Summoned to Tourney (15 page)

Yeah, but they’re people who grabbed Beth and Kory and tortured them! They’ve probably done things like that to lots of people! I mean, God only knows what they do in there—maybe they’re testing nerve gas on street people, grabbing winos for drug testing—

But did that give him the right to act the way they did?

Fiercely he told his conscience to
shut up
, and followed his army.

There would be no walls and barriers to hide the Nightflyers’ victims in there. And he didn’t want to see them.

Maybe it was wrong of him to avoid witnessing the results of his work. Certainly it was cowardly. He wasn’t going to rationalize that fact away, but he also wasn’t going to watch what they were doing. And if he didn’t have to see the victims afterwards, he wasn’t going to. What was the point? It wouldn’t make him feel worse than he did now, just sicker, at a time when he couldn’t afford any weakness.

What he
was
going to do, however, was to stand here with Kayla, keep tapping into that nexus of elven power, and keep those walls standing tall and strong between his personal horrors and the outside world. No matter how many or few innocents there were inside this complex, the ones outside it were all innocent, at least of doing anything to him.

One by one, the lights shining from the windows of the buildings began to dim, and he and Kayla shivered together, avoiding the shadows beneath the trees.

Elizabet sat quietly in the corner of her cell, ignoring the outside world—which at the moment was a generous ten foot by ten foot cube. She kept her concentration turned completely inward, carefully regulating her heart-rate and brain-wave patterns so that it would appear that she was semi-conscious, terrified into near-catatonia as her captors seemed to want.

Be fair, now
, she chided herself. There was only one of her captors that wanted her prostrate with fear. That repellent man, the one calling himself Warden Blair, who was clearly the one in charge. She had seen his type before.

Forty going on nine. Nasty little man.
This was the first time she’d been in the power of someone of that type, but she had a fair idea of what to expect. Brilliant, ruthless, sociopathic.

Leader of a group of those like him, he would carefully collect them; he would cultivate them, set himself up as a substitute father-figure, and collect blackmail material on them so that if they actually began to think for themselves, they could be threatened and would never dare leave his employ. Elizabet had most often encountered these little pods of psycho paths in the sciences. They were usually involved in the hard sciences: physics, computer sciences, and math. But they occurred in the “softer” sciences too, as Warden Blair’s little cabal proved.

They had been nasty little children, no doubt of it; the kind that tortured and tormented other kids’ pets and hid in books and laboratories. Later, they joined Mensa in college and went into psychology not to discover themselves but to find out how best to stick knives into the souls of those they considered inferior to themselves. They tended to be mostly boys; girls in general were more connected to society than boys, even when abused. That was certainly the case here; in fact, she hadn’t seen any women here in anything but strictly subordinate roles. This “project” of Blair’s was a kind of boy’s club in many ways, where females were still “icky,” still “the enemy”—for there wasn’t a one of these men that had grown emotionally beyond the age of nine. That was probably why the little-boy psychics that backed up the guards here worked for Warden Blair so readily. He was one of them; their pack-leader, their Peter Pan. And it explained why he was so eager to destroy her mental stability. A man like Blair would not tolerate a strong, independent woman anywhere about him. Any woman in his “project” would have to be reduced to the status of non-person.

Well, none of that got her free of this place. And thinking about him made her angry. Anger disturbed her equilibrium, and if she wasn’t careful, that would give her away to the monitors. She was certain that there were monitors. They hadn’t attached any wires to her, but she had no doubt that every bodily and mental function that could be monitored was being watched. In this ultra-secret complex there must be a great many technological breakthroughs available to the scientists that the general public wouldn’t see for a decade or more.

Being duped into captivity had been her first and last mistake. After the initial shock and the drug they’d used on her had worn off—which was long before the car she was in reached the lab complex—she was ready and wary, feigning a fear and confusion she did not feel.

She suspected they had been relying heavily on the drug to keep her disoriented. They must not have ever had a healer with as high a drug tolerance as she had, and she had no intention of letting them know how quickly their narcotics wore off, how little they affected her. If they did, they’d drug her again, and she intended to retain her advantage.

Warden Blair had revealed more to her about himself than he dreamed, and certainly she had given very little away to him. His open questions about what frightened her, for instance—so clumsy even a CIA operative would have been ashamed. Even if he’d had someone with telepathic skills monitoring her, the chances that a telepath could penetrate her mind to read more than she allowed him to see were slim to none. She let him think that she was afraid of the dark; a simple phobia, and being left in total darkness was no hardship to her. And it was pitifully obvious from Blair’s clumsy threats that he had no notion just how extensive her personal contacts were—nor how high up they reached. She had favors owed to her by some fairly high-powered lawyers and private investigators—not to mention Ria Liewellyn’s still-loyal second-in-command—and when she failed to return from this conference, there were going to be several people asking awkward questions. People it would be difficult to shut up. People with money, political influence, or both.

Warden Blair was going to discover he’d taken the wrong “holdover hippie”—that was one of the kindest things he’d called her when she failed to give him any real answers to his questions. Interesting that his intelligence was so poor; either he wasn’t relying on government sources, or someone was withholding information from him. Was that happening at the source, or in his own organization? She rather hoped it was the former; attempts to probe her files should set off alarms that would alert some of her friends—and her friends’ friends—to the fact that Warden Blair was showing an unhealthy interest in her. Add that to her turning up missing, and the FBI might come calling, asking Dr. Blair some very awkward questions.

With luck, they’d demand to inspect the premises. There were others here besides herself; she’d sensed them as she cautiously explored the confines of her prison. She didn’t dare go further than that; her telepathy was not all that strong, and she could not know if who she touched was a friend and fellow prisoner or one of Blair’s tame psychics.

Of course, waiting for official help was going to take time, and time was critical for some of her patients. If she could manage it, she should try for an escape on her own. She knew that she must be in a sub-basement of some kind; that was frustrating, since it meant that even if she won free of her cell, getting to the outside was going to be very difficult. On the other hand, she was middle-aged, female, and black—and if she could find a cleaning-woman’s smock, she could probably scrub her way to freedom.
No one ever looks at janitors. Particularly not black women janitors.

The more she thought about it, the more appeal that idea had. The only problem with it was that left the others she had sensed still locked away.

Could she walk away and leave them there? They didn’t have influential friends; it was just a matter of accident that she did. Her own influential friends would be unlikely to move very energetically on behalf of other nebulous captives on her word alone—they would be unlikely to move if their own interests weren’t involved. She didn’t know names, faces—if she couldn’t actually cite the names of people known to be missing, Blair could say she was crazy, deny that there was any such thing going on here. It couldn’t be that hard to hide a few dozen people; not with all the government facilities that must be available to him.

Miserable little lizard
, she thought bitterly. How soon would it be before Blair’s flunkies caught Kayla? That was a thought that truly chilled her. If this were Los Angeles, she wouldn’t have worried; Kayla’s extensive street-side connections made her impossible to catch on her home turf. But this wasn’t Los Angeles, and Kayla hadn’t had the time to make those connections here. She was essentially trapped in her hotel room, unless she had the wits to call Beth Kentraine for help—

She was also a minor, whose guardian had vanished. She could be charged with anything and “arrested,” taken into “protective custody,” and no one would make any complaints.

Except Kayla herself. Which wouldn’t change a thing.

But even as she thought of Kayla—Kayla in Blair’s hands—something changed. As real as a storm-front, as full of potential, and as difficult to pin down without the proper instruments, the passing of this “change-front” raised gooseflesh on her arms and brought all of her senses to alert. Elizabet wasn’t a precognitive, but she was at least a little sensitive in every extrasensory area.

Something
had just happened, out there, outside the walls of this lab. Something that changed everything, that negated every calculation, every plan. And unless she was very much mistaken, all hell was about to break loose. Her Gram used to say, “When devil walk, people should hide.”

It certainly felt like devils were walking.

Be damned to Blair’s monitors.
If this was as big as it felt, it wouldn’t matter what the monitors recorded. Blair was about to have a surprise. Fire, flood, earthquake, or something she couldn’t even guess at—these labs were going to experience catastrophe. If there was enough confusion, she would be able to walk right out. She gave up her pretense of catatonia in favor of the tightest barriers she could raise, and sheltered behind them. Waiting.

Something told her that the wait wasn’t going to be long.

Dr. Susan Sheffield watched the needle of the seismograph with one eye, and the rest of the instruments with the other. One of her techs followed the countdown silently, lips moving. When he reached zero, he clutched involuntarily at the edge of the desk, even though the probability of them actually
feeling
anything, even if this run was successful, was less than half a percent.

Unless, of course, by pure coincidence, they had chosen the moment Mother Nature had picked for a shake to run Poseidon.

Nothing happened of course. It would take several minutes for Poseidon to vibrate this little faultlet loose, even under the best of circumstances. They’d only picked it because it ran directly under the Dublin Labs property, one of hundreds of little cracks coming from the San Andreas.

“Ja, Shub-Niggurath,” muttered Frank Rogers, her partner.

“Say what?” she replied, without removing her attention from the instruments. Oh, they’d record whatever happened, but
if
it happened, she wanted to see it.

“Lovecraft,” he told her. “Howard Phillips. Horror writer. Shub-Niggurath was one of his Elder Gods—the ‘Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young.’ I was thinking the San Andreas is like that—Big Mama Nasty with a thousand little nasties spawned from her. The little nasties wouldn’t matter squat if Mama wasn’t there to back them up.”

“Yeah, well if Poseidon works today, we’ll have a way to lasso Mama,” she said. “And we’ll have the data to prove it.”

Just at that moment, the needle jumped—tracking the course of a quakelet on the scrolling paper. “Shut it off!” she yelled, as she sprinted over to the bank of other geological instruments. The tech threw the switch and shut Poseidon down as she and Frank frantically took sight-readings in case any of the recording monitors might possibly have failed. Every reading Sue took made her feel like cheering more. Finally Frank let out a whoop. “Hot
damn
!” he yelled, waving his clipboard. “Come look at this one!”

The rack of crude sensors was entirely dead. As it should be; they measured nothing—only registered electrical flow across pairs of contacts set all along the faultline at varying depths. That they were all dead meant that the contacts were no longer touching.

Which meant the fault had moved, easing stress. Quietly, infinitesimally, without so much as a beaker shaking. And along the
entire
faultline.

Poseidon was an array of devices that were the sonic equivalent of a laser: coherent sound. What Frank and Susan had proposed was that if a Poseidon line could be set up along a fault under stress—like the San Andreas—low-frequency, coherent soundwaves could trigger tiny quakelets along the entire length, for as long and as often as it took to ease stress along the faultiine. So far it had worked well enough to warrant a bigger proposal, taking the project out of the stage of pure research and into the stage of attempted application. The Big One everyone dreaded might never happen now…

And the pinheaded holdover hippies that picketed every month might be persuaded that there was
legitimate
research going on here. Susan was getting damned tired of running a gauntlet once a month, and wondering if this time
she
would be the one who’d have to spend hours getting red paint off her car.

Not that there wasn’t a military application to Poseidon—but Frank had agreed with her to destroy the figures and any reference to their other finding. That one single Poseidon CSAA (coherent sound amplification array) placed at a point of maximum stress
could
trigger a “Big One.”
She
was far more right-wing than Frank, and she didn’t want that information in the hands of the military. All it took was one nut… and unlike radioactives, CSAAs didn’t require any equipment that couldn’t be bought on the open market—nor did they need bombers or ICBMs to deliver them. Just a good power-source.