A Few Good Men (3 page)

There were broomers everywhere, some of them women. And there were fights going on between broomers and guards and, in a couple of instances, prisoners. But I just looked at the downward grav well at the end and determined that no water was falling down through that. That meant there was no water in the level above. So the hole had to be on this level, right? The hole was my chance at escaping. I wasn’t about to try to leave through the main entrance. I wasn’t that stupid.

A quick look, to see where the hole would be, brought an even quicker decision that it would be on the side where there were more broomers and fewer guards. Stood to reason, since guards were pouring in from above.

I grabbed my charge’s wrist and pulled him in the direction where there were more broomers, and I told him, my voice little more than an exasperated puff—it’s not easy running and towing a full grown man, even if he’s smaller than you—“Come this way, ignore the broomers.”

He hesitated a moment, then followed me. I was coming to terms, as he splashed behind me, with the thought that I’d have to tow the kid behind me no matter how far the surface was. Couldn’t leave him here. He seemed about as capable of survival as the drowned baby rat he resembled. Twenty-one or twenty-two or around there, certainly not as much as twenty-five. His face was too rounded and soft for that, and his skin seemed smooth and flawless like a girl’s. And he could be my son. Well, he could have been if I’d ever done anything that could have led to a son. And I didn’t think so, not even when drunk out of my mind.

But he could have been. And I was the adult here, which meant he was my responsibility. What kind of species would we be, if adults didn’t take the responsibility for juveniles?

Your father’s species?
Ben said in my mind, which only goes to show you that ghosts don’t get out of breath or tired, no matter if the head that they’re haunting feels as though it would very much like to have a good bout of unconsciousness.

I ran down the hallway towards where I hoped the source of the water was. First there were ever increasing numbers of broomers, all of whom ignored us. If I’d had a little more breath, I’d have slugged one and stolen his broom to pull us to the surface. Except I was fairly sure I owed my freedom to them, and I refused to slug my saviors. Monster I might be, but there were limits.

Then there were no more broomers, as they were all behind me, and I could see the hole—a jagged tear in the wall of Never-Never, through which water poured. And one of the mysteries was solved for me, because someone had slapped a manhole underwater seal on the opening. Because it wasn’t precisely the same shape as the opening, it allowed water to rush in around the edges. But it wasn’t the torrent it would have been, had the hole been fully open. Which explained why even the lower level wasn’t fully filled.

I turned to the kid behind me. “Take a deep breath. I don’t know how far down we are, but the broomers came that way, so it can’t be too far.” I neglected to tell him that the broomers had brooms to tow them down, and therefore would have traveled much faster than any swimmer could. “I’ll take you to the surface.”

But even as I heard him draw breath, a man came through the membrane, then another. I jumped back and—this shows you how ghost-bullied I was—stood in front of the young man, as my mind realized that these men in stylish, dark suits, who clipped their brooms to their belts with military precision as they landed on this side of the membrane were not your average broomers.

In fact, they were a paramilitary unit, and only one of those deployed with brooms, so they could target problem spots in no time.

They were almost mythical, only I’d seen them once before. Scrubbers. The Good Men’s secret service of last resort.

Out of Hell

Scrubbers weren’t spies and they weren’t exactly a military force. What they were was the Good Men’s ultimate weapon in opinion control. Whenever an incident occurred which might cause public opinion to go out of control, Scrubbers were sent in to deal with it.

Their normal approach was killing everyone and making the bodies disappear. If you were really, really lucky, you might have some DNA and a few scuffle marks left when they were done. Theirs was the only avocation in which disposal of dozens of bodies wasn’t rare or incidental but a core part of their mission.

I’d met them before, once. I’d escaped with my life, barely. Ben and I might be the only ones of their targets to ever do so.

But Ben and I had ended up in jail. That led to all the rest.

Now, my blood ran cold, and my entire body seemed to tighten in a knot. I’d escaped that one time, but this was death. Death for me, death for the kid I’d rescued, death for the broomers who’d set us free. Nothing would be found of us.

And then I lost my mind. Or at least my mind let my body spring free.

I can’t explain my capacity to move really fast, and I’ve never found any reference to this from anyone else, not even in the copious literature and history gems someone had snuck to me in the depths of Never-Never. For a long time, I’d thought it was illusory, but both in the last incident with the Scrubbers and in the many incidents that Ben and I had been involved in in our first year in a common jail, I’d found that my ability was in fact true and it could be summed up as this: When in danger or great fear, I could sometimes move at a speed above normal humans. Fast enough above normal humans that I could win against great odds.

There were six men, which was the limits of even my ability, particularly since the front one was drawing a burner, no doubt to cut us down. And I didn’t want to kill. I didn’t want any more deaths on my conscience, but I also didn’t want to die. And I couldn’t let them kill the kid.

I sprang. Kicking the gun from his hands, I punched him hard enough to shove his nose in, then flung myself sideways towards his burner because it was easier than drawing mine. I must have moved at a speed that his comrades found hard to perceive, since their burner fire followed me down, but didn’t quite catch up with me. I heard the kid give a sort of gasp, and hoped it wasn’t loud enough to call attention to him.

And then I was flat on my belly, with the gun in my hand, and cutting down the Scrubbers in a long, continuous scything. I didn’t even have time to set the controls on the burner and it wasn’t set to heat, but only to the penetration where it works like a blade. Bodies fell, cut in half. Which was good, because they were wearing the large oxygen tanks people use when they will take brooms underwater, where the mere oxygen concentrator on the broom won’t be enough. And if I’d hit them with heat-burn, depending on what the tanks were made of, I’d have either blown us all up or ended up with a lovely rocket effect. But it poured out blood and guts in plentiful supply.

The kid must have been shocked enough by the sight that he didn’t move. Which was bad, because the last of the Scrubbers jumped, before the beam reached him, and got behind the kid, his burner to the kid’s temple. “Surrender your burner or your son gets it.”

And damn it, I didn’t have time to argue genealogy, any more than I had time to set the burner to burn, instead of cut. So, instead I removed my fingers from the trigger for a moment, aimed it at the man’s head, faster than his eye would be able to follow or—I hoped—his hand react to, and I shot him neatly in the middle of the forehead.

It was the equivalent of running a sharp, lance-long needle, through the middle of his head. Blood and brains erupted, then poured. He spasmed once. Fortunately his hand moved from its position at the kid’s temple, so the shot went straight down the hallway. Someone screamed down there.

But I was already reacting. Reacting to the falling Scrubber, reacting to the kid’s turning very pale, and his eyes trying to roll up into his head, as the blood of the scrubber poured over him. Good thing we were about to go out and into seawater, right? It would get rid of most of the evidence.

I sprang, pulled the corpse away from the living boy, administered a calculated slap to the kid, and told him, “Buck up. We don’t have time for nonsense.”

All I can say is that he must have been raised by as strict a man as my father. His reaction to the slap and the voice of command was to come fully awake immediately, steadying himself. “You—” he said, his voice unsteady. “You killed them all.”

“Yeah, kid,” I said. “I’m a murderer. Why else do you think I’m in Never-Never?” As I spoke, I was unhooking the broom from the dead Scrubber’s belt, and cracking the shell over the remote sensing-and-controlling unit, but not over the unit that transmitted the ignore codes.

To explain: every government broom—or military broom—came equipped with a unit that would allow your superiors to call you in, or at least bring the broom in if needed, as well as allow them to tell where you were at all times. There was another and separate unit—and I only knew this from having taken these brooms apart—that simply broadcast a code which told local authorities to ignore this broom.

Broom riding was illegal in every seacity and every continental territory, but it was routinely used by two sorts of people other than illegal broomers: people escaping flyers that were about to crash, and police or agents of the Good Men. The first type of broom had a beacon that called for the authorities to help. The second had a hush-up-ignore code. This code was generic. It wouldn’t identify the broom, just let local authorities know that as far as the Good Men were concerned, it would be better for everyone to pretend the broom wasn’t really there.

I left that in place because I’m not stupid, but I crushed the locator and remote with the butt of the burner. I could do a prettier job, I could. Given tools. But I didn’t have tools. And I wanted the kid out of here and safe.

“Have you ever ridden a broom?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I’d asked him if he’d ever drunk the blood of a newly killed infant. “No!” Probably outraged at the idea of doing something illegal.

“Do you know how to?” I asked, and then realized how stupid I was being. Of course he knew how to. Every kid old enough to drive a flyer—which in most places was around fourteen—was required to learn how to ride a broom, since it might be his only escape from a crash, and his only hope of getting to civilization again, depending on whether he was flying over a wild zone or the sea.

“Uh . . . I learned . . . I mean . . .”

“Yeah,” I said. “Look, this broom is a little more powerful than the rescue ones.” I fumbled with the nearest dead Scrubber, and got the mask and the oxygen tank. I strapped the tank to the kid’s back. “You can go higher. And faster. I don’t know how far you need to go. I want you to put this on.” I handed him the mask and goggles. “And I want you to hold onto the broom for dear life, and aim it up out of the water. Then stabilize and try to get to the nearest landmass or seacity where you’ll be safe.”

“I have friends in every—”

“Good for you.” I left him holding the broom and the mask and goggles, and stripped the Scrubber who had held the kid hostage. He was the only one with an intact suit, since I had cut the others in half. Damn it. I had to learn to plan better. At least the kid wasn’t wearing a prisoner’s uniform.

I was, and I was also barefoot. Which meant I had to have the suit. “I don’t have a suit you can use, kid,” I said. “So just try to land on whatever seacity this is located in, if you truly think that there is someone who will take you in here.”

“We have people in every seacity,” he said. Right. From his expensive suit, he was probably a merchant’s whelp, and they did tend to have vast and interlinked families.

“Good,” I said, as I slipped the suit on, zipped, and turned my attention to the other brooms. The suit fit like a tourniquet and the seams were close to splitting. The dead Scrubber had been tall and well built but I’d always been outsized and now was even more so. No matter. I wasn’t likely to sire any kids anyhow.

I realized the kid was still there, staring at me, as I crushed the locator and control unit on the first broom. “Why are you still here?” I asked him. “Scram. Go. Make yourself safe.”

He blinked at me, as I grabbed a second broom and beat its locator out of it, then clipped it to my suit. “What are you waiting for?” I asked him.

“You . . . saved my life.”

“Oh. And?” I hoped he didn’t think this made me responsible for him forever.

“My . . . my name is John Jefferson.”

“Ah. Good for you.” I beat the brain out of the sixth and final broom, clipped all but one of them—besides the one the kid had—to my suit. Unless things on the outside had changed completely in the last fifteen years, brooms like this, with the chip disabled, were worth their weight in poppy juice, and little less in more complex designer compounds.

The kid hesitated one more second, as I collected burners and clipped them to my belt or slipped them into as many pockets as I could. Burners, too, made good trade coin, besides being good to keep you alive.

He put the mask and goggles on, slowly, looking at me in appraisal. Then he lifted his hand, his thumb and forefinger held in a circle, the other fingers up in that moment solving for me the puzzle of what a nice boy like him was doing in a joint like Never-Never.

The gesture was the benediction of the Usaians, a religious sect that seems to have its roots in a mythologizing of the old country that used to occupy much of the North American territories. I’d learned a lot about that country in the gems my unknown benefactor had provided.

Without giving me time to react, the kid faced the membrane and turned the broom on. He punched through the membrane with force, allowing a little water in, and left me to wonder if Usaians reproduced by fission. They seemed to be everywhere if one looked carefully enough.

The entire incident, subduing the Scrubbers and getting the kid out of there couldn’t have taken me more than five minutes. My muscles ached in the way they did when my super-fast mode had been activated and was starting to subside. There was a good chance what had confused the kid was that I’d talked too fast also. Sometimes I wasn’t aware of it.

I hesitated for a second considering whether to shout to the broomers and warn them more Scrubbers might come, then realized I was being an idiot. Chances were that the authorities would give Scrubbers a little time to clean up a problem this size. A glance down the hall told me broomers were now going up the antigrav well to the next level, a lot of prisoners with them.