by Timothy Zahn
With a prolonged rustle of paper Kesner laid them out. Covering the lens of his flashlight with his hand, Tirrell let a faint glow fall on the plans from between his fingers.
“Air vents; crushed ore conveyer; furnace feed, out-gas, and slag lines,” Kesner said, touching each point as he named it. “I’d say the best bet is to use the furnace feed duct … except I’m not sure how you’d get out of the furnace once you were inside.”
Tirrell nodded. “Tonio?”
“I think it’s worth a try,” the righthand said promptly. “I’ll need a flashlight, some flares, and probably someone to help me get in the other end of this pipe. One of those radios would be handy, too.”
“Hold it,” Kesner cut in. “Who put you in charge of this operation? Tirrell and I will decide if someone’s going and who that someone will be.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to skip the parliamentary procedure, Kesner,” Tirrell said. “There’s no time for a long discussion—Martel could make his move practically any time now. Tonio’s volunteered to try it, and he knows the situation and people in there better than any of your righthands do.”
“All right,” Kesner said heavily. “Technically, I suppose, you can take charge here. But remember that whatever happens will then be your responsibility.”
Tirrell nodded. “I know. Now get busy and start collecting the stuff Tonio’ll need.”
Barely five minutes later Tonio was gone, flying low in a wide circle that would get him invisibly to the north side of the refinery where his three assigned helpers awaited him. Tirrell watched him disappear into the darkness, his feelings badly mixed. One way or another it would soon be over, he knew, and however it turned out Martel would definitely have lost his bid for the power he craved. And yet, down deep, the detective recognized uncomfortably that by sending Tonio in he had effectively forced the most crucial decision of his life squarely onto his righthand’s shoulders. Tonio could do his best to rescue Jarvis … or could try equally hard to make sure neither the scientist nor his formula survived the night.
And Tirrell had no idea which the preteen planned to do.
For a long, agonizing moment he thought seriously about having Kesner call the boy back. But it was too late for that. Already the brightest stars were visible overhead; any minute now Martel would be opening his window again and announcing his imminent departure. No, Tirrell would have to trust Tonio’s judgment … and perhaps, he thought suddenly, that was the best decision his tired and irresolute mind had been able to make. Perhaps the best decision it could have made.
The thought failed to console him. Staring through the gloom at the almost invisible refinery, he listened with half an ear as Kesner directed his righthand force into position, and tried to ignore the painful thudding of his heart.
Chapter 29
ONLY THE WINDOWS THEMSELVES were still visible, and they were distinguishable only as rectangles of navy blue set into a pitch-black background. Seated with his back to the huge furnace, his hands tied tightly behind him, Jarvis shifted slightly to ease his muscles.
The figure standing over him stirred in response. “Relax,” Axel’s voice came quietly. “It won’t be much longer.”
“I’m sure,” Jarvis murmured. “You realize, of course, that the police aren’t going to just let all of us fly merrily out of here. And if that cyanide hits me, it’ll be you who gets charged with murder.”
Axel chuckled. “You don’t know Omega very well. He’ll get us out of here, all right. Don’t worry about that.”
“Don’t underestimate Tirrell,” Jarvis warned. Under cover of the conversation, he carefully probed the edge of the furnace’s metal plate sheathing with his fingers, searching for another place where the coating of rust was thick enough to abrade rope. Omega was smart, all right, but the pressure was making him careless, and he hadn’t bothered to check the metal before sitting Jarvis here. Finding a new spot, the scientist resumed his stealthy rubbing. “And my other comment still stands: you’re the one holding those bowls over my head, not Omega. He didn’t give you this job because he likes you—he did it because he thinks that dragging you in as deep as he is will insure your loyalty to him.”
“A lot he knows about loyalty.” Axel shifted position again and Jarvis tensed involuntarily. The two small bowls floating rim to rim directly over his head held enough sodium cyanide powder in the space between them to kill him ten times over … and the only thing holding it up there was Axel’s teekay, transmitted through a single finger touching each bowl. A slight distraction, a flash of light or whiff of tear gas, and it would literally be all over. “Let me tell you a little secret,” Axel continued, lowering his voice still further. “As soon as we’re all set up in Omega’s secret hideaway, I’m going to get rid of him. I don’t think he’s telling the truth about making us into priests, and I don’t want to wait until Transition to find out for sure.”
“You aren’t going to live even that long.” There was a slight jerk in the rope binding his wrists as one more of the fibers broke. Jarvis strained carefully at what was left. Not quite enough. “If you know Omega as well as you say, you must know he won’t just wait for you to act against him.”
“You let me worry about that, okay? Now shut up,” he added as, across the room, Martel began speaking. “I want to hear this.”
It was not, as Jarvis had feared, the order to move out, but merely another in Martel’s series of speculations as to what the police were doing. The relative silence suited Jarvis just fine, though. Leaning hard into the rusty metal, he put as much power into his efforts as he could without making any noise … and with a suddenness that jammed his wrists painfully against the edge, the rope finally broke.
Quickly, hardly daring to believe he’d done it, he worked his hands free from the loops around them. Then, moving carefully lest the sound of rustling cloth alert his guard, he rolled over onto his hands and knees and began to crawl, heading for the back side of the furnace. The first three meters were the hardest, as he waited with nerves on end for the shouts that would mean his discovery. But even to his own hyperalert ears he made no sound, and as he continued on, his fears gradually diminished. By the time he halted, half the circumference of the furnace and an eternity later, his heartbeat was no longer the loudest sound in the room. Leaning back against the furnace, his shirt soaked with sweat, he swiped at his forehead with a trembling hand and took his first deep breath in hours. For the moment, at least, he was free.
But even with darkness to hide him, such freedom would only last a little while past the discovery of his escape unless he could get out of the building. The doors, he knew, were out; any that weren’t barricaded against the police would undoubtedly have preteens guarding them. The windows weren’t designed for easy egress, and opening them made enough noise to wake the dead, anyway. But there was one more possible escape route … one that Martel might not have thought to block.
Jarvis’s memory was far from eidetic, but he’d had ample time to study the room’s layout through the long afternoon. Slipping his shoes off, he took his bearings from the windows and set off in what he hoped was the proper direction, feeling carefully for obstacles with hands and toes. Ten paces later he found what he was looking for: one of the ladders leading to the network of catwalks high above. With a silent plea to the metal not to squeak, he started up.
His luck held all the way up the ladder and perhaps four steps along the catwalk itself. But his fifth step brought his weight down on what was apparently a rust-weakened section of the grating, and with a loud snap that seemed to reverberate forever one of the heavy wires broke under his foot.
He froze, and on the floor below the quiet conversations abruptly ceased. “What was that?” one of the kids whispered nervously—and the words were barely out when Axel’s bellow split the air. “Grack! Omega—he got away!”
“Damn you, Axel—no, hold it, damn it, everyone just stay where you are for a minute. Jarvis, you can’t get away�
�we’ve got the doors blocked and we’ll tear your head off if you try for one of the windows. Give yourself up right now or I guarantee the consequences will be very, very painful.”
Under cover of Martel’s voice, Jarvis had made it another six steps along the catwalk. Now, as silence again settled onto the room, he paused, hardly daring to breathe. Clearly, no one below had yet realized where the original noise had come from, and he had no intention of giving them unnecessary hints. Pitch darkness or not, once they figured out he was on one of the catwalks they could have him in thirty seconds flat. Squinting into the darkness, he tried unsuccessfully to see how far ahead the next intersecting catwalk was, the one he needed to get on.
“All right, Jarvis, have it your way,” Martel snarled suddenly. “Axel, Brody, Royce—go to the east end of the room and start working your way west. Cover every square centimeter of floor and wall and make sure he hasn’t climbed onto any of the machinery.”
Jarvis had made it to the intersection and onto the proper catwalk by the time Martel finished talking—but he knew his time was nearly up. The mere mention of climbing was bound to bring this aerial walkway to mind, and the minute Martel remembered it he would certainly reach the proper conclusion. Quickly, Jarvis unfastened his belt and took it off, coiling it as tightly as he could. Giving it enough loft to clear the other catwalks, he tossed it as far as he could toward the west wall.
“Aha!” Martel shouted triumphantly. “The cat—”
And with a clatter the belt hit the floor.
The flurry of activity at that end of the building was all Jarvis could have hoped for, and he didn’t hesitate. Abandoning all efforts at stealth, he ran at full speed along the heavy wire mesh, his hands merely brushing the low guard rails. Distances were impossible to judge in the gloom, but he tried to form an estimate by counting his steps … and two earlier than he’d expected the door loomed suddenly ahead and he slammed full tilt into it. Beneath him Martel bellowed. Ignoring the stabbing pains in his cheek and right kneecap, the scientist fumbled the door open and staggered into the tiny control room, slamming the door behind him. The pale square of a small outside window gave him direction, and he crossed the room in four quick steps, hands searching the wall for the emergency exit he knew would be there.
It wasn’t.
For a long second Jarvis stood perfectly still, his mind doing a slow tumble as all his hopes unraveled like an old sweater. The kids would be on him in seconds; far too short a time for him to try squeezing out through that tiny window, or even to sneak back out onto the catwalk. Not that the latter would help him, anyway. Blind or not, they would have him back in their control soon no matter what he did.
And, almost too late, the answer hit him.
He banged the same kneecap a second time in getting to the long control board spanning the room’s right-hand side, and he broke a fingernail against the rim of one of the meters set into it as he desperately threw every switch and spun every dial he could find. Most of the equipment had presumably been disconnected or shut down at the machines themselves … but Martel had mentioned both a generator and battery bank. If the connections were still intact—
He was halfway down the board and someone outside was fumbling for the doorknob when he found the right section of the board. Without warning, two floodlights blazed on, lighting up the main room with a brilliance that seemed devastating after the blackness. Jarvis squeezed his eyes shut reflexively and got two more switches before he was abruptly yanked off his feet. He got just a glimpse of Axel’s face at one of the control room’s inside windows, his face distorted almost beyond recognition by fear and hatred, before being slammed hard against the door. Below, on the floor, Martel was screaming something incomprehensible as he pointed up at the floodlights. There was the sound of breaking glass and one of them abruptly went out—
And with a slap Jarvis heard all the way inside the control room, everyone below suddenly slammed face downward onto the concrete floor. Axel spun around, releasing Jarvis from his teekay hold, and an instant later was flying past the catwalks in a desperate attempt to reach the west windows. But he’d barely covered ten meters before his body seemed to slam into an invisible barrier, and he was plucked from midair to land roughly on the floor beside the furnace. An instant later the outside door was blown in off its hinges and the room began to fill up with police and righthands.
It wasn’t until Jarvis walked back onto the catwalk that he saw that Axel was lying facedown in the spilled cyanide powder he’d been holding so recently over Jarvis’s head. Lying with unnatural stillness …
Chapter 30
“I SUPPOSE YOU’RE GOING to gloat now,” Martel said, a sardonic smile tightening the corners of his mouth. Leaning back in his chair, he idly scanned the books on the shelf beside him, pulling one out for closer examination.
On the opposite side of the desk, Tirrell took a deep breath, refusing to acknowledge Martel’s obvious attempts to irritate him. He would have given practically anything to put this talk off until morning, when he would at least have been able to snatch a few hours’ sleep; or, failing that, to have used one of the Plat City Police Department’s interrogation rooms instead of Detective Kesner’s office. But by morning there would be no chance at all of stuffing the genie back into its bottle … and interrogation rooms were always rigged with hidden recording and observation equipment. “Gloating is the last thing on my mind,” he told the other. “As a matter of fact, I brought you here to offer you a deal.”
Martel turned back to face him, an eyebrow cocked. “Oh, really? I’d never have guessed. Let me see—can I assume my part of it will be to keep quiet about Jarvis’s experiment?”
Tirrell grimaced, but he knew he should have expected this. Martel was far too smart to have missed the significance of the detective’s choice of meeting room, and he’d obviously put considerable thought into the implications of Jarvis’s work. “You’re very perceptive,” he told the other. “That’s precisely what I want you to do.”
“It would cause a great deal of chaos, wouldn’t it?” Martel mused, as if Tirrell hadn’t spoken. “Everyone worried about the changes that might or might not hit the society, wondering whether this was going to start a new Lost Generation type of period—and of course the whole population would be dithering over it for ten years before anyone even knew how successful the project had been. A whole society jumping at its own shadow for a solid decade—that would be something to see, wouldn’t it?”
Tirrell waited until he was finished. “To see, perhaps, but not to live in. Now—”
“Ah, but I wouldn’t really be living in it, would I?” Martel interrupted him. “I’m an outcast, remember?—a criminal who’s going to be spending the next several years in confinement and supervised service programs. Why should I care what happens to Tigrin society?”
“That’s a stupid question, but since you’re only asking it to try and raise the value of your silence, I’ll ignore it,” Tirrell said tartly. “Consider your point made, all right?”
Martel smiled briefly. “All right. So what are you offering in exchange?”
Tirrell took a deep breath. “In exchange for your absolute silence regarding everything you know of Jarvis’s work, the attempted murder charges against myself, Tonio, Lisa, and Colin will be set aside. In addition, fagin charges stemming from your free gold mine work will be dropped completely, as will various infractions concerning the whole refining and distribution process, though we’ll probably hit your confederates with those whenever we catch up with them.”
“Interesting,” Martel murmured. “What exactly is this ‘set aside’ business?”
“It means that those charges will still be on the record but that you won’t be tried on them.”
“That sounds distinctly dangerous. I want them dropped outright instead.”
Tirrell shook his head. “No. I need to have something that’ll insure your half of the bargain is kept. As long as those charges are merel
y set aside, I can instigate trial proceedings at any time within the next twelve years. Dropped charges are gone forever.”
Martel toyed with the book he still held. “What makes you think you can keep that sort of bargain?” he asked at last. “You don’t handle the prosecution directly.”
“No … but I believe I can control the willingness of the involved parties to testify. That brings up one other matter; you’ll also have to accept the blame for Colin Brimmer’s kidnapping. We can work out some story about you having left him with one of your accomplices out in the woods and Jarvis accidentally finding him, which is how Jarvis wound up in your hands. That charge will also be set aside, needless to say.
Martel smiled thinly. “In order to whitewash Jarvis?”
“And in exchange for his cooperation in setting aside the attempted murder charges,” Tirrell shrugged. “Do we have a deal?”
The other hesitated. “Some of my kids know I didn’t take Colin.”
“As long as the fagin charges are dropped, they won’t be called on to testify. Besides, most of them never had any real proof other than your own statement, and we all know what a good liar you are. As to the others—well, I can take statements from them and alter them if necessary, but I gather Axel really didn’t tell them all that much. He probably would have made you a fitting successor if he’d lived.”
A strange sort of shadow crossed Martel’s face. “Perhaps,” he said. For a moment he hesitated, lips pressed tightly together, and then carefully returned the book to its place on the shelf. “Very well, Detective, I accept—on the condition that you tell me what exactly it is that Dr. Jarvis has discovered.”
“Possibly a method to allow kids to keep teekay after puberty,” Tirrell said. There was little to be gained by refusing the request; Martel had probably already guessed, anyway. “We won’t know, of course, until Colin grows up. Possibly not even then.” Standing up, he stepped to the office door and opened it. “Tonio?”
