Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail flotd-4

by Jack L. Chalker

  What I found in the maintenance room was not just my cell, but five separate cells, perhaps sixty people, all crowded into a place that could hardly hold one-third that number. Up front somebody had set up a screen and small recorder. A sense of extreme tension pervaded the air, yet few speculated or even said much to one another. The cells were uncomfortable being this packed together, and not just in the physical sense.

  A tall woman from one of the other cells, all masked and robed as usual—even Ching was so disguised, although I still refused—looked around, took a count, then, satisfied, began by asking for quiet. The request was quickly granted by the uncomfortable crowd. Ching and I climbed up in the back on top of some crates so we could get out of the crush and still see at least the top part of the screen.

  “We have been directed by our leadership board to gather you here and play this recording for you,” tlie woman told us. “None of us have any more idea of what it contains than you do. Therefore, we will proceed to find out as quickly as possible. I am told that the recording card will destroy itself as it plays, so there can be no repeats.” She punched the card into the recorder, and the screen flickered to life.

  They could have saved themselves the trouble of a screen for all it was worth. It simply showed a man, masked and robed himself, sitting at a desk. It was impossible to tell anything about the scene, even the planet of origin, and it was obvious from the start that even the voice was distorted.

  “Fellow comrades in opposition to the Lords of the Diamond,” he began, “I bring you greetings. As some of you may have guessed, you are a part not only of a planet-wide organization but a systemwide group devoted to the overthrow of all Four Lords of the Diamond.”

  There were gasps and some rumbling in the crowd.

  “All of you have your personal reasons for wishing to overthrow the Medusan system, reasons we well understand. Simply because you are a part of a larger plan, please do not for one moment think that your own hopes and objectives are not part of that plan,” the man went on. “Events have a way of overtaking plans, however, and that has happened in this case. The Confederacy itself is taking an active hand against the Four Lords, and has some chance of success. It is time, therefore, to explain to you all a little of what this is about.

  “An alien race, totally alien to anything we know, discovered humanity before humanity discovered it. That race is somehow bound up with our homeland, the Warden system itself, and they are very clever and have a very good understanding of the way people work. Instead of warring with the Confederacy, they contacted the Four Lords, who jointly accepted a contract to destroy human civilization outside of the Diamond.”

  A lot more whispering and rustling now, and I could hear some snatches that included the words “mad” and “insult” and the like. Clearly this cloistered group, few or none of whom had ever known anyplace except the Warden Diamond, either didn’t believe the man or they couldn’t care less about the aliens. This reaction was understandable, and, I found, exactly what the speaker had anticipated. Either he Vas a psych or he had some good ones prepare the talk.

  “Now, I know this doesn’t seem to apply to you, but the fact is, it does. The Four Lords have made this contract and they are in the process of carrying it out. Their means are irrelevant to you, since they are worked against non-Diamond people, but those means depended on secrecy to the very last minute. Now that secrecy is blown. The Confederacy knows. Knows, but not enough. They are left with two options. We are one. The Four Lords must go, and be replaced by more honest, Warden-oriented people who will work for the Diamond and not on some sort of mass revenge. But we are no tools of the Confederacy, I assure you. We do this for our own good.”

  Nice dramatic pause here, I thought.

  “The second and only remaining option as to the overthrow of the Four Lords and the consequent flushing out of these aliens is simple. The Confederacy, if it can not achieve or see the first, will not hesitate to do on a mass scale what they fail to do on a simple scale. They propose to incinerate the four Warden Diamond worlds totally and kill every living person and thing upon them.”

  Another pause and much agitation and some really loud comments rose from the crowd. It sounded angry and upset.

  “They have the power to do this. They have the means. And those aliens won’t save us. If they could, they wouldn’t have needed the Four Lords in the first place. Therefore, this organization of good, serious men and women of the Diamond, very different on each world but nonetheless there, was formed not to save the Confederacy, which means nothing to us, but to save our homes, our worlds, our very lives. The Four Lords will not back down. They are in this to the death, since anything less than the aliens’ total victory will destroy them. And since we know very little about them ourselves, we have no reason to think that, even in the case of a now improbable alien and Four Lords victory, those aliens would then be friendly to us. We have no choice.

  “However, each planet is different, and must be dealt with by different methods—and is best dealt with by th” natives of those worlds. Therefore, the members of Medusa’s Opposition must now sit back, reflect, and discuss the situation among themselves. Cells will be asked within no more than two weeks to propose plans for action. Those plans will be examined and coordinated by us, and then a single master plan will be developed. We will win. We must win. I leave you now to discuss the situation in your individual cells. With your help, Medusa, TMS, and the very idea of monitors that strangles the world will be vanquished within a year.”

  With that the recording stopped, and there was instant pandemonium that took the group leader some time to quiet down to a dull roar. Finally she got enough of a lull to yell, “Discussion will be in individual cell groups. Those with numbers beginning in four will file out first, then those with six, following your cell leaders. Those in my cell will remain here! Do it now!”

  Everyone stood around for a few moments, then a small group of four started toward the exit, followed by the rest, still grumbling and talking. As for me, I was reasonably excited by this development, since it meant action in the foreseeable future. I could just, imagine the furious debates that would ensue when we met in private from now on. But something still bothered me a little. Was it really true that they had no plan, or was this simply a test? And would the truth sell to these folks?

  I saw Sister 657, and turned to Ching. “What do you think?”

  She shrugged. “It’s hard to believe.”

  “It’s true,” I told her. “I knew it before I ever got to Medusa.”

  She thought about that one for a moment. Finally she said, “But is it any of our business, really? I’m not sure I even know what he means by aliens, and as for the Confederacy, all Outside is just a fairy tale to us, anyway.”

  I expected more of this logic when we assembled in our cell meeting. A lot more. What could you expect from people who weren’t even sure what wild animals lived on their own native world? What did the concept of “alien” mean to them, anyway? Cerberan or Charonese was as alien as they could probably think. The idea that somebody, somewhere, could or would give an order and be willing and able to blow up a world was incomprehensibly abstract. I suspected that the Opposition leader had his hands full. I could tell just from his accent that he was a transportee himself, probably from the civilized worlds. His fancy, wood-paneled office wasn’t in the Medusan style, at least none I’d ever seen, leading to the inescapable conclusion that our leaders were Cerberan or Charonese, not Medusan. That would also be the ultimate conclusion of the group, I knew—and would cause even more intense anti-leadership feelings. For the first time these play rebels were being asked to do something, possibly to put their lives on the line, and they would do anything to avoid that.

  Our, group was going out, and I jumped down and helped Ching down as well. We turned and followed the others, bringing up the rear of the group. I moved only a few paces outside the door when I stopped and ducked back inside. Ching, startled,
looked at me. “What’s the matter?”

  “TMS!” I shouted so that everybody could hear. “It’s a trap!”

  The monitors also heard my echoed warning, because there was the sudden sound of an amplified official voice. “This is TMS! Everyone inside that room will come out, one by one, hands on heads, starting exactly one minute from now! We will gas anyone left after the rest have emerged, so there is no reason to hold back. You are trapped, and there is no way out. You have fifty seconds!”

  Ching looked at me, scared and confused. “What will we do?”

  I peered back out the door and saw perhaps a dozen agents, lined up on both sides of the catwalk about ten meters on either side of the temporary bridge. I had never seen TMS monitors armed with anything more lethal than a night stick, but these held very familiar-looking laser weapons.

  I turned back to Ching and lowered my voice. “Now, listen carefully. I’m going to try and bluff us out of here with Hocrow’s name. At the very least that should get us taken to her.” I turned and looked at the remaining Opposition members in the room. Most had their hoods off and defeat registered all over their faces and in their mannerisms. They were sheep who’d do what they were told, like good little children, now that they’d been caught.

  “Thirty seconds!”

  “Damn!” I swore. “No, that Hocrow thing won’t work except as a diversion. She’s got to be behind this, at least partly. That means I’m no longer useful to her. We’ll get psyched with the sheep. We’ve got to escape.”

  “Twenty seconds!”

  “Escape? How?” Ching’s whole expression showed that the very concept was alien to her. On Medusa, you were raised from birth to believe that there was no escape.

  “I’m going to get one of those guns, then go over the rail into the sewer. Follow me if you want, but it’s gonna be rough.”

  “Ten seconds!”

  “But—where can we go?”

  “Only one place. It’s that or the Goodtime Girls, love. Ready?”

  She nodded.

  “Come out now!”

  I walked out, hands above my head, and Ching followed. The rest of the cell walked behind us, looking very dejected. I could now see the others who’d gone before us lined up on both sides, and I couldn’t help but be disgusted at the sight. Not a single weapon was aimed at them; in fact, nobody was even looking at them.’ Yet there they stood, hands meekly over heads, waiting for the rest of the sheep. Well, by God, they had one rabid dog in this bunch. Still, I couldn’t believe that these were the shock troops of a real rebellion. If they had any guts or weren’t so completely conditioned by their society, they could have easily taken all those TMS agents and their weapons. Escape? Where? Rule one: first escape, then go where they aren’t.

  Thanks to the illuminated stripes on its top, you could see a pretty long ways up and down the pipe, and the dozen TMS agents were all I saw. Only two on each side held laser weapons, short rifles from the looks of them.

  “Get over against the wall with your traitorous friends!” snapped the laser-armed woman closest to me.

  “Hey! I’m with Major Hocrow—I’m her inside man!” I protested.

  “Major Hocrow is under arrest, just like you,” the monitor snapped back. “You’ll meet her in traitor’s belli”

  Oho! Well, that was interesting. At least it meant that Hocrow was either being done in by a subordinate who was walking into her job or she really was with the Opposition and was one of those who ran cover for us. I would never know which, but the comment removed any last doubts I had about what I was going to do. There was no reprieve, and, once out of here, no chance at all.

  I walked on past the monitor with the nasty tone, who, I saw, was no longer even looking at us but idly holding the rifle while gazing at the people coming behind us. I was about the same size as the monitor, but I had several advantages, not the least of which was that I wasn’t conditioned by Medusa and I knew how to use that fancy rifle.

  I whirled, pushed, and knocked her head into the rail, then reached out and grabbed the rifle from her loose grip as she struck.

  In one motion I ducked, came up with the rifle, using it to push Ching on past, then opened fire on the line of monitors across from me. The beam, set to kill, sliced through them all pretty neatly, leaving just one weapon and four unarmed monitors at my,baek.

  Men and women screamed at the violence that was not and had never been a part of their lives. I grabbed the groggy monitor I’d pushed into the rail in a hammer grip and, using her as a shield, started firing at the others.

  I still would have failed, though, if three of the sheep still pressed against the wall hadn’t made a split-second decision and rushed out. The officer holding the laser rifle on the far end was pushed into the muck, toppling nicely over the rail. The other three monitors, looking not just stunned but actually stricken, had eyes only for my rifle—and they stood still as stone.

  “Thanks!” I called out to the three who’d come to my aid. “I couldn’t have done it without you!” One of them waved, and I looked over at Ching. “You all right?”

  “You—you killed them!”

  “It’s my job. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Right now we have to get out of here—fast.” I looked up and down at the Opposition members, some of whom still had their hands over their heads. I could sympathize, sort of. What they’d just seen was impossible, and that’s why it’d worked. The monitors were simply too self-assured and too relaxed, too confident that the sheep would all be meek. They reacted very slowly, and, amateurishly, they had their rifles on narrow-beam kill, which allowed me to get that whole neat row with a single shot. Even the monitors were products of Medusa, conditioned to certain kinds of behavior and confident in their total mastery over the common herd.

  I pushed my prisoner into the others and freed myself of any physical restrictions. The monitor rubbed her head and looked at me with a mixture of fear and confusion. “You better let us have that! There is no escape. Your entire organization is broken.”

  I smiled at her, which confused her all the more. “Okay, you Opposition members, listen up!” I yelled. “They’re picking up our people all over the city, maybe all over the planet. You have only three choices. You can kill yourselves, go with the monitors, or come with me!”

  “Come with you? Where?” somebody yelled back nervously.

  “Outside! In the bush and the wild! It’s the only place to run!”

  That suggestion stopped them for a moment. I let them mull over the implications, but only for a short period. We had to move fast, before we were missed. This group of monitors was the usual bunch of egomaniacal incompetents, but TMS had much better than these, and it wouldn’t take very long for their best to set out after us. I wanted to be long gone by then. “Anybody here know where the sewers dump outside the city and how to get there from here?”

  “I know ’em pretty well,” one of the three who’d pushed at the right moment called back. “I think I can get us out of here.”

  “Who’s coming? I have to know now!”

  It didn’t surprise me that only the three who’d showed any guts wanted to come. Counting Ching, who was still looking pretty scared and confused herself, and me, that was five out of almost sixty. Some rebels!

  “You three come up with me!” I called, then turned to Ching. “Coming?”

  She was frightened and shocked, but she nodded affirmatively. “I go with you.”

  “Good girl!” I looked at the three. All were women, and one was familiar. “Well! Morphy! I thought you’d have the guts!”

  Our demanding shift supervisor looked sheepish. “You knew?”

  “Almost from the start. Introductions later, though.” I flicked the rifle field to wide scan. “This won’t hurt anybody,” I said loud enough for all to hear, “just knock you out for a couple of minutes. I gotta say, though, that you deserve what you’re going to get from TMS.” I looked around. “Last chance.” Nobody moved.

 
; I fired first at the side with the monitors, then turned as the others on the other side screamed once more and started to panic. They all dropped in their tracks, although they were going to be a pain to crawl over on the catwalk.

  I looked at them, feeling oddly confident and solid with the rifle in my hand. Four women and me. That could make the wild easier to take, that was for sure.

  “C’mon, tribe!” I said, and we started picking our way through the unconscious bodies toward the clear area of the tunnel.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Wild Ones

  When we’d gotten pretty far from the fallen crowd, I stopped and turned to them. I had had the foresight to pick up the other rifle as we’d moved by the dead monitor on the end, as well as a power pack from the monitor’s belt, but the charges were still limited and I was pretty sure I was the only one who knew how to fire the things.

  “Okay—now things get messy,” I told them. “They’ll have squads all through this tunnel, and we’re going to have to crawl in the muck below the catwalks and keep very still when they pass near so they go right on past. Understand?”

  They nodded. I looked at the one who had said she knew the sewage system, a very attractive women perhaps in her early twenties. “You said you knew these sewers. Can we get near a train at the exit point?”

  She looked startled. “I thought you said we were going out with the garbage.”

  “Argue later. But for the record, now that we’ve said that it’s exactly where they’ll look for us. Remember, they’ve got all sorts of scanners in these tunnels, too, and they’ll all be looking for us. I’ve looked at their regular locations, though, which depend on the power cables, and they’re all located above the catwalks. If we’re quiet enough, and careful enough, they won’t see us down in the muck below. They have fixed focal lengths, so anything below the catwalks is a blur. Let’s move—you lead. Morphy, you know what I’m thinking?”