Eternal Life Inc. (29 page)

“Valkyrie!” Roger said in surprise. “Since when are the Tongs in bed with the Church of the Goddess?”

Jericho shrugged. “War makes strange bedfellows,” he said. “Anyway, the Church pulled their Valkyrie back when fighting broke out in the city.”

“Wait a second,” Roger said. “Has anybody bothered to check the monitor on Harry’s ka?”

“Chueh had that covered,” Jericho said. “He was hacked into Eternal life, tracking Harry through his ka. Just before the balloon went up in the city, the monitor on his ka went dead. He never resurrected.”

“Dead,” Roger repeated dully and closed his eyes. “Worse than dead. I’ve seen it happen more than once at Eternal Life. It
means the wolves ate him! Susan told me they like to do that sometimes instead of taking possession. It’s a kind of Masters of the Universe delicacy.”

He shook his head in despair. “It’s something you don’t come back from. No rebirth in the light of the Goddess.” He was surprised at how hard this hit him. “Harry and I were never close, but God damn it! No one deserves to die with their ka ripped into nothingness to feed a wolf!”

Jericho shot a concerned glance at Diana, standing ramrod straight with her back to them, staring out the window. “It doesn’t necessarily have to mean that,” he said without conviction.

“Yeah, right!” Roger spat and finished off his coffee and slammed the cup down hard enough to crack the delicate, pre-Crash, antique, bone china.

Jericho winced at the sight of the cracked coffee cup and then sighed resignedly. “The only positive thing to come out of all this is that no one seems to care about you two anymore. You should be able to get out of here without too much trouble.”

“What about you, Mr. Morley?” Diana said with her back to him, still staring out the window. “Do you still have a monitor on your ka?”

“I went in and wiped the coding and removed the monitor yesterday like Jericho suggested,” Roger said. “No one can trace me now.”

“And you can die for real now,” she said as if she was commenting on the weather.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Roger said uncomfortably. “What about you?”

“Me?” Diana said and turned and looked at him, her face cool and composed. “I’ve never had a monitor on my ka,” she said and as she brushed back a stray lock of her jet, black hair, Roger noticed for the first time the ring on her finger, the black onyx ring of a Jaganmatri Valkyrie. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he said.

“In all probability,” Diana said and placed her cup on the coffee table. She picked up her notebook and snapped it shut. “It’s time to go,” she said decisively as if she was closing a business meeting. “Thank you for your hospitality, Doctor Jericho and for that information about the Nevada Quarantine.” She shook his hand and turned towards the door. “I left my gear downstairs,” she said over her shoulder to Roger as she walked out. “Are you coming?”

Roger eyed Jericho. “That is one cold, Valkyrie bitch,” he said and irritably ripped the price tag off his new boots and threw it on the table beside her coffee cup. Then he noticed the cup was still full. She hadn’t touched a drop.

Jericho noticed too. “Looks can be deceiving,” he said.

On the way out, they picked up Diana’s gear in the downstairs hall. Roger noticed that her pack was surprisingly compact with an old, brown, leather jacket folded on top. He also noticed the sawed-off shotgun in a battered leather shoulder scabbard leaning against the pack. The walnut butt had been cut down and sculpted into a stubby pistol grip that was scratched and worn and as black with age as the grips on the forty-five.

Before they took off, Jericho suggested they cut due east, keeping well away from the troubles in the Sinks before turning north. Roger thought this was a good idea. They might lose an hour or two in the beginning but they would make it up as soon as they got into the open waters of the Trench that ran all the way up to the Sacramento Palisades.

Then in a surprising sign of affection, Jericho leaned over and kissed Diana goodbye and wished her luck.

By late afternoon, they had left the Rift Archipelago behind and Roger had come to the conclusion that Diana was lousy company. Her mind seemed to be elsewhere and all his attempts at conversation petered out into brooding silence. He glanced over at her pale profile staring out the window and thought of
the coffee untouched in her cup. For some reason, he thought of Harry.

“Here are the coordinates for where we’re going,” she said, breaking the silence for the first time in over an hour.

He’d asked for them before they left, but she told him to simply steer due north towards the Sacramento Palisades and the Northern Reaches. They were still over a hundred miles south of the Palisades and when he fed the new coordinates into the navigator he saw that where they were going was nowhere near them. In fact, they were going nowhere near the Northern Reaches or the Eastern Oregon Quarantine that he had been led to believe was their destination.

“Do you mind telling me what’s going on?” he asked.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she answered without looking at him.

“Look, let’s cut the horse shit!” he said. “We’re in this together, remember? Back at Chueh’s I got the impression we’d be heading for the Eastern Oregon Quarantine and a back door into Las Vegas. According to these coordinates, we’re going to cut due east in a little while and then continue on that heading right up into someplace in the High Sierras.”

“That’s correct,” she said.

“But that’s in the middle of nowhere!”

She nodded. “That’s just where we’re going, the middle of nowhere.”

45

Creatures from the Black Lagoon

He slammed back into his body like a Looney Tunes Wiley Coyote, riding a rocket sled into the face of a cliff. But old Wiley, spread-eagled and splattered against a cliff, couldn’t possibly feel as bad as Harry, mashed back into a body screaming with pain and drowning in toxic shock.

On top of that, someone just tried to electrocute him. That’s what cut his umbilical, he realized. He should be dead! Why wasn’t he dead, he wondered, just before someone drove a rusty spike through his heart! Adrenaline rush kicked it up from zero to one hundred beats in two seconds flat. It jackhammered against his chest cavity with enough force to shake his whole body. What the hell was going on?

Now someone strapped the wrong side of a pincushion around his underarm and hundreds of small needles dug in. Who were these clowns? Were they trying to kill him all over again? He fought against the double trauma of being violently pulled back from the dead into his body and the rush of adrenaline shocking through his system.

He opened his mouth in a silent scream of protest, and they shoved a soft plastic tube down his throat and held his nostrils closed. He started choking on the hose as pure oxygen re-inflated his collapsed, burnt lungs. The initial pain was excruciating, and he struggled to spit out the tube as his body flopped around, raising thick clouds of silt from the seabed.

He managed to set up a pain block and began concentrating on slowing down his juggernauting heart and stabilizing his system. He realized someone thought he was dead or dying and had tried jump-starting his heart with electric shock and a needle full of adrenaline. They may have meant well, but if he didn’t get
his heart slowed down fast, he was afraid it was going to explode through his chest.

So intense was his concentration that he didn’t even register the first tentative, feather-light touch of soft hands lifting him out of the muck of the sea bottom. Only when he was floating free and began to feel the pressure change as he was carried toward the surface, did he attempt to open his eyes. Miraculously, they had survived plasma burn, protected by the heavy diamond glass, night vision goggles that ripped off his head only after their plastic straps melted into his burning hair as he hit the water.

He rolled his eyes and squinted into the darkness, trying to make out the figures he could feel swimming around him. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a large shadowy figure, momentarily silhouetted against flashes of broken light, sheeting across the surface above. A large dolphin, maybe? Seconds later, large round, faintly luminous eyes swam into view, peering down at him. He could just make out a seal sleek, round head.

It reminded him of the creature he glimpsed when he popped the roof of the picket-runner. What was it? Something like a cross between a seal or a dolphin and a man? Once again, he remembered the childhood horror movies of genetic experiments gone wrong and terrible mutant monsters prowling the Sinks, but strangely these creatures hardly raised a ripple of concern.

In fact, nothing really bothered him. He was feeling pretty good. In fact, he was feeling better than good. In fact…he was drugged to the eyeballs! he realized. Then he remembered the “pincushion” still strapped to his arm. “Ah ha!” he thought. “Elementary, my dear Watson.” He lifted his arm in a slow motion, underwater, way until he could see the red glow of the diagnostic readouts on the face of the little, emergency, field medivac unit strapped to his underarm.

All those little pincushion needles had been sampling his blood for the medivac to analyze. Then its little computer-chipped
brain began filling him full of feel-good drugs and whatever else it thought he needed. Yeah, like a hypodermic full of adrenaline to the heart, he thought.

“Just take it easy partner,” a voice whispered, and someone took his arm with the medivac strapped to it and gently lowered it to his side.

Harry thought that if he took it any easier he’d be too whacked out to even see straight. He started to giggle and choked again on the plastic tube down his throat.

“Better cut back ten cc’s,” another voice said, and Harry could feel someone tapping instructions into the medivac. As his mind began to clear, he realized that he hadn’t really been hearing voices. Instead, words had been forming inside his head like someone was thinking them for him.

Gentle laughter. “That’s right my friend. You catch on fast. I’m thinking it for you, like telepathy, nothing to it, and nothing to be afraid of. Just relax and enjoy the ride. You’re with friends now.” And a mental image of Chueh’s old Chinese coin medallion formed in his mind just before they broke the surface.

Firm hands held him upright with his head just above the surface. A cold, wind-lashed rain stung his burnt face where new skin tissue was beginning to form. Despite the drugs and his own pain block, he still felt it.

On the other hand, he should be glad to feel anything at all, he told himself. All this emergency first aid had nearly killed him. In fact, it did kill him, he realized and remembered again his umbilical snapping and falling free into the white light of death. So how come he was still alive here, in his old body? For an instant, he caught a glimpse of an answer so horrendous that his mind sheared away and hit the “delete” button before it could register.

But something registered, and it started him retching. Then, he coughed up and spit out the tube in his mouth and gulped
cool night air. His lung tissue was still regenerating, and it felt like breathing nails. He dove back inside himself, trying to recapture what he had registered, but it was like chasing a mirage and at last he gave up and instead did a quick reconnaissance of his physical status.

The medivac seemed to be getting it right for a change and things were stabilizing faster than he would have thought possible. On the other hand, despite this mysterious healing rush, the physical damage to his meat locker body was so extensive that he was going to need a lot more time powered down in his ka to complete the healing process and take care of the trauma of being so ham-handedly resuscitated by these clowns. Whoever they were, they probably meant well, but he would have been better off if they had just left him on the seabed for another day or two.

He opened his eyes and looked around. They had surfaced behind a little island of wreckage that was overgrown with pale magnolia blossoms. He could smell their sweet, heavy scent on the night air. He could also hear sounds of battle, but they were muted with distance and sometimes blown away by the wind and rain.

Sleek round heads bobbed around him in the water. Their faces were human and surprisingly childlike except for the round, luminous eyes, glowing like radium watch dials below a huge dolphin-like cranial bulge. But human, definitely human, he thought.

“Well, I’m glad we got that cleared up” the thought popped into his head, riding a caressing wave of friendly laughter as one of the creatures swam up to him. “You can call me, S-s-s-arge.” He grinned, a wide cartoon grin that went from ear to ear and was full of sharp, needle like teeth. “Now, let’s get the medic over here and see what the damage is.”

While the medic took Harry’s arm and began reading the diagnostics on the medivac, S-s-s-arge swam in close. He pushed
his face up into Harry’s, tilted his head from side to side, and examined him with his large radium watch dial eyes. Finally, he drew back and shook his head. “You look like you been through a meat grinder,” he said.

“Always nice to get a professional opinion,” Harry said.

S-s-s-arge ignored the sarcasm and bent down to confer with the medic. Then they both looked at Harry’s head, examining the burns and gently prodding the wound in the back. Finally, the medic shook his head, shrugged, and swam away.

S-s-s-arge gave Harry another pointy toothed, jack-o-lantern grin and slapped him on the back. “Don’t worry,” he said. “In our professional opinion, you shouldn’t even be alive, let alone conscious! Since you are, though, I guess we gotta keep you that way and get you out of here in one piece. First, we should take a look at the hornets’ nest you stirred up.”

He gestured at one of the bobbing heads, and the creature swam over to the little island and pulled himself out of the water. His pale arms were well formed and muscular but his hands were disproportionately wide and flat, the fingers spindle thin and spaced far apart with pale webs of membrane between. When he’d pulled himself halfway out of the water, he reached back and one of his companions handed him something that looked very much like Harry’s lost rail-gun.

“You recognize it?” S-s-s-arge asked. “You should, it’s yours. We thank you for your contribution to the war effort.”

“Glad to oblige,” Harry said absently as he watched the scout clamber up the island slope. Stubby, little legs that had the fat, chubby look of a baby’s grew directly out of the side of his hips and ended in fleshy, muscular fins that scrabbled for purchase on the muddy slope. Harry noticed that the pale skin of his upper body gradually turned dark and shiny as it tapered down to a long sleek tail beneath the hips.

Distant lightning sheeted across the sky as the scout crawled beneath the magnolias. His long tail curled up out of the water
and its tip fanned open into a broad-ribbed fin almost three feet wide and as gaudily colored as a butterfly’s wing. The tail uncurled, and the fin slapped the water as the scout disappeared into the undergrowth.

“Why, you’re mermaids,” Harry whispered in amazement.

“I think in this case, mermen is more correct, don’t you?” the laughing voice in his head commented dryly.

“But you’re beautiful,” Harry blurted out.

“You mean we’re not monsters, is that it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you meant it?”

“Yeah, I guess I did,” Harry admitted. “In fact, you better believe I did. After all the horror films that have been made about this place and the genetic wars, I guess I expected you guys to look like a remake of ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’.”

Harry could hear the mermen’s thought-voices whispering back and forth to each other, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. It was like listening at a closed door. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“The scout reports the coast is clear,” S-s-s-arge said. “The battle is still moving away from us.”

The patrol swam out from behind the island, carrying Harry with them. “You’re safe for the moment,” S-s-s-arge added. “But when they find out you’re not dead, they’ll fight their way back here.”

Harry looked down the long, back-alley waterway to where what was left of the apartment building was burning ferociously a couple of hundred yards away. He wondered momentarily what there was left to burn. Then he noticed that the little picket-runner had somehow survived and was still parked under the stairs. If they could get to it, he might have a chance of getting out of here.

“Don’t even think about it,” S-s-s-arge warned.

Harry looked at the merman treading water nearby. “Why
not?”

“Why do you think they left it there?” S-s-s-arge asked. “They were feeling generous maybe? Use your head! They booby trapped it. Then they burned overrides through the slaver circuits of your AI. So even if you discovered the bomb and disarmed it, they would still control the car.”

“How do you know all that?”

“We watched them do it.”

“Why didn’t you stop them?”

“We’re soldiers, not suicides. We were the only patrol in this quadrant when Master Chueh called my people and asked for help. He said he had a tracer on you that we could follow.”

“The medallion, of course,” Harry said, fingering the old coin that had miraculously survived and still hung around his neck.

S-s-sarge nodded. “We were supposed to keep an eye on you until Chueh got here, but all hell broke loose first.”

“Where’s Chueh now?”

S-s-s-arge pointed down the waterway to the distant flashes and occasional explosions where the battle was moving away from them.

“We have to leave now. Our orders are to get you out if we can. The Seraphim must know by now that you’re still alive, and they will be back. For some reason, they want you pretty bad. This was a major operation.”

“I was so careful,” Harry said. “I scanned the whole area before coming in. I had top of the line detector…”

“They were dug in, shielded and waiting for you. Your detectors weren’t going to pick up anything they didn’t want picked up. Now, we don’t have any more time. Let’s get out of here. We’ve rigged a sling to tow you.”

“Where?”

“Some place where you’ll be safe, where master Chueh can find you, and where you can get proper medical attention.”

“Whoa, stop,” Harry said. “No more medical attention,
okay?” He reached down and began unstrapping the medivac.

“Hey, what are you doing?” S-s-s-arge swam up and grabbed his arm.

“Listen, you got to trust me on this,” Harry said. “How do you think I survived so long under water before you guys got to me? You said yourself, I shouldn’t be alive, right?”

The merman nodded reluctantly. “You were under water too long, and the extent of your injuries…” he shrugged. “We clipped on the electrodes to shock your heart into starting, but it was just a formality. No one expected anything to happen.”

“Then you shot it up with adrenaline to really get it going and damn near killed me,” Harry said. “You didn’t mean to. You couldn’t know I was still alive. I know this is going to sound crazy, but I can put myself into a state of suspended animation at will. My metabolic rate falls so low that it looks like I’m dead. In fact, my body is healing itself.”

The merman kept a grip on Harry’s arm and regarded him skeptically.

“You don’t believe me?” Harry asked.

“I don’t know what I believe,” S-s-s-arge said. “I was the first one to find you, and I would have sworn that you were as dead as a doornail and had been for quite a while.”

“You gotta trust me on this,” Harry repeated.

“You know, the back of your head is caved in. There are probably bone splinters in your brain, and you still got third degree burns down the front of your body. I meant it when I said you shouldn’t even be alive, let alone talking to me.”