Sea of Silver Light o-4

by Tad Williams

  "I see three working and one with a gun, watching," the tinny voice said. "Is that all of them?"

  "I'm not sure," said Jeremiah.

  Joseph frowned, thinking. When he and Del Ray had snuck in, they had seen . . . how many? "Five," he said suddenly. "There are five of those men."

  "So one's off somewhere," Sellars said. "We shouldn't forget about him. But first we have to deal with the digging. How thick are the floors, any idea? Wait. I should be able to access the plans."

  For long seconds the speaker was silent. Joseph's thoughts were just turning sadly to the small bit of wine he had left when the strange voice spoke again. "Roughly two meters deep where they're working, next to the elevator bay. Which means they're probably about a quarter of the way there." He made a strange sound, perhaps a hiss of frustration. "It's heavy concrete, but they'll be through in a day at the most."

  "We only have one gun, Mr. Sellars," Jeremiah said. "Two bullets. We're not going to be able to fight with them when they get through."

  "Then we have to see what we can do to keep them out," Sellars replied. "I wish this place were a bit older, then maybe I could find a way to banjax the heaters, fill that upper section with carbon monoxide."

  Joseph remembered enough from his days in the construction trade to remember something about those carbon what-so-oxides. "Yes, kill the bastards! Poison them. That would be a fine thing."

  Jeremiah winced. "Kill them in cold blood?"

  "We can't do it," Sellars said, "or at least I can't see a way just now, so it's not worth debating the morality of it. But you must understand that those are not ordinary men, Mr. Dako. They are murderers—perhaps the very men who attacked your friend, the doctor."

  "How do you know about that?" asked Jeremiah, startled. "Did Renie tell you?"

  "In fact, they have killed someone else that Joseph knows," Sellars said, leaving Jeremiah's question unanswered. "The young technician you visited in Durban."

  Joseph had to think for a moment. "The fat boy? Elephant?"

  "Oh, God, they didn't!" said Del Ray.

  "Yes. Shot him in the head and burned his building." Sellars was speaking briskly now, as though a timer inside him was ticking loudly. "And they will kill you, too, as blithely as swatting a fly, if it suits them . . . and I suspect that it will."

  In his mind's eye, Joseph could see the cluttered storage depot burning. His initial horrified fascination began to curdle into something else as he remembered Elephant's cheerfulness, his pride in his top-of-the-line equipment.

  Not right. That is not right. He just helped us because Del Ray ask him.

  "What will we do, then?" asked Jeremiah. "Wait tor them to break through and murder us?"

  "He said about police." Joseph felt anger building, a different kind of anger. "Why don't we just call someone—the army? Tell them some men are trying to kill us right here in their base?"

  "Because you are yourselves wanted by the police," Sellars said, his voice flattened by the electronic distortion. "The Brotherhood has seen to that. Do you not remember what happened when Mr. Dako tried to use one of his cards?"

  "How do you know about all this?" Jeremiah demanded. "I didn't tell you any of that when we talked before."

  "Never mind." Their invisible companion seemed frustrated. "I told you, I have little time and much to do elsewhere. If you call the authorities it will take hours for any suitable force to respond—you are far up in the mountains. Then, even if they drive away or capture Klekker and his thugs, what will happen to you? More importantly, what will happen to Renie and !Xabbu? After you three are arrested, they will either be left alone and untended here, with the place empty and perhaps the power shut off, or, if you tell the authorities, they will be disconnected and dragged away. Still deep in what will appear to be comas, would be my guess. Moving them now might even be fatal."

  The idea of the electricity failing and Renie waking in the darkness of the tank, struggling to get out, thrashing in that strange jelly, was even more horrible than imagining her lying in some hospital, as unresponsive as her brother. Joseph slapped his hand down on the table. "It will not happen. I don't leave my girl here."

  "Then we have to think of another solution," Sellers said. "And quickly—I have my hands full just now trying to put out fires, and for every one I control, two more seem to flare up." A moment of silence was filled with the looping hum of the mystery man's voice-distortion gear. "Hang on. That may be it."

  "What? That may be what?" Jeremiah asked.

  "Let me look at the plans," Sellars told him. "If I'm right, we'll have to work fast—you'll all have lots to do. And it's risky."

  "Just a small pile at first," Sellars told them. "Concentrate on the things you know will burn—paper, cloth."

  Joseph looked down at the huge heap of trash they had spent the last hour and a half collecting under Sellars' guidance. The paper and kitchen rags he could understand, the dusty military-issue sheets from the supply depot they had dragged down in the first days of their occupation, but what on earth were they going to do with the wheels off all the office chairs? Plastic floor mats? Rugs?

  "Let me test it one more time before we commit ourselves," Sellars said. "Unlike your enemies, you don't have access to outside air." As if a ghost had flicked a switch, a rattling noise sprang up behind the wall vent. It mounted higher, until it was a high-pitched whine, then eased down again. "Good. Someone please start the fire."

  Del Ray, who had dragged himself from his convalescent bed to help, looked first at Jeremiah, then at Joseph. "Start it? How?"

  Something like weariness was in Sellars' voice. "Isn't there anything you can use? The base is old—surely someone left behind a lighter, something?"

  Joseph and the others looked around, as though such an object might magically appear.

  "There's a little petrol in the emergency starter for the generator," Jeremiah said. "Only a spark would do it. We can make a spark, can't we?"

  "I suppose you can cut into the wires in the monitor console," Sellars said. "Those are the only ones you can get to easily. . . ."

  "Hold on!" Joseph stood up straight. "I know. Long Joseph will fix this problem." He turned and hurried toward the room where he slept.

  He had put Renie's clothes in a box, knowing she would want them when she came out of the tank. He felt in the pockets, and to his great joy discovered her cigarettes, but could find no trace of a lighter no matter how he looked. His moment of pride turned sour.

  "Shit," he said, letting the clothes fall back into the box. He stared at the cigarettes, wondering dully how Renie was coping without them. Could you smoke in the computer-place she was?

  She must be crazy if she can't, he thought. 'Course, I am in the real world and I can't get any wine, so who has got it worse?

  "Good thinking!" someone said from the doorway.

  Joseph looked up at Del Ray. "No lighter, no matches." The younger man seemed puzzled for a moment, then smiled. "Don't need any of that. Those are self-lighting."

  Joseph stared at the packet of cigarettes, relief mixed with a certain angry regret at having to be told something important by someone his daughter's age. He took a breath, then swallowed what he had been about to say. He tossed Del Ray the cigarettes and followed him back to the makeshift bonfire.

  The tab pulled, the end of the cigarette smoldered alight. Del Ray dropped it on the knee-high pile of paper and rags. Little tongues of yellow flame scalloped the top of the pile; within half a minute it was burning well. As Joseph and the others heaped more of the most flammable objects on top of it, smoke began to drift upward in a visible cloud. The whine of the air intake deepened and the smoke was drawn toward the wall vent.

  "Slowly." Sellars' disembodied voice was hard to hear above the noises the fire was making. "It has to be burning very hot before you can put any of the plastic or rubber on it."

  Joseph wandered over to the monitors. The men in the hole beside the elevator well upstairs were work
ing just as hard as ever, nearly waist-deep now. The white one watching their progress had a cigar in the corner of his mouth,

  "You will get your smoke, ugly man," Joseph said, then went back to help the others.

  Within twenty minutes the flames were as high as Long Joseph himself, the blaze several meters across, and only the air-intake, which now roared like a small plane taking off, kept them from being choked by the clouds of gray smoke.

  "Push in the pans of oil," Sellars said. "And start throwing on the rubber mats."

  Jeremiah and Joseph used a pair of broom handles to slide the kitchen baking pans full of machine oil into the heart of the blaze. Del Ray threw much of the material they had been saving onto the top of the pile. The smoke, and even the flames themselves, began to change color: the cloud billowing out now and being drawn into the vent was stormy black, and even through the wet rag wrapped around his nose and mouth the smell was making Joseph woozy. His eyes were burning too: the safety goggles they'd found in a cabinet were ancient and fit badly. He stepped away to watch Jeremiah and Del Ray throw the last boxes of plastic and rubber onto the top of the burning pile. The flames beat out so fiercely the three of them were forced back across the wide area they'd cleared on the cement floor, coughing all the way.

  Weren't for that getting sucked out, Joseph thought as the inky clouds disappeared into the vent, so thick they almost folded rather than flowed, we all be dead. He suddenly realized what Sellars had meant when he said "risky." If the power failed, if something in the burning, black cloud choked the intake system, that black mass would come flowing back on them. Then their choice would be to suffocate or open the armored elevator doors and stumble out into the gunsights of the killers.

  The pall of black was beginning to overcome the intake's capabilities, curling back, widening like a thunderhead. Joseph felt a rising terror.

  "Where is that damn man?" he said. Jeremiah and Del Ray were too busy coughing to answer. Joseph, in a moment of unusual clarity, turned to memorize the location of the V-tanks so he could find them and release the prisoners if the power went out. His thoughts, absorbed by the fire-building, were now beginning to grow fragmented and panicky. "Sellars! Whatever your name is, what are you doing, man? We choking to death here!"

  "Sorry," the voice hummed. "I had to disable the fire alarms. I'm ready now."

  Easy enough for you, Joseph thought. You are not fighting just to breathe.

  He and the others gathered around the monitor, wheezing. The full-throated roar of the intake did not change, but there was a succession of distant clanks, as though someone was striking a metal pipe with a hammer. An instant later Joseph felt the pressure of the room change, not enough to make his ears pop, but a definite shift. The plume of black wavered and then bent visibly toward the vent. The rest of the smoke that had escaped the intake began moving back toward the vent, too, as though the mountain itself had just inhaled.

  "Watch," said Sellars.

  For a moment the scene on the monitor remained unchanged, the picks rising and falling, the white man with the cigar—Klekker, Sellars had called him; Joseph wanted to remember the Boer pig's name—leaning in to say something. Then Klekker lifted his head like an animal hearing a distant gunshot. A moment later the picture darkened. For an instant, Joseph actually thought the monitor was failing.

  It all seemed strange and distant on the tiny screen, without sound. Suddenly, in the new, nightdark dimness of the picture, the men came thrashing up out of the pit. One collapsed to his knees, choking and vomiting, but before Joseph could see what happened to him, the monitor screen went almost completely black.

  All the screens of that floor were dimming as the smoke rolled out from the vent near the elevator shaft. Joseph could only catch glimpses of the men, stumbling, falling, crawling toward the exit.

  "Die, you bastards!" Joseph shouted. "Burn down my house, do you? Shoot up some fat computer boy you don't even know? Choke and choke and die!"

  But they did not all die, at least not as far as he could tell. The monitors recorded their escape to the next level up and their frantic attempts to seal the doorway behind them, but Sellars was apparently forcing the fumes and smoke up to that level as well, so the mercenaries were forced to flee again.

  Four of them escaped through the base's massive front door. The camera by the armored gate showed the small, silent shapes as they staggered out into the air and fell to the ground like shipwreck survivors who had reached land against all odds.

  "Four," said Del Ray, counting. "So one of them didn't make it out. That's something, anyway."

  "The rest of them will not be able to enter the level they were digging in, not for a long time," said Sellars. He did not sound particularly pleased, but there was an undertone of grim satisfaction. "They already had the doors blocked open, probably just to make sure we couldn't trap them anywhere, but I've disabled the vents on that level and it will take them a long time to disperse the fumes."

  "I wish it had killed them all," Joseph said.

  Jeremiah shook his head and turned away. "A terrible way to die."

  "What do you think they are planning for us?" Joseph was irritated. "A braai? Cook up some barbecue, open a few beers?"

  "I must leave you for now," Sellers announced. "But I will be in touch again. You should have gained a few days' respite."

  When the speaker was silent, Joseph took the damp cloth from his mouth, then had to put it back on.

  "He better make sure our air gets better in here," he rasped.

  "The vent's still working," said Del Ray. "I think it will get better. But we should put out this fire." He lifted one of the fire extinguishers they had set in readiness.

  Joseph hurried to join him. "How are Renie and the little man?" he called back to Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah Dako raised his goggles for a moment to squint at the readouts on the console. "Everything steady. They're breathing better air than we are."

  "So what do we do now?" Joseph asked, heaving a large fire extinguisher off the floor. Smoke curled around his shoe tops, but the largest part of the cloud was still being sucked into the vents, the grille, and the wall around it stained a shiny, sludgy black.

  "What we've been doing," said Jeremiah. "We wait."

  "Damn," said Joseph. He fired a gooey plume of foam onto the blaze. "That is the thing I am tired of doing. Why is it that Sellars man can turn this mountain upside down, but he can't send me a damn bottle of wine?"

  It was a dream, of course—not the sort that had ravished her life, not the children come back to her after their long silence, but a simple, ordinary dream.

  It was nighttime, and Aleksandr was outside the door of her Juniper Bay house. He wanted her to let him in because he had left something behind, but even though she could see his outline in the thin light from the streetlamp—in the dream there was a window beside the door—she felt uncertain. Again and again he called to her, not in pain or anger, but in that sort of explosive preoccupation he had always had, that air of having something important to do that was being prevented by a needlessly obstructive world and its petty details.

  He couldn't or wouldn't tell her what it was he had left behind. Driven to a kind of fluttering despair by indecision, she had rummaged through drawers and cabinets, trying to find whatever was so important that he would delay whatever journey he was on, but she could find nothing in any of the places she searched that made any sense at all.

  She woke up to the wallscreen yammering and darkness in the spaces between the motel drapes. She had fallen asleep sitting on the bed, in midafternoon, and now only the light from the screen remained. Carelessly, she had nodded off with the drapes not completely closed. Anyone could have stood and watched her through the window.

  But did anyone care?

  She stood up and pulled the drapes shut, then went back to the warm trough of the bed. As she sat, trying to make peace with being awake, she felt something missing. It took a moment before she realized it wa
s Misha, who at home would have been curled up beside her, or more likely in her lap, his entire little body laid trustingly upon her.

  Never again. Tears came to her eyes.

  The news was still chattering away in the background. stories of sudden instability in financial markets, of strange rumors, of mysterious silences from key movers and shakers. It was so hard to care. Rather, it was too hard to give it true attention, because the caring was too painful. Once she had sat down every night to watch the news, but each evening's iteration had left her feeling that she and the rest of human civilization were poorly balanced on the crest of some huge wave, that any moment the entire thing would crash down with shattering force.

  She turned off the screen. It was time to go. The security officers, corporate police, whatever they were, had given her a bad turn, but clearly they were just investigating all possibilities. People had noticed her asking questions.

  After all, for all they knew, I might be a terrorist, she thought. It amused her, then her own amusement struck her as even more ironic. But I am a terrorist.

  The urge to laugh, all alone in the now-silent room, seemed unhealthy. She was frightened by the thought of what was to come, that was the truth of it. Olga was not the kind of person who lied much to others, and not at all to herself.

  She had lied to the security people, of course, if only by omission. And in a way she had lied to Mr. Ramsey—not by anything she had told him, but by doing it in a written message, knowing he could not respond, that she would not have to defend herself. And just as she had feared, his replies had come hastening back, a chorus of protesting voices that she could not bear to access.

  It was time to go. She would sleep in her rental car for a few hours in the out-of-the-way spot she had found deep in the bayou, then when her alarm woke her at midnight, she would make her way in through the swamp in the raft she had bought, try to land somewhere in the park that covered one edge of the artificial island. It seemed unlikely there would be no guards, but there would certainly be fewer of them out on the edges of the impenetrable swamp, wouldn't there?