Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (27 page)

Something hit me in the back of the head. It didn’t hurt, much, but it clattered on the floor, and I jumped and almost drew my pistol. I looked around and saw Polly up on the balcony. She was squatting, just her head over the balcony rail. I looked down and saw she had thrown a bullet at me. I was impressed with her accuracy.

I picked up the bullet and put it in my pocket, then signaled to her that I’d just be a minute. I ran into the automated gift shop and spotted a wide-brimmed straw hat with
TIMBERLINE
sewn into the crown, more fitting for a tropical resort than a ski lodge, but I wasn’t complaining. I put a couple bucks in the cashier and hurried out with the hat.

I found Papa just where I’d left him. There were several birds sitting quietly on his shoulders and on the table, but he wasn’t feeding them anymore or even looking at them. He was still, with a thoughtful look on his face. I knew that look. He was thinking about something, thinking hard, and when Papa thinks hard, there’s no telling what the result will be. But you can be sure it will be interesting.

I put the hat on his head and pulled it down so it partially hid his face. It was the best I could do to hide him from the security cameras. He didn’t resist when I pulled his arm. He was almost in a trance state, just glancing up at me, then following along. We went back into the lodge and up the stairs, where Polly was waiting for us. I handed her the bullet.

“You have a good arm,” I told her, “but I think you’re supposed to put these things in a gun. They get there faster.”

“Yeah, and it would have hurt your hard head less. Hi, Papa.” She put her arms around him and hugged tight. Papa’s face lit up, and he murmured something in her ear. When they broke the embrace, I saw Polly wipe away a tear, which choked me up a little, too.

“Let’s go,” she said. “No time to waste.”

We followed her down the pine-paneled hallway with the rustic light fixtures and the paintings of the Oregon Cascades and coast on the walls, and entered a room.

It was a suite, actually, two bedrooms with a large sitting room that could have come through a time machine from 1938. No data screen on the wall, no computer station, an old-fashioned telephone with a dial on it. There were bulky, overstuffed chairs and a sofa, and a stuffed elk head on the wall. I thought that was sort of creepy. There was a simple, polished-pine table that would seat eight by the windows overlooking the interior.

Patrick was sitting in one of the chairs, his arms folded and his head resting on them. He looked exhausted, and for that matter, so did Polly. I knew they must have been through a lot to get there. My own trip had been easy. All the comforts of home. Good food, good companionship until Papa got sick, a new friend . . .

I looked over at Patrick, barely able to keep his eyes open. There was the remains of a room-service meal on the table. He looked so gorgeous, and so tired, like a puppy who’s played too hard. I wanted to go over there and cradle his head in my lap.

I had to figure that Polly had made some time with him. I was jealous as hell, but I had to put all that behind me. For now. But just wait, sis.

“I need a pencil and paper, me,” Papa said.

“You need . . .” Polly was clueless.

“I think he had another brainstorm,” I told her. “I had to put him in a bubble because I didn’t want to upset him with all this.”

“What’s all this?” Papa said.

“I’ll get into that in a minute,” I told him. “Meantime, let’s get you a pencil and paper.” I pulled open a desk drawer and found what I suspected would be there. It was a clear, roll-up, twelve-inch pad. I broke the latch and carried it over to the table, unrolled it. The screen came to life, and a little chime sounded to let us know it was ready. Papa frowned at it.

“I work better with a pencil, me,” he said.

I wondered if they even had paper in the room, or if I’d have to go buy something in the gift shop. But we were in luck. In keeping with the historical theme, there was a sheaf of heavy letterhead stationery in a desk drawer, and several ballpoint pens also inscribed with the name of the lodge. Even a paper room-service menu. Polly brought them to Papa. He frowned at the pen but shrugged and started scrawling diagrams and equations on the paper.

We left him and went to sit on the couch.

“So tell me what you know first,” Polly said.

It didn’t take long. Then I asked her what had been going on with her.

Oh, my.

—

I had had no idea. The fight at our house, the abduction of our entire family. The swim and the chase. The parade . . . unbelievable, and my respect for my sister soared. That was pretty ingenious. And I really wished I’d seen it. Patrick as a clown, Polly as a showgirl? The mind boggled.

The horror over the casino. She began to cry at that point, and I put my arm around her and let her sob for a moment. But we couldn’t waste too much time, and we both knew it. No time for tears, anyway.

Finally, the skycycle trip, with Patrick basically a deadweight. No wonder she was tired. No wonder he was.

I glanced over at Patrick. He was sound asleep.

“You say he’s afraid of heights?” I whispered.

“Sad to say, yes. Not his fault.”

“Of course not.” But to someone like me, who loved nothing more than being on a flimsy cycle with a mile of empty space below me, it seemed like quite a disability indeed.

“He managed. You gotta respect someone able to make it through a phobia like that. It wasn’t easy for him.”

“Of course not.” I wanted to go over and comfort him, poor baby. But that might be Polly’s prerogative now. I wouldn’t poach on her guy—if he
was
her guy—until I knew for sure where we all stood.

“Anyway, that’s all behind us now,” she said. “What do you figure our chances are of staying undetected here?”

“Did you pay cash?”

“Patrick did. We thought he was a little more anonymous than me since we’re direct Broussard family.”

“That makes sense. But I wonder, if everything was working right with the computers, would we stand a chance?”

“I doubt it. That’s probably all that’s keeping us free now. The mess that’s going on in the security systems as Max tries to take them over.”

“You think he will?”

“Who knows? But I’m optimistic because I haven’t given you the best news yet. I talked to Travis and Aunt Elizabeth.”

“Tell me more.”

—

Polly said that the way Elizabeth put it, the mutiny didn’t seem to be going very well, at least from what they could gather. The number of conspirators seemed to be small. The computer war was either not going their way or was a standoff.

“How do they—”

“Let me tell it, okay?” Okay.

The captives, hostages, internees, however you wanted to put it, were being held somewhere near the control room, at the North Pole. Elizabeth didn’t think the control room itself had been breached yet.

They had been taken, unconscious, from our house and didn’t wake up until they were all in some sort of underground reception room. There was no prison in this ship big enough for them all. They had been searched, stripped of everything that could be used as a weapon or a tool, and all communication devices had been deactivated. They were watched constantly, the lights were never turned off, there were no chairs, only a stack of mattresses to sit or sleep on. Every once in a while, one of them was taken out for questioning, but so far it hadn’t been rough. Travis, of course, was questioned most of all. He was the only one they were sure had the codes to unlock places they needed to be to complete their takeover, the only one they knew could shut down the cyber war. All of them were still a bit woozy and sick from the knockout gas, which was no fun at all to breathe. But no one was badly hurt.

So how had Elizabeth managed to get through to Polly? They had forgotten, or didn’t know about, her hand.

Elizabeth has had a dozen hands over the years, each an improvement over the old one. I’ve seen pictures of her first one, which looked real from a distance but was obviously plastic when you got close, and I heard it felt nothing like a real hand. But it was as supple as a real one, and when she had learned to use it, the same nerve impulses that were read by the hand could be used to operate remote ones, big or small, or
extremely
small. She pioneered the field of nanosurgery, and for years was the one everyone went to when they wanted to learn how to do it. She was also the one the very rich sought out when they wanted the best . . . and she usually turned them down. Her sole criterion for taking a patient was how critical the need was. She would refer a billionaire to another surgeon and operate on a pauper if she felt the poor person needed it worse. I’ve always admired her for that even if she does still treat us like bratty little children.

The current one is almost indistinguishable from a living hand. In fact, the skin that covers it is real skin. You even have to look closely to see where it joins the stump of her arm. She usually wears long sleeves to cover it, but she doesn’t really need to. So I’m not surprised that whoever searched her either missed it or didn’t think it needed to be removed. That would probably have made even a mutineer feel small.

“They missed it,” Polly assured me. Okay, but so what?

Well, Aunt Elizabeth has a few tricks up her sleeve, so to speak.

The same electronics that allow her to remotely use a surgical device can be used for communication, just like a phone. She records notes on it as she’s working. The stuff in her hand is better than any phone she could buy.

“It has a positioning device, too,” Polly said. “She knows her location to within a few feet. I’ve used that information to locate her on a map of the spaces near the control room.”

“So . . . we know where they are. How do we get them out?”

“I don’t know yet. She didn’t try to call out to anyone earlier because she didn’t know that Patrick and I had escaped. She thought we were being held somewhere else. And she knew you were out there gallivanting with Papa. When she tried to call, she dialed both of us, and I guess mine was the only call that went through.” She paused for a moment. “What does Papa know?”

“Not much,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to upset him, that’s why I put him in the bubble for a while. I’ve been wondering if we should tell him.”

“I think he deserves to know.”

“Yeah, I guess so. But how can we put it so it doesn’t drive him off the rails? If he thought someone would hurt Mama . . .”

“Not so good.” She looked over at Papa, who was utterly absorbed in his paper and pen. “What’s the deal with that?”

“I don’t know. He got a brainstorm. I don’t know what it’s about, and I don’t know if it’s a good idea to interrupt him. You never know what he might come up with. But I guess we better tell him.”

“Okay. But listen, Aunt Elizabeth said she would try to call in . . . twenty minutes. So I hope we can avoid a meltdown.”

We went over to where Papa was scribbling things that might have been Mayan hieroglyphs or Japanese haiku or odds on a horse race. We sat on either side of him. In a few moments, he noticed us. Patrick lifted his head, yawned, and rubbed his eyes. Papa gave me a sheepish look that melted my heart.

“You girls got somethin’ to tell me, don’t you,” he said, putting down his pen. “I’m sorry, I shoulda been payin’ more close attention, me. We got some troubles, am I right?”

“You’re right, Papa,” Polly said. She took a deep breath. “There’s been a sort of . . . a sort of uprising. They’re not happy with what they see as a plan to stop the ship and turn it around.”

“I figgered they wouldn’t be. I ain’t happy about it, neither. But I never said we had to . . . well, wait a minute, I guess I did, didn’t I? But I didn’t know enough then. What I did know scared me, is all.”

“What do you know now, Papa?” I asked.

“We found out the dark lightning is just the same whether we be behind of the big bubble out front, or if it ain’t even there. Which been botherin’ me somethin’ awful, oh yes. It shouldn’t be that way,
cher
, no. Nothin’ should be able to get through the bubble. But this stuff is. Now I gotta figger out why, and how.”

“Do you know anything yet?”

“Mostly I know what I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know some stuff, but I know I don’t know it. Oh, girls, my tongue done tangled again.”

“We understand,” I said. “What do you know?”

“I couldn’t ’splain it to y’all. But I’m chipping away at what I don’t know, and figgerin’ out things.” That was as good as we were going to get. He sighed, and looked at us one at a time. “So tell me what I need to know,” he said. “Some people are tryin’ to take over the ship? ’Cause they don’t want to turn it around?”

“That’s about it.”

“But we may not have to. I could talk to ’em. Maybe ’splain?”

“The leader seems to be Max Karpinski,” I told him. He was about as shocked as I expected him to be. “He and some others . . . well, they’ve put most of our family in jail.”

“Max? Not Max, how could he did that?” He grabbed my arm, unaware that he was squeezing a bit hard. “Podkayne, she cain’t be in jail, too, is she?”

“I’m afraid so, Papa,” I said, loosening his grip. “Now, don’t worry. Nobody’s going to hurt them.” I hoped.

“Who else?”

“Well, Travis, Mike, Marlee.” I mentioned a lot of others, and his frown deepened.

“You wouldn’t lie to your old Papa, would you, Cassie? They’re not bein’ hurt or anything?”

“You know we don’t like to upset you, Papa, but no, we’re not lying.”

Papa said, “Well, I been in jail a time or two, long time ago. It wasn’t no fun, but as long as they feedin’ you . . .”

“They’re being fed and cared for, don’t worry.”

“Then I won’t. Are you girls doin’ somethin’ about it?”

“We’re planning to get them all out and take the ship back.”

He grinned at us.

“Okay, then. Everythin’ gonna be all right then.”

—

I was glad he felt that way. We left him to his calculations, and Patrick joined us to wait for the phone call.

“Did she say anything about my parents?” he asked.