The Machine's Child (Company) Read online

  ANOTHER MORNING

  IN 2302 AD

  Commander Bell-Fairfax, sir! Wake up.

  It was gray and early, with night draining away into morning. Edward was awake before the voice had finished speaking. Beside him, Alec and Nicholas slept on.

  What is it, Machine?

  Lady Luck just spread her knees, son. Appears Dr. Zeus had a little trouble running down some of the Enforcer commanding officers when they was demobilized. Somebody named Labienus had a bug devised to knock ’em out during a fight. Won’t kill ’em, of course, but it’ll send ’em into fugue. I’ve just managed to copy it!

  How is it administered?

  In yer murdering days, did you ever use a blowpipe and poisoned darts?

  Yes.

  Because I’ve made the neatest—You did? Well. So much the better, then. No circuitry he can detect, y’see? And it gets better. I got the frequency and the hailing codes Dr. Zeus uses to send him messages. We just tell him Dr. Zeus has decided to transfer a prisoner, and yer the bailiff!

  Edward flexed his hands. Clever. But I’d gathered the impression Dr. Zeus never brought anyone back from this damned place.

  To be sure, sir, he never does. But you ought to be able to keep the lie going long enough for this Marco to turn his back on you, and then all you got to do is shoot him with a dart and run like hell. The harder he chases you, the faster it’ll knock him out. Then you get the girl out of her cell, and make off with her. We clap on sail and leave any pursuers awash in our wake.

  Edward nodded. All very satisfactory.

  Now, we want to be damned careful piloting in. The Company’s charts is confusing. It looks like the girl was sent back in time twice on 24 March, 1863; leastways there’s two transit entries for her on that date. They might be a few seconds apart or a few hours or any amount of time, and I ain’t got any way of knowing which one to reckon from.

  Then take your best guess, Edward told him impatiently. Now, in the event that anyone’s injured . . . or should Mendoza require medical attention after her ordeal . . .

  Bless you, sir, I got a full infirmary belowdecks. Had time to make certain improvements in it whilst our Alec was getting better after his suicide attempt, so it’s got features even he don’t know about; and that’s something I’d beg the liberty to discuss with you at a more convenient time, private-like, if you catch my meaning, sir.

  Do I? Perhaps I do. You’re a conniving old devil, aren’t you, Machine?

  Aye, sir, and I reckon we’re two birds of a feather, ain’t we? All I want is what’s best for Alec; and he don’t, always. But I reckon getting the girl is the first step to making him see things my way. You and me can row along together, later, eh, and sign articles?

  Perhaps. When we’ve rescued the girl.

  Edward woke the others. Tersely, he told them the plan and something of what they might expect.

  “A hospital’s not so bad,” said Alec. “Maybe they just keep her there, on drugs. That’s what happens when ordinary people get arrested.”

  Edward considered him. He looked at Nicholas.

  “Not quite,” he said. “I’m afraid this will be very bad indeed. Perhaps as bad as the Inquisition.”

  Nicholas blanched. Alec looked from one to the other of them, until he remembered what the word meant from Mendoza’s journal. He opened his mouth in horror but Edward continued, not giving him time to speak:

  “I think it’s best if I take control for the job. Neither of you have much experience in this sort of thing.”

  “Do what thou must,” said Nicholas. Alec nodded. It took an effort of will for him to relinquish control, and wait as Bully Hayes and Flint brought out a suit of body armor, to be worn under the Company-issue coveralls the Captain had fabricated during the night. Edward dressed, swiftly and efficiently. Billy Bones crept forward, offering on a tray an assortment of clever little knives and a length of flexible pipe. Edward inspected the knives briefly, and made them disappear into Alec’s clothing. He took up the pipe next and examined it.

  “Where’s the dart, Captain?” he said.

  Hooked into the pipe, so it can’t fall out. See in there? When yer ready to use it, twist the pipe. The dart will unlock. It’s loaded with enough of the stuff to drop him in his tracks.

  Edward nodded in satisfaction. The pipe disappeared, too.

  “Shall we go?” he said. The others rose and followed him. He mixed a time transcendence cocktail and gulped it down, grimacing; then fastened himself into the storm harness. Alec and Nicholas linked arms with him and held on. Clear calm day was breaking over the sea, as clouds fled away with the rags of the night.

  “Cast off, Captain, if you please,” said Edward.

  Aye aye sir!

  The air filled with yellow stasis gas, the masts retracted and the storm canopy closed down. The Captain Morgan hurtled through time.

  LATER SOME SAME EVENING IN 300,000 BCE

  When the gas cleared, when the ship had righted itself, Edward unfastened the harness and they got to their feet.

  “Where are we?” said Alec. There was darkness beyond the portholes.

  By thunder, that took some navigating! 300,000 BCE, lying off an island what ain’t there in our time. See that light to starboard? That’s the facility. It’s about eight bells in the second dog-watch, if time had any meaning here, which it don’t, but a night raid’s better. I’ve just sent the communication to the guard. He’ll be expecting you, but not so soon. Best for our purposes if you take him by surprise.

  “Very good,” said Edward. With a gesture something like an elaborate stretch he assured himself that all his hidden weapons were where they ought to be. “The air-boat travels fairly swiftly, doesn’t it? We’ll take that ashore.”

  Already powering up, sir.

  “I will say this once.” Edward turned to the others. “I’m in command on this mission. Do not, at any time, attempt to wrest control from me. If what you see dismays you, avert your eyes. Is that understood?”

  The other two nodded.

  “Then we’re off, gentlemen,” Edward said. He gave a bleak smile. “God and Saint George!”

  “For Mendoza,” said Alec. They clasped hands and went out on deck.

  It was a short journey across black water, toward a blur of sulphur-colored light that flickered. Nicholas, half expecting the fires of Hell, was thoroughly unnerved by the time they arrived there. The agboat settled just above the tideline and Edward leaped out, Alec and Nicholas following. They found they had to run as he ran, in silence, through the night toward the illumination they now saw was steady, occluded only by the silhouette of a turning wheel, some kind of gear mechanism throwing strange shadows along the approach to the building.

  When they came close enough to see the scurrying legs and working arms, they froze for a moment. Alec gave a nervous chuckle. Then he realized what he was seeing and doubled over, retching. Nicholas nearly followed suit. Edward waited, watching them; when he judged they had recovered enough he strode on, and the others had no choice but to scramble after him.

  They came around the corner and saw the old couch, the refrigeration unit, and the doorway. There was a waggish sign tacked up above the door, hand-lettered: THE BUREAU OF PUNITIVE MEDICINE, it read.

  Edward set his shoulders and strode through the doorway.

  He was struck at once by a suffocating wave of smell. It was compounded of chemicals and some kind of animal musk, of blood, and charred tissue, and ozone. Invisible behind him, Alec retched again, clutching at the doorway. Nicholas looked into that great room with its gleaming instruments and bright lights. No brazier of coals, no fearful rusted iron to grow red-hot there; tidily bottled acids instead, powered drills, marvels of technology that would have made the hooded monks envious. Still, Nicholas recognized what he was seeing.

  Eloi, Eloi, lama sabancthani—

  Shut your mouth, Edward told him, and continued forward.

  They saw a vast back, bending over a table.
As they drew closer, Marco rose and turned.

  “You’re early,” he observed.

  The Captain prompted, and Edward said:

  “Penal Specialist Marco? I’m here for the transfer of the prisoner Mendoza.”

  He was doing his best not to stare, as Alec and Nicholas were staring transfixed, at the shuddering thing on the table, or the fluids that were daubed liberally across the front of Marco’s black rubberized raincoat.

  But Marco was looking at Edward, fascinated. He set down the tool he had been using and stepped closer, sniffing the air carefully. His eyes began to glow with a certain humor.

  “It’s here. But what are you? You’re something new, aren’t you?” He put his head on one side, considering.

  “Yes, I am,” Edward said, flexing his hands slowly. “And that’s no business of yours, I’m afraid.”

  “Right, right; I don’t need to know,” agreed Marco. He came closer still. “All the same . . . I’m intrigued. You’re mortal, but not Homo sapiens sapiens! And you’re a cyborg, aren’t you? In a limited kind of way.”

  “You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?” Edward smiled at him. “They haven’t kept you informed. Yes, I’m the latest fashion in security technicals. But I’m not general knowledge, you see. Just like you.”

  “A lot like me,” Marco said, sidling just a bit closer, sniffing the air again. There was something unnervingly familiar about the giant. Deep-set palest blue eyes, dun-colored hair, fair skin, and a general strangeness in the articulation of his upper body . . . and very broad, very high cheekbones.

  Alec, who had had the opportunity to look into more mirrors than the other two men, understood first and grunted as though he’d been punched. Edward managed to smile.

  “You know, I do believe you’re right,” he said. “Do you suppose we’re related, somehow?”

  “Not a doubt in my mind,” said the other. “You’ve got some of our genetic material. So the Company’s trying again, huh? I knew they’d come around in the end. Well, this feels like a birthday or something! Can I offer you a beer?”

  “No, thank you.” Edward kept smiling. “But please indulge yourself, by all means.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” said Marco, and sidled past him to reach out to the refrigerator. He began to smile, too, a funny little smile that stiffened Edward’s spine. Neither of them were turning their backs on the other.

  Marco held up a beer in a salute—Edward had calculated its suitability as a weapon in a microsecond—and twisted its neck off.

  “To the Old Guard!” he said, and drank.

  “To the Old Guard,” said Edward. “And its last bastion. So this is what they’ve got you doing, is it?” He gestured at the table and its writhing occupant.

  “That’s right,” Marco said, belching. He wiped foam from his mustache. “Reaching for the unreachable star. Every time I think I’ve figured out a way to make one of the little bastards die, they reroute or regrow or whatever—and I’m back where I started.”

  “You seem to have damaged this one pretty badly,” Edward said, strolling around the steel table, to put it between them under pretext of examining what lay there. Alec had his eyes shut tight. Nicholas, weeping, couldn’t look away.

  “It always starts out easy,” Marco said, setting down the beer. “They come here wanting to die in the first place. The sense of guilt—for whatever reason—is strong enough to override the basic defense programming. They let me strap them down, and then there’s nothing they can do but go along for the ride.

  “That’s the honeymoon, then, that’s when I can take off their arms or their legs and ask them questions about what they’re experiencing. Only problem is, when I’ve worked on them long enough so they’ve lost voluntary control, the involuntary reflexes kick in, and those are unbeatable. So far,” he added, reaching for his beer again.

  “There are no poisons?” Edward frowned down at the subject.

  “None. Their systems neutralize them.”

  “But—surely if you removed the heart—?”

  “They start growing new ones. I could do that with this thing.” Marco pointed with the beer. “You know what would happen? He’d fugue out, and I’d put him back in his box and pump in bioretardant to keep the heart from growing back, and it wouldn’t—but nothing else would happen. The biomechanicals in his system would fight the retardant to a standstill. If enough time passed, they’d start converting molecules from the bioretardant into new tissue! He’d still be alive in there, shut down, until the next time I thought of something to try.”

  “How tedious.” Edward swallowed.

  “It is. For the first few thousand years I used to just whittle away at them, until finally they were down to the skulls. That’s where the last defense action gets fought, you see? Nothing gets into their skulls. Can’t penetrate the things. Can’t crush them, either.”

  “Really?” Edward looked up.

  “Oh yes.” Marco grinned, leaning across the table companionably. He jostled his subject in doing so. It went into a fit of silent shrieking. He ignored it and had another sip of beer. “I’ll bet you haven’t been briefed on this, but because you’re some kind of little brother, I’ll let you in on a secret. It isn’t the design of an immortal’s skull that makes it impenetrable. It isn’t even the decapitation support package in there. It’s the fact that it incorporates its own time transcendence field.”

  “Fascinating.” Edward attempted to appear intrigued. He felt the focus of attention that meant that the Captain was listening and recording.

  “Swear to God. Inside their skulls, existence is always just a split-second out of phase with the rest of the universe. No matter when I go in to try and saw one of them open, they’re always in some other when just as soon as I do, and nothing happens. Well, to them. Saw blades explode, or turn to rust flakes in my hand. This is why you can lop off our heads, but you can’t kill us,” Marco said. His smile widened, became slightly malicious as he regarded Edward. “And you can bet our masters won’t install this stuff in you, little brother. It doesn’t matter to them if you die; they can always make more of you. But you’re probably too well indoctrinated to mind that, I guess.”

  “Naturally.” Edward smiled back. “What about fire?”

  “I’ll tell you about fire.” Marco drained his beer and flung the container out through the door. “I thought, what if I dumped one of their skulls in a raging volcano? I didn’t have one handy, of course, but I dug a pit out there and filled it with everything I could think of. Special-ordered liquid fuel, solid fuel, all the flammable junk in the world. Lit it and had to jump back: it roared up two stories tall, singed my beard right off to the roots, good and hot like Hell is supposed to be. Burned for two days down, consuming the rock underneath it. I was almost afraid this island was going to sink. But I’d created a nice white-hot inferno in its heart, so on the second day I loaded up my little friends into a wheelbarrow.

  “Come on, kids, I yelled, we’re going for a ride! Must have been ten skulls in there, ten old deathless ones holed up inside their ferroceramic caves. I took them out and tipped them into the holocaust. Boom! Something jerked at the fabric of space and time, I can tell you, and I thought I’d done it at last. I danced around that pit, I was so happy. Then I was thirsty, so I went for another beer, but you know what I saw when I looked in through the door?

  “There they were, all ten of them, lined up on a shelf like so many coconuts, staring at me with their sockets.

  “Man, I was pissed,” Marco said, standing and stretching. “And you know what the worst part of it was? Within two days they were growing tissue back. All the fire had done was scour away the bioretardant.”

  “How very frustrating for you,” said Edward. Marco shrugged.

  “It’s a job,” he said. “Not so bad, really. The work is fun and I can tinker with my little hobbies. What do you think of my generator? The wind vanes weren’t reliable, and I had all these immortal parts lying
around, and I thought—”

  “Put them to some use, yes, really rather clever of you,” said Edward. “Well. As interesting as this is, I need to attend to business, I’m afraid.”

  Marco’s smile widened, showing his enormous long teeth, and his eyes took on a shine like broken glass.

  “That’s right, your business,” he said brightly. “You came for Mendoza. Yes, I remember that one. Funny, though, you know? In all the ages I’ve been here, not once has the Company ever called any of them back. This is a little unusual.”

  “So is Mendoza,” said Edward. “As I daresay you must have discovered.”

  “Yes indeed.” Marco pushed back from the table and stood. “Crome Girl. How did she ever slip by their notice? I bet somebody thinks they’ve found a way to harness Crome’s, huh? So they need her back for experiments?”

  “Something like that,” Edward said.

  “Well, well.” Marco sidled off toward the racks of shelves. “Let’s go see if we can find her.”

  The racks were no closer together than bookshelves in a library, but Marco was so wide he was obliged to turn sideways as he went along between them. Edward followed slowly, acutely aware of the possibilities of a trap. He had the exit at his back, at least, and Marco was at a comparative disadvantage in that he had very little room. So intent was Edward on planning his strike that it did not register on him that they were not walking past cell doors: only steel coffins.

  It registered on Alec and Nicholas, though, pulled along unwillingly as they were. Alec began to curse. Nicholas stumbled after him in silence. Then he cried out and froze, arresting their progress until Edward yanked them on again.

  What the shrack is it? Alec turned to him.

  I made this place! Nicholas looked horrified.

  What?

  Thy Spirit said it. I testified in the flame where I burned, and set in motion this long coil, this hellish circumstance that bore this Company!

  Lad, it ain’t true. And even if it was, now ain’t the time to think about it.

  All this place is mine, said Nicholas as though he hadn’t heard the Captain, and none but I set her on the path that led her here. He stared along the narrow aisle, row upon row of steel coffins, and heard now clearly the faint terrible sounds that came from within them. The coffins bore brass plates engraved with the names of their occupants, just as though they were intended to be tidily buried.