I cannot say, sa. She said you would offer me everything in the world and when that did not work, that you would threaten me with every other thing in the world. She told me to tell you that you, of all people, should recognize the dangers in knowing the future. The path you follow is dangerous, narrow, tricky. I will not tell you and there is nothing you can do or say to convince me otherwise, so do not waste your breath or my time.”
“What if I don’t want to follow? What if I decide to tell everyone to fuck off.”
“You can’t. You won’t.” Turuin shuddered hard and he felt things tearing loose inside. He had little time left. “Your job is to protect, sa. That is what you do and you cannot do it properly unless you get into The Box. You are compelled by titanic forces to protect the innocent and you can no more stop doing that than I can prevent my particularly grotesque death. You are destined to open the Box or die trying, Sa Garth, and there is nothing you can do but decide the path you take to get to that moment.”
Garth glowered angrily at the desiccating man but said nothing. He, it, was right. “So why are you here?”
“Starlight Woman … Lisa … foresaw the steps you would need to get to The Box, saw that you would need to deal with Ashok Guillfoyle and the manner by which you would best accomplish your task. She entreated me to assist your entrance into Guillfoyle’s complex.” He smiled weakly. “I have done so.”
“How?”
“By manipulating the renovation blueprints to this facility, sa, and by coordinating governmental retrofitting of underground service tunnels, sewage pipes and other access paths between here and Ashok Guillfoyle’s main offices. The greatest work I have ever done. Hundreds of people, thousands of blueprints. It … it … was easy. I fooled an entire world. Me. One mockery of a man. When I am dead, download my proteus into your own. It will show you the underground path you must take. It will be easy until you break through the final walls leading into your destination. From there I am afraid you will be required to kill or be killed.”
“You did all of this because of what someone showed you?” Garth asked flatly.
“Sometimes … sometimes you have to take a leap of faith, Garth Nickels. Sometimes, it is all we have left.”
Garth stood there watching with horrified fascination as Turuin began aging even quicker. It was like that scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies where the guy died of extreme and rapid old age, although much messier and far too realistic. Garth gave an involuntary shudder.
Everywhere he looked, there were signs that the rot infesting the Latelian soul ran from the top down. No one in their right mind would employ tactics and technologies like what they’d forced Turuin to go through, even if he’d done a good job and hadn’t abused his power. No one should have to go through that kind of torture every day of their lives.
When Turuin’s body died, Garth picked through the clothes, curious to see what he’d find. Nothing but a few odd lumps of metal and a few kilos of dust. There was no sign that a man named Turuin had ever existed. Not at all. Grimly, he used his prote to download the files the BCU agent had left for him.
Turuin hadn’t been boasting when he’d claimed the work was brilliant. It was. Dozens of different companies, each legitimately employed by the government to rework various underground facilities, had been manipulated into building something or removing something in such a way that, taken singly, seemed insignificant. Combined with all the other changes, though … Turuin had constructed a rat’s maze of hidden passages and false walls beneath the city of Central with no one being the wiser. It led right into the bowels of Guillfoyle’s complex.
All he had to do was follow the path laid out for him and he’d be one step closer to accomplishing his goals.
But at such great cost.
Garth wasn’t fond of being manipulated. He never had been. If even the tiniest hint that what he needed to do wasn’t entirely his own choice showed, he inevitably dug his heels in and ground things to a halt, caring little about the consequences. Everything he did was his choice or he would do nothing. That was how he’d lived his life before coming thirty thousand years into the future.
Since that time, bit by bit, inch by inch, he’d surrendered himself to the inevitable tide pushing him towards some indecipherable goal. Each instance had been incrementally larger, but acceptable because he’d had no choice; as a man without a past, a history, a hope … well, without those things, what choice really had there been?
And all of it was Lisa Laughlin’s doing. What could his Intelligence Officer have possibly seen in this thirty thousand year distant future that would require his particular brand of talents? What reason would she have for doing as she had? His life in SpecSer hadn’t been a bed of roses, not by a long shot, and here, in Latelyspace, it seemed his life was going to be even worse.
Standing there in the dusty room, staring absentmindedly down at what used to be a man, Garth thought about the few memories of Lisa he knew were real and true. He trusted her. That first time he’d seen the playback video of her, when she’d told him a bit of what was coming, when he’d practically known nothing except his own name … he’d trusted her on sight. Implicitly and without reservation.
It was that gut instinct that made his mind up. Waking up out of suspension, he’d known instinctively not to trust Kant Ingrams and that automatic, inbred sense had proven true. Trusting Lisa Laughlin’s recording had also proven true.
He had no choice but to continue trusting in her, even though he was being pushed.
There would come a time, though, when he’d start pushing back.
“Woe betide the man or woman who pushes me then.” He said direly, setting out to follow Turuin’s Maze.
Gauntlet
A tracking light from a Guillfoyle guard’s heavy-duty slugthrower flickered across Garth’s eyes, forcing him to shoot blindly. A combination of luck and skill sent the bullet through the guard’s forehead. Knowing that there wasn’t much time before the rest caught up to him, Garth grabbed hold of the corpse before it hit the ground and dragged it around the corner. Hastily, he rifled through the guard’s pockets for spare ammo clips and any other useful gewgaws before running down yet another featureless hallway; beyond his wildest dreams, Garth discovered a pack of flat, palm-sized fragmentation grenades strapped to the man’s stomach. These were rescued, and then he was away down the hallway.
Ever since busting through that final wall built by Turuin’s manipulations, he’d been in constant danger. Whether or not Guillfoyle’s security teams had been aware of the false wall, they’d responded to his sudden presence inside their territory with surprising quickness and ferocity. And damned if Turuin’s prote hadn’t had a single goddamn blip of a layout for the building. He was running blind down hallways, through corridors, getting shot at from every corner. There was barely any time to consider his prote’s steady, patient mapping of the avenues he took, let alone use its hacking features to shut down surveillance cameras or to get an actual fucking clue.
Guillfoyle’s teams knew where he was every step of the way and it seemed they were bored, because for all their chasing, they weren’t herding him anywhere. They were killing time, having a good time.
Assholes.
xxx
Garth looked over his shoulder, attention drawn by a ratcheting clatter that sounded awfully like … yes, yes, someone was flinging frag-grenades down the hallway at him, banking the deadly explosives off corners with such skill that Garth knew, just knew, that this was a thing they practiced at the Guillfoyle Family Picnic.
Garth jammed his head down and bulled forward, hands on his ears; there was no way to protect himself from the concussion, but keeping the ability to see and hear was doable. A few seconds later, just as he neared a door, a huge wall of force laced with tiny shreds of razor-sharp shrapnel picked him up and threw him against the wall.
Garth groaned, trying to find his hands and feet. Found, he started a search for fingers and toes. Everything w
as more or less where it’d been this morning. His back was an aching mess of minor lacerations, which, he supposed was better than nothing. If he’d run any slower the ribbons of metal would’ve turned him into sushi.
“Not cool guys! Grow up and, I dunno, fuck off or something.” If anything, shouting angrily at the guards might give them pause for thought, if only on how long they should laugh before resuming Hunt Garth for Fun.
Before the smoke could clear, Garth took a stolen grenade, set the timer, pulled the pin, and chucked it down the hallway. A faint ‘clunk’ told him that the grenade was now doing double-duty as a landmine. If luck was with him, the men chasing him wouldn’t realize he’d stolen some of their own hardware and walk right into the thing. Then he ran into the room he’d decided to ‘hide’ in.
His plan, tenuous and shaky as a house of cards made from tissue paper, was simple; convince the guards he was trying to hole up and defend himself from a single location. That’d make them laugh their asses off, especially since getting into the building he’d been basically ‘Clueless Offworld Moron’. That reaction, which Garth was sure his activities would elicit, could possibly give him the few minutes he needed to collect his thoughts and get a goddamn grip.
First things first. Grabbing hold of a huge wooden table, Garth lugged it over to the door. Then he piled all the chairs he could find on top of that, then added a holographic projector liberated from a closet for good measure.
The guards, smug and cocksure, knocked politely on the door.
Garth chuckled.
Now that he was ‘cornered’, they were pretending it was all one big joke. In a few minutes, they’d behave much differently.
Leaning against the pile of stuff he’d loaded against the door, Garth opened up his MilInt prote’s hacking software and started stabbing ‘yes’ to every single request the various avatars were asking, caring very little at this point if he blew through Lady Ha’s protective recoding or not. He was pissed and everyone was going to suffer.
A lot.
In short order, everything in the entire building was shut down, from external comm bands to internal relay systems. Data servers supplying security guards with updated protocols closed their doors, cameras went dark, and spEyes fell invisibly to the ground. The savage hacks went further, burrowing through power grids and shutting everything off.
The Guillfoyle Complex went dark. Emergency systems came on, flooding his little room –and presumably the rest of the building- with dim illumination.
The high-spirited jerkholes on the other side of the door suddenly lost their jocular spirits. To a man, they started cursing and swearing and hammering on the door.
Garth grabbed a chair and climbed into the ventilation shaft. He had just enough time to replace the ceiling cover and scuttle frantically out of the way before the doors to the room exploded inwards.
He had only a few seconds’ worth of confusion before the security guards did some basic math and turned their automatic weapons to the ceiling, so he crabbed-walked quickly through the maze of interconnected shafts, faint strains of a heated argument between the surviving members of the night crew reaching his ears. A few of the men seemed to think it was a test, while others argued it was government infiltration. The commander warned them all to shut up so he could check to see if his proteus carried any schematics for the ventilation system. Still others suggested not waiting, that ventilating the ceilings with everything they had was the best option. The CO told everyone to shut up, they’d already caused enough damage to the building to enrage Ashok to the point of firing them all.
Garth scooted up a ten-foot shaft as quietly as he could. Crouching at the top, he strained his hearing, and, sure enough, a faint thumping that meant the commander’d found a malnourished Latelian small enough to come after him reached his ears. Since his presence was a complete surprise, they couldn’t possibly divine his intentions; he could be anything from their alleged government spy to a very well prepared industrial espionage guy. Nowhere in their brains would they consider their boss as the target.
Garth hunted for a grill leading into an office, dropping through it when he did. He then carefully replaced the grill, smiling as he did so.
Luck was finally back on his side. If Lady Fortune really liked him, though, the security team after his ass would spend the rest of their time hunting him in the endless array of shafts and access tunnels built into the building.
Eventually, they’d come to the conclusion that he’d snuck out somewhere along the line, but with their proteii working at less than half-capacity, the chances they’d catch him now diminished with every passing second. Now that he was back on track and thinking straight, he was the Invisible Man.
Creeping softly, Garth opened the office door slowly and looked both ways down the hall. The coast was clear. From this point on, the task should be relatively simple; as an ultraparanoid maniac, it was virtually inconceivable to imagine Ashok as stupid enough to leave his own main systems on the same links as the rest of the building, or that he’d leave incriminating evidence anywhere but on those same systems. Somewhere on the floors above him, Garth rightly knew there was a private office with at least one protean system that was still fully functional. On that system would be everything Ashok Guillfoyle was up to, and with every single person in the building who could be hunting him bunged up, there was no one to stop him.
If Garth knew anything, he knew that those files would be good reading. Good enough to convince the man to come to his offices, unarmed, alone, and without God soldiers on tap. Good enough to force him to call up the Portsiders, rather than messing around with unnecessary steps.
First, he had to return the Cat-and-Mouse game those assholes had been playing with some of his own fun.
Whistling softly under his breath, Garth reoriented himself and was on his way. He found the offices ten minutes later.
xxx
Locked out of their main systems, unable to exit to call for help and with their own internal communications systems completely compromised, the security guards were lost. They literally did not know what to do because none of their contingency plans covered methods on how to deal with someone who’d managed to do the impossible: first, breaking into the building, second, deactivating the defensive systems, and third, reactivating them under his control.
Uri knew their intruder was still on the premises; he just had no idea where to start looking or how to proceed. They still had the ambient connectivity that linked prote to prote, but without a control system, that small shred of hope was only worthwhile if they were actually chasing the intruder. Even then, the man had proven unusually adept at avoiding capture. Especially for an Offworlder.
Maybe the guy was a midget Latelian. That made more sense. What didn’t make sense was everything else.
According to training manuals and info-seminars, anyone breaking into a building like the Guillfoyle was willing to kill to stay alive, and their mysterious visitor was textbook up to that point. Beyond that, though … four men were stuck in an elevator between floors, six men were irrevocably locked in a bathroom until the door -welded shut by an absolutely improbable power surge from nearby light sockets- was cut free and an even dozen men were trapped behind security doors in the cafeteria. How could you defend yourself against stuff like that?
Uri’s proteus chimed. For a long moment, he thought he was imagining things; life without a fully functioning prote, even for an hour, was miserable. He read the diagnostic data streaming along one side of his prote. If the same process that’d given their intruder access wasn’t relaying corrupt data, he was calling from Sa Guillfoyle’s personal offices.
That drove the situation from incredibly bad to suicidally rotten. Sa Guillfoyle’s personal main controlled the entire building, including the labs, weapon facilities, rows upon rows of deep data storage, everything. From there, their prototype mechanized infantry robots could be deployed. From there, illegal mutagen viruses could be released, not on
ly into the building, but into the air outside. From there, every single thing Guillfoyle knew could be stolen. And if Uri heard right, Sa Guillfoyle knew an awful lot, and none of it was any good.
“Hey!” A voice shouted from one of the loudspeakers. “Answer the fucking phone!”
Uri tapped a button. “Yes?” he asked stiffly. It was probably too much to hope the man didn’t know he was in a position of supreme authority.
“Lissen,” Garth said from his lofty vantage point, “I am in control of this facility, from the top to the bottom and everything in the middle. You follow me?”
Uri’s heart sank. Of course the man knew. “Yes.”
“Care to tell me why the inside of this facility is riddled with autocannons and laser support? Ashok shoot people when he gets bored or something? I mean, really.”
Sections along the walls and ceilings popped open with a loud clatter. Autocannons and laser grid emitters began moving into place, tracking the motions of his team with mechanized doggedness. If any of his men panicked and opened fire, the automatic systems would respond with lethal force.
“You have access to the computers, why don’t you tell me?” Uri asked, stalling for time. He didn’t have any idea –beyond living for a few more minutes- what he was stalling for, but he couldn’t let his troops see his terror.
“I’m busy decrypting ’em.” Garth paused. “Your boss is way paranoid, huh? Anyway, here’s the thing: I can’t find a prote-sign for Ashok Guillfoyle anywhere in this fucking office, and I really need to talk to him. Do you know how to call him up?”
“He…” Telling unauthorized personnel how to contact Ashok Guillfoyle was a sure-fire way to die, but the presence of immediate death was an overwhelmingly convincing reason to be as forthcoming as possible. “I’ll flash you the access codes. It won’t get you anywhere. He won’t bargain with you or give you what you want.”
