Setting All the Captives Free
Angels shouldn’t have faces that looked like the result of an industrial accident—perhaps an encounter with a giant cheese grater—one of their shoulders shouldn’t be hunched on itself, and the entire left side of their body shouldn’t droop and sag as though the muscles and bones holding it had been semi-liquified.
They shouldn’t have a only a few straggles of long brown hair that looked like the rest had been plucked by a blind man wielding tweezers.
And—mark me, I’m not an expert on theology, but I’m still fairly sure of this—angels should not, under any circumstances, be singing Women of Syracuse at the top of their lungs while standing on a broom.
Women of Syracuse was a listing of the acts supposedly performed by these willing ladies for varying quantities of money, and, let me tell you, some of them were so inventive that even I found them odd-sounding. I’m quite sure, for instance, one’s ear is not built for that.
I blinked stupidly. My savior gave me the sweetest smile I’d ever seen, despite its necessarily lopsided nature. He waved cheerily and moved on, still standing on the broom even as it sped off. Of course—I thought—angels could stand on brooms. They could fly, so if they lost the broom it wouldn’t be a big deal.
And then I realized that the door was open and that the water level was still climbing, slowly, very slowly.
I jumped from my cot, and the water was just below my knees as I half ran, half lurched out.
My rescuer was moving from cell door to cell door, as the women of Syracuse found ever more unlikely things to do to their gentlemen friends. His burner flashed at intervals. Yells and strange inhuman-sounding laughs echoed somewhere.
The hallway had grav wells at either end. As usual, one would be rigged to go up, the other to go down. Water was pouring in a torrent through the downward one. And I was going to the upward one.
I ran towards it, then stopped just short of the grav well field.
In my mind, Ben’s voice came, clear as day, That broomer will free the people on this level, but what about the poor bastards in the cells below? And in my mind, Ben crossed his arms and looked his most stern.
So, Ben has been dead for fourteen years and really shouldn’t be talking to me like that. But this never seemed to matter to him and anyway, whether he talked to me or not was a matter between myself and him and none of anyone else’s business, right? What’s a minor insanity between friends?
I can’t, I told him. See the way that water is pouring? The antigrav wells are actually pulling the water downward as fast as possible. Down there, the water will be up to my neck. And I’m tall. If anyone was there, they’ll be dead for sure. Now or soon enough.
Yeah. Think about that, he said. Think about the “soon enough.”
And I did, though I didn’t want to. I remembered being down there, strapped to a chair, or strapped to the wall, while they did unspeakable things to my body with instruments no sane human could even conceive of, much less use. And then I imagined water pouring in and not being able to escape, not being able to swim, while the water climbed, climbed, climbed.
It’s none of my business, I said. I am a murderer. A monster.
In my mind, Ben’s mouth twitched with the beginning of a smile, and his dark eyes wrinkled slightly in amusement. Now, Luce, he said.
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 to 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 man-hole 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.