A Few Good Men (2 page)

Never-Never had seven levels. Seven circles of hell. I was on the sixth down. If I understood the organization properly, and it was entirely possible I didn’t, this level housed the most dangerous prisoners. The level below me contained only torture cells.

I’d been taken to them for two days when I’d first come to Never-Never. I’d never understood what exactly they wanted to know or what they thought torture would accomplish. Maybe they just liked hearing me scream.

I tried to remember exactly how long it had been from boom to water under my door. The water was now up to my ankles, and I couldn’t think clearly. It felt like the explosion had simultaneously taken place several years ago and only a heartbeat away. But the water was now above my calves, which meant the hole had to be nearby.

Someone would come, I told myself, swallowing, imagining the cell filling with water to the ceiling, drowning me. They’d come before I was floating lifeless. They’d never let me commit suicide, and they weren’t about to let me die now.

Yes, I’d tried to commit suicide before, but you need to work yourself up to a certain pitch of despair for that. I wasn’t there now. I had a brand new data gem, slipped in yesterday’s otherwise empty mid-day food can. It claimed to be ancient novels from the twentieth century. Thirty of them. I hadn’t even looked at the gem at all. I’d been saving it, reading my old gems: history and science, music and language, and saving the new one like a rare treat. New ones came in seldom and irregularly. I’d gladly forego a meal a day for a gem, but I never got that. This was the first new gem in three months. And now I’d die without reading one word of it.

I lurched towards my cot again. I kept the gem reader—a cheap, tiny unit of the sort you used to be able to buy for a couple of cents anywhere—and the gems in the crevice between bed and wall. Not exactly hidden. Either the cell was wired for sound and sight—and it probably was or else how could they stop all my suicide attempts in time?—and they didn’t care I had it, or else it wasn’t and they didn’t know. No one ever came in to inspect, so no one would find it otherwise. But I kept it there so it wouldn’t fall and break. The gems were my only connection to other humans: to their words, their minds, their thoughts. If I lost them, I would quickly lose whatever grip I retained on reality.

Perhaps I had, I thought, as I grabbed the gems and the reader, and wrapped the whole thing, tightly, in my coverlet. Perhaps this was all a hallucination. The coverlet ripped easily but I’d found in the past, when I’d spilled drink on it, that it was completely impermeable. Like water proof paper. I was thinking that neither gems nor reader were designed to be exposed to salt water. And if I broke them, new ones might not be provided.

Though they had to come from someone within the system, they couldn’t be exactly official or else they’d not be sent inside otherwise empty food cans.

I wrapped the whole as tightly as I could, ripping the coverlet and tying it over itself. The torn strips weren’t sturdy enough to hang oneself with, but they worked for this. I slipped the packet inside my suit. The water was now up to my knees.

Splashing, I drew myself up to my cot and stood on it, my hands on the ceiling for balance. That would keep me safer longer and give someone time to rescue me.

They would come. They had to come. After all my clever attempts at killing myself, they weren’t going to let me die like this.

A voice screamed something outside the door. No, wait, sang. Then there was . . .

A flash of sound and light that glared through the hole in my door where the lock used to be. I blinked.

When I opened my eyes again, the door was open, and above the ripple caused by the door opening, standing on a broom—a little antigrav wand, forbidden for transportation in all civilized lands—was the most unlikely angel of deliverance I’d ever seen.

Setting All the Captives Free

Angels shouldn’t have faces that looked like the result of an industrial accident—perhaps an encounter with a giant cheese grater—one of their shoulders shouldn’t be hunched on itself, and the entire left side of their body shouldn’t droop and sag as though the muscles and bones holding it had been semi-liquified.

They shouldn’t have a only a few straggles of long brown hair that looked like the rest had been plucked by a blind man wielding tweezers.

And—mark me, I’m not an expert on theology, but I’m still fairly sure of this—angels should not, under any circumstances, be singing
Women of Syracuse
at the top of their lungs while standing on a broom.

Women of Syracuse
was a listing of the acts supposedly performed by these willing ladies for varying quantities of money, and, let me tell you, some of them were so inventive that even I found them odd-sounding. I’m quite sure, for instance, one’s ear is not built for that.

I blinked stupidly. My savior gave me the sweetest smile I’d ever seen, despite its necessarily lopsided nature. He waved cheerily and moved on, still standing on the broom even as it sped off. Of course—I thought—angels could stand on brooms. They could fly, so if they lost the broom it wouldn’t be a big deal.

And then I realized that the door was open and that the water level was still climbing, slowly, very slowly.

I jumped from my cot, and the water was just below my knees as I half ran, half lurched out.

My rescuer was moving from cell door to cell door, as the women of Syracuse found ever more unlikely things to do to their gentlemen friends. His burner flashed at intervals. Yells and strange inhuman-sounding laughs echoed somewhere.

The hallway had grav wells at either end. As usual, one would be rigged to go up, the other to go down. Water was pouring in a torrent through the downward one. And I was going to the upward one.

I ran towards it, then stopped just short of the grav well field.

In my mind, Ben’s voice came, clear as day,
That broomer will free the people on this level, but what about the poor bastards in the cells below?
And in my mind, Ben crossed his arms and looked his most stern.

So, Ben has been dead for fourteen years and really shouldn’t be talking to me like that. But this never seemed to matter to him and anyway, whether he talked to me or not was a matter between myself and him and none of anyone else’s business, right? What’s a minor insanity between friends?

I can’t
, I told him.
See the way that water is pouring? The antigrav wells are actually pulling the water downward as fast as possible. Down there, the water will be up to my neck. And I’m tall. If anyone was there, they’ll be dead for sure. Now or soon enough
.

Yeah. Think about that,
he said.
Think about the “soon enough.”

And I did, though I didn’t want to. I remembered being down there, strapped to a chair, or strapped to the wall, while they did unspeakable things to my body with instruments no sane human could even conceive of, much less use. And then I imagined water pouring in and not being able to escape, not being able to swim, while the water climbed, climbed, climbed.

It’s none of my business
, I said.
I am a murderer. A monster
.

In my mind, Ben’s mouth twitched with the beginning of a smile, and his dark eyes wrinkled slightly in amusement.
Now, Luce,
he said.

Which just goes to show you the damn bastard didn’t play fair. He never did. Even dead fourteen years, dead at my hand for fourteen years, the stubborn cuss insisted on thinking the best of me. And now, as always, I couldn’t disappoint him. Death would be easier.

My body didn’t want to want to go to the lower levels. Bodies aren’t stupid. They know their business is survival. I tried to overpower it with my mind, but the body would have won. Except the mind had Ben on its side and even my body wasn’t able to resist the irresistible force of his belief in my non-existent goodness.

I lurched around, unsteadily, against the shrieks from my body that I should save myself, and ran to the grav well. I dropped through it, water pouring down with me, soaking my hair and clothes, and hopefully leaving the gem reader dry. Hopefully. Because when I was caught, I wanted my damn gems.

And if I just did this, Ben assured me, I wouldn’t have the ghosts of the dumb bastards down here keeping him company in my head. That was incentive enough.

There were four cells down here. I remembered that from when they’d dragged me down there to torture. The nearer one was open—the door hanging on one side and blown on the other.

On the water here up to my chest, someone was floating facedown, a middle-aged, well-dressed man. I splashed over and turned him face up, then let go. First, he was Good Man Rainer. Second, there was a burner hole in the middle of his forehead. The Good Man Rainer was dead. The man who’d first sent Ben and me to jail. My mind couldn’t process it and neither could Ben’s ghost, who frowned distractedly but said nothing.

The next cell was still locked and it occurred to me, belatedly, I didn’t have a burner.
He’ll have it
, Ben said. Obviously talking about the corpse.
Remember all the bastards have burners on them at all times for self-defense.

I told him he could search the corpse himself, but he only smiled at me in that irritating way he did when he reminded me he had no more existence than any other figment of my imagination. All I can say is that my imagination must be against me.

Trotting back against water resistance was not as easy as it seemed, and I had to swim to get a good grip on the late, departed Good Man Rainer. I might never have found the burner in time, if I hadn’t got lucky. It was strapped under his pant leg, to his all-too-cold ankle. I grabbed it and sploshed back to the first cell.

Using a burner under water is always a crap shoot. You shoot and, if it’s a cheap burner, it won’t even produce a beam. If it’s a slightly better burner, it will sort of work and shock you right back through the water. But this must have been one of the solid state ones, equipped with a laser for underwater work, because it beamed, white and hot and true, and burned the lock right out. And then nothing happened. The door didn’t spring inward.

The water pressure is holding it,
Ben said.
You’ll have to kick it in.

Ghosts have absolutely no sense of reality. Probably comes from not existing. To kick something under water is about as easy as to kick something in low grav—an experience I remembered from an all-too brief visit to Circum where some areas were kept at half-g.

You had to get a good hold on something. All I could get was a sort of hold on the door frame. Fortunately I’d spent the last fourteen years exercising insanely.

I got hold of the frame and kicked at the door with both feet. It opened enough to let the water flow out some and then it opened fully.

The occupant of this cell was beyond human cares. He was strapped to a chair, and floating, chair and all. And if he wasn’t dead, he should be. I was no more prepared to give him regen for his eyes or to stop the blood spreading in billows in the water around him, than I was to fly. And if he wasn’t dead, he’d be dead in minutes, one way or another. He was unconscious, so there was no suffering I must stop as I’d once stopped Ben’s.

I turned and swam back to the next cell where I burned the lock, kicked the door in. And found myself assaulted by a madman, wrapping his hands around my neck, in what seemed like a creditable attempt at strangling me.

A good slug with the back of the burner would have cold-cocked him, but then I’d have to save him. So, instead, as he scrambled for a good hold on my neck, hampered by my hand in the way, I hauled back and slapped him hard across the face, then took advantage of his confusion to point him towards the upward grav well. “That way,” I said. “Go.”

It was iffy whether he would, but he shook his head, then turned and swam that way. Leaving me to swim to the last closed cell and repeat the door-opening procedure.

This time I faced a young man, probably twenty-two or so, the age I’d been when they’d brought me here. Actually, he looked a lot as I had at that age, with smoothly cut hair—though his was brown—and, from what was visible of his sleeve, wearing a high-quality suit. And he was clinging desperately, with an expression of terror in his eyes, to the light fixture directly above where they normally strapped prisoners to the wall. His head was tilted back to keep his nose above water.

He stared at me as though seeing a vision of perfect horror, which I probably was. Don’t know. I had been fourteen years without a mirror. I pulled myself up so I could talk and said, “Come on!”

And he tilted his head back more and spoke, the words intercut by chattering teeth. “I ca-can’t. Ca-can’t swim.”

Damn. Yeah, I could go and leave him here to drown. He was going to slow me down, and frankly I had to leave fast. The few inches of air up there would soon be closed off by water, but I couldn’t leave him here to die. I just couldn’t. Ben wouldn’t ever let me hear the end of it, and worse, he might acquire a buddy with brown hair and chattering teeth.

I must have expressed myself loudly and profanely. You spend too much time alone, you forget that there are thoughts that shouldn’t be expressed aloud. My companion looked even more terrified and tried to shrink from me.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “Try to breathe when your head is above water, because I can’t promise it will always be.” And I grabbed him by the back of his suit. Expensive material ought to hold.

Then I took a deep breath, and plunged my own head under for faster speed towing him. I hadn’t swum at all in more than fourteen years, and certainly hadn’t swum towing someone. Halfway through the hallway, I surfaced to breathe. My charge, white as a sheet, seemed to be managing to keep his own head in the air by treading water. Good. I plunged under and dragged him again.

All the way to the antigrav well, which sucked us all the way to the upper floor.

The well was, of course, slightly dislocated from the well on the next level, so you wouldn’t accidentally go all the way up. So we stumbled off the well field, sideways, and into the field of the next well, having no more than time to register that the water here was up to our knees. Then up again, and the water up above our ankles. Then up again, and the water covered our feet. I stared at the other grav well at the end of the corridor, ignoring the people swarming around.