The Jesus Incident

Chapter Thirteen

As I am your creation, you are Mine. You are My satellites and I am yours. Your personas are My impersonations. We melt into ONE at the touch of infinity.
- Raja Flattery, The Book of Ship
FROM THE instant the Redoubt's first hatchway exploded, Jesus Lewis stayed within arm's length of his bodyguard, Illuyank. It was partly a conscious decision. Even in the worst of times, Illuyank inspired a certain confidence. He was a heavily muscled man, dark-skinned, with black wavy hair and a stone-cut face accented by three blue chevrons tattooed above his left eyebrow. Three chevrons - Illuyank had run outside around the Colony Perimeter three times, naked, armed only with his wits and endurance, "running the P" for a bet or a date.
Testing their luck, some called it. When the hatch blew, they all needed luck. Some of them were barely awake and had not yet eaten their first dayside meal.
"The clones got a lasgun!" Illuyank shouted. His clear, dark eyes worked the area. "Dangerous. They don't know how to use it."
The two men stood in a passage between the clones' quarters and a random huddle of survivors who waited behind them near a half-circle of hatches leading to the core of the Redoubt. Even in this moment of peril, Lewis knew how he must appear to the others. He was a short man, thin all the way - thin straw-colored hair, thin mouth, thin chin made even more so by a deep cleft, a thin nose, and oddly dark eyes which never seemed to reflect light in the thin compression of his lids. Beside him, Illuyank was everything Lewis was not.
Both stared toward the core of the Redoubt.
There was a real question in their minds whether the core of the Redoubt remained secure.
Knowing this, Lewis had deactivated the communications pellet buried in the flesh of his neck and refused to answer it even when insistent calls from Oakes tempted him.
No telling who might be able to listen!
There had been some disquieting indications lately that their private communications channel might not be as private as he had hoped. By now, Oakes would have received word about the new Ceepee. Discussion of that and the possible breach of their private communications system would have to wait.
Oakes would have to be patient.
At the first sign of trouble, Lewis had hit an emergency signal switch to alert Murdoch at Colony. There was no certainty, though, that the signal had gone through. He had not been allowed time for a retransmit-check. And the whole Redoubt had gone onto emergency power then. Lewis had no way of knowing which systems might be working and which not.
The damned clones!
A loud whirr sounded from the direction of the clones' quarters. Illuyank flattened himself on the floor and the others were showered with shards of passage wall.
"I thought they didn't know how to use that lasgun!" Lewis shouted. He pointed at a gaping hole in the wall as Illuyank leaped up and spun him around toward the others at the hatch circle.
"Downshaft!" Illuyank called.
One of the waiting group whirled the downshaft hatchdogs and opened the way into a passage lighted only by the blue flickering of emergency illumination.
Lewis sprinted blindly behind Illuyank, heard the others scrambling after them. Illuyank shouted back at him as he ran: "They don't know how to use it and that's what makes it dangerous!" Illuyank tucked and rolled across an open side passage as he spoke, firing a quick burst down the passage from his gusgun. "They could hit anything anywhere!"
Lewis glanced down the open passage as he ran past, glimpsed a scattering of bodies blazing there.
It soon became apparent where Illuyank was leading them and Lewis admired the wisdom of it. They took a left turn into a new passage, then a right turn and found themselves in the Redoubt's unfinished back corridors, skirting the native rock of the cliffside into the small Facilities Room on the beach side. One plasma-glass window overlooked the sea, the courtyard and the corner where the clones' quarters joined the Redoubt itself.
The last of the followers dogged the hatch behind them. Lewis took quick stock of his personnel - fifteen people, only six of them from his personally chosen crew. The others, rated reliable by Murdoch, had not yet been tested.
Illuyank had moved to the maze of controls at the cliff wall and was poring over the Redoubt's schematics etched into a master plate there. It occurred to Lewis then that Illuyank was the only survivor from Kingston's mission to this chunk of dirt and rock named Black Dragon.
"Is this how it was with Kingston?" Lewis asked. He forced his voice to an even calm while watching Illuyank trace a circuit with one stubby finger.
"Kingston cried and hid behind rocks while his people died. Runners got him. I cooked them out."
Cooked them out! Lewis shuddered at the euphemism. The grotesque image of Kingston's head crisped to char grinned across his mind.
"Tell us what to do." Lewis was surprised at his control under this fear.
"Good." Illuyank looked directly at him for the first time. "Good. Our weapons are these." He indicated the power switches and valve controls around them. "We can control every circuit, gas and liquid from here."
Lewis touched Illuyank's arm and pointed to a one-meter square panel beside him.
"Yes." Illuyank hesitated.
"We're blind otherwise," Lewis said.
For answer, Illuyank tapped out a code on the console beneath the square. The blank panel slid back to reveal four small view-screens.
"Sensors," one of those behind them said.
"Eyes and ears," Lewis said, still looking at Illuyank.
The dark man's expression did not change, but he whispered to Lewis: "We also will have to see and hear what we do to them."
Lewis swallowed and heard a faint snap-snapping at the hatch.
"They're cutting in!" a voice quavered behind them.
Lewis and Illuyank scanned the screens. One showed the rubble that had been the clones' quarters. I'M HUNGRY NOW!, the new rallying cry of the clones, was smeared in yellow grease across one wall. The adjoining screen scanned the courtyard. A crowd of mutated humans - E-clones all - scoured the grounds for rocks and bits of glass, anything for a weapon.
"Keep an eye on them" Illuyank whispered. "They can't hurt us with that stuff, but all that blood out there will bring demons. There are holes all over our perimeter. If demons hit, they'll catch that bunch first."
Lewis nodded. He could hear some of the others pressing close for a better view.
Once more, there was that snap-snapping at the hatch.
Lewis glanced at Illuyank.
"They're just pounding at us with rocks," Illuyank said. "What we have to do is find that lasgun. Meanwhile, keep an eye on the courtyard. The bloo...."
The lower left-hand screen showed the clone mess hall, a shambles of security hatches broken open in the background, a turmoil of clones throughout the area. This screen suddenly went blank.
"Sensor's gone in the mess hall," Lewis said.
"Food will keep them busy there for a time," Illuyank said. He was busy searching through the Redoubt on the remaining screen. It showed a flash of the courtyard from a different angle, then a broken tangle of perimeter wall, cut to pieces by the lasgun and swarming with clones coming in from the outside where Lewis had ejected them, the action which had ignited this revolt.
We have to cull them somehow, Lewis told himself. The food will go only so far.
He turned his attention to the screen showing the courtyard. Ye.... there was a lot of blood. It made him aware that he was badly cut himself. Celltape stopped his major bleeding, but small cuts began to ache as he thought of his condition. None of them was without injury. Even Illuyank bled slightly from a rock cut above his ear.
"There," Illuyank said.
His voice coincided with a new thump and crackling agitation at the hatch. But the COA screen Illuyank had been using now showed the passage outside their hatch. It was filled with a mass of clone flesh: furred bodies, strange limbs, oddly shaped heads. At the hatch two of the strongest clones were trying to maneuver a plasteel cutter, but their actions were impeded by the press of others behind them.
"That'll get them in here for sure," someone said. "We're cooked."
Illuyank turned and barked orders, pointing, waving a hand until all fifteen were busy in the Facilities Roo...valve to control, a switch to throw; each had some particular responsibility.
Lewis keyed for sound in the screen and a confused babble came over the speakers.
Illuyank signaled to a man at the remote valve controls across the room. "Dump the brine tanks into level two! That'll flood the outer passage."
The man worked his controls, muttering as he followed the schematics at his position.
Illuyank touched Lewis on the elbow, pointed to the screen which showed the courtyard. The clones there were looking away from the sensor, all of them at full alert, their attention on a broken segment of wall which led to the perimeter. Abruptly, almost as one organism, they dropped their rocks and glass weapons and ran screaming off-screen.
"Runners," Illuyank muttered.
Lewis saw them then, a waving swarm of tiny pale worm shapes cresting the rubble. He could almost smell the burned acid and tasted acid in his throat. Automatically, he gave the orders.
"Seal off."
"We can't," a timid voice from the edge of the room began. "Some of our people are still out there. If we seal of.... if w.... they'll al...."
"They'll all die," Lewis finished for him. "And our perimeter's full of holes. Runners are in the courtyard. If we don't seal off we die, too. Seal off!"
He crossed to a valve-control panel, punched the proper sequence. Lights above the panel showed that the indicated valve was closing. He could hear others around him obeying. Illuyank's voice intruded with a quiet warning: "Check the surface shafts." This brought another bustle of activity.
Lewis glanced at the courtyard screen. A clone stumbled back into the sensor's range, screaming and beating at his eyes with the blunt knobs which passed for his hands. As he moved into range, he fell and lay twisting on the ground. A blur of writhing shadows swept over him. The courtyard filled with fleeing clones and tiny, eel-like bodies. Behind Lewis, one of their group could be heard vomiting.
"They're in the passage," Illuyank said. He gestured at the sensor where the view outside their hatch showed brine rising in the passage with a swarming mass of Nerve Runners riding in on the wave.
Lewis shot a frantic glance at the hatch. What the sensor revealed was happening right out there!
The brine stopped short of the passage ceiling, but not before it had shorted out the plasteel cutter.
Clones were thrashing in the water, Nerve Runners covering them, but here and there dead Runners could be seen on the brine's surface. And where the plasteel cutter had shorted out, a milky gray gas clouded the thin space over the water. Wherever the gas touched, Runners died.
Lewis felt his mind leaping from item to item. Item: brine. Item: electrical short.
"Chlorine," he whispered. Then louder: "Chlorine!"
"What?" Illuyank was clearly puzzled.
Lewis pointed at the screen. "Chlorine kills Nerve Runners!"
"What's chlorine?"
"A gas created when you throw an electrical charge through sodium chloride brine."
"Bu...."
"Chlorine kills Runners!" Lewis looked across the Facilities Room where the plaz-glass barrier showed a corner of clone area and the ocean beyond. "Are the sea pumps still working?"
The man at the pump console checked his keyboard, then: "Most of them."
"Sea water wherever we can put it," Lewis said. "We need a large container where we can dump it from here and throw an electrical charge through it."
"Water purification," Illuyank said. "The purification plant. We can pump almost everywhere from there."
"Wait a bit," Lewis said. "We want to attract as many Runners as we can; make them easier to wipe out."
He watched the screens, dragging it out, then: "All right, let's hit them."
Once more, Illuyank scanned his schematics, throwing orders over his shoulder while the survivors in the Facilities Room obeyed.
Lewis fixed his attention on the sensor screens. The outer passage was quiet no...few dead E-clones floating on the surface of the brine, many dead Runners among them. He tuned the mess-room screen to another sensor eye, found the exercise bay outside the clone labs. It was filled with a thrashing crowd of E-clones in absolute panic and, here and there among them, some of his own people caught outside when he had given the order to seal off. There were not many recognizable faces, but the colors of the uniforms could be identified. One by one, they died, their mouths frothing pink and their last stares turned upward toward the sensor.
Even as the last of them were dying, a milky cloud of gas had begun to sweep out of an open passage, drifting across the scene, blurring it.
"Watch their eyes," Illuyank said. "If we don't get all the Runners, they'll go for the eyes first."
All was quiet in the Facilities Room then as the survivors listened to their own precious breath, felt the comfort of their own live sweat and watched the eyes of the dead outside for some reflection of their own mortality.
Lewis leaned against the lip of the console, feeling cold metal under his fingers. Other screens showed more of the milky gas billowing through the Redoubt. There were even sensor eyes still alive to show the area outside their perimeter, the gas drifting across the open ground there. Illuyank scanned from sensor to sensor.
Someone behind Lewis heaved a shuddering sigh and Lewis echoed it.
"Chlorine," Illuyank muttered.
"We'll be able to sterilize the Runner boils right out of existence now," Lewis said. "If we'd only know...."
"A nasty way to learn," someone behind them said.
And someone else said: "It'll be a long wait."
"Waiting's that way," Illuyank said. "Think how long you live if you're always waiting."
It was an insightful comment, deeper than anything Lewis had ever expected from Illuyank. And it meant that Illuyank would have to be shifted to a tour of duty Colony side. He saw too much, deduced too much. That could not be permitted. First, though, they had to get out of here. But there was no way out except into the Runner-contaminated open areas of the Redoubt. The chlorine would make that possibl.... in time.
"Can we get a message to Murdoch?" Lewis asked.
"Emergency transmitter only," Illuyank said.
"Send him the emergency shut-down signal. No one comes in here until we've cleaned up. It wouldn't do to have anyone see what's happened an...." Lewis directed a loaded look at Illuyank.
Illuyank nodded, and provided Lewis with the perfect opening for what had to be done. "Someone should go Colonyside, though, and see that they understand."
"That had better be you," Lewis said. "Make sure they don't try to explain anything to The Boss shipside. That's my job."
"Right."
"Don't tell them any more than you have to. An.... while you're there, try to circulate in the Colony - everything normal, routine. Accept the usual assignment...."
"And try to find out if word of thi...." Illuyank glanced at the sensor screens. ". . .has leaked out."
"Good man."
And Lewis thought: too good.