Vigiant

by Gardner, James Alan

  Here's the thing: an adult Homo sap could hold the leaner's weight easily. Chappalar, though, would be knocked ass over teakettle and possibly crushed. Leaners never got it through their dumpy heads that even though Ooloms looked tall and strong, they were actually breakably light. Ergo the need for robot lifeguards—otherwise, the League of Peoples would ask why we let potentially dangerous animals get rough on our sentient citizens.

  The League had very strict rules against putting sentients at needless risk. Either you followed those rules, or you got declared non-sentient yourself.

  You didn't want that. The League also had very strict rules for dealing with dangerous non-sentient creatures.

  The door to the pump-station building was locked. Routine safety precaution? Or was some paranoid someone truly worried about saboteurs tampering with the city water supply? No. Most likely the staff locked the door for fear some leaner might rest against it and accidentally push it open. Before long, the plant would be full of orts and donkeys, not to mention sheep drowning themselves in the filtration vats. Who wants woolly water?

  The mosaicked wall had an intercom screen embedded beside the door; I could easily call someone to let us in. But what would Chappalar think? We'd agreed on an unannounced visit... not an all-out catch-them-with-their-pants-down raid, but still we didn't want to give the staff time to prepare a show. ("Oh yes, Ms. Proctor ma'am, we surely need all the cash you can funnel our way.")

  I glanced at Chappalar. He'd taken his cue from the leaners and propped himself back-against the building's wall. A creamy dreamy expression settled on his face as he started to turn pointillist, color-matching the teeny mosaic tiles of gloss-fired clay. The perfect picture of a man in reverie over his new girlfriend... not at all waiting to see if I was too wimp-gutless to use my link-seed.

  Closing my eyes, I reluctantly reached out to the world-soul: my first deliberate brain-to-byte contact with the collective machine intelligence that permeated every digital circuit on Demoth... including the axonal vines through my brain and whatever computerized locking device kept the pump-station door closed. Faye Smallwood of the Vigil, I thought, silently projecting the words toward the door. Please grant me entrance. (The same formal way I used to speak to my wrist-implant... which, by the by, had got removed during müshor, to avoid radio interference between it and my link-seed. Since then, my wrist had felt so indecent-naked, I'd taken to wearing a rack of cheap bracelets.)

  My Open sesame signal traveled like radio fizz out through my link-seed and into the closest datasphere receiver cell, then shunted through a slew of relays to the world-soul core. My identity got verified; likewise the identity of the lock I wanted to open. (The Vigil could pop locks in public buildings, but not private residences.) In less than a second, the door gave a soft click. I pulled it open and offered Chappalar a weak smile... mostly sick relief my head hadn't exploded.

  Without losing his dreamy expression, Chappalar said, "Next time before you open a door, tap into any available security cameras to see what's on the other side. On my first scrutiny, I nearly got impaled by a forklift that happened to be passing. The door was locked specifically to prevent such accidents." He smiled and gestured toward the entranceway. "After you."

  No forklifts inside... just a fiddly-dick locker room where workers stored their street clothes. Some of the staff had hung private trinkets on their lockers—a photo of someone's family, a wire-painted miniature of the Blessed Mother Mary, the green-on-gray insignia of Bonaventure's premier boat-racing team—but overall, the room had a spartan feel, whitewashed concrete, sucked dry of personality.

  "Is there a city ordinance against dressing up your work area?" I asked Chappalar.

  "Pump stations have to meet sanitation standards," he replied. "Some plant managers interpret those standards more rigorously than others."

  "You know the manager then?"

  "I know everyone who works for the city. You will too."

  I'd already memorized the names of plant staff, and downloaded their files from the civic databanks. (Not through my link-seed. Through the one hard-copy feedbox in the Vigil offices.) The manager of Pump Station 3 was Elizabeth Tupper, age sixty-two, employed by the city works since humans took over Bonaventure. No complaints registered against her from above or below: she'd never screwed up badly enough for higher-ups to notice, and never harassed her subordinates to the point where they lodged an official protest.

  You could say the same for almost every bureaucrat in town. I wished the employment records would say things like, "Plodding but competent," or "Goat-wanking control freak." Too bad they didn't let me make up the checkboxes on performance-review forms.

  Chappalar moved ahead of me, holding his arms crossed against his chest so his gliders were folded tight to his body. The walkway forward was camel-eye narrow; if he hadn't trimmed his sails, they would have brushed against lockers on both sides, knocking off all the hung decorations. I followed, tucking my arms in too—I didn't have Chappalar's wingspan, but how often do I have to use the word "Amazonian" before you figure out I'm a big old girl?

  Probably three times less than I've used it already. Redundancy, thy name is Faye.

  Beyond the lockers lurked the vat room: a chamber the size of a skating rink, dominated by massive metal tanks. Water from the local aquifer got pumped up from below, fed through a line of processing vats and squirted out the other end, purified of toxic metals and native Demoth microbes. This station was supposed to have three working lines of four vats each; but the two oldest lines had been jinxed with mechanical gremlins over the past year, forcing the staff to hammer away at stubborn pumps, jammed stir-paddles, and hiccuppy valves. Scarcely a week passed that one line didn't conk out for a day or so... and over last Diaspora weekend, both bad lines went tits up together.

  No wonder city council wanted to rip out the old and put in state-of-the-art replacements. The only question was why they'd let the place degrade so badly to begin with. Elizabeth Tupper, plant manager, must have really cranked someone off.

  The moment Chappalar and I entered, we could tell which two lines were on the futz: the ones that were half-dismantled, their high-up access panels open to expose wiring and plastic tubes. A pair of wheelstand stairways had been rolled up to the guts of the nearest vat, as if two workers had been poking around side by side, consulting with each other on how to get a bit more service out of the heap of junk... but no one was there now. No one anywhere in sight.

  I turned to Chappalar. "They're all on rest break?"

  He shrugged. "Could be a staff meeting."

  "The regular staff meeting is tomorrow." Chappalar would have known the schedule if he'd done his homework on the plant... but then, he'd been busy playing lose the spoon with Maya, hadn't he? Anyway, this scrutiny had got docketed under my name, so I was the one supposed to know the facts. In his way, Chappalar was giving me a vote of confidence—trust I would cover the background trivia so he wouldn't have to.

  "Even if it's not time for the regular meeting," Chappalar said, "Ms. Tupper might have called an impromptu one. Perhaps she assembled the crew so she could distribute a memo on putting away one's tools." He rolled his eyes. I was beginning to get a picture of Ms. Memo-Making Tupper. "Or," Chappalar went on, "they may have received a delivery of spare parts at the other door, and everyone's helping unload."

  Possible. Plausible. Considering the rat's banquet of pipe and cable strewn round the floor, they must send out for spare parts frequently. Still... the place seemed needle-nick quiet. And abandoned. I was getting a case of the hinkies, some of that "human intuition" Chappalar grumbled about.

  "Let's keep on our toes," I told him, keeping my voice low. "This is making me edgy."

  He gave me a look—a studiedly neutral look reserved for first-time proctors who talk like escapees from a melodrama. Then again, his inner ear-sheaths lowered a fraction, letting him listen better for suspicious sounds. He was giving me the benefit of the doubt, even if he though
t I was overreacting.

  Warily, I moved forward. Chappalar followed. As we drew level with the stairways up to the vat controls, I yielded to impulse and climbed the steps—up two full stories above the ground till I was face-to-face with a jumble of fiber optics and plumbing.

  Chappalar flapped up beside me and landed lightly on the other set of stairs. His head suddenly jerked; he put a hand to his cheek. "Wet." He looked down and pointed to a black poly pipe just below eye level; it had a pinhole in it, shooting up a thin spray of water that had hit him in the face.

  "That can't be good," I said.

  "Not unless you're in need of a shower." He ducked around the spray and leaned forward to peer at the pipe. "There's more corrosion here than just that pinhole. Look at this wire. See where the insulation is missing?"

  I leaned in beside him. Yes: specks of damage on several wires, on the pipe, and on the readout of a nearby pressure monitor. I could pick up something else too—a sharp scent that curled my nose hairs.

  "Acid," I whispered.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I can smell it."

  "Oh." Ooloms flip-flop in their respect for the Homo sap nose. Sometimes they act as if they don't believe in smell at all, as if we're shamming our ability to use a sense they don't have. Other times they treat us with something close to awe: astounding creatures that we are, privy to profound sensations that are hidden from their race.

  This time, Chappalar decided to be impressed. "What type of acid is it?" he asked.

  "Don't know." I could have downloaded the world-soul's library of smells, to compare this pickly odor to the ones on file; but what would be the point? Showing off to Chappalar? And did I want to fill my brain with a catalogue of bitter stinks?

  Our cowardly Faye, rationalizing. To avoid taking another kick at the data-tumor can.

  "Who cares what acid it is?" I said briskly. "The question is where it came from."

  Chappalar looked disappointed at the fickleness of my nose; but he turned back to the innards of the control panel. "I can't imagine why anything here would leak acid. Pumping and filtration equipment shouldn't use strong chemicals. I suppose there might be batteries, for backup power supply if the main current goes out..."

  He scanned the pipes upward, searching for a source of the spill. I didn't. I'd memorized schematics of all the equipment in the plant; nothing used so much as a dribble of high-corrosive.

  "This is all wrong," I muttered. "I'm going to call Protection Central."

  "Faye." You didn't need sensitive Oolom ears to hear the reproof in Chappalar's voice. "This is your first scrutiny," he said, "and you're ready to see everything as suspicious. I was the same when I started. But think—this is just a water-treatment plant, in a quiet city on a quiet planet. Nothing sinister goes on here. My guess is the workers were just cleaning out pipes with an acid wash. They spilled some, everyone rushed to the first-aid station or the shower, and..."

  His ear-lids suddenly opened wider.

  "What?" I whispered. A moment later I heard the sound too: footsteps tapping toward us from the far end of the room.

  Chappalar gave me a gentle smile, with only a hint of I-told-you-so. "Hello!" he called. "We're from the Vigil."

  The footsteps sped up. In a moment, two figures hove into view at the bottom of the stairs below us—a man and a woman, both human, wearing the standard gray overalls of city maintenance staff. They looked mainstreet-ordinary: in their thirties, one Asian, one Cauc, both with shoulder-length black hair.

  Just one problem: I'd gone through the files on everyone who worked here. The files included ID photos; and these two people weren't in the pictures.

  "Good morning," Chappalar was saying. "We've come to look around..."

  He began to lift his arms as if he intended to launch off the stairs and glide down to the newcomers. Bolt-fast I grabbed him, pulling him back. He gave me a wounded look. "Please, Faye; this kind of behavior..."

  That's when the folks on the ground drew their pistols.

  I only had an instant to recognize the weapons: jelly guns, able to shoot a blob of sticky goo up to forty meters where it would splatter on impact. Police loaded them with clots of neural-scrambling syrup—even if the shot didn't hit you dead on, one tiny splash touching bare skin would send frazzled messages to your brain, interfering with most motor functions. Petit mal on a plate.

  Somehow, though, I didn't think the guns pointed my way were filled with knockout paste. I could almost smell the acid inside, gluey wads of it, that would cling to your skin like tar and eat straight down to the bone.

  With simultaneous coughs, the pistols fired.

  Standing out in the open up a flight of stairs, two stories above the floor, nothing behind me but a copper-solid wall of pipes and wires... I had nowhere to run. Yes I ducked, and I pulled down Chappalar too, though I knew it wouldn't help—the whole point of a jelly gun is its splash, its knack for spattering you with droplets even if you dodge from ground zero. In a second I'd be sprayed with burning slush...

  ...except that Chappalar snapped up his gliders like a membranous shield.

  I don't know how he knew the attack was coming—he had his back to the shooters. Maybe he was just trying to catch his balance after I pulled at him... but his sails spread wide, flat to the incoming wads, and the shots broke against him with a sharp double-splat.

  The air blossomed with acid's bitter reek. Chappalar screamed.

  He toppled forward, collapsing onto me—his moaning body so light, the weight was like a flimsy coat stand holding a single burning cloak. Twin splash patterns of acid speckled his back and gliders... and each droplet was starting to smoke, a thousand stringy white streamers smelling of cruel vinegar. I had to get him to safety; and do it fast, in the two seconds the jelly guns took to build up pressure before they could spew another round.

  First things first: an instant Mayday over my link-seed and piss on being a nelly about data tumors. Protection Central, I bellowed mentally, defense squad, ambulance, killers! The world-soul was bright enough to fill in the details... like where I was calling from. It could triangulate on my link-seed signals. Meanwhile, I grabbed Chappalar under the armpits, hiked up his arms, and rolled us both straight over the stairs' guardrail.

  We didn't fall. We didn't glide. Imagine a wobbly blend of both, me dangling under Chappalar as if he were a crippled parafoil. He was halfway unconscious, but still managed to keep his arms and legs stiff enough for a semicontrolled descent—vectoring down at a steep angle till my feet jarred against the floor. Two staggering steps to catch my balance, then I was running for the exit.

  Good points about my situation: Chappalar wasn't heavy to carry, and I had a head start on the shooters, still back at the stairs.

  Bad points: my grip on Chappalar was cramp-awkward—just fingertips under his armpits. My fingers were stopped against the solid web of his gliders, so I couldn't wrap my arms round his body... lucky for my arms, considering the sticky blobs of acid sizzling their way into his back. (The smell of vinegar smoke. The shuddery whimpers of my friend.)

  Another bad point of my position: the shooters had begun to run after me. Arms pumping. Feet pounding the floor like hammers. Only world-class sprinters ever galloped that flat out... certainly not me as I juggled an injured Oolom. The jelly guns must have repressurized by now, and I was easily within range; but the two racing after me must have wanted a point-blank shot, maybe flush in the face to scour away my eyes. That queasy thought spurred me on. I sped through the door to the locker room and slammed it behind me with an adrenaline-fueled kick. Didn't help.

  My pursuers hit the closed door like twin battering rams. The door didn't just fly open, it snapped off its hinges and hurtled across the room, smashing against a locker, then bouncing off to cuff me a good one in the shoulder. I reeled and lost my grip on Chappalar. Trying to do a dozen things at once—keep my balance, avoid dropping my friend, prevent him from crashing to the floor or against the lockers
—I made a hash of damned near everything.

  Down I went, the door flipping over on top of me. It was only luck I didn't fall on Chappalar. He landed beside me in the narrow aisle between lockers, the two of us jammed side by side with the broken door heavy across one of my legs.

  Pity the door only covered up to my knee; I could have used some protection for my face.

  The shooters stopped at my feet. Their guns lowered and took aim. Two triggers fired simultaneously.

  And here's what I saw: a ghostly tube of light, green and gold and purple and blue, suddenly glimmered into existence before me. The two acid balls flew into that tube... and the tube funneled them up, around, in a smooth arc that led from the pistol mouths, circling over the shooters' heads, back behind them, and out onto my attackers' shoulder blades. Acid jelly flew through that misty channel, around the loop; then smack, the two wads slapped into the shooters' backs, splattering against nearby lockers but missing Chappalar and me.

  As fast as it'd materialized, the phantom tube, all its peacock colors, vanished like steam. No evidence it had ever existed... except I was still alive, and the acid balls meant for me had got redirected at the shooters instead.

  Their clothes billowed with smoke where the acid struck... as if the gray overalls were catching fire, braised by a flamethrower. The woman spun round, clutching at her back with one hand, but making no sound—no squeal of pain/surprise/outrage. A heartbeat later, I saw why: through clouds of vinegar smoke, metal glittered under her burning clothes.