Cyber Way

CHAPTER 20

Lightning fractured the sky. Thunderstorms were common in Florida, but Moody had never seen one of this intensity coalesce so fast. He did his best to keep up with Ooljee and the others.

The corridor that led to Engineering was deserted. All nonessential personnel had long since fled the structure or been evacuated. Lights gleamed everywhere, though they flickered with each flash of lightning. Machinery hummed smoothly, defiantly. Moody felt like a puppet, and didn’t like it.

Gaggii was here somewhere. They would find him, he thought grimly. An instant later he was reminded that their man hadn’t come alone.

There were three of them, loping up the ramp from the first subterranean level. Big, fast, and snarling all the way, their eyes burning like shards of a bad dream. One managed a good snap at Moody’s face before the pins from Ooljee’s taser decussated its field, sending it flaring into oblivion. The detective had time to note that their attackers had no odor.

They stumbled into Engineering. Moody concentrated on catching his breath while his partner and the harried corporal did all the talking.

“We shot out the lines. There shouldn’t be any power to this building,” Ooljee declared, “much less to the accelerator. We do not know where it is coming from.”

The chief engineer gestured. “It’s sure as hell coming from somewhere. Emergency generator read’s off.” Grayhills joined Moody. “So Gaggii is having his way in spite of us.”

“It is more than just this installation.” Ooljee looked over at her. “I think whatever he is doing is also affecting the weather. The storm outside came up too fast. What really scares me is that he may not know what he is doing.” Moody lumbered forward, his eyes roving the banks of readouts and monitors. “There’s got to be a way to shut this thing down. Some critical components we can disable. ”

“You don’t know what you are suggesting,” said the engineer. “You don’t have any idea what a facility like this costs.”

“You tell us where to start,” Moody replied emotionlessly, “or we’ll pick a spot and begin disassembling at random. The result will be the same. Only not as neat.” She met his gaze briefly, then dropped her eyes and let out a resigned sigh. “Come with me.”

On the way they were attacked twice by intruding mah-ih. One plainclothesman suffered a bite on the arm before the corporal blew his assailant to oblivion with a blast from his taser.

They descended two levels via open stairways, not trusting the elevators. Not with Gaggii in control of the building’s power supply. While the others stood guard, the project’s chief engineer set to work with an assistant in the bowels of the machine. As they removed a protective panel, exposing circuitry and delicate processor cubes, the unearthly howling rose in pitch around them.

The flickering lights made it difficult to see. Moody squinted at shadows, searching for low, loping shapes, his taser clutched tightly in one hand. He muttered urgently at his companions.

“Hurry it up!”

Already furious at what she was being forced to do, the chief engineer yelled back at him. “This isn’t a bathtub, young man. You don’t drain it by pulling a plug.”

The detective tried to put a rein on his impatience. Gaggii might already have gotten what he was after anyway. Whatever the hell that was. Ooljee’s remarks about the universe being a delicately balanced, easily upset place kept haunting him. Was Gaggii playing around with that somehow? And if so, why? If they had learned one thing about Yistin Gag-gii’s character, it was that he liked, even needed, to be in control. It followed that he would do everything to keep from losing it.

Somehow that was small consolation.

In a moment of candor he’d confessed to them that he had a specific goal in mind. Did he know how to achieve it? Or was he simply seeing how far he could push what he’d learned?

The whine that reverberated through the lower level of the facility reminded him of a shuttle just lifting off, of a wave rolling in from Africa, which, finding no beach to break upon, kept crashing and tumbling in upon itself, the very picture of kinetic frustration.

Ozone tickled his nostrils, burned his eyes. Strobing lights distorted his vision. He thought he could see shapes advancing. Not coyotes. Coils and loops of light, violent neon, gaping auroras with sparks for teeth. The plainclothesman on his left cursed and fired, struck nothing. You couldn’t shock a reflection, a trick of the eye. No dragons roamed the service corridor, no demons occupied the depths of the machine. Blurred images of vast tentacular shapes and ambulatory geometries were no more than the hallucinatory

offspring of tired minds. The toroid accelerated heavy particles, not dreams.

Here there be nonsense, he whispered silently. Get ahold of yourself. All lawbreakers thrive on confusion. Gaggii’s no different. Don’t give him that.

The two engineers worked silently, applying their tiny and insignificant tools to the vaster instrument that was the accelerator. From their position they were unable to see the howling phalanx of buff-colored shapes that came snarling up the corridor. One of the cops turned to flee. Moody grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back. “Hold your ground!” he roared. “Use your taser!”

Then everyone was firing madly at the onrushing mah-ih. Coyote bodies exploded in fountaining sparks and blinding light. Moody found himself ducking and whirling as he tried to avoid teeth and claws, cursing the several seconds the taser’s battery needed to recharge. Nor did it matter how many he and his companions obliterated. The survivors pressed on relentlessly, as if delighting in their own destruction.

“Got it!” The triumphant shout came from behind him, not from the battle line.

Almost immediately the whine of the toroidal accelerator began to fade. The chief engineer emerged from the service bay, cradling a rutilant cylinder of metallic glass. The lights in the corridor ceased to flicker as emergency power came on line. Their comforting steady glow banished the mah-ih and companion nightmares from sight.

Moody rose from his crouching position, the taser hot in his palm. Officers and techs eyed one another uncertainly. The chief engineer handed the cylinder to her assistant as carefully as an obstetrician passing a newborn to its nurse.

The howling was a memory, the only noise in the corridor the hiss of the lights and the automatic space heaters.

Moody pocketed his weapon. “That’s it, then. We stopped him.”

“I wonder.” Ooljee tilted his head back to gaze groundward, two flights above them. “We have seen some things down here. I wonder what Grayhills has seen up there.”

They used the elevators this time. As Moody emerged he happened to glance through a corridor window. It was now sleeting outside. Lightning twisted and cracked through boiling black clouds, millions of volts with no place to go. He was reminded of sandpainting patterns.

Grayhills was not waiting for them. She was seated at an engineering station, weaving in tandem with the young tech next to her. Moody observed the performance, admiring their technique much as one would that of duo pianists.

She sensed his presence and paused long enough to look up.

“We stopped it,” he told her.

“I know.” She indicated her companion, who grinned shyly at the detective. “Little Bear and I have been trying to determine what happened. There was heavy particle acceleration to near light-speed within the toroid, but no result we can measure because no target was emplaced.”

“So what happened to the particles?” Moody asked.

“We do not know.” The young tech blinked. “They went someplace. We do not know where. Since they did not collide with a preset target, they must have collided with particles somewhere else. Unless they were aimed at something located outside the toroid.” He blinked again.

“Is that possible?” Grayhills’ gaze narrowed.

“Theoretically. It is never done, because it would be impossible to monitor the results properly. And there is no guarantee the particles would not strike others before reaching an external target, thus invalidating the experiment. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to do such a thing. ”

“Unless they want the result of the experiment to remain a secret,” Ooljee pointed out.

The chief engineer had been silent long enough. “This is madness! You don’t throw heavy particles around like cookie crumbs. If they escape the confines of the accelerator, there’s no way to track their paths.”

“There’s something else,” said Grayhills. “It’s this storm. We’ve been in touch with the National Weather Service office in Flagstaff. A low-pressure system just materialized, right here. No front, no occluded lows. The bottom just fell out of the barometer over Cameron.”

“Gaggii,” said the sergeant. “Whatever he is doing is affecting the climate. We have stopped the accelerator, but the storm continues. He is doing something, wherever he is.”

“All I know is that the NWS says this is an abnormal weather system, that its effects are highly localized, and that it’s not moving. It’s just sitting here on top of us.” Tired, she leaned back in the swivel seat and closed her eyes.

“I don’t know why he activated the accelerator, or how he managed to enlist those coyote-things to help him. I don’t know if this crazy storm is related to his activities or not. Accelerator, coyotes, storm: I can’t put those three together any more than I can pull a rabbit out of a hat. But that doesn’t mean Gaggii can’t.”

A phone clanged, dissonant in the charged atmosphere of the room. The tech who answered nodded slowly as he listened, then passed the handset to the corporal. Moody watched his expression change from one of frustration to one of confusion. He hung up and stood staring off into space for a long moment, then turned to face the detective.

“That was the security kiosk at the eastside parking lot. They need advice. There’s something they think should be checked out.”

“We’re busy here.”

The young man shook his head slowly. “No, I think we ought to have a look at this. I don’t want to, but we probably should.” His tone was that of the hunter chosen to leave the cave and confront the saber-tooth.

Puzzled, Moody and Ooljee followed him out, leaving Grayhills and the tech to their weaving.

No burning eyes, no fiery otherworldly shapes leapt from dark comers to confront them. Nothing impeded their progress as they hurried toward the back of the building.

They slowed in the hallway that led to the parking lot exit. Outside, sleet continued to whiten the pavement, the half-ice spending itself violently against the wide, tinted windows that looked out on a field of cars and minivans and trucks. Farther to the east, transport traveling the north-south two-lane highway was slowing and pulling off the road. Tugging jackets and shirts tight against the sleet, drivers and passengers were leaving their vehicles to stare at what had materialized in the gravelly soil just beyond the graded shoulder.

It was big. Men in uniform were lined up alongside it to gaze at the people gathering below them. At this distance Moody could not see their expressions, but he doubted they could be any less astonished than his own. He had very good eyesight and was able to see the name on its front, but he could not read it, since it was written in a script unfamiliar to him.

The corporal surprised him by translating. The words meant nothing.

The two men from Ganado left the members of the security staff standing dumbfounded in the blowing sleet. Not a word was spoken until they’d returned to Engineering.

“It is a mistake, an error on Gaggii’s part,” Ooljee murmured as they entered the busy room.

Moody brushed moisture from his shoulders. “It’s getting out of hand. I’m beginning to get some idea of what you meant when you spoke of messing around with incomprehensible forces.”

Eyes followed them as they entered. Grayhills came over to them and put a hand on Moody’s arm. It was a good thing she did so, or the spellbound detective might have walked right through the back door and out into the next corridor.

“I take it you saw something.”

He started to tell her, hesitated. How could he explain? It was not an explainable thing. Instead he said, “Can you patch us through to the university library molly? Not the one here: the main one, in Flagstaff.”

She eyed him curiously. “I don’t see why not.” Her attention shifted to Ooljee, who had slumped in a chair nearby. “Why?”

“We need to check out a name,” Moody told her.

“A name? What name?”

“The name of a ship.”

She shook her head, her confusion deepening. “I don’t understand.”

“Y’all have lots of company. Be a good gal and run the patch.”

Watching him carefully, she resumed her seat and jacked the request. A moment later he found himself confronting an open library prompt. He entered his request and awaited a response, which appeared within the minute.

Ooljee rose to peer over his shoulder. Several techies left their stations to see what all the fuss was about.

As the library patiently informed them, “the destroyer Akitsuki, while escorting the heavy carrier Zuikaku, was hit and presumed sunk by American aircraft on the morning of October 25, 1944, during the battle for Leyte Gulf, Philippine campaign, WWII.”

“Except it didn’t sink.” Moody muttered aloud. “It went someplace else. Now it’s here, outside. In the high desert.” Grayhills turned to Ooljee. “What is he talking about?”

“Out past the parking lot.” The sergeant nodded eastward. “A Japanese destroyer from the Second World War. At least some of the crew is still aboard, no doubt wondering what has happened to them. I imagine the majority of survivors are huddled below, praying to whatever gods they prayed to in those times.”

“That’s crazy."

“I have no intention of disputing you.” His expression narrowed. “The codetalkers.”

Moody blinked, looked at his partner. “What?”

“Navaho codetalkers. An important part of tribal history. We all learn about them in school. During the second great war, before mollys, all the governments looked for ways to transmit messages that the enemy would not be able to understand. When Navahos joined the American forces, someone thought to station one at each important position. The codetalkers concocted a goofy, personal version of our language. Strange as it seems, the enemy was the Japanese. They never could figure out what kind of code the Americans were using. It wasn’t a real code; just mixed-up Navaho.”

“I don’t see how that explains that ship outside.”

“The alien web. Some codetalkers must have hit on the right phrasing. Momentarily and accidentally, but enough to access something in the web. Or maybe,” he added, his voice dropping, “Great-grandfather Laughter decided to try and make use of his sandpainting knowledge, and this ship ran into some real hatathli magic which yanked it right out of the Pacific and into…”

“Strange seas and shores,” Moody finished for him, “until our friend Gaggii started playing with the web. Now they’re back home—sort of. Wish I spoke Japanese.”

“It can’t have been deliberate on his part,” Ooljee observed. “He is just stumbling around in search of his own ends.”

Moody eyed his partner. “You’re gonna have to use the template again, ask the web where he is.”

The sergeant was dubious. “I’d rather not. Each time we access I get the feeling I am going to do something wrong, or that Gaggii will finally have figured out how to insert a

safeguard to cover his tracks and we will all end up like the men on that ship. Or the building we are in will materialize someplace else, or maybe the state of Arizona. I do not want to have to wait on someone to ‘accidentally’ bring us back a hundred years from now.”

It was an image impossible to avoid: the whole state, with all its rivers and cities and mountains and people, suddenly extracted from reality as neatly as a child would cut out a piece of map. And why just Arizona? Moody thought. Why not all of North America, or if Gaggii wasn’t careful with his parameters, the entire planet? Earth shunted to an obscure comer of an alien database, just another insignificant byte of data in a web large enough to include…

What? How vast was this web they’d stumbled upon?

Maybe that’s all it was. Just a big database devised by whoever they were. He could feel himself beginning to lose it, and Vemon Moody, Detective First, TPD, never lost it. But the scale, the immensity, the apocalyptic indifference of it all, was starting to get to him.

He could see it clearly: galaxies as directories, subdirectories of individual solar systems. Within one subdirectory, little files. One of a place called Earth, or however it was labeled. Tiny subfiles for plants and animals and human beings. Subfile for individuals: Vemon Moody, Paul Ooljee, Samantha Grayhills, Yistin Gaggii. Infinitesimally minuscule bytes easily accessed by anyone who knew how to use the web. Garbage files.

What was Gaggii after? Surely not something as inconsequential as a means for protecting or enriching himself? No, Gaggii would want to know how to run the subfile labeled “mankind.” Or perhaps his vision was grander. Perhaps he hoped to discover how to access an entire file. Press enter here and shift the planet a little nearer the sun (maybe Gaggii was easily chilled). Or move it next to another sun, for a change of pace. Gravity, the speed of light: suddenly these little constants no longer meant anything. Not when you could access the web and braid yourself a custom Julia pattern here, a Mandlebrot there, and shift yourself into the subdirectory coded Alpha Centauri.

Moody shivered. How could you go on, with the foundations of your reality become as insubstantial as gossamer? Time, space, speed: meaningless. Qualitatively irrelevant. Who punched in the entries up there? God? The aliens? Navaho Holy People with unpronounceable names?

Pain flicked across his face. He blinked at a worried-looking Samantha Grayhills. It took him a moment to realize he’d been slapped. Ooljee stood nearby, equally concerned.

“You were laughing,” she said seriously, “and we couldn’t get you to stop. I’m sorry I had to hit you.”

“I wouldn’t do it,” said Ooljee. “Thought you might react instinctively and flatten me. What were you thinking about that made you do that?”

Moody hesitated, finally announced brusquely, “Nothing. Nothing important.

“What we have to do now is concentrate on what we can understand. Because if you look at this thing too hard, you lose your focus real quick. Let’s just work on Yistin Gaggii. He’s a murderer and we’re going to take him into custody. That’s all we need to worry about.”

“I’ve been thinking.” Both men turned on Grayhills. She didn’t back down under their stares. “If he’s at the center of everything that’s been happening, then he also might be at the center of this impossible storm. Pinpoint the nexus of the low-pressure system and we might find him there. If it’s over Vegas or Bullhead City then we can try something else, but if it’s as close to here as the National Weather Service suggested…”

“Give ’em a call,” snapped Moody.

She nodded, resumed her seat at the console. “I’m on it.”

Ooljee whispered to his partner while they waited. “I know what your problem is, my friend. You think too much. Especially for a cop.”

“What if the people who built this web left their own safeguards behind? What if Gaggii accidentally stumbles into one of them? You think it’s gonna deal with him selectively?” He smiled crookedly. “Try ‘not’ thinking about thinking about that for a while.”

“Nothing is intrinsically good or evil,” the sergeant told him. “It is all in how you use it.”

“That really reassures me,” Moody replied sarcastically. “I’ll remember that when Arizona is sinking.in the middle of the Indian Ocean.”

“If such a safeguard exists, it may be clearly labeled.”

“You think that’d stop our boy Gaggii? He’s come too far to quit now. He’d try getting around it. No, we’ve got to get our hands on him before he can make any serious mistakes.”

“I do not think,” Ooljee said quietly, “that Yistin Gaggii wants to move the state of Arizona to the middle of the Indian Ocean.”

“Naw. He just wants to make himself President. Or Emperor of the planet.” The detective glanced down at his partner. “We’re gonna have to kill him to stop him. You know that, don’t you? Because of that damn unreal boat outside. If some hatathli codetalkers made that happen over a hundred years ago, it means you don’t need a monitor or spinner to access the web. All you need is the right words, the right phrasing. It means you can’t stop Gaggii by locking him up. You couldn’t put him in a hole deep enough to keep him from making mischief. So we have to kill him.” Ooljee waited a moment before replying, but not for the reason Moody thought. “I think you are right, but that does not solve the problem.”

“How so?”

“What about me? I know the chant. I know the sandpainting.”

Moody eyed him sharply. “What about you, Paul? You tell me.”

“I have a fine woman who loves me. I have two wonderful children. I have a job that I like in a place that I like. I have fulfillment. I do not want to be emperor of anything. More importantly, I want as little to do with this business as possible. That which grants power can also take it away. Let specialists who can watch over one another delve into its depths. Let them stumble across any safeguards that may have been left floating in its innards.

“I am no hatathli. If we destroy the remaining images of the sandpainting it will be a long time before anyone stumbles across its secret again. Perhaps never.”

“Never.” Moody nodded, pleased. “That sounds like a decent length of time. Never, yeah.” The terrifying, indifferent emptiness of the universe receded a little, bearing some of the fear he felt with it.

“Don’t you wonder?” Ooljee asked him. “If the codetalkers are responsible for what happened to that ship, don’t you wonder what else might be floating around in the web?”

“Make you a deal,” the detective said curtly. “I won’t think so much if you won’t wonder so much.”

Grayhills had information. “The center of the low is only forty-five miles north of here. South of the gap at Cedar Ridge, somewhere between the highway and Marble Canyon.” She looked back up at them. “It’s still fixed, not moving.”

“Real close.” Ooljee checked his gun. “He did not have to come into town to get what he wanted. Let’s go. We have a killer to apprehend and a storm to stop. Among other things.”

The two men exchanged grim grins.