Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen , Twenty
Part Twenty-One
The security ops' smudged white uniforms stood out pale against the green foliage. Two of them, both taller than Will, emerged silently from the undergrowth with Tasers raised and ready. Ernest pointed and Will turned, careful not to spill what was left of the water. His caution snapped off like a servomechanism when he saw the ops, and he swung the sawed-off POD roof in a wide, strong arc that took the security op by surprise. It hit the op's head with a dull thud that seemed disproportionately quiet, since the blow knocked the man to his knees.
Leaves rustled and branches snapped as the attackers had no more need of stealth. A deep voice bellowed, "Stand down!" Ernest whirled. Three more ops approached from behind, all of them tall and muscled, with shaved heads, square jaws and hard eyes. One of the ops--probably the one who'd yelled--had a W3 link at his temple. It wasn't blinking. They were too far from the grid to pick up a signal.
Ernest had no Taser. No syringes. He scanned the ground. Not even so much as a likely stick.
A shriek. Ernest whirled again. Elizabeth spasmed on the ground, down from a Taser hit, while Will aimed a blow at the second op's head. It connected, but didn't fell him. He was too large, too solid--and the resin piece Will struck him with, though sizeable, was lightweight and dull-edged.
Ops surrounded them on all sides now. The first op to fall began to stagger to his feet, and Martha aimed a solid kick between his legs, and another at the side of his knee. The op fell to his side clutching his groin, and he vomited up a yellowish froth.
"Stop her," said the captain, who apparently knew enough to order his men even without the help of his link.
The op who'd been coming toward Ernest lurched to the side and swung his Taser at Martha instead. She ducked the swing, her hand shot up and connected to the op's wrist with a meaty smack, and the Taser went tumbling into the bushes.
Of the five security ops, the one Martha had kicked was still down, and the one who'd been disarmed was trying to grab her. The guard who was focused on Will took another hit, which still didn't seem to faze him, though it did keep him at arm's length. The only other unoccupied guard came toward Ernest. The captain shouted, "Leave him, get the strong one."
Will.
Ernest flung the half-full water flask at the op. It bounced off his shoulder. He turned toward Ernest, who'd just thrown something at him, and his leader snapped, "Do what I said."
The percussive sound of the POD roof hitting the op's head, though muted, was the loudest sound in the clearing. The second op was almost upon Will. And then they would overpower him.
Ernest crouched and pried a rock from the ground. He stood and flung it, hard. It made almost no sound at all when it hit the back of the op's head, a soft thwack, but the op reacted much more dramatically than his teammate being pummeled with the lightweight POD roof. He staggered and clapped his hand to the place the rock had struck. His hand came away bloody. Blood oozed down his shorn scalp and stained his white collar red-red.
He turned. His eyes were wide with hatred and dismay.
"Get the strong one." The leader's voice grew hoarse from shouting. "I have this puny one under control."
Ernest turned and found the captain almost upon him. He did as he'd seen Martha do, and aimed a kick between his attacker's legs. The op must have anticipated the move--he twisted and took the kick to his massive, hard-muscled thigh. He crouched low to protect his groin, which put his shunt arm within easy reach.
The shape of the op leader's shunt was plain through the fabric of his sleeve. Ernest grabbed it two-handed and twisted.
The op leader shrieked, and sagged to his knees.
Ernest landed a kick to the captain's ribs, the only place he could connect, since the captain was curled into a protective ball around his damaged shunt. He pivoted in a crouch and scrambled away, toward the bushes.
Ernest's head jerked back--one of the remaining ops had him by the hair, but then the op who'd been hit thirty times or more with the sawed-off POD roof called to his companion, "Wait--uh, Patrick ran. We need orders."
A huge hand closed around Ernest's throat, but stopped short of squeezing. Ernest grabbed it with both hands and wrenched, as he had with the leader's shunt, but it didn't budge.
"Stop," Ernest forced out. "You have no commands. It's done."
The hand at his throat flexed, as if the op were considering crushing Ernest's neck simply to see what it would feel like.
"You're wasting time you could be gaming. Free time."
The op released Ernest, who sagged with relief. When Ernest could turn his head again, he saw Will and the first op squaring off. Will was breathing hard and the op had a thin line of blood oozing from a split on his eyebrow, but neither was significantly harmed. "Go," Will said. "Get out of here. Your captain turned tail and ran. There aren't rewards on any of us. As far as your Deacons are concerned, we died a long time ago. So why bother?"
The op Martha had disarmed had her by the throat too, though whether he was imitating the op who'd been grappling with Ernest or he'd been the one to invent the maneuver, Ernest didn't know. The op jerked Martha's head back and wrenched it--much like Ernest had done to the leader's shunt--and dropped her limp body to the ground.
Ernest went cold. The ops grabbed their vomiting teammate beneath the arms and dragged him swiftly from the clearing. Will fell to his knees beside Martha. "What did they do?" he cried. "Ernest, help her. Do something."
Ernest looked to Elizabeth, hoping for medical guidance. She was still unconscious, thanks to the Tazer, and she'd probably be out for a while. It was up to him, then. He somehow managed to break through his panicked inertia and crouch beside Martha with Will. He didn't know nearly enough about physiology, though it seemed to him that a sudden, violent torque of the spine might be very bad.
He smoothed Martha's gray-stippled hair back from her forehead, and her eyelids fluttered. "Martha? Are you conscious?"
Her eyes fixed on Ernest, and she whispered, "Abraham?"
"No."
"Oh." Her brow furrowed. "Ernest. Yes. Is Abraham here?"
Will stood. "I'll get him."
The bushes rustled as he headed toward the railroad, and when he was gone, Martha said, "Ernest, do me a favor."
"Yes."
"Touch my hand."
Her hand lay at her side, fingers gently furled. Ernest pressed his fingertip into the palm.
"Are you touching it?"
"Yes."
"Squeeze my fingers. Do it hard." Ernest obeyed. "Are you squeezing?"
Ernest was puzzled. "Yes."
Martha shut her eyes. "You don't need to keep squeezing. But I'd like it if you kept hold of my hand until Abraham gets here."
Will returned much more loudly than he'd left. The leaves and branches rustled as if a dozen ops were stomping through. Will and Abraham emerged, and between the two of them, Benjamin, the retired guard from the waiting room at Reclaim--as tall as Will, with broad shoulders only slightly stooped. Benjamin was no longer in the papery smock in which Ernest had rescued him. He wore security op whites.
Abraham held a Tazer to his neck. The C754 looked fierce enough that Ernest saw little of himself in his clone's stormy eyes, but Abraham's expression fell apart at the sight of Martha on the ground. He dropped the Tazer and lunged forward. Audrey scrambled to pick the weapon back up, though Benjamin hadn't made any move to escape, and instead looked around the clearing, at Elizabeth and Martha, with an expression so subtle Ernest had no idea what to make of it.
Ernest moved out of the way as Abraham took his place exactly, right down to the holding of Martha's hand. "What happened?"
"Spinal injury."
"Who did this?"
Though Martha seemed to have trouble speaking, her words were calm and carefully measured. "It doesn't matter. He's gone." She drew another laborious breath. "You've got to promise me."
Abraham's expression contorted, and both his eyes leaked profusely. "No."
"Abe…."
"I'll kill him."
Martha smiled knowingly. "You won't. You've worked too hard on this, and have too many people depending on you, to throw it all away. You'll finish the railroad tonight. Now. And you'll go--before they come back with more men. Promise."
"I'll…kill…him."
"That won't help me."
"What do you need--some medical equipment? We'll find it…figure out how to run it off the grid."
Martha wet her lips with great care. "There's nothing to find. Medicine stopped treating spinal injuries all the way back when the Deacons started the retirement program. It was classified as being too resource intensive. Just like aging."
The two trails of wetness on Abraham's cheeks glimmered in the lowering afternoon light. Drops--tears--fell on Martha's hair. "There has to be something…."
"There isn't. It would have been better if I'd died right away. Now I'll stop you from leaving."
"There's room. We'll take you with us--"
"Abe, I can't move. At least let me rest while you finish the railroad."
More tears. Abraham wiped his face with the back of his hand. "Does it hurt?"
"No. It's numb. But we have some syringes now…Ernest knows what they look like…I'd be much more comfortable…."
Ernest found the syringes he'd taken from the Deaconate among their supplies and brought one over to Martha. Abraham snatched it from his hand, then turned back to her. "How much?"
"All of it."
Ernest was about to correct Martha, because she'd told him herself that the whole syringe would be enough to stop someone's heart, and maybe her injuries were impairing her judgment--but he saw her staring at him, eyes wide and desperate, and he paused. Martha knew what she was asking for.
Abraham fit the syringe to her shunt.
Perhaps Martha might have nodded, if she could still move. But instead she gave Ernest a small, sad smile, and looked to Abraham again. "Kiss me?" Her voice was barely a breath. "For luck."
"There is no such thing," Abraham said softly. He bent and pressed his lips to Martha's, and Ernest looked up into the trees, wishing he hadn't just made his own promise to Martha with his eyes. The promise not to say anything about the syringe.
When he looked down again, the empty syringe was at Martha's side.
Abraham sat back on his heels and wiped more wetness from his cheeks with his sleeve. "What about this guy?" Will asked him, shaking Benjamin by the forearm. "What do we do with him?"
Abraham pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes and rocked there, as if it would help him figure out what to do.
"We could question him," Ernest suggested. That's what they would do in an old-time feed.
Before he could even try, Benjamin blurted his plan out in a halting rush. "I only wanted them to reverse the shunt damage. Deacon Frank said he would, but I had to tell them what quadrant you were in."
"You idjit," Audrey shouted, and leveled a kick to the side of his foot. Ernest had never heard of an idjit before, but evidently it was no compliment. "That's not reversible. Didn't you hear what Martha just said? There's no cure for age."
"But they told me they could."
"And you believed them. I'm so mad I can't even think of a good idiom."
"We should tie him up," Ernest said, "so he can't hurt anyone. And then we can make the railroad work."
Abraham peered at Ernest over his damp sleeve. "You seem to know an awful lot about security for a data clerk."
Audrey said, "What do you mean by that?"
"Maybe one of the smarter ops was on the case and sent someone to infiltrate us from inside."
Will dropped Benjamin's arm and hauled Abraham to his feet. "Don't you dare…."
"Or what?"
Audrey started yelling, "Stop it! Stop it!" over and over like a looping program.
"Or we're leaving, Ernest and me, and you can run the railroad without us."
Ernest saw Benjamin ease back a few steps while everyone else hollered. Martha and Elizabeth both lay on the ground. Elizabeth was breathing. Martha was not. Ernest cradled his mottled red arm to his chest and stood by as everyone argued, everyone but him and Benjamin.
He didn't try to stop Benjamin from slipping away. Keeping the retired op there would only complicate things. After what Martha sacrificed for the railroad, it didn't seem right to divert their attention to monitoring him and making sure he didn't sabotage their plans further.
"I was the one who did it," Audrey shrilled. "I told him what quadrant we were in, him and Elizabeth. He'd just escaped from the Deaconate--he'd seen it from the inside. I thought he'd want to be free."
Abraham turned to her as if she'd slapped him. He would rather have blamed Ernest--and seeing how small and defiant Audrey looked, and how painfully young, Ernest would rather have taken that blame. "He knew damn well what was inside the Diaconate. He'd known it all his life. He was a security op."
"I was trying to help!"
Abraham turned and looked at the place where some brittle branches had snapped as Benjamin escaped, then kept turning toward the railroad that ran for three point two seconds and then shut off, and finally, coming full circle, he stopped with his gaze on Martha.
"Ernest will sit with her," Will said. "You need to get the motor working."
"It doesn't matter. She's dead."
Ernest felt his own eyes sting. Abraham knew--he knew what Martha had been asking. And he'd done it. Himself.
Will rushed over to Martha and fell to his knees beside her. "No she's not. She's drugged. She's sleeping. Elizabeth was a health aide too--she'll wake up in a few minutes and tell us what to do."
Audrey sat down hard on the forest floor, buried her face in her hands, and wept.
Everyone was crouched or sprawled in the grass but Ernest and Abraham, and the look in Abraham's eyes was so fierce that Ernest wished he could find a plausible reason to fling himself down to the ground as well to avoid seeing it. He tried to look away, but he couldn't.
Finally, Abraham spoke. "I'm bringing her to Reclaim."
Will got to his feet and squared his shoulders. "You're not going to the Diaconate."
Abraham said simply, "I am."
"If you don't get to work on that engine right now, then we're all as good as dead."
"I can't leave her like this. She has to be demagnetized."
"What did you think would happen, wherever we ended up someday, when we actually died? That we'd take a trip back and see if the Diaconate welcomed us with open arms? I thought you didn't believe in that Deaconist propaganda."
Abraham glanced down at Martha's body. "I never thought I did."
"Just think for a second, Abe. It's no good. Not only are you both heretics, but she has no POD to trade in. They won't demagnetize her without a POD."
"Her POD is here."
"Deep inside the railroad," Audrey added. "Her POD was one of the first ones you dismantled."
Abraham smiled…no, smirked…no…. Ernest didn't know what to call the cruel twist of his mouth--but it was grim, and conveyed no humor at all. Whatever the word, the meaning was clear enough. Abraham had pieced together the railroad. He could dismantle it.
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