“I know, your dad brought it,” Kate says. She fires out the window.
Helen spins around frantically. There’s no time to discuss what to do with the book. They can’t just leave it there, but it’s heavy—a liability when you need to move fast. She finds a leather knapsack on the floor, so old and rotten it’s stiff. She punches it a couple of times and a cloud of dust rises from it. It’ll have to do.
She shoves the book into the bag and slings it on her back.
“Ready?” Kate says. She fires. Another Tromindox gone. Another crackling noise.
“Ready,” Helen says. “Let’s go.”
Kate and Helen burst out the front of the building amid a hail of gunfire and energy blasts that hit the ground in front of them and tear chunks out of the wooden porch behind them. They take off sideways, toward an alley between buildings. Kate turns, aims and fires at a Tromindox on a balcony across the street, but misses. They dive into the alley and look for an opening.
“We’ve got to go building by building,” Kate shouts, “and make sure everyone is out. The sluggish ones will tend to hide in the dark. Stay alert.”
They find a window at the side, about chest-height, and climb through. The room looks like a parlor from a past century, dust-covered rotten furniture and faded wallpaper. No one is home.
“You check upstairs,” Kate says, “I’ll cover the front.”
Helen runs up a staircase that is so rickety each footfall feels like she might break through and wind up back in the parlor. At the top she finds a short hallway lined by a series of massive wooden doors, all shut. A blue glow shines underneath the door at the end, straight in front of her.
Helen creeps forward. The blue glow fluctuates like the light from a TV set. She suspects this might be coming from a digital Tromindox face. She takes up a position outside the door, clicks her viewer down over her eye, and checks to be sure her weapon is ready. Then, she lifts her boot and kicks the brittle door in.
Before she can even get inside, Helen is whacked in the face and knocked to the floor. She recovers quickly, aims, and fires. She can make out a shape in front of her, huge and black and ragged. Through her glass lens she can see the outline of a person; it looks like a woman. The figure lets out a scream, filled with the sound of dozens of voices. The Tromindox falls to the floor and convulses with rage. The pixels on its digital face flip crazily, showing faces screaming, crying, terrified eyes, sometimes just one big eye. There is one face after another. Finally it settles on the face of one woman, her expression frozen in fright.
The Tromindox dissolves into black, ash-like dust, the digital display going static, then dark. The blue light subsides and the mask falls away onto the floor.
Left in its place is a woman, probably in her thirties, with dark hair. She lies on the floor, black dust streaming from her clothing as if she has been pulled from the sand on a black beach.
It’s Mrs. Chen.
The digital face lights up one more time, with Mrs. Chen’s face, in one last convulsion of data. Mrs. Chen looks at it in horror. Helen crouches down next to her and lifts the glass off her eye. The digital face goes blank again and stays that way.
Helen places her hand on Mrs. Chen’s shoulder. “Ma’am, I’m going to send you back to where you came from now. I don’t have a lot of time. Are you ready?”
Mrs. Chen looks up at her, tears and black dust streaking down her cheeks. “I came here, they said I would find my boy, I came here to get my boy…”
“I’m so sorry, ma’am, I’m sorry. They lied to you. Now I’m going to give you another coin, like the one you had before, but this one takes you home, okay? Everything is going to be alright. You’re going home.”
Helen pulls a portal from her pocket and presses it into Mrs. Chen’s hand. She presses the button on the device attached to her belt.
“You’re going home, Mrs. Chen,” Helen says again.
Mrs. Chen fades out and disappears. Her eyes never leave Helen’s.
Far away, in a tall apartment building in a city on a bright sunny afternoon, a young man wearing a wedding ring sits at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. He lifts his head when he hears a sound. His wife stands in the doorway, her face a landscape of pain and fear and exhaustion. She steps forward, begins to speak, but before she can make a sound he has gathered her in his arms, an embrace so forceful his knees buckle. He holds her as if she could disappear again at any moment. He asks her nothing, she says nothing. The photograph of their son, their beloved boy, sits on the windowsill, where it will stay.
Gabriel crouches behind a pile of lumber, perhaps used to make coffins back in the days when this was a real town above water. Gunshots and explosive noises ring in his ears. He can tell when Helen and Kate are on the move by the amount of gunfire. It picks up, then subsides again.
Now to find the power cord for this place. The Tromindox must be drawing energy from somewhere to maintain this wonderful bubble under the lake. And somewhere, that energy has a source that can be turned off. But where? And what happens when they pull the plug?
Gabriel rummages in his pockets for the light card from the Chairman. It’s got gobs of mumbo jumbo on it, codes, pictures, more stuff than he has time to sort through. Why couldn’t the Chairman just summarize? Bottom line it? Oh that’s right, Gabriel remembers, I was too busy punching him in the face and menacing him with furniture.
Gabriel pokes around a little more on the card. He is about to lose hope and throw the stupid thing in the dust, but there’s one item that catches his eye, a tiny icon of some sort. It might be a message; he is pretty sure that wasn’t there before. He pokes it with his finger.
A window appears with the Chairman’s face. He looks pretty bad, not his usual dapper self.
“Hello, Mister Silverwood,” the Chairman says.
“Shush! Quiet down!” Gabriel hisses. “Kind of in a pinch, here.”
The Chairman waits, looking annoyed. Gabriel runs behind the building and crouches down. “Okay, what? Now you can talk.”
The Chairman rolls his eyes. “Well, at least I got through. I’ve had to use some extremely obscure channels to get in touch, since I no longer have access to the Council protocols.”
“Does that mean I can just call you ‘Bob’ or something now?” Gabriel asks. “Instead of Chairman Magistrate Poobah?”
The Chairman looks unamused.
“Actually, on second thought, that kind of ruins it. I’ll just call you Chairman. For old time’s sake,” Gabriel says.
“Are you finished and ready to listen?” the Chairman asks.
“Sure, Chairman Sir. How can I help you?” Gabriel says.
“If I’m not mistaken, it’s you who needs assistance at the moment,” the Chairman says.
“Oh, we’ve got things in hand. Helen’s popping people out of Tromindox, Kate’s shooting up the place, it’s all good.”
“All good, except you are stuck in a field under a lake. It would be nice to get out of there, wouldn’t it? And, I’m guessing, you have surmised that this field is Tromindox technology.”
Gabriel considers this. Yes, now that he mentions it, that would be a good idea to exit this place without bringing thousands of tons of water down on our heads all at once. “I was just going to let my family destroy it, they’re doing such a good job. But what did you have in mind?”
The Chairman appears to lean in close. “Here’s the problem. There’s this fellow, Julius Dinkle… ”
“Nice name,” Gabriel snorts.
“Well, not a nice fellow,” the Chairman says. “It appears that he’s been working to develop a vaccine against Silverwood blood.”
“A vaccine? But he’s human, right? What kind of idiot… ”
“The kind of idiot who has struck a deal with a particular group of Tromindox, and in the process gotten control of the Council.”
“Oh, that kind of idiot,” Gabriel says.
“Right, that kind of idiot,” the Chairman says. “N
ow, the vaccine was all but complete, but it seems to have disappeared. And you can bet that Dinkle and his people will be after it.”
“I don’t have it,” Gabriel says.
“You don’t,” says the Chairman. “But ask your daughter.”
“Helen doesn’t have it.” Gabriel pauses. Where is this going?
“She will be tracked, and Dinkle, or his people, or his Tromindox, will find her.”
“All the more reason to exit this little underwater scene, then,” Gabriel says.
“All the more reason,” the Chairman says.
“Can I ask you something?” Gabriel says. “What is it you want? I mean, the deal with getting the portals back was a non-starter, now you’re on the run, this Dinkle person appears to have the upper hand. What gives?”
Gabriel knows the Chairman well. Theirs is a long, complicated history. There is always a catch.
The Chairman is silent for a moment.
“I want balance, balance of power,” the Chairman says. “Also, I don’t want to end up living in the jungle. Which is a very real possibility right at the moment.”
Gabriel considers this. The man in the double-breasted suits, sleeping in a tree.
“I see,” Gabriel says. “Although I must say, the rugged look isn’t bad. Not bad. Doesn’t make me want to punch you nearly as much.”
“Look,” the Chairman says, “there used to be a balance. The Council and the Silverwoods didn’t like each other, but the portals were looked after and kept secure, The Book of the Future and The Book of Regrets were safe, things were… peaceful. Irritating, but peaceful. Now, we’ve got a new player. One who wants to take us both out of the game entirely. You with a vaccine, me with banishment or digestion by a squid.”
The Chairman continues. “What I have going for me, or should I say, what we have going for us, at this stage, is that I still know my way around. My passwords have passwords. And as long as I can still dig a tunnel under the system, we still have a chance to restore balance… between that and your daughter, who seems to have hacked her way to Council Headquarters and back.”
Council? Headquarters? Teenagers never tell their parents anything about where they have been, do they, Gabriel thinks.
“Anyway,” says the Chairman, “here is what I know. There is a power source that is bringing the Tromindox through. And there is that portal, the one that I delivered to your wife out there on the road. Do you still have it?”
Gabriel reaches in his pocket and holds it up. “Yes, I do.”
“Okay,” the Chairman says. “The power source is underground, most likely disguised as a mine or a pipe or something like that. It will be centrally located in the town. Bring that portal in contact with it, and the whole thing—the energy source, the Tromindox, their stronghold—goes back to where it came from. Got it?”
“Okay,” says Gabriel, looking around him. Power source. Hole in the ground. Hole in the ground.
“You will not want to go with it,” the Chairman adds. “My guess is, you will only have a few minutes to get out of there. Be ready to put some distance between you and the power source. Get your family as far away as possible. In fact, any field being generated in the surrounding area is liable to collapse too.”
Gabriel is up now, peering around the building. Where is this power source he speaks of?
“Mister Silverwood? Are you listening?” the Chairman asks.
“Yeah,” Gabriel says. “Hey, if I do this thing, if we do this, send this Dinkle guy down the drain, and you get yourself back together, remember that I know how your prison works, and I’ve got a hacker daughter and a clairvoyant son and a wife who could kick your ass. Got it? Don’t mess with us.”
Gabriel looks straight down into the card. “Got it, Mister Boss-man?”
The card has gone blank. The Chairman probably didn’t get his little speech.
Gabriel heads for the front corner of the General Store, a building that has the advantage of windows on two sides. He peers through the smeary glass of one window, through the other window on the front, and surveys the scene from there. Where would this drain be?
His eyes land on the obvious choice: Of course, the well, in the center of the town. The middle of the street. Right in front of him. It’s ideally located, and nobody thinks anything about there being a well there. Shoot, it’s a nice little cast-iron pump surrounded by a circle of stones. So innocent looking. That’s got to be it.
Now, he’s got to figure a way to get out there without getting blasted to bits or crushed under an entire lake of water.
Gabriel must locate his wife and daughter before pulling the plug, which is not difficult. Kate comes running out the front of the Saloon across the street, backwards, firing into the building. A moment later Helen appears on the landing upstairs. She runs and jumps to the balcony next door, and Kate sprints along below her. They’ve worked their way practically through the whole town.
He hopes that their mayhem is enough of a distraction to provide him cover… that’s a chance Gabriel will have to take. He straightens his back and walks, as casually as possible, out toward the well.
He reaches the well without incident. He can hear his wife taking out another Tromindox down the street, but that’s it. Nobody seems interested in Gabriel himself. That’s strange, he thinks. Surely they haven’t cleared out the entire town already.
He crouches next to the pump handle and looks it over. It’s bolted to the ground. He reaches down and pulls on one of the bolts, and it comes loose in his hand. Looks like the bolts are completely rusted. Not a big surprise, since this well has been underwater for such a long time.
Gabriel grabs the other bolts and pulls them out, one of them sticks, so he puts his shoulder against the pump, and shoves the whole thing upward and over to snap it. The pump tips over and falls on the ground, leaving a rusted chunk of curved metal and a hole in the ground.
He grabs the portal from his pocket and peers down into the hole. It’s narrow, not big enough to climb into. There’s no way to go down into it and investigate. This will be a complete gamble, literally flipping a coin.
He holds the portal out over the hole, and…
“Making a wish?” a voice says behind him. Doctor Julius Dinkle, his hand heavily bandaged but still wearing his ratty bowler hat, stands blocking the sun from Gabriel’s face.
“You must be that Dunkle fellow,” Gabriel says, peering up at the silhouette. “I’ve heard about you.”
“Dinkle,” Dinkle says.
“Did you call off your hounds? Nobody’s apparently interested in slowing my progress, here. At least nobody’s shot me, yet,” Gabriel says.
“I did call them off, Mister Silverwood,” Dinkle says. “I thought we could have a talk, you and I. So why don’t you just relax there a minute.”
“What happened to your hand?” Gabriel asks. He can sense stirring behind the windows of the buildings nearby. Tromindox, waiting and watching.
“You know you’re about to do something very foolish there,” Dinkle says. “Throwing your only means of escape down a well. Don’t you think that’s a bit too obvious? A hole in the ground, in the middle of the street? I suppose the Chairman put you up to this.”
Gabriel stands, holding the portal positioned over the well so Dinkle has no choice but to keep his distance.
“So you’re saying this isn’t it, then?” Gabriel says. “That I shouldn’t just toss this here portal down the well and see what happens?”
“I’m saying you would be very foolish if you did,” Dinkle says. “Don’t you wonder why the Chairman would tell you to go out in the middle of the street, totally exposed, and toss a portal into the ground, where you can’t ever reach it again? Doesn’t that seem, on the one hand, obvious, and on the other, a little risky?”
“Everything is risky,” Gabriel says. “You do the best you can with what you’ve got.”
“Well you haven’t got much,” Dinkle says. “And I have lots of things. Like
, for example, your wife and daughter.”
Two figures appear on the porch of the General Store, dressed all in black, wearing black helmets on their heads. One has an arm around Helen’s neck. The other has pinned Kate’s arms behind her.
“These projection things,” Dinkle says. “They are so useful. Not just for this purpose, but to give you the idea your family is still hard at work, running around causing mayhem, when really they are right here. You know, I got these from your Chairman friend.”
Dinkle walks up close to Gabriel, his beady little eyes burning. “Oh, and I have one other thing, this.”
He holds up a small vial. That can only be the vaccine.
“And what exactly are you planning to do with that?” a voice asks.
Gabriel spins around. Tromindox T-441 stands in the middle of the street, a dark ragged shape against the dry, yellow ground. A breeze sends dust swirling around his boots.
“Move off, 441,” Dinkle says. “Let me do my job.”
“Your job?” 441 says. “You mean, our job. I’m here for insurance, Dinkle. To be sure you don’t screw it up.”
“Well, whatever I choose to do with this vaccine is my decision, isn’t it?” Dinkle says, dangling the vial between his fingers. “And you’d better do exactly what I say, I suppose, if you Tromindox ever want to get a hold of a single drop.”
“Wait… okay, wait…” Gabriel stammers. A second ago he was in a standoff of his own, now he finds himself in the center of a standoff between two other people. Or, a person and a squid.
“Back off, 441,” Dinkle says. “I’m warning you.”
“441… wait, what do you want with him?” Gabriel asks.
441 says nothing, and instead sends a blast of energy straight at Dinkle’s head. Gabriel’s head is on the same trajectory, so he drops to the ground. Dinkle ducks also, but still gets knocked backward by the force.
“There’s more where that came from,” 441 says.
“You idiot, of course there is,” Dinkle says. “Or have you forgotten, I brought you here. I did! You would be nothing, still starving in a jungle somewhere, if it wasn’t for me. Now you’re here, you’ve got your own place. I got you the technology to do it. All you need to do now is; dispose of that piece of Silverwood garbage standing between us.”
Silverwood Page 22
