Lawless Sign Part Twelve (Fiction)

Chapter 19: Time In A Bottle Part Three

I protracted my baton and twisted its end. I screamed “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“Not if I want to get out of here.”

The thing was changing its holds on me as we rotated. It kept trying to get onto my back.

I had to ask it “Why can’t you get out of here on your own?”

“I haven’t found a dead guy who can swim well in the yellow stuff. Yet.”

I shut off the belt for a blink and the Assembler lost its snaky grip. My baton struck it squarely with a flash. The coffee pot split, spitting sparks and cords as it plummeted to the floor.

I set the belt to climb and wound up hovering near Claudia. She had one arm out. Her other hand was still on the brackets. She was reaching for me.

Then Sulfur was reaching for me, having taken Claudia’s place. Then Cole took Sulfur’s place. I took one last look at her. Both of her hands were back on the brain boxes. Her head was down, her shoulders again slumped.

I was shaken. I wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed. I went into full Space Monkey mode and began scanning everything anew.

I still had four minutes worth of air and I was still dead.

For some reason the corvette was hovering over the building that jutted into the pyramid’s wall. When I inquired as to what orders it was following, it shot back a spate of the same ancient accounting language that Sulfur had been using. I dropped to its level.

Upon closer examination, it was apparent that the corvette’s prow was pointed directly at a door on the building. It was just inside the fence. This is where I landed.

The door I had landed beside wasn’t very promising. The green piece of boilerplate was without a handle and had been welded shut. I was unclear as to whether it had ever been a door. More likely it was the entry to a cable vault of some kind. I was half tempted to check the corvette for a magna gen tool when I remembered my baton.

After a brief pass of the baton’s rotating ends, the door popped out with a hiss. It slipped straight down five feet and hit with a thud. Falling away from the building, the metal plate was caught by the fence, which sizzled at its touch.

Electricity was arcing from the door to the metal frame where it had been housed. If anyone was inside, they now knew I was here. My sensors weren’t picking up much more than the lightning at this point.

I chanced it, after taking careful aim. I took a twelve mile an hour header through the opening. Whatever there was to hit on the other side, I hit. I bounded off three objects and sprawled to the cement floor.

I can’t be dead. I hurt too much. The pain kills were barely keeping up. Before me were three skids piled nearly to the eleven foot ceiling with strapped compressed cardboard. To my immediate right was a ten foot tall green object that I later identified as a garbage compressor. To my left was a brick wall.

Although I was fenced in, I was in no immediate danger. The zapping door was twelve feet behind me. I heard the hum of autorecs. I saw the glow of florescent lighting.

The baton caused a stack of cardboard to lose its strap. Two of the skids contained white boxes of various sizes and actually seemed new. One skid was of oil soaked, filthy crushed boxes. After having removed a foot or so of dirty boxes, I activated the belt and peeked over the skid.

Just past the clearing around the compactor area was a short but broad hallway. I could see shelves packed with man sized blue tubes at the end of the hall. There were two layers of shelves, each crammed with tubes set in individual plywood frames.

They looked like the weapons I had seen used on Tiamore.

I floated over the skid and touched down just beyond it. Beyond the hall was a vast space with an eighteen foot ceiling. The tube laden aisles were flush with the back wall. On the right were a collection of uniform autorec arrays, each about the size of a mailbox and in the general shape of a pineapple, arranged in two tiers within a thick wooden framework. Humming silver duct work  ran throughout the framework, all connecting to straight-aways jutting from the ceiling.

Most of the open space was dedicated to five lines of conveyors, which started at large freight containers and ended fifty feet away in thick wire bins. Along the conveyor’s lengths were padded shopping carts. Wire, metal parts, sections of tubing and other small plastic items were in a giant mound within one of the open truck-sized containers. Another container was empty and the other three were sealed. Hydrants festooned with electrical and pneumatic outlets came out of the floor around the conveyors. Covered spools hung down from the ceiling over the shopping carts.

Nothing was moving. The shopping carts were empty as were the thick wire bins. I couldn’t tell what they were sorting for or what was waste.

Beyond the shipping containers was the disbursement field itself, and beyond that, another area somewhat matching this one’s size. A matching framework of the same model autorecs as previous  ran flush against this area’s left wall, although it was lacking the venting of its twin on this side of the barrier. Beside this was the remains of a large aircraft. It was missing its wings and had a pair of what I believed were greatly oversized jet engines.

This disassembled thing was the supposedly missing A-10 Warthog  jet.

Eight shipping containers were stacked two deep next to the aircraft. The rest of the area, about a quarter of the floor space, was open. On the far walls were a pair of giant garage-like doors which ran nearly all the way to the ceiling. One of these doors was cracked about half a foot open at the bottom.

The air in here was different from the rest of the pyramid complex. I tested it and came up with readings for pollen and burnt kerosene. It did smell funny, like a gas station.

There was an round clock on a post just beyond the barrier. Its second hand moved erratically, sometimes not moving at all, sometimes sprinting three clicks and then sometimes going backwards a click.

My suspicion was that I was looking out of the Voliant Wave event space back into real space. The clock was here to detail the disparity in real time. I hoped they had a more scientific measure than that.

The wall opposite the autorecs on this side of the barrier was covered by one long grey metal cabinet with an equally long desktop before it. I thought it was some sort of computer bank, since there were multiple screens recessed scattershot across the cabinet. It looked like a control area of some sort, so that’s where I headed.

It was not any sort of computer. It didn’t even have computers in it. The guts were vacuum tubes and some sort of system I had yet to see. The thing’s recording format consisted of continually moving spools of wires housed within the desks. Its screens were cathode ray tubes of various sizes, each displaying green lines of angles and words in English. The giant desktop was covered in wipe switches, numbered knobs and lettered round metal buttons. Illuminated glass tubes sprouted up amidst the fields on the desk. Whatever it was, it was apparently of Royce Cole’s own design.

Strike that. It was Cole’s interpretation. The design was of a standard used in every capital starship I had ever served on. Its scale was off. It was made out of different things. But I should have known what it was.

At the center of the control desk was an eight way knob. It’s a knob that breaks into eight pieces with a track configured like an asterisk. Just for additional attraction, the gauntlet Claudia had lost was dangling from it. Once I plucked up the gauntlet and saw the knob, I knew exactly what the device was. It was also at that point that I recalled the grease pencil marks on that table upstairs.

The system was set to full manual operation, which is cumbersome. I began flipping switches and twisting dials, hoping to get it ready for telepathic interface. I could have done this all with one switch, as it turns out. Cole was telepathic, too. Why someone had set it to manual in the first place was a mystery at the time.

Grey light was peeking in from the opening at the front door. A breeze actually came through the dispersion field, indicating that it wasn’t entirely solid. I wasn’t about to go walk through it, but I did chance scanning for signals.

I picked up the usual twelve million cell phone calls. A moment later I established a connection to Honey and thus also to Windy.

“They’ve arrested Hap for murder,” Windy reported without giving or waiting for a preamble.

“Who did he kill?” I asked quietly.

“Dr. Colbert.”

“He murdered Emile? They found her body?”

“No. The police arrested Hap for the murder of Pierre Colbert.”

Then she had to go. No explanation. I tried to hook Honey up to the other corvette. The signal wasn’t perfect, but it was functional. Within instants Honey was reading the other corvette’s systems, perhaps in live time. Honey had designated the new queen of space ‘Toots’ and began rattling off her condition. I cancelled this while it was still in progress.

Some things were best done other places. I would try tapping into Toots when I got back to the base.  If I got back to the base.

At this point the device’s vacuum tubes had warmed up. It gave Osiris Alcibiades Royce Cole a warm telepathic greeting and then went on to detail four years worth of non telepathic manual operation. It didn’t have any security system. The thing assumed that if you were telepathic, you must be Royce Cole. As its first order of business, it would like to tattle on all of the non telepathic users.

Without a telepathic interface this device is difficult to get readings from. The device functions to visualize components within a system, say a space ship. It will show you each component, where the component is and what its current condition is. You use the knob to adjust perspective and to operate sensors and tools. If you have a telepathic hook up, you could, for example, see the tube, where it is, what is passing through it and tell if it’s leaking. Or if you detected gas or a spray of something, you could use the device to detect where such came from. Or you could just ask it to list everything that is malfunctioning today. Poof. There it is, Straight to your brain. Without the telepathic helmet, you have to use the screens with the green lines and a battery of Hewlett Packard printers, which is tedious—and exactly what had been going on for the past four years.

All of this fed my suspicion that Osiris Alcibides Professor Royce Cole Esquire the Walking Thought Demigod Mad Scientist was no longer amongst the living.

Found within the device were five operations which were systematically monitored and arranged with beauty and precision and eight hundred unconnected, unreferenced operations which were clearly the handiwork of a boob--someone who could wash dishes but not stack them.

Sort of. Operation One is the Warthog A-10. It’s an inventory of parts. Accounted for is how much military salvage it takes to obtain each part. We have lists of strictly military parts and lists of parts that can be obtained by other means. Cost break downs by the score. Having at one time been constructed from these parts, the A-10 was now being deconstructed, split up and sent to commercial self storage lockers around the Kansas City area. It’s expensive to maintain and they don’t have a use for it anymore. Because the mind scrambler project has been canceled. They are also being paid to dispose of their inventory of mind scramblers. I suppose that is good news.

Operation Two is Roymarrillo Holdings Active Accounting. If I was going to loot Mister Cole, this would be my first stop. True to form, in four years no one has touched the system. Roymarrillo has big gobs of dollars in assets. Windy. Windy. Windy. This is really her thing. Half of the cash tossed off gets plowed into something with dividends, if not scooped out of its silos on a timely basis and the other half gets flushed into Operation Five. Kind of on an automated basis. Operation Two may never have more money than Operation Five. In four years of shenanigans Cole’s deft successor pirates have managed to skim away an amount slightly less than the cumulative depreciation of his office furniture.

Operation Three is Tiamore. Hello.  Full geological survey. Tiamore is rich in oil, gold, chromium and ‘natural steel’. Cole discounts the idea of pursuing these deposits, DUE TO INTELLIGENT INHABITATION. Emphasis his. Preliminary work on ‘Dog People’ languages and social structure. Air and water tests for micro-organisms. Has noted the distinctions in the flora. Feels the potential risk to the population of Tiamore from Earth borne contact is too great to proceed with personal exploration at this time. Is attempting to seal the portal to prevent accidental contamination—of Tiamore. Hardly sounds like he’s out to kill anyone there. The portal that opened to Tiamore isn’t one of his. (That’s because it belongs to Countess Rezvulga.) He is having problems closing it and has determined that it did not originate on Tiamore. Oh, he has translated what the satellites are communicating: updated astrology based on the movements of the planetoids comingled in Tiamore’s orbit. Entire operation was two weeks old when it was pended four years ago.

Operation Four is Active Facilities. Very space ship-like layouts. Nothing I didn’t know, except for the actual schematics of the pyramids (interspacial prefabricated vessel—great guess on Cole’s part), the hospital, the work shop, the aircraft hangar (where I am now)  and the Roymarillo Building.  As I suspected, most of these facilities are linked together with Zoom Tubes. So it’s all really one big facility. But Greg’s factory and my bank aren’t part of it. There’s no listing for Greg’s factory at all. Of course there would be no need for it since the work shop—the building directly adjacent to the one where I left my allies behind—is fully capable of any type of automated assembly Cole might need. No one has so much as cracked the door open to the work shop in four years. My bank is an abandoned asset, left to the mercy of the authorities after the West Town Bank became non-viable.

Enough. Where is Emile? Where are the Goodman twins? Where are the twenty-four Nedor Services troopers?

Bio One. That’s not from the system. That’s from one of the seven hundred and eighty-six un-stacked plates. Per the uncoordinated operation, Emile is being prepared for release. And a tube is being readied for Miles Nasus.

So where is Bio One? Greg said it was at the hospital. The hospital is a space ship, sans the engines. I have no idea what its actual purpose is other than to contain an atmosphere. There is no Bio One listed. The area beyond the rear truck dock is the induction point for a proposed underground carrousel of suspension tubes. These tubes are intended for the viable patients extracted from suspension in the pyramids. Interesting term: patients. Per Operation Four, this carrousel does not exist, though there is an ongoing operation to extract the aliens in the pyramids and assess their conditions. The operation is not pended, but there are no updates for the past four years.

Operation Four also reports that all of the Zoom Tubes are operational, but only the tube from the hospital to this hangar is currently on. That tube just empties here. I can’t use it to get to the hospital. There are Zoom Tubes with destinations extraneous to the system’s zones, but it doesn’t say where to. As Windy detected, all of the tube network—in fact, all of the operations—are controlled from a central point at the top of the Raymarillo Building. But that control area, whatever it may be, is not existent. A lot leads there, but it’s not there.

Very frustrating. I move on to Operation Five which is the Family of Osiris. Royce Cole has one living child, a sixty-seven year old son, a retired optometrist housed in an assisted living facility in Panorama City, Florida. Cole has listed all of his wives and children throughout the ages. If I had stopped here first, it would have helped me make sense of Cole’s file structure. All of his operations are named and branched based on his wives and their children. Besides the optometrist, Cole has 8.132 living descendants. This is down from a 1920 total of 12,415. Operation Five is set up to disperse funds to these people, automatically and on a clandestine basis.

All in all, Cole doesn’t radiate evil. The Cole that set up the five large operations isn’t much for annotation. Whomever did the other systems—let’s call him Cole Two—is downright anal, but not a big picture guy. Cole One assumes you know his motivation and paints a broad picture. Cole Two is all details and no context. Yet they both use the same naming conventions and terminology. To know more, I’m going to have to find one of them.

And the system won’t say where Cole is. I went back to my fruitless search for Bio One. Then I heard something. I turned and looked across to the hallway I had come in from. I was concerned that my companion the Assembler Box had taken the opportunity to follow me in here. It wasn’t there. When I next looked back in the barrier’s direction, I spotted Sulfur rounding the edge of one of the stacked shipping containers on the other side.

Sulfur was facing me directly. We both froze. And then I waved at him.

The hooded being poked a boney hand out from the folds of its black shroud and flashed me a thumbs up. Its head tilted, showing its teeth to the light. (Smiling?) The eyes were blinking, but I wasn’t able to translate the code.

Then I said it, clearly and slowly “I speak English.”

“Oh,” he said. And then he started speaking ancient Authorian.

“No. English. Earth. Human,” I said.

He was smiling and gibbering away in gosh knows what language.

It passed through the barrier, which erupted with boils of plasma. Once through and seemingly unaffected, the being glided in my direction. He was swirling his scythe in circles as he went. Despite his overall appearance, it did not seem hostile. Or as not hostile as it could have.

I said “I don’t understand a word that you’re saying.”

“Oh. Crud. One moment, please,” he said. Perhaps it was its lack of inflection, but this was the first clue I had that I was being talked at as opposed to being talked to. After an audible warble, he enabled a telepathic emersion system—a cheap and overpowering one.

Suddenly I can’t see, I can’t smell, I can’t feel my toes. If I didn’t have experience with cheap telepathic emersion systems I probably would have taken it as the effect of a weapon. I wasn’t too pleased as it was, but if this is all he could do then I would have to live with it.

Our communication got off to the typical and none too promising start. I was floating in space, alone, the seas of stars all about me. My body registered just enough chill to convey the idea that space is cold. From among a cloud of stars there emerged a bubbling puddle of muck. A starship shot from the middle of this pool, streaked across the scene and then dead ended in a spider web explosion, taking chunks of white dotted black with it. This was telepathic stock footage. We who were once humble beings bound to some mud ball somewhere have conquered space and have now gone beyond what can conventionally be seen. Perhaps it was the experience of my species, but everyone who opened this way turned out to be a propagandist. All it needed was patriotic theme music.

That followed. All would be explained to me in short order, but first I needed to endure a little prologue. In short, this is a recording. I will answer your questions later. As it should turn out, Sulfur had a fairly good reason for doing it this way.

Much of what followed I already knew. Sulfur had been sent by his government in response to their reception of an alpha wave blast from the pyramid. They seemed to know what the pyramid was and were quite prepared to recover the thing from scab space. More inspiring, his egg heads knew that the pyramids were grown from crystals, which is something my guys didn’t know. How or why they screwed up on the library’s dimensions isn’t explained.

Sulfur heads off to summon the pyramid in his special vessel. The device in which he is going to bring the library into reality is the candelabra eating a fireplace thing that Countess Rezvulga later found. All becomes ready and then things go horribly wrong. The pyramids go bursting through the sides of his ship. Through some magic, he is able to fuse his ship around one of the wings, perhaps the pyramid that I didn’t go into. He then spends the next (open question) number of years trying to send the library back into scab space.

Cole is not the problem. Cole is not an issue. Cole is an example. Cole came later. It’s the complex itself that is the problem. Sulfur has a disease theory about the pyramids.

I know where this is going. I am now shaking my head. “Think of something else. That’s not going to happen.”

The pyramids are communicating a new physics, transforming everything it touches to ready this universe for whatever dreadful things lurk where it has been. This influence contaminates all it touches, instantly and thoroughly. We are now about to go into the mind numbing explanation about the potential for geometric expansion of this influence. Please hold all questions until the end of our presentation.

I have already seen enough. Your conclusion is not actionable, even if supported. You admit Cole did not come from the pyramids. His facility with the Voliant Wave is natural. It is his natural affinity for such things that enabled him to find the complex, some (open question) years after your vessel wrecked on it. Cole’s had the thing moored to Earth for let us say forty years. If the corruption physics you cite is instantaneous and thorough, there would be no Earth. As for Tiamore, it seems to have been fine until some malefactor set off Cole’s weapons upon it. Even then, the effect was hardly to degrade the physical laws of the place, but rather eliminate its most conscious life forms. I’m sorry your ship was destroyed and you’ve been stranded here, but I think you are running off at the mouth.

By the way, thank you for involving me in this. I suppose your instantaneous contamination theory justifies your actions. Just as Eskimos have a thousand words for ‘snow’, my people have a specific word for jerks like this. It roughly translates to he who finds himself over his head in dealing with a tar baby and decides to distribute his misery to the nearest passing person—not out of hope that this person might come up with a solution, but rather because it’s the only type of activity that they are capable of. (I suppose it says something about my people that we have a single word for this.) Vrecky Tomlinson’s approximation was “douche bag.”

That said, Sulfur is my kind of spaceman. He’s brave. He’s loyal. His standard of technical training is dubious, but even in demented form his heart is in the right place. Everything accounted for, he’s out to save the rest of creation from this thing. Even the people who sent him aren’t bad eggs. At the very least, they were willing to sacrifice treasure for the chance at saving some semblance of the alien culture housed within the pyramids. My people are far too leery for any such adventure.

By the way, they might be right. They may have an entire vagabond history of incidents and empirical evidence that they just can’t transcribe for me. I don’t like their conclusion and am going with the selection of objectives and course of action that suits me.

Besides, they don’t know how to get rid of the pyramids and neither do I. I’m going after the killers of Tiamore because that’s what I want to do. I am some sort of jerk, too.

I don’t have a clue as to who Sulfur’s people are, but they are far ahead of mine in some places. The gear that guides his empty shell isn’t quite a Brain Box, but it is nearly so. What’s advanced beyond our capability is the miniature matter drive he has housed in one of his leg bones.

Sulfur was mortally wounded during the emergence of the pyramids from scab space. The mini drive disassembled his skin and organs and has been saving them ever since. Whenever Sulfur needs a new idea or a branch in the options of orders given to his suit, he summons his body and lives again for a few moments. It’s not so much prolonging his life as it is extending his death throws. I merit a moment of this time, perhaps to communicate or change his suit’s set routines.

The drive activated, filling in his bones and covering them.

He was deader than a doornail. For some reason I wasn’t surprised.

The body was so desiccated that I couldn’t tell what kind of being he had once been.

He had left a sort of memo, a capacitor fired blast of alpha waves.

Kill everyone.

This was an extrapolation of the Lawless Sign. Another definition might be ‘Cull Everything’. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to do it.

The drive activated again and swept the flesh from his bones. He gave me a thumbs up and its machine voice asked “How may I help you?”

I gave him the thumbs up back. This was just what I didn’t need: another complication. I had no idea what this thing might do if it suspected that I wasn’t going along with its stated objective. Given how many routines it had running, what it would and wouldn’t do was unknowable to the point of being random.

I chanced it. “Do you know where Bio One is?”

He started flipping switches and glancing at screens. “This may take some time.”

“Do you know where Cole is?”

“The active one is at the Standard Oil Building.” And then it said something else in gibberish.

“Is there a Zoom Tube that goes there?”

“No.”

“Could you activate the Zoom Tubes so that I can use them?”

“This may take some time.”

“How do I contact you? What frequency are you on?”

Gibberish. Unfortunately, he’s on the UHF, the same wavelength the humans are crowding.

“I have to go. Watch out for the Assembler Brain Box. You do know about the Assembler Box, right?”

Gibberish. But he did wave me away. Somewhere in its stream of talk was a “Will contact.”

Now that I knew the layout of this place, getting back wasn’t going to be a problem. Without the Zoom Tubes, however, retracing my steps was the best way out of here. Before heading back down the hall, I turned to face the framework of mind scramblers.

I wasn’t sure what Sulfur would do if I destroyed them right then and there. I was also tempted to whack the machine Sulfur was operating. It was at that point that I became committed to living through this.

I was going to need evidence. Someone was going to have to help the humans shut all of this crap down. Breaking things was just not a good idea.

I waved good bye to Sulfur and, after shooting through the door and dodging lightning, reentered the library chamber. I tried to pick out Claudia again, but she was lost in the green haze.

The rest of this didn’t seem so dreadful. I went back into the multi gravitational chamber and then into the liquid filled pyramid.

I played a hunch. Having been brought down here by some 45 degree force, I guessed that there was one going up. I found it in a minute and started being transported upward.

I broke off at what I thought was my floor. I was off a little and was forced to scale a few of the terraces. Fifty feet from where I thought the shaft down was, my tactile sensors went completely dead.

I checked my systems. I was still dead. I still had four minutes of air. Consider all readouts completely untrustworthy.

That said, I found the shaft down. There was something in the water behind me. I was no longer in the mood to play.

The Charliq mine would kill the Assembler Brain Box. There would be no jumping to another body. It would be dead.

At the time I didn’t regret attempting to kill it. I did regret missing it.

It was a good reminder that Charliq had to be tuned. It reacts differently in different environments.

I churned about and spotted the Assembler Brain Box. This one was a can of beans.

If it had gotten this far, why couldn’t it go further? I later was informed that this body had been pre-positioned here. Just getting it to this area had taken several attempts over what seemed a very long period of time.

Due to the nature of the fluid and the materials the Assembler had to work with, it could only go up. It couldn’t go down. As yet, it hadn’t been able to compel a zombie to go down this shaft.

I began to back down the angled shaft. It swam from the terrace and headed to the shaft’s start. I kept moving back until I had the being squarely in the mine’s sights. Then I triggered it.

I have never missed anything so cleanly. The charge hit the back wall, blowing the Assembler at me. Plasma shot up behind it. The next stop was being ejaculated into the building at Chicago and Avers.