03. The Maze in the Mirror (34 page)

"There has been abnormally heavy courier traffic of late," she told me. "Usually he only allows his own people to do the messages, but now that the others are involved they insist on their own people. I have selected a spot where it should be possible to intercept a courier, although it might take some time."

"Good," I told her, impressed. "Uh-you realize the risks here, don't you?"

She stared at me. "I am doing this because my mission is to stay with you and assist you in
anything that does not involve your going outside of or threatening the organization. I always understood that if you unmasked a murderer among the higher-ups you would probably have to go after them yourself. To turn them in with or without absolute evidence would otherwise be fatal. That means you would either 'go down swinging,' as it were; in an honorable cause, or directly make your case. My life has no meaning except that I do what I was ordered to do. The risk here is irrelevant."

I wondered for a moment if she was any saner than the rest of them. At least I had a good personal excuse for doing this; Maria, on the other hand, had no real stake in it at all. I had correctly analyzed her way of thinking and in good lawyer fashion turned her into a temporarily useful ally by finding the loopholes and the fine print in her literal instructions, but I was really beginning to wonder here. I was depending a lot on her, and she had ho real stake in this at all. Worse, she'd totally misread all the evidence and was taking me entirely on her own cultural terms-my "function" was to solve crimes; therefore, this was essential to solving the crime.

They wouldn't like it if I solved their little crime for them. They wouldn't like it at all.

We checked out everything, then prepared to move to our ambush location. I had hopes that we'd be there some time; I was tired and I could use the rest. This had come up too sudden and too fast; I didn't like being pushed and I didn't like the extra risks the speed-up was causing.

We re-entered the Labyrinth, weighted down by our equipment, and turned back the way we'd come. For a short while the coast seemed clear,
but then Maria touched my arm and pointed, and I whirled around and saw our mysterious shadow in his accustomed position. So we hadn't fooled him; or, at least, we hadn't made good our escape.

The phantom had stopped for a moment, in the usual fashion, but did not step back as he always had. After a moment, he continued on towards us. Maria was very fast, drawing and crouching low at one and the same time. She was clearly going to fire, but I stopped her with a hand signal. If the fellow wanted to come out of the bushes, now was the time to do it.

He was of medium height, with a strong, middle-aged face that was tough and somewhat like a bulldog's, with a shock of white hair that really stood out. He was wearing, so help me, an old style trenchcoat and had both hands in his pockets, and he seemed in no hurry. He looked like either the villain or the Scotland Yard inspector out of countless old British movies, and I mentally bet he had a retired or honorary military rank.

He seemed utterly unworried about Maria's pistol, but he did stop just before entering our cube, slowly and carefully remove a hand from a pocket to show it was empty, then point beyond us. I turned, and for the first time saw another figure, this one also rather close. There could be no greater contrast in the pair.

The second was female and looked like she belonged with Valintina's amazon security staff. Tall, lean, very pretty and sexy in an all-leather jump suit, high-heeled black boots that looked great but didn't seem all that practical, and long hair that was either very blond or almost white. None of that mattered. All that mattered was the
small but deadly Uzi style submachine gun she was carrying, cocked, ready, and pointed in our direction.

Maria was suddenly caught in a position where she wasn't certain about anything except her primary function and duty. I watched, horrified and helpless, as she turned in deadly pantomime and brought her own pistol to bear directly on my chest. I looked straight into her eyes and only for that moment did I see the slightest bit of hesitation or doubt in her expression.

That slight moment, however, was enough. In total silence and with professional accuracy I might have admired under any other circumstances, the strange woman in leather fired, the submachine gun pumping at least twenty rounds in deadly precision directly into Maria, who was kicked back against the cube wall by the tremendous force and almost seemed to explode in a mass of guts and gore. Her own pistol went off a couple of times, one missing me by only a hair, but I couldn't move, couldn't really feel the reality of the scene.

The tough-looking guy in the trenchcoat didn't flinch, stepping into my cube and losing his composure only slightly when he almost slipped on some of Maria's spilled guts. He pointed expressionlessly towards the leathery blonde, and I wasn't about to argue with them.

We didn't go far. There was one of those abandoned switches nearby that the opposition used so conveniently, and as soon as we stepped into it I suddenly could hear the breathing of all three of us and smell the death these two represented.

"We can talk here," said the man in a cultured
British accent that perfectly fit his looks. "Sorry about that ugly business, old chap, but she
would
have potted you, you know. She was going to do it anyway. She would have either done it or betrayed you to Carlos the moment she found out just why you were there, and she certainly wasn't about to allow you to go into any Company territory."

"She was the product of her world and culture," I responded limply. "She was good at what she did and that can't help but affect me. I've been more or less living and working with her for weeks, after all."

"Understandable. But your sentimental streak would have been fatal in the end. Surely you knew that."

I nodded. "Maybe so. If I'd had a gun and she'd had a gun and she came at me I might have felt differently about it. But it's done. Now you want to tell me by who and why?"

"My name is Moran," he said. "My associate, here, is Miss Blaise. We have the same employer at the moment and, with other compatriots, we have been keeping one eye on you and another on your old homestead. We weren't going to be so- intrusive-as yet, but clearly you two were off to Carlos' lair, and our employer had strict instructions about preventing that."

"Your-employer?" I repeated.

"Mister Pandross, honey," the woman replied in one of those sweet, sexy voices. "You know- Lothar Pandross?"

I nodded. "I figured as much. How is Mister Pandross, Colonel? I
can
call you Colonel, can't I?"

He seemed startled, then relaxed. "If you like. I assume Mister Pandross is all right. Why?"

"Well, he's been killed twice, you know. Ugly business. What are you doing, Colonel? Switching sides, or just moonlighting on the Professor?"

"The Professor, as you well know, is long dead," Moran responded. "Since then I have entertained offers from anyone with the means to satisfy me. But this gets us nowhere, you know. I'm afraid you've forced our hand in this a bit."

I looked at him and at the pretty girl with the Uzi. "So what can you do? Shall I go back and play footsie with Voorhes some more and wait for my last appointment with Carlos? Or should I simply sit here and refuse cooperation, knowing that you can't blow me away like you blew away poor Maria. Or do I get trussed up and hauled down to some maniac's lab for special treatment?"

"No time for that sort of thing," Moran muttered. "Takes weeks, you know, when you can't use the drugs. No, I think we make a deal to our mutual benefit."

"What kind of deal, Moran? You and your boss need me. I could use your help, but there's no easy way for either of us without guarantees."

"Don't need them," he commented gruffly. "You want Carlos? Go and get him. There's the exit-we won't stop you."

I smiled grimly. "You just killed my entree in and you know it. I might be able to work on my own, but I don't know where the hell he is."

"Precisely. Well, we do. We know where he is and where the entrance is and we know all the bypass codes and procedures. With our knowledge and your talent you could get right into his lair. Whether you could successfully get out, or even do
any harm, is not the question, but we have far more than you would have on your own. Right now, you're stymied."

That figured. Pandross designed all these systems, and they were all tied into the central computer anyway. With his drug zombie army around, Carlos probably had no more bothered to significantly alter the system than Mancini or the rest had. All he had to do was keep a major distance from anyone not under his control and have any outsiders deal only with underlings at a remote location.

"Think about it, darling," Blaise put in, also revealing a British accent in her sweet and sexy tones. "If you do what we want you at least have a
chance
at what you want. If you fail, what difference will your own personal problems make, anyway? You seem to be so smart about other things but so stupid when it's personal. If you had your way, you might just win one but then when that gets out what happens to that sweet little boy of yours?"

She was right. I really had been so hung up on one thing it never occurred to me to put my priorities in order. A lack of enthusiasm for derring-do was one thing; being blind-sided on my own interests was inexcusable.

"Just what's involved here?" I asked them.

Moran, who seemed to be almost machine-like, allowed himself a bit of a smile. "I think you have the basic idea of what they're planning. I can fill in the details."

He reached into his coat and brought out a close-up system map of the central Zero region of
the Labyrinth. It was well-worn and marked up and looked a lot like the one on Yugarin's wall that I'd seen.

I crouched down with him on the floor of the station and looked at the thing.

Moran pointed to a complex-looking set of symbols. "There is True Zero, the power source for the Labyrinth. It puts out enormous, near limitless, energy which is tapped in the side cubes here and here bracketing the Zero access itself. The huge areas here on either side are massive power regulators and transformers that take this erratic but immense power and turn it into something that can be used and make certain it is stable-and that it does not bleed over. The key bypass is here to allow traffic to go from one side to the other without the impossibility of passing through Zero or having any real access to the source."

I nodded. "All right, I'm with you so far."

"Good. Now, when the Company fries a world, as they did to those people, they seal off a section here and here, run power bypasses along the container car route to continue power, then terminate the main tunnel, making it effectively a deadend siding. They rig a bypass, in other words. Power is then bled into this new siding until eventually it reaches the end and emerges in a steady, building stream. With nowhere else to go it fries all facets of the end cube."

I nodded. "I got that much."

"The analogy is much like pouring massive voltages through a wire or tube and then using it much like a deadly firehose. It's quite tricky, which is why it's a last resort thing, and that's what gave the opposition the idea. When the energy is
turned down, there's a lot built up without regulators at the end and some of it surges back through the line where the transformers and regulators must absorb it and keep things cool, as it were. Now, the theory was to produce surges from the
opposite
ends, out here a ways, so that they rush inward to the transformers and regulators at the same time. If they are overloaded without the massive safeguards, and both at the same time, they can't handle the load. The odds are excellent that this will produce a meltdown of the transformers and regulators. They are designed to do this as a last resort, sealing off the Labyrinth from the Zero world. So long as one side works, the other can be brought back on line via the bypass, but if
both
are melted, well, then, there's no power to the Labyrinth at all. It dies, and who knows if that melted mass could ever be borne through again and a new grid built?"

"I think I get the idea," I told him. "And the danger is that the intense heat formed by the melting down might break through to Zero rather than seal the opening, so we have the unchecked power of an energy universe rushing freely through the Labyrinth."

"Precisely."

I stared at it. "I'm no physicist and I flunked most science, but I've done a lot of electrical work. Where in hell are they getting enough power to rush back along the lines to the regulators? Where are they getting so much power that the surge will overload them and shut them down?"

"That was Mancini's genius, old boy. He developed a storage system which would absorb and keep quantities of the energy from the main line.
Just giant batteries, really. The power demands were increased, of course, but not to a degree that a flag would be raised in Maintenance. A few weeks of just, say, a hundred and ten percent power consumption, far within the normal fluctuations of the line, would be sufficient. And if the substation being serviced was down or at minimal levels, almost all of the energy, perhaps ninety percent, could be diverted to the storage cells. For that reason, they needed sidings with little traffic and no commerce."

"I see. But why
my
siding?"

"Physics. The release of that stored energy must be sequential and it must be perfectly timed, within milliseconds certainly. The signals can not exceed the constant speed of light within the Labyrinth, so a number of sidings on both sides were required and they had to be relatively close together and perfectly positioned. They had their own abandoned sidings to start with, which were easy, but not sufficient. They were able to take control of a few Company sidings, and occasionally corrupt or take over main stations so they had security on their siding work while maintaining normal commerce and not raising the Company's suspicions, but there were just a few crucial gaps that might make the difference between not enough power and enough for the job. They tried taking inconsequential ones, under little or no Company control, when they failed to control the optimum one, but they always threw another location off. Yours was perfect It came down to
using yours or widening the risks."