The Alejandra Variations (32 page)

He watched the distance meter tick away as the Bore burrowed underneath the subterranean sea and proceeded upward. The pressure gauges seemed to indicate that the surface was not far away.

Nicholas began to feel apprehensive. Inside the Bore—with Lexie dead—they were relatively safe. Outside, in the open, anything could happen if Alejandra wanted him badly enough.

An explosion reverberated through the walls of the Bore. Half the ship's lights went dead. The instrument panel and direction grid dimmed briefly, but didn't go out. The battering almost deafened them.

Sally looked scared now. She was even shaking. Sweat had begun to pearl across her forehead. "We struck the lava tube of a volcano."

"A volcano?"

"Alejandra's changing all the rules on us now. There shouldn't be a volcano on a planet as old as this one's supposed to be!" She pulled back on the controls, forcing the Bore upward.

But that wasn't necessary. There came a wrenching pitch as if the craft were being borne upward by some exterior force. A deep, gutteral rumbling resonated throughout the machine.

"Oh, God," Sally whispered, looking at the grid. "We're in the chimney now. We're going up!"

Both members of Foresee clung to their seats as they tossed and gyrated in the angry throat of the volcano that had sprung out of the imagination of the computer. Alejandra was disgorging herself of the hidden craft which carried her precious Nicholas.

How could Foresee counter a volcano? Had they foreseen
this
?

The force of the earth's molten rock shook the Bore like an impatient child's rattle.

"I'm going to be sick," Sally suddenly said. Nicholas saw that her face had gone green in the roiling motion of the Bore. Was it possible that her nausea was computer-induced as well?

Possible, yes. And probable, too. They were having problems back at Foresee. Alejandra was beating them at every turn.

The Bore jerked with such violence that Nicholas heard something deep within it break. Steel tore with resounding groans, glass shattered, and severed gas pipes hissed. The computer board in front of them was demolished. Blood was everywhere. But it wasn't his blood. Sally Diaz's head hung low, and a rag of blood flowed from a wound at her temple.

"Sally!" he cried, unfastening himself from his seat. He lifted her away from the board. She was dead. A sharp piece of the console wall had broken off and killed her. Alejandra's judgment was swift indeed.

Nicholas turned away from her. The Bore had come to a halt in a more or less horizontal position. He staggered away from the cockpit.

As he stood in the dark corridor of the ship, he heard the coughs and gasps of several of the surviving crew members. The Boremen were beginning to unlimber themselves from their couches. Were these real or were they merely functioning props?

He watched them rise through the dust and smoke, like insects emerging from their hives.

"Hey, Nick!" he heard one of them call. "Are you OK?"

"Yeah," he called out. "I think so." The voice in the corridor of rising Boremen sounded familiar.

He could barely make out the soldier. There was a solitary emergency light burning at the rear of the demolished ship. He felt as if he were in the halls of Limbo, with apparitions rising from the dead all about him.

"Sally didn't make it," Nicholas said. "She's…"

The soldier came into view through the yellow haze. "Reitinger!"

"The one and only," he said, but this time there was no fool's grin on his face. In fact, he seemed shaken.

He checked Nicholas over. "So
this
is what you do for a living." He brushed his hands along the sides of a Warrior's tunic. He was nervous and sweating. This was a little different from chasing a soccer ball or riding zelles across safe, green fields. This wasn't Nelson's element.

Reitinger tried to peer around Nicholas.

"Don't look," Nick said, pulling him away. He knew that Sally was safe back at Foresee, but he didn't want the sight of her crushed head here to upset Reitinger. He wanted out any way he could get out, and he needed Reitinger's help to do it.

"I didn't know you were back there," Nicholas said.

Reitinger ran a set of gnarled fingers through his mat of curly hair. "I wasn't, until a few minutes ago when Melissa saw the volcano appear on the program. It's going to be tight from here on out."

"Nothing's gone wrong, has it?" Nick asked. His heart had begun its horse-race pulse again.

"I don't know," Reitinger replied through the dust. "We just have to play our hand and see."

Nicholas stared down through the salmon-colored haze into the Bore's corridor and watched as a number of the Boremen wrestled with the outside hatch. This was it, he realized. The final scene.

Steam—and an awful, penetrating heat—poured through the hatch as it cracked open. The Bore was on its side. The soldiers had to struggle with the door at an awkward angle. They coughed and wheezed in the smoke, but managed to fling the hatch open.

"Let us go first," Nelson said to Nicholas. Then he pulled out the pistol he'd been wearing and stepped up to the gathering of men by the hatch. Nicholas brought up the rear.

The first soldier hoisted himself up on his arms at the rim off the hatch and swung expertly into the opening. The second soldier was standing just beneath him when the first man screamed and fell back—minus his head. The head itself came down a second later, an expression of surprise and horror transfixed on its face. Blood was everywhere.

Nicholas noticed that some of the soldiers had not survived Alejandra's harassment. He lifted a pistol from one of the Boremen. He somehow felt better with a gun in his hand, even though he knew the computer wasn't about to harm him. It was the others she was after. The other worms in the apple.

"Wait here," Nelson shouted at Nicholas, waving him back. Nick cocked his pistol.

Reitinger carefully looked up at the hatch above him. There were five surviving soldiers. Nicholas didn't know if they were part of the program or were actual Foresee agents.

A hearty female voice sounded from somewhere beyond the hatch where a sturdy shaft of morning light penetrated the smoke and haze.

"You can't stall for time like this," the voice said with all the confidence in the world. "All we want is Nicholas, and the rest of you can go back to where you came from. He belongs with the Clans."

Cesya, Nicholas realized. Alejandra had merely shifted from one body to another. Somewhere just outside the hull of the Bore stood magnificent Cesya, waiting for what was rightfully hers. The divine right of queens. A manifest destiny of the spirit. The woman's arrogance knew no boundaries.

A tanned female dressed in a white kilt and breastplate of gold suddenly dropped into the Bore's hold like an archangel, brandishing a razor-sharp sword. She wore a golden helmet with a long purple plume trailing behind it. Amazon! The vision had completed itself. Almost from the instant she had landed, her sword began singing a deadly song in the tight, compact air of the corridor.

She charged the soldiers before they were ready. An arm was quickly severed, and an arc of blood flew across them all as a Boreman screamed pitifully. Nelson Reitinger whipped out his pistol and fired repeatedly at the golden-helmeted woman. The shots echoed inside the Bore and the woman was knocked backward against the hull, illuminated by the sun shining down from the open hatch. She crumpled up over the headless body of the first Boreman.

Another woman dropped down into the hatch, but was summarily shot—the gold of her armor was no match for copper-jacketed .45s.

Nicholas grabbed Reitinger, holding his pistol. "Nelson, if this is her scenario, why are we allowed to shoot her people? Why can't she just remove the bullets from our guns?" There was further commotion outside the Bore.

Reitinger turned to him. "The matrix of her mind is still half-programmed. Like the rest of us, she can only control so much of the world. That's why Mallory and I were able to seep into the scenarios. And Melissa, too."

"Melissa?" Nick looked at him. "Was Melissa here?"

"She was Ariuzu. Alejandra was too busy consolidating her world to notice that she'd slipped in. That made it a little easier for the rest of us."

Alejandra wasn't omnipotent after all. She was like the Christian Gnostics' concept of the demiurge, the god who created but who was himself created. And like that demiurge, she demanded much from her creations. Too much.

The Boremen were pulling out what looked like concussion grenades. They were small; each soldier held two in each hand.

"We're ready, Nelson," one said. Could these Boremen be from other sections of Foresee, an attempt to overload Mnemos Nine? Nicholas couldn't imagine what the plan was. To keep Alejandra busy on all fronts?

Reitinger walked up to the hatch. Nicholas could tell that Reitinger knew that he was going to "die," and that it was probably going to be rather unpleasant. One rarely perished in an Environmental scenario, and Nick could see Nelson wasn't looking forward to the event.

"OK, boys," Reitinger said to the surviving few. "Let's get this show on the road."

They gathered around the hatch. On Reitinger's signal, they tossed their grenades—pins pulled—up and out of the hatch.

"Go!" Nelson roared as they heard the grenades go off. The soldiers grabbed the rim of the hatch. They scrambled into the open air. "Follow us!" Nelson shouted to Nick.

Reitinger swung his apish form out of the Bore. Nicholas heard gunshots going off amidst screams and confusion. The hull of the earth-eating craft resounded from the impacts of projectiles, but after a few breathless moments a silence of death surrounded the Bore. A smell of sulfurous gunpowder drifted bitterly in.

"My Heart!" Cesya cried out. "Come out, come out!" she sang.

Slowly, Nicholas boosted himself up into a sitting position on the rim of the hatch. He still gripped the gun, for all the good it might do him.

Before him was an unhappy sight. Reitinger and the Boremen had really had no chance whatsoever, and they had known it. Alejandra was playing a hand loaded with wild cards.

The Bore rested on an open plain. A long sienna banner of soot and smoke ghosted away from the jagged cone of a volcano into the light of the morning sun. Dust and ash from the concussion grenades drifted lazily above the Bore.

Surrounding the Bore itself at a slight distance were fifty or sixty huge Clantrams. But these were not the peaceful cars of the earlier variation. Each had deadly gun turrets, and the guns were aimed at the burrowing machine.
These
Clans were of a more assertive character—a completely different scenario.

Hundreds of female warriors clad in cotton kilts and golden chest plates stood like Trojans on the plains of Dardan. They were ready with their swords and crossbows and the guns of the turrets behind them to engage whatever enemy the immature mind of Alejandra could imagine for itself.

Reitinger and the Boremen lay dead, sprouting shafts of oaken arrows like pincushions.

In full battle regalia, Cesya stepped out of the crowd of armed women and walked up to Nicholas. She smiled triumphantly, but Nicholas noticed that there was nothing malicious in her manner. It was her game now. She had finally eliminated all the competition.

"Heart," she said sincerely, "it was too bad that we had to fight your friends this way, but they had no right to interfere with us."

Nicholas could smell death all around him. It assailed his senses. Would it be like this every time he tried to get away from her? He looked up into the cruel sky, wondering if Melissa Salazar was watching over him as he lay helpless in his dream-couch.

Despite those wonderful nights in Cesya's bower, he now found nothing about her attractive. Alejandra was still a child to the core—a very spoiled child.

He felt empty as he slid down onto the killing-ground of the plain. Wind riffled the feathers of the arrows in the bodies of Nelson Reitinger and the other Boremen.

"Honey," Cesya began, dropping for a moment her warrior's guise. "Please don't be like this. I only did it for you. There isn't anything in the world I wouldn't do for you. Can't you understand that?"

There was much passion in her eyes, but he couldn't ignore the hundreds of Amazons surrounding him, their weapons ready. He knew that no matter how sincere her words sounded, she wouldn't hesitate to use up her followers, props though they were.

Melissa! his mind shouted.

"Sweetheart," Cesya breathed, "give me a chance to show you how much I love you. I can treat you as no woman has ever treated you before."

He then could feel something strange going on inside of him. Endorphins at work! It had the effect of
genna
or
gohhe
, but now Alejandra was being quite overt. The puppet master was at work again on the strings of his brain chemicals. Those eyes, those upturned breasts.…

Nicholas backed away from her, up against the Bore, even though there was really nowhere he could go. His heart began to lift on the wings of the passion she was arousing within him.

He said to her, "You don't know the first thing about love. And you can't do this to me forever."

But she held the cards. It was her deal. "I know as much about it as you do. Only, I can add more."

Cesya reached out and took away the gun Nicholas had been holding. She tossed it aside.

The golden women were withdrawing into the revised Clantrams, as if Alejandra, on the outside of the scenario, knew the probability of her success. It was not a good sign.

Cesya and Nicholas walked away from the Bore as if they were out for a Sunday stroll. She removed her helmet, shaking down her long, sensuous hair in a platinum waterfall.

The sexual pull would not go away. The orgiastic urgings brought back the memories of those long nights with her in her Clantram—how she took him so easily within her, how she touched him in just the right way.…

He had to get out.

"You don't know what it's like to suffer as a human being," Nick said. "You can control my enzymes, but you'll never sway my heart. I demand that you set me free."