Quite Possibly Heroes (Freeman Universe Book 3), page 11
She’d said it just like that. The feel of the neck between one’s fingers.
Old Seamus shivered. Just do it.
New Seamus ignored him. He flicked the knife open and placed it in the center of the work surface, where it would be impossible to miss. If he were to sit here long enough, eventually someone would find him. Ares Adonis. Olek. His father. All he had to do was… nothing.
After a while he gripped the wire, and felt around at the base of his neck, between his shoulder blades.
This was a lot harder to do with one hand than with two.
And then something clicked, and the world shut off.
And then he wasn’t alone anymore.
“Hello, Void,” he said to the void.
He knew that his lips wouldn’t move. That he would utter no sound. Would move not a muscle. That what was now blackness would slowly illuminate, as his mind gathered materials from the library. All he needed to know was where to begin. And he knew that, thanks to the Gant’s records and the work he’d put in studying them.
Unlike a librarian’s interface, what he could seek for didn’t end inside the library. He could poke around anywhere.
Anywhere he could find. Anywhere he dared look. If he took a misstep and realized it, he could bail out and run. But if he tripped over something and he didn’t realize it… He hoped they used the knife. Or if they decided to strangle him, they screwed up and left him jacked in. Except they’d knock the jack out, getting the feel of his neck beneath their fingers. So that wouldn’t work. They should use the knife. He hoped they did.
This always seemed the weirdest part. No settling in, no getting ready, no arranging one’s possessions. He was in, and every second he was in was a second his enemies had to find him. He needed to find what he needed to find and get out.
There was no sense of time passing. It was perpetually now inside. The wire, which wasn’t really a wire, but wire-like, was short enough and the connectors loose enough that if he fell out of his seat he’d un-jack. He knew that worked, because it had happened once, while cramming for his sophomore finals. Technically it wasn’t cheating, but he didn’t want people to know. It wasn’t cheating because it was impossible, except it wasn’t. At the time it felt like he was hiding a superpower, one that ran in the family and was mostly used for evil. But he was different, and he was using that power for good.
He laughed. This time the story he told himself felt almost true.
And the sooner he started using his power for good, the sooner he’d finish.
So he began.
And instantly realized he had a huge blind spot.
He’d heard that the interface seemed different to different people. To him inside looked like columns of numbers. It smelled like columns of numbers. It felt like columns of numbers. Tasted like columns of numbers. The numbers wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, like a musical score wouldn’t make sense to someone who couldn’t read music. A musical score didn’t sound like anything. Except it did. It was like that with numbers for him, inside. And now it felt as if he’d gone deaf in one ear and couldn’t read the score, except it wasn’t his ear, but part of one eye that he couldn’t hear with. There wasn’t anything active in his brain, not like with an implant, so it had to be a bad wire, a bad workstation, or faulty connections in his brain, or whatever the connector at the base of his neck connected to. He thought it was connected to his brain, that’s what they’d told him as a kid, but people lie to kids. It could be hardwired to his sensory organs for all he knew, and piggybacking signals on their outputs.
It didn’t matter how it really worked. Testing the internal connections seemed like a reasonable place to start. Tearing Ixatl-Nine-Go out of him could have severed something, or shorted it out.
He tested the connections in isolation. Most of them worked fine. But when he touched three of them the void shivered. So he blocked those connections in what he thought of as the interface’s control panel.
He could still work. He’d just have to work slower. Stay inside longer. Be more careful.
It wasn’t the end of the world.
That would come with one swift slice.
Or one long, slow, squeeze.
22
Seamus saw stars as his forehead struck the deck. Someone was shouting, he covered his head with his hands, he was being pelted with stuff, and the shouting kept going. Until it suddenly stopped, and someone kicked him, not hard, but dismissively, like they were done with him.
He cracked an eye open and got a toe to the ribs. “I said jet off! This is my seat.”
Seamus laughed, and crabbed out of toe range, and leaned against the bulkhead. His possessions were scattered around him. He glanced at the open knife. Old Seamus reached for it but New Seamus scooped it up and flicked it closed, and pocketed it.
His attacker was a big guy, muscular and scowling, but he wasn’t going to murder Seamus in the next ten seconds. He spread his stuff around the work surface, regular student stuff. He plopped a portable computer onto the table and opened it up, an expensive unit, fashionably retro, the sort of status symbol that said that utility wasn’t as important to him as signaling. He was dressed the part as well. Spindle-rat rags fresh out of a First Families’ macrofab.
“Show me your reservation,” Old Seamus mouthed.
New Seamus pointed at the three other, empty workstations in the cluster. “Those were available.”
He made a fist and shook it at Seamus. “Here’s my reservation. And fuck you. You were in. My. Spot.” His eyes narrowed. “Are you even a student?”
“But I was almost done,” Old Seamus whined.
“I’m calling security,” the guy said.
New Seamus began to gather his stuff. “Forget it. I’m going.” He stood.
The world shook, his legs shook, but it wasn’t at all like he was going to stroke out. Adrenaline shakes. Old Seamus boiled beneath his skin; he’d thought he was being murdered and now this? The guy was bigger than Seamus, everyone was bigger than Seamus.
Leave it, New Seamus thought. A lump of carbon was bigger than a diamond.
He was harder than diamond now.
He was whatever diamond became when it passed the event horizon.
When it fell into the gravity of a black hole and kept falling.
Seamus took one of the other workstations.
He placed his possessions on the table.
All but for the knife.
The guy flipped the two-handed computer open. He punched a couple of keys and a prerecorded comedy began to play on the rubbish lowrez display, an overdubbed laugh track spilling tinny and unreal from its tiny rubbish speakers.
Old Seamus reached for the knife.
New Seamus stopped him. He had that power now.
You were that guy, he reminded Old Seamus. Smoother, more polished, because you had to be. More subtle. More indirect. Watch what he does next.
The guy pretended to watch the screen of his status toy, but his gaze kept darting to Seamus.
Who sat quietly. Who prepared to use a different, less desirable terminal. Who wasn’t hurting anyone.
The guy paused the comedy playback and tapped a couple keys. And then he used his rubbish lips to speak into the unit’s rubbish microphone. “Security?”
I was never that guy, Old Seamus lied.
New Seamus ignored him. He entered his credentials, they worked; he touched a file and the backdoor he’d installed his freshman year worked; he promoted his account to admin and that worked; he made himself a security agent and that worked; he reprogrammed all of the cipher locks on the floor and that worked.
He started to log out, which forced the cleanup to begin, but he stopped.
New Seamus started to stand. I’m never coming back here. What’s the point?
Old Seamus slammed them back into their seat. The work is the point. We’re a professional. Now act like one.
He sighed, and signed out, and that worked.
He waited. Somewhere processes kicked back on, logs began logging again, caches started caching again, and five minutes later the locks would begin to reset.
When he reached a lock, and entered the code he’d chosen, the displays on the locksets would flash green twice. The existing cipher code would be stored and a new one set. The display would flash green three times. Then he could enter the escape code, the lock would work, and when it latched again, reset to the original code. He knew it worked because he’d tested it dozens of times as an undergrad. There existed no better place to meet girls than the library.
The guy turned his recorded comedy on again and pretended to ignore Seamus.
Four minutes later Seamus heard footsteps. He rose and headed for the doorway that led to the emergency-exit stairwell.
Someone opened the stairwell door.
Seamus turned the opposite way and kept walking. A row of tall storage media cabinets hid him from view. He could enter the service corridors ahead. It wasn’t ideal, and he wasn’t dressed for it, but he didn’t want to explain who he was, or what he was doing there.
“You took your fucking time,” the guy said. “Hey!”
There was a snapping sound, one Seamus recognized, then a thump, like a bag of garbage being dropped onto the deck.
Seamus stopped. More footsteps. Lots of them.
“I wanted him alive,” a deep voice said.
“What for?” a woman said.
“To make him suffer.”
More footsteps. Ones he could use to mask his own. He began to move again, timing his footfalls with the others.
“No one told me,” the woman said.
“Told you what?” another man said.
“Not to kill him. Why are you two late?”
“We can’t come in the front door, can we?”
A short laugh. One that sounded familiar.
Seamus reached the service hatch.
“What’s so funny,” the woman said.
He typed in the reset code.
“That’s not him. He’s a small man. Very quick. Very clever. This is meat.”
Two green lights flashed.
“No one told me.”
“No one thought you could catch him.”
Come on, come on.
“This has to be him. He was using this workstation.”
That laugh again.
Three green lights flashed.
“I’m telling you, that’s not him,” the man said.
Seamus’s fingers danced over the keypad.
“He’s right,” Sun Shin Liuc said.
The lock clicked.
“That’s him over there, by the service hatch.”
23
The hatch closed behind him and latched. The lock reset to its original settings. He began to jog along the corridor, not because he was in a hurry, but because it was cold this close to the service docks.
He could hear them pounding on the hatch behind him. Good luck with that. There were lifts and emergency stairwells on both sides of the hatch. They ran parallel but every floor had a service hatch between them, and every service hatch remained locked. He supposed they could find a security guard and dragoon them into service, forcing them to override the locks, or find someone with skills like his to add their own hack, but both would take time. By then he’d be long gone.
There was another hatch, on the main level, one that led to a delivery courtyard, and a sally gate. The gate led to a loading dock and private platform for the zero-radial tram, a terminal station beyond the terminal station, one only used by staff and faculty between semesters, and by those few students that knew its secret. There was a maintenance hatch and a tunnel behind it that led to another maintenance hatch on the other side of the security perimeter. It was meant to be blocked after the tram had been completed, and it had been, but it had been opened up again later, for some emergency repairs, ones done without a work order and on the cheap, the difference in funds being pocketed, and the breach patched in the way that off-the-books work was always done, halfway, in the dark, and without a thought for tomorrow.
Without people like that, it would be a lot harder for people like him to move freely through the world. He considered taking the lift but he might bump into someone. And while there were recording sensors everywhere on the station, the ones on trams and lifts and loading docks tended to be monitored by people with actual brains and not almost-expert systems churned out by lowest-cost bidders.
A hundred meters of hard vacuum stood between the service docks on the ring and those on the spindle. A migrant or two leaking across, a trickle of contraband, those were acceptable risks in the Freeman Sector in particular. An invasion of Hundred Planets skinnies, or a river of goods bypassing the fingers of the First Families, were the worries, and rivers didn’t flow up stairwells one tread at a time. They used the lifts, the trams, and the airlocks.
He had time, and this close to the spindle he had the stamina. The gravity remained light because the loads were low value and heavy, trolleys of rubbish picked clean and destined for a sunward trajectory, body bags offloaded onto barges at the ring and shipped under and over, the barges little more than freight-expediting containers programmed to follow a looping flight plan, from the ring, to spindle, and back again. He’d come onto the station that way, via the spindle under a shroud, stitched up and tossed off the nic Cartaí longboat as dead, the short ride from ring to spindle long enough for him to cut his way out, and wait with the dead for the hatch to open and Sun Kang’s people to lock in and begin the unloading.
And now Sun Kang had betrayed him.
And Seamus had escaped, despite the betrayal. They had no hope of catching him now. He could see the stairwell door.
He touched the lock. Two green lights flashed.
Excellent. His little workers began their task of copying the old code to memory, storing it, loading the new code, storing it, the only thing capable of interrupting their work a power failure, and that wasn’t going to happen, or a—
The fire alarm began to scream.
—priority override.
The lock flashed five times. It clicked. Every lock in the library clicked.
Open.
Seamus cursed.
And ran.
The lifts wouldn’t work.
He was fast but there were, what, four of them chasing him?
Five?
They could spread out and blanket the exits.
He needed to get to an exit first.
But which one?
Old Seamus laughed.
The closest one.
New Seamus felt the blood drain from his face.
And hooked a right turn into a cross corridor.
One aimed toward the spindle.
He didn’t have time to argue.
And he’d only be wasting his time.
I hate it when he’s right.
24
The loading dock felt freezing cold. He wished he had a merchant captain’s great coat almost as much as he wished he had two hands.
He practically leapt into one of the emergency hardsuits racked in the airlock vestibule. They were one-size-fits-all and two fully clothed Seamuses could fit into one.
The last time he’d suited up he’d done it in thirty seconds, plumbing included. This time he was taking shortcuts, it was a hundred-meter sprint, not a marathon spacewalk. The only safety protocol he worried about was the one that said get off the ring before someone snaps your neck like a chemical light stick.
It had taken thirty seconds and two hands last time. And last time he hadn’t had to spend forty seconds slashing all of the other emergency suits on the rack with some spindle rat’s stolen switchblade. He didn’t think he’d like a thruster chase in hard vacuum any more than he cared for a foot chase through a space station’s only slightly warmer service corridors. He couldn’t understand how he could be freezing and sweating at the same time.
He clicked the helmet to the collar and began to tongue through the command menu.
He clicked on the first gauntlet. Emergency hardsuits didn’t have gloves, but gauntlets, a double layer of protection running up the forearms to the elbows. The forearms of the suits tended to wear. It was cheaper to replace gauntlets than suits. Gauntlets weren’t any harder to put on than gloves.
If you had two hands, they weren’t.
He’d just about worked out a system when he heard someone shout, “There he is!”
It was only a hundred meters. Did the suit really need to seal?
Are you an idiot? Of course it does.
He gave one more desperate tug.
The right gauntlet telltale on the heads-up display flashed from red to green.
He stepped into the airlock.
They were at the far end of the corridor.
There were five of them.
Three of them he recognized.
Two spindle rats he’d never seen.
Sun Shin Liuc. The betrayer.
The girl he’d admired on the way into the library. She looked more fashionable from behind. The nerve disruptor in her hand didn’t match her shoes.
Then there was a man he’d only seen in images.
Ares Adonis.
Evil, wrapped in evil, with extra evil on the side.
Ixatl-Nine-Go rode him. Seamus had learned that and more while he was inside.
He’d been no less a monster before he and Ixatl-Nine-Go had hooked up.
They were a match made in hell.
And they wanted to make Seamus suffer.
Suffer some more.
He was huge.
Bigger than Ciarán mac Diarmuid.
Bigger than Macer Gant.
Big, and quite far away, all things considered.
He’d hate to see how big Ares Adonis looked up close.
Seamus press the airlock cycle control.
Old Seamus waved.
Ares Adonis charged.
He was very fast.
New Seamus groaned and began to step further into the airlock.
