Otherland-4-SeaofSilverLight

This is so bad, this is so bad, was all Christabel could think.

The van bumped up over the sidewalk and slowed down at the opening, so the soldier who was driving could do something with a big metal box standing there. A woman wearing a bathing suit and a robe, pushing a baby in a stroller along the walkway beside the building, was trying to look in through the van's windows, but it didn't seem like she could see Christabel at all through the glass. After a few seconds the woman turned away. The van rolled down the ramp into darkness.

Christabel knew she must have made a noise, because her daddy leaned over and said "It's just a garage, honey. Don't be afraid. Just a garage for a hotel."

They had been driving for what seemed like a long time, driving out of the town and into a place where there were more hills than houses, so that she had seen the hotel coming for a long time—a big, wide, white building that stretched high up into the air, with flags flying in front. It looked like a nice place, but Christabel did not feel good about it.

The younger soldier sitting across from them looked at her, and for a moment she thought he was going to say something, maybe something kind, but then his mouth got tight and he looked away. Captain Ron, who was also sitting across from them, just looked unhappy, like his stomach hurt.

Where's Mommy? she wondered. Why did she drive away in our van? Why didn't she wait for us?

To keep Mister Sellars a secret, Christabel suddenly knew. Just because her Daddy and Mommy—and this new person, Mr. Ramsey—all knew about him now didn't mean that everyone did.

Something she hadn't really thought about came to her as the van stopped. That means Captain Ron doesn't know about Mister Sellars either—about how he came with us in our car, with that terrible boy, too. None of the army men know about it. That's why Daddy kept saying not to talk to anyone.

She had to hold her breath, because the being-scared suddenly felt so big. She hadn't understood. She had thought Daddy was angry at Captain Ron, angry because Ron didn't want him to take time off from work. Now she knew that he wasn't angry, he was keeping a secret. A secret she might have told one of the army men if they had asked her.

"Are you all right, honey?" her father asked. The van doors hissed open, and one of the soldiers stepped out. "Just take the man's hand when you get down."

Mr. Ramsey leaned close to her ear. "I'll be right behind you, Christabel. Your daddy and I will make sure everything's going to be okay."

But Christabel was beginning to learn a scary thing about grown-ups. Sometimes they said things would be all right, but they didn't know they'd be all right. They just said it. Bad things could happen, even to little kids.

Especially to little kids.

"Very slick," Captain Ron said as the door slid open in the garage wall, but he didn't sound happy. "Our own private elevator to the exec suite."

What kind of sweet? Christabel started to cry. Exec. She'd heard the word before. She didn't remember just what it meant, but she was pretty sure it must mean something about executions. She knew about them—she saw more things on the net than her parents knew about. Execution sweet, that was what Captain Ron was really saying. She wondered if it was a poison candy bar or something that they kept just for bad kids—maybe a poisoned apple, like in "Snow White."

Her father put his hand in her hair, touching the back of her head. "Honey, don't cry. Everything will be all right. Ron, does she have to come along? Can't we put this off until I can get hold of her mother or someone else to take her?"

Christabel grabbed her daddy's hand, hard. Captain Ron just shrugged, a big, heavy movement of his shoulders. "I got orders, Mike."

It was crowded and hot with all of them in the elevator—herself, her father, Mr. Ramsey, Captain Ron, and the two other soldiers—but Christabel didn't want the ride to end, didn't want to see what an execution sweet looked like. When the doors pinged and opened, she started crying again.

The room inside wasn't what she expected, which had been something like one of the terrible gray-painted prisons she'd seen on netshows, like the one Zelmo and Nedra had been in on Hate My Life. Captain Ron had kept calling it a hotel, and that's what it looked like, a big, big hotel room with a floor as big as their lawn at home, covered in pale blue carpet, with three couches and tables and a wallscreen that took up one huge wall, and a kitchen at the far end, and doors in the other walls. There was even a vase of flowers on one of the tables. The only thing that seemed as bad as she had expected was the really big man in dark glasses who stood in the doorway waiting for them. Another man who looked a lot like him was sitting on one of the couches, although now he stood up. They both were dressed in funny black suits, tight and a little shiny, and both had things strapped on their chests and hips that looked like guns or something even worse and more complicated and scarier.

"ID," said the man waiting at the door in a low slow voice.

"And just who the hell are you?" Captain Ron asked. For the first time his unhappiness seemed like something else—like he was angry, or maybe even scared.

"ID," the big man in the wraparound glasses said again, just the same, like he was one of the store window advertisements in Seawall Center. The soldiers with Captain Ron moved a little. Christabel saw one of them drop his hand to his side, near where his gun was. Christabel's heart began to go really, really fast.

"Hang on," her daddy said, "let's all just. . . ." One of the doors on the far side of the big room swung open. A man with a mustache and short gray hair walked out. Christabel could see a whole other big room behind him, with a bed and a desk and a big window with the curtains drawn. The man wore a bathrobe and striped pajamas. He was smoking a cigar. For a moment, Christabel thought she had seen him on the net because even in such funny clothes he looked so familiar.

"It's all right, Doyle," the man with the mustache said. "I know Captain Parkins. And Major Sorensen, too—oh, yes."

The big man in black walked back across the room to the nearest couch. He and the other shiny-suit man sat down together, not saying anything, but there was something about them that made Christabel think of a dog pretending to sleep at the end of a leash, just waiting until a kid got close enough to jump at.

"And I even remember you, darlin'." The man in the mustache smiled and leaned forward to pat Christabel on the head. She remembered him then, the tan-faced man in her daddy's office. "What are you doing here, little girl?" Her father's hand tightened on hers, so she didn't pull away from him, but she didn't say anything either.

The man straightened up, still smiling, but when he spoke again his voice was cold, like someone had just opened the freezer door and let the air puff out in Christabel's face. "What's this child doing here, Parkins?"

"I'm . . . I'm sorry, General." Captain Ron had sweat stains under his arms that had got bigger since they had left the elevator. "It was a difficult situation—the girl's mother was out shopping and couldn't be located, so since you said this was going to be informal. . . ."

The general laughed, a snort. "Oh, yes, informal. But I didn't say it was going to be a goddamn picnic, did I? What, are we going to have father-daughter sack races? Hmm? Captain Parkins, were you thinking we should have a picnic?"

"No, sir."

Mr. Ramsey cleared his throat. "General . . . Yacoubian?"

The man's eyes swiveled across to him. "And you know what?" the general said softly. "I definitely do not recognize you, citizen. So maybe you should just get back on the elevator and get the hell out of my suite."

"I'm a lawyer, General. Major Sorensen is my client."

"Really? This is the first time I've ever heard of a military officer bringing legal representation to a casual meeting with his commanding officer."

Now it was Ramsey who smiled, just a small one. "Clearly you have a broad definition of the word 'casual,' General."

"I'm a brigadier general, sonny. I think you'll find that things have a way of being what I say they are." He turned to Parkins. "All right, Captain, you've done your job. Take your men and get the hell back to whatever you're supposed to be doing. I'll take it from here."

"Sir?" Captain Parkins seemed confused. "But my men, sir . . . you said to bring a couple of MPs. . . ."

"You don't think Doyle and Pilger can handle anything that might come up?" The general shook his head. "Those boys are carrying more armament than a combat helicopter."

"Are they also US Army, General?" asked Ramsey loudly. "For the record?"

"Ask me no questions, lawyer, and I'll tell you no lies," chuckled the general.

Christabel's daddy's hand was trembling on her shoulder, which was making her almost more frightened than anything else that had happened today. Now he finally spoke. "General, there's really no need for either my daughter or Mr. Ramsey to be involved in this. . . ."

"Mike," Ramsey said, "don't give away your rights. . . ."

". . . So I wish you'd just let them go," her father said, ignoring him. "Send them with Captain Parkins, if you like."

The general shook his head. Although his face was very tan and his mustache was very small and neat, he had a crinkly look around his eyes that looked like pictures Christabel had seen of Santa Claus. But she thought that he was more like some kind of backward Santa, someone who instead of bringing presents would come down the chimney and take little boys and girls away in a sack. "Oh, no, I don't think so," he said. "I'm very interested to hear what everyone has to say—even the little girl. So you and your men just paddle off, Captain Parkins. The rest of us have some talking to do." He leaned past them and pushed the gold elevator button in its little frame in the wallpaper.

"If it's just the same with you, sir," Captain Ron said suddenly, "I'll stay. Then if you need Major Sorensen or his daughter taken somewhere, I'll be available. Mike's a friend of mine, sir." He turned quickly to the two soldiers, who were looking very wide-eyed, but still not saying anything. "You and Gentry go down and wait in the van. If I'm not going to need you, I'll call and let you know you can head back to base."

The door hissed open. For a moment everyone just looked at each other, the soldiers, the men in black on the couch, Captain Ron and Ramsey and her daddy and the general. Then the general smiled again. "Fine. You heard the captain, boys." He gestured the soldiers into the elevator. They were still staring out when the door slid closed. For some reason, seeing the young soldiers in their shiny helmets disappear, she felt like she had the first day her mommy had left her alone at kindergarten. She reached up and took her father's hand again and squeezed it tight.

"Make yourselves at home," the general said cheerfully. "I have a rather important conference to finish, but I'll be done in half an hour or so, and then we'll all have a long chat." He turned toward the two men in black. "Make sure our guests are comfortable. But make sure they remain our guests until I'm offline. Gently, though. Gently."

He turned and began to head back toward the bedroom.

"General Yacoubian, sir," Christabel's daddy said. "I want to ask you again if my daughter and Mr. Ramsey could be released. It would just be a lot easier for everyone. . . ."

The general turned around, and Christabel thought his eyes were as bright and strange as a bird's. "Easier? It's not me who has to make things easier, Sorensen. It's not me who has to answer the questions." He started toward the room, then stopped and turned again. "See, someone named Duncan from your office copied me on a request for labwork—something I should have been copied on automatically, but for some reason you held it back from me. Made for interesting reading, I have to say. A bit of scientific analysis you had done on some sunglasses. Very interesting sunglasses, they were, too. Ring a bell?"

Captain Ron looked completely confused, but Christabel's daddy turned as pale as if something had leaked out of him.

"So just sit tight and keep your mouth shut until I'm ready for you." The general smiled again. "You might say some prayers, too, if you know some." He turned and walked back into the bedroom, then shut the door.

There was a long silence. Then one of the men in black, the man called Pilger, said, "If the kid's hungry, there's some peanuts and chocolate in the minibar," before turning back to watch the wallscreen again.

The thing is, Dulcie told herself, I don't really know him all that well

She was surveying the routine maintenance levels of Dread's system, which he kept in a state rather similar to his household decor—sparse and colorless. Where her own system had the equivalent of notes and unfinished projects lying around everywhere, not to mention all kinds of strange coding bric-a-brac—everything from long out-of-date utilities and code-busters which she'd hung onto just in case she ever bumped into such a system again to algorithmic representations so interesting she saved them almost as objects of beauty—Dread had nothing out of place, nothing that was not absolutely necessary, nothing that gave any hint of his personality at all.

He's so guarded. One of those anal-retentive types. Probably rolls all his socks the same way. But after spending her childhood in her mother's aggressively bohemian care—most mornings young Dulcinea Anwin had not only needed to clear plates of spoiling food from the previous night's dinner party off the kitchen counter before making her own breakfast, but also had to make a circuit of the house putting out candles that had been left burning and evicting guests who had fallen asleep in strange places—she thought that a certain rigidity about order was not the worst trait a man could have.

She had finished running diagnostics on their project's house system, which, despite the rather uncommon strains Dread was putting on it at the moment, was holding up nicely, and she was busy making records of some of the events from their incursion into the Grail system for future study when she bumped across something odd.

It was a partition of sorts in Dread's own system, a boxing-off of data, but that wasn't the unusual thing about it. All systems were divided for organizational purposes, and most people who spent a lot of time working directly online were as idiosyncratic about how they arranged their system environments as they were with their RL homes. What she had seen of Dread's space was in fact so nonidiosyncratic she was almost disturbed by it: he had never bothered to change any of the settings, names, or infrastructure of the original system package, for one thing. It was a little like realizing the pictures on your manager's desk were the fake ones of smiling catalog models that had come with the frames. No, there was nothing unusual about partitioning your storage. What was interesting about this partition was that it was invisible, or supposed to be. She checked the directories, but there was no listing to correspond with the fairly extensive secured area onto which she had stumbled.

A little secret door, she thought. Why, Mr. Dread, you do have some things you want to keep private after all.

It was sort of cute, really—a boy thing, like a hidden treehouse. No girls allowed. But of course, Dread was a beginner with this stuff, and Dulcie was a very, very hard girl to hide things from.

She hesitated for a few moments—not very long at all, really—reminding herself that it was wrong, that not only did her boss have a right to his privacy, he was also a man who did a lot of dangerous things for dangerous people, people who took their security very seriously. But Dulcie (who almost always lost these arguments with herself) found the idea more a challenge than a discouragement. After all, didn't she run with a dangerous crowd herself? Hadn't she shot someone only a few weeks ago? The fact that she was having regular nightmares about it, and now wished she had invented an excuse not to do it—faulty gun, jammed door lock, epileptic seizure—didn't mean she was suddenly unfit to run with the big boys.

Besides, she thought, it will be interesting to have a peek into his mind. See what he really thinks about. Of course, it might just be his account books. Anybody this much of a neat freak might be pretty serious about hiding their double-entry stuff.

But the small bit of poking and prying she allowed herself failed even to turn up a keyhole, let alone a key. If there was something interesting on the other side of the door, she was not going to find it out so easily. With the faintly shamed feeling that had visited her as a young girl rooting through her mother's bureau drawers, she erased all records of her investigations and dropped back out of the system.

Her employer's secret compartment was still nagging at her half an hour later as she stood over his sleeping form, which lay nestled like a piece of dark jewelry in the while padding of the coma bed.

It's true—I really don't know anything about him, she thought, looking down at his heavy-lidded eyes, at the minute movement of his irises between the mesh of black lashes. Well, I know he's not the most stable person in the world. It was hard not to remember each and every one of his flashes of anger. But there's something else in him, too—something calm, something knowing. Like a big cat, or a wolf. It was hard to avoid animal analogies—Dread's compact grace somehow did not seem quite civilized.

She was watching the way his cocoa-colored skin took and softened the clinical glare of the overhead lights when Dread's eyes popped open.

"Hello, sweetness," he said, grinning. "Bit jumpy today, aren't you?"

"My God. . . !" She fought to regain her breath. "You could have warned me. You've been out of communication for almost twenty-four hours."

"Been busy," he said. "Things are hopping." His grin widened. "But now I'm going to show you a little something. Come join me."

It took her a moment to understand it was not an invitation to climb into the coma bed—an unpleasant thought even had her feelings about the man himself been less ambivalent: the low murmur of its engines and the constant slow movement of the bed surface made her think of some kind of sea creature, an oyster without a shell. "You mean . . . on the network?"

"Yes, on the network. You're a bit slow today, Anwin."

"Just a few thousand things to do, that's all, and about two hours of sleep." She tried to keep her voice light, but this teenage jocularity was making her tense. "What do I do. . . ?"

"Access the way I did, and make sure you're in full wraparound—you're going to need it. When you hit the first security barrier, your password is 'Nuba.' N-U-B-A. That's all."

"What does it mean?"

He was smiling again. "One of our abo words, sweetness. Comes from up north, Melville Island."

"What, is it insulting or something?"

"Oh, no. No." He closed his eyes as though drifting back into sleep. "Just the term they use for an unmarried woman. Which you are, right?" He chuckled, savoring something. "See you when you get there." He visibly relaxed, dropping back into the system like a swimmer sliding under the water.

It took her a long moment to realize that she was still shaking a little, startled by his sudden appearance. Like he was watching me, she thought. Just standing behind me, watching me, waiting to give me a little scare. The bastard.

She poured herself a glass of wine and drank it off in a couple of swallows before lying down on the couch with the fiberlink.

Dulcie had barely uttered the code word when the nothingness of the first system level abruptly took on color and depth. The initial dazzle was so bright that for a second she wondered if she was staring into the sun, then the huge bronze door in front of her swung open and she stepped through into darkness.

The darkness was not complete: the far end of the corridor had an unsteady glow that drew her forward. A dull murmur washed out to her, deep and slow as an ocean pawing at a stony beach. As the light grew and she began to glimpse the large chamber beyond, a shadowed space filled with tight-packed, round shapes like a field of sunken megaliths, she could not help feeling that she had stumbled into a dream. A look at her own legs and bare feet, muscular and bunioned from years of dance class, told her otherwise. Who ever saw their own feet in a dream? Her hands, too, were recognizably her own, the freckles on her long fingers visible even in the dim light.

It's a sim of . . . me, she realized, even as she stepped out into the great chamber.

The rush of muttering voices rose around her. A thousand people, maybe more, were kneeling on the floor of the massive room, their rhythmic, whispering chant rising to the distant ceiling. Oil lamps burned in niches all along the walls, making everything flicker like some visual recording from the earliest days of technology. A clear space between the huddled bodies led across the pale marble; none of the bent figures even looked up as Dulcie walked past them.

At the far end of the chamber a silent, motionless figure sat enthroned on a dais like a statue in a pagan temple, a long silver rod clutched in its hand. The creature was larger than a man, and although its body was human-shaped, the skin was absolutely black and as glossy as Chinese lacquer. The snouted, prong-eared head was that of some doglike beast.

As she neared the dais the whispering voices dropped into silence. The dog-creature's head was lowered, eyes hooded as if in sleep, muzzle against the massive chest, and she had begun to think it really was a statue when the great yellow eyes fluttered open.

All the kneeling shapes suddenly bellowed in perfect unison: "Cheers, Dulcie!" The room thundered with echoes, covering the sound of her startled shriek. "You're looking damn nice today," they added, loud as artillery fire, toneless as a punch press.

Silence fell again as she took a staggering step to maintain her balance. The thing on the dais stood up, rising to almost ten feet, and the muzzle gashed open in a long-toothed leer. "Like it? Just my way of saying 'Welcome!' "

I wonder if you can wet yourself in VR. Aloud, she said, "That's just charming. Took a few years off my life."

"What do you want from the Lord of Life and Death—flowers? Singing and dancing? Well, that can be arranged, too." He lifted the silver rod and a fluttering snow of rose petals began to descend from the roof. With a great scraping and murmuring, the thousands of shaven-headed priests rose from their kneeling positions and began clumsily to dance. "Any particular music you'd like?"

"I don't want anything." Dulcie looked up through the flurrying petals, trying to ignore the disturbing spectacle of a thousand blank-eyed, sandaled priests doing a spastic soft-shoe. "What the hell is this place?"

"It's the Old Man's home away from home." He waved, and the priests lowered themselves to the floor once more. The last few rose petals were still drifting down. "His favorite simulation—Abydos, I think it's called. Ancient Egypt."

It was more than a little disturbing to be carrying on a conversation with a jackal-headed man almost twice her own height, like something from a game or interactive theater. "The old man—you mean your . . . employer, right? And who are you supposed to be? Sparky the Wonder Dog?"

He showed her his teeth again. "This is the sim I always wore here. Of course, I was taking orders then, and now I'm the one giving them." He lifted his voice. "Roll over! Play dead!" The priests dropped to their bellies, rotated once, then lay motionless with their knees and elbows in the air. "It's amusing, in a sort of way, especially when I think how much it would piss the old wanker off." He gestured to one of the nearest priests, who leaped to his feet and scuttled to the dais. Dulcie stared at the sim curiously. He certainly looked like a real person, right down to the gleam of sweat on his shaved head. "This is Dulcie," Dread told the priest. "You love her. She is your goddess."

"I love her," the priest intoned, although he did not look at the object of his newfound affection. "She is my goddess."

"Would you do anything for her?"

"I would, Lord."

"Then show her how much you love her. Go on."

The priest struggled to his feet—he was one of the fat, middle-aged variety, and a bit short of breath—and waddled to one of the wall niches. As Dulcie watched with growing horror, the priest snatched out the oil lamp and upended its contents over his head; in a moment he was running with flames. His white robe caught and blazed up. His round head seemed to float in a halo of fire. "I love you, my goddess," he croaked even as his features began to blacken.

"Oh my God, stop, put him out, stop!" she screamed.

Dread swung his long-muzzled face toward her in surprise, then lifted his rod. The blazing figure disappeared. All the other priests still lay on their backs like dead locusts in a field. "Christ, girl, they're only code."

"I don't care," she said. "That doesn't mean I want to see something like that."

The jackal shape vanished, leaving the real Dread, ordinary size and dressed all in loose-fitting black, standing on the top step of the throne. "Didn't mean to upset you, sweetness." He sounded more annoyed than contrite.

"I just. . . ." She shook her head. "What's going on here, anyway? You said this was the . . . Old Man's place. Where is he? What have you been doing since you got into the system?"

"Oh, this and that." His human grin was only slightly less feral. "I'll explain more later, but first I want to take you on a little tour. Just for fun."

"I don't want to watch any more burning priests, thank you."

"There's lots of things more interesting to see than that." He raised his hand in the air and the silver rod abruptly shrank to a small silver cylinder. "Let's go."

"That's the lighter!" she said. "What. . . ?" But the high hall of Abydos-That-Was and its thousand patient priests had already vanished.

It was indeed a tour. From their first stop in the streets of Imperial Rome, complete with the shouts of street vendors and the wind off the Tiber rank with the scents of human sweat and urine, Dread moved Dulcie in short order to sweltering afternoon on an African plain inhabited by strange creatures as large as elephants, but which Dulcie had never seen before, and then in quick succession through the plum-treed gardens of some clearly mythical China, to a cliffside position overlooking a waterfall a mile or more high, and at last to the white weirdness of the ultimate north, where the convulsing Aurora Borealis hung over their heads like a fireworks show stuck on extra slow speed.

"My God," she said, watching her breath hang as vapor in the air, "it's staggering! I mean, I knew there were a lot of simworlds—we saw quite a few through the Quan Li sim, but. . . ." She shivered, mostly out of reflex. Due to some wrinkle in the simworld, or to Dread's control of it, the temperature here felt no cooler than an early spring evening. "And you can just go anywhere. . . ?"

"Go anywhere, do anything." His grin was now only half a smile, the expression of the proverbial canary-catching cat. He rolled the lighter in his fingers. "I won't need this much longer. And you can do whatever you want too, if you behave yourself and keep me happy."

She felt a tingle of warning. "What does that mean, exactly. . . ?"

"Do your job. Stay out of trouble." He paused to stare at her in a way that made her squirmingly uncomfortable. It was almost as though the attempted incursions into his hidden storage had appeared on her forehead like stigmata. "You have no idea what I've got going here."

She looked out at the endless ice fields, the northern lights shimmering. "But what about your employer? Where did he go? How is it that you have access to everything. . . ?" Nearby, a piece of ice the size of a football field groaned and shifted, lifting a jagged edge above the permafrost and tipping the entire plate on which Dulcie and Dread stood. She grunted in fear, staggered, and put her hand on Dread's arm for support.

He opened his eyes wide. "You don't have to worry," he said, although he seemed to be enjoying her discomfiture. "Even if you get killed here, you'll just drop offline. We're the only people left with on-and-off access."

"What about the owners? What are they called, the Grail people?"

He shrugged. "Things have changed a bit."

"And you can control the system? You can make things happen?"

He nodded. He seemed as pleased as a child, and Dulcie realized that just like a child, he was anxious to show off. "Anything you'd like to see?"

"Have you let those other people off the network, then?"

"Other people. . . ?"

"The ones we were traveling with—Martine, T4b, Sweet William. If you can control the access to the network, you should be able to set them free. . . ." She realized suddenly that she missed them. After living with them day in and day out for weeks, she knew them better than she knew most of the people in her real life. They had been so miserable, so frightened and trapped. . . .

Dread's blank look had become something even deeper and more distant. She pulled at his sleeve. "You are going to set them loose, aren't you?" When he did not answer, she tugged again. He snatched his arm away with a quick violence that almost yanked her off her feet.

"Shut up," he snapped. "Someone's using the main broadcast channel."

As she watched, in a white world silent but for the deep shifting of ice, his lips moved minutely as he subvocalized to the invisible someone. A slow smile stretched his face. He seemed to say something else, then his fingers flicked momentarily across the lighter. He turned to her slowly, eyes bright.

"Sorry about that. Something I'll have to see to later." He nodded. "What were you saying?"

"About the others—the ones the Grail had trapped online."

"Ah, yes. As a matter of fact, I've just been too busy to see to Martine and the rest. But I'll be getting to them directly. You're right—I need to deal with them." He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, his curious elation had been banked like the coals in a fire. "Come along—we've got one more thing to see."

Before she had time even to open her mouth the polar icecaps had dissolved and the two of them were hovering in midair above a vast and unbroken expanse of ocean. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, scalloping the wave-tops in brassy light, but otherwise there was nothing to see for miles, not even seabirds.

"What's this. . . ?" she began, but he flicked up his hand, demanding quiet.

They hung above the endless green for long moments, then Dulcie saw that the pattern of the waves was beginning to change just before them, the regular crisscross of breakers churning into something more chaotic. As she watched, openmouthed, the churn became a great boiling, the waves lifting into plumes dozens, perhaps, even hundreds of meters tall, flinging gobbets of froth into the air. Then, like the nose cone of a missile launched from some inconceivably huge submarine, the first tower top pierced the surface of the angry seas.

It lasted over an hour. For most of that time Dulcie was aware of nothing but the unfolding spectacle before her. The city heaved up from the waters with a surging roar, as though the earth itself were painfully giving birth—the spires of its tallest buildings first, tangled in great ropes of kelp, the walls of the citadel following closely behind, their armor of barnacles glittering wetly as they emerged into the sun. When the citadel had breasted, water sluicing down its roofs and walls before thundering into the ocean, turning the waters into white foam as far as she could see, the mountain and the rest of its clinging city arose, the drowned streets gleaming as they came back into the light.

When it was over, and the monstrous empty husk of island Atlantis had returned from the depths, Dread slipped his arm companionably around her shivering shoulders and leaned close to her ear.

"Play your cards right, sweetness," he whispered, "and someday all of this will be yours." He reached down and patted her on the buttocks. "I'll even dry it off for you. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a few loose ends to deal with. Just keep out of trouble, and make sure that my loft doesn't catch on fire or anything, right? Cheers."

An instant later she was lying on the couch in the converted Redfern warehouse, muscles cramped and head pounding. Across the room, Dread's unmoving form lay like a corpse set out for viewing.

It was only when she had finished her shower and was sipping her second glass of wine of the afternoon that she realized she had just been taken on what must have been the strangest first date in history.

"Here, honey," Catur Ramsey told the little girl. "Come here and look at the giraffes."

She stared at him doubtfully, then at her father, who was standing on the far side of the suite. Sorensen nodded, so she came over and curled up on the couch beside Ramsey. He lifted the hotel guide and touched the picture of the Tanzanian resort; instantly the image sprang to life. Ramsey muted the soundtrack. "See how tall they are?" he asked her. "They eat the leaves on the very tops of the trees."

Christabel frowned, her big, serious brown eyes curtained by her lashes. He could see she was nervous but doing her best to control it. Catur Ramsey found himself impressed yet again by the composure of such a young child. "Does it hurt their necks to stretch like that?" she asked.

"Oh, no. Doesn't hurt them any more than it hurts you to reach up and take something off a shelf. That's what they're born to do."

She bit her lip as the brochure cycled through to a picture of a young, happy, wealthy-looking family dining on the veranda overlooking the waterhole while impala and zebra moved gracefully in and out of the spotlights bathing the veldt.

Ramsey was not feeling any happier himself. He eyed his pad, wishing he could try to call out again, but the shorter of the two men in black, the one called Pilger—shorter, but still over six feet and muscled like a professional wrestler—was watching him, broad face set in an expression of misleading indifference. Ramsey was furious with himself that he hadn't brought his t-jack.

Christabel's father, Major Sorensen, had wandered over to the suite's kitchen unit and was fiddling with the touch controls on the range. The big man named Doyle, the general's other bodyguard, or whatever they were, looked over from the European football game he was watching on the wallscreen. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm just making my daughter a cup of cocoa," Sorensen said scornfully, but Ramsey saw something anomalous in his body language. He had no idea what the major might be doing but he hoped the men in black weren't paying close attention. On the other hand, he hoped that Sorensen wasn't planning anything heroic—Doyle and Pilger were armed to the teeth, and even Sorensen's friend Captain Parkins, sitting stiffly in a chair in his uniform, scowling at the floor, was armed. It was Parkins who had arrested them in the first place, after all, and now they were cooling their heels waiting for General Yacoubian. That made it three large men with guns against himself and Sorensen, both unarmed, and a little girl who probably didn't even have the training wheels off her bike.

"Daddy," Christabel said suddenly, unable to pretend interest in the lioness that was chasing down a wildebeest for the fifth time through the loop, "when can we go home? I want to see Mommy."

"Soon, honey."

Sorensen still had his back to them, waiting for the water to boil, and Ramsey felt a shiver of unease. Doyle and Pilger might look like they were doing anything but performing their professional duty, but Ramsey had met their sort before, both on the military bases of his youth and in the cop bars in which he sometimes found himself in his adult profession. Not to mention that physiques like theirs probably owed something to metabolic enhancement. The one named Doyle certainly had more than a bit of yellow in the whites of his eyes, which could mean any number of unsavory things. If he had gone through one of the military biomod programs, it meant that even if Sorensen threw a pot of boiling water over him, the bodyguard would still be capable of snapping several necks, pain and third-degree burns notwithstanding.

Oh, man, Ramsey found himself silently begging. Major, please don't do anything stupid.

He was beginning to wonder just what exactly he had let himself into. Yacoubian clearly knew something that scared Sorensen to death—the man's blood had all but drained into his feet when the general started talking about sunglasses—and they were none of them going anywhere without the general's permission. Ramsey was furious that he had not had more time to talk to Sorensen, and had not even met the strange Sellars before this whole thing had blown up; it was like walking unprepared into a capital murder trial, then finding out that you were the one on trial.

His nervous thoughts were interrupted by Christabel scrambling past him toward her father. Sorensen turned and waved her away. "It's hot, Christabel," he said sharply. "I'll bring it to you when it's ready."

Her face screwed up, and her eyes filled. Ramsey looked helplessly to Captain Parkins, who was still glaring down at the blue carpet as though it had done something to offend him, then went and took her hand and led her back to the couch. "It's okay, honey. Come sit with me. Tell me about your school. Who's your teacher?"

Something thumped in the far room. For a moment, Ramsey thought he heard the general's voice raised in anger. The two bodyguards flicked each other a look, then turned back to the game. Ramsey wondered who the general's conference was with, and why it was more important than the interrogation of Sorensen. The general had clearly expended a great deal of energy to track the girl's father: it seemed strange he would keep the matter waiting for half an hour or more. Ramsey looked up at the wallscreen. Closer to an hour. What was this all about?

Something banged the connecting door hard, like someone had taken a sledge to it. Ramsey had only a moment to wonder why such an expensive suite would have doors thin enough to shudder just from someone banging their fist against it in the middle of a phone-conference argument, then Doyle jumped to his feet. He moved across the suite in perhaps two strides, just as frighteningly quick as Ramsey had feared he would be, and stood before the door to the general's room, listening. He knocked twice, loud.

"General? Are you all right?" He flicked a glance back to Pilger, who had risen now too, then knocked again. "General Yacoubian? Do you need some assistance, sir?" He leaned to the door, straining to hear a reply. After a moment, he pounded again, wide hand flat on the door. "General! Open up, sir!"

"What are they doing?" Christabel asked, beginning to cry again. "Why are they shouting. . . ?"

Doyle took a step back, grabbed Pilger's shoulder to brace himself, then lifted his booted foot and slammed it against the door. "Bolted," he grunted. This time they both kicked the door at the same time, which crunched and fell inward. Pilger splintered it off its broken hinges while Doyle snatched the huge machine-pistol from his shoulder holster and stepped through, the weapon already locked in firing position as he disappeared from Ramsey's view.

His voice came from a few meters inside the room. "Shit!"

Pilger stepped through after him, his weapon also drawn. Ramsey waited a moment. When no sounds of firing were heard, he stood and moved cautiously toward the door, trying to get an angle to see what was happening. Captain Parkins was leaning forward in his chair, mouth open.

"Christabel!" Sorensen shouted from somewhere behind him. "Don't get up! You stay on that damned couch!"

Doyle was squatting over the body of General Yacoubian, which lay sprawled on the floor between the door and the suite's large bed, his bathrobe rucked around his legs and open over his white-furred chest. The general's tan skin had turned a strange shade of gray. His tongue dangled from his mouth like a piece of rag. Doyle had begun CPR: for a surreal moment, Ramsey wondered how the bodyguard had pushed hard enough in just a few seconds to make that broad purple welt on the general's breast.

"Ambulance to the garage," Doyle said between his teeth. "This is massive. And get the kit."

Pilger was already hurrying back into the main room, his finger pushing against the jack on his neck. He spat a sequence of code into midair, then suddenly turned and waved his gun across the room. "All of you, lie on the floor. Right now!" Without waiting to see whether his order was obeyed, he kneeled and pulled a black valise out from under the couch, then headed back toward the bedroom. He popped its catches and slid it toward Doyle, who was still working on the general; with each blow, Yacoubian bounced on the carpet. Pilger drew a syringe out of one of the valise's inner pockets. As he checked its label, he saw Ramsey standing in the doorway. The gun came up in his other hand.

"Goddamn it, I said I wanted you all down on the floor!"

"Daddy?" Christabel was crying back in the main part of the suite. "Daddy!"

Even as Catur Ramsey backed away, helplessly watching the frighteningly large hole at the end of Pilger's gun barrel, something flared in the corner of his eye. He flinched, but there was no sound of a shot. He looked to the right and saw something that made no sense at all: Major Michael Sorensen was standing on a chair in the suite's kitchen holding a burning' napkin clutched in a pair of ice tongs. He was lifting it up to the ceiling, like some bizarre parody of the Statue of Liberty with her torch.

"I told you all to lie down!" shouted Pilger, who could not see this inexplicable sight. Even as Doyle plunged the hypodermic into the middle of the dark bruise on Yacoubian's chest, Pilger's gun tracked from one side of the doorway to the other, then tilted down at Ramsey's knees. Something clattered, then hissed.

Suddenly it was snowing purple.

The tiles of the ceiling had folded back like Venetian blinds. Dozens of nozzles racked down, spewing clouds of pale lavender fire-retardant dust. The lights of the room began to flick on and off and a painfully loud buzzing filled the air. Sorensen leaped past Ramsey and snatched his daughter up off the floor, then sprinted toward the elevator door where he began to press the button, over and over.

Doyle was pasting the second of two defibrillation patches to the general's still unmoving chest, but Pilger came out of the bedroom with gun drawn, waving his arm so he could see through the fog of choking purple. He shoved his gun against the back of Major Sorensen's head, inches from Christabel's terrified face. "You don't want it to go down this way, do you?" he snarled. "Your brains splashed all over your little girl? Just step away from the door and lie down."

"No. None of it's going to go down this way." Captain Ron Parkins had drawn his own service automatic and was pointing it at Pilger's head. Parkins' face was red with frightened anger. "We're not going to be disappeared by you bastards, whoever you are. These people are under my authority, not yours. You go tend to the general. We're leaving."

In the moment that followed, silent except for the low moan of the alarm, the elevator door swished open. Ramsey, who had both Pilger and Captain Parkins between himself and safety, struggled to slow his rattling heartbeat. It was already hard to breathe, and although most of the purple dust had settled to the floor, there was enough left in the air that he could feel the mother of all sneezes coming on. That would just be the capper, he thought. Sneeze and set off a gun battle.

"Let us go," Sorensen said quietly, Pilger's gun still against the base of his skull. "The general's dead. You may have more of your people coming to help clean up the mess, but now the fire alarm's gone off, so there are a lot of people on the way that you don't own. Just turn around. He's dead. This isn't worth it anymore."

Pilger stared at him, then flicked his eyes sideways to the silvery snout of Captain Parkins' gun. His lip curled. He lowered his pistol, then turned and walked back into the bedroom without another look at them. The general's body was twisting on the floor as Doyle turned the defibrillator dial. Ramsey fought the urge to faint dead away.

"Get out here," growled Captain Parkins. They were five miles from the hotel, the van stopped in front of the light rail station. "You can get a cab from here, a train, whatever the hell you want. Just get going."

"Ron—thank you, man, thank you." Sorensen helped his daughter down from the van. The two young soldiers, who had fought to keep astonishment off their faces when three men and a girl stepped out of the elevator powdered in purple from head to foot, sat a little straighter.

"I don't want to know," Parkins said angrily. "But even if I lose my bars for this, I just . . . I couldn't. . . ."

"I don't think you're ever going to hear about it again, Ron. At least not through official channels." Christabel's father brushed some of the powder from her hair; she looked up quickly as though to make certain it was his hand, not a stranger's. "Trust me—you don't want to know anything more about this than you have to, anyway."

"No, I don't."

Ramsey stepped down beside them, still amazed that he was alive and free and under the open sky again. "Thank you, Captain. You saved our lives."

Parkins threw up his hands in confusion. "Jee-zuss!" He turned to Sorensen. "Just . . . Mike, just take care of that wife and little girl of yours. On second thought, maybe I will ask you to explain this to me one day. What do you think?"

Major Sorensen nodded. "As soon as I figure it out, you'll be the first to hear."

Christabel was shivering despite the warm sun in front of the railway station. As the military van drove away Ramsey took off his windbreaker, shook a cloud of dust from it, and draped it over her shoulders. It was only as he followed the child and her father toward the taxi line that he realized he was shivering as badly as she was.

CHAPTER 2Execution Sweet

CHAPTER 2
Execution Sweet