Out of the Black (17 page)

***

Inside the utility room, Alex watched Rae and Ping get into position on the ends of the aisle. He wondered when the bad guys would notice that the shelf they leaned against was the only one in the archive that wasn't on the move. Given enough time...

He watched the movements of the agents outside, looking for the best opportunity. One of the scanning teams approached Rae's position, but fortunately they were scanning the exterior wall that ran perpendicular to her aisle. There were another two teams in the central aisle close to the Detective.

He touched the activating button with his stylus. Now or never. As the screen went white, he moved the monitor window into the background.

Now that they were off balance, it was time to repare for phase two.

***

In a jittering flash, the lights blazed back to life.

Ping and Rae opened their eyes fractionally and got to work. Rae's gun hummed out of standby as she pivoted around and braced her arms against the shelf. Her targets were taken off guard as their seers went white with the flood of light. In a second the seers would adjust to the bright vapor lights, but by then it wouldn't do these two any good. The first shot went behind the ear of the one with the gun. The next two went into the chest and throat of the one with the scanner.

She bolted across the aisle and slid on her butt between two shelves on the other side of the walkway. She rolled over into a prone shooting stance and the moving shelves bumped into her sides and moved away.

There was an oily tendril winding through her guts that she could not ignore. She'd just killed two people. Her mind kept trying to drag her focus to the possibility that they had families- children. She made a small involuntary sound as her heart rebelled at where her will had taken her. In her five years on the force, some of it spent in Chicago's worst neighborhoods, she had never needed to fire her weapon outside the training range.

She gritted her teeth and forced herself back into the moment. Harsh reality was that if she was very lucky, those two were only the first of many. Fury rolled through her, there had been plenty of times when people had tried to kill her, but this was the first time she'd been forced to kill someone else. She used the fury to crowd the guilt off of her mind's stage.

Her ragged scream ripped out of her, seeming to pulse though her clenched hands as she fired through a row of shelves, hitting a partially hidden gunman in the knee, then in the head as he fell. Now was the time for ruthlessness, for death. Later she could curl into a ball of doubt and self-loathing- if she was lucky.

If she killed enough to live.

***

Squinting in the new light, Ping rounded the corner. He braced his right arm against the shelves and steadied it with his left arm, the pistol in his left hand pointing cross-body. He rounded another corner as he shot the agent with the scanner first. Logic would have told him this was the wrong order, but he wasn't thinking. Times like this were made only for reflexes. Some people in the martial arts community insisted that fighting was like chess. Of course, if the round timer in chess were set to fifteen milliseconds, chess wouldn't really be chess either. Ping believed what his parents had taught him: fighting was reflexes, resolve and geometry.

The woman with the gun was the next to fall. Behind them, Good Cop and Bad Cop were struggling to get their seers off. He hit Bad Cop in the shoulder before Good Cop tackled him out of the way. Ping managed to hit Good Cop in the calf as they fell into an aisle and the shelving closed around them.

Behind them, Ping saw four more agents. As their guns came up, Ping snapped off three ineffective shots then retreated back around the corner.

Automatic gunfire erupted from everywhere. The air about him filled with dust and fragments of books, shelves, and wall. Keeping low, he scrambled back toward the center of the aisle, away from the storm.

"Now would be a good time, Alex!"

***

Alex touched the I-Candy icon on the screen. The screen's contents melted away, a reflection blurring then fading in a disturbed pool. All resolved to blackness, then a play list appeared. He made a selection and hit the start button. The air around him seemed to fill with a resonant Gregorian chant.

He tried to relax, but the tension wouldn't go... nothing like a little mortal peril to really frazzle the nerves. "Calm down baby, you can calm down, hey?" He muttered as the chant broke out into polyphony. The choir sang in harmony, each part of the harmony pulling the mind toward its distinctive melody. As he had been trained, he wrapped his mind around the music, letting it expand.

Training wheels. Ivo liked to call this "Pattern Stretching". If he lived long enough, he'd learn to Cast without it someday.

The active compensation built into the phones in his ears canceled out maybe ninety percent of the gunfire, but it was still a distraction. He increased the volume as the beat started. First it was a simple drone punctuating the chant. Then the synths moved in and the chant became the filigree around the outside of a deepening musical pattern.

On the screen electric milk moved in deeply layered fractals. The patterns shifted in syncopation with the complex lattice of the music. He pushed his mind into the patterns. In his mind's eye, he saw the patterns stretching off the sides of the screen, extending in a sphere around him, finally joining behind his head. He floated inside a continuum of blending sound and light, stretching outward into the synaesthetic patterns. Soft, lemon-flavored electricity crawled over his skin in time with the joining patterns of sound, light, and thought. He let his eyes lose focus as he focused on a component of the beat that hid layers down. He let it expand until it was the primary sound he heard, felt, tasted.

There was a tingle of final anticipation and then he fell. Inward. Downward. Behind his eyes, below his feet, inside his bones, the complexities of the Underworld unfurled and he exploded out into its light. Ivo liked to call this place the world's utility crawlspace. Here, the plumbing and wiring of the "real world" could be seen- could be manipulated.

And so, washed of the things of the world above, he approached the Loom. Far away it seemed the music changed, but this was a caress on a sleeper's face, unfelt in the dream. He had work to do.

Ivo had been teaching him a Cast that he called "Brownian Dissonance"- with Ivo it had always been about the polysyllabic. The point of the Cast was to overwhelm an electronic device with a randomly distributed series of dissonant pseudomagnetic fields.

He started with the template for that Cast, attempting to change the amplitudes of the vibrations, tuning them to harmonize with metal. He then accessed the template for a Cast that affected ferric pliancy, which was the first Cast Ivo had taught him- the spoon-bender. He took these two simple Casts and began to knit them together, combining their purposes. It seemed to take forever to get the patterns integrated. Fortunately, here in the Loom, time was stretched thin. Here, seconds could stretch on for what seemed like minutes.

He didn't want to think about the odds of a novice successfully contriving an ad-hoc Cast like this. It was dangerous and probably wouldn't work, but it was the best he could do.

Passion and focus- Ivo said these were the keys to all interaction with the Loom. Alex had focus in spades. It was medde him so good with computers. Of course, you didn't really need passion to create fractal security algorithms.

To this point, Alex's greatest work had been the Forge of Rae's cameo. Even Ivo had been impressed. It had taken him forever, but when Rae was involved, Alex found he had more passion than for any of Ivo's assignments. Rae's life depended on his work now. All of their lives did. The trick was to turn fear into passion, rather than paralysis.

He put just a little power through the conjoined weave. He then quickly found the frays and misflows and quickly reincorporated the problem sections.

This was not going to work.

He remembered long ago Ivo saying that it was easier to destroy than to create- this was his only hope. This Cast was more like a drunkard brandishing a chair than building a fine piece of weaponry. Forging Rae's cameo had taken about four months to get right, but today he had only seconds.

Quickly, he Cast the weave of Vision and saw through the eyes of the Loom just how desperate things had become out in the archive. Rae and the Detective had made a decent accounting for themselves, but he could see they didn't have long to live. One of the assassins whipped around the end of the row of shelves where the Detective was crouching. Not yet!

In the pristine speed of the Loom, Alex saw the Detective move in the glassy smooth slow motion of action movies. Ping changed the geometry of his crouch, shifting his weapons ever so slightly. The assassin's finger was still tightening on the trigger of his assault weapon when three bullets from the Detective's twin guns tore through his chest.

Shifting his view quickly to Rae, he saw the strained look on her face as she fired from a prone position between two shelves. He saw the tears on her hard face, determination and sorrow behind the bright, furious eyes. This was killing her.

Passion. Looking at Rae it seemed to flow into him, leaving him both more alive and more uncertain. This was the moment of truth. He threw off the Vision and composed the pattern of Collection. Power began to accumulate around him, drawn to the substance of his will. Soon he was straining to maintain the pattern of his Cast through the pressure of the building energy. He needed dangerous levels of power to make this work over a large enough area.

Ivo had told him that with time and practice he would be able to channel much more power. Once he had seen Ivo in a Cast with enough raw power to kill Alex many times over. But then Ivo was quite a few centuries now without the training wheels. Ivo could Cast dry, though he liked to work with Reggae music in the background. Alex had tried to get to the Loom with Bob Marley once... he didn't see how it helped Ivo. To each his own.

The pressure grew until he felt he would unhinge with it- bone and thought splintering, dispersing into welcoming oblivion. He was at the heart of a whirlwind, but the wind was whirling into him- tearing through him, blinding his mind. His will faltered and his crude Weave began to dissolve. Now or never.

He let the power explode into his clunky weave. The Cast crystallized and blazed before him as it expanded out into the world above. He reeled for an instant in the hollow silence of the departed storm- had he actually pulled it off? Had it fizzled out? For a few ticks of the atomic clock, he was too overwhelmed to care.

Unseen, somewhere in the Overworld, his new Cast shattered. Alex's first indicationwas a shift in the currents of the Underworld- the receding sea before the tsunami. Then the backlash came. It crashed over and through him, an avalanche of light.

Blackness.

***

Ping hit the end of the shelves at a dead run. He crossed the narrow aisle between the stacks of shelves in a wild leap. As he landed on the other side between two closing shelves, he caught a foot on one and went down hard. The fall probably saved his life. He hit the floor awkwardly between the shelves, bruising his shoulder, losing one gun and his wind. He was immediately showered with debris from a barrage that tore through the shelves at chest level. As the shelves moved away again, he blinked and wiped the debris from his face.

A few aisles closer to the exit, he could hear Rae returning fire, a few plinks in the midst of the hailstorm of enemy fire. "Move Rae!" He shouted. "Keep moving..."

A black silhouette appeared in the space between the shelves behind him, weapon at the ready. Someone must have pursued him down the aisle as he fled. His remaining weapon was already twisting toward the attacker, but there was no way he could win this race.

His gun was perhaps twenty degrees off-target when a tidal wave seemed to turn the world inside out. His vision blurred and wavered in the wake of the muted fury. The dying harmonics of an unheard or unremembered explosion rattled the air, lingered in his head. The lights stuttered out, and most blew. Flickering near-darkness returned and silence covered the room.

Unbelievably, the gunman at the end of the shelves hadn't sawed him in half yet. Ping's own weapon came on-target. He pulled the trigger.

Nothing. His ears felt dull, like they were filled with water. His vision still shivered slightly. All the gunfire had stopped; the loudest sound he could hear was his heart, and the rasp of his labored breath.

The gunman was making sharp gestures with his weapon as he repeatedly pulled the trigger with great emphasis. He attempted to clear the bolt while Ping found a more effective use for his own pistol. His thrown needle gun hit the gunman squarely on the forehead with a crack that came as a dull thunk through Ping's watery ears. The gunman dropped like a bag of hammers without even the volition to clutch at his damaged face.

Alex, Ping thought, now he owed the little centimeter-shorter runt his life. He wondered if he'd been able to take out all the weapons in the room.

He could barely see through the dust and jittery shadows. Somewhere a few lights still flickered sporadically. He found his other pistol within arms reach, but dropped it into his holster without trying the trigger. It was subtly warped, barrel curving perhaps three millimeters to the left. Ozone tinged the air as a few of the shelves' motors labored against warped gears, tracks, and casters. A low electric hum moaned about him as he struggled to his feet.

Alex's work must have either stunned him or affected his inner ear because he couldn't immediately stand without holding on to the now immobile shelves. The dizziness subsided to a manageable level after a few seconds.

He made his way unsteadily to the end of the aisle and poked his head around the bullet-pocked end cap. In the walkway between the stacks of shelves were two corpses at about four meters. Farther back was another corpse, and three visible gunmen. One had been coming down the aisle whenhad opened his little present. He was now on all fours, retching into an expanding pool of bile. Farther away another gunman stumbled out from between two shelves. Ping rounded the end of the shelves and entered the aisle where Rae was now swaying on hands and knees. The gun still clutched in one hand supported part of her weight with the barrel pressed into the floor.