The Free Lunch Page 9

  He began to see how it could work. “I get it. And then you tell them what your price is, to not let me be opened and read.”

  “Good boy.” She was looking as serene as a nun, her gaze on the middle distance. “And my minimum condition is, get the hell out of my home, at once! After that, we can negotiate. If they convince me they’re as benign as you think they are, we can work something out.”

  Mike grimaced. “What if they won’t go that high?”

  Her eyes refocused on him, and all at once she looked a thousand years old. “Then you get opened and read.”

  “Oh.”

  Several minutes of silence went by.

  “If you decide they’re Bad Guys…how are you gonna fight ’em?”

  “Good lord, how should I know? At this point I don’t even know what star they’re from, or how to kill one of them. But anything that lives can die, and anything that can die can be killed.”

  “But there aren’t any weapons in here, Annie.”

  She sighed. “There are weapons everywhere. I’ll improvise. If I have to.”

  More silence.

  “So where do you start?” Mike asked finally.

  She nodded. “That’s the next question, all right. I’m making a list now.”

  She fell silent again, and although her words had answered nothing—a list of what?—he kept silent and waited for her to finish her list.

  “I make it somewhere between twelve and fifteen,” she said at last. She saw his incomprehension and explained. “I said before there were six possible points where someone could break in, unnoticed. I’ve been working out how many points there are where one or more persons could—I suppose I might as well use the expression—‘beam down’ routinely, with zero chance of being noticed by Staff or Guests. Tricky, since I don’t know if beaming down makes noise or not. I come up with at least a dozen, and a few others I’ll have to check.”

  Mike thought of a few such sites himself. “Which do we check first?”

  She pursed her lips, like a teacher who just heard you say, “Jesus.” “‘What you mean “we,” paleface?’” she said dryly.

  He didn’t know the joke, but he took her meaning. “Well…shit, Annie, what am I supposed to do?”

  She glanced around. “The dishes and the laundry, for a start.”

  He said a word he was almost certain she would find objectionable, albeit softly; she ignored it and went on.

  “After that, you sit down and type up an e-mail containing everything we’ve been talking about, in as much detail as you can. Avery’s personal private address is in my file. I’ve fantasized using it a billion times in the last thirteen years. Never thought I ever actually would.” She shook her head. “Anyway, you address that message to Avery, with a copy to Security, and you place the cursor over Send Now, and then you spend the rest of the day no more than a second’s jump away from that mouse button. I’ll report in by voice if I see anything worth reporting—if I can—but if your Command Band lights up red, you go straight to the mouse and wait. If it starts to blink or goes dead, hit the mouse…and then run like hell.”

  Mike was too dazed to take this all in at once. “Where?” he asked, to be asking something.

  “Out from Under,” she said. “Someplace where there are a lot of people. Yell a lot. Draw a crowd.”

  “But what do I say?”

  “Tell them about how I died,” she said. “Tell them to get out their cell phones and call CNN.”

  He started to cry silently. It shocked him; there was no warning. Tears simply started leaking down his cheeks.

  She saw the tears and frowned hugely. “Don’t worry, boy: it isn’t going to happen, for God’s sake. You’re the backup letter, remember? Ever read a story where one of them got opened and read?”

  He shook his head no in agreement, but the tears kept flowing. He wanted to stop them, but couldn’t. He wiped them away with his arm. “Okay,” he said. “This sucks, but okay.”

  Her frown went away. “Any questions before I go?”

  He nodded again. “Where’s the goddamn laundry machine?”

  She smiled faintly and pointed to the sink—then smiled bigger at his expression.

  Mike took a long slow deep breath, and then another. How else could she do laundry regularly without getting caught? What else did he have to do while he waited to find out if he needed to run for his life or not? “Aw…okay. But this really sucks. The big one.”

  “After you finish your chores, read Thomas Perry.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Her smile waned. “And Mike—”

  He held up his hand. “Annie,” he said angrily, “if you tell me to be real careful not to hit the mouse by accident, you can get yourself another sealed letter.”

  Her face went blank. “I was going to say, ‘Wish me luck,’ actually.”

  They both knew she was lying. “Good luck, Annie,” he said.

  They both knew he meant it. She got up and left at once.

  HE WAS HALFWAY through typing the letter before it occurred to him that if this letter were ever actually sent…he and Annie wouldn’t be Under anymore.

  He had no idea exactly what would happen, couldn’t envision the consequences in any detail, save that he was pretty sure Dreamworld would never actually have anybody put in jail—certainly not for warning them of alien invasion. But it seemed a safe bet that when it was over, he and Annie would at best be…Out There, somewhere. In the world.

  It seemed…well, drastic. What did Annie care if some space guys snuck through Dreamworld undetected? She and Mike did the same thing themselves every day. He did not know the word “territorial” yet, but he wondered if Annie was just being jealous. Like she had to be the Boss of Under, even if she got herself thrown out proving it. And him.

  On the other hand…what if she were right to be suspicious of the intruders? Maybe it didn’t necessarily follow that traveling between stars made you a nice guy. Maybe it was just like all the stupid movies Mike had ever seen, and they wanted to conquer Earth, for no good reason.

  Something suddenly occurred to him. If that were so, if something ever happened to Annie and he actually had to send this e-mail message he was writing, the act of doing so would make him—really and truly and no shit—the Boy Who Saved the World.

  He finished the letter.

  As he was addressing it, something else occurred to him. If he sent that message, one of the first things Mr. Avery would do was call the army guys—he’d have to. And what would the army guys want to do to the aliens’ landing zone?

  Nuke it! Or come in in armor with guns blazing…gunships swooping down out of the sky on Dreamworld…paratroops drifting down onto Strawberry Fields…Firefall come early to the Octagon…horror unimaginable, ultimate obscenity…

  A two-for-one bonus: the Boy Who Saved the World could also be the Boy Who Destroyed Dreamworld Doing It.

  For a moment he was so angry at the aliens, he wanted them dead as much as Annie seemed to. The very reason he’d come Under was because Dreamworld was a place where you wouldn’t ever have to make decisions like this.

  Maybe there was no such place. He saved the message, placed the cursor over the “Send Now” button, took his finger carefully off the touchpad, and got up from the desk.

  As he did the dishes he kept pausing after rinsing each item and turning to stare at the computer, rehearsing the leap that would take him to the mouse button in the shortest possible time if the alert came.

  Doing laundry by hand required closer attention; he glanced toward the computer only once a minute or so. Thomas Perry proved too interesting; Mike tried to train himself to pause and rehearse his leap at the end of every other page, and failed often enough that he reluctantly put the book aside. He traded it for the DREAMWORLD SECURITY master manual, and that was just right: it held his attention without imprisoning it.

  A couple of hours later, he suddenly had another of those internal-Firefall realizations, a thought so
powerful the manual fell from his lap, unnoticed even though it landed on his foot. It was one of those lovely, rare double epiphanies, combining an “oh wow!” with an “of course!” The kind where the instant you saw it, you couldn’t believe you hadn’t thought of it hours ago, but it was so lovely you forgave yourself.

  Mike was going to get to do him some alien hunting after all. Annie was going to have to let him.

  “Do you read?” his wrist said. “Come in, over.”

  He jumped half a meter in the air and almost hit himself in the teeth with his Command Band. “Are you okay, Annie?” he yelled at it, and then felt stupid, blurting out her name that way like a kid.

  “Answer, dammit!”

  He felt even stupider. Annie had only had time the night before to teach him a few of the Band’s myriad functions, but enabling its mike had been one of the first. He got a grip on himself, switched the thing on, and said, “Read you. Status?”

  “We got troubles,” she said.

  C H A P T E R 8

  IGNORANT ARMIES

  Not quite believing he was doing it, Mike got up and went to the computer. “Where are you?”

  “Hold your fire!” she said urgently, ignoring his question. “Don’t do it yet. In fact, wipe the damned thing: we’d look like idiots.”

  “What?”

  “No, don’t do that. But go through it now and take out every reference to ETs. They’re human beings, lad.”

  He felt an odd mixture of relief and disappointment. If they were only human, he had no doubt Annie could handle them. But now his brilliant spaceman hypothesis was as dumb and childish as Annie had originally thought. He was just a dopey kid who’d managed to talk a smart grown-up into believing in fairy tales for a few hours. Impressive, by his usual standards…but a major comedown from being the Boy Who Saved the World.

  “Who?” he asked automatically as these thoughts and others tumbled through his head.

  “Beats me. I’ve spotted two so far, maybe a third—and this is in addition to costumed Trolls. These are goons, in civilian clothes. While you’re editing, put this in: they’re carrying guns. I don’t know how, but they are, no mistaking it. Can’t tell what kind. Are you typing?”

  After all that rehearsal, he tripped and fell on the way to the computer. “I am now,” he said when he got there. Taking great care not to touch the mouse button just below it, he used the touchpad to move the cursor from the Send button to the text area, clicked there, and began scrolling and editing. “Where are you now?”

  “The Warlock’s, heading in. They’re running some kind of search pattern. Don’t know what for.”

  “Are they all little people?”

  “Affirmative. We knew that.”

  “Who could they be?”

  “Insufficient data.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t know, all right? I’m going to go silent now: getting hard to keep them in sight without being in earshot too. Do not take any action without my signal.”

  “Be careful.” The line went dead.

  He finished editing the message to Mr. Avery, doing the best he could, removing all references to extraterrestrials. And then he waited, for a million years, in an agony of suspense and indecision.

  He thought he knew—at least in theory—a way to interface his Command Band with the computer, and then use it to physically track Annie’s Band, plotting its location against a map of Dreamworld. But he might be wrong—and if he opened up the necessary application and experimented, it would take him precious seconds to get back to the e-mail application if the alert came. Worse, he might hang the system and have to reboot.

  But he hated not knowing exactly where she was.

  AFTER AN ENDLESS time, he reached the horrid conclusion that something had gone wrong.

  Annie was not going to come back online. If she could, she’d have done so by now, if only to reassure him. There must have been a fourth one she hadn’t spotted. Or one of the bogus Trolls had seen her, or perhaps there’d been a second search team backstopping the first—it didn’t matter how: she’d been caught, and Mike had to do something.

  But she had not sent the signal.

  The very last thing she had said to him was, “Do not take any action without my signal.” All he could do was sit here and do nothing, while the fate of Dreamworld was decided somewhere else by people he’d never seen.

  With all his heart, Mike wanted to leave—race to the Warlock’s Keep, pick up Annie’s trail, and rescue her somehow. But even assuming he was actually competent to pull it off—defeat several grown-ups in combat and rescue another—he knew it was the one thing he must not do. Now of all times. If Annie was in trouble, had been captured, then the only card she had left to play was him, the only weapon she owned was the sealed letter he represented. The worst possible thing he could do was risk getting himself captured too. Nothing dumber lay within his power.

  To be doing something, he tried his idea for interfacing his Command Band with the computer, and it worked. There were some keyboard functions he couldn’t figure out how to duplicate with the Band, but basically it was now a remote terminal for the computer. Shortly he had a fix on Annie’s carrier signal. She was in a large vehicle depot about halfway between the Warlock’s Keep and The China That Never Was, two levels underground. Her position was unchanging.

  With a little fumbling, he managed to bring up readings from her Band’s medical monitor. It said she was in stress. High pulse, blood pressure, and blood oxy.

  Something within Mike fractured.

  He returned to the mail program. Leaving the Avery message carefully undisturbed, he opened a second message box on top of it. After some thought, he addressed this one to “John@aol.com”—there had to be one—and limited the message to two blank paragraphs, even though Annie had assured him this account had no official existence and could not be traced. He placed the cursor on this message’s Send button. Then he stepped back a few paces, took a few deep breaths, held his breath, and poked at his Command Band.

  On-screen, the cursor turned into a spinning ball, and the blank message vanished, on its way through cyberspace. He stepped forward and confirmed that the cursor now rested on the Avery message’s Send button. With his Command Band, he had just proven, he could send that message to Mr. Avery from anywhere in Dreamworld.

  The fractured thing within him snapped clean through.

  He made a slow circle, but the most lethal portable object in the room was a steak knife. Those six seconds were all the time he wasted before racing out the door. He knew of places along the way where tools were stored…

  THREADING THE MAZE through the underside of Dreamworld was a challenge. Despite his newly acquired working knowledge of the basic layout, he got lost and had to backtrack twice. The second time, he even needed to briefly go Topside and reorient himself. This was his first time in this particular part of Dreamworld—underground, anyway—and his grasp of geography was largely theoretical. He wished he were more sophisticated in the use of his Command Band as a computer remote interface: he suspected it was possible to use it not only to track any changes in Annie’s location, but to monitor his own progress, let him know when he was drifting off course. But even if he knew how to do that, he might not dare. At all costs, he must keep the Command Band and computer ready to send that message at the press of a stud.

  At last he recognized landmarks that told him he was approaching his goal, and slowed his pace drastically, lest he blunder into a trap. He’d decided on tactics along the way, while choosing from among the tools he’d found available.

  According to the records, the depot where Annie was now located housed assorted floats and other vehicles used during the Firefall Parade. In theory, it was accessible only from the surface, via a large freight elevator or an emergency stairwell. Obviously it would be stupid to go anywhere near either of those. A pity there were no internal-combustion mobiles in Dreamworld, or the depot would have had huge ventilation sh
afts. But even modern vehicles implied drains. Vehicles always leaked oil and other fluids, and had to be washed and hosed off. Beneath that depot would be unusually large drains and catch basins—and Mike believed he knew how to get into the drainage system.

  Sure enough, the access hatch was just where he’d hoped it would be. The lock yielded to the same code that had let him into the maintenance tunnel system yesterday. The drainage tube was much smaller than that one had been—but no smaller than the branch tunnel in which Mike had hidden then. Of course, this one had no lights at all in it…

  He climbed in without hesitation. It was clammy inside and damp at the bottom, but there was no actual standing water in it. He sealed the hatch behind him and began crawling as fast as he could through total darkness, ignoring damage to knees and elbows and trying to build three-dimensional maps in his head with insufficient data.

  He did this to keep his mind off his fear. Annie’s captors, whoever they were, very badly wanted their existence kept secret. There were only two ways to do that: take her out of Dreamworld against her will—a much bigger technical challenge than sneaking in in the first place—or kill her.

  God, it stinks in here. Getting slimy, too.

  If they knew that she was Under, that there was no record of her existence here, they’d almost have to be crazy not to kill her and put her corpse into the outgoing sewage system.

  Should be a left coming up soon…ah, there! Turning was harder than expected, but he managed at the cost of some skin. Straight shot from here…

  There was a theoretical third possibility: terrifying her into silence. But Mike didn’t think anybody could look at Annie and believe she could be threatened.

  He was distracted from distracting himself by the sight of what appeared to be pale hexagrams, hovering in the darkness ahead of him. At first he took them for optical illusions, hallucinations produced by his brain in response to total darkness, like the paisley swirls of color he’d been seeing all along. But these enlarged as he moved forward. All at once he realized what they were. Each “hexagram” was bars of light filtering down into the tube through a large rectangular grate overhead. He was nearly under the depot…