3rd World Products, Inc., Book 2

by Ed Howdershelt

  Caitlin stared around the scene in abject shock for a moment. When her gaze turned my way, I tried to tell her to stay put, but our ears were still so full of the explosion that I didn't think she could hear me, so I slapped the tree in front of me and yelled again, hoping that she could understand what I was saying.

  Apparently she couldn't. As she stepped from behind her tree to go to someone near her, the second explosion I'd expected shattered the top of another tree. Caitlin was thrown backwards and my tree rocked slightly as another blast wave rammed its way through the forest around us.

  A yard-long chunk of split tree branch had spun past my position so quickly that I hadn't seen it. When I looked for Caitlin, I saw the branch embedded in the earth only a few inches from her left hip. As she stirred and looked around, she saw it, too. Her eyes were like saucers as she stared at it for some moments.

  Her stare found me when I moved away from my tree toward her. She shook her head as if to clear it, then rolled away from the branch and tried to stand. No good. She fell back and settled for crawling to the nearest member of her team.

  I put my hand on her back to get her attention. When she looked up, I tried to tell her to look at her leg, but she couldn't hear me, so I pointed. When her eyes fell on the six inches of wood sticking out of the side of her leg, they widened again.

  I pressed her flat to the earth on her front and left a hand on her back to keep her there as I looked at her wound.

  "Stephie, we need help fast."

  "It's on the way, Ed. The medic 'bots will arrive very shortly."

  Caitlin had no other wounds that I could see. I tilted her face up to see mine and yelled at her to 'leave it there'. When she nodded understanding, I moved to check the other people. Caitlin managed to get to her feet and hobbled over to do the same.

  "Can the medic 'bots get in without opening the gate, Steph?"

  "No, Ed."

  "They can fly, right? Like the ones on the ship?"

  "Yes, Ed."

  "The gate's fifty feet tall. Block the gate with a field before you open the big doors. Let the 'bots in at the very top. Only the 'bots come in here, Steph. Why the hell didn't you know there were explosives in the trees?"

  I didn't mean for that to sound like an accusation, but it did, of course. At least, it did to me. Steph's answer reflected that she'd noted my tone.

  "Ed, my sensor sweeps never noticed them. They must have been concealed. That's all I can tell you. I'm sorry."

  Can a computer program truly be sorry, or was that just a programmed response to a situation that seemed to require one? What the hell; was it any more than that in people? Barrett hadn't noticed the wire he tripped in 1968, either. He was sorry. It hadn't helped a goddamned thing, but he was sorry about it. Shit.

  "Yeah, Steph. Okay. Sometimes the bad guys get to score."

  Chapter Thirty

  I was kneeling next to someone, searching for a pulse, when a bit of stick bounced off my field suit. If I hadn't seen it fall away, I wouldn't have known to look around. Caitlin was yelling something and frantically pointing to my extreme left. When I looked that way, a slight motion guided my eyes further left.

  A patch of green moved, then disappeared for a moment, then moved again. Caitlin's people all wore blue. I rose to my feet and followed the motion in the woods. The next motion wasn't green. It looked as if the trunk of a tree swelled outward, then the swelling changed to match the background vegetation.

  "He's using a distortion field, isn't he, Steph?"

  "He must be, Ed. I can't see him."

  "You don't see anything? Not even motion about twenty-five yards ahead of me?"

  "I see nothing at all."

  "Steph, will option three work while I'm using option five?"

  "Not as well. Displacement of light won't be quite as effective."

  "Why the hell not? Never mind. Okay. Brinks is heading to the gate, isn't he?"

  "It appears so, Ed."

  "That can't happen, Steph. Can you stop him? Can you stun that whole area?"

  "I'll try. You may feel this, Ed. Stay in your five suit."

  A few small animals fell from trees in the area where I'd last seen motion. For several moments nothing happened, then some vegetation seemed to shift itself to the left. 'No,' I thought, 'It's more like seeing things through a ripple in a window.'

  "Didn't work, Steph. He's still moving. Try the barrier."

  The barrier field snapped into being ahead of Brinks and me. A line appeared in the vegetation as if a knife had cut through the forest. Where the field neared me, I could see that the barrier hadn't actually cut anything but the dirt; it had simply displaced leaves and branches to one side or the other of the barrier and appeared to extend into the earth a foot or so.

  Brinks saw the field effect ahead of him and laughed.

  "Ed, I heard him. I have a fix on him, now."

  "Try whatever you can, then. Focus a stun on him that would knock over a rhino. Try everything you can think of."

  Brinks became partially visible, then again seemed to disappear.

  "His field shunted the stun to the ground, Ed, but it seemed to take a lot out of it for a moment. I saw him before he adjusted his system to compensate."

  "What about a laser or something, dammit? Don't you have anything but fields to throw at him?"

  "Not in here, and even if I did, I couldn't use something like that on a human, Ed. You know that."

  "I'm getting tired of hearing that line, Steph. Real goddamned tired of it. Did you get any kind of reading on him while he was visible? What's he got with him that could force open the gate?"

  "He's carrying a pad and a backpack, but I couldn't tell what was in it. From his posture, it would appear to be fairly heavy."

  As I pushed forward through the bush, dodging the stuff that I couldn't shove aside, I said, "Probably more of that plastique shit. He seems real fond of it. Why the hell isn't he moving?"

  As if to answer my question, there was a ripple as Brinks moved again. His warping of vegetation approached the barrier and stopped, then I heard his laugh again as he stepped through the barrier. It stretched in an effort to hold him, then slipped around him and snapped back into place. The barrier instantly disappeared and reappeared in front of Brinks, but he pushed through it again. It didn't even slow him down.

  "Steph, ahead of me is a tree. I want three chunks of branch about the size of baseballs waiting for me when I get there."

  They were. I saw the branch fall to the ground and three chunks almost instantly separate themselves from it. I grabbed them and continued jogging toward Brinks. When I was maybe sixty feet from him, I threw the first one.

  The chunk of wood missed, but it got his attention. He stopped. He probably turned around, too, but I couldn't tell. I threw the second piece. It headed right for him in a high arc, but it stopped dead in the air about seven feet off the ground.

  The upper half or so of Brinks became visible. He was holding the bit of branch in his right hand, examining it as if amused. His left hand was below the periphery of his visibility.

  "That was a very good throw. Did you ever think of turning pro?"

  "If you could catch it, it wasn't good enough, Brinks. I won't call an agent yet. Why are you blowing up the woods? Why are you killing people?"

  "If you have to ask, you wouldn't understand. I know you saw my website. What did you think of it?"

  I muttered, "Stephie, can you do anything to him now?"

  "No, Ed. I just tried another stun. Obviously, it failed."

  "To hell with your website, Brinks. You're just talking to me to buy some time to figure out how the hell to get out of here."

  "Oh, no, I have that covered," said Brinks.

  He smiled as he raised his left hand and showed me a brick-sized block of plastic with a small box on one side of it. His thumb rested on the box.

  "I'm pressing a button," he said. "If I let the button up, we both become vapor, so why don't yo
u just stay right about where you are?"

  Hell, yes, I stayed right where I was. There was a good-sized tree near me, so I leaned against it and crossed my arms in a pose of nonchalance.

  "Well," I said, "At least it would be quick, right? Why, Brinks? Why are you doing all these things?"

  "Like I told you..."

  "Yeah, yeah, 'I wouldn't understand'. Bullshit. I used to say the same thing about Vietnam. 'You weren't there. You can't understand.' But guess what? Some did. So try me, Brinks. Tell me what I wouldn't understand and maybe I will."

  He smiled again and said, "There isn't one drone on this station who could possibly understand. I don't have the time to waste on you."

  He half-turned to cautiously continue toward the gate. I looked at the remaining block of wood in my hand and tossed it at him, but it passed over him and fell well behind him. His staring eyes never left me, so he didn't see the block rise from where it had stopped tumbling and approach him from behind.

  Brinks said, "Aww, that was terrible. Got any more?"

  He grinned and hefted the block he'd caught.

  "Want me to toss this one back to you for another try?"

  "It wouldn't be any more effective than the others, but I'd try to bean you anyway."

  He held out the block in his hand and grinned as he let it fall.

  "True. It was a rather primitive and feeble effort, really."

  "What now, Brinks? If I try to grab you, will you really blow us up and leave your little errand unfinished?"

  His gaze narrowed and he held the block of plastique toward me.

  "You want to try me? Do you really want to see if I'm serious?"

  The floating block of wood was nearing the back of his head. I sent a cold spot into it and saw it gradually frost over, then turn glossy with ice rime. Brinks thought I was trying to decide what to do and gloated over what he perceived to be my confusion.

  "I didn't think so," he said, lowering the plastique. "Being a hero is so hard sometimes, isn't it? Especially when there's thinking involved."

  "Fuck you, you pseudointellectual bozo. You aren't the first guy to think he's smarter than anyone else. The graveyards are full of them and their followers."

  Brinks glared for a moment, but his irritating smirk returned.

  "Pseudointellectual? Where did you, of all people, pick up a word like that?"

  "Around. I know lots of big words, Brinks. Tell you what; four syllables: Hitler was one. So was Stalin. Guess the word I'm thinking of and win a prize, smartass."

  He straightened and seemed momentarily confused, then he said, "I told you I don't have time to spare on you."

  "Can't get the word, huh? Boy, that must wrinkle your ass."

  He was opening his mouth to reply when I sent a bolt of intense heat into the ice-bound chunk of wood that was floating just behind his head and dived for the cover of a big tree. The explosion sounded almost like that of a grenade, and Brinks was knocked forward and down.

  Brinks hadn't been lying. The plastique exploded like nothing I'd ever experienced. I almost made it completely behind the tree. Not quite. The explosion grabbed my legs and threw me some distance further into the woods as it blasted past me.

  Stunned. To people who haven't been stunned, it's just a word. In fact, though, it's a state of disorientation so complete that all of your senses short circuit and your brain ceases to function for a while. You lie where you fall until some of it passes. If you can, you'll probably want to lie there until all of it passes.

  When the world started to make sense again and I could actually correlate the concept of 'up' with the light above, I tried to sit up - as I rather tenuously perceived 'up' to be - and looked shakily around.

  There was a brownish-black cloud in the air around me and visibility was poor. I could see maybe twenty feet, at best. The branches above me were naked of leaves and some of the branches were hanging by shreds of bark.

  "Ed, I'm trying to clear the air. Stay in your five suit or you won't be able to breathe."

  "Uh. Yeah. Okay."

  I tried a few times to stand up and finally made it with the help of a tree, but there seemed to be something wrong with the tree. It was slippery. A closer look showed me there was no bark where I'd put my hand. The crap in the air had settled on and concealed the damp surface where the bark had been.

  "Uh, Steph? Am I hurt? I can't really tell."

  "You appear to be uninjured, except for your eardrums. I'm sorry my field wasn't more effective, Ed, but the explosion was too powerful."

  "You had a field up?"

  "As soon as the wood exploded, I put a field between you and Brinks, but as I said, the explosion was far too much for it."

  "Uh, huh. Probably helped, though. How did my briefcase manage to stay in place through something like that, Steph?"

  "It didn't, Ed. It was thrown over a hundred feet up and away from you, but it was undamaged, so it returned and resumed operation. You were unshielded just after the blast passed you, but only for a few seconds."

  I nodded as I stumblingly set out toward the center of the explosion. It wasn't likely that Brinks had survived something like that, no matter what kind of field-genius he'd been or thought he'd been.

  The sixty feet felt like sixty yards uphill on my shaky legs. I had to stop and rest about halfway to the crater that was finally becoming visible as the air cleared a bit. Finally I made it to the edge of the crater.

  I've seen plastique explosions before. No one block of it made the hole I was looking into. Maybe twenty feet below, several square yards of the bare metal of the deck gleamed back at me.

  Looking back along my path, I could see that the damage to the area where I'd been was far less than to the surrounding forest.

  "Musta been one helluva field you put between us, Steph."

  "It used about half the power for this segment of the station."

  "Thank you. Damn, that sounds so feeble, but thank you anyway."

  I sat down near the edge of the crater to wait for a wave of dizziness to pass and woke up sometime later to the sound of Caitlin swearing softly.

  "Stephie, I order you to turn off his field."

  "He is in no danger. I cannot contradict his orders unless he's in danger."

  "Goddamn it! He's bleeding from his ears! The medic 'bots need to treat him!"

  When I put a hand on her leg, she screeched and slapped at my hand. I removed the hand from her leg and rolled on an elbow to face her.

  "Sorry. Just wanted to stop the argument, Caitlin. Stephie, how am I?"

  "Your microbots are repairing your eardrums, Ed. Fifteen minutes or so more."

  "Thank you, Stephie. Caitlin, she says I'm okay. Option five off."

  I should have stood up first. The dusty crap from the explosion that had collected on my five suit fell the inch or so to my clothes and skin as soon as the field collapsed. I sat up, spitting out dust, then stood up and looked around. Williams was nearby. So was Price.

  My legs weren't shaky anymore. I walked to the edge of the crater and took another look into the hole.

  "There's no sign of Brinks," said Caitlin. "We think he was at ground zero."

  "He was. All that plastique he was carrying must have been wired together. I think that was the errand he mentioned. He was going to blow something up and probably go up with it."

  "Errand?"

  "Play it all back for them, Stephie. From when I started chasing him."

  Stephie's view of things was adjustable, from in close to somewhat distant. After taking us through the encounter and explosion from something near my own viewpoint, she displayed on the viewfield an overhead version of the explosion, reduced in size to afford a view of the entire blast radius.

  It was then that I truly began to understand the immensity of Stephie's effort to shield me. While her field couldn't stand firm before the blast, it had given way gradually enough to have greatly reduced the amount of energy that reached me.

  We w
atched in amazement that lingered after the image of the aftermath froze and Stephie asked, "Should I replay it for you?"

  The answer, of course, was 'yes'. We watched the overhead replay twice more before Caitlin said, "That's enough."

  She stepped away from us and stood alone for some moments, then sent Williams and Price to see if there was anything left to do for the others of their group. They seemed to understand that she wanted a moment alone with me.

  "Caitlin, the med 'bots are there. Those who can be helped are being helped. What's this about?"

  "Turn off your computer for a minute, sir."

  "Can't. She's with me all the time."

  Caitlin looked at me oddly for a moment, then asked, "How did you make the wood ice up and then explode?"

  "New tech stuff. I can't talk about it."

  "Didn't it occur to you to keep Brinks talking until we could get there? To try to talk him into surrendering?"

  "No. It didn't seem to me as if things would go that way."

  "So you killed him deliberately?"

  "No, Caitlin. I deliberately kept him from leaving the arboretum. The dumb shit blew himself up, just as I believe he'd planned to do somewhere else."

  "You believe... Ed, what I saw was you causing him to set off the blast."

  "Well, you tell me how you'd have stopped him, Caitlin. Tell me where you'd have stopped him, too. Here, or somewhere else in the station? That blast could have trashed the computer room or anything else. Here it got some trees."

  "That wasn't your decision to make."

  "If it wasn't mine, whose was it? Yours? Is that what this is about?"

  "This is about right and wrong and responsibility. The responsibility for dealing with Brinks was mine, as head of Security. What you did was wrong."

  "We disagree completely."

  "Records of the event will go up the ladder. They'll decide what to do about this."

  I nodded. "Was this discussion just your personal venting, Caitlin? Tell you what; if nothing comes up by tomorrow to make us think this matter hasn't been solved, I'm taking the day off. If I'm allowed to do so, I'll leave the station on the Wednesday transport to Earth and turn myself over to Linda Graves. Would that suit you?"