Flinx in Flux (28 page)

Flinx was used to strange dreams. This one was no exception. He was drifting, floating just below the surface of a lake of pure crystalline water. Pip bobbed beside him, and Scrap next to her. But none of them were swimming. None of them were breathing. They simply hung there below the glassine surface, adrift in cool peacefulness.

Though he knew he risked drowning by doing so, he tried to taste the water, only to find he was unable to inhale a drop through either his mouth or his nostrils. It was very peculiar water, almost like air. Maybe that was it. Maybe he was floating beneath the surface of a sea of methane or liquid nitrogen.

At times he thought he could see shapes moving above. They passed by infrequently. Faces with wings that gazed mournfully down at him before fluttering away. He tried to speak to them, tried to reach up to them, but could not do so. He was unable to move. Nor was his Talent functioning, since he could not sense their emotions. What pale impressions he did receive were tenuous and imprecise. He felt neither hostility nor affection, only bland indifference.

He was not alarmed. Contentment seeped through him. Hunger and thirst were abstract concepts. Very faintly, something deep inside his mind tried to insist that this was not right, that he needed to bestir himself, to move about, to stand.

Waste of time. Useless and unnecessary to try to analyze his situation or his environment. Enough to lie in the lake heedless of the world around him, whatever it might be like.

He sensed the minidrags’ emotions and knew they paralleled his own. They dreamed of flying through an empty sky with no land below, no trees, no clouds above. It was an unsettling dream, and Pip and Scrap fluttered their wings.

No one in the room noticed the two minidrags twitching and trying to fly. It did not matter, anyway, because they remained sedated. While their tolerance for the morphogas was higher than Flinx’s, neither had recovered enough to regain consciousness. They simply moved a little before growing still again, moved and lay still, dreaming of flight while trapped on the ground.

Chapter Sixteen

Clarity had agreed to everything her boss had requested. In the final analysis the young woman was as logical and sensible as herself, Vandervort knew. Possibly she still harbored thoughts of somehow freeing Flinx, but she had neither the experience nor the knowledge to do so. Vandervort was confident that as time passed she would be able to manipulate both young people as required.

She had a private transport service coming to help with the moving. Dabis and Monconqui would be available also. The plasteel coffin, its top now closed so as not to reveal its contents to casual observers, would present no problem.

It was an off-work day and she had to pay double for the moving service, but that was one of the nice things about having a virtually unlimited expense account. Scarpania’s own research people were more than anxious to have a look at her prize.

Two weeks to get everything ready. A secure installation had been thrown together on an isolated island on a modest colony world clear across the Commonwealth. They would travel on a Scarpanian freighter devoid of cargo except for themselves and their precious sleeper. To any outsider it would seem a flagrant waste of money, but several members of her new employer’s scientific staff had recognized the importance of her discovery and appreciated its potential fully as much as she did.

Clarity was there, too: packed, ready to depart, and downcast, having barely resigned herself to the situation. Plotting and planning, no doubt. That was fine, Vandervort thought. It would give her something to do during the long, dull journey through null-space.

Dabis called down to her from the top of the stairs. “They’re here, ma’am.”

“You checked their idents?”

“Yes’m.”

“Then let them in and let’s get on with it.”

She made a last sweep of the room in which she had spent so many busy hours this past month. Monconqui was checking the morphogas tanks to make sure they were full and working properly. He did not talk as readily as Dabis, but the two men were cast from the same mental mold. They were much more than simply dumb assassins. If one was willing to pay, one could hire intelligent muscle as easily as stupid.

The moving crew wore light green jumpsuits and caps. She expected people Dabis’s size, but apparently the company had opted for numbers instead of individual mass. Perhaps it had been difficult to bring in their regulars on short notice even for double pay. Not that size and strength were necessary, she reminded herself, in these days of labor-saving devices. With the levitating grapples they carried, the four of them could easily position a two-ton generator. One of the women, a tall blonde of icy mien, looked capable of lifting one end of the coffin all by herself, though her three companions did not appear nearly as capable. Even with the grapples taken into account, one man in particular looked too old to be engaged in this sort of work. Not that she knew anything about the particular expertise moving work required, she told herself.

She walked over to the curtain and pulled it aside for the last time. “Let’s start with this.”

“Right,” said the young man who seemed to be in charge.

The four of them placed their grapples and switched them on. Wrist movement alone was sufficient to raise the coffin and its attached atmosphere unit several centimeters off the table. Carefully they turned its head toward the stairs.

“Remember, you’re handling extremely fragile and valuable equipment,” Vandervort told them. Somewhere behind her, Clarity made a disparaging noise. Vandervort almost frowned but resolutely kept her expression neutral.

On the other hand, the tall blond woman smiled.

Why should she smile? Come to think of it, why would she react to such a bland statement at all? The smile was already gone. No need to say anything. No reason to comment.

But something made Vandervort stride forward and confront the much taller woman. “Something funny about that?”

The blonde’s beautiful face was blank. “No, ms.” She hesitated. “It’s just that we’re proud of our work. I was amused that anyone would think we’d take less than the best care of anything we were moving.”

“I see.” Vandervort stepped aside. A perfectly plausible explanation for an innocent little grin. Too plausible? Or too pat. “One more thing.” The four movers paused, each with a hand holding the trigger of a grapple. “Could I see your identification one more time, please?”

The young man in charge hesitated for just an instant, then reached for his chest patch. It was the very old man who made the fatal mistake. Perhaps he thought he was speaking in a lower voice than he actually was. Maybe he was just slightly hard of hearing. Whatever the reason, Vandervort heard him hiss quite distinctly.

“Don’t show it to her.”

The blond amazon’s eyes flicked in his direction. Ignoring the advice, the young man removed his chest patch and passed it to Vandervort, who made a show of inspecting it closely. Whispers, eye movement, inexplicable smiles.

“No problem, ms,” the young man was saying cheerfully. “Something the matter?”

“Just a routine check.” Holding the ident patch, Vandervort turned so they couldn’t see her face. Her lips moved silently when she caught Dabis’s eye. His widened, he nodded slightly, and that was when she dived for the cover of some hastily packed crates.

Dabis crouched and pulled his needler. Not having been warned, Monconqui was slower on the uptake, but he, too, made a dash for cover as soon as he saw his partner in motion.

The movers reacted swiftly, but they were not fast enough. Despite their recent experiences they still did not possess the fighting skills of professionals. The trailing member of the quartet took the blast from Dabis’s needler square in the chest. It penetrated his sternum to fry nerves, blood vessels, and his spine as it emerged from the back of his shirt to spend itself against the wall.

Screams and shouts filled the room. Clarity was an easy mark for the movers, but they had no time to concentrate on her, and she was able to find shelter. Dabis and Monconqui were the problem. Both had taken good cover behind heavy packing crates filled with electronics and monitoring instrumentation. They were outnumbered three to two but were better shots. While they commanded the only exit, the fanatics had to expose themselves on the stairway in order to take aim into the room.

Firing continued steadily. A burst from a neuronic pistol just missed Clarity, momentarily paralyzing her left side. Feeling returned rapidly following the near miss, leaving behind a tingling sensation.

Vandervort lay nearby, watching the battle. “Keep your head down, child! You and I have nothing to do with the outcome of this.” She was peering between two huge crates, her observation made easier by the fact that the fanatics were concentrating their firepower on the two bodyguards.

The mover who had been shot lay crumpled at the foot of the stairs, eyes staring blankly upward, the hole in his chest still smoking. Having been released by the movers, the plasteel coffin had drifted to a halt against the wall nearby, still suspended in its four softly humming grapples.

“Your friends from Alaspin and Longtunnel,” Vandervort murmured as she struggled to get a better view without exposing herself. She raised her voice. “Give it up! These two men here will pick you off sooner or later. They’re professionals, and you are not. There is nothing more for you here, whatever you intended. You cannot have Clarity.”

“We’ll have her.” Clarity thought she recognized the voice of the young man. He was keeping out of sight near the top of the stairs. “And we’ll have you, and we’ll have the mutant as well.”

“How could they know about that?” Vandervort was shaking her head in disbelief. “How could they have found out?” Abruptly she looked at the younger woman crouched nearby. Clarity’s eyes widened, and she shook her head violently. The administrator considered thoughtfully before speaking again.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The tall blonde responded this time with a harsh, femmine laugh. “We broke the Coldstripe communications code a long time ago, so forget about lying to us. We know everything. We knew about the mutant before Scarpania did.”

“God damn,” Vandervort muttered. “I
told
our people they had to change keys at least every other day. Lazy sons of bitches!”

The blonde was not through. “How do you think we knew where to find you on Longtunnel, knew where your records were stored and the labs were located? When she was our guest on Alaspin, your life meddler told us some of what we needed to know, but not all. The rest we obtained from monitoring your local transmissions and from our operative within your own organization.” She laughed humorlessly. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that your friend Jase seemed to have nine lives?”

The color drained from Vandervort’s expression. Clarity delighted in the older woman’s distress. “Thought of everything, did you?” The administrator did not reply. The blonde was still talking.

“The life meddler comes with us, to ensure she won’t tamper with nature any further.”

“What do you want with our young man? He’s being well looked after. His name is Flinx, and you have no right to—”

This time it was the young man who interrupted her. “You’d lecture us on the rights of the individual? Do you think we’re fools, like your former employers? You’re spitting air, Vandervort.”

Despite her superior’s warning, Clarity raised her head so that she could be heard clearly over the packages shielding her. “Let nobody have him, then! Why not just let him go?” She ignored Vandervort’s frantic gestures. “He’s done nothing to you.”

“It is what has been done to him that matters in this.” It was the voice of another man, speaking for the first time. His tone was commanding. “We will treat him kindly while we attempt to return him to normal, try to correct the damage done by the Meliorares. There are expert gengineers who are sympathetic to our aims.”

“The Meliorares worked with prenatal cells,” Clarity argued. “That was different. You can’t tamper with the genetic code of a mature person. You’ll end up ruining his mind or his personality or both.”

“We intend neither,” the man replied. “Regardless of the result, it will be an improvement on what now exists because the individual in question will once again be truly human when we have finished with him.”

A burst of neuronic fire passed just over her head, and she was forced to duck back down, her scalp tingling. Dabis and Monconqui were quick to return the shots.

“You want him? Come and get him!” Dabis’s tone was deliberately taunting. “He’s floating right there at the bottom of the stairs, where he bumped into the wall. Why don’t you just stroll on down and pick up your grapples?”

“We’ll do that soon enough,” the blonde shouted. “We may not have your training, but we’ve practiced long and hard for moments like these. We aren’t ignorant of tactics. Maybe we can’t take you out or recover the mutant, but you’re trapped down here. We’ve cut all communications to the outside and secure-blanketed the entire building. A stray electron couldn’t find a way out. You can’t talk to anyone on the outside, nor are you expected anywhere for some time, so nobody’s going to come looking for you. Your obsession with privacy, Vandervort, works to our advantage as well. We cannot get in, and you can’t get out. So we’ll have to find another way to resolve our little impasse.”

“We’ll resolve it, all right,” Vandervort snapped back. “The three of you will join your friend on the floor.”

“I think not. What we’ll do is sit here and relax while one of us goes for help. That’s our advantage. One person could guard this exit.”

“You can bring a hundred cephalos back with you, but you’ll never get them down those stairs!” Dabis was earning his money.

“No need to. The morphogas you use to keep the mutant inert can just as easily be introduced into this room. You’ll all quietly go to sleep.” Dabis had no ready answer for that.

Monconqui tried. “We have filter masks. Gas won’t bother us.”

“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t. Let’s find out. We’ve nothing to lose by trying. Unless you’d consider bargaining with us.”

The young man took over. “You two with the guns—this is only a job for you. Why risk getting shot for a credit boost?”

“Because it
is
our job,” Dabis replied simply.

“Whatever Vandervort’s people are paying you, we’ll double it. Triple it.”

“Sorry,” and Monconqui sounded genuinely so, “but if we break a contract we’ll never get another job. Also, there are bonuses waiting when we deliver our people to their destination.”

“Admirable ethics in the service of a lost cause,” the second man declared.

“Maybe we
can
strike some sort of bargain,” Vandervort suggested.

“What kind of bargain?” Suspicion tainted the young man’s reply.

“You want the gengineer. The mutant’s more important to us.”

Clarity stared at the older woman, and began backing away until she was pressed up against the wall. Vandervort smiled apologetically. “I am sorry, my dear, but the situation is grave. Extreme measures are called for to resolve it.”

Clarity’s response was a horrified whisper. “I never should have listened to you. I should have listened to Flinx. He’s not the dangerous one here. He’s not responsible for the way he is. You’re the one who’s evil and dangerous.”

“Since you feel that way, I consider myself under no obligation to apologize.” Vandervort turned away and raised her voice anew. “What do you say? You’ve already destroyed the Longtunnel installation. I’m only an administrator who’s about to enter a different line of work. You can have the gengineer.”

The amazon replied, “We must have the mutant also. The way I see it, we have the upper hand strategically. You can try to cross an open floor and fight your way up these stairs if you like. I don’t see any reason why we have to bargain with you for anything.”

“We might not make it, but some of you will die,” said Dabis. “Be better if all of us could get out of this without any more deaths.”