Lawless Sign Part Fifteen (Fiction)

Chapter 22: Signatures Without Subjects

The cloud cover had kept up, but traffic had increased on the roads below. If I dropped out of the sky, my chances of being spotted were fairly high. My only piece of luck was that the Roymarillo Building was in an under populated area. Many of the buildings around the tower were abandoned. It abutted empty lots on either side.

The last time I was here I spotted guards—or at least lingering persons—near the building’s welded shut front double doors. I didn’t spot such a congregation this time. Instead, the AUAQ white city truck driven by Paco Sanchez was parked in the lot off Madison. Two police cruisers were in the alley.

Per the police radio, someone had been spotted climbing the back of the building about an hour ago. Since the first two floors of the iron bar fire escape had been removed, this seemed improbable. Many of the windows on the alley face of the tower had either been bricked over or boarded up. None of them seemed to be damaged and there was no sign of anyone having been on the fire escape.

The police made the educated guess that the figure spotted was probably a flying garbage bag which may have become stuck in the escape’s bars. I don’t know what prompted this conjecture. The initial report indicated that an ape or someone in a fuzzy coat was scaling the building.

This building had been a source of problems in the past. Over the years, over a hundred bodies have been removed from the place, mostly homeless squatters. For that reason, the owners had boarded up all of the doors and windows on the first three floors. The building’s remaining windows, some of which were broken, were not conventionally accessible. Just to be on the safe side, the police had contacted the building’s management company. In response, Cole’s group then dispatched Paco.

It had taken some time for Paco to get here. Otherwise the police would have cleared off sooner. From what I was able to piece together, Paco claimed not to have the keys to the building. He and the police had walked around the outside and made the determination that there was nothing more than usual going on. Paco and the police were about to take off at the time I arrived.

I suspect Paco was telling the truth. It didn’t seem as if Cole’s organization wanted anything to do with the building, other than to keep people out of it. The controls I had found in the hangar had the ability to remotely activate the antenna array built into the Roymarillo. But the system had no procedure for activating them at the building. Supposedly there was another master control unit at the Roymarillo, which the system said currently did not exist. Maybe they were afraid of the place?

It did look out of place. The twelve story, white terra cotta covered office building was a remnant of a long vanished business district. The other commercial buildings on the block were smaller, newer and comparatively slapdash. Whatever business these buildings were constructed to conduct was no longer in evidence. What remained of this neighborhood seemed to be residential. Its sole economic activity centered on a fruit store across the street. Mostly, the area was a resting place for debris.

Cole had two reasons for building the tower here. First, circa 1929, Cole could not find a firm that would build it in Amarillo. Building something this size, even in Dallas would have cost him too much—and invited scrutiny. Second, he wanted it as far from the Loop, Chicago’s central business district, as he could get without incurring additional expense.

Incorporated into the structure’s design are four special beams which run from the foundation and form the frame for the two story penthouse. These beams tap the grid, a web of energy networks strung between the pulsars. The building itself rises to a uniform height of ten stories. Its capping two story penthouse is recessed from each side but is flush with the street. Originally the penthouse was the headquarters of Royce Cole Petroleum Holdings company, but that didn’t last. In 1930 Cole was wiped out in the stock market crash and the building fell into receivership, becoming the property of its largest bond holder the West Town Bank. For a time the penthouse served as the broadcast studios for a succession of radio stations, and the offices the headquarters of the bank itself. The building was never fully occupied and, by 1960, was largely abandoned.    

Cole and his various shell companies reclaimed the place in 1963 and have been buying it back from tax auction ever since.

Somewhere inside four terra cotta sheathed shafts, beams rooted to bedrock were singing to the stars. I’m not sure how effective this is in broad daylight. Per Sulfur, Cole’s people were aware of this, but hadn’t initiated the process. Combined with gearing up for a Voliant Wave event at the hospital and not being able to contact Leon Bernstein, the powers that be there seemed distracted. All Sulfur could say for sure was that Cole had moved from the Standard Oil Building

Sulfur also transmitted a raft of information that took me a few moments to make sense of. He had partially decoded the party that the tower was trying to reach. I think. From the looks of it, someone was trying to contact Countess Rezvulga.

Through the scope I spotted broken glass on the building’s roof. The formation of chards was just beneath a missing window on the penthouse. It was the only broken glass on the faded tar roof.

The police had moved off. Paco was turning his truck left out of the lot and onto Madison. I ordered Honey to drop from the heavens, my intention being to land on the middle of the penthouse’s roof. That would at least keep my ship from being spotted from directly in front of the tower or from the alley.  

Upon climbing out of Honey, I spotted bits of glass rolling off the roof. The breeze had become stiff and was punctuated by sparse sprays of sleet. I activated the floaty belt and swooped down through the broken open window.

Most of the top floor of this penthouse was an open room. Grey light shown in from the windows on three sides of the room. These windows were placed on the walls from chest high and ran almost to the ceiling. Each window was five feet from the next. A wall with two closed doors at its center sealed off one third of the area. Hanging above the space was a metal grid where a drop ceiling had once been. The floor was littered with white chunks from fractured sound-proof ceiling  tiles. All in all, it was a thirty foot by forty foot room with a fifteen foot ceiling.

My sensors were fuzzing up so much that I wanted to shut them off. Garbage read outs were occluding my awareness. At first, I was going to blame the singing beams. I touched down inside, three feet from the window. Then I spotted it: a man-sized mass shuffling through the gloom near the doors. I turned to face it.

It was a big monkey wearing white shorts.  The being was covered in blue nylon fur and had tiny gold cymbals grafted to its wrists.

It warbled at me “I think we got off to a bad start. Perhaps we can leave the past in the past and move on from an entirely clean slate? Not to presume on you at all, no sir. I apologize without reservation. If you can forgive me, you’re a better man than I.”

“I forgive you. But I don’t know any monkeys.”

“It’s me. Rover.”

“I don’t know any giant talking monkeys named Rover, either.”

“Countess Rezvulga’s Assembler Brain Box. That was me. Is me,” it said, advancing. “We met in the library. You’re not hurt, are you?”

“I’m a little burnt, but I will live—“

“—I am so sorry about that. I don’t know what came over me. I was in there for--I now know-- four years and my mind became utterly mangled. Not being able to tell time threw me. Not that I’m not ruthless. I’m ruthless. But I’m not vulgar. And self preservation is not my highest motivational force. Ever. And I don’t go after guys on my own side. We’re all Team Rezvulga here. I didn’t mean to insult your religion. I shouldn’t have repeated anything I heard about you being crazy. I don’t know you. It’s not my practice to believe gossip. Or repeat it—“  

“—We’re good.—“

“—I did not mean all that racial stuff. I mean, you’re a small Warbird. The small Warbirds are the good Warbirds. I work for a small Warbird. And you’re a blue Warbird, not a red Warbird. Only the red Warbirds are—“

“—Why are you a monkey?”

“Give me a day or so. I’ll pass as human, piss test and everything.”

“What are you doing?”

“Giving the boss lady a heads up.”

“Do you have to do that now? Have you seen the sky?” I cautioned.

“Yeah. Right. It may be a while before she gets it. If she gets it.  Look, it’s compulsory, a compulsion. I have to. At the first opportunity I have.”

“You’re not sending off anything that might be of value to Cole?”

“Cole? I’m just telling her that I’m here. If her worship the Countess wants more, she will have to reach out in real time,” he said, his monkey head rotating right then left. “Why are we worried about Cole?”

“How are you doing this? I don’t see a control system here.”

“With great difficulty. But you’re right, there’s emanations for all sorts of things here. Signatures left and right, but no subjects. Here, let me show you something,” he said, heading off to the windows which faced Madison.

Following the loping thing closely, I said “There’s supposed to be an astroglance here. And zoom tubes.”

It passed a paw through a patch of space about one step from the windows. The fuzzy hand glowed a familiar hue. He asked “What do you make of this?”

“The haze of space. Starlight unfiltered,” I said, identifying the glow. “I guess it would make sense if there was an astroglance there.”

“I’ve never been close enough to an astroglance to tell you either way. What I can tell you is that it isn’t invisible--it is not here,” Rover said. “And if it was here, I doubt it would work that well. There’s something hooked to a drawing damper on the floor beneath us.”

I asked “What’s under us?”

“Large stationary green cloud with a lightening rod on the floor. It seems to be feeding this tube thing.”

“Battery?”

“Same idea, but it’s a drawing damper,” Rover said. (If he says so. New one on me.) “I tried to disable it, but I got light headed on the staircase going down.”

I had been looking around. Just then I made note of an odd object welded to a beam in the ceiling near the center of the room. Whatever it was, it had been painted over several times and was obscured by the skeleton of the drop ceiling. It was  the shape that drew me. Having walked under it, I pointed up and asked “Is this anything?”

“Junk. Looks like an electric motor,” Rover said, ambling to join me. “Maybe not. It’s got a binary chemical kick start on it.”

“Shape reminds me of a matter drive,” I said. “Do electric motors on Earth have binary chemical kick starts?”

They don’t. Let the record show that neither of the two spacemen present knew that. I reached up and pressed the two buttons on the side. They were painted over and didn’t have much give. Rover then did the same thing. Nothing happened.

I said “I was hoping for a bit more here. Other than what’s downstairs, this seems to be a dead end. Are you through hailing the Countess?”

“It either works or it doesn’t. In either case, my motivational bladder is exhausted of compulsions,” Rover said. “Speaking of which, it occurs to me that we’ve both successfully escaped from Mister Cole and his pals. During my time in the library I was all but convinced that Cole ruled the Earth. And that the Earth was some sort of gulag or ruin-scape—“

There was a whirr and then a pop. The room was suddenly well illuminated. New fixtures sprouted out of the drop ceiling. Partitions and offices grew in the vicinity of the doors. Tile appeared under our feet. Panels clad the walls. A pipe organ-like desk appeared, covering the entire length of the wall facing Madison. But that isn’t what had our attention.

Rover muttered an obscenity I couldn’t translate. I said “Ditto.”

Hovering where the starlight had been, over the control panel, was two foot long glowing egg. Swirls of light pricks against an ocean of black showed from inside. It was an astroglance. The thing had us both mesmerized.

Stupidity erupted. The astroglance may been in this building since 1929. All that time it had probably been in Cole’s possession. Or it could have been taken from Sulfur’s ship, which meant it had been here for forty years. Regardless, the two spacemen present, neither of whom have ever so much as blown on one, take one look and mutually decide that the humans can’t have it, that it must be taken into immediate custody. Chalk it up to prejudice or that both of us had heard time after time that astroglances were the most valuable, most powerful things in existence. As an outside possibility I am willing to entertain the idea that it exerted influence over us. But I’m placing my wager on stupidity.

We both reached for it and then stopped.

Rover asked “Room for this thing in the corvette?”

“It should fit,” I answered.

“You take the left, I’ll take the right.”

It leapt out of our hands and exploded through the window. Cascading down with a shower of glass, the astroglance hit the side of the building once, bounced off the sidewalk, bounded half a block down Madison, hopped a curb and came to rest in a puddle on a vacant lot. That’s where I retrieved it from two months later. And no, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t do anything. Now.

“Any other priceless artifacts we want to chuck while we’re here?” Rover asked.

“Supposedly Sulfur’s ships have them stock.”

“Sulfur?”

“Joe Blow.”

“He can keep it. I’m not going back into that place.”

“Or that might have been the one from his ship.”

“It will have to remain a mystery. Destroying one is good enough for me.”  

From the moment the lights had appeared, they started to flicker and fade. The control desk had failed to power up entirely. Something that sounded like a hail storm rumbled from below and was tapering off with the lighting.

Referring to the sudden appearance of the office interior, I observed “There must have been some delay in the matter drive’s operation.”

“There’s not a chance all of this stuff jumped out of that little thing.”

“It’s similar to the one Joe Blow is wearing on his thigh. Joe Blow’s people seem quite adept with matter drives. Strike that. They have good matter drives, deploying them is another story. Or maybe it’s just Joe Blow?”

“That’s nice,” Rover said. “You know, there’s a great big world out there. Why don’t we explore it? It would probably be easier if we did it together.—“

“--What is that noise downstairs?”

“Damper’s having a snack, drawing power away from all this crap,” Rover said. “I don’t care. You shouldn’t care. It’s time for us to go. I got this place figured out. I know how to win the game.”

“I am at a loss,” I said. “What game are you—“

“—Become a quarterback hedge fund manager with a ten inch—“

“—What game are you playing?”

“Why rough it?” he said. “Life on Earth. That’s the game to win at. Why mess with the demigod? That’s a no win game. I want no part of that. You should want no part of that. We do no good to Countess Rezvulga dead. We do no good to ourselves dead. Our chances of not being dead increase dramatically with the distance we place between ourselves and this Cole monster. Guess what? There’s an entire planet worth of places to do that, with people and cultures to enjoy. And billions and billions of meat shields to hide behind.—“

“—You’re not going to help me?—“

“—No,” Rover said. “I am helping you. Helping you deal with reality—“

“—Based on what happened on Tiamore, might the people here be under some imminent—“

“—Where do I start? I was on Tiamore. I witnessed the massacre,” Rover said, stepping in front of me. His monkey eyes glowed with electric flame. “Here you go. You are there now, too.”

With that, he uploaded his entire memory detail of the event. It turned out to be more interesting than illuminating. At that moment, however, it was overwhelming.

I told him “I need a moment to mull this over.”

“Because it has to go through that fatty interface of yours. You gonors are all alike. You’ll keep a fingernail even after the hand has rotted off. Lose the meat! Your language centers, all of your motor functions, your memory, your heart, your lungs, one entire arm have all come over. I could trick your rig out. There’s stuff here on Earth better than what you’re made of. I’ll set you up.”

I tracked none of that. I was still ruminating on the memories he had bestowed to me. “Trick up my fatty interface with your revelation. It’s not self-evident.”

“That you can do nothing for the people of Tiamore? You get that. What you don’t get is that Cole is from Earth, not Tiamore. Whatever his motives were on Tiamore don’t apply here. Just a cursory check will show that he’s one of a dozen humans who is capable of wiping out life on a planetary scale. It’s an Earth thing. Having that capacity. Yet they don’t wipe themselves out and don’t seem to be in any hurry to intentionally do so. Cole is the least influential person in the wipe the planet out club. He doesn’t run a country. He’s made no public demands. He’s an enigma amongst the Earth people. This is a fast read, but he doesn’t seem the type to poop in his own nest. Cole husbands his influence, using it to defend his interests. Stay away from his stuff and you will fast lose his attention. That’s all.”

“You’re not going to tip him off?”

“He’s a monster. He’s what hell is for. We are Team Rezvulga, my half brother. You are needlessly endangering your continued viability,” Rover said. “You want to do a good deed, try tipping off the Earth cops.”

“I tried that.”

“Done. Let the record show I tried. I know better than to debate a gonor once it’s locked in.—“

“--It’s Captain Meteor.”

“Captain Meteor, my loyalty is to you. And your continued viability. I will not participate in any behavior which hazards your continued viability. I’m sure you have your reasons, but save them. I just won’t participate,” Rover said. “If you want to go downstairs to play with whatever creature feature Cole’s got down there, you might want to distend the rotating thing on your stick. I’m guessing it’s got ambient sensors. That ought to screw it up. That doesn’t work, hit the cloud with the programmed acid. But wait until I get out of here, because that stuff is going to screw me up, too.”

“Thank you.”

“Call me once you have nothing further to do with Cole. I will monitor the open frequency. And do me a favor. Live through this.”

“Trust Captain Meteor.”

Rover left via the window I had flown in. I was later pleasantly surprised that he didn’t try to steal Honey. He has subsequently lived up to the letter and spirit of his word.

By the time Rover left, the lights had gone completely dead. I passed into the short hallway that had appeared before the room’s double doors. In the glass enclosed office to my right was a metal desk with a microphone and a control station. A turn table was on the device beside it. The left office was set up similarly, but also featured a stand-alone reel to reel and the station’s transmitter. The radio station’s equipment looked intact, however it was not powered.

I came to the two doors at the end of the hall. The one on the right featured an empty shaft which ran down the entire length of the building. I didn’t know it yet, but this was the zoom tube access. At one time it had housed a small elevator. The left door opened to the landing of a staircase.

I started down the stairs. I protracted my baton, activated its tip and then initiated a telepathic sweep.

Something reached back. It seemed to focus on my memories, which it missed since they are not organically resident. I didn’t feel as if it was looking through my eyes, as the version of Cole I met in the library had done. It did have Cole’s touch, however. For an instant I weighed whether or not I needed to risk this.

What I needed was a way to get into the hospital via the zoom tubes. With the controls here rendered powerless, that entire plan of action was out the window. Disabling the damper might enable the power flow to the controls, but I had no proof of that. My time might be better served by getting to the hospital to see if Nedor Services had devised a covert method of entering. Regardless, I pressed on.

Once at the door to the lower penthouse floor, I realized exactly where I was and what everything here was supposed to be. This was the room where Major Pines and his crew had attacked Cole with their paddle weapons. Filling up one fourth of the space and appearing as a giant mound of melted marshmallows was the damper itself. Cloud was an inexact description. It was more of a foam—more akin to instant hull shielding than it was to the bank’s battery. The lightning rod or grounding tool or whatever it was, was not apparent. It was somewhere in the dried marshmallow gunk. Unhappily sticking out of one end of the mound was a black ceramic tower, a larger version of the one I had destroyed in Colbert’s lab.

By unhappily I mean that whatever was in the tower was steaming psychic invective.

“I’ll bet you want to come out. What would you give me?” I had to. I just had to.

The response was what one might expect from an intoxicated lunatic—a mean one, at that. It was post-rational. Knowing it had an audience made it want to curse louder.

“I’m going to have to insist on a pleasant etiquette. Your comportment sucks.”

The thing had never been confined before. After four years in solitary and deprived captivity, it was broken.

An expanding yellow square of Charliq flew from the compartment in my hands. The damper and only the damper sizzled and dissolved thoroughly. Then bits of the tower sprayed in all directions.

No, he didn’t say thank you. He didn’t even say hello. Instead, the luminescent sky blue glob that spewed from the broken tower expanded in an oblong way, apparently attempting to take up as much space as it could.

It was the largest surviving fragment of Osiris, the aspect of Royce Cole known as the Old Man. Created by a weather event over a pack of men thousands of years ago, it had been dwelling inside selected individuals ever since. It didn’t have much affinity for humans, other than as vehicles, other than as the only other creatures on Earth in the same intellectual class as it. Being a weather caused imprint of man never occurred to it. That it needed the humans was a given. It justified itself morally in a maze of ways. The humans, it had concluded, must need him, too.

Sometime after Ghengis Khan killed Cole’s wife, he became convinced that the human race was destined to wipe itself out. He was working towards the goal of creating a force to prevent that right up until the moment Major Pines and his merry men slammed him into this tube.  

Justified or not, its methods were dubious and reflective of an entity which could not help but feel it was innately superior to everything it had ever encountered. I wasn’t beneath its notice, but I was just another thing awaiting quick classification: food, vehicle, tool—there are no other things.

At length it took the shape of a twice man-sized scorpion, flailing vines ending in morning stars, screw shafts, fang covered ovoid maws. The boiling glowing blue stuff from which it was made was too thick to be smoke but not substantial enough for liquid. It grew. It lashed out. It engulfed me.

It’s pastel. How tough can it be? (Famous last words.)

It was a standard issue walking thought. The thing’s wagging prehensile tail weaving at the Voliant Wave was a new twist, (as a skunk is a rat) but it was otherwise unexceptional. Thanks to the parlor tricks of our science, I am a perfect host. I engulfed him. I absorbed him.

He can go spout off how special he is to the others around the long table of my ancestors. Windy and the rest would waste no time kicking in his shins.

I can be flippant about it now. The whole experience was as comfortable as swallowing a Coke bottle. I didn’t let that on.

To Cole, it seemed as if I had chewed him up and spit him out. His light show was over. He became a mewing, foot tall fuzzy haze snake, retreating at my every step. I was herding him in circles.

“I am Captain Meteor, a monk, late of the Shadow Fleet. Royce Cole, Osiris, Alcibiades, Saint George, whatever you want to call yourself, if you value your continued existence you will answer my questions plainly and in a civil manner.”

If I were a human being, I would have killed him. I would have been justified in doing so. It was a man killer a million times over. The thing was demonstrably malicious, parading as deities and generals and arms contractors—always venomous authority. It thought it was its place, that its plans were greater than all of man’s, that its cruelty was excusable by virtue of grander design. But I am not a human being.

It came from Earth. It belonged here. The thing was made of the same atoms as everything else in the solar system. For all I knew, he had some natural function. Wiping out a disease here and there is one thing. Dispatching the only evident example of a native intelligent form is not kosher.

In the end, I let him go. Mostly because he was innocent of the charge. He didn’t kill the people of Tiamore. He was locked up in a can when it happened.

The Old Man answered my questions, to the best of his ability. This encounter may have gone differently if the creature was housed in one of its specifically engineered host bodies—and hadn’t been starved for four years. Both he and I knew this. As opposed to playing for time, I think it was thankful that I didn’t dispatch him.

I let him know what would happen if he tipped off Sparky. I had made an impression. Having handled him so easily, he concluded that I might have other tricks up my sleeve.

He had never faced an existential threat before. That earned me something.

Once I was satisfied with his answers, he requested leave of my presence and slowly wafted out a broken window. Inevitably he would find one of the mindless Royce Coles Sparky had seeded around the countryside. How long he could last in purely disembodied form was a subject that we did not broach. Instead, much of our time was spent clarifying a technical issue.

Thanks to what he explained to me, I had a chance of avoiding a potential conflict with Sulfur.

Afterwards I returned to the control desk in the above suite. Unfortunately, it remained useless. Although it was now powered, Cole had made the whimsical modification of routing all of its functions through the library’s brain box network. That network had been hijacked by zombies. If I wanted to operate the system, I would have to use Cole’s home brewed controls at the hangar. And I would have to go through each function with green screens and the eight way handle.

Then I remembered the eight way switch and the gauntlet that had been left over it. I leaned over the control desk and called out “Claudia.”