The Archimedes Effect (32 page)

He chuckled. “Yeah, that military is the lowest job on the totem pole, all right. Below the guy who cleans out Porta Potties.”

Jen laughed. “No offense. It just wasn’t for Beth.”

“No offense taken. What happened?”

“She hated it. Really hated it. Discipline was not her thing. So she just . . . left. The Army doesn’t much care for that, once you sign on, apparently.”

“No. They don’t.”

“She came home, hid out in my apartment, sneaked back and forth to her mother’s. Eventually, the FBI came looking for her. Apparently, desertion is a federal offense.”

“Yep.”>

“Scared the hell out of me when the FBI agents showed up on my doorstep one day. They rattled me good—threatened me with dire things if they found out I knew where Beth was, or was helping her. Really scared me because, at that moment, she was hiding in my bathroom, not twenty feet away.”

“The weed of crime bears bitter fruit,” he said.

“What?”

“Sorry. That’s what the Shadow used to say on the radio.”

“Yeah, well, it was bitter enough I didn’t like the taste of it. I told Beth she needed to get this straightened out, that I certainly wasn’t planning on spending any quality time in a federal pen for helping her.”

“Prudent.”

“I thought so. Beth saw it as a kind of betrayal. We were friends, I should be willing to put myself on the line for her, even though she had done something stupid to get herself in trouble in the first place. We had words.”

“Ah.”>

Jen nodded to herself, lost in the memory. “Yeah. The thing was, I had blossomed a bit by the time I got to college. Filled out a little, found there were other music geeks, some of them boys, a whole department full of them. I had acquired a boyfriend. My first love.”

“I’m jealous.”

“Harold was tall, reedy, very talented as a pianist, and, I thought, in love with me. We had discussed engagement, marriage, blending our music careers together, the whole nine yards.”

“But it didn’t work out,” he said.

“No. Beth was really upset with me for not being more supportive. She had also ripened some, and while she never got taller, she had developed some curves and learned how to use them.”

Kent could see where this was going, but he said nothing, letting her tell it in her own way.

“So my best friend seduced my boyfriend and convinced him to run away with her. He left me a note:

“ ‘Jenny, I’m sorry, but Beth and I are leaving together. She needs our support and since she can’t get it here, we think it best that we go. Love, Harold.’ ”

“Ow.”

“Oh, yeah, big-time ‘ow.’ I’d never had a boyfriend before and had never been dumped, much less for my best girlfriend. I fell apart. Had no clue how to handle things. Dropped out of school, went home to Mama, and spent a month locked in my room crying. I lost twenty pounds. Never even touched my guitar the whole time.”

Her hand moved again, still silent on the strings. “Eventually the tears dried up, I started playing again, and picked back up at school, but it was a pretty miserable time for me.”

“I can understand that.” He could see she was upset by the memory, even now.

“Beth used Harold to support her just long enough to find a better ride. She dumped Harold, and married a well-to-do lawyer.

“Harold eventually got a music degree and went to teach somewhere out west—Colorado or Wyoming, like that. He called me a couple times. I hung up on him.” She smiled, but it was a sad, twisted thing. “Beth’s husband was apparently a pretty good attorney. He worked a deal with the Army, and she was discharged dishonorably, but didn’t have to serve any time. A few months later, she called me. She was living a hundred miles or so away. Said she was sorry about what she had done, wanted to make amends, patch things up, get back to being friends.”

Kent shook his head.

“Yeah, that’s what I felt. But I was sweet. Butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth. ‘Sure, okay. Give me your number and address. I’ll call you.’ ”

“But . . . ?”

“The Devil would have been ice-skating in Hell before I ever called her. She tried again a few times, eventually gave it up.”

“You never forgave her.”

“Some crimes earn you a life sentence,” she said. “But I kind of got past the bitterness. We weren’t going to be friends, but eventually I was able to get up in the morning without wishing she’d be hit by a train. I kept a loose kind of track, through mutual family and acquaintances. She had a hard life. Divorced and married three times, four kids, two of whom got into drugs and wound up in jail. Her last husband was a long-haul truck driver. She gave up the cello, drank too much, smoked too much, and got fat.” She paused, her eyes far away.

“One day last month, Beth apparently went out to collect the newspaper, and she had a heart attack and fell over dead in her driveway. Same age as I am.”

Nothing for him to say to that.

“It’s kind of hard to believe,” she said. “She’d been dead three weeks before I heard. I somehow thought I’d sense it if that happened, though I didn’t expect it to happen for a long time. She was my best friend, then my worst enemy, and then just . . . not much of anything to me. She was a huge part of my growing up. My best memories of that age include her; also my worst memories. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around the idea that she’s dead. I mean, we never wiped the slate clean, and on some level I always hoped she would realize how badly she had behaved, and would have come and fallen on her knees and admitted it and begged forgiveness.”

“Would you have forgiven her?”

“I don’t know. I would have liked to have the choice, though.”

He nodded again. He understood.

She sighed. “You know why I told you this story?”

He shook his head.

“So you’ll know I’m not an altogether nice person before we get too far down the road. I held that grudge for a long time. I wasn’t a cosmic, realized being who could look at my friend’s youthful mistakes and just let it go. Eighteen-year-olds aren’t that mature, I wouldn’t want to be judged at that age, but I was angry and I stayed angry, and even now I can get pissed off all over again if I think about it too long.”

He smiled. “What—you’re human like the rest of us? For shame.”

She laughed. “Yeah, I know you had me up on this goddess pedestal and all.”

He took his guitar out of the case and looked at her. “Remind me to tell you the story about my brother’s daughter some time. She married a guy who was a Christian Scientist, she converted, and she later died of breast cancer. At her funeral, I heard him say that it was Susie’s own fault she died—her faith wasn’t strong enough. If he hadn’t been the father of their five-year-old child, I think I might have killed him.”

She shook her head. “Couple of fine old retreads, aren’t we?”

“Take it slow and you can drive a long way on retreads,” he said.

Jay had paid off, and now there were four of them outside the prison and on the run. Jethro, who had already given him all he knew; a giant of a man named Gauss; and a grizzled old guy who called himself Reef.

Five hundred meters away from the walls, Jethro stepped into the maw of a flesh-eating plant and was gobbled down in this slow-motion peristaltic spasm that took a while, though the plant apparently injected him with some kind of narcotic so that he was smiling as it ate him. Jay had a handgun, a blaster that fired a charged-particle beam, and he’d started to cut loose on the plant, but Reef said, “Don’t! The guards’ll spot the beam on their sensors this close! Jethro’s already dead anyhow, no point in shooting.”

So Jay, Gauss, and Reef kept running. They wanted to be deep in the swamp before the guards came looking for them.

If they could stay alive for a while—and Jay would make sure of that as best he could—he should get something from the two escapees that might be useful.

A thunderstorm rolled in from somewhere, fast, and lightning and thunder flashed and boomed as a rain so heavy it turned the world into watery grass fell.

“Don’t step on anything red or blue,” Reef said. “Or round,” he added.

Given how hard it was to see anything, much less colors or shapes in the deluge, Jay was trusting to mostly blind luck about that.

After fifteen minutes, the rain stopped, as suddenly as it had come, and the sun burst out and started cooking the water away. They splashed through puddles, avoiding red, blue, and round.

“There’s a caldera that way,” Reef said, “Hot springs. That’ll throw off the guards’ IR scanners. They won’t put anybody on the ground there, it’ll be skimmers above the treetops. If we can make that before they come looking, we’ll have a chance.”

“How do you know this?”

“I been in the Cage for thirty-three years—what there is to hear, I heard five times already.”

“Lead on, then.”

“I don’t suppose you want to give me the blaster, since I’ll be in front?”

“You’d be right about that,” Jay said.

“You don’t trust me?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but no, I don’t.”

The old man cackled. “I wouldn’t trust me, either. Come on. Keep an eye on the trees, there’s hanging serpents there look kind of like moss—one bite, you’re done.”

“Nice place.”

“Only bad men get sent here, son. We’re all guilty.”

As they walked, Jay figured he had better get whatever information he was going to get sooner rather than later. He was a little ways behind Reef, ahead of Gauss. He dropped back a little more so he could talk to the bigger man.

“So,” he said. “Stark.”

“What about ’im?”

“You tell me.”

Gauss shrugged. “Soldier. Killer. Got shot in the back trying for the gate when a supply flitter came in.”

“I know that much. What else?”

“He hung with ex-troopers, mostly. Mercs, freelancers, guys who made money in shooting wars, guarding dopers or smugglers.”

“Any names?”

“Groves. Russell. Hill. Thompson. Carruth. Couple others I never got to know. Special Forcers—Recon, green hats, Rangers. Badasses. Just as soon kill you as smile at you.”

Ahead, Reef said, “We’re almost—ah, shit!”

Jay turned his attention to the old man, who had dropped to his knees. What—?

There was something that looked like an arrow piercing the man, the barbed point of it coming from his back. As he watched, Reef was jerked off his feet and dragged along the wet ground. Jay saw that the “arrow” was actually the end of a long, vinelike tentacle, connected to a creature he couldn’t immediately tell was animal or plant. Looked kind of like a squid, but squatter, and covered with what looked like scales or bark. It had a huge, circular mouth with lots of pointed teeth in concentric rows.

Whatever Reef had, there was no getting it now.

Terrific scenario, no question. Scared himself.

“FREEZE RIGHT THERE!” came an amplified voice.

Jay glanced up and saw a five-man flitter floating twenty meters above them, the snout of a plasma cannon pointed over the side at them. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. Crap.

“I’m not goin’ back!” Gauss yelled. He started running, lumbering through the brush.

The squidlike thing fired a sharp-ended tentacle at Gauss, but missed.

The gunner in the flitter was more accurate. He opened up with the plasma cannon and when the bolt hit Gauss, like a tree being hit with lightning, Gauss’s sap turned into superheated steam and blasted him apart—
ka-blam!

“Euuww,” Jay said. “Ick!”

Time to leave.

“End scenario,” Jay said as the gunner started to line up on him.

Not much, maybe, but he had a few names. Something, at least.

Lewis, at home, worked out the best way to deal with Carruth. There were a few risks, but she figured she could handle those. It was all in the setup.

First, she had to pick another Army base. Which one didn’t matter, as long as she could convince Carruth he had every chance of getting in and out okay, and that ought not to be a problem. Then, it was just a matter of how best to make sure he wouldn’t be captured alive.

She could use a vox-scrambler and make the call from a moving car in the middle of the city; she knew who to talk to to get the maximum response, and they’d never be able to get a fix on her in time.

She imagined how it might go:

“Listen, don’t talk—the terrorists who have been hitting the Army’s bases are going to hit another one.” She’d fill in the blanks here—time, place, like that. “But here’s the thing: the leader of the group, guy named ‘Carruth’? He’s an ex-SEAL who won’t let himself be taken alive. He’s already killed a bunch of GIs, plus a couple of civilian cops—he carries this monster handgun—and he has wired himself up with explosives. There’s a button on his belt, if he pushes it, he’ll take down half a city block when he goes. . . .”

She smiled at the scenario she was creating. She could easily imagine that she was the officer in charge of security. They wanted these suckers, bad, but they sure as hell wouldn’t let Carruth and his boys get within a hundred meters of anything they didn’t want to see blown up. So the ideal place to take him down would be in the middle of nowhere. But if they stopped him before he got onto the base, they’d have to bring in the civilian authorities—local and state police, FBI counterterrorism force, Homeland Security, maybe even the National Guard. The Army wouldn’t like that for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which would be the lack of control.

If, however, they could channel Carruth once he was on the base—a detour into an artillery range would be good, like that—then they could surround him somewhere relatively safe, and if he went nova, too bad. There were some stiff antiterrorism laws on the books these days, but if Carruth was simply captured, eventually he’d get a day in court.