I almost laughed. Yes, I knew she was furious at me. And yes, I knew to her mind it would seem like I was debating small and pointless bits of the plan ahead. In that, she was much like Ben, too. Or perhaps it was that Ben had died very young, and therefore had never lost this trait. But instead of being stung I was charmed because I remembered my own youth, my own rashness. It was like looking onto a summer’s day from the middle of cold, bitter winter, with nothing but more winter in store. Amusement must have danced in my gaze, because she looked bewildered for just a moment, which gave me time to say, “Never mind that. Yes, you’re probably right, but on the off-chance you’re not, or that they’ve put something in since they brought Nat here, let me go ahead, will you?”
She shrugged. “Whatever makes you happy. Now, you brought burners, right?”
I supposed after leaving my own broom behind, I deserved that, but I just answered with, “I always have burners.”
And then we were airborne. She really must have investigated—I supposed by filtering the accounts of the various broomers who had escaped this way—because she didn’t even hesitate about which tunnel to stop in.
The tunnel itself surprised me. I’d expected it to be narrow enough that we’d need to crawl along its length on hands and knees, but instead—and much more pleasant when you considered the sludge along the bottom and trickling from the tunnel opening even if I couldn’t smell it through the oxygen mask which I’d kept on, since I suspected the air here might be less than wholesome—it was large enough for us to fly into and for me to not even have to bend much—just inclining my head allowed me to fit.
If I could read Abigail’s eyes through the goggles, what they were saying was that I was an idiot for going ahead of her, when I looked like some kind of giant, and she could slip quietly along in the shadows. All very well, but I still felt I couldn’t risk her. What would I tell Sam if I let her get killed? What would I tell Nat? Because—I told myself, taking a deep breath—Nat was going to be alive, and I was going to rescue him.
The sludge came to almost the top of my boots, and I tried not to think what it was, because it would only activate my gag reflex, and I sloshed along in it, forward, while I heard Abigail slosh behind me. So much for making a stealthy appearance. We would have to count indeed on the fact that no one would expect sane people to break into a jail. Perhaps.
It got colder as we continued inside the tunnels. I don’t know why, except that we were going farther away from where the sun warmed the sheer surface of the cliff onto which the sewers opened. Colder, and darker. And yet, other senses kicked in. I can’t explain it, except by saying that perhaps I’d developed more awareness of other people by being in solitary for so long. But no, that wouldn’t apply. After all, I’d completely failed to recognize Abigail’s nearness in Deep Under. But then again, in Deep Under, there were too many people all around, and perhaps I simply couldn’t be aware of a single signal.
I don’t know. What I know is that in that dark and probably smelly—thank all the gods for the mask that didn’t let me know that for sure—tunnel, I was very aware of all sounds, of all movements, and particularly of sounds and movements that were or might be human.
And that’s what saved our lives.
We’d just got to a point where the main tunnel broke up into several branching-out tunnels, something like an intersection in a highway system, and I stopped, to allow Abigail to indicate which one to take.
She had touched my arm, and extended a hand into my field of vision to point, when I became aware of sounds and movement at the entrance to one of the tunnels. Nothing was visible yet, but I could hear sounds that were more than the random sloshing and dripping of the liquid around us and underfoot. The sounds were much, in fact, like the ones that Abigail was making behind me.
I went into fast mode, shoved Abigail between me and the wall so that even if I were cut down it was unlikely the burner would get to her. The burners I had in hand got shoved into “slice” instead of burn by a flicker of the thumb. No, I didn’t think about it till afterwards. Not consciously. But afterwards I reasoned it had been the right thought, because in this dark space, light was very visible and far more obvious than mere noise. Light would announce to anyone else along the tunnel that there was someone breaking in.
So I didn’t use it. Instead, as two men emerged from the tunnel—darker silhouettes in the dark space—I hit them fast with the cutting ray. They fell gurgling, before they could fire and—I hoped—before they could give the alarm to anyone else. From behind me, Abigail gasped. I gave her more room, afraid I’d crushed her too hard, but she made no move to escape the space, and when I looked back at her, she just nodded, the bits of her skin that showed having gone very pale. But she nodded and hand-signaled, “that tunnel.”
I nodded to let her know I’d figured that much out, and proceeded ahead of her, this time slower and trying to move with more stealth. Stopping by the corpses, I bent down and got their burners. Yes, I was wearing broomer gloves, which is good, because they were not only half submerged, but they were adding to the flow with blood and guts. But they had good burners, and, even in the dark, I could tell they were the flat, black burners that were assigned to most of the Good Men forces and which were never traded in the market unless they had been stolen.
Not Scrubber weapons, mind, and these men were not Scrubbers. But they were wearing some sort of uniform, and this made me feel both an infinitesimal amount of relief—I hadn’t killed innocent broomers trying to escape the prison—and tense up, because unless I were wrong, these were Liberte prison guards. Which meant . . . there would be more ahead.
And no, I didn’t expend much thought on the idea that St. Cyr’s own guards might be cooperating in keeping Nat hidden, or in imprisoning him. Look, I’d seen enough of those papers to know that a Good Man’s control of his territory is at best nominal. No one man can control so many operations at so many different levels. It is one of the downfalls of all dictatorial regimes that are larger than a small village, that the dictates of the one true ruler end up being enforced, ignored, distorted and sometimes created by a vast bureaucracy. Depending on what that bureaucracy, or parts of it want to do, the result will be varying shades of evil. It is never good. I’d read enough of those papers to realize that even with Sam in control, even with the bureaucracy being, obviously, shot through with Usaians, most of the results were at best erratic and at worst evil. Even well-intentioned people in a bureaucracy end up having to defend themselves from encroachment by other people trying to acquire more power, and end up having to do things for how they look, instead of their results. That meant no order went undistorted. The big lie of the various isms of the twentieth century, from fascism to communism, was not that they’d bring paradise on Earth. Every tin pot dictator had been promising that, presumably since we’d first crawled out of caves. No, their lie was the assertion that this time—each time and each iteration—was different, because this time was scientific. In fact, no dictatorship could ever have science on its side. Insofar as science could be applied to social behavior, the only sound science on governance shown through multiple experiments was that the more concentrated the power, the worse the results.
And from the fact that St. Cyr was still a part of a secret organization and hadn’t called it up into the light of day and told it to take its place in governing, I suspected most of the organization beneath St. Cyr and working around him were not believers in whatever it was the Sans Culottes believed in. So I doubted St. Cyr was double-crossing us, or had feigned lack of knowledge about Nat.
On the other hand, I suspected the Council of Good Men had picked exactly this place because they knew that we wouldn’t think of it, even if we thought of lower-security prisons as a possibility. I also assumed there was a plan in place and ready to kick in, should Simon decide to “officially” inspect the prison. It could be anything from razzle-dazzle, to Nat being kept in a secret and easy-to-hide portion of the place.
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br /> So, I continued very carefully indeed, down the somewhat less wide tunnel, where I had to bend down a little further. I also tried to slosh less. I’d like to say that helped, but I’m not sure. I’m almost sure the only thing that helped was my super-fast mode, my being attuned to noises that might be human, and my frankly disturbing—even to myself—tendency to shoot before thinking.
We met three more two-guard teams along the way. None of them took much effort to dispose of, and I got all of their burners, though I gave three of those to Abigail because my pockets couldn’t hold any more. And if she thought my habit of letting no burner go to waste was odd, she didn’t say anything. Her posture had lost that odd dragging-sullen-teenager look it had shown at first, and she was walking as stealthily as she could, too.
The tunnel bifurcated again, after we killed the last team of two, and Abigail signaled, her hands only visible because she was wearing grey, instead of black gloves, to the third tunnel on the left. “It’s a dead end. The fresher at the end is the one that opens.”
I nodded, and hoped she could see it. If she could it was only because I was light-haired.
But she followed me quietly. There were no guards there. Which could be good or bad. On the good side, it could mean that there were more guards along the corridor, which continued on. On the bad side, it could mean that they too knew exactly which fresher slid off its moorings and allowed people out. And in our case, in. Or maybe there were more than one, and they weren’t sure, but what kind of prison didn’t have cameras? I balked, and stood, breathing hard, while Abigail bumped into me from behind.
Her fingers moved in the dark, signing, “Are you okay? Heart attack?”
I shook my head, and I signaled back “Trap. Sure of it. Trap.”
Then I realized she couldn’t see my fingers, which were in black gloves, and I repeated the signaling against her arm. Her hands flashed fast. “You’re crazy.”
It was hard thinking through how to explain things in sign language, and clearly enough that she could get it by touch, but I did my best. “No. Cameras. Prison. Know which. Will watch that.”
She tilted her head, and shrugged her shoulders in an eloquent show of “What then?”
I had no idea, but my body did. I grabbed her arm, went back, and took a random tunnel. She made a sound of protest, which I ignored completely. I walked on and, after a moment, she followed. I thought that for better effect I should go all the way back to the beginning and take completely different tunnels, but that was never going to happen. If I did, I would end up completely lost. I had to assume in her study of the prison, Abigail had figured out what the areas of higher security were, the areas in which Nat was most likely to be. I didn’t want to disorient her further.
I had the growing feeling at the back of my head that this was a quixotic enterprise and more than a little crazy; that I would never have engaged in it if I’d been in my right mind; that Abigail and I were going to die here. It didn’t matter. Sometimes, when you’ve already made the mistake, it was just as good to keep forward as to back out. As Shakespeare said, if you’re in the middle of the river, it’s just as good to wade forward as back. At a guess, if we left now, they’d find the dead guards and they’d move Nat. Or reinforce security. Right now we had a shot at freeing him. It wouldn’t last forever.
I waded down the tunnel, relieved to find no one there, but still a little wary. Hopefully we hadn’t managed, by sheer coincidence, to find ourselves in the one tunnel where there was another loose fresher. The tunnel dead ended, and Abigail pointed upwards. “That’s a drain valve,” she gestured, “now what?”
Now, I took one of my plentiful borrowed burners and put them on cut. The good ones, the police issue ones, were a marvel of the art, and could cut through anything, even ceramite. They had a little trouble with dimatough, though held in place long enough and hard enough, they would shatter it. But the valve above us was mounted on ceramite. I cut it off by cutting a neat circle around it.
Don’t ask me how prison freshers work or what the valve contained. All I knew is that it was round, and massive, about the same general mass and bulk as my trunk. I pushed Abigail against the wall, to be out of the way of it when it fell. Unlike household freshers, which are a distinct unit, mostly meaning a shower and a vibro-cleaner, prison cell freshers were an integrated all-in-one vibro and toilet and several other functions, including a unit that pared your nails when you put hand or foot in. This one seemed to be arranged for water also, because there was a lot of clean water released when the valve fell into the sewer. Presumably, I’d somehow cut a water pipe. I didn’t mind it, since it felt and looked, in the light from above, as clean water. I crawled right into the opening, with the water sloshing around me, grateful the valve was large enough to give me a way to crawl through.
The cell was empty and the lights were off, though the filtered light that came from the hallway through the open door was enough to seem dazzling after the darkness. It’s possible the camera was off. I don’t know. I know alarm wasn’t given immediately. Still I located where the camera was on the wall—it was visible, unlike whatever had watched my prison cell, even if far enough above that floor and the cot and table, and anything that could be climbed, that it would be unreachable. It was not unreachable to a burner and the burner took care of it, just as Abigail came in behind me.
She was a sensible girl, and no more had she climbed up, than she took a burner in each hand. Then she seemed to realize I’d have no idea where I was going. Again, presumably she knew, because after a quick look around, she returned a burner to her pocket, and gesture-spoke, rapidly, “To the right out of here. End of corridor. Take grav well down. Then down again. Then corridor. May God be with us.”
I can honestly say that in my entire life with the broomers, I’d never found a need to do the sign for God, but I somehow knew it and recognized it when it was made.
We followed her plan, and there was no problem until we got to the last corridor, by which point alarms had started sounding, loud and clear.
We should have been dead. We would have been dead. Guards poured ahead and behind us, burners drawn. We had only two advantages. One was my odd speed trick. The other was Abigail’s ability to know exactly what part of the hallway I couldn’t see or hadn’t covered. No, I don’t understand it, and I wouldn’t know how to do it myself.
We went two steps, three. I burned and she burned. Ahead and behind. And behind and ahead, we proceeded, back to back, killing numbers of enemies that should have overwhelmed us.
And then suddenly Abigail whimpered and fell. I thought she had stumbled. I reached for her. I didn’t know what to do. “Abigail,” I said, even as I burned in a circle, to left and right and in front, to keep the enemy at bay. “Abigail, for the love of God, stop fooling around.”
I don’t know when I realized she was dead. I should have realized it earlier. The corridor was well lit, and there was a hole the size of my fist between and below her breasts, where her heart should be. Someone had used the cutting function of the burner, on wide dispersion.
I burned around me with blind abandon, setting both burners to flame and setting fire to the bastards. If it started an inferno in the prison, I no longer cared. I was a dead man walking, and Nat would die with me, which would undoubtedly be a better fate than whatever they’d planned for him.
And Death is at My Side
Steady, Luce, steady, Ben’s voice, clear as day, and for the first time in all the time I’d been alone and desperate, in all the time I’d dreamed of just a glimpse of him, I could see him. Not just in my mind’s eye, but in reality with my eyes. He looked a little odd in a way I can’t describe, besides the fact that he was obviously still twenty-one, as he’d been when he’d died, and that, well, he was there, while he was dead. But other than that, he looked much like he’d looked before they’d arrested him. He stepped through the attackers—most of whom were on fire, and bumping into each other, and came to me. Steady, Luce,
steady, he said again, his voice sounding in my ears and in my head, all at once. Don’t you dare waste her sacrifice or let the boy die. Take the burners. Take her burners from her pocket. Throw out the one you expended cutting the valve. Take the rest of them. All of them. Put them in your waistband. There.
I obeyed, blindly, even while burning with my free hand. At the bottom of Abigail’s pocket was a small round, marble-like thing. I realized it was Fuse’s bomb, and I took it. I wondered how it could be used, but it didn’t matter. If all else failed, I could use it to blow myself and everyone around me to the kingdom that would never come for the likes of us. Then I remembered something else, and on impulse, looked inside her tunic, and found a pocket, and in it a box much like the one they’d given me with the fragment of flag. I took that, and slipped it into my pocket. Then I took the other gadgets in the pocket, too, two of them being the ones that she’d used to break into the flyer. No, I didn’t expect to need them, but how was I to know what I’d need? Truth was I expected to be dead in minutes.
All this was done at fast, very fast mode, and I burned around me every few seconds. I’d like to say my attackers were getting fewer, but they weren’t.
That’s it. Good boy. Now, burn your way that way. Yeah, watch your back too, but burn forward in that direction, as fast you can. That’s where the boy is.
A Few Good Men Page 29
