A Few Good Men (36 page)

I wrenched my mind away from that forcibly and into the way that Shangri-la had been anchored. Once the seacity was completely built, anchoring it had been a difficult matter of pouring new dimatough that extended it, and bound to the dimatough already in place. This was easier said than done because Shangri-la, as well as being mobile, had been designed to be inaccessible, so that on all sides, it had all sheer, tall dimatough cliffs, and the city itself was perched atop, as well as drilled down into, the dimatough—casinos and factories and everything drilled into tunnels all the way to the base. When binding it in place, and making sure it wouldn’t drift, no matter how violent the tides and how hard the storm, it had been poured down and extended over a small set of rocky islands, to which it had been bound as a way of keeping it from moving.

The result was an odd topography for anyone who had been raised in a seacity. We were used to flat surfaces, often built up in terraces and platforms, but having started out flat on their own.

Most of Shangri-la was like that, if at a height much higher than sea level, consisting of a very thick base and a flat surface above. But the part where we had landed was an odd tongue of dimatough covered, imperfectly, with dirt, on which a few straggly trees were trying to grow without success. That dimatough portion extended in a rather steep ramp from the top of the rest of the island, down to the area where we were, a few feet from the ocean, and then around, to surround portions of the island that were still sheer cliffs. You could stand on a strip of dimatough just large enough for a couple of warehouses and look up at the sheer cliffs above.

There were sewers there, it goes without saying. There had been before the city was anchored. Holes bored into the rock, but too far away from each other to provide a foothold for anyone trying to climb the wall. And I had a vague idea—I’d read a lot, and one of the things I’d read had been a novel from the twenty-first in which the plot consisted of trying to get into Shangri-la, to steal jewels or something—and so I thought that there were traps at the entrance of those sewers, anyway. Whether that was real, though, or the imagination of the writer, it’s hard to say.

Anyway, the sewers had been left up there, all a hundred feet up, punctuated by oozing holes in the dimatough. To keep it semisanitary in the warehouse area beneath, some genius had carved a vast gutter and a channel system that diverted the effluvia to the sea. That channel passed right of where we’d hid the flyer, between a warehouse that looked abandoned and another one whose door opened the other way.

“It’s risky, of course,” Abigail said. “Since we can’t lock it. But we’ll have to risk it.”

I nodded, not saying anything. The way she’d pointed was not to this wall, which was probably good since some of the warehouses were clearly busy and these people would get curious—wouldn’t they?—if we were to fly up on brooms and go in through the sewer like that in full view of them.

Not that I was sure the way she pointed, to a part of the wall that was over the sea, was out of sight, but I could pray. I walked with her along the gritty little shore of dimatough, which seemed to be covered in more broken glass and discarded bits of ceramite than the sand and dirt that had doubtless been dug up from the seabed to cover it, as it had in more prosperous seacities.

On the extreme-most tip of it, she started to unclip her broom, and I put my hand on her arm and held. “Abigail,” I said. “You know which entrance is to the right sewer, right? You researched it?”

She nodded once, her features tense. She’d got the oxygen mask out and put it on, though she hadn’t brought oxygen bottles for either of us. We’d have to rely on the concentrator in the broom itself. That was fine, provided we weren’t going really far up or really long distance. I’d still have felt safer with bottles, but I understood the principle of not having them: moving faster and more easily. Also that just quite possibly Abigail had never thought to get them, for which I couldn’t blame her. Without her we’d be on one broom and given my size I suspected her little, ladylike broom would never have got more than five feet off the ground.

I held onto her arm again, as she tried to move away. “No, Abigail, listen. You show me which tunnel to enter, but I go in first.”

She gave me the eyebrows-lifted look that in Ben would have meant
the hell you say, buddy.
I sighed. “Look, I read a novel, and it might be ad-libbing on the novelist’s part, but I read a novel about trying to break into one of these tunnels in the twenty-first, and they had all sorts of cunning tricks and traps.” She made an impatient exhalation and I said, “Yes, Abigail, I do know that in the twenty-first this place was an illegal seacity and would have to defend itself, while right now it is under the protection of the Good Men, but bear with me, will you? Wouldn’t they have some alarms in the prison sewer? To prevent people coming in.”

And now she rolled her eyes, and that too was a Ben expression. “Why would they prevent people coming into the prison?” She said, sounding testy. “It is not the normal thing, you know? Most people try to break out of prison, not into it. And besides, Lucius”—she didn’t add
knucklehead
, but it was implied in her tone—“this route is often used by escaping broomers, and it wouldn’t be if it had all sorts of cunning traps and devices.”

“Fine,” I said. “But then you have to ask yourself, if it is a normal way for broomers to escape jail, why has it been left without traps?”

Again, the escape of air in a hissing sound between her teeth reminded me that she was very young and had a distinct lack of patience for those older and slower than her. “Look, it’s a minimal security prison. I think the longest sentence given here is about six months. It’s a revolving door. The same broomers come in over and over again. If they escape, it’s less time that they have to be fed. And if you tell me that then they should abolish it, you’re missing the entire point. The point is to keep up the appearance of a lawful system, with minimal involvement and expense. Let’s face it, particularly in drug distro, most broomers are indirectly working for the regime. Are we going to continue the debate society, or are we going to rescue my brother? Because if you just want to stand here and talk, I’ll go, and you can wait.”

I almost laughed. Yes, I knew she was furious at me. And yes, I knew to her mind it would seem like I was debating small and pointless bits of the plan ahead. In that, she was much like Ben, too. Or perhaps it was that Ben had died very young, and therefore had never lost this trait. But instead of being stung I was charmed because I remembered my own youth, my own rashness. It was like looking onto a summer’s day from the middle of cold, bitter winter, with nothing but more winter in store. Amusement must have danced in my gaze, because she looked bewildered for just a moment, which gave me time to say, “Never mind that. Yes, you’re probably right, but on the off-chance you’re not, or that they’ve put something in since they brought Nat here, let me go ahead, will you?”

She shrugged. “Whatever makes you happy. Now, you brought burners, right?”

I supposed after leaving my own broom behind, I deserved that, but I just answered with, “I always have burners.”

And then we were airborne. She really must have investigated—I supposed by filtering the accounts of the various broomers who had escaped this way—because she didn’t even hesitate about which tunnel to stop in.

The tunnel itself surprised me. I’d expected it to be narrow enough that we’d need to crawl along its length on hands and knees, but instead—and much more pleasant when you considered the sludge along the bottom and trickling from the tunnel opening even if I couldn’t smell it through the oxygen mask which I’d kept on, since I suspected the air here might be less than wholesome—it was large enough for us to fly into and for me to not even have to bend much—just inclining my head allowed me to fit.

If I could read Abigail’s eyes through the goggles, what they were saying was that I was an idiot for going ahead of her, when I looked like some kind of giant, and she could slip quietly along in the shadows. All very well, but I still felt I couldn’t risk her. What would I tell Sam if I let her get killed? What would I tell Nat? Because—I told myself, taking a deep breath—Nat was going to be alive, and I was going to rescue him.

The sludge came to almost the top of my boots, and I tried not to think what it was, because it would only activate my gag reflex, and I sloshed along in it, forward, while I heard Abigail slosh behind me. So much for making a stealthy appearance. We would have to count indeed on the fact that no one would expect sane people to break into a jail. Perhaps.

It got colder as we continued inside the tunnels. I don’t know why, except that we were going farther away from where the sun warmed the sheer surface of the cliff onto which the sewers opened. Colder, and darker. And yet, other senses kicked in. I can’t explain it, except by saying that perhaps I’d developed more awareness of other people by being in solitary for so long. But no, that wouldn’t apply. After all, I’d completely failed to recognize Abigail’s nearness in Deep Under. But then again, in Deep Under, there were too many people all around, and perhaps I simply couldn’t be aware of a single signal.

I don’t know. What I know is that in that dark and probably smelly—thank all the gods for the mask that didn’t let me know that for sure—tunnel, I was very aware of all sounds, of all movements, and particularly of sounds and movements that were or might be human.

And that’s what saved our lives.

We’d just got to a point where the main tunnel broke up into several branching-out tunnels, something like an intersection in a highway system, and I stopped, to allow Abigail to indicate which one to take.

She had touched my arm, and extended a hand into my field of vision to point, when I became aware of sounds and movement at the entrance to one of the tunnels. Nothing was visible yet, but I could hear sounds that were more than the random sloshing and dripping of the liquid around us and underfoot. The sounds were much, in fact, like the ones that Abigail was making behind me.

I went into fast mode, shoved Abigail between me and the wall so that even if I were cut down it was unlikely the burner would get to her. The burners I had in hand got shoved into “slice” instead of burn by a flicker of the thumb. No, I didn’t think about it till afterwards. Not consciously. But afterwards I reasoned it had been the right thought, because in this dark space, light was very visible and far more obvious than mere noise. Light would announce to anyone else along the tunnel that there was someone breaking in.

So I didn’t use it. Instead, as two men emerged from the tunnel—darker silhouettes in the dark space—I hit them fast with the cutting ray. They fell gurgling, before they could fire and—I hoped—before they could give the alarm to anyone else. From behind me, Abigail gasped. I gave her more room, afraid I’d crushed her too hard, but she made no move to escape the space, and when I looked back at her, she just nodded, the bits of her skin that showed having gone very pale. But she nodded and hand-signaled, “that tunnel.”

I nodded to let her know I’d figured that much out, and proceeded ahead of her, this time slower and trying to move with more stealth. Stopping by the corpses, I bent down and got their burners. Yes, I was wearing broomer gloves, which is good, because they were not only half submerged, but they were adding to the flow with blood and guts. But they had good burners, and, even in the dark, I could tell they were the flat, black burners that were assigned to most of the Good Men forces and which were never traded in the market unless they had been stolen.

Not Scrubber weapons, mind, and these men were not Scrubbers. But they were wearing some sort of uniform, and this made me feel both an infinitesimal amount of relief—I hadn’t killed innocent broomers trying to escape the prison—and tense up, because unless I were wrong, these were Liberte prison guards. Which meant . . . there would be more ahead.

And no, I didn’t expend much thought on the idea that St. Cyr’s own guards might be cooperating in keeping Nat hidden, or in imprisoning him. Look, I’d seen enough of those papers to know that a Good Man’s control of his territory is at best nominal. No one man can control so many operations at so many different levels. It is one of the downfalls of all dictatorial regimes that are larger than a small village, that the dictates of the one true ruler end up being enforced, ignored, distorted and sometimes created by a vast bureaucracy. Depending on what that bureaucracy, or parts of it want to do, the result will be varying shades of evil. It is never good. I’d read enough of those papers to realize that even with Sam in control, even with the bureaucracy being, obviously, shot through with Usaians, most of the results were at best erratic and at worst evil. Even well-intentioned people in a bureaucracy end up having to defend themselves from encroachment by other people trying to acquire more power, and end up having to do things for how they look, instead of their results. That meant no order went undistorted. The big lie of the various isms of the twentieth century, from fascism to communism, was not that they’d bring paradise on Earth. Every tin pot dictator had been promising that, presumably since we’d first crawled out of caves. No, their lie was the assertion that this time—each time and each iteration—was different, because this time was scientific. In fact, no dictatorship could ever have science on its side. Insofar as science could be applied to social behavior, the only sound science on governance shown through multiple experiments was that the more concentrated the power, the worse the results.

And from the fact that St. Cyr was still a part of a secret organization and hadn’t called it up into the light of day and told it to take its place in governing, I suspected most of the organization beneath St. Cyr and working around him were not believers in whatever it was the Sans Culottes believed in. So I doubted St. Cyr was double-crossing us, or had feigned lack of knowledge about Nat.

On the other hand, I suspected the Council of Good Men had picked exactly this place because they knew that we wouldn’t think of it, even if we thought of lower-security prisons as a possibility. I also assumed there was a plan in place and ready to kick in, should Simon decide to “officially” inspect the prison. It could be anything from razzle-dazzle, to Nat being kept in a secret and easy-to-hide portion of the place.