A Dark and Hungry God Arises (40 page)

We can talk now, ' he mumbled past his sore tongue.

'No wires or guards' - he made a short, harsh gesture -

'near enough to hear us. What did Captain Sheepfucker say?'

A twist of disgust lingered on Milos' face. 'According to Succorso, ' he answered softly, 'the Bill doesn't have a lockup. He doesn't punish people that - simply. But he has a series of cells for interrogations. Down in his command complex somewhere. That's where he usually keeps people until he decides what to do with them. ' He looked like he wanted to spit. The woman didn't know anything else. ' After a pause he added, 'It's not much to go on. He didn't tell us how to find the cells. And we can't be sure the kid is there. '

'It's enough. ' Angus knew where those cells were: he'd spent some time there years ago, during one of his more problematic visits to Thanatos Minor. Apparently the Bill hadn't changed his procedures for dealing with human loot since then. That was all the reassurance Angus needed.

Milos waited for more information. When he didn't get it, he hissed, 'All right. Assume you can find the cells.

Assume the kid is there. You still haven't told me how you propose to get him out. We can't just walk in there and take him. ' His head twitched a reference to the Bill's ubiquitous surveillance. 'And you haven't told me why, '

he finished almost plaintively.

Good questions, both of them. No more than a minute ago, Angus couldn't have answered either one.

And he still had no idea why he'd made this deal with Nick; why Warden Dios wanted him to do whatever he could for Morn. But as soon as Milos said the words take him, the data-link in Angus' head opened like crossing the gap, and information he'd never seen before came on-line.

Involuntary excitement thudded through him as he received a flood of new knowledge.

Triggered by Milos' words - or the proximity of a crisis

— this database informed him that his EM prostheses had capabilities he'd never suspected. They weren't simply able to identify wires and bugeyes; read alarms and locks; analyze technological enhancements. Properly coded, they could also emit jamming fields for a wide variety of sensing devices. He could glitch a monitor until it recorded nothing but distortion, if he got close enough to it.

Or-

Suddenly his excitement became so intense that he forgot Milos and the cruise, Warden Dios and Morn Hyland. The world around him seemed to vanish in discovery.

Or he could bend light.

Not over a large area, of course. His power supply wasn't adequate for that. But he could surround himself with a radiant curve, an electromagnetically induced refraction wave in the visible spectrum, which would make him effectively indistinguishable to most optical monitors. Human eyes would always be able to see him.

But neurologic and electronic encoding were fundamentally different, vulnerable to different kinds of distortion.

And because the Bill's bugeyes were designed to function over distance under uncertain lighting conditions, they received wider bandwidths — with less accuracy. They would record Angus as nothing more than a slight opal-escent ripple in the image, like a blur on the bugeye's lens.

The ripple could still be tracked. An intensive computer analysis of the recordings could follow it as it moved. But first it had to be noticed: someone in Operations - or in the Bill's command complex - had to see it and worry about it. And that might never happen. No one on Thanatos Minor had any reason to suspect that Angus carried this kind of jamming equipment - that he or anyone else could carry it.

Light-bending fields were known, of course, but they weren't common: their emitters were too bulky, and required too much power, to be effectively portable. And even where the size and power consumption of the equipment weren't a problem, the fields themselves remained too small and immobile to have much practical applica-tion. By welding these emitters into Angus, Hashi Lebwohl had accomplished a miracle of miniaturization.

The codes were right there in Angus' head.

Lebwohl and Dios had left him defenseless in the path of madness; he hated and feared them. But that didn't prevent him from experiencing a strange, amazed exultation which bordered on gratitude at their technical abilities. When they'd taken his freedom away, they'd made him into something wonderful.

He hadn't felt an emotion like this since the day an Amnioni had taught him now to edit Bright Beauty's datacore.

He'd earned that knowledge by committing what the UMCP would probably have considered the worst crime of his life - a crime they still didn't know about because none of his human or computer interrogators had possessed enough information to frame an accurate question.

Single-handedly he had hijacked a large in-system hauler; but he hadn't wasted his time with the actual cargo.

Instead he'd loaded the survivors, twenty-eight men and women, into Bright Beauty's holds and sold them directly to the Amnion on Billingate.

In return for booty on that scale, the Amnion had supplied him with the skill which had kept him alive ever since. Plainly they'd believed he would in turn sell the information to other illegals; thereby doing humankind's defenses incalculable harm.

The memory still brought him a burn of satisfied rage as consuming and addictive as matter cannon fire.

'Listen, ' Milos protested insistently. 'You're probably going to get us killed. At the very least we'll be caught.

I won't know what to do - I won't be able to react properly, I won't be able to back you up - if you don't tell me what you're planning. '

In the grip of an excitement like glee, Angus stopped, turned. Ignoring the crowds and hawkers, the bright, wild signs, the inviting doorways, the occasional shove, he held Milos' arm with one hand; with the other, he reached up and clenched Milos' pudgy cheeks so that his mouth gaped like a grotesque kiss.

Then pay attention. ' Angus' datacore didn't require him to reassure his second. 'I'm only going to say this once.

'I don't need you. You're irrelevant here. I'm keeping you with me because I can't send you away. The fuckers who did this to us don't trust you out of my sight. But all you have to do is stay with me and stay close. This close. ' He grinned again, squeezing Milos' cheeks harder.

'If somebody shoots at us, try to hide behind me. '

An instant later he added, 'And keep your mouth shut.

Any sound might give us away. '

Baring his teeth, he let go of Milos and moved into the crowd.

As he walked, he felt his second behind him, so close that Milos' chest brushed his back. He could hear fear in Milos' tense respiration.

Good.

Almost giddy with exultation and movement, he headed for the nearest lift.

It happened to be one which only served the cruise from Billingate's equivalent of a slum, the habitation levels where the installation's more reduced people lived.

That suited him fine, however. He and Milos were still being tracked - or could still be tracked. SAC programs in the Bill's computers could sift the vast body of data from all his bugeyes and wires. Under the circumstances, Angus was perfectly content to let the Bill know where he was. The Bill would think that he was looking for someone here; or that his meeting with Nick had resulted in some task which could only be performed here.

Savoring Milos' tension, he led his second along the grime-crusted halls until he found a small knot of men and women waiting for a lift to the docks.

With Milos pressing against him, he pushed his way into the middle of the crowd.

As the lift opened and people squeezed aboard - while he and Milos passed out of range of one bugeye, into range of another — he activated his refractive jamming field.

He didn't doubt for an instant that it worked. He could trust whatever his databases told him about his equipment. False information could kill him - and then everything Dios and Lebwohl had invested in him would be wasted.

Confident that he and Milos were effectively invisible to the Bill, he left the car when it reached the docks.

But he didn't linger there. The pressure of his need for movement swelled inside him: he wanted to run. As if he were eager, he went toward one of the general service lifts used by ships' personnel to reach Operations or the cruise.

Now he had to be more careful: his jamming field wouldn't protect him from guards. And the closer he came to lifts that ran down to the depths of the rock, the more guards he encountered. They paid him no particular attention — which meant they hadn't yet received orders to watch for him — but they were still dangerous, if only because they had eyes and guns.

His heart beat faster and his nerves sharpened as if unknown or unused systems were coming on-line: computer-assisted reflexes; decision-making programs; survival instincts. Beads of oily sweat slid down his temples.

There: a lift that went where he wanted to go.

One guard stood outside, staring dully at nothing with eyes as empty as muzzles. Three people waited for the car to arrive, the doors to open.

The indicators said it was going up.

So much the better.

When the lift opened, half a dozen men and women surged out. With Milos clenched behind him, Angus entered along with the other passengers.

One level up, a man and a woman got off.

Two levels later, the third passenger got off.

No one got on.

Now.

As the doors swept shut, sending the lift upward again, Angus fired a precise laser needle into the control panel, burning a gap in its alarm circuitry.

No warnings sounded, either in the car or in Operations, as he engaged the same locks that maintenance would have used to take the lift out of service.

For a few minutes, at least, he had a private elevator.

As a precaution, he clamped one hand briefly over Milos' mouth, reminding him to be quiet. Then he sent the car downward like a taste of freefall, toward the core of the rock. Where nothing lived except the Bill in his strongroom and Billingate's fusion generator.

Milos' face looked like Angus' mouth felt: thick with pain; sickened by ground-in ash. Still good. Angus showed his teeth and watched the indicators count the levels.

He knew the one he wanted. His memory of the time he'd been locked up here was as vivid as his databases.

You remember Morn Hyland. All his memories were vivid.

She had a kid. Of course, there was no guarantee the Bill still used the same rooms. That's what we were doing on Enablement - force-growing her kid. Come to that, there was no guarantee the kid was still alive. She calls him

'Davies Hyland', after her pure, dead father. The whole deal might be a lie. Now the Amnion want him back. Succorso's treachery might extend to risking Milos, his only ally, for the sake of some unimaginable leverage with the Bill; with the Amnion. They want to study the consequences of having a mother who didn't lose her mind. And the cells would be guarded in any case; watched by human eyes.

Nevertheless Angus' concentration held steady, like one of his lasers. He was moving. Personally he didn't believe Succorso had lied - not about needing to get Davies away from the Bill. Succorso's efforts to conceal his desperation only made it more convincing. And Angus' datacore was incapable of doubt: the prospect of trading Davies Hyland to redeem Morn had engaged programming as compulsory as the pull of a black hole.

Five levels to go.

Fourthreetwoone.

Stop.

Milos staggered slightly, shifted away from Angus. A stupid mistake; dangerous. And slow. All Milos' movements appeared tortuous to Angus, clogged with mortality. Reacting at micro-processor speeds, he caught his second by the shipsuit and hauled him close again.

One hand behind him to keep Milos tight against his back, Angus stepped between the opening doors into the corridor.

It was only twenty meters long - a blind passage formed in concrete, with no entrances except to the cells and no exits except by the lifts. Six cells, two life. Lighting and bugeyes lined the ceiling; more bugeyes than Angus remembered. With that many monitors, the Bill could study every atmospheric eddy and current - the molecular aftermath of moving bodies.

He'd lived in forbidden space for so long that paranoia had become his ruling passion.

Between one tick of his computer's chronometer and the next, Angus grinned at the idea that he was about to justify the Bill's paranoia.

He was already in motion, already dropping to a crouch as he drew Milos out of the lift. The bugeyes weren't enough for the Bill; of course not: he also had two guards in the corridor. They stood on either side of a door off to the left. One of them cupped an impact rifle with flexsteel probes instead of fingers. The other wore his gun built into his chest - a weapon like a small projectile cannon.

Both of them were wired. Operations would receive everything their equipment saw or heard; would know it the instant they stopped transmitting.

The indicators must have told them the lift was coming. They weren't surprised when the door opened.

Because they weren't surprised - and because they had no reason to expect trouble - they weren't braced for Angus' attack.

Speed. Accuracy. Silence. He'd been designed for such things. His lasers made no noise except the small frying sounds of flesh and hardened plastics as he shot one guard between the eyes, the other through his thoracic gun.

Both men folded to the floor as if the sinews holding their joints together had been cut.

Untouched, their transmitters went on functioning.

Operations' visual recordings of the event would show a blur, an odd ruby wink, an unlikely change of perspective. Anyone who saw those recordings would know that something had happened. But most of the time no one watched the recordings: only the computers watched.

The computers might not know the difference between men who sat down or even stretched out on the floor to rest and men who fell dead. The Bill's programmers might not have anticipated this situation. A little time might pass before pre-selected analytical parameters signaled a warning.