Neurolink (27 page)

“We’re near the bridge.” The NP spoke in a hush.

That tone sounded ominous. Why would Qi bring him near the bridge? The Net link was there. No, she wouldn’t bring him anywhere near the Net link, he was certain of that much. She was leading him to the nearest airlock. “How deep are we?” he asked the genie.

“Easy. From the light refraction, I calculate we’re 62.487 meters below sea level.”

“That’s shallow.” Dominic wondered how fast his drowned body would pop to the surface.

“This has to be the Canadian shelf,” said the NP. “Used to be hundreds of islands around here.”

“Before the snow melted,” Dominic said. “You remember snow.”

“I remember the Net link. Don’t play games with me, boy. We’re close.”

The airlock. Do it now, Dominic told himself. After one last look at the view, he pushed away from the window and marched toward the door at the end of the passage. It was like the others, heavy and oval-shaped, painted gray. What awaited him on the other side. Oblivion? He hesitated only an instant. Then he leaned his weight on the lever and pushed through.

But he didn’t find an airlock, only a small dim room. More blue shadows rippled along the walls, but these were not from ocean reflections. Here were the flickering displays of a dozen active computers. A semicircular bank of flat plasma screens dominated the room, and one cone projected a rippling 3-D hologram of the local seafloor. Its shimmering green projection showed a scale copy of the miners’ underwater town rising out of the waste dump, and Dominic gazed at it for a long while.

Audio signals overlapped in a soft background babble, and the dense array of instrument panels made the room feel cozy. Several moments passed before he chanced to look overhead. Above this room rose the thick glass hemisphere of a lookout dome, and he glimpsed stairs leading up to the instrumentation. This could be only one place—the bridge! Dominic spun around and located Qi pressed against the wall. Her dark face was hidden in shadow, and she wouldn’t meet his glance. Seated in the captain’s chair, square in the middle of everything, was Gervasia.

“You!” Dominic said.

Gervasia’s beautiful blue eyes transfixed him. She’d tucked her blond hair under a cap, and she seemed more at ease than before, clearly at home in the seat of command.

“So you’ve come at last, coin giver. Are you ready?”

Ready to be flushed out to sea? Hell no, he wasn’t ready. There was no graceful way to drown. He could already imagine the dark waves rushing into his mouth, the choking panic. He realized he was breathing too fast and willed himself to calm down. He said, “I’m here, aren’t I?”

A bolt of pain shot through his left eye. “You’re a Jedes, born and bred. No way are you gonna sacrifice yourself to save protes.”

Dominic smiled with grim irony and spoke aloud to the NP, no longer caring who overhead him. “You’re right about one thing. I’ve got too much of Richter in me. No one dictates what I do.” Then he turned to Gervasia. “Where’s the airlock?”

She glanced to her left, and Dominic saw someone standing there, in the shadows behind the bank of computers. Several people. He began to recognize faces. Estaban, the bathysphere pilot, the one he’d planned to knock in the head. Millard in his wire-rim spectacles, with a ballpoint pen stuck in his hedge of red hair. Naomi in her dress blue uniform. Massoud stepped out of the shadows and winked roguishly. Sereb, the mining chief, saluted him, while Djuju gave a solemn nod. Then Dominic saw something even more unexpected. Sitting cross-legged on the floor was the old grandmother, Juanita Inez. She rocked back and forth, gripping her long-lost grandson in her arms, and as Benito gurgled with joy, tears washed her wrinkled brown cheeks.

“Am I late? Sorry!”

Dominic spun around and saw Penderowski rush through the door, red-faced and out of breath, with his green turban half undone and his amber glasses pushed up on his forehead.

The young man flashed a dimpled smile. “Hullo, mate!”

“What does this mean?” Dominic swung to face Qi, but unaccountably, she wouldn’t look him in the eye. This was some new trick. Here he was, preparing for a gruesome death, and she was still playing games!

He turned to Gervasia. “Explain to me what’s going on.”

“You wanted to meet the council on the bridge. Here we are.”

“What? You people are the council?”

Gervasia pointed to the observation dome above her head. High in the air on a suspended platform, tottering on a rickety step stool, with a floppy set of paper instructions unfolded in his hands, stood Tooksook. How did the old man move around so fast? A heartbeat later, Dominic noticed what Tooksook was polishing with his tattered yellow cloth. The Net link.

“That’s it.” The NP’s whisper seemed to vibrate down the length of Dominic’s spine.

He remembered its shape perfectly. An upright black box on a squat swiveling base. And there was the diaphanous silver disk, two meters across, tilted toward the heavens.

Dominic said, “What hoax is this?”

“It’s real.” The NP spoke with raw lust. “I’m picking up signal frequencies. That link’s active, and it’s broadcasting. Just make physical contact anywhere on the surface, and I’ll call for our limousine.”

Dominic backed away. He had no intention of approaching the Net link.

“Touch it, boy. That’s all you have to do.”

When Dominic tried to move farther back, his muscles locked up, and he staggered.

“Hello, Nick.” Tooksook stepped down from his stool and gestured toward the stair that led up to the silvery Net link. “You wanted to see it, yes?”

Dominic turned away, then spun back around against his will. The flashes in his eye throbbed brighter. “Touch it,” the NP whispered. “This is what we’ve come for.”

He felt his limbs shaking as if he had some kind of palsy. The NP was trying to direct his muscles. “Qi, it’s already penetrated my motor controls,” he shouted. “You know what that means.”

“Climb the stairs,” the NP’s voice echoed inside his skull, “to save ZahlenBank.”

“Qi, talk to me!” His right foot moved without his volition toward the staircase. He clutched at a column, but his hands failed to grip.

Frantically, he grabbed a teacup from Gervasia’s console and hurled it toward the silver disk, hoping to smash the link before the NP could use it. But the cup fell short and bounced against the wall.

Gervasia moved out of his way and said nothing. All of them simply watched. Why didn’t they stop him!

“Climb. We share the same nature. We want this.” The NP’s voice no longer carried sound. It threaded through Dominic’s mind like a brilliant thought, and he began to mount the stairs.

“Qi, help me!” he called out.

Qi sprang toward him, but Gervasia blocked her. Were they fools? “Tell them what the NP will do!” he shouted, clenching his muscles to resist the NP’s power. But his legs moved as if pulled by wires.

“Why are you resisting?” The NP’s thought whispered like an embrace. “The same father made us both.”.

“No!” He took another step up the stairs. This was crazy. He was about to destroy all of them. Why didn’t Qi stop him? “Qi!” he screamed, fighting for control. But his legs jerked up the steps.

Then a memory flashed. The Net link had a vulnerable point at the base. If he could smash it there, without making contact. What could he throw? Penderowski’s torch? It was still stuck in his waistband, at the small of his back. He reached for it, but his arm stopped midway as if turned to stone.

His eye ached, and when he willed his arm to reach for the torch, a bolt of pain sharper than any he’d known pierced his cranium. But his arm moved. First a centimeter. Then two. Bunching his muscles like ropes, he pushed against an invisible force and drove his arm farther behind his back, stretching his fingers, compelling his hand with a conscious thought to close on the torch. He had it! In one smooth motion, he spun and hurled it at the swiveling base. But his aim was high. The torch sliced a small rip in the receiver dish and ricocheted against the dome.

Inside his eye, the NP laughed. “Piss poor!”

Out of control now, Dominic’s body leaped up to the platform and staggered closer to the apparatus. He pleaded with Tooksook, “Push me away. Knock me down.”

The old man stuck a knuckle in his mouth.

“Don’t you know what’s at stake?” Dominic yelled, even as his left eye sizzled with a new, agonizing light. “I’ll destroy all of you. Stop me!”

Without meaning to, he lifted his arm. Tears streamed down his left cheek. His fingers stretched forward as if moved by unseen magnetic fields, and as he fought to keep from touching the link, his muscles shuddered. When he tried to speak again, his words came out as a guttural roar. Was it his imagination, or could he smell the aqueous tissue of his eyeball burning?

“Touch it,” the NP breathed. “Our father made us for this.”

I won’t let you control me, he thought. But he lurched another step forward, and as pain cut through his head like acid, his fingers wavered just centimeters shy of the black box. Sweat dripped from his body, and with every fiber of strength he still owned, he took a step back.

The NP gloated, “Give it up. I’ve always been the truest copy. You’re just analog. You’ve got Richter’s flesh, but I know his mind!”

And in that distracted moment as the NP howled with smug laughter, Dominic took control again. Faster than thought, he stumbled backward, leaped over the stair rail and fell.

He fell into white light. Cold as ice. Cracking white brilliance, like a glacier rupturing through silence, splitting time.

“Nick. Oh Nick.” He heard Qi’s voice muffled and far away. Hands seized his shoulders, and breath warmed his ear. “You did it”

He was lying on the floor, gazing up into the faces of Qi and Gervasia and Tooksook. Their expressions were dreadful. They stared at his face and glanced at each other. Tooksook’s long eyebrows drooped mournfully, and Gervasia turned away. Qi sobbed. Dominic found this confusing because he felt better than he had in days. The left side of his face had gone blissfully cool, and the sharp lights no longer flashed in his eye. Best of all, the NP had finally stopped talking.

Qi pulled a lot of stuff from her pockets. He could tell she was cleaning his face with swabs, but he didn’t feel her touch.

“You just had to find that Net link. Dominic Jedes knows best.” She wept quietly, but it didn’t interfere with her work. He realized she’d always been very efficient at everything—kick-punching him, patching him up, telling him off, whatever he needed. He wanted to laugh, but his throat didn’t respond. When she taped a thick white bandage over his left eye, he noticed it didn’t block his vision at all. That eye was blind.

Am I paralyzed? He raised his right hand and let it flop back to the floor.

“Stop wiggling.” Qi held an injection jet against his shoulder.

He sensed a pressure and heard a brief hiss. She’d injected him with a sedative. He felt the effects at once, but he didn’t want to sleep. When he tried to speak, he started coughing. Tooksook laid a hand on his forehead. The hand felt cool. That was a good thing.

Why did you let me get so close to that Net link, he wanted to ask. But every time he tried to speak, he only gurgled and coughed.

“Rest!” Qi yanked his chin hairs, then ran her fingers over his lips. She was kneeling on his left side, so Dominic had to turn his head to see her. Those ink black eyes, so different from what he’d imagined he would like. She held a water sack to his lips and squeezed a few drops into his mouth. When he swallowed, she smiled.

Tooksook winked at him. “That sickness in your eye. You cured it. Yes, yes, it’s all gone.”

“Sleep.” Qi stroked his hair. “You’ll need your strength, Nick-O. The council’s ready to negotiate.”

“YOU
lied to me!”

“Yep.”

“You tricked me, so you could use me!”

“Yep.”

“This entire expedition, the people I’ve met, everything was staged.”

“Some of it. Not all.”

“And you’ll lie again if it suits you.”

Qi flashed a grin and shook her head. “Not that I wouldn’t enjoy it. You’re such an easy mark. But no, we can’t fart around anymore.”

Dominic tried to prop himself on one elbow. As the dizziness hit him, he grabbed an overhead rail. He was lying in the lower bunk of a small cabin. Indirect light glowed against the walls, and he heard the faint electric whir of a cooling fan.

He clenched his jaw and spoke in a dangerous whisper. “Was Benito part of the act?”

“No, not the boy,” Qi said.

Dominic studied her face. He had never been able to read her, and he couldn’t do it now. He glanced at his surroundings, a desk with charts, a rack of crystal liquor bottles, the sheen of faux leather upholstery. He touched his left temple and felt bandages covering the side of his face. Memory of a terrible pain flitted through his head, but there was no pain now. Qi must have given him a local anesthetic.

“Where am I?”

“You’re in the first officer’s quarters,” she said, “of the good ship,
Dominic Jedes
. We thought you’d feel more at home here. The council’s waiting next door.”

“Don’t patronize me.” He sat up and gripped the edge of the bunk to keep from swaying. “You’ve played a cynical game. You’re no different from the NP.”

It was then Dominic noticed what he was wearing. Crisp blue trousers with a sharp hand-pressed crease running down his thigh. He touched his chest and felt the smooth pleats of a tailored shirt. Someone had dressed him in Nord.Com executive blues.

“Is this a joke?”

Qi wasn’t smiling. She was leaning forward and scrutinizing him with such intensity, he involuntarily jerked back.

To cover his confusion, he barked, “Why did you let me get so close to the Net link? The NP might have locked on our location.”

“The link is dead. We killed the broadcast last night.”

“But the NP picked up an active signal.”

“We faked it,” Qi said. “We had to make both of you believe it was real so you would fight. That’s what killed the demon in your eye.” Her dark fingers slid across the blue fabric covering his chest. She lifted his chin and forced him to look at her.