A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “So, he was taken to this prison, in Shangri-la. But he didn’t stay more than a few hours, even though they’d given him, like . . . two years. So, you know, I was surprised to see him back on the streets this afternoon, and he told me these guards came in and cleared the prison and turned everyone loose, and there was this high-security transport. He thought they were transferring the prisoners from Never-Never there, which would make sense, except he says it was a small transport, and he wondered if they only managed to keep like less than ten prisoners in. But then it was really small and he says maybe one. Anyway, it’s weird.”

  Abigail and I traded a look. We let the talk stray to weird things in general for a while, not wanting to call attention to our interest in the prison, because Birt might be three fourths air head, but he might not. I was never sure how much of it was an act.

  Then Abigail came back to it, by a circuitous route, talking about things that were named weirdly, and got to “That prison, isn’t it named something like Coconuts? The one that, ah, Snake escaped from?”

  “He didn’t escape,” Birt said. By then we’d bought him maybe five drinks, and his speech was starting to get a little slurred. “At least he says it’s no trouble at all escaping from it, you know, because in some cells over time they’ve loosened the fresher assembly so it can be pulled over, and then you can go out through the drains to the sea, but the thing is, this time he didn’t have to, which he was glad about, because he had new, fancy boots, and he didn’t need to destroy them in the muck, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Abigail said, and went back to her point. “Isn’t that Coconut Guard, or something like that?”

  He gave her an odd look, then said, “No. Coconut Heights is the overnight lockup in Olympus, and no one has any idea why it was named that. This one is out on Shangri-la. I think it’s called something like Correctional Facility for the Rehabilitation of something or other, but everyone calls it Coffers.”

  And then we had to continue the conversation for a while longer. Had to. Again, Birt might not be the smoothest pebble in the brook, but I doubted he was a complete simpleton either. In fact, before we acted on anything he said, I was going to have to double-check it. Because now I was completely aware of how shot through with my father’s spies and informants every place and every group was.

  But Birt seemed inoffensive enough as he took leave of us on the street outside the bar. “Give my best to Ben,” he shouted out, as we walked down the street to the place where the roof wasn’t directly overhead and we could actually take off on the broom. Birt, himself, went the other way down the street, probably looking for another bar.

  Ben snorted in my mind, with a sound like Abigail’s and I would have told him he was a bad influence on her, except she couldn’t hear him.

  We took off and Abigail signaled for me to follow her and told me we were going back to the lair with finger movements so rapid it betrayed she spent a lot more time than I’d have thought on broomback. And there didn’t seem to be any way to argue with her. Nor did I know where we could go to confirm the stuff about Coffers.

  Consensus

  The Brooms of Doom had a much bigger and better appointed lair than we’d ever had. It took up most of a warehouse in the Deep Under region of Syracuse Seacity, so that Abigail and I just had to fly around a few minutes, then fly through the disabled robotic arms, before we landed and walked to the lair. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure that this was not on the bottom floor of the building where the Twelve had first gathered to meet me.

  The lair must at one time have housed flyers ready for resale, one of those places that have niches on the wall, each large enough to accommodate a family flyer, with open space in the middle for special show-pieces and for the salesmen to walk around and meet customers. It was that big, and some structures in the corner looked like what would remain after those niches were removed.

  Most of the space was open and shadowy, but there was an entire area partitioned with boxes, pallets, pieces of ceramite or dimatough, and the occasional blanket. Our lair had never got that sophisticated. We all slept in the same communal space, and if you wanted privacy you had to look for it in the shadows or around the edges, or, if you were lucky, behind a pile of something or other, usually debris from wrecked brooms and parts for broom repair.

  Abigail led me to an open area, past some of the sleeping cubes. It was clear it had been set up as an eating area in that it was marginally cleaner than what you found in this sort of place, and that there were various seating arrangements. By which I mean that no chair, stool or pillowlike object was the same height, color or rough size. They’d either been scavenged from discards or bought from some tenth-hand store one by one. It could be either or both.

  The funny thing is that the moment we entered the area, Abigail became the perfect hostess, asking me to sit down and if I wanted to eat something. As it happened I did. I was no longer twenty. She might have drunk five or six pink whatsits and look no worse for the wear, but after what must have been all of three single malts—I’d ordered more than that, because we’d been to five bars, but I’d nursed them parsimoniously, and when we’d left had left more than half in the glass at each bar—if that many, I felt like I needed something to soak up the alcohol. Besides, I was sure this would be another late night or early morning or whatever. It better be. I grudged every minute that Nat was in enemy hands and at their mercy.

  I was eating a sandwich—a surprisingly good one too—when the others straggled in. First Simon, who still managed to look as if he dressed to attract attention in a line of costumed dancers and who, somehow, had managed to go through the lowest dives around and emerge without a wrinkle on his ruffles. He’d grunted something that might have been allo or allors. I’d noticed his tendency to lapse into ancient French, which was nonsense. Liberte Seacity had, it is true, Gallic origins, but those had been from Francophone Swiss, and at any rate, the patois they spoke was no closer to real French than Glaish was to ancient English. The seacities were such a melting pot of languages and peoples who fled the catastrophic if slow-motion collapse of old Europe that hardly a single tongue escaped unchanged. I’d decided that for whatever reason Simon thought that French helped with his non-threatening image. And perhaps it did, a little, as he spoke it, since it was pantomime French or stage French—French as spoken in period dramas in which the French character was often either the evil seducer or the comic relief.

  Martha and Jan stumbled in shortly after.

  And then we talked. And it soon became obvious that we had all heard the same story. We’d had different sources, mind you, but the story was always roughly the same.

  The problem became how much of it to trust.

  “It’s not that it’s implausible, allors,” Simon said, leaning forward on a thin, tall stool that caused him to look much taller than Jan or Martha and about my height. “When you think about it, the sort of prison they use for the sort of petty drug infraction that gets most broomers arrested would be packed on any given day. So, if all the prisoners were sent out at once, the story would be everywhere. Particularly after the break into Never-Never got into the rumor mill, sparking a bunch of conversations about prisons and detention.”

  “But would they just kick all the prisoners out?” Abigail said. “What we have to ask ourselves is, wouldn’t they consider it likely that knowledge of this event would be indeed everywhere at once, and that we’d come to know it? They know we have broomer connections.”

  “Not the way I see it,” Martha said. “They’re laying a trap for Lucius, mostly. They don’t even know about the rest of us. And if the trap they’re laying is for Lucius, how are they to know he’d go bar crawling and gathering information? Hell, we’d not even thought of that till a few hours ago.”

  “Okay, so maybe it almost makes sense,” Jan said. “But it’s the almost that bothers me. Wouldn’t they have seen the potential for us discovering where Nat was and finding a way in? If there is a way in.”
>
  That part at least was different, as in, no one had told them about the way to escape Coffers, which of course, happened to make an excellent way in. That is, if we could figure out which freshers had been loosened so the bases could be pushed, and if we had any idea at all where the drains for the sewers ended.

  We didn’t. But that wasn’t the hold up. The hold up was that none of us—not one—could be satisfied that this was real and not a trap. And walking into a trap tonight was on no one’s plans.

  After a good two hours pointless discussion, Simon, who for some reason seemed to hold authority in this lair, broke up the discussion and told us to go to bed. I hesitated. “If I go back home,” I said. “There is a chance of being ambushed. Not high perhaps, but—”

  “Oh, not home to bed,” Simon said. “To bed here.”

  “He doesn’t have a bed here,” Martha pointed out.

  “Surely we have accommodations for guests, enfin?”

  “Well,” Abigail said. She seemed to hesitate minimally, then took heart, as if daring herself to do something. “Perhaps . . . I mean, if you don’t mind, Lucius, you can stay in Nat’s space. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind, and it saves us having to figure out a place where you’re not likely to be walked in on by a drunken broomer or an amorous couple.”

  I nodded. Nat’s space, whatever that was, would do fine. “I don’t like this,” I said, as Abigail drew me into the partitioned area. “I don’t like waiting. You don’t know what every hour in the sort of situation he might very well be in, can do to a man. You don’t—”

  “I do,” she said. “And I don’t like it either. Except that of course you can’t expect us to go charging in to what might be a trap, either.”

  “No,” I said, and was about to add that I could always do it alone, when a head popped out the blanket-hung door of the partition we were passing. He looked remarkably like the unlikely angel who’d freed me, and he said, “Ab’ga’l, wanna see a boom?”

  Was that a flash of panic in Abigail’s face? She put a hand out and grabbed the other broomer’s arm, and said, “No, Fuse, you can’t make a boom in here. You know what Ma—what Simon would say to that, don’t you? It’s not safe, and he doesn’t like it when people get hurt.”

  The creature addressed as Fuse blinked. “I wasn’t going to set off a boom,” he said, with the supercilious exactness of an aggrieved six-year-old. “Just to show it to you and tell you what it does.”

  Abigail sighed and gestured for me to follow her. Inside was a small compartment, with a vast working table, covered in materials I couldn’t identify. Some of them smelled chemical, and some looked like they were made of strange, sparkly materials. When Fuse turned away, Abigail told me over her shoulder, in a loud whisper, “Don’t touch anything. Most of it will explode on contact.”

  Now Fuse was turning back from the bench with a radiant smile, the sort of sweet smile he’d had when he broke me out of jail. “No, no,” he said. “It’s not like that. Not this new one.” He picked up what looked like a glass globe only slightly larger than a marble. “This one you can carry in your pocket for months. It won’t explode until you throw it with force, like this,” He lifted his hand, holding the marble, and Abigail was on her tiptoes, grabbing his hand with both of hers, so he couldn’t throw anything out of it. “No, no, Fuse. Not in here. You promised, remember?”

  “Uh. Yeah,” Fuse said, and then started talking about chemicals and how he’d put a shell with a cushioned something or other on the globe, and how this meant it needed an impact above . . .

  I zoned out, my mind spinning over the problem of how to figure out if the setup with Coffers was a trap or not. Again and again I wondered how we could know. And again and again I got that we couldn’t. Which didn’t make it any easier to accept. Nat still needed rescuing, but could I allow all these people to risk their lives in what might be an enterprise that would never succeed?

  I had something like the glimmer of an idea, the sort of feeling one gets when there’s a solution to a problem, but it’s not appeared in words in your mind, yet, so all you have is a feeling. And then Abigail smiled at Fuse and said, “It is all very interesting Fuse. It is quite a lesson, isn’t it? And now, you know, we’ll have to go, but I’ll be back later to talk some more to you, okay?” To my surprise, she kissed him on the cheek. To my greater surprise, he made no movement to follow us.

  Still, it wasn’t until we were a long way away that she said, “He’s perfectly good with explosives, you know? They work the way he says they work. He made the shaped charge that got us into Never-Never. The material shattered a little wrong, because he couldn’t be expected to know twenty-second century dimatough, but the rest, he got quite right.”

  “But . . . he’s mentally deficient. Who taught him to work with explosives? Wouldn’t that be dangerous?”

  She gave me a very serious look. “He is the son of Good Man Mason, and he—” She sighed. “He had an accident going through the spider at the entrance, you know? He was running from his father’s guards because he . . . he had discovered something terrible.”

  “I’ll hazard I know what was so terrible,” I said.

  She nodded. “I thought you might, but I didn’t know what Nat or Dad had told you, and I certainly didn’t want to be the one to break the news to you.”

  “I understand,” I said, as she pulled up a corner of a blanket separating a cube delimited by boxes and pieces of ceramite.

  “This is Nat’s place, and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you sleep in it for a few hours. Maybe with a clear head we can figure out what is best to be done about breaking him out?”

  “I hope so,” I said. If my mind had been machinery, it would have had glue poured on its gears. That’s what it felt like, slow and submerged in something that kept pulling me in irrelevant directions, or stopping my thought completely.

  “Me too,” she said. She went into the cubicle, and held the curtain up, so that I ducked in after her. “Light,” she said, and the lights in the area came on.

  I was so surprised to find myself in what looked like a regular room in a well-to-do house, that I stopped cold.

  Abigail let the curtain fall. “We have to find him, Lucius. We have to bring him back.”

  And then she was gone.

  The Man, Alone

  The cubicle smelled like Nat. I hadn’t realized before that he even had a distinctive smell, but he clearly did, and it was all over this area: a hint of aftershave, a remainder of cigarette smoke, and something else, indefinable, and vaguely reminiscent of cinnamon.

  There was a carpet on the floor. The bed—a double bed—had been carefully made and sported a heavy, embroidered bed cover, not the sort of scraps of blankets and worn-through wrappings you found around the lair. There was a trunk in a corner, a desk in the other, and there were pictures on the wall.

  My wandering eyes stopped on the framed picture over the bed. It was in the same style as the picture of Max and Goldie, but the subject was quite different. I found myself staring at it, as I slowly absorbed the fact that the nude man depicted was not me, not even me at twenty. For one thing, back then, I’d never let my hair grow that long, so that it formed an almost leonine mane. When I was twenty, I wore my hair pretty much like Nat wore his, well cut and shaped to the head. The other thing is that the expression wasn’t mine. I didn’t think even in my youngest days I’d ever looked that . . . well . . . innocent. The other discrepancy I took to be artistic license, because after all, what artist wouldn’t increase a man’s endowment, even if both himself and his patron knew it was wrong. Nonsense, Ben said in my mind. Looks accurate to me. Which meant the part of my mind that played at being Ben had some . . . inflated ideas as well.

  I was still looking at the picture, when I realized this one was signed, in the corner, and that the name on it was, unmistakably Nat Remy. I blinked. Nat. But he was a lawyer. It was like opening a door and finding a garden where you expected an office. Suddenly I had a glimpse
of Nat, the older brother who had assumed the parenthood of his siblings, and yes, anyone who came in contact with his family, while his parents devoted themselves to his great cause.

  I looked at the drawing, and it wasn’t simply that it was good. There are any number of good pieces of art that are mechanical, contrived and not alive. Nat was a good stylist, but that wasn’t just it, nor was it his trick of returning to an almost minimalist style at a time when holos could improve on and add visual richness to mere nature. That was also a trick of learning and of habit. Craft. Any reasonably good craftsman who was intelligent enough could have come up with that. No. What I was looking at here was of a different order. The drawing, sketchy though it was, showed in every line Nat’s feelings for Max, from the admiration of his physique to a protective tenderness. Someone who drew like that was someone for whom art was a passion, an overmastering drive that forced him to create, even if the drawing in public areas had to remain unsigned, because he wouldn’t want his father to suspect that Nat had any other interest but in working for the family’s cause and in helping his father with the management of the Keeva estates.

  It made me want to laugh, then cry. The crying part came when I imagined how it must have felt when Not-Max, whom, at the time, Nat didn’t know wasn’t in fact Max, had asked him who had painted the portrait now in my room. And also because I wondered what else Nat didn’t bother talking to anyone about, and how much of himself he hid. I would guess a great deal.