Deathworld Read online

  And parents who’re going to remind me of it every chance they get, for the foreseeable future.

  Suddenly Nick could understand how nice it might be for it all just to stop. Like going to sleep and not waking up. The sudden desire for it to be that way, just quiet, just no more trouble, came down on him, darker and stranger than the surroundings … and Nick shivered.

  Shade stopped, looked back at him. “Nick. Come on, what’s the matter?”

  “Uh, nothing.”

  That feeling was gone now, but it had been … weird. Nick went after her, shaking the umbrella a little to get the excess ash off it. The dark shape up ahead of them, in the shadow of the mountain, was a little better defined now, starting to look like a building. “Uh-oh, watch out for this one,” Shade said, stopping very suddenly.

  Nick stopped and looked down, stepping back hurriedly as the growing crevasse shot out arms in several directions, one of them stitching along right in front of his feet, the ash in front of him tipping down into it, faint flakes of darkness against the quickly revealed dull-red glow of the flow of lava, away down there. In the air above them, Camiun’s tuning-up paused and then segued into a low quiet minor-key strumming. “So strange,” Joey Bane’s voice sang, “so strange …”

  They made their way around the new crevasse, and kept walking. A shadow reared out of the air near them as they walked. Nick stopped and stared at what was swinging there. Two shapes. It wasn’t a tree of any kind. It was some sort of metal framework, and a man and a woman were hanging upside down from it. “Mussolini,” Shade said. “You know Italy … last century. They caught up with him, eventually.” She raised her eyebrows, just visible in the light of the nearby volcano. “There are plenty more like that around here if you care to investigate… .”

  “Thanks, no.” Nick gulped, sickened by the image swinging gently in front of him. Then he looked past Shade, still unnerved by that odd feeling that had come down on him, and saw something more to the point. Past the tall metal frame, at the foot of the volcano, was something that interested him a whole lot more. A faint shimmer of light, something genuinely reflective in all that dead matte black-a wide, dark sheet of water. It was the Lake of Tears, and beyond it, reflecting darkly, rose the Keep of the Dark Artificer at last, all gleaming black towers and walkways, and high up in one tower, a single light.

  “That’s really it,” Nick whispered. “Finally …”

  “Yup,” Shade said, looking at the Keep. To Nick’s eye she looked astonishingly blase about something which, in its way, was the heart of Deathworld. “Bigger than it looks,” she said. “Don’t be fooled by it.”

  He nodded, then turned back to Shade. There was something about her voice, something sad… . “Are you okay?” Nick said.

  She looked at him in surprise. “Why wouldn’t I be?” The answer was defensive, flip, a little sarcastic… .

  Why wouldn’t I be? he’d said to Charlie, and laughed at him. And Charlie had genuinely been concerned. Nick bit his lip. “Just asking,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, thanks.” She tossed her hair back, a shadow in her greater shadow. “So what are you waiting for? You pass … you might as well go on in and see what’s waiting.”

  “Pass?” Nick was bemused. “But I didn’t do anything.”

  Shade gave him that scornful look again. “You asked the right question,” she said, and began to fade away in the volcano’s feverish light.

  “But which one?”

  She grinned. “If you have to ask,” Shade said, “I can’t explain it. Go on, go ahead and see if you get anywhere in the Keep. The way to Nine is through the Keep, they say … if you can figure it out. But I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope.”

  She vanished completely.

  Nick turned to look at the huge doors of the Keep. Slowly, hauled open by troops of demons singing yo-yo-heave-ho, and pulling on giant bronze ropes, the massive doors swung open before him. Nick stood there feeling a great flush of triumph as Camiun’s voice cried out in feedback-fuzzed ecstatic arpeggios all up and down the scale.

  The demons stood waiting, standing at attention.

  Nick, though, stood still there, thinking.

  The way to Nine is through the Keep, they say … if you can figure it out.

  Nick stood there, considering, for a while … then deliberately turned his back on the Keep and started to kick his way back through the downfalling ash, back the way he had come.

  “Hey,” yelled one of the demons down by the door, “where ya goin’?”

  “Back to help some people,” Nick said, and scuffed off into the darkness, toward the edge of the Eighth Circle again.

  From the shadow of the doors, a tall dark form, not a demon, faded back into existence, watching him go … and smiled.

  Chapter 5

  Mark Gridley’s workspace this week looked like the old Vehicle Assembly Building down at Cape Canaveral. This was a new one on Charlie, though it didn’t exactly surprise him. On earlier visits he had seen it looking like an underground cave full of stalactites and stalagmites, like a single gigantic floor of an office building towering over the Singapore skyline, like the entrance hall of the Museum of Natural History in New York, like the salt flats outside Bonneville, Utah, and like the surface of the Moon-an area not far from the Lunar Appennines, where some astronauts had left their moon buggy. In his own version of that empty, arid place, Mark had constructed a garage for the buggy, one which had also quizzically sheltered a beat-up lawn mower and a folded-up Ping-Pong table. Charlie had come to believe, both at the sight of those workspaces and during some of the events later associated with his visits to them, that it was entirely possible Mark Gridley might have a hinge loose somewhere.

  But whether he did or not, there was no ignoring the fact that Mark was possibly the single most dangerous person on the planet, at least as far as the Net was concerned. Whether heredity had anything to do with it, Charlie wasn’t sure. Having the head of Net Force for your father and a talented computer tech/heavy-duty philosopher for your mother could certainly predispose you to think more about the Net than a lot of people did. But just thinking about it a lot couldn’t possibly endow anybody with the kind of talents Mark had with computers in general and the Net in particular. He was a genius at getting into any kind of computer system, and exploiting it while there. Maj Green had remarked once to Charlie that the Net Fairy had plainly been present at Mark’s christening. Charlie wasn’t so sure about that, but there was no keeping Mark out of any system he was interested in … and he was interested in everything.

  At least, he always had been before. Today Charlie was banking on the idea that nothing had changed.

  Charlie headed across the vast concrete floor of the VAB, looking for signs of life. He didn’t see any. The huge space, thirty stories tall, was empty. This by itself wasn’t so odd: in the real world it had been a long time since spacecraft had been built there, and mostly the building was kept for its history as the assembly area for the first rockets to take man to the Moon, and because demolishing the VAB would have upset the colonies of pygmy Cape buzzards that nested . There and worked the little “pocket” weather system inside the building.

  Off in one corner, though, about a quarter mile away, Charlie saw where a beam of sunlight came in through the movable cowling in the roof, and shone down on what looked like a conversation area-various chairs arranged in something like a circle, with a big low hardwood desk off to one side. Charlie made his way toward this, listening to the creaks and cheeps of the buzzards above him as they circled in a mini-updraft near the roof.

  “WHO DISTURBS THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ?” thundered a huge voice all through the VAB. The buzzards squeaked in protest and flapped over to the sides of the building, perching and shaking their heads at the noise.

  “It is I,” Charlie said, rolling his eyes. “I mean, it’s me, Squirt. Lay off the ‘great and powerful’ trip before I choke myself laughing.”

  “I don’t think y
ou take me seriously enough,” said a much more normal voice, that of a thirteen-year-old kid again. It echoed in the huge space, but didn’t roar as it had a moment before. Mark came into sight now from somewhere behind the “conversation circle,” his arms full of e-mail images. He was wearing swim trunks and a MoldToYou T-shirt which was presently showing, one phrase at a time, in bold white letters on black, the message SPACE IS BIG / SPACE IS DARK / IT’S HARD TO FIND / A PLACE TO PARK / BURMA SHAVE.

  Charlie blinked at that. Mark was part Thai, but he wasn’t sure what Burma had to do with anything. “How is it possible to take you anything but seriously,” he said. “You busy?”

  “Nothing important,” Mark said, dumping the load of e-mails onto his desk of the moment. They scrambled around on the surface of the desk, putting themselves in some prearranged order, and then ascended gently into the air and hovered there, like well-trained bubbles. “Just trying to get down to the bottom of the In-box before the end of the week.”

  “Why? What’s the end of the week?”

  Mark snickered and brushed his dark hair out of his eyes. He was due for a haircut, or maybe this was just some new style he was trying out. “My dad’s been threatening to take me surf-fishing for about the last year. Well, the stars or whatever must be propitious, because we’re going away for the weekend, up to some place on the Jersey shore. Or so he claims.” Mark gave Charlie a knowing grin. “I’m betting you something’ll come up Sat- urday morning and it’ll all be off. But I can’t absolutely count on it, so …”

  “WAAAH,” said something nearby, a raspy upscaling voice that vaguely suggested a soul in torment.

  Mark looked over his shoulder. “Yeah, yeah, it’ll be dinnertime soon,” he said to someone Charlie couldn’t see.

  “What was that?” Charlie said, looking around. It didn’t sound like a buzzard.

  “The cat. Theo,” Mark said. “Or, as we call him, The Gut Who Walks.” Another piercing Siamese-cat shout filled the air, suggesting either that Theo didn’t appreciate the characterization, or that this conversation wasn’t producing food, or that he was testing the acoustics. “So look, what brings you by? Not that I don’t think it’s entirely social.”

  Charlie grinned. Mark had taken some ribbing from the older Net Force Explorers about his age, and his size-he was short and light even for a thirteen-year-old-until they started to discover that the area in which Mark was decidedly no lightweight was his brain, and that he could outthink, and sometimes outmove, any of them. Those who had christened him the Squirt as a joke had since turned it into a title of honor, and kids five or six years older than he was had soon learned not to treat Mark as if he were too young to be taken seriously. Charlie had never been one of these. He knew entirely too much about what it was like to have people decide because of your background that you weren’t worth their time.

  “Got a problem, Squirt,” Charlie said.

  Mark looked surprised, and eyed him curiously. “Yeah, you do, don’t you?”

  “Does it show?”

  “You look bothered. What’s the matter? Trouble with your folks?”

  “Me? No.” Charlie laughed, but he wasn’t surprised that the sound didn’t come out sounding particularly humorous. “Look, I have to ask you something.”

  “Blaze away.”

  “I’m not sure it’s not illegal.”

  Mark put up his eyebrows. “Oh? Not your usual mode of operation, Mr. Straight Arrow.”

  “Don’t remind me. I need to get at some information.” “You interest me strangely.”

  Mark’s suddenly delighted expression made Charlie laugh. “Nothing real involved. I need to get at some medical records.”

  Mark looked bemused. “Thought you’d usually ask your dad about that kind of thing.”

  “Not just general information. I need to get at some county coroner’s files.”

  “Aha,” Mark said, and leaned back in his chair. “Not public files, then.”

  “Nope. Autopsies.”

  “Wow, truly disgusting,” Mark said, not sounding disgusted in the slightest. “I wanna see, too.”

  “Not sure it would be good for you to see this stuff,” Charlie said, uneasy. “Heck, I don’t really even want to see it.”

  “You’re gonna have a hard time getting at it in the first place without me,” Mark said, sounding all too matter-of-fact. “Come on, Charlie, I’m not going to look over your shoulder if you’re really worried. But it’d make me feel a lot better if you’d tell me what was going on.”

  Charlie didn’t see that he had any choice. He sat down on one of the chairs pulled into the circle and told Mark the basics of his problem, without mentioning any names.

  When he was finished, Mark sat down across the circle from him and folded his arms, thinking. “Been a lot of attention on Deathworld, hasn’t there?” he said. “Since the last couple of suicides . _ _

  “Yeah.”

  “But you don’t need me to break in there, I take it.” “Nope. It’s just this medical stuff I’m after.”

  Mark sighed. “Pity,” he said. “Deathworld would have been a challenge… . But as for this other stuff, we can do it this evening, if you like.”

  “Really?”

  “Shoot, we can do it now.”

  Mark opened a drawer in his desk, looked at the e-mail “solids” floating around above the desk. “Okay, every- body i “

  n… .

  One after another the icons dropped into the drawer, all but one, a recalcitrant sphere that hung bobbing in the air over the desk and wouldn’t budge. “Yes, you, too, get in there!”

  “You promised you would deal with this today,” said the e-mail, in Jay Gridley’s voice.

  Charlie’s eyebrows went up. Mark flushed pink and grabbed the mail out of the air, stuffing it in his pocket. “No rest for the weary,” he said. “Never mind.”

  Mark dusted his hands off, knocked the drawer shut with his hip. “Okay,” he said, “let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Charlie fished around in his own pocket and came up with a notepad, the icon for a little file full of bureau names that he was carrying with him. He handed it to Mark. Mark tossed it onto the desk, and a window appeared in the air in front of them and displayed the list.

  “Mmm,” Mark said. “Bangor County Coroner’s Office, Collins County Police Coroner, Arlington City Coroner’s Department …” There were six offices matched with six victims-the paired suicide, the most recent one, was being handled by two different coroner’s offices, as the kids had lived in two different jurisdictions.

  Mark stood there with his arms folded, thinking for a moment. “Let’s do the county systems first,” he said. “Then the police ones. The cops are likely to have better security, and they might take us a little longer.”

  “You don’t think they’re likely to alert each other that someone’s going after data on the suicides?” Charlie said, beginning to get nervous. He was feeling guilty already.

  “I doubt it,” said Mark. “There isn’t nearly as much cooperation between police forces as there should be if they really want to make their systems secure. Especially regionally. Too much rivalry …” He grinned slightly. “Old habits die hard. Besides, these people don’t seem to have been comparing notes in the first place, do they? I mean, just from what you told me now, the fact that all the suicides seem to involve a hanging of one kind or another-no one seems to have picked up on that. At least nothing’s been mentioned about it on the news.”

  “They might be hiding that information,” Charlie said, uncertain.

  “If they were coordinating, yeah. But we don’t have any proof that they are. So let’s stir around a little and see what we find. If any of the data you’re interested in is trip-wired, or has associational links to similar data in some other police department’s network, then that might indicate that they’re talking to each other privately about this stuff. Meanwhile”-he looked at the list-“Let’s start with Bangor.”

  M
ark looked around him. “Okay,” he said to his workspace, “strike the set.”

  The VAB, the sunlight, the little flickery shadows of the buzzards away up high-it all vanished away in a blink, leaving them in a peculiar sort of darkness in which the two of them were illuminated, but nothing else was. The only other thing visible was the window with the names of the agencies Charlie wanted to raid for information. “Bring up the advanced-level penetration utility,” Mark said.

  And the floor of Mark’s workspace suddenly became visible. More than visible. It was transparent, so that Charlie could see down into it, for what looked like maybe a thousand meters. The space below their feet was full of light, light of every color, columns and lines and pillars of it, some horizontal but mostly vertical, interwoven, sometimes even interpenetrating. This was an expression of a program that Mark had designed for getting into other programs. “What language did you write this in?” Charlie said, very impressed.

  “Digamma, it’s called. Nasty stuff.”

  “I believe you.” Charlie knew in a general sort of way that every line of the light he saw reaching down to limitless depths beneath him was a statement in computer code of some kind, but there his knowledge stopped. “Man, I’m just getting the hang of Caldera. I thought that was complicated-!”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t want to mess with Digamma unless you were seriously unbalanced,” Mark said. He looked down into the abysses of light, and the whole deep panorama began moving with great speed underneath him, slipping sideways. Then it was as if the floor on which they stood plunged downward like an elevator, though they weren’t actually moving at all-rather, the graphic expression of the “penetration” program was pouring itself up past the two of them into the air around them as ghosts of structures of light. It paused, then pouring sideways again as the program sorted for some specific spot that Mark had in mind. After a moment it stopped, which was a good thing, because Charlie’s stomach was bouncing around inside him as if he was on a roller coaster.