Brother Death (23 page)

"I want it," Ruul said. "The vouch. I'm going to give it an electrical plug of its own and let it graze for the rest of its life. Maybe bring it a mate and breed little vouches."

Taz smiled, something she'd been doing a lot of in the last few minutes. She glanced up at Bork. He knew what she wanted.

"What say we step out into the corridor for a few minutes?" Bork said to the medic.

"Huh? Why?"

"I think Chief Bork there has something she wants to say to M. Oro in private."

"Oh. Oh, sure."

Taz pressed her hand against the thick clear plastic as if the gesture might be able to transfer some of what she felt to the injured man.

"Listen," she said, "I need to tell you something."

"I'm not going anywhere. Fire away."

"You still want to marry me? Exclusive contract?"

"Well, I don't know. I'm not really up for it at the moment."

"Ru...''

"Don't get all weepy on me, Tazzi. It's a stupid question; we Oros don't change our minds about such things. I'd marry you in a San Yubi second and you know it."

"Okay."

" 'Okay'? Just like that? 'Okay'? "

"Soon as you get well."

He grinned, tried to move, she could see it on his face.

"What are you doing?"

"Trying to get up and out of this thing. Open the lid. Get me an exoframe."

"I can't. You know better than that."

"Then I am going to get well faster than anybody in history ever has. Why, parts of me are healing even as we speak. I can't feel them but I'm sure they are."

She laughed. "I love you," she said.

"I know. Me, too, you."

Taz laughed again. Why, it hadn't hurt a bit to say that. In fact, it felt quite wonderful.

"Those people are going to be sorry they hurt you."

"Whoa, hold up. You aren't going after them? Not after what I told you? They walked into the fucking wall and fucking disappeared."

"We know. Missel is working on a device that will let us follow them."

"Tazzi . . ."

"Hey, I'm a cool, remember? You said I could work after we were married; it wouldn't bother you any."

"Yeah, well, if I weren't lying here like a sack of soypro maybe it wouldn't bother me."

"Are you going to give me trouble about this?"

He managed a dry chuckle. "Not much. If I were up and myself, I would."

"If you were up and yourself, we'd be destroying the room with our naked bodies and chasing bad guys would be the last thing on my mind. That make you feel better?"

"Well. Maybe a little. Tazzi, be careful. These are sick people, they're dangerous."

"I know. And what they don't know is who they are fooling with. We Borks take care of our families.

Always. Saval and I both have scores to settle. The fanatics are the ones you should be worried about."

He essayed a nod. "I think maybe you're right. But now that I've got you where I want you, more or less, I don't want to risk losing you."

"Lighten up, crip. Guys like these we eat for breakfast."

"The man who broke my neck was a giant, Tazzi, bigger than Saval. And he tossed your brother around like a ball, didn't he?"

"He caught him from behind. There isn't a man or mue alive who can come straight at Saval and walk away." It was brave talk. She hoped it were true. But even if it wasn't, she was going after this Kifo Unique. The man had caused a shitload of trouble for a whole lot of people, her included, and one way or another, he was going down. She was going to bring him back and it didn't much matter to her if he were alive or in little pieces when that happened.

Missel shook his head. "Listen, to be sure about this I need a couple of days to run tests."

"No," Taz said. "We can't afford the time. We don't know where the other side of the Zonn trail leads. A couple of days might put them out of reach."

Deep in the bowels of the police electronic lab, Missel shook his head yet again. The device lay on the table, hooked into a test grid. It was no bigger than a package of flicksticks, an innocuous rectangle with a rounded bulge on one end, flat gray spunplast with a couple of buttons and diode-analogs on it.

"You're the ones who pointed out it was dangerous."

"Is it dangerous?" Bork asked.

"Well . . .

"Come on, Missel

"Not that we can tell. It's got an overload kickout and a short relay and pin-it. It'll draw power, there's an inducer that will pull more than enough from any place in 'cast radius, plus I've installed a battery that should give you plenty of spare juice, you need it, but . . ."

" 'But' what?" Taz said.

"Look, you have to have a team of scientists on this! I know I'm just a second grade cool-tech, I'm not a theoretical type, but this is big! You are talking about a whole new branch of physics here!

Interdimensional stuff! There are some guys at the University who would come all over themselves to get their hands on this! We're talking about Helsinki Prize-class stuff here. Listen, I have to pass this on, I can't sit on it. I can't believe nobody ever thought of it before."

"Somebody did," Bork said. He nodded at the device.

"Yeah," Missel said. "That's right, but it got lost. We can't lose it again. I'm sorry, I have to insist on this, this is too valuable-"

"Tell you what," Taz said. "After we collect these geeps, the toy and all the specs are yours, Missel. You can do whatever you want with it. Hell, somebody is gonna win the Helsinki Prize, why shouldn't it be you? You're good enough to work backward and figure out the theory, right?"

The skinny man blinked. Bork almost laughed, held it in but barely. Scientists were a strange breed. It had never occurred to him to try and take credit for this; his face said so as plain as a large-print reader.

"Huh?" he said.

Taz did laugh. "Missel, you don't want to be a labbo all your life. This is your ticket to respectability.

Only we get to use it first."

The light of intellectual dawn shined from the man's eyes. The possibilities flooded from him like dance-floor laser beams.

"Oh. Oh, wow."

"Show us how it works," Taz said. "And when we are done, it's all yours. Missel? You there?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah. What?"

This time Bork laughed with his sister.

The slab of material looked as solid as anything Taz 'had ever seen. She touched it and it sucked heat from her bandit felt like a chunk of frozen steel. She pushed against the door-sized block and it was heavy enough so it didn't budge.

Missel blinked like someone with dry-eye disease, the device he had produced gripped in a sweaty hand.

He had explained the controls to them. They were in a section of the lab that could be closed off, and the three of them were alone. Saval said, "Here, lemme do it."

"Your butt," Taz said. "Me."

He looked at her. "We both go."

She nodded.

Saval took the device. Pointed it at the slab of material. Looked at Taz again, at the tech, then pressed the button.

The gunmetal blue-gray turned to smoke, flowing in wild patterns, but contained by the bounds of the material as a solid.

"It did that before," Missel said. "I tossed a light pen into it and it vanished."

"Well," Bork said, "if we see your pen, we'll get it for you."

Together he and Taz stepped into the wall.

Chapter TWENTY-SIX

WHEN KIFO STEPPED into the realm of the Zonn, his flock stood bunched and waiting. They were not all afraid, but fear rose from some of them as heat waves do from hot plastcrete.

Kifo smiled. The wall behind them towered to infinity, or at least past the height that the eyes of men could see. The ground crawled with a blue fog nearly the color of the wall itself, a sinuous and thick blanket that curled and flowed around the ankles of the few as if it were alive and lapping at their flesh with gaseous tongues. In the distance blue-white lights danced like giant fireflies in the skies above fat hillocks that appeared to move in some kind of repeating S-pattern, each hill moving at a slightly different speed and cycling back to where it began.

Visibility was limited to a few kilometers; beyond that a purplish murk occluded the air, giving the already strange scene an even more sinister look. It was slightly cool, though not uncomfortably so. The air had an acrid smell and it tingled against mucous membranes, drying them, making them just a little raw.

Something cried out in the distance, the rattle of a great bird, perhaps, or that which easily mimicked one. A low hum, a drone answered the cry, a sound that resonated deep in the pit of Kifo's belly, as if attuning itself to humans, or perhaps tuning them to it.

An orange light flashed at the edge of his peripheral vision and was gone. When he took a step, red sparks sprayed and showered down, drifting like pollen back into the blue fog. Kifo laughed. He could understand their fear. The landscape was nearly as alien to him as it was to any other among the Few.

The wonder of the Zonn realm was that the gods seldom let it stay the same for long. He knew the fog from before, the shifting hills, but the sparks were new to him and the air not quite as he remembered it.

"Come," the Unique said to the Few. "We travel to Sanctuary."

Taz's first impression when she got over the shock of not being in the cool labs was easy: "Jesu Damn," she said. "It looks like a giant warehouse."

There were tall, twisted columns scattered at odd intervals. She couldn't see the tops of them because there was some kind of shimmery yellow fog a dozen meters up that formed a ceiling. It roiled back and forth but seemed to hold its shape pretty much in a flat plane. And it wasn't really as if there were walls to make it a warehouse, but somehow she got an impression of them. When she looked more closely, the walls weren't there. But sort of were...

"Here's Missel's pen," Saval said. "I think."

Taz turned to look at her brother. He held something up on the palm of one hand.

A light pen is a fairly simple thing. A tube, maybe fifteen centimeters long, smaller in diameter than a woman's little finger, round on one end, pointed on the other. The outer shell is simple spuncast plastic.

Holding it like a wand or pencil activates a small but bright beam, a solid-state bioelectric laser that shines from the pointed end. The device is used to mark on holoprojic or flatscreen monitors. It has a minimal amount of memory, and can be switched from a point to a fan beam. In a pinch it can be used as a light, provided what you wish to illuminate isn't particularly large or far away. You can read a hardcopy note or map in a dim surveillance vehicle, find the key slot to a dark door, find your way to the fresher in a power failure. Not the acme of man's technology, a light pen, but a useful tool.

What Saval held on his palm looked to be a mating between an engineer and a tree. It was almost the right length, but bent and twisted like a boiled noodle. Patches of spunplast appeared as darker spots against a lighter material that looked like bark. Tiny tendrils like rootlets radiated from the diameter in what Taz guessed was a Fibonacci sequence. The entire thing had a glow to it, as if the laser within were lit but diffused through the tendrils.

"Jesu Damn," she said.

"Yeah."

Something growled nearby, and both Taz and Saval spun to face the sound. Whatever it was must be adept at ventriloquism or invisible-there was nothing there.

Saval came up from his shooting crouch. Said, "I want to try something here." He pointed his left spetsdod and triggered it.

Taz saw the blast of compressed gas erupt from the barrel. Watched the tiny dart fly. She didn't know exactly what normal velocity was for a spetsdod, probably two hundred, maybe two-fifty meters a second, subsonic, but too fast to dodge, anyway.

The dart that emerged from her brother's weapon did so at perhaps two meters a second. If she sprinted, she could catch it.

She started to speak, but Saval waved her silent. "Watch that column," he said. "Eye level, in the middle."

The column was maybe fifteen meters away. Taz lost sight of the spetsdod's dart halfway there-it was smaller than a housefly, after all-but she saw the little missile when it impacted the column, right where Saval indicated. The action was much like a pebble thrown into a pond. There came a small impact crater, then concentric ripples.

Taz turned away from the column and looked at Saval.

"Man."

"Yeah. It hit just as hard, but it took seven and a half seconds to get there. Never seen anything like it."

For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Bork said, "Try your com."

Taz nodded. Good thought.

The com was dead, at least on the receiving end. Maybe somebody could hear her but somehow she doubted it.

Saval waved the little device Missel had built them. "Good thing this has got its own power," he said. "I don't think we're drawing any from the 'cast in here."

"Something else," Taz said. "Given the light pen, I don't think we should stay here a real long time."

"I second that. What say we go back now?"

"Yeah."

Saval turned and faced the wall behind them, pointed the device, pushed the button. For a heartbeat nothing happened and Taz felt a surge of panic. Then the wall roiled as it had before, turning fluid. She began breathing again.

"Let's go," Saval said.

"Yeah, let's. I don't think I've ever looked forward to seeing Missel's skinny face so much before."

The two of them moved as one, stepped into the wall.

And out into darkness.

The place that Kifo called Sanctuary was easy enough to find, though he could not have given exact directions on how to arrive there using normal geographical terms. The terrain here was fluid and there didn't seem to be any landmarks to offer as guides. That big M-shaped hill to one's right, say, seemed unique, but after walking for a time one might look up and notice that it was now on one's left. How and when such a transition might have taken place was a mystery. Or one might blink and, between the closing of eyelids and the reopening, the hill could vanish entirely. The Zonns' domain was not a place for someone with an inflexible mindset.