A Few Good Men Read online

  Which just goes to show you the damn bastard didn’t play fair. He never did. Even dead fourteen years, dead at my hand for fourteen years, the stubborn cuss insisted on thinking the best of me. And now, as always, I couldn’t disappoint him. Death would be easier.

  My body didn’t want to want to go to the lower levels. Bodies aren’t stupid. They know their business is survival. I tried to overpower it with my mind, but the body would have won. Except the mind had Ben on its side and even my body wasn’t able to resist the irresistible force of his belief in my non-existent goodness.

  I lurched around, unsteadily, against the shrieks from my body that I should save myself, and ran to the grav well. I dropped through it, water pouring down with me, soaking my hair and clothes, and hopefully leaving the gem reader dry. Hopefully. Because when I was caught, I wanted my damn gems.

  And if I just did this, Ben assured me, I wouldn’t have the ghosts of the dumb bastards down here keeping him company in my head. That was incentive enough.

  There were four cells down here. I remembered that from when they’d dragged me down there to torture. The nearer one was open—the door hanging on one side and blown on the other.

  On the water here up to my chest, someone was floating facedown, a middle-aged, well-dressed man. I splashed over and turned him face up, then let go. First, he was Good Man Rainer. Second, there was a burner hole in the middle of his forehead. The Good Man Rainer was dead. The man who’d first sent Ben and me to jail. My mind couldn’t process it and neither could Ben’s ghost, who frowned distractedly but said nothing.

  The next cell was still locked and it occurred to me, belatedly, I didn’t have a burner. He’ll have it, Ben said. Obviously talking about the corpse. Remember all the bastards have burners on them at all times for self-defense.

  I told him he could search the corpse himself, but he only smiled at me in that irritating way he did when he reminded me he had no more existence than any other figment of my imagination. All I can say is that my imagination must be against me.

  Trotting back against water resistance was not as easy as it seemed, and I had to swim to get a good grip on the late, departed Good Man Rainer. I might never have found the burner in time, if I hadn’t got lucky. It was strapped under his pant leg, to his all-too-cold ankle. I grabbed it and sploshed back to the first cell.

  Using a burner under water is always a crap shoot. You shoot and, if it’s a cheap burner, it won’t even produce a beam. If it’s a slightly better burner, it will sort of work and shock you right back through the water. But this must have been one of the solid state ones, equipped with a laser for underwater work, because it beamed, white and hot and true, and burned the lock right out. And then nothing happened. The door didn’t spring inward.

  The water pressure is holding it, Ben said. You’ll have to kick it in.

  Ghosts have absolutely no sense of reality. Probably comes from not existing. To kick something under water is about as easy as to kick something in low grav—an experience I remembered from an all-too brief visit to Circum where some areas were kept at half-g.

  You had to get a good hold on something. All I could get was a sort of hold on the door frame. Fortunately I’d spent the last fourteen years exercising insanely.

  I got hold of the frame and kicked at the door with both feet. It opened enough to let the water flow out some and then it opened fully.

  The occupant of this cell was beyond human cares. He was strapped to a chair, and floating, chair and all. And if he wasn’t dead, he should be. I was no more prepared to give him regen for his eyes or to stop the blood spreading in billows in the water around him, than I was to fly. And if he wasn’t dead, he’d be dead in minutes, one way or another. He was unconscious, so there was no suffering I must stop as I’d once stopped Ben’s.

  I turned and swam back to the next cell where I burned the lock, kicked the door in. And found myself assaulted by a madman, wrapping his hands around my neck, in what seemed like a creditable attempt at strangling me.

  A good slug with the back of the burner would have cold-cocked him, but then I’d have to save him. So, instead, as he scrambled for a good hold on my neck, hampered by my hand in the way, I hauled back and slapped him hard across the face, then took advantage of his confusion to point him towards the upward grav well. “That way,” I said. “Go.”

  It was iffy whether he would, but he shook his head, then turned and swam that way. Leaving me to swim to the last closed cell and repeat the door-opening procedure.

  This time I faced a young man, probably twenty-two or so, the age I’d been when they’d brought me here. Actually, he looked a lot as I had at that age, with smoothly cut hair—though his was brown—and, from what was visible of his sleeve, wearing a high-quality suit. And he was clinging desperately, with an expression of terror in his eyes, to the light fixture directly above where they normally strapped prisoners to the wall. His head was tilted back to keep his nose above water.

  He stared at me as though seeing a vision of perfect horror, which I probably was. Don’t know. I had been fourteen years without a mirror. I pulled myself up so I could talk and said, “Come on!”

  And he tilted his head back more and spoke, the words intercut by chattering teeth. “I ca-can’t. Ca-can’t swim.”

  Damn. Yeah, I could go and leave him here to drown. He was going to slow me down, and frankly I had to leave fast. The few inches of air up there would soon be closed off by water, but I couldn’t leave him here to die. I just couldn’t. Ben wouldn’t ever let me hear the end of it, and worse, he might acquire a buddy with brown hair and chattering teeth.

  I must have expressed myself loudly and profanely. You spend too much time alone, you forget that there are thoughts that shouldn’t be expressed aloud. My companion looked even more terrified and tried to shrink from me.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said. “Try to breathe when your head is above water, because I can’t promise it will always be.” And I grabbed him by the back of his suit. Expensive material ought to hold.

  Then I took a deep breath, and plunged my own head under for faster speed towing him. I hadn’t swum at all in more than fourteen years, and certainly hadn’t swum towing someone. Halfway through the hallway, I surfaced to breathe. My charge, white as a sheet, seemed to be managing to keep his own head in the air by treading water. Good. I plunged under and dragged him again.

  All the way to the antigrav well, which sucked us all the way to the upper floor.

  The well was, of course, slightly dislocated from the well on the next level, so you wouldn’t accidentally go all the way up. So we stumbled off the well field, sideways, and into the field of the next well, having no more than time to register that the water here was up to our knees. Then up again, and the water up above our ankles. Then up again, and the water covered our feet. I stared at the other grav well at the end of the corridor, ignoring the people swarming around.

  There were broomers everywhere, some of them women. And there were fights going on between broomers and guards and, in a couple of instances, prisoners. But I just looked at the downward grav well at the end and determined that no water was falling down through that. That meant there was no water in the level above. So the hole had to be on this level, right? The hole was my chance at escaping. I wasn’t about to try to leave through the main entrance. I wasn’t that stupid.

  A quick look, to see where the hole would be, brought an even quicker decision that it would be on the side where there were more broomers and fewer guards. Stood to reason, since guards were pouring in from above.

  I grabbed my charge’s wrist and pulled him in the direction where there were more broomers, and I told him, my voice little more than an exasperated puff—it’s not easy running and towing a full grown man, even if he’s smaller than you—“Come this way, ignore the broomers.”

  He hesitated a moment, then followed me. I was coming to terms, as he splashed behind me, with the thought that I’d have t
o tow the kid behind me no matter how far the surface was. Couldn’t leave him here. He seemed about as capable of survival as the drowned baby rat he resembled. Twenty-one or twenty-two or around there, certainly not as much as twenty-five. His face was too rounded and soft for that, and his skin seemed smooth and flawless like a girl’s. And he could be my son. Well, he could have been if I’d ever done anything that could have led to a son. And I didn’t think so, not even when drunk out of my mind.

  But he could have been. And I was the adult here, which meant he was my responsibility. What kind of species would we be, if adults didn’t take the responsibility for juveniles?

  Your father’s species? Ben said in my mind, which only goes to show you that ghosts don’t get out of breath or tired, no matter if the head that they’re haunting feels as though it would very much like to have a good bout of unconsciousness.

  I ran down the hallway towards where I hoped the source of the water was. First there were ever increasing numbers of broomers, all of whom ignored us. If I’d had a little more breath, I’d have slugged one and stolen his broom to pull us to the surface. Except I was fairly sure I owed my freedom to them, and I refused to slug my saviors. Monster I might be, but there were limits.

  Then there were no more broomers, as they were all behind me, and I could see the hole—a jagged tear in the wall of Never-Never, through which water poured. And one of the mysteries was solved for me, because someone had slapped a manhole underwater seal on the opening. Because it wasn’t precisely the same shape as the opening, it allowed water to rush in around the edges. But it wasn’t the torrent it would have been, had the hole been fully open. Which explained why even the lower level wasn’t fully filled.

  I turned to the kid behind me. “Take a deep breath. I don’t know how far down we are, but the broomers came that way, so it can’t be too far.” I neglected to tell him that the broomers had brooms to tow them down, and therefore would have traveled much faster than any swimmer could. “I’ll take you to the surface.”

  But even as I heard him draw breath, a man came through the membrane, then another. I jumped back and—this shows you how ghost-bullied I was—stood in front of the young man, as my mind realized that these men in stylish, dark suits, who clipped their brooms to their belts with military precision as they landed on this side of the membrane were not your average broomers.

  In fact, they were a paramilitary unit, and only one of those deployed with brooms, so they could target problem spots in no time.

  They were almost mythical, only I’d seen them once before. Scrubbers. The Good Men’s secret service of last resort.

  Out of Hell

  Scrubbers weren’t spies and they weren’t exactly a military force. What they were was the Good Men’s ultimate weapon in opinion control. Whenever an incident occurred which might cause public opinion to go out of control, Scrubbers were sent in to deal with it.

  Their normal approach was killing everyone and making the bodies disappear. If you were really, really lucky, you might have some DNA and a few scuffle marks left when they were done. Theirs was the only avocation in which disposal of dozens of bodies wasn’t rare or incidental but a core part of their mission.

  I’d met them before, once. I’d escaped with my life, barely. Ben and I might be the only ones of their targets to ever do so.

  But Ben and I had ended up in jail. That led to all the rest.

  Now, my blood ran cold, and my entire body seemed to tighten in a knot. I’d escaped that one time, but this was death. Death for me, death for the kid I’d rescued, death for the broomers who’d set us free. Nothing would be found of us.

  And then I lost my mind. Or at least my mind let my body spring free.

  I can’t explain my capacity to move really fast, and I’ve never found any reference to this from anyone else, not even in the copious literature and history gems someone had snuck to me in the depths of Never-Never. For a long time, I’d thought it was illusory, but both in the last incident with the Scrubbers and in the many incidents that Ben and I had been involved in in our first year in a common jail, I’d found that my ability was in fact true and it could be summed up as this: When in danger or great fear, I could sometimes move at a speed above normal humans. Fast enough above normal humans that I could win against great odds.

  There were six men, which was the limits of even my ability, particularly since the front one was drawing a burner, no doubt to cut us down. And I didn’t want to kill. I didn’t want any more deaths on my conscience, but I also didn’t want to die. And I couldn’t let them kill the kid.

  I sprang. Kicking the gun from his hands, I punched him hard enough to shove his nose in, then flung myself sideways towards his burner because it was easier than drawing mine. I must have moved at a speed that his comrades found hard to perceive, since their burner fire followed me down, but didn’t quite catch up with me. I heard the kid give a sort of gasp, and hoped it wasn’t loud enough to call attention to him.

  And then I was flat on my belly, with the gun in my hand, and cutting down the Scrubbers in a long, continuous scything. I didn’t even have time to set the controls on the burner and it wasn’t set to heat, but only to the penetration where it works like a blade. Bodies fell, cut in half. Which was good, because they were wearing the large oxygen tanks people use when they will take brooms underwater, where the mere oxygen concentrator on the broom won’t be enough. And if I’d hit them with heat-burn, depending on what the tanks were made of, I’d have either blown us all up or ended up with a lovely rocket effect. But it poured out blood and guts in plentiful supply.

  The kid must have been shocked enough by the sight that he didn’t move. Which was bad, because the last of the Scrubbers jumped, before the beam reached him, and got behind the kid, his burner to the kid’s temple. “Surrender your burner or your son gets it.”

  And damn it, I didn’t have time to argue genealogy, any more than I had time to set the burner to burn, instead of cut. So, instead I removed my fingers from the trigger for a moment, aimed it at the man’s head, faster than his eye would be able to follow or—I hoped—his hand react to, and I shot him neatly in the middle of the forehead.

  It was the equivalent of running a sharp, lance-long needle, through the middle of his head. Blood and brains erupted, then poured. He spasmed once. Fortunately his hand moved from its position at the kid’s temple, so the shot went straight down the hallway. Someone screamed down there.

  But I was already reacting. Reacting to the falling Scrubber, reacting to the kid’s turning very pale, and his eyes trying to roll up into his head, as the blood of the scrubber poured over him. Good thing we were about to go out and into seawater, right? It would get rid of most of the evidence.

  I sprang, pulled the corpse away from the living boy, administered a calculated slap to the kid, and told him, “Buck up. We don’t have time for nonsense.”

  All I can say is that he must have been raised by as strict a man as my father. His reaction to the slap and the voice of command was to come fully awake immediately, steadying himself. “You—” he said, his voice unsteady. “You killed them all.”

  “Yeah, kid,” I said. “I’m a murderer. Why else do you think I’m in Never-Never?” As I spoke, I was unhooking the broom from the dead Scrubber’s belt, and cracking the shell over the remote sensing-and-controlling unit, but not over the unit that transmitted the ignore codes.

  To explain: every government broom—or military broom—came equipped with a unit that would allow your superiors to call you in, or at least bring the broom in if needed, as well as allow them to tell where you were at all times. There was another and separate unit—and I only knew this from having taken these brooms apart—that simply broadcast a code which told local authorities to ignore this broom.

  Broom riding was illegal in every seacity and every continental territory, but it was routinely used by two sorts of people other than illegal broomers: people escaping flyers that were about t
o crash, and police or agents of the Good Men. The first type of broom had a beacon that called for the authorities to help. The second had a hush-up-ignore code. This code was generic. It wouldn’t identify the broom, just let local authorities know that as far as the Good Men were concerned, it would be better for everyone to pretend the broom wasn’t really there.

  I left that in place because I’m not stupid, but I crushed the locator and remote with the butt of the burner. I could do a prettier job, I could. Given tools. But I didn’t have tools. And I wanted the kid out of here and safe.

  “Have you ever ridden a broom?” I asked.

  He looked at me as if I’d asked him if he’d ever drunk the blood of a newly killed infant. “No!” Probably outraged at the idea of doing something illegal.

  “Do you know how to?” I asked, and then realized how stupid I was being. Of course he knew how to. Every kid old enough to drive a flyer—which in most places was around fourteen—was required to learn how to ride a broom, since it might be his only escape from a crash, and his only hope of getting to civilization again, depending on whether he was flying over a wild zone or the sea.

  “Uh . . . I learned . . . I mean . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Look, this broom is a little more powerful than the rescue ones.” I fumbled with the nearest dead Scrubber, and got the mask and the oxygen tank. I strapped the tank to the kid’s back. “You can go higher. And faster. I don’t know how far you need to go. I want you to put this on.” I handed him the mask and goggles. “And I want you to hold onto the broom for dear life, and aim it up out of the water. Then stabilize and try to get to the nearest landmass or seacity where you’ll be safe.”

  “I have friends in every—”

  “Good for you.” I left him holding the broom and the mask and goggles, and stripped the Scrubber who had held the kid hostage. He was the only one with an intact suit, since I had cut the others in half. Damn it. I had to learn to plan better. At least the kid wasn’t wearing a prisoner’s uniform.