L. Neil Smith - North American Confederacy 02 (6 page)

I’d fingernailed my way up outa pole-axed disconnection from reality—it was getting to be a perversion with me— sprawled across the copilot’s couch, pistol in hand, teeth in mouth, and confusion in what passed for mind. “Spectacles, testicles, vallet
und..
Didn’t seem to have many more contusions and abrasions than I’d already collected. Helluva tribute to
Georgie
’s defensive magnetogravitics.

Viewscreens coulda been an excerpt from
The Sound of Heidi:
a saddle-shaped stretch of breathing-space between the lofty cliche-capped peaks—the kinda flower-speckled meadow where they make beer commercials. Real scenic, it was: as close to 105°30' West Longitude as’d matter to anybody but a stake-and-chain man; 40°30' the other way. Call it a quarter past Wyoming, somewhere along the eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies. A large mustard-colored fly buzzed the outside pickups.

But, incredibly,
Georgie
was claiming it was 1993— half past teatime, April first, t’be exact. All Fools’ Day, and for the moment, that seemed to include me. I
knew
this era better’n I wanted to. Shoulda been a countyful of subdivisions here, crackerbox houses row-by-row, semivan-dalproof public schools, nondenominational churches, shopping centers the size of Greater Mesopotamia, and about a million square klicks of bumper-to-bumper parking lot.

Yet it wasn’t any weirder than what greeted my perplexed inspection of the interior of the timebuggy. Cromney, Hep-lar, and Kent had
vamoosed,
leaving some impressive bloodstains slowly fading into the housecleaning systems. My own uniform was dry and stiff with the stuff until I started moving around and it powdered off and fell away. This was turning out to be a messy assignment.

I checked the Gold Cup, filling the gunbelt’s vacant clip-pouch from the shoulder rig, which I unzippered my coverall to shrug out of. Ain’t the most comfortable way to haul a piece around, anyway—but highly concealabie. Looked like the big autopistol’d carry three small oval etchings from now on, where my bloody fingertips had rested while I was dozing. Honorable battle-scars. We all got a few.

Okay, one mystery at a time.

If my would-be hijackers had recovered already, why had they left
me
armed and on the loose? Or still alive, for (hat matter?

I verticalized myself and limped toward the after lounge, discovering not one muscle, joint, or sizable surface anywhere that didn’t inspire a groan when I moved it. Surprisingly enough, I was hungry, which probably meant I was gonna live. I lifted a swollen ankle over the doorsill—

"Hail, O Mighty Gruenblum, puissant and indestructible!"

“Errrk!” My right hand clawed convulsively for the armpit where my pistol
wasn’t,
anymore—a gesture appropriate to shock-induced coronaries, as well.

“O Lord”—there came a high-pitched but exceedingly reverent squeak—“who endureth through great travail, wilt Thou guide Thy humble servants even as Ye did in days of yore?” All three Freenies had gathered in the after lounge, which was otherwise devoid of inhabitants. The suddenly-talkative individual among them swiveled an eyestalk at its companions: “Rejoice, ye people, for our Creator awaketh at last!”

“O Magnificence,” uttered a second Yamaguchian, rolling forward as if he were on ball-bearings. His legs wiggled like cheap rubber special effects. “Deignest Thou to speak unto Thy worshippers, revealing now Thy Holy purpose and design?”

“C’mon, guys, knock off the Charleton Heston crap, willya? My head hurts!” Which was true, all of a sudden, bringing me to a state of anatomical unanimity. My hand brushed idly along the steel and black rubber of my pistol grip. “Seen anything of Cromney and the rest of his bug collection?” I pulled a cigar from its waterproof—and bloodproof, it appeared—pocket case.

The third alien piped up, just like the others, Mickey Mouse breathing helium. “Lord, Thy servants hath immured the Evil Ones, with the victims of their late foul butchery, in the chambers beneath Thy locomotive extremities.” It pointed its turkey-neck toward the after stair-well. “Have we acted rightly?”

All three looked up at me with anxiety-filled optics.

What was I gonna say? The little farts’d saved my life— twice, now—and, thinking back on it, had tried to warn me even
before
the fireworks started. Shucks, standing there it took
me
several seconds to figure out that we were in even worse trouble than before. So why take it out on the Freenies?

Y’see,
omnia
Georgia
in partes tres divisa est,
to wit: the uppermost deck where we presently found ourselves; a larger middle deck for the paying customers—staterooms, dining area, etc., and, grandest of all, the lowest level, reserved for the engines, cargo, and maintenance supplies ...

And Auxiliary Control.
That
was the cockroach in my enchilada: up here on the control deck were two separate hatches, one aft between the pilot’s lounge and the bunkie where I’d hang my hat if I had one. That led to the passenger level and nowhere else.

But amidships was a second ladder-well, theoretically accessible only to the crew, which dropped directly to the lowest deck, the idea being to keep curious amateur fingers outa the bright pretty machinery. If things worked out as spiffily in practice as they do in theory, my tiny worshippers woulda had the badguys boxed and locked.

However.

On the tubular outer surface of the ’midships ladderway, as it passed through passenger-country, was a four-foot curving plate bolted on, clearly labeled in bright orange letters six inches high:

EMERGENCY ENGINE-ROOM ACCESS AUXILIARY CONTROL AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

Somehow, even without Rand Heplar’s contribution to this farce, I had the feeling Cromney was gonna figure things out and consider himself authorized. After all, y’can’t make a New Secular Order without breaking regs.

In the couple of seconds it took all of this to whip past iny little gray cells, I practically teleported back through to the console, quick-twisted two pairs of thumbscrews, and slammed up the panel they held down. In the recess underneath was a fist-sized module amongst all the spaghetti and shirt-buttons. I pushed it down a quarter-inch, turned it to the left. It popped out into my hand as half a hundred dashboard lights went yellow. I crammed it into a pocket with a long, grateful sigh of relief.

The frammis in question was
Georgie
’s field-density equalizer. Without it, she was grounded as thoroughly as if I’d yanked her powerplant. Here she’d stay until I could figure out what to do about the miscreants below. Replacing the panel, I rejoined Truth, Justice, and the Yamaguchian Way, who were still waiting for an answer from me like puppies at Alpo time.

“Tell y’what, fellas, y’done okay, all things considered. Hell, I coulda woke up dead, couldn’t I?”

They’d screwed the after hatch down good and solid. Musta dragged my sleeping time-pirates and pitched ’em over the coaming, then somehow dropped the heavy lid without making freenieburgers of themselves in the process. I gave the wheel a gentle experimental turn, with no more luck than I’d expected. Appeared the prisoners had locked us out sometime after the Freenies had locked them in.

“Seems only fair,” I mumbled.

“I beg Your pardon, Lord?” one of the Freenies squeaked.

“Hunh? Oh, yeah. Look, guys, I been thinkin’...” The forward hatch is always down, lock-wheel dogged tight. Auxiliary Control ain’t so much for flying
Georgie
from. Any disaster that takes out the control deck’s gonna make scrap-metal of the rest of the ship. Mainly it’s for the convenience of the overhaul mechanics—somethin’ I’m
that
glad the Academy doesn’t trust to its radiocontrolled gorillas. Yet. Now the ’midships wheel wouldn’t turn, either. That meant the hijackers’d unshipped the access panel downstairs. I headed back to the control room, Freenies squiggle-marching right behind me.

“Like I said, I owe you fellas—first for Edna. She was gonna set me up in the tincup an’ pencil business. Also for roundin’ up the whole menagerie while I was, er, incapacitated.”

I paused, rockered a gang of switches. Sure enough, the belowdecks monitors focused on a pair of gleaming halfmeter vise-grips clamped through both lower hatch wheels, freezing ’em solid. Corridors were empty. Camera by camera, I tracked my prey to the messroom, then switched off real quicklike before someone noticed the monitor light.

I turned back to the Freenies. “Your ‘Evil Ones’ are down there, right enough, lickin’ their wounds. Looks like Cromney’s gonna be mashin’ his peas left-handed from now on.” I trickled to an awkward halt, mildly embarrassed at what I hadda say next, an’ surprised to be. “Listen, guys, what I was gettin’ at earlier is... well, I seem to’ve underestimated you all a mite. !... shucks, t’be perfectly honest, I can’t even tell you apart. Whyn’tcha start by givin’ me your names? Mebbe I can...”

There followed some kinda noisy chirping an’ warbling contest that didn’t do my headache any good. While the aliens were confabbing, I concentrated on the image of the lower airlock. The one everybody’d used back in Tokyo. Long as it was operating, Cromney and company weren’t really all that confined.

Grinning, I punched a phony collision alarm into
Geor-gie's
systems, suppressing the accompanying klaxons, and laughed out loud when I heard, even through her normally soundproof structure, the ’tween-compartments pressure doors thudding shut. Oughta keep those varmints where they were for the time bein’!

I was startin’ to enjoy this. Cackling like a fool, I electrified all the doorknobs and flooded the corridors with vomit-gas—two standard Academy preventatives against anachronistic intruders. No time-traveler relishes gettin’ boarded by Neanderthals, medieval sword-swingers, or twenty-first century Freedom Police.

I pulled a Command Override Key—only one aboard, thank Ochskahrt—outa my breast pocket. It’d gotten kinda quiet, and I gathered the Freenies were done with their conference. “Well?”

Careful to avoid getting fried, I overrode the lounge door, heading for a locker starboard of the after stair-well. The Freenies were right behind me.

“‘Well’ what, Lord?”

“Well, what did you people decide?” In the locker there’d be a plastic suit allowing me to traipse through vomit-gas totally unregurgitated.

“Decide, Lord?”

A moment of exasperation: “You gonna tell me your names, or what?” Make that
double
exasperation: unexpectedly, the locker was on the intruder circuit and hadda be overidden. Inserting the insulated Key, I cursed every overcautious bureaucratic safety-fetishist who ever—

“But Lord, those
were
our names.”

“Oh.”

Nonetheless, by the time I got the closet open, I was chuckling gleefully over the fact that, like the Command Key, there was only
one
antigas outfit aboard ship. To the Freenies: “All righty, why don’t I just think of somethin’ t’call you that us mere mortal gods can pron
—smoldering slothdung!”

Instead of a nice shiny plastic Yves St. Laurent, there hung a large manila-colored tag from an Academy inspection crew:

OBSOLETE EQUIPMENT REPLACE AT NEXT OVERHAUL

“An I.O.U. for a pressure-suit? Goddamn form-fillers think the paperwork’s as good as the real—”

“Which one of us, Lord?” One of the aliens tugged at my pants cuff with a greenish tentacle. It clashed with my uniform.

“Howzat again?”

There was a hint of disappointment in his little voice. “Which of us is to be named ‘Smoldering Slothdung’?”

I turned from Ma Hubbard’s cupboard to face my turtleshaped worshipper. “Listen, let’s not get into an Abbott and Costello routine here. From now on you’re.. .Color.”

“‘Color’, Lord?” I swear his compound eye almost blinked in astonished delight. Now where the hell had I left my cigar?

“Sure, sport. An’ this one over here—hey you, eatin’ that maintenance tag! You’re Charm. That suit you, kiddo?” The second alien sorta quivered all over and
hooted!,
which— together with a missing p-suit and the sudden depressing realization that I’d rendered my ship impassable to
myself—
seemed to give my headache new lease on life.

With an option to purchase.

“I take it this meets with your approval?”

“O, indeed, Lord, a calling personally bestowed by the One True—”

“Just don’t get effusive, okay? That leaves the one over there in the comer, lookin’ for the sandbox. How ’bout Spin for a monicker? And t’round things off, let’s make a... well, in the spirit of the occasion, call it a Covenant. Hereafter, you three are officially entitled t’call me Bemie and put a stop to all this conversational theology.”

Silence. Limp necks. Lackluster eyeballs. Maybe I’d left my cigar on the monitor panel.

“All right, make that a
Commandment.
Bemie is a religious name, y’know, from the ancient, um, Urdu, meaning’ ... Bearer of Precious Ambrosia. Not caffeine, but brandy—close enough for Holy Work. Any of you guys got a cigar?”

In the end. I’d collected a whole handful of cigars, plus assorted lightweight survival gear, including my nifty combination lockback foldknife and thermolighter. Absorbs body-heat all day an’ gives it back in stogie-sized doses. Pretty fair penlight, too.

Escape & Evasion wasn’t exactly the course I woulda chosen for myself, but it started with
Georgie
screamin’ at me from the control cabin.

“What in Ochskahrt’s Rosy Red?...” Indicators said there was a fire, small but very, very hot. General vicinity of the messroom. I slapped the intertalkie.

“Cromney, whatcha think you’re doin’ t’my ship, you brassbound bastard?”

A loud hissing I knew altogether too well almost drowned out the answering voice. “Denny Kent here, Capt—er, Gruenblum.” Apparently, my .45 hadn’t made the impression on him I’d hoped for. “We’re cutting our way
out
of here,
that's
what we’re—”