Rainbows End (48 page)

He was closer to the library now. Civilian rescue workers were in evidence, though the network support was probably provided by the marines.

 

Interrogation teams were not yet in action. And he’d found a backup aero-bot to relay through! He got one fresh message before it was lost:

Mitsuri — > Vaz: Günberk’s analysis is almost complete. Please give us a few more minutes’ cover, Alfred. USMC is still focused on the labs. You have a clear run to your Bollywood team. She marked a map with the cinema team’s current location, on the north edge of the crowds, in the eucalyptus. The Bollywood crew and its automation were well prepared for tonight’s operation, though the on-site people were not knowing participants.

Alfred took a final check all around himself. He walked a few paces through the trees… and he was in midst of his Bollywood crew.

“Mr. Ramachandran! We have lost all connectivity.” The video tech’s eyes were wide. “Everything was fine, but now it is so very terrible!” The crew were experts on the spectacular, but not the real. Alfred shifted into the persona of harried cinema exec. “You have your cached videos, do you not? You forwarded the earlier contexts back home, did you not?”

“Yes, but — ” They wanted to rush out from the trees, to help the injured down by the library. That was for the best; in moments, Vaz would be one of the group again. Perhaps the DHS analysts were still in chaos. It would be amusing (and amazing, too) if this cover got him past the USMC cordon and out of California. As he followed his cinema crew out into the open space around the library, he had only one remaining link to his mil-net. It was past time to drop that bit of incrimination.

But there was still intelligence streaming in. Terrible, chilling words that Alfred would never have been burdened with if he hadn’t still been linked.

“Please. Please don’t do this to her. She’s just a little girl.”
Gu
. Alfred searched wildly in his only remaining view. Back in his physical person, he stumbled.

The video tech grabbed his elbow, steadying him. “Mr. Ramachandran! Are you quite well? Were you blinded in the attack?”

 

Alfred had the presence of mind not to shake her off. “I’m sorry, it’s just all this destruction. We must help these poor people.”

“Yes! But you must stay safe yourself.” The tech guided him down to where the rest of the Bollywood crew was already helping the emergency workers. Her aid gave him cover to look carefully out from his underground viewpoint. The damage to the camera had partially healed; some of the stuck pixels were flickering, and now he could see a little beyond the left of the fallen cabinet… The elder Gu was pinned beneath. Lord, where was the other one?

I didn’t mean for this
. He should say nothing, but his body betrayed him:
Anonymous — > Robert Gu: Where is your little girl?

“Who is this?” the voice screamed in his ear, then continued more quietly, more desperately. “She’s right here. Unconscious.
And I can’t move her out of the way”

Anonymous — > Robert Gu: I’m sorry. Alfred couldn’t think of anything more to say. Dead, these two might marginally improve his own prospects. He looked angrily away from the viewpoint.
Damn me
. He had accomplished nothing this night except destroy good people. But how could he safely save them?

“Please. Just tell the police. Don’t let her burn.”

More spikes of overpressure, the sound of a thousand fragile things breaking, of heavy plastic tearing, bones being crushed. Robert didn’t really hear it all. The bones getting crushed, that was distracting. Even the follow-up explosions and the heat went more or less unnoticed.

Robert surfaced from introspection that might as well have been unconsciousness, except that it hurt a lot more. Miri was on her hands and knees. She was wailing. “Grandpa! Grandpa! Say something,
please
. Grandpa!”

He twitched a hand, and she grabbed it. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to knock things over. Are you hurt?”

It was one of those questions that had an easy answer. Agony the size of an elephant was sitting on his right leg. “Yes,” but the rest of a clever answer was lost in the pain. Miri was crying, choking, very un-Miri-like. She turned and pushed at the cabinet that had him pinned.

Robert took a deep breath, but that mainly made him dizzy. “The cabinet’s too heavy, Miri. Stay back from it.” Why was the air so hot? The steady light was gone. Something like an open furnace glowed beyond the fallen equipment, where the sounds were all of popping and hissing.

“Cara —
Miri
! — come back from there!”

The little girl hesitated. Under the cabinet were the crushed remains of the mouse array that had been about to load. It wasn’t going anywhere now. Miri reached down into the broken glass. Robert cricked his neck and saw a tiny face peering back into his, a mouse loose from its suction trap in the array.

“Oo,” Miri’s voice squeaked. “Hi, little guy.” A laugh mixed with a sob. “And you, too. You each get a free pass.” Robert saw more tiny faces as she freed other mice. The heads bobbed this way and that. They didn’t seem to see him, and after a moment, they found something that was much more important in the mousely order of things: freedom. They ran around the girl’s hands and away from the heat.

Now Robert could see what caused the heat. A glowing white gob of syrup dripped over the wreckage, hissed into redness as it oozed down the side of the fallen cabinet.

 

Cara gave a panicked cry and came back to him. “What is that?”

 

The hissing and spattering. If it could make it over that barrier, it must be dammed up several feet deep. “I don’t know, but you’ve got to get away.”

“Yes! Come on!” The girl pulled at his shoulders. He pushed with her, ignoring the tearing pain in his leg. That moved him four or five inches; then he was stuck more solidly than before. And now the heat was even more distracting than the crushed leg. Robert’s mind hopped from one horror to the other, trying to keep its sanity.

He looked across at his crying sister. “I’m sorry I made you cry, Cara.” She just cried harder. “You’ve got to run now.”

 

She didn’t reply, but the crying stopped. She looked at him, uncomprehending, then slid back from the furnace heat.
Go! Go
! But then she said, “I don’t feel good,” and lay down just beyond his reach.

Robert looked back at the oozing rock. It had swamped the bottom of the cabinet. Another inch or two and it would slop onto his little sister. He reached out, snagged a long shard of — ceramic? — and wedged it against the glowing tide.

There were more explosions, but not so loud. Up close there was just the smell and sound of things cooking. He tried to remember how he had come to be here. Someone had done this to him and Cara, and surely they must be listening now.

“Please,” he said into the glowing dark. “Please don’t do this to her. She’s just a little girl.” No reply, just the terrible sounds, and the pain. And then the strangest thing, letters scrolling across his gaze:

Anonymous — > Robert Gu: Where is your little girl?
“Who is this? She’s right here. Unconscious.
And I can’t move her out of the way
.” Anonymous — > Robert Gu: I’m sorry. He waited, saw nothing more. “Please. Just tell the police. Don’t let her burn.”

But the silent watcher was gone. Cara lay unmoving.
Can’t she feel the heat
? It took everything he had to hold the shard in place.

 

Then: “Professor Gu? Is that you?” It was some pestering student! There were so many afterimages, he couldn’t be sure, but someone was there, partly submerged in the molten ooze.

 

“It’s me, Zulfi Sharif, sir.” That name
was
familiar, a weaselly arrogant student. But now his skin wasn’t green. That meant something, didn’t it?

 

“I’ve been trying for some hours to call you, sir. It’s never been this bad before. I… I fear I may have been truly hijacked. I’m so sorry.” He was mostly submerged in the glowing rock. A ghost.

“You’re injured!” said the ghost.
“Call the police,” said Robert.
“Yes, sir! But where are you? Never mind, I see! I’ll get help straight — “

The glowing rock dribbled over Robert’s makeshift dam, onto his arm. He descended into a pit of mindless pain.
Freedom on a Very Long Leash

The New Annex to Crick’s Clinic was less than five years old, but the spirit of the place was straight out of the last century, when hospitals were great imposing places where people had to go for a chance at survival. There was still some need for such places: the most extreme intensive-care units were not something you could pack into a first-aid box and sell to home users. And of course, there were always tragic cases of incurable, debilitating diseases; some small portion of humanity might always end up in extended-care nursing homes.

The New Annex satisfied certain other needs. Those occurred to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., every day when he drove onto the hospital grounds. Every day since the debacle at UCSD, he’d pull into the Crick’s traffic circle, get out, and look down along the cliffs and beaches toward La Jolla. The clinic was just a short hike up the hill from some of the most fashionable resort properties in the world. Just a few miles inland were the biotech labs that ringed UCSD, perhaps the most prestigious source of medical magic in the world. Of course, those labs could have been on the other side of the world for all that their location made any real difference. But psychologically and traditionally, this joint nearness to resort luxury and magical cure was a lure for the very richest of the very ill.

Bob Gu’s wife, daughter, and father were not stuck here because they were rich. Once you walked past the imposing — and totally real — main entrance, you had privacy. In this case, the privacy was a combination of the clinic’s basic design and the fact that Uncle Sam had taken a special interest in certain patients.

What better place to keep sensitive cases hidden from contact than in a resort hospital. The press flitted around beyond the walls and speculated — without having grounds for a civil-liberties complaint. It could be a very good cover.

Bob hesitated just outside the main entrance.

Oh Alice
! For years, he had lived in fear that JITT would take her. For years, he and she had fought about the limits of duty and honor, and the meaning of Chicago. Now the long-imagined worst had happened… and he found himself quite unprepared. He visited her every day. The doctors were not encouraging. Alice Gu was stuck under more layers of JITT than these guys had ever seen. So what did they know? Alice was conscious. She talked to him, desperate gibberish. He held her in his arms and begged her to come back. For unlike Dad and Miri, Alice was not a federal detainee. Alice was a prisoner in her own mind.

Today Bob had an official assignment at Crick’s. The last of the detainee interrogations — that is, the last of the
debriefings
— were complete. Dad was scheduled to be awake by noon, Miri an hour later. Bob could spend some time with them, in the virtual company of Eve Mallory, a DHS officer who fronted for the investigation teams.

At 1200 hours, Bob was standing in front of a very old-fashioned-looking wooden door. By now he knew that such things were never faked at Crick’s. And he’d have to turn the doorknob if he wanted to go in.

Eve — > Bob: We’re especially interested in this interview, Colonel. But keep it short. Stick to the points in our memo.

Bob nodded. For a moment he didn’t know who he was most angry at, his father or the jerks from DHS. He contented himself with pulling the door open without knocking, and stepping abruptly into the hospital suite.

Robert Gu, Sr., was pacing the windowless room like a caged teenager. You’d never guess he’d recently had one leg crushed and the other fractured; the docs were good at fixing that kind of thing. As for the rest, well, his burns were hidden by medical pajamas.

The old man’s gaze snapped up as Bob came in the room, but his words were more desperate than angry. “Son! Is Miri okay?”

Eve — > Bob: Speak up, Colonel. You can tell him everything about your daughter. “… Miri is fine, Dad.” He waved at the plush chairs by the table at the side of the suite.

But the old man just kept bouncing around the room. “Thank God, thank God. The last I remember was the heat and lava crawling toward her.” He looked down at his pajamas, and suddenly seemed very distracted by what he saw.

“You’re at Crick’s in La Jolla, Dad. Miri wasn’t hurt in the fire. Your left arm was pretty much destroyed.” The flesh had burned down to the bone in places, burned all the way
through
the lower forearm.

Robert Senior touched the loose sleeve. “Yes, the doctors told me.” He turned and dropped into one of the chairs. “That’s about all they’ve told me. You’re sure Miri’s okay? You saw her?”

The old man never behaved like this. There was strain all around his eyes.
Or maybe he’s just reacting to the look on my face
. Bob sat down across from this father. “I’ve seen her. I’ll be talking to her later this afternoon. Her worst problem is some mental confusion about what happened in the labs.”

“Oh.” Then more softly, “Oh.” He sat mulling the news, and then he was fidgeting again. “How long have I been out? There’s so much you need to know, Bob… Maybe you should get some of your law-enforcement buddies in here.”

Eve — > Bob: So he doesn’t remember the debrief? I didn’t think we were that good. “There’s no need, Dad. There maybe follow-up questioning about particular points, but we’ve dredged up all the dirty little secrets. You’ve been under interrogation for several days.”

 

His father’s eyes widened slightly. After a moment, he gave a nod. “Yeah, all those weird dreams… So that means you know about, about my own problems?”

 

“Yes.”

Robert looked away. “There are strange bad guys out there, Bob. The Mysterious Stranger — the one who hijacked Zulfi Sharif — he was on my case all the time. I’ve never known anyone who could manipulate me as he did. Can you imagine someone riding on your shoulder all the time, telling you what to do?”