The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 19

The Roderigan destroyer crushed its way into the Spindinny’s lagoon as the last of the escapees were fleeing down the adjacent waterways. Gejas stood in the navigation pod, watching the blips speed away.

“Something has happened here,” he said to the destroyer’s commander. “Decant a squad of cyborgs. I’ll reconnoiter.”

He hoped, as he waited for his squad to reach the deck, that he might find Ruiz Aw here. Where else would a man like Ruiz Aw go for sanctuary in SeaStack? And he could easily justify his lust to see Ruiz Aw again — who knew what the slayer might have learned in the virtual? Perhaps he was here in SeaStack to take the treasure for his own.

He took his squad through the Spindinny in a methodical manner, stunning everything that surrendered, for later interrogation — and killing everything that resisted.

When he reached the sub-basement and saw the charnel house that the meeting hall had become, he smiled in manic approval. “He’s been here,” said Gejas to no one in particular.

When his cyborgs found the woman bound in the maintenance niche, he went to see. “Hello,” he said to her, instantly certain that this was a meeting ordained by fate. He called for a chair, and got out the black leather pouch that held his instruments of persuasion.

“You won’t need those,” she said, as he laid out the glittering hooks and knives in a neat little row.

“No?” he asked, in a soft attentive voice. But he used them anyway. Why take a chance?

When he was done, after he had learned so much more about Ruiz Aw than he had hoped to learn, he felt an abstract gratitude toward the lump of screaming bleeding meat that the woman had become.

“Put it out of its misery,” he said to the cyborg as he left.

Ruiz returned to Deephcart’s moorage without incident, to find his clone standing on the narrow deck of a small, heavily armored submarine.

“Hello, Dad,” said Junior, raising a hand in sardonic greeting. “What do you think?”

Ruiz motored slowly along the flank of the sub, noting the rust weeping from the vents, the chipped anti-fouling paint along the waterline, the other small signs of neglect. He shook his head.

Junior, pacing along the deck, laughed. “She’s in better shape than appearances would indicate, I think. Though I’m no expert. Tell me, were you provident enough to take a course in ship surveying since you made me?”

“No,” said Ruiz regretfully.

“Too bad,” said the clone. “I’m in better shape, too. I’ve finally settled into my new body. It feels good.” He shrugged elaborately, as if enjoying the play of muscle and bone. “It almost seems to fit better than my old one. I can’t help wondering who would win, if we wrestled.”

Ruiz smiled. “Let’s hope we never get a chance to find out, Junior.”

He tied up his squirtboat to the quay and went ashore. He took off his helmet and breathed deeply, grateful to have survived his trip into the Spindinny.

After a minute he went down the quay and vaulted aboard the sub. “Show me what we have,” he said.

When they were ready to go, a small group assembled just inside the blast doors, to see them off.

Ruiz, searched the unfamiliar faces, wondering if one of them hid the mind of Nisa. No one seemed at all familiar, except for Hemerthe, who had assumed the body of a beautiful elderly woman. Her dark skin stretched tight and polished over lovely bones, and her long white hair fell down her still-straight back in fanciful curls, gathered with a blue ribbon.

Hemerthe gave Ruiz a hug and a kiss, and then turned to the clone. “Come back to us,” Hemerthe said earnestly to Junior.

The clone smiled but made no reply.

As they went out to the quay, the blast doors ground shut behind them. It seemed to Ruiz that there was a certain finality in the clang the doors made when they met their sills.

The two of them boarded the sub and spent a few minutes stowing weapons and other gear. When it was time to start the engines, Ruiz swung himself into the commander’s chair without thinking.

Junior smiled wryly, but he buckled himself into the copilot seat with no other sign of resentment.

Immediately outside Deepheart’s lagoon, Ruiz submerged and set the planes to force them into a steep dive. “The Lords will have their antennae out,” he said. “We’ll go as deep as we can and then switch to noiseless propulsion.”

Junior nodded in somber agreement. He tapped the datascreen and called up a chart showing deep currents. “Design limit is seven hundred meters, Dad. Look.” He pointed to a thin orange line that slid sinuously around the roots of the city, winding in the general direction of the Yubere stronghold. “Insert us into this current and we could drift at five fifty, and draw no attention at all. The last two kilometers we’d have to shift streams, but it’s our best shot.”

“You’re right,” said Ruiz. He had been about to call up the current chart. He was somewhat distressed that his clone had beaten him to it. What did it mean, if anything?

Junior was still thinking a bit faster. “All these currents are wind-driven,” he said, and called up a weather module. “Strong southeast wind for the last two days — the current should be running strong.”

When they reached the level of the current, Junior’s prediction was borne out, and Ruiz shut down the engines.

An hour after they began their silent drift, they detected a large surface vessel, thrashing along their course at high speed.

Ruiz sank back in his chair, expecting the worst — but the vessel went on without pause.

When the roderigan destroyer crashed through the sill of Yubere’s lagoon and began shedding cyborgs, Corean’s first incredulous thought was, How did they find me so fast?

She locked Yubere’s remaining exterior weaponry on the destroyer, but before she could fire, tracer beams touched her emplacements, followed instantly by grasers that melted her weapons into useless slag.

A moment later, the destroyer hailed her on one of the trade frequencies. She shut down her transmitters so the Roderigans wouldn’t be able to see her. But her screen displayed the mad face of Gejas the tongue, eyes bright with anticipation. “Ruiz?” called the Roderigan. “Are you there yet?”

She was abruptly furious. Her heart pounded and her vision went a little blurry with the power of her rage. Ruiz? He thought Ruiz was coming here? The Roderigans weren’t even after her?

She slapped at a switch and opened the channel, so that he could see her. She had the satisfaction of seeing surprise on the Roderigan’s narrow face. But an instant later the surprise was replaced by hideous gloating satisfaction. “You too?” breathed the tongue in delight. “Oh, I have been very lucky today.”

Corean cursed and shut down the channel, already regretting her foolish gesture. She turned to the Dirm bondguard who waited behind her and told it to withdraw her forces to the second line of defense.

Her mantraps on the first level killed only a handful of the cyborgs, and she began to be afraid.

With some difficulty, Ruiz and his clone found the air lock he had left welded to the ingress, 600 meters below the entrance to Yubere’s stronghold. When he had mated the submarine to the ingress, Ruiz shut down the maneuvering jets. He sat back in the seat and tried to gather his thoughts, but he found himself distracted by the ominous creak of the sea’s pressure.

“So,” said Junior. “What are our chances?”

Ruiz sighed. “Pretty good, I think. As far as I know, everyone who knows about this ingress is dead. So I assume no one will be guarding the tunnel, unless Publius left someone to watch.”

Junior shook his head. “If you’d asked me to guess who might reach out from the grave and do us under, the name of Publius would come to mind first.”

“True,” said Ruiz glumly. “Well, time to get ready, kid.”

The clone gave him a strange twisted smile, and Ruiz felt an odd shock of recognition. He knew how that smile felt from the inside, but he’d had no idea what a bitter shape his mouth could make. One thought led to another: Why did that smile seem so strange to him now? Ruiz put on his helmet to cover his face, to hide it, lest it assume some shape even stranger than his clone’s face had taken.

As they were buckling on the last of their weapons and surveillance gear, Ruiz turned to Junior and patted his clone on his armored shoulder. “I’m grateful to you, Ruiz Aw,” said Ruiz to the clone.

The clone shrugged away the hand, and pulled his helmet on so that his face was hidden. “Think nothing of it,” the clone said over the close-range comm.

Ruiz felt a cold sense of rejection. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and latched down his own helmet.

“Don’t be, Dad,” said the clone. “You can’t help it if you like me better than I like you.”

Ruiz was still puzzling over the meaning of that, when the lock cycled open and filled the chamber with foulness. Ruiz smelled ordinary decay, but worse was the dead earthworm stink of the Gencha. Ruiz quickly toggled his armor’s filtration system, and the worst of the odor gradually cleared from his nostrils, though it left a lingering taint in his mouth.

“High body count?” asked Junior, as he moved ahead with his sensors.

“I guess so,” said Ruiz.

They reached the great central pit of the stack without incident. The remnants of the acrophobic sisters still lay there, though stripped of their armor and looking as if animals had worried at their flesh. The vilest stink came from a small heap of Publius’s monsters, who lay where Publius had apparently killed them in a fit of pique. In the reddish light that glimmered from the tunnel walls, the dead shapes formed a dreadful sculptural mass, black and hideous.

Ruiz ignored the corpses while he waited for Junior to report from the rim of the tunnel. He remembered the faces of those who had accompanied him on his last venture into the stack. Albany Euphrates, Huxley the Nomun clone, Durban the beaster, the sisters Chou and Moh, the nameless ex-gladiator… all dead and forgotten, except by Ruiz Aw. That train of thought afflicted him with a melancholy inertia, so he stopped it and began to check over his weapons, one more time. The ritual, so familiar, calmed him, and he finally felt ready for whatever was to come.

The clone came back at a trot. “I can’t find any signs of surveillance in the pit — the spectra seem dead. It’s weird. The tramway shows fairly steady use; the rail is bright, if that means anything.”

“No movement in the pit?”

“Not that I could tell,” said the clone. “Maybe some life back in the tunnels — the walls are like cheese, especially deeper in the pit. So, what do we do now?”

“Wait a moment,” said Ruiz, and sat down, slinging his ruptor across his back. He took a deep breath, activated the camera, and switched on the link.

A small voice whispered in his ear. “Ruiz? I see you. Or is that my fellow clone?”

Ruiz felt tears come to his eyes, so that his vision blurred for a moment. For some reason, he hadn’t expected Nisa’s clone to speak with her own voice. “I’m here,” he said, using the private channel. “I’m here.”

Gejas had secured Yubere’s security rotunda with little difficulty, and now he set up his command center in the shattered remnants of the kiosk that had guarded the drop shafts. His cyborgs were fighting their way through the secondary defenses just above the stronghold, encountering better-organized resistance.

One of his monitors crackled and cleared to show the steel face of a squad commander, who stared calmly into its wrist camera. “Gejas Tongue,” it said in its uninflected voice. “A report.”

“Report, then,” answered Gejas.

“A setback. Three of my fighters rendered dysfunctional by a Moc of high lineage and great ferocity. The creature irresistible in our present configuration. Ten fighters unable to lay down sufficiently comprehensive firing pattern.”

Gejas cursed. A Moc! An unexpected obstacle, indeed. He was about to instruct the commander to amalgamate his squad with a nearby unit, when a blur crossed the screen and the viewpoint slammed sideways.

The image shuddered and grew still. The screen showed a twitching metal foot, kicking feebly at the plastic tile. The foot grew still, and a puddle of hydraulic fluid mingled with blood spread across the corridor floor.

Gejas turned away and issued instructions to his remaining squad commanders. The squads condensed into larger units and progress slowed. The Moc became more cautious and was able to make only an occasional kill.

Another monitor chimed at Gejas, but he ignored it. It was only Roderigo, trying to question his tactics, trying to find out why he was attacking the stronghold of Alonzo Yubere.

Gejas grinned. He knew what he was doing and he had no time for the hetmen and their complaints. It was as if The Yellowleaf’s ghost dwelled in his mind’s eye, the strong beautiful face still vital, still telling him what he must do. He watched her. He was almost content.

Ruiz and the clone laid out their climbing gear just inside the tunnel. “I’m afraid of heights,” Nisa whispered in his ear.

“You can look away from the screen,” Ruiz replied.

“No,” she said. “If you can stand to be there, I can stand to watch.”

She sounded so heartbreakingly like herself. So true, so strong. “Well, everyone’s afraid of something,” he said.

Ruiz fired a piton into a crevice at the edge of the pit and hooked his descender line to it. He thought of the last time he had stood here, waiting. That time he had ridden the tram upward, spiraling around the sides of the pit to the fortress of Alonzo Yubere high above. There Ruiz had killed Yubere in the slaver’s beautiful bathtub. A simple piece of work, it seemed in retrospect — though it had failed to purchase Publius’s willing assistance.

He wished he were going up again.

He stood for a long moment looking out into the haze that filled that great emptiness, and then looked down at the dull red glow below. It seemed to him the glow had dimmed perceptibly since the last time he had stood there. “Gencha heaven,” he said out loud.

“What?” asked his clone.

“Nothing. Just nattering,” said Ruiz, and, turning about, began to lower himself down the wall.

When he reached the rail, he set another piton and waited for his clone. Junior swayed down the face with a lithe grace that Ruiz had to admire, even though it was his own.

When his clone hung suspended above the rail, Ruiz got out the railrider and shackled the device to a recessed pad eye on the chestplate of his armor. Junior did the same.

“Well,” said Ruiz. “Let’s try it.” He swung out and over the rail and dropped to the face just below it. He reached out and set the railrider over the polished alloy of the rail and, tightening a knurled knob, cranked the rider into a shape that conformed perfectly to the rail’s cross-section. He locked the rider into that shape and gingerly slid it back and forth a few centimeters — the almost frictionless lining of the rider made no sound.

Junior had his antennae extended in all directions and an inductance sensor almost touching the rail. He examined the screens strapped to his left forearm, and after a moment said, “Nothing. Hard to believe, but no one’s watching, as far as I can tell.”

“All right,” said Ruiz. “Get rigged, and we’ll go.”

Junior put away his sensors and lowered himself to Ruiz’s level. In a moment his rider was attached.

Ruiz jerked a tab from his climbing gear, and the descending lines and pitons puffed into dust. He dropped with a jolt, to hang from the rider’s tether, his hand on the brake lever at his chest. Junior destroyed the remaining evidence of their presence, and dangled from his own rider a few meters up the rail.

“This looks like fun,” said Junior darkly. “It’s going to be a lot easier getting to Genchaland than it will be to climb back up.”

“Maybe we’ll find a tram at the bottom,” Ruiz said hopefully. “Besides, it’s traditional — it’s always been easier to go to Hell than to leave it.”

Junior made a fretful sound. “I know now why people have so frequently criticized my sense of humor. I used to laugh at folk who bought therapeutic clones — I never thought I’d become one.”

“You seem to be learning more from this than I am,” said Ruiz. He released the brake and slid downward for ten meters before he reengaged it. “Give me a couple hundred meters head start — if I run into something lethal you might be able to stop. Remember not to shoot me, if you have to fire across the pit when I’m on the far side of the spiral.”

“The same to you,” said Junior.

Ruiz smiled and took a deep breath. To Nisa he said, “Here we go.”

“Good luck,” she whispered.

He pushed up on the lever and began to slide down the long spiral into the red-gleaming darkness.

Alone in her war room, Corean took some satisfaction in having slowed the advance of the Roderigan cyborgs, but they were slowly pressing her deeper into the fortress. The Moc was her best weapon — it had accounted for more enemy casualties than all her other fighters combined. But it was insufficient.

Yubere had, in her opinion, somewhat neglected the defenses of his fortress. The Dirm bondguards were too slow and stupid to do much more than inconvenience the cyborgs.

She had decided to hold in reserve the half-squad of Deltan shock troops that Yubere had bequeathed her, as well as the Muramasa-Violencia killmechs.

The Roderigans had penetrated the cross-baffled elevator shafts and were slowly consolidating their position at the topmost level of the stronghold. She was starting to feel a little trapped. How was she going to get out, if she could not find a way to reverse the tide of the engagement? The only lane of retreat was downward, down the great pit that led to the Gencha enclave.

No, surely Gejas would eventually grow weary of his losses, or his superiors would recall him.

Still, there were some very odd things about Gejas’s behavior, she thought. Why, for instance, was Gejas so sure that Ruiz Aw was here? Or did he intend to take the stronghold and then wait for Ruiz Aw to show up? She shook her head. Ruiz Aw was far too wary; he seemed to sense danger with inhuman sensitivity and accuracy.

Another unpleasant thought struck Corean. How long would it be before the pirate Lords sensed that significant events were in the offing under Yubere’s stack? She might soon be opposed by layers of enemies, pouring into the stack, pressing her deeper into the roots of the world.

“Well,” she told herself sternly, “how bad can it be down in the enclave? Can it be any worse than Dobravit? If worse comes to worse, I’ll take the Moc and hide. They’ll never pry me out. Or better yet, I’ll hold the Machine hostage.”

She felt a little cold, and she put her arms around herself. She thought of Marmo and his slow cautious advice. She remembered again how much she had regretted having killed the old pirate. It was, she thought, another thing for which Ruiz Aw must pay — she would never have done it except for her hatred of the Dilvermoon slayer. Never.

But the thought lacked urgency. Was her hatred deserting her? She felt a thumping explosion, and a shiver ran through her. Without her hatred, she would be soft and helpless, nothing but a thing to be victimized.

So she sat in her war room and recalled all the things Ruiz Aw had done to her, starting with his arrival on Sook and ending with Gejas, whom Ruiz Aw had somehow called down upon her.

She finally began to feel a bitter heat, and soon she was strong again.

Ruiz whirled around the spiral, falling down the rail, the rider making only a whisper of sound as it slid. At intervals he heard a metallic snick as the rider passed one of the standoffs that supported the rail.

His body swung outward until he hung at a forty-five-degree angle to the perpendicular walls of the pit. His speed increased a bit more and his metal boots touched the wall, making a terrible screech, and trailing a rooster-tail of sparks. He spun violently on his tether. Recovering, he drew up his legs slightly and tugged lightly on the brake. He gripped the tether above the swivel in his gauntleted fist, and the friction slowed his spin.

When he had stabilized his position, he heard Junior’s low laughter in one ear and Nisa’s whisper in the other. “Are you all right?” she asked. “It made me almost sick, just watching.”

“I’m fine,” he said, though in fact he was quite dizzy.

“Are you?” asked Junior, and Ruiz realized he had forgotten to switch channels. He felt a sudden confusion, and swiveled to watch the wall of the pit. Images almost too momentary for comprehension flickered past: the mouths of tunnels, the slagged-over scars of ancient battles, the scribble of incomprehensible graffiti — left by tram riders or perhaps by the devolved alien refugees that inhabited the deepest caverns of the stack. Once he saw the yellow flash of lamplight at a cavern mouth, and a moment later his passage startled a sticklike figure with too many limbs.

“Busy place,” Junior commented. Then his voice changed, became metallic. “Something moving in the pit, dropping a little faster than we are.”

Ruiz swiveled, tipped his head back. He could see nothing in the murk above. “Visual?”

“Not yet. Wait. Yes, I see it now. A bird, maybe, or a bat… but more likely an ornithopter drone.”

Ruiz cursed and slowed his descent a bit. He unslung his ruptor, wrapped the sling around his upper arm so that he could use the weapon one-handed. He could see Junior above him and to the right; his clone had dropped quite a bit faster than Ruiz had. Bolder than I am, he thought.

“Slow down,” Ruiz said, and he saw the clone’s body jerk and swing as he applied his brake.

“It is a drone,” said Junior. “I’ve got an uplink energy spill. The signal originates somewhere in the stronghold, I think.”

Ruiz looked ahead, desperately seeking a tunnel mouth they might hide in. The pit was as smooth as glass for at least the next two hundred meters — as far as he could see through the thickening haze. “Of course,” said Ruiz.

Now he could see the drone, a flash of silvery red glitter in the darkness above. At almost the same moment, whoever was flying it saw Junior; the drone plummeted with the speed of a raptor, metal wings folded against its meter-long body.

It slashed past the clone, snapping its wings open into bright knives — but Junior had applied his brakes strongly and the drone’s operator misjudged the vector.

“Missed me,” shouted Junior.

Corean held the inductor against the side of her head, seeing what the drone saw as it hovered in the pit. “How?” she breathed, watching the two armored men sliding down the rail. Her first reaction was bewilderment. How could the men have gotten below her, into the pit? Were they from her own forces, deserting the stronghold? No… deserters would have taken the tram, which was still locked to the top of the track. She made a mental note to post a reliable guard on the tram.

Then the uppermost man braked again, until his speed had dropped to a slow glide. He drew out a gyro-stabilized pinbeam, with a graceful purposefulness that she instantly identified.

“Ruiz Aw?” It was. It was.

Ruiz tried to bring his ruptor to bear on the drone, which for some reason was hovering in the center of the pit, as if the operator had abandoned it.

But again Junior was quicker, and fired his pinbeam. The drone shattered into a cloud of glowing fragments, which drifted downward.

Ruiz released his brake and drew up his body, knees to chest. Now the need was to get down to the bottom as quickly as possible, before the person who controlled the stronghold sent someone, or something, after them.

He picked up speed with what seemed painful slowness… but soon he was falling down toward the Gencha at a speed close to terminal velocity, trying not to think about his destination.

Until the drone’s arrival, he had truly believed that he might survive somehow. Might stand again in the sunlight.