03. The Maze in the Mirror (40 page)

"Fellow rebels, comrades, friends and associates!" It was one of the big guys here but not Carlos, and this guy was an English speaker. "Great news! I know you have heard all the rumors and we want you to know the truth. What at first looked like a horrible disaster to our cause has turned out to accomplish what none of us in all our years of work, sweat, and planning could accomplish! Most of you know of the grand project. Well, up line, left of Zero, one of our stations blew up. We do not yet know why, but it sent a massive surge of its own down and through the Labyrinth which set off others further along and built into a powerful wave. Like lava through a tunnel, it melted and sealed what it passed. When it struck the control regulators, they could not absorb the impact and sent it back up line. The result was to short out and seal in every single siding and bypass along the immediate route,
although there is still clear traffic on the walking path only from here to there. Comrades-it sealed the Company World off and it severed their power connections by burning out their own private regulators. Their backups can not last long in there; certainly not long enough for them to punch back through. They are gone, but with much repair the Labyrinth will hold up.

"Friends!
We are the only remaining intact organization with Labyrinth access and control!"

There were massive cheers and it sounded like they'd just won the World Series. It lasted for some time.

It was glorious news to them, but her own heart sank to the bottom. Not that she really felt for those Company folks, who seemed to embody only the worst attributes of Far Eastern culture with the sensitivity and caring of South African Boers, but for what it meant. If the Company was destroyed, cut off, then these bastards would begin openly taking over world after world, station after station, network after network. Hell, there'd be noplace to run to, noplace to hide, nobody out there strong enough to end a cesspool like this. Nobody with any kind of connections to find this place and care about rescuing her.

And, hell, before they turned them worlds into new cesspools they'd go after all the old Company folk they had grudges against. There'd be a lot more "examples" and revenge on folks like her, with nobody to stop them.

When they quieted down, the speaker continued, "No more hiding, no more skulking around. Already we have seized the remnants of the Company's communications and computer monitoring system. One by one we are going to take every switch and then every station in this sector while preventing any serious repairs on the other side. Then
we
will move there, and
we
will do our own repairs, and we will take control of the power and regulators and the entire network! Much work needs to be done, and much planning, and much sacrifice will yet be demanded of you, but final victory is ours! There is no one left large enough and organized enough to prevent us! Now we who worked so long and hard in what often seemed a futile cause will be the leaders of a new order among worlds, a new and glorious network of power, for
we
are now the Company!"

More cheers and building-rocking reactions. The Company folks were ruthless assholes on the whole but at least they did some good and left the worlds alone and worked within their systems. Not now. These were guys with a cause, and no matter how much their rhetoric sounded like well-intentioned revolutionaries their way of thinking was strictly high-tech black shirts and swastikas. The bad guys could lose a thousand times; the good guys could only afford to lose once.

And for her? What was the use any more? Shit, she'd been kidding herself anyway. She was naked and under almost constant watch and she was blind as a bat to boot, only able to see smeary colored light and dark. Even if she got Carlos alone, what could she do? He was pretty good at fighting when he had to be, she guessed, and he could see. He'd never be alone with her, unmonitored, without strong boys close by. And now that psychotic druggist had Sam and her and Dash and all the worlds in his pocket. Tears
streamed down her face, and she never felt so helpless and powerless in her life.

She got up, with a sudden urge to get away from that cheering mob, and went towards the gardens. It was pitch dark but she no longer even thought about that. She knew the way, every twist, turn, pathway and stone, so well she didn't even have to think about it.

She in fact preferred the darkness. It was the one element where she had some superiority, and there was a lack of confusing blurs to get in the way. The gardens smelled pretty, even at night, and there weren't any people around this time, although as public area it was within her rules to be here. Sure, they had the place monitored. Infrared, you name it. They knew just exactly where she was. She knew she'd reached the point that Carlos had predicted, and, thanks to events, sooner than even he had expected by a long shot.

She couldn't run away. There was no longer anyplace she could reasonably run to or anybody who could help her. The old organization would still be around, of course, but they'd be far too busy for her problem and maybe just as hard to find-and who was she kidding? She couldn't manage a hundred yards from the compound, let alone somehow get through that security and switch.

She couldn't kill herself. The Labyrinth remained open, the power on. It was damaged, but intact. You couldn't run the cargo cars but you could walk in the usual tunnel. She had no doubt that he would do as he threatened with Dash, even if she was no longer around to know it. He was just that sort. Oddly, there was a sense of perverted
honor about him, too, as if the devil always kept his bargains. She sensed, somehow, that if she did not give him cause that he really would never bother Dash, maybe even protect him.

But as much as she wanted that happy pill to mental oblivion, she was never going to beg him for it. Never.

But with all hope crushed, there was only this endless existence whose only purpose was to save Dash from Carlos. That was purpose enough, to endure.

"Ah choo!"
Sam Horowitz went, and then brought up a big handkerchief and blew his nose.

"You are the only human being I've ever met who actually goes 'ah choo' when he sneezes," Bill Markham remarked, without looking up from the papers spread out in front of him.

"Well, it's little wonder I got it," Sam replied. "I went from sub-zero cold to the dry Labyrinth, then to the tropics, then to the high Himalayas or someplace like that, wound up in a tropical place where they made me parade around stark naked, then damn near got blown up in freezing cold on my own doorstep. I probably got double pneumonia."

"Well, you're not going to be the one to make the dramatic rescue, I'll say that. I can just see you getting all the way in there, bypassing all their neat security, and just before you reach your objective you sneeze like mad. About all you'd accomplish would be that in two weeks or so everybody there would have your cold."

"Damn it, Bill, I gotta be there. She'll need somebody she trusts and it won't be easy as it is."

"I'll go in," Markham told him. "I won't have your symptoms for days yet." He sighed and said, "Okay, now let's see what we got one more time."

They were on a rocky island perhaps seventy miles from Carlos' Castle, but they'd been there a while and they knew the layout now. A team of twenty was on hand, all hand-picked experts, and more were ready in support as needed. So far the documents "Pandross" had provided had panned out perfectly. A crossover world from a known Company siding led to a weak point on this one that had a solid security shield-which meant nothing if you had the exact bypass procedures going in. Carlos, secure that nobody even knew the rough location of this siding or world, would never have dreamed that anybody could come at him this way.

The region "left" of Zero, as you looked at a Labyrinth map, was a real mess, including Sam's old substation, of course. But that had been the first blast and had gone inward from there, so the main line up from Sam's siding hadn't been much affected. McInerney, Oregon, was still in business.

This would have been tough, maybe impossible, if Carlos had hid out inward on that same damaged side, but he hadn't. He was "right" of Zero, which was neither touched nor involved in the blast. It was certainly wired for the grand project, but even now opposition crews were dismantling those. It didn't seem to be clear that Sam and sabotage had caused the misfiring; apparently the Council had associated it rather with the timing test. Without Mancini to tell them any different, and with their own computer to suggest that very scenario-and also to pinpoint Sam somewhere else-it was a
given. They knew that Sam had escaped, somehow, in the big bang, but now he no longer concerned them.

"It appears that the cliff was actually dug out, and the labs and complex below were built in the excavation, then the Castle on top of the complex, and dirt and such re-used to reform the land as it was. Most of the cliff is actually artificial," Markham noted. "See, here are the intake and outake ducts for the fusion reactor. We figure four one-man aquasubs, each carrying a single electron torpedo, hitting in this region, will cause the whole damned reactor to go up. He's still using primitive steam turbines here so there's probably enough pressure in there to blow that whole cliff halfway to here."

"Easy to do," Sam agreed, "but the trick is to get Brandy out first. She's set up as some kind of sex slave, always in public areas, always in public view."

Markham nodded. "So we need a diversion. We've got his switch location, we don't need it to get in or out, so let's blow it to Hell. It'll cause pandemonium in there, set off every security alarm in this world, and there ain't gonna be a soul there thinking one whit about Brandy. Me and two backups dressed in their security uniforms could get in with no trouble. Nobody is going to question us, and Brandy's too smart not to go along if her mind's still in one piece. If it isn't we'll knock her cold and
carry
her. We'll go over the cliff and down over here if we can; if not, we'll fire a flare when we're clear in the jungle and they'll let 'er rip. Then we'll make our way down to the beach well clear and get picked up."

"Sounds too easy. What if she doesn't have an unused capsule?"

"I've got a biomedical team standing by. No guarantees, but they might be able to sustain her with what the medical computers can dig out of her tissue samples or bloodstream. At least we can sedate her until we find something. No guarantees, Sam."

He nodded. "I understood that from the start. I think she'd rather die trying than stay that way anyway. What about Carlos? If he's in there he's sure to have his own back door exit point somewhere and a way of getting there, and we don't know the whole territory. If he puts two and two together and smells us, he'll take Brandy as insurance. I keep remembering what happened one time before."

"We can't cover everything, Sam. If this data is right, and so far it has been, there are no weak points anywhere on that main island other than the old substation, and nowhere in the plans here does it show either a boat dock or anyplace to hide a chopper or similar thing. Maybe he's too confident to have a back door. Or maybe he's got some way to make it to the nearest one, which is ours, and which will make life easy. Look, the crescent moon doesn't rise until after three tonight and we got scattered clouds. I say we go in and do it, tonight, before anything has a chance to fall apart, including my nerve."

Sam nodded. "All right. I'll be stationed at the pickup point and coordinate communications." He paused. "Bill-thanks. And no matter how it comes out, I understand and will always appreciate this."

Markham seemed slightly uncomfortable. "No big deal, Sam. If we don't take them out fast they're gonna take us out slow. It's a whole new ball game. Come on, let's go over the thing with the rest of the team. If we're going tonight we have to have those aquasubs armed and in position by then, which means they have to leave in maybe two hours. And we have to give a go to the demolition team on the switch."

She had pretty much ceased to think. In her mind, if all she had left was keeping Dash from harm and that was accomplished by being absolutely and perfectly what Carlos wanted then that was all there was. The conversation was still all around her, but she tuned it out. It was just noise to her, and not a word really registered. None of it mattered any more, and even curiosity had died.

When she was sleepy she found an out-of-the-way corner and slept. When she was hungry she went back to the kitchen and they gave her stuff. When anybody wanted to feel her up or wanted a backrub or wanted to screw or wanted anything else she did it expertly, happily, without complaint. If she got bored she wandered in and worked out, mostly because it seemed to please the regulars and was now an approved activity. All of it was essentially automatic, impulsive, without any direction or purpose, her own mind just sitting in neutral somewhere as if asleep, no longer required.

She was just sitting there in the parlor that evening, waiting to be of use to anybody who wanted what she could offer but not anticipating anything at all, kind of half dozing, when suddenly
the windows shook and the ground rumbled slightly and all sorts of loud and unpleasant alarms went off all over the place.

The feeling and the noise and the sudden shouting and running all over the place frightened her, but she didn't move, just sat there, trying to keep out of the way, not even wondering or caring what it was all about.

Around her, the place was sheer bedlam. Every light, interior and exterior, came on, and there were bells, buzzers, sirens, flashing lights, and people running everywhere and shouting to one another trying to figure out what was going on and where the hell they should be.

The guards to the secure areas stood their places on the main floor, doubly alert for trouble, but the place otherwise emptied out fast, as large numbers of staff ran down one side towards the substation area, which in the darkness seemed to have some smoke and flames rising out of it.

Suddenly there was a man near her, and he bent down and said, "Brandy; come with me."