The Children of the Company (43 page)

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Authors: Kage Baker

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #C429, #Extratorrents, #Kat

BOOK: The Children of the Company
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I had never heard this. These details had never become part of recorded history. I stared, astonished, at the images, forgetting to hand Hendrick his mittens. He took them from me, patiently, and pulled them on.
Then I was Seeing, through the eyes of a kameraman, the Disease Control investigators in their protective suits, emerging from the house where they’d just found the mother and child dead.
I knew that house. I’d been inside it. It was in the red light district. The kameraman was running close to get a shot through the window, before being pushed back by police. The only image he was able to frame that was
clearly recognizable was a travel poster on one wall, its subject a city in North Africa.
The commentator was unable to interview any of the investigators, but the suited figures rushing to and fro in the background lent weight to his expressed opinion that this might explain at last the origin of the plague: for the child’s mother was a licensed prostitute of African descent, and she may have contracted the disease from an African customer, likely enough in view of the plagues that had decimated so much of Africa’s population in recent years …
I had kissed her. Children, teachers, had kissed me.
It really is remarkable how our immortal senses take control at such times. I rose like the perfect machine I should have been and shut off the Wire. I took Hendrick’s hand and led him through the dark house to wait by the back door. We could hear Labienus helping Anna and Geert carry their bags downstairs. They were stumbling, dropping things. There were already barricades at the end of the street and crowds assembling there, shouting at the police.
How sad, how sad, the poor girl had been exposed to a virus and unwittingly passed it on to me, and I’d—
But I’d have known if there had been anything wrong with her.
We heard the first shots fired in the front street, not what you’d expect at all, an insignificant-sounding popping.
“There it goes,” said Hendrick, almost calmly. He was in shock, his dark eyes enormous. “All locked up now. I told you so.”
I had scanned the mortal woman before our encounter. She hadn’t been carrying any virus.
“Here, here!” whispered Labienus, shepherding Anna and Geert before him. “Out to the car. Now! Nils will drive you to a safe location.” He looked into my eyes and transmitted:
You’ve got the blood effects ready?
The woman hadn’t been carrying any virus. I, however, had.
It didn’t feel like rage. It felt like a white flare, so intense it was, so unlike a human emotion. I stared back at him.
Was it in the Theobromos you gave me?
I transmitted.
His face told the truth, though he hastily transmitted back:
What? Don’t be ridiculous! Get them out of here, now, we can’t waste time on this
.
How true. We couldn’t waste time, not when history was dictating that Anna and Geert and the child escaped from their house at nineteen hundred
hours precisely, exiting through the back and making their departure in a rented car driven by Hendrick’s bodyguard.
The perfect automaton went briskly down the back steps, opened the doors of the waiting Volta, took bags and loaded them into the boot while the Karremans family scrambled into their seats. He shut them in, and climbed behind the wheel to take them to their appointment with history.
As we drove away, a faint transmission came from the dark house:
I’ll explain when we rendezvous
.
How pleasant to have an explanation offered.
How heavily I’d been perspiring in the school. And with the woman.
The last act played out quickly.
I drove the mortals to their previous home in the country, the loft apartment above the laboratory where they’d done their work. The apartment was closed up now, though the laboratory was still in use; it was within commuting distance and the Karremans had planned to go back to work after Hendrick was in school full-time.
We let ourselves in and they took shelter upstairs, in the rooms where Hendrick had played as a baby. The place can’t have afforded him any comfort of familiarity now, dark and empty as it was. I remained below in the laboratory, ostensibly to stand guard but in reality following through on what I had been told was the point of this entire operation: locating and securing all the files, all the project notes for the Karremans’ work with recombinant DNA. History would record it as lost in the course of the evening’s events.
The Company knew otherwise, naturally. The Company knew that a man placed in the event shadow—for history did not record what happened in the laboratory during the hour the Karremans family cowered upstairs—might remove the data on Hendrick’s creation to a safe location for later retrieval. Anna’s and Geert’s work would be saved, would pass into the possession of Dr. Zeus Incorporated, presumably to be of some benefit to mortal humanity at some unspecified time in the twenty-fourth century.
Though I had no real idea of what would be done with the knowledge. We’re told so little, we operatives struggling through the past. Our masters assure us it’s better that way. Easier on our nerves.
I seemed to have no nerves left in the forty-five minutes I searched
through the laboratory. Eventually I found the files, or at least their backups, neatly labeled in—what else?—a file box. I carried it out into the night, ran with it to the nearest drainage ditch, dug a hole in the snow and buried it. Then I returned to the laboratory to keep my own appointment with history.
Not long to wait. Glancing at my chronometer, I saw that the mobs would by now have stormed the house and found it deserted, but set it afire anyway and gone looking for the monster and his wicked creators, pausing only to raid the Civil Guard arsenal. Thanks to the splendid media coverage Labienus had masterminded, a good many people knew exactly where the Karremans’ laboratory was. Yes: here came the line of headlights through the night.
Car doors slamming. Shouted consultation. Upstairs, inaudible to mortal ears, Hendrick’s whimpering, Anna’s stifled sobs. Heartbeats pounding, both within and without, for the attackers were frightened, too.
So it was a brave man who climbed back into his utility vehicle, after pounding had failed to force the door, and simply drove it through the wall.
He died almost at once. Pointless to shoot him, I suppose, but I had no choice: history stated that he was shot by Hendrick’s bodyguard before he had time to jump from the cab of his vehicle. It stated further that other members of the mob, pouring in through the breach he’d made in the wall, promptly gunned down the bodyguard.
So I took my pose there in the dark, as their shots went wide, and I thumbed the electronic device that set off the little detonations in my heavily padded clothing. The blood bags exploded. I toppled forward, as dead as I would ever be.
The mob advanced cautiously, fearful. There came an echoing clatter of feet down the stairs. Who was running down the stairs? This hadn’t been mentioned in any of the accounts, and of course I couldn’t turn over to see.
“Make it be over,”
I heard Hendrick crying in desperation. “Make it be over now!”
Geert and Anna were close behind him, frantic to pull him back out of danger.
Deafening barrage of shots. They died there, on the stairs.
I hope it was over quickly.
Certainly I could hear no failing heartbeats, no last gasps in the moment of profound silence that came when the shooting stopped. The mortals seemed stunned at what they’d done. At last somebody had presence of mind to say:
“We’ll have to burn this place. It’s the only way to keep the plague from spreading!”
Yes! That was a plan all of them understood. It was done quickly, because some of them had thoughtfully brought along accelerant as well as guns. They dumped it around, ran back out through the breach, and somebody lit a firecracker—perhaps left over from New Year’s Eve-and tossed it in. Very effective: a roar and a fireball at once.
I winked out to the lavatory at the back of the building. Forcing the window over the basin, I crawled out and dropped into the snow that had drifted behind the wall. No need to worry about the telltale print of my body in the drift. It would have melted away within the hour, as the laboratory became an inferno.
I fled, secure in the knowledge that my escape wouldn’t be spotted. History recorded otherwise, after all. Pausing only long enough to retrieve the file box from the ditch where I’d hidden it, I ran away, back toward Amsterdam.
One oughtn’t to think at such times. Undeniably a foolish thing to do.
I thought and thought as I ran, you see, with the result that by the time I reached the outskirts of the city all my questions had resolved into just two: Could I do it? How was I to do it?
Hard to find a fire hot enough, intense enough. Probably even the fire at the laboratory wouldn’t have been of sufficient heat. No bonfires permitted nowadays, in safety-conscious 2093, and most homes were heated with electricity.
As I marched along, I came to a shop licensed to sell liquor. It was gated and locked against the night, but the lock could be forced; and the shop contained everything I’d need, which was to say rows of bottles of alcohol and little packets of hotpoints to start the fire. Yes. Would the fire cleanse away my filth?
Undoubtedly, if it burned away all but the indestructible skeleton within me and the augmented brain protected within my ferroceramic skull. I wouldn’t die—I was immortal, after all—but I might be so badly damaged the Company would be unable to repair me. I might spend the rest of eternity in a bioregeneration vat, only marginally alive. Better than I deserved, to be sure, but I hadn’t many alternatives. I wasn’t even certain I could force myself to remain there in the fire. They made us such cowards, when they made us deathless.
I had set down the file box and was wrestling with the lock when Labienus stepped from the shadows behind me.
“Let it go, Victor. It was a wretched business, but it’s over now.”
I turned to stare at him. He scooped up the file box and tucked it securely under one arm. He met my stare.
“Why?” I demanded.
“Why were you used as the carrier or why weren’t you told?” he inquired. No attempt to brazen out the lie. I hadn’t expected that. He smiled slightly at my confusion.
“What’s the first rule we learn, Victor? That
history cannot be changed
. History recorded that the Karremans plague would kill a certain number of people. History recorded that the Recombinant would be killed, along with his creators, and their research lost. How was the Company to alter any of those historical facts? We couldn’t, of course.
“All we could do was work within the historical record, to place ourselves in the position of greatest advantage and thereby control the situation. You see? But it was decided to do more than simply take the research files. Wouldn’t it be better to ensure that there was no Karremans plague after all? No unknown and uncontrollable virus evolving from a Recombinant’s body? There’d be no way to change the historical facts as known, those little victims must die—but wouldn’t it be much less dangerous for humanity if they actually died of something controllable? Something we could deactivate once the historical facts had been
apparently
matched? We were minimizing the potential for a greater disaster, Victor, you see?
“Terrible that the tragedy had to occur, certainly. Terrible that it will galvanize all the nations of the world to forbid any further research into work of this kind. Impossible to change these things. But at least this way we’ve been able to derive something positive from it! The research has been saved. And the ‘plague’ will never spread further, because we know it never existed in the first place.”
So, once again, Dr. Zeus Incorporated had become the beneficiary of mortal suffering. I leaned on the grate, longing for those bottles of vodka and aquavit behind the glass. I wondered what Labienus would do if I grappled him close, if I forced his mouth open with my own and spat my misery down his throat.
He narrowed his eyes, perhaps picking up the image from my thoughts,
and continued: “As to why you were chosen for the job—well, really, Victor, it must have occurred to you by now that you’re unique among our operatives.”
“I’m an ordinary Executive Facilitator,” I stated.
“Oh, Victor, so much more than that! You have a talent none of the rest of them have. You were augmented to do in fact what that poor child was assumed to be doing: your body can produce customized toxins in response to specific stimulus. Surely that affair in San Francisco gave you a clue, beyond what we were permitted to tell you at the time? Budu attacked you, and you immediately manufactured a virus to disable him.”
“And the woman, here?” I demanded. “The children? What threat did they present?”
He cleared his throat.
“Well—none, of course, but their deaths were a regrettable necessity. There was nothing in the Theobromos. You’d have detected any adulteration, you know that. Your ability is programmed to activate when certain signals are transmitted. Do you recall when I shook your hand, New Year’s Eve? You felt, perhaps, a slight shock? No? But your body responded to the order I gave it by producing what history will call the Karremans Recombinant Defensive. As we had intended it to do, I might add. Nothing was ever out of our control.”

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