“Yeah, well, when I was there, in Master Control, and I thought of all those people dead and of my own sessions and Cassie’s dad and all the rest, I got real mad. I had a search done and I found him—or her. Not in my quadrant, but way over to the east. The Guardian there was an old Fluxgirl, too. She understood. All I could think of was that he’d seduce some young wizard out in Flux after shutdown and be turned back into what he was. I looked at his readout and it was boiling with hatred. I knew if he ever got back he was fully capable of killing millions and enslaving more.”
“So when the master program was adjusted, you exempted him as the original had exempted Spirit, for example.”
“Worse. I wanted to pay him back for everybody as much as possible. I made him—her—into his own original inner fantasy for women. She’s practically a thinking animal, designed for just one thing. She’s immune to spells as such, but she draws from Flux. I—it’s so complicated I can’t even remember it all now.”
Matson stroked his now-bearded chin and thought about it. “And you think this might be our Ayesha. It fits, in a way. It might even explain it all. One item on their shopping list they missed at Vishnar’s place was you. This’ll make it pretty damned tough, if Weiz is as smart as you say, but she is vulnerable.”
Suzl was not so sure. “She might be destroyed— might—in Anchor, but never in Flux. Even if you beheaded her, she would be instantly re-formed. Unless she’s repro-grammed by the master computers, she’s the closest thing to an immortal we have on World.”
“That’s bad,” he admitted, “but not fatal. She’s dependent. Right now, she’s dependent on Borg. She absolutely needs him, and I think he knows that, which is why he’s so confident himself. She knows it, too, so she’s got to figure some way to get around it. We have to get her before she does, that’s clear. A man must take her, but only a woman can get close enough. This’ll be a real tricky one.”
“If she is Weiz, then she’ll remember I once had a prick. Think that’s the way out?”
“Hard to say. You wrote the program. The thing is, with this gadget, she can write everybody else’s. With Borg around, she has the luxury of being able to experiment. Whatever she comes up with, it’s not going to be any nicer than Coydt’s version of things.”
“Oh, boy! What a mess I always make of things! He was always a little kinky, even as a man. Of course, I was, too, so we fit pretty well. All I did was try and give a little justice and instead I made another Coydt!”
He went over to her and drew her to his naked body. “We all make mistakes,” he told her gently. “Your mistake might still be for the best. We might never have stopped New Eden. Maybe you gave us a fighting chance.”
It was what she needed to hear, and tears came into her big, soft brown eyes. She very much needed to draw on his strength right now, and he was more than willing to provide it.
He had average desires, but she’d forgotten that his wizard ladies had given him nearly infinite capacity. It lasted for hours and through countless variations, and it was the best she’d ever had.
The hotel lobby was a buzz of conversation, filled with patrons both regular and visiting. Power was back on and everybody was celebrating a more-or-less return to normalcy, although nobody liked having to send to Flux to get fresh food and beverages, or paying what it cost.
The tall figure came down the central stairway almost casually, although it was something of a grand entrance. People stopped talking or doing whatever they were doing when they saw him and just stared, some open-mouthed. It spread across the lobby like a wave of silent awe, and it was both eerie and, to Matson, funny as hell.
He had purchased an all-black outfit, similar to, but a bit fancier than, what the stringers wore as their uniform. His boots, also new, were of shiny black leather and had silver spurs, basically ornamental but effective. He also had a new black felt wide-brimmed hat, the left brim hooked up in stringer fashion, although around the crown was a silver band of ornate design. On the upturned brim, he’d pinned the silver leaf and star cluster of a field marshal of the armies of New Eden, and under it the smaller, slightly tarnished eagle that marked him as a colonel, Signal Corps. That had come from the box he always carried with him.
Also from that box was the black leather belt, loose on the hips, with the worn silver design almost woven through it, and the well-worn buckle with the ancient symbol of the Pathfinder on it. A number of things in the case and out of it would attach to that belt as needed, but he had chosen to wear twin ancient pearl-handled revolvers, the outlines of rearing white stallions carved into those handles.
Everyone just stared, seeing this ghost from the ancient past come down the hotel stairs, not quite believing their eyes or knowing what to do or say next.
Finally the desk manager, a man of some practicality, muttered softly but loud enough for all to hear, “I’m sure he never registered. I would have remembered. . . .”
Matson, with his thick drooping black moustache and mean-looking eyes, surveyed the entire room like a king surveying his subjects. Then he said, in his best deep voice, “Don’t let me stop your fun, people. I’m not going to be here very long.”
Nobody had taken much notice of Suzl, who’d come down behind him, but she couldn’t suppress a look of haughty pride and satisfaction. They all looked even sillier than she’d dreamed.
The grand entrance had been timed for Major Verdugo, who was just coming in the door and hadn’t yet realized that anything unusual was going on. He stopped when he saw the people around him just staring, though, and he followed their gaze to the man on the stairs and his mouth dropped as well. “Oh, my God!” he breathed.
Matson saw him, and was all business, ignoring the others. “All right, Major. We have a train to catch, I think. Have somebody see to our bags.” And, with that, first Matson, then Suzl, walked right by the major and out the front door.
Verdugo snapped out of it in a minute, but he wasn’t thinking too clearly. He whirled and sped out the door after them. Matson was standing on the entrance porch, breathing in the air and discussing the weather casually with Suzl, just waiting for him.
“You! You’re not …” the major began, trying to sort it all out.
“James Patrick Ryan, Major,” the big man in black responded casually. “But I think we better use Matson from here on in.”
The major glanced down the street, as if to check and see that the big statue of the legendary man was still standing in front of the Institute and hadn’t come to life and walked down here. “Matson’s dead!” he protested a bit weakly. “It’s against the law to impersonate him!”
“I’m impersonating no one, Major, and I think you better show a little more respect and be a little less of an asshole, if that’s possible. In case you haven’t noticed, I have six ranks on you in the same army.”
Verdugo came up close to him and stared. “Are you really Matson?”
The big man sighed. “Son, unless you’re a complete idiot, which I doubt, you think it through. Either I’m Matson, or his ghost, or somehow I got by all your guards and went through Flux, did this, and then got back here without breathing hard or any of your spies noticing. Since I bought most of this stuff here yesterday, as you well know, and since I spent the night right here in the company of this charming lady of old acquaintance, I think you can figure out the rest.”
Matson took out a four-pack of cigars, offered one to Suzl who shook her head and declined, then stuck one in his mouth and lit it with a safety match. He then pulled back his sleeve and looked at his watch, the same watch Ryan had been wearing. “It’s getting on, Major. We’re going to catch that train. If our baggage and my horse and one for the lady aren’t on it as well, I will take great delight in showing you how easy it is to make a eunuch. Now move!”
The train was a small one, almost a toy by comparison to the large locomotives that now went all over New Eden. The original line was a prototype built from the old plans discovered in the ancient files; the track had been laid down along the main road between the old Anchor East and West Gates. It was still a prototype; now its power was electric, from a shielded third rail, and it was unusually smooth-running and quiet compared to the puffing steam engines on the full-sized long hauls. A nationwide electric system with sufficient surplus energy to run all the trains was not possible at the moment, but it was hoped that these sorts of trains could be used for the cities, and for city to suburban locations.
Matson sat back and watched the countryside go by. “Last time I rode this line it was night, I was stark-naked and manacled, and it was going the other way,” he noted. It was just a memory. There seemed no bitterness or anger in his tone, and his thoughts did not dwell on the memories. “The country around here’s gotten too built up. Not enough green showing anymore. It’s a shame.”
Suzl said nothing, but she certainly agreed with him on the way things had gone. The area alongside the train had gotten built up; farming had been reduced in the area to small truck farms serving the cities—chicken ranches and stuff like that. A lot of the trees had been chopped down, too, to make way for new villages and some small industry. She had been born and raised here, and had returned and lived in New Eden even longer when it was still just an Anchor, and she recognized few landmarks.
Matson sighed. “Well, Major, you’ve had me checked all out and you know I’m who and what I say I am.”
“Yes, sir. I can’t say I understand, though. I can see why you might have taken all that trouble to ‘die’—I’m not sure I’d like to be a monument while I was still alive myself—but why come back now?”
“A matter of family honor, mostly. I just can’t have powerful people picking on my folks. This way, nobody’s ever sure about me. I’ve been twice dead and twice now I’ve come back. Even if somebody sees me blown apart and then cremates my remains, they’ll never be sure about me. And, there are other reasons.” In point of fact, none of the kidnapped children were any kin to Matson at all, but he’d taken pains to say that they were. It made him far more menacing, considering his reputation, and it also allowed him to call upon stringer resources if he needed them. Anyone harming him while he was on a personal adventure would be free and clear; if on a matter of family honor, though, every stringer would be out to avenge his death. It was part of their own clannish code.
“Now that we all know each other, I think we deserve to know just what it is we’re looking for here,” Matson told Verdugo. “Just what is it? What’s it look like? What’s its power and range? What’s it supposed to do, anyway?” He saw that the major was still hesitant. “Come on, Major. It seems like all the bad guys already know. It’s kind of crazy to keep us in the dark after all that.”
Verdugo thought for a moment, then decided to talk. Matson was, after all, a field marshal, a rank never more than technically retired.
“It’s pretty bulky,” he told them at last. “Looks like a chair but a chair built into a heavy machine. It weighs close to a ton, and so it’s not easy to move. There’s also four antennas attached to the top, but they can be removed when shipped. They only got it on the lorry because it was on a platform and electric winch.”
“They knocked out all the power,” Suzl noted. “How’d they get it up?”
Verdugo was not used to having women in these conversations, but he answered the question. Things were changed now, at least for the present.
“You always have a backup system. They turned it with teams of horses. Their own and some of the judge’s, too. It wasn’t hard to do.”
Matson nodded. “What about the scientists who built it? None of them were there at the time, surely.”
“No, none were. Only a couple of soldiers as guards, both of whom were killed. They just blew in the door, bypassing the security, with some very heavy explosives. We didn’t hear it because we had enough noise and mayhem going on with the fires and their own explosions.
Everyone working on the project is now in the custody of the district military commander, to see how the raiders could have known so much. Even allowing all the rest, they knew there was a winch in there and how to operate it, for example, without power. They also blew in the weakest point in the building. Somebody who’d been inside had to tip them.”
“Good thinking,” Matson approved. “I wonder what they could have offered somebody to sell out? Or what kind of hold they had, anyway. Probably duped somebody into thinking they were working for somebody else. It’s easy to fool people when those people think they’re too smart to be fooled.” He sighed. “O.K., so they have it. Now—can they make it work?”
“It connects directly to the power grid, so it has to be used in Flux or at the Anchor Gate to be worth anything. That’s why it was being built and tested out here, close to the Flux border. It’s a prototype, so there’s not as many safeguards on it as a production model would have, but there are some.”
Suzl was thinking. “It weighs a ton, you say? Then, if they can get it to Flux, any competent wizard sitting in it would be able to move it. Not very fast, but they could draw up enough energy to lift it off the ground, and move it forward in fits and starts. If it was up at all, then it could be pulled by horses with no big problem. There wouldn’t be any drag like a wagon would cause, and the only friction would be atmosphere.”
Both men looked at her with some surprise. This was insecure little Suzl talking about drag and friction?
“All right, they can move it, at least as fast as a stringer train would move wagons,” Matson said. “Now—can they work it? Honestly?”
Verdugo thought about it. “If they knew enough to steal it, they probably won’t have much trouble figuring out how to work it. It draws tremendous Flux from the grid and then can send it to anyplace else. You program in a grid ID system that’s consistent. Any assignments will do, so long as there’s no overlap of locations. Simple map work. Block A-25, Block K-144, and so on. That’s the only real security item on this one. You have to know what is Block 0-0, or the locations make no sense.”
Matson nodded. “Uh huh. So the operator sends a program along the grid to any specific block and it works there just like a wizard was standing there. You said there were four antennae. Does that mean you can send to four blocks at once?”
Verdugo shook his head negatively. “Uh uh. If you have all your locations correct, it forms a circular pattern around the projector. When the Samish took off, they drew a shield that extended for a distance of about a kilometer around their flying ship. They, however, were a remote unit of the mother ship, tapped into the Flux at the Gate itself, which was then broadcast to the ship. The more power it got, the more it could expand its shield and link it back to the mother ship’s.”
“But that was in Anchor!” Suzl protested. “You can’t tap the grid in Anchor. That’s why magic doesn’t work there!”