Devil's Vortex (10 page)

Chapter Eleven

“Dr. Sandler!” the tech cried out in obvious alarm. “Dr. Oates!”

Frowning at the man’s tone, which was altogether unprofessional regardless of what had occasioned it, Dr. Sandler turned to look at the man where he sat in the cool darkness, pierced by myriad flickering lights in green, yellow, orange and red, before a console in Lab Central.

“What is it, Shaughnessy?”

“It’s a Level 5 spatiotemporal disturbance in our target zone.”

“Impossible!” Dr. Oates exclaimed.

Dr. Sandler felt his mouth tighten slightly. Such an outburst, muted as it had been, was also thoroughly unscientific. Dr. Oates had a keen mind, no question. Otherwise Dr. Sandler would have disposed of her long ago. But he had to remind himself she was still just a woman and subject to the vagaries of her hormones.

After all, that was why he was in charge, even if some in Overproject Whisper might harbor evolutionarily unsound notions of women’s complete equality with men. They were all in perfect agreement that most people were fit to follow orders, and only a scientifically selected and trained few were fit to give them, of course. But some fools nonetheless remained willfully blind to certain details of nature’s innate hierarchy.

“Perhaps,” he said to his colleague. “Perhaps not. Are your detectors in proper working order, Shaughnessy?”

“They’re all perfectly calibrated, Dr. Sandler,” the tech answered. “I’d stake my life on it!”

“You have.” Dr. Sandler stepped up close behind the tech’s swivel chair and peered at the indicator lights. “What do we have?”

Shaughnessy was a young man with a red crew cut that made his unfortunately prominent ears stand out even more. Dr. Sandler considered them a sign of genetic imperfection, but the man had proved himself good enough at his job to warrant his continued tenure. There was no point in expecting a technician to be the equal of a scientist. That was
why
they were technicians. Nature’s hierarchy was as iron in its castes as the distinction between genders or races.

Despite his coolly rational reserve, Dr. Sandler felt his eyes widen when he looked at Shaughnessy’s screen. He, too, would have called the reading impossible had he been as lax in his control of his emotions as his female associate.

“That is indeed anomalous,” he said, allowing himself a micrometrically precise nod. “What are its coordinates?”

Shaughnessy worked his keyboards. Latitude and longitude numbers appeared in the upper-right corner of the display, overlaid where they would not interfere with the visual representation of data.

“Fifty-one kilometers west of the confluence of the White River with the Missouri and five point three kilometers north of the course of the former Interstate Highway 90, Dr. Sandler, Dr. Oates.”

“How shall we respond?” Dr. Oates asked. She had stepped up beside him.

Anger was welling within Dr. Sandler, a purely understandable response to unreasonable interference in their work. Even if it was kept secret from the rest of Overproject Whisper. And even more imperatively so from the umbrella project, the Totality Concept.

“It is those genetic misprints Doctors Hamlin and Stone!” he snarled. “Those Operation Chronos bunglers will disrupt everything. Everything!”

Dr. Oates reached out a pale, precision-manicured hand and almost, but not quite, touched the sleeve of Dr. Sandler’s immaculate white coat.

“May I speak to you privately, Dr. Sandler?” she asked.

“Yes.”

They withdrew to a space along the bulkhead of the compartment. Dr. Sandler felt the stirring in the airs on his eyebrows and arms as he stepped into the hush-field.

“May I remind the senior scientist that even if this timeline is contaminated by anomalous events, at least four others nearby in the multiverse will still continue with satisfactory to near-mathematically certain chances of success of the introduction of the next phase?”

“But the Baronial America Endgame is key,” he said. “Especially to our success. And may I remind the junior scientist that, by undertaking to bring it to fruition on our own, the only possible outcome that can preserve us from purgation is complete success?”

Wisely, she nodded her narrow, close-cropped head.

“Of course, Dr. Sandler. But let us consider alternate possibilities. What if this unprecedented disturbance is
not
due to the Operation Chronos renegades impinging on our timeline?”

He scoffed. “You disappoint me, Dr. Oates. What else could it be?”

“As scientists,” she answered coolly, “is it not our duty to find out? To gather evidence before coming to a conclusion?”

He scowled; she did not flinch.

And then he realized,
She’s right
.
If she seeks to use this to her future advantage, she will discover, also, how very wrong she is
.

Aloud, he said, “You are correct, Dr. Oates. We shall dispatch our asset to the scene. I trust our operative continues to foster close relationship with the Primary?”

“His reports indicate success, in exact alignment to your own predictions, Dr. Sandler.”

He nodded, feeling gratified—and mollified—at her acknowledgment of his prowess.

“Most satisfactory,” Dr. Sandler said.

He turned away to study the interrupted Goode homolosine projection that glowed on a gigantic display above the instrument consoles at the front of Lab Central. There the map of the current target timeline of twenty-second century Earth showed a wealth of information: environmental, population, economic and political indices. As well, a few red dots indicated potentially serious disruption of their ultimate secret offshoot project to achieve a key step in the realization of Totality decades in advance of even the most optimistic projections of Concept Central Authority. A new red dot, brighter than the rest, would soon be added.

“But make no mistake, Dr. Oates,” he said, unable to keep a note of harshness out of his voice. “This is far and away the ripest timeline for our plan. And should it suffer significant disruption—even, or perhaps especially, absent interference by our subcompetent rivals—we could lose it utterly.”

“But the parallel timelines—”

“Remain suboptimal, Dr. Oates. Given the stakes, we can simply not afford anything but the highest probability of success. The very survival of our genetic lines depends upon it.”

* * *

“W
HAT
 
CAN
I
tell you?” Mariah asked. She sat with her back propped against the side of a pickup grille. The vehicle’s shadow stretched far off to the east, cast by the low blood-red sun.

In spite of everything, Krysty’s heart went out to her. The two of them had grown close in a surprisingly short time. How—why—even Krysty wasn’t sure.

“The truth might do for a start,” Ryan said harshly.

He stood a bit apart from the rest of the companions, who slumped in various postures of near exhaustion. The exception was Jak, who had recovered his weapons and jacket and headed off on his usual lonesome patrol, keeping a watchful eye over his friends.

Krysty shot Ryan a reproachful look. He didn’t pay her any mind. He was fixated on what he saw as his duty. To her no less than the rest.

“That big cat didn’t mysteriously vanish,” Ryan said to the girl. “You made it go away. That was that nuke-awful screech we heard.”

Mariah hung her head. Her pigtails hung limp to her shoulders.

“Yes.”

And she didn’t tell
me
the truth either, Krysty thought. Even though—as a secret mutie herself—she could understand the girl’s reticence, she still felt betrayed.

“And the stickies back at that farm where we found you. You knew why they left you alone, and you knew why they looked like they exploded. Because you made them explode. You sicced that—that cloud on them, and it tore them apart like ripping up so many sheets of paper.”

“Yes,” she said.

They were still where they’d been dragged as captives, in plain sight of Duganville—them and the four wags the Buffalo Mob had abandoned in their panic flight. Three of the four ran fine, even the one that had gotten hung up right on the brink of the ditch bank. Only the truck whose radiator Ryan had punched a hole in with a shot from his Scout longblaster refused to start.

At some point the residents of the barony were going to venture back out into their crop lands to find out what had happened out there. Ryan seemed content to leave that for when it happened—if they were even still here when the locals nerved themselves up enough. Clearly, he needed this matter settled, and settled now.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked.

“I was afraid.”

“Ryan, get real,” Krysty said. “What if she had told us what happened? Would you have even believed her?”

He frowned, then nodded. That was one thing out of so many Krysty admired about him: his intellectual honesty, as relentless in its way as everything else about him.

“Mebbe after the thing with the tiger,” he admitted. “But not the first time. No way.”

“I thought you’d get scared of me,” Mariah said.

“I’m sure the hell scared of you now. That’s just with what we’ve seen. I’m not taking account of any other world-shattering secrets you might be hiding from us.”

Mariah just shook her head wearily. “You want me to go away. I’m a monster. That’s all right. People always send me away when they find out.”

“We’re not sending her away!” Krysty said. Ryan was startled to hear genuine anger in her tone.

“It sounds like a double-good idea to me,” J.B. stated. “Or should I just keep my trap shut?”

“That second thing,” Mildred said dangerously.

“Fireblast, Krysty,” Ryan said, “what’s gotten into you? The girl’s as dangerous as old dynamite that’s sweated nitroglycerin all over. She could chill us all at any time.”

“Yeah,” Mildred agreed. “And exactly who among us couldn’t? Isn’t that the reason we’ve all stuck together—because we’re all deadly? And that it takes a passel of us working together to stay alive in this bad old world?”

Ryan looked at her. For one of the rare times in his life, the one-eyed man found nothing to say.

“She does make a persuasive point,” Doc said gently.

J.B. sighed.

“Well, since now you go and put it that way, Mildred,” he said, “I’m minded what Trader’s old pal Abe always used to say about dangerous folk... I’d rather they be on the inside pissing out than on the outside pissing in.”

“And there you have it,” Mildred told them.

“Ryan, she’s right,” Krysty said.

“She did save us all when the coldhearts were—” Ricky began. Then his words choked off as if he’d had his gullet slit. His cheeks turned pink and his dark eyes grew as round as predark silver dollars. He was mortified at the fear he’d spoken out of turn—and humiliated at the very thought of what the Buffalo Mob boss, and by his order much of the rest of the gang, had been about to do to Krysty.

“You’re right, Ricky,” Krysty said hastily. “No need to be ashamed. She didn’t hurt us. She didn’t leave us to our fate and hope to sneak away unnoticed in the commotion. She helped us.”

It was Ryan’s turn to heave a massive sigh. “Yeah,” he said. “Reckon she did.”

“You have wondered aloud on more than one occasion, Ryan, why we let her tag along if she was not of any use in a fight,” Doc said. “Well, it would certainly appear that she can be powerfully useful in battle, indeed.”

“True.”

“But we don’t want you using that power more than you absolutely have to,” Krysty told Mariah, going to the girl’s side and placing a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“I don’t,” Mariah said to the furrowed gray ground. “It...scares me.”

Krysty threw her arms about her. For a moment the girl held herself as rigid still as a rigored chill. Then she melted to turn and throw her arms around Krysty, lower her head and sob against the redhead’s bosom as her own skinny body was fixing to tear itself apart.

Krysty cradled Mariah and murmured soothing sounds at her. They didn’t make sense, but they didn’t need to. Her black hair, tightly parted in the middle, smelled of the lilac soap, another product, somehow, of Baron Dugan’s distilling operation.

The girl’s tears soaked into Krysty’s shirt.

The shirt had been hastily repaired. Not so much because of modesty, which was a commodity they could afford a limited amount of, the way they traveled and generally stuck together, but because Krysty felt vulnerable with her breasts exposed.

Ryan grunted, loudly enough for Krysty to know he wanted her attention. She looked up at him.

“Time’s blood,” he reminded her. “We need to do something about all these wags, weapons and other gear that have fallen into our hands, before the ville folk come out and decide to make some kind of issue about it.”

“Where shall we go?” Doc asked. His voice sounded muzzy. Krysty realized his mind, damaged by his captivity at the cold and soulless hands of the Operation Chronos whitecoats, had begun to wander. Doc’s mind focused to razor sharpness at times, especially when it was most sorely needed, such as in fighting for their lives. But when the inevitable adrenaline-depletion slump set in after combat, he sometimes drifted away.

To Krysty’s surprise, Ryan chuckled.

“Right straight back to the ville,” he said. “If we say we’re entitled to this loot by right of conquest, who’s going to contradict us? They had to have seen what happened here.”

“How do you plan to explain—” J.B. tipped his head toward the still weeping Mariah “—you know?”

“Well, we hope they didn’t see it in that much detail,” Ryan said.

“Even if they saw the scary parts,” Mildred added, “I don’t think there’s any way they can accept it. It was too freaking strange. I bet all Ryan has to do is flash that devilish smile of his and spin them some of his vintage bullshit.”

“Reckon I can do that,” Ryan said, grinning.

Krysty stroked Mariah’s head. The girl seemed to be trying to unload all at once a weight of grief that had built up over a long time. Perhaps her whole life.

“What about her?” Krysty asked Ryan.

“She can help with the chores. Plus, who knows? We might find ourselves in another tight place, where that...talent of hers could prove a big help.”