Medea shook her head and clicked her tongue sympathetically. “Your marriage is not blessed with children? Fertility magic is one my specialties. I can help you.”
“I’ll bet.” He grinned. “Actually I’m not married. Never have been.”
She gave him a skeptical enquiring look. The kind that says: yeah, tell me another one.
His copper skin darkened. “No. Honestly. I had a steady girlfriend for a while . . . but it kind of wasn’t going anywhere. And she wanted to get married, settle down and have a family. I wasn’t ready for that sort of commitment back then. She got married to one of my buddies, about two years back. Funny. That seems like a lifetime ago now.”
She smiled devastatingly at him. “So, you don’t like children?”
Anibal Cruz knew he was painting himself into a corner. “Erm. No. No, I like kids.”
She backed off hurriedly. “You like goats?”
* * *
The Krim device came from a civilization that had been old and decadent before the mythology it was now exploiting had even conceived gods that were more complex than venerated trees. It possessed within it energies and devices that could turn a continent to slag. But of what value to the Krim was slag? The Krim wanted that which they had all but lost. This meant working in the Ur-Mythworlds. And despite the vast powers contained within the force-shielded pyramid, that meant working within the reality framework of each particular Ur-Mythworld too. It meant you had to hire local labor. And it was so hard to get decent help in those days. Really, you’d have thought the primitive Ur-gods would have been glad of the work. But no. Bone idle and far too independent to make good Krim servants.
But rich in anger. And credulous. Perfect for prukrin manipulation.
27
Employees must give
two weeks’ notice.
“It’s not working.” That was the second time Miggy Tremelo had heard that exact statement in the last twenty minutes. The first time had been from the head of the insulation-project team. He’d restrained himself from the desire to kick the idiot downstairs. The woman might be an expert on insulating materials but she had absolutely no common sense and was so deeply involved in her field as to be blind to everything else. Of course the polymer spray wouldn’t stick to the pyramid surface. If she’d bothered to read the reports or even talk to anyone . . .
Now it was the turn of the representative from the National Security Council who had replaced Harkness. Tremelo took a deep breath. “What isn’t working, Mr. Milliken?”
The NSC man ran his hands through his once impeccably ordered hair. “Project Poison Pill. The pyramid just pushes the bombs ahead of itself when it expands. Like a bulldozer.”
Tremelo steepled his fingers. “I sometimes wonder why the hell we bother to write reports,” he said conversationally. “That bit of information has been available since the first day. Fairly early on the first day, in fact—Colonel McNamara tried it right off. Several times.”
He sighed heavily, biting off further sarcasm. “Any ‘poison pill’ will have to go in with the snatched victims. You’ll have to get sufficient new material, and hope the pyramid selects one of your ‘pill’ carriers.”
Milliken stared intently at him. “Will that work?”
Tremelo shrugged. “I wish I knew.”
“We’ll try it!” Milliken rose to his feet. “We’ll arrange for new soldiers with heavy weapons. Some of them will be snatched.”
“In the meanwhile, I’m going ahead with a project of my own. At least seven of the victims could definitely have been resuscitated if we’d gotten to them fast enough. We’re going to saturate the area inside the cordon with medics. If we can get one more survivor in a better mental state than the last one, we can learn a great deal more.”
Milliken nodded. “That sounds like an eminently effective plan. Just see that you keep me posted.”
Miggy Tremelo stood up, stretching out his lanky frame. “You could try doing that, too. It might save you having to explain more non-working projects,” he said dryly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, we’ve been conducting interviews with the next of kin of all the disappearance victims that have not returned. I’m especially interested in the relatives of that one large group that hasn’t come back. We’re trying to establish just how the pyramid selects people and how this group have managed, presumably, to stay alive. We’ve only had two returns from them, and that was within minutes of their being snatched.”