City Without End (60 page)

The two men bent to their task, depositing Alex’s body in a dead end around a corner. Booth took the gun from Alex’s body and put it in his pocket. Then they came back with rags and water, and cleaned up what they could. There were stains; it couldn’t be helped.

When at last they’d finished, Lamar said, “I’m going up. I’ll keep things moving.”

Booth couldn’t shake the picture of Lamar shooting Alex point blank in the head. “I never knew you were such a bloody son of a bitch.”

Ignoring the jibe, Lamar glanced at the door to the transition room.

“And her? What are we going to do with her?”

Booth had been wondering the same. On the one hand, they needed to know everything that she had to tell them. But it could take hours to find out all she knew, maybe days. Could they afford to delay? Maybe this was exactly what Titus Quinn intended: Send her to slow them down, then Quinn comes through with a larger force. . . .

Booth said, “Let’s bring her up to the engine vault. I’ll question her there. If there’s anything else we need to consider, I’ll fetch you.”

Lamar shook his head. “No good. We need someone to watch John. He’s going off the tracks.”

Booth nodded. Their mSap engineer was freaking out. They couldn’t let him out of the control room now, to spread this news.

Lamar offered, “You stay with John. I’ll get someone to handle the line out there. Then I’ll come back and see if there’s anything more to learn from her. That way, there’s only the three of us who know anything.”

Booth hesitated. “Maybe. But the next person who crosses over goes with a weapon.”

Kay Kenyon 405 “Good.”

“Whoever’s next, give him yours, Lamar. You’ve got no business with a gun.” In the back hallway was a cache of weapons under lock and key. Booth was astonished to realize that this once far-fetched precaution was now proving needful.

They went into the transition room, finding the woman wild-eyed, crouched in the corner. John still had flecks of blood on him, which wasn’t helping the visitor’s panic. They managed to calm John down, bringing him into the control room and explaining the plan. People would have guns going over—those who were willing to carry them. But nothing would be said about Tarig killing people. It wasn’t confirmed. The woman could have been sent by Titus Quinn.

John balked, but saw reason when Lamar threatened him again.

“I’ll be waiting at the top of the stairs, John. Nobody comes back up.

Especially not you.”

Jianzi, or whatever her name was, pressed herself firmly into the corner, not wanting to go into the hall. It took two of them to get her up the stairs.

Through the antechamber, they dragged her to the heavy doors into the engine vault. Long ago, people used to take tours of this very room, back when it gave access to the front face of the reactor core. Superceding the reactor core now was the renaissance engine, two stories high, sprayed with cooling foam and thrumming mightily.

Once inside, they left the lights off, searching by flashlight for something to tie the woman’s hands and feet. Here, the engine’s relentless drumming sounded like the pounding of ocean surf, further stressing Booth’s ragged nerves. Dragging Jianzi along with him, he found some copper wire coiled in a box in the corner. As he bent to retrieve it, his prisoner bolted for the door, but Lamar caught her, and the two of them managed to bind her.

An oily cloth served as a gag.

They left her there, parting in the upper hallway. Its walls were still mint green from the old days, and a sign, fresh as in 1945, said, “Evacuation Route.”

Booth had by now gotten his determination back. He told Lamar, “As people come down to the transition room, I’ll give them a gun from the cache. I’ll talk to them before they go over. You just find someone out there who can take charge of the list and keep people coming. Can you do that without murdering anyone?”

Watching Booth slip back down the stairs to the transition room, Lamar considered drawing his pistol and getting rid of the bastard. But Booth was armed too; he had Alex’s gun.

Lamar had only a few minutes—a brief window when Booth would be rummaging in the weapons cache and waiting for the next victim to suit up and come down. Lamar’s first move was to handle the people outside; then he’d handle the girl inside.

The moment that he’d seen the Chalin woman on the bench near the vat, he’d known that their enterprise had failed. She was saying that their colleagues were all dead, and whether she was lying or not, he knew that things had gone far enough. He’d almost quit after killing Caitlin. Now, with Titus Quinn fighting back and the Tarig possibly on his side, Lamar knew that renaissance was in shambles.

The Tarig were welcome to the Entire. Let them have it. The Earth was good enough. It would have to be good enough; it was all they had. Lamar was simply too disheartened and too tired. He was a murderer twice over, but Alex Nourse didn’t count; only Caitlin counted, and he’d have turned the gun he had in his waistband on himself if it weren’t for the fact that he bloody well was going to stop Booth and crew if he could.

And he thought, just maybe, that he could.

Smoothing his hair down, he took a calming breath and opened the door to the waiting crowd outside.

Anzi looked around her at the cavern prison. It was cold and dark here, just like the songs said. But of course she was inside.

She had made one terrible mistake. She carried the note from Titus. He’d meant it for her alone, or at least never meant it for his enemies. By carrying it on her person, she had revealed that she was against them. They didn’t believe her about the lord murdering their people. At least they didn’t act like it. And therefore they were still going to kill the Rose.

It was at times like these that she wondered why the Jinda ceb couldn’t have given her a decent weapon, something a thousand thousand days in advance of anything that the Roselings
or
the Tarig had ever dreamed of.

But the Jinda ceb had their own agenda, and unfortunately, it was not to save Titus Quinn’s universe.

Left alone in the dark, she thought about Titus and his adversary in the plaza. It was clear who would win that fight. And perhaps he already had. The Jinda ceb had told her that the orientation of the two universes had been firmly fixed for these hours by Lord Nehoov. So, in the same moments she was breathing the air in this cold, hollow place, Titus might be taking his last breaths in the Ascendancy.

This seemed impossible to her. She felt her breath coming in, going out. It was as though she was breathing for him, of him, through him.

Oh, Titus.

Under a heavy mantle of stars, in a dark broken only by hundreds of flashlights, Lamar stood in front of the groups camped out in front of the vault building. The 1,947 remaining Earth-side members of Project Renaissance stood in small knots of friends and co-workers. Anchored by one or two flashlights, the groups looked like an army around its cook fires. And they
were
an army of sorts. An army of self-styled rebels, determined to salvage the human race from its inevitable regression to the mean.

Some of them had clustered by profession. On his left, a gaggle of astrophysicists; directly in front, the biologists. They sat on the ground, or on folding chairs, or stood in tight circles, offering each other comfort or just plain company. And although they were savvies—each one of them—they were all dumb as stumps.
Did you really think we could pull this off?

Yes, and he’d thought so, too. But no longer. The decision, when it had come, had brought him an acute relief. It just hadn’t been clear until a few moments ago what he could do to set things right. Killing Alex Nourse was an ugly prelude to all that came next. Although he’d intended to shoot him in the chest, in his panic he’d got him the head. Fatal either way, but, Christ, to see that carnage on the wall! It had shaken him to kill Alex. But everything depended on geeks like Booth being in control. They had no idea how to be ruthless. Alex Nourse had.

Lamar held up his hands and called for attention. People moved in closer, but he could really only talk to those closest.

“We’ve run into some trouble with the mSap, I’m afraid. We’re running some diagnostics. Nothing to worry about, but we need to take a break and do a little cleanup.” He hushed people when a few started to speak. “Look, we’re going to start up again in the morning, once our readings stabilize. We’d like you all to head back to your dorms and try to get some sleep. We’ll be fine, but move along now. No point in drawing attention to our location with all the flashlights. Really, people, let’s call it a night. We begin again at first light.”

A dozen questions hit him all at once. What was the problem? What did he mean, readings? Why weren’t they sharing the problem with the other sapient engineers?

He answered as best he could, while shooing people off. The mSap engineers were another matter. They had to be dealt with.

“Those of you who’ve been working on the sapient engineering, John wants to meet with you in Dorm B. Please assemble there. John will be over in a few minutes.” He delegated a few people to take the message into the crowd and get people to go back to the dorms.

That had taken what he judged to be five minutes. Booth might be just settling in down there, ready with a supply of weapons to hand out and wondering when the next person would show up.

People were moving along, heading back to their dorms or the coffeehouse. Lamar ducked back into the vault building through the steel access door and along the corridor between the old concrete cocoon and the outside wall. He was wasting precious minutes coming back for the woman, but he was tired of being responsible for death, and this woman would die if Booth concluded she was sent by Titus.

She looked up in alarm as he entered.

He hurried over to her and began removing her bonds. As he worked the wires binding her ankles, he said, “I’m helping you, you understand? I know you want to stop the engine, but there’s nothing you can do from here. That takes an engineer. You understand? We have to go for help. All right?”

“Yes.” She stood, rubbing her wrists. “We going outside?”

He gave her the jogging outfit that had belonged to Chitra. “Put this on, and hurry.”

Once the woman had discarded her wet clothes and dressed in Chitra’s too-small garments, Lamar led the way by flashlight to the door. In the corridor, the sparse working lights showed that they were alone. Looking at the woman, he realized he’d forgotten that her hair was pure white. God almighty, she stood out like a fox in a hen house. With his flashlight tucked away and gun drawn, he dragged her quickly by the elbow toward the nearest dressing room.

“Help me find something to cover your head.” He searched the piles of clothes. Nothing. Jesus, why didn’t anybody have a bloody hat?

She left the dressing room. He charged after her, but when he got into the hallway she was just emerging from the next dressing room with a scarf tied around her hair. It didn’t cover it completely, but it didn’t need to.

Enterprising girl. It would have to do.

Here in the corridor it was a straight shot to the outer door, but they’d have to go past the stairway entrance. He hoped Booth wasn’t getting impatient. All he needed was just a few more minutes.