Deathworld Read online

  The sound of a car slowing down close to him when all the rest of the traffic was doing forty or better made Charlie turn his head. A big car had slid up beside him, and just as his head was turning its door popped open and someone lunged out, reached out toward him-

  It was only the reflexes of the nascent street kid Charlie had once been that now saved him, the thing that even these days sometimes made it hard for him to hold still and let his mom hug him. Don’t let them touch you! Touch is control-

  He twisted away and plunged off down Morrison Street, away from the car. Charlie heard the whine of the sonic going off behind him, someone actually trying to stun him into collapse-but he was just out of range, and his legs were moving faster than his brain for once. They remembered fear more clearly and immediately than he did, and while the intellectual constituent of the fear was still working its way down from his brain to his adrenals Charlie was already running, running as if the Devil himself was after him, down the street, turn the corner, down the side alley that served that block of Morrison, turn another corner in the opposite direction, run, run He barely felt the concrete beneath his feet, he was running so hard, and though his body was panting with terror and exertion already, Charlie’s brain was running ahead of him, planning his escape.

  It’s a one-way street. They can’t get down here easily. And I know this area-

  He ran. His lungs started burning, and he ignored them. I thought they were in a hurry. I was right. Too right. Charlie gulped for air as he ran. If they’re ready to try a snatch in broad daylight, they’re really serious. Got to get online right away. Got to get help. The cops-or better still, Net Force For the cops didn’t know him. Net Force did. He needed Mark Gridley, or James Winters, just as fast as he could get to one or the other of them.

  Is it the killer himself Charlie thought, or an accomplice? Does it matter? They’re right behind me-For he could hear an engine, getting closer. He didn’t bother looking behind him. He turned immediately right and plunged across a brownstone’s front yard, down the driveway beside it, heading into its paved backyard. There was a Dumpster up against the brick back wall. Charlie blessed its name and that of District Recycling Company, whoever they were. He went up onto the top of it in a rush and from there jumped up to grab the top of the wall, having already seen as he was going up that there was no broken glass embedded in it. Charlie went over the wall into the yard of the brownstone on the other side, paused for just a second to take it in-blind dirty windows, all with security shutters or shades down, another Dumpster, a couple of parked cars- I know where I am, he thought as he plunged out of the yard, into the brownstone’s driveway and down to the wall in front of the building and the driveway’s open gate. He looked up and down the street. I can’t let them catch me out here, where they have the advantage-size, weapons, mobility. If there’s going to be a chase, let it be where I have a chance. Not out here!

  He ran like a sprinter, terrified that as he got to the corner he would see that car in front of him. Dark blue, a glossy new Dodge sedan of some kind, one of those big ones, they keep changing the names, recent model, Virginia plates- But it didn’t materialize. Some kindly fate gave him the few seconds he needed to fly in the door of the WorldGate public Net-access place on the corner. He stood there panting at the front desk, and the guy who manned it straightened up from taking something out of the shelves behind the desk, looked Charlie up and down with an expression of complete boredom, and said, “Yeah?”

  “I need a booth!” Charlie said.

  The behind-the-counter guy looked at him with a total lack of urgency. “Cash or credit?”

  Charlie fumbled in his pocket and came up with, to his shock, not one of the family commcards, but something he had grabbed off the hall table that morning on his way to school, thinking that he might as well use up a little of whatever comm time was on it: a public access commcard. Gulping, Charlie slapped it down on the reading plate on the counter. The guy behind the counter read what the plate and the commcard had to say to each other, and pushed Charlie’s card back toward him. “Only got fifty-five minutes on that,” he said.

  Charlie swallowed. “Which booth?” he said.

  “Six-”

  He ran down the hallway between the booths, found Six, slid the curved booth door shut behind him, then palmsealed it locked. There he stood for a moment, breathing hard, and then flung himself into the implant chair which was the room’s only furnishing. He leaned back, sweating, lined his implant up with the chair’s pickup, closed his eyes-

  Charlie opened them again on whiteness, and jumped up out of the chair. He was standing on an infinite white plane with a featureless blue “sky” above it, empty of everything except a voice that said, “Welcome to a WorldGate public Net-access facility. Instructions, please?”

  The terrible thing about it all was that the one place where Charlie would have felt safe and at least slightly in control, his own workspace, was the one place he couldn’t now go. There was a better than even chance that it had been tampered with somehow, that his accessing it would trigger some tracing facility that would betray his presence here. And that door would only be closed for fifty-five minutes. Charlie had almost no cash on him to buy more time. After that he would have to go out the door, and if they had been able to track him down, one way or another, the people hunting him would be waiting there with some plausible story-

  Then it was all too plain what would happen to him, what had happened to the others. If not today, then some other time real soon, at an unguarded moment, he would be snatched. Someone would stuff him full of scorbutal cohydrobromate, either with a FasJect or even just out of a spray can, the aerosol method. And when the drug took, in a matter of a few minutes, when he could not resist, Charlie would be spirited away into some private spot, a hotel room, say, and his “suicide” would be set up. Possibly even with his own cooperation, but in any case, he certainly wouldn’t be in any condition to resist. And even bearing in mind what Mom said … in this case, the odds are better than fifty-fifty that they can make you do something you wouldn’t normally do. Think of what Nick said about Jeannine and Malcolm… .

  Charlie swallowed. “Workspace access,” he said. “Address 77356936678822-847722-”

  He rattled the number off as fast as he could, having to stop once or twice, because it wasn’t one he normally had to remember. The whiteness around him flickered-

  Charlie found himself standing in the middle of Grand Central Terminal in New York. This was his father’s desperate joke about the state of his own schedule, which he described as being like living in Grand Central, though without being able to go downstairs to the Oyster Bar whenever he liked. The terminal’s great main concourse was gloriously lit, with sun pouring down in great diagonally striking rays from the tall windows on the Vanderbilt Avenue side. But there were no people in it … and more to the point, to Charlie’s despair, his father wasn’t in it, either. Normally he had a big desk, made of the same creamy polished terrazzo of the floor, standing just west of the circular information kiosk with its polished brass knob-clock, but the desk was missing.

  “Damn,” Charlie whispered to himself. There was no point in leaving a message, no time “Home system,” Charlie said. “Workspace, new access, address, 77356936678822-8472086633-”

  Another flicker. A second later Charlie was standing in his mother’s space, which for reasons she had not explained to him was currently a huge stretch of sand just east of the Pyramids. The view was spectacular, until you turned around and saw that the suburbs of Cairo were directly behind you, and in fact you were standing in someone’s backyard, with a picnic table and a swingset off to one side, and a lawn that was scrubby not for lack of water, but because some kids and an overenthusiastic dog or two had dug or worn it nearly flat. Charlie looked at the picnic table and saw a scatter of his mother’s paperwork all over the top of it, stuff from the hospital, her computer pad, a bunch of flowers stuck in a crude vase that Charlie had made
her from clay a long time ago. “Mom?” he said softly.

  Her simulacrum appeared immediately. “Hi, honey,” she said, but Charlie let out a breath of pure desperation, for she was canned. “Guess what? The best-laid plans have ganged agley after all. I’m going to be late again tonight, sorry … they needed some more warm bodies down in ER, they were short of staff. When you get home, be a sweetie and put some more white wine in the marinade for the ribs, okay? Otherwise, if you need me for something, call the hospital and have them page me, they ‘11-”

  Damn. “Home system,” Charlie said, racking his memory, and then shaking his head in frustration, for he couldn’t remember James Winters’s commcode or the code for his office. “Emergency call. Net Force headquarters-”

  Suddenly he found himself looking at a uniformed lady, a cool-looking blonde, sitting behind a desk. “Net Force. How can I help you?”

  “This is an emergency,” Charlie said. “My name is Charlie Davis. I am a member of the Net Force Explorers. I need to talk to James Winters immediately!”

  She smiled at him, an understanding expression, and Charlie was instantly angry enough to spit, for the look was that of someone humoring a child. He then instantly felt guilty for his anger, for there were thousands of Explorers scattered all over the North American continent, and there was no reason for this woman to believe that he had anything important going on in his life at all. “I’m sorry, but he’s not available right now-”

  “Then let me leave a message for him,” Charlie said. “Please tell him that I have the data he asked me to correlate for him, but if I don’t hear from him shortly, the body count may have increased by one. Tell him he can reach me here for the next fifty minutes-” And he rattled off the address of the Net center and of the present workspace. “Thank you! Workspace, new access address, 8846396677336-”

  This number he knew well enough from having to input it about thirty times two weeks ago, when his address-filing facility had developed a fault that it took him the better part of an afternoon to put right. Charlie gulped, and then let out a breath of pure relief as the sunlight spilling in through the roof of the VAB appeared all around him, but grayed out, as if through a veil. “You are entering a restricted space,” a harsh robotic voice said. “Access is forbidden. Track and trace protocols are in operation.”

  “Mark, it’s me, it’s Charlie!”

  Thegrayness vanished immediately. He rushed out into the sunlight across the concrete, looked around him. The Rolls-Skoda was sitting in the middle of the floor. High above him, he heard the buzzards softly squeaking and cheeping to one another as they worked the in-building updraft. “Mark?” he shouted, and to his embarrassment his voice broke in mid-word.

  “Jeez,” Mark said, though Charlie couldn’t see from where, “what’s up with you? You sound like a chicken.”

  There were about ten possible answers to that. “Mark, where are you? I’m up the creek!”

  Mark appeared immediately in the middle of the floor, over by the Rolls. “Sorry, I was doing some maintenance,” he said, heading over to Charlie. “What’s up?”

  “I’m stuck in a public access near the Square,” Charlie said, “and somebody just tried to grab me off the street!”

  “I’ll call the cops,” Mark said.

  “Don’t!”

  Mark looked at him as if he was nuts. Charlie could entirely understand why. “You do that,” Charlie said, “the minute they turn up there, whoever tried to grab me will just play it innocent and vanish, and we’ll be no better off than we have been-either they’ll come after me again later, at a better time, or else some other poor kid’s gonna get grabbed instead. And probably killed! We’ve got to do something now. But we’ve got to keep whoever’s chasing me on the hook, until the Net . Force people can catch up with him, with me-”

  “I’ll hit the panic button,” Mark said. Immediately the whole space filled with an astounding howl of klaxons. He looked around him with intense satisfaction.

  “It’s not going to help,” Charlie said, “Winters isn’t available!”

  “I bet my dad is, though,” said Mark. “He’ll call the cavalry.” He looked around him, then, with some concern, because nothing but the klaxon seemed to be happening. “Or he would if he was in his office-” he muttered.

  “Mark, we have to do something now!”

  “That’ll go through to his pager,” Mark said. “No point in us sitting around waiting.”

  “The guy chasing me,” Charlie said, “it’s a fair bet he’ll realize what I’ve done. If he has any brains at all, he’ll be in some other Net access place right now, trying to find out where I am online. Then he’ll try to trace me-and I’m on limited time, all I had was a valuecard. I only have about forty-five minutes now before the door of my booth opens up-”

  “Then we’d better get where you’re expected to be,” Mark said, “and stall.”

  Charlie stared at Mark. “You mean Deathworld-”

  “Where else? How else is he going to track you if you’re in a public access except by your Deathworld ID? And you’ve got a hot-pursuit situation, haven’t you? Well, you don’t want to lose the guy, do you? You just said you didn’t want him to go to ground! He will, if he loses you.” Mark looked at him, a challenging kind of look. “You’ve got to keep him chasing you until the cavalry comes over the hill, Charlie!”

  Charlie gulped.

  “But you won’t be alone,” Mark said. “Come on, Charlie … the game’s afoot. And it’s us. But we won’t be the ones who get caught. Let’s go where you’re expected to go when you panic.”

  “My workspace.”

  “From in here, not direct from your access.” Mark picked up the Magic Jacket from where it had been draped over the chair behind his “desk” and threw it at Charlie. “He, she, or they won’t expect that. My antitrace protocols outside this space will at least slow them down. And then we’ll get into Deathworld. But on the way, you think we might pick up someone else who knows his way around there … ?”

  Charlie gulped, and began to see how it could go. And slowly he started to smile. It was still dangerous, and he was still scared. But this was exactly what he had been working toward. And he now had someone on his side.

  “Nick,” he said. “Yeah. It’s worth a try. Come on, Mark, let’s go … !”

  Chapter 9

  Charlie came out into the ashy darkness between the Lake. of Tears and the Dark Artificer’s Keep, and stood looking around him for a second with Mark. Here and there in the darkness beyond the lake, the Damned ran by, pursued by the usual demons. Banies made their way toward the Keep, or into and out of it. There was no sign of any pursuit, but then he wasn’t sure what pursuit would necessarily look like. It could wear a seeming as easily as he could, and didn’t have to look like anyone he would recognize at the moment. And is it Kalki? Or Shade? Or someone else they’ve sent after me?

  “One thing you’ve going for you,” Mark said, “they’ll be looking for one kid, not two.”

  “Great. That means they’ll either pass me by, or find me and also try to trace and grab whoever’s with me,” Charlie said. “Why leave witnesses?”

  This thought made Mark widen his eyes briefly. Then he grinned. “I don’t think so somehow,” Mark said. “I don’t care who they are. They’re not going to get into my workspace from my ID here. It’s too well protected for that.” He looked around them, though, with some concern. “But I don’t think we should just be standing around. Where do we go?”

  “For the moment,” Charlie said, “safety in numbers. There are more people in the Keep than there are out here. Let’s get inside.”

  They headed in through the front door. There were a fair number of Banies who used this spot as a gateway “access” while working on solving the Eighth Circle, and most of them were heading past Charlie and Mark toward the entryway that led to the Stairways to Nowhere. “We could lose ourselves pretty well in there, from the look of it,” Mark said.
r />   “Lose would be the word,” Charlie said, nervous. “I don’t know my way around in there real well-”

  “Doesn’t matter. Whoever’s chasing you,” Mark said, “we’ve just got to keep them in here, and occupied, until the Net Force people can get in and identify them.”

  Charlie swallowed. “Will they be able to do that in forty minutes?”

  “More like thirty-five now,” Mark said, not even having the grace to sound scared. “They’d better.”

  “But how are they going to find us?”

  Mark tugged at the virtual “fabric” of the Magic Jacket’s sleeve. “I left full details about this in the message to my dad,” he said. “The tracking routine it uses is piping direct into his space. Anything you see or hear, he and Net Force will, too … and it’s all archiving, storing virtual locations and addresses second by second. All we can do now is leave the tracking to him and his people, and get ourselves deep inside here … deep enough that anyone who comes after us is plainly doing it on purpose and not just as some kind of accident.”

  Charlie looked around him, looked at the entry to the stairways. “Okay,” he said. “I guess we’d better-” “Manta!”

  Charlie jumped. But it wasn’t Kalki’s voice, or Shade’s.

  Not that that means anything! He turned, half-furious, half terrified to see Nick hurrying toward them through the great doors. “Ohmygosh,” Charlie said, grabbing Nick by the shoulders as he got close, “I’m gonna kill you! Do you know who I thought you were?”

  “I can imagine. But I didn’t want to yell your real name in the middle of all this. Who knew what could happen? Hey, nice jacket.”

  “Never mind the jacket. How did you know my handle?”

  “I’ve been reading the message boards,” Nick said. “I put some things together. Your message timings, for example. Look, can this wait? I got the message you left me about the people who’re after you. Had to be the hero, didn’t you?”