Chapter #40Smashing Vulcan by: Seuzz   You've got it all now. The body of Julian Dey. His memories as well as those of Jameson Hyde-White. Complete control to Project Vulcan. If you filled the husks of Frank and Joe with your P3, you could pick up right where Dey left off, with yourself playing Dey's part. You can almost hear Dey and Hyde-White whispering in your skull, tempting you to join them. A tripartite personality. You'd no longer even have to perform that tedious mind wipe to obscure Hyde-White's contribution. For though you'd be filling Frank and Joe with your P3 rather than theirs, you feel sure there would be no treachery like what Dey had feared.
Wouldn't there be? Frank and Joe are awfully strong. If you were inside Frank's body, or Joe's, and left some kind of doppelganger behind to run Vulcan while you--
While you played their part, and infiltrated the Stellae.
While you played the very dangerous game of trying to fool that old man in Olympia, and Hal Swann, and Rick Bredon--
You could do, couldn't you? Julian Dey felt he could, and you've got all his advantages. You even used them to bluff and fool the Dey-possessed Joe.
Three minds writhe inside yours ...
* * * * *
In the end, it's probably your own native common sense that turns aside these power-trip fantasies.
Or maybe it's your affection for Verity and your brother. Verity would catch on instantly. If you made Dey's ambitions your own, you'd have to leave her where she is now: disassembled. And you might have to do something to your brother as well.
In that light, it's not hard to toss those obscene dreams aside. You shouldn't even think about taking down Vulcan and Dark Stars and Fane. That's for the Stellae to do.
So the thing to do is somehow get Frank and Joe repaired. It'll be ticklish; they're not likely to be happy when a guy who looks like Julian Dey revives them and tries explaining what was going on. But it shouldn't be too awful. You will have rescued them, after all. It's not like you were the guy who--
Something tickles in the back of your head.
It's Jameson Hyde-White. His P3 is inside your head, and he's laughing at you.
You steady yourself against the wall as your knees buckle. You still have that old black spot, the one that hides three months of your life during your senior year at Westside. But Hyde-White remembers for you.
Oh yes. He remembers the goofy kid his minions caught. The goofy kid who had been working with Steve Patterson, making masks of classmates and impersonating them. The goofy kid who--
You close your eyes and groan hard.
The goofy kid who caught and trapped Frank and Joe Durras, and more or less handed them over to Fane.
The goofy kid whom Hyde-White offered a job, and who turned it down, and so got returned to Saratoga Falls with his memory erased.
The goofy kid whose refusal had so enraged and disappointed the professor that Hyde-White had tied him into an elaborate ruse, for no other reason than the spiteful pleasure of imagining the kid twisting in confusion and terror should the Stellae ever discover him.
You tremble. No, best not to revive Frank and Joe right away. Best to take them back to the Stellae, even in this partially disassembled state, and let the Stellae put them back together, and sit on them until Frank, at least, cools off.
Which would probably be around about the bicentennial of your death of old age. The Frank you met at Blackwell's, who threatened to bash your skull in while hanging you upside down— He was only play-acting the threats, to lend credence to his and Joe's pretended escape. The real Frank wouldn't even give you a chance to beg for mercy, you suspect.
* * * * *
It's the middle of the night, but you've got lots to do.
You prop the vault door open--since you'd otherwise have no way of getting it open again--then phone the medical lab and having them send a gurney and sheet to the elevator bank that leads down to this apartment. You fetch it, pile the real Julian Dey onto it, and take him back upstairs to the main operating chamber. You make sure you're alone, which means you have to run the machinery by yourself, but the system is mostly automated, so that's not hard. You remove the ancient anima band from Dey's forehead--destroying the hold that the ghost of Hyde-White had on him--and use the drill to remove Dey's own P3. That will keep his body alive but comatose until someone can figure out what to do with him. You call the lab again and order them to send down a carrying pod--one of the specialized packing crates specially designed for transporting humans and human simulacra. After it arrives, you seal Dey into it.
You need to leave a copy of Dey behind, to run things in your absence and to be a plausible "number two" now that you are having to play at "number one." A clone is docile and obedient toward those with whom they share P2, so you use the machinery to extract some of your own. From the operating chamber's control room you take your silvery P2 disc and Dey's golden P3 disc and return to his private apartments.
In the duplicating chamber you replace the disc that has Dey's P2 with the disc that has your own. You disrobe and step into the cylinder so it can copy the most recent form and memories associated with Dey's P1; it will also pick up the mentalia associated with your P3, so the clone will have your personality beneath Dey's. You program the machine to make a new clone, and watch as a raw substratum drops into the cylinder and the lasers begin to play over it. Then, while your new deputy is being prepped, you call upstairs for two more carrying pods to be sent to the elevator. Into one of them you pack the P3 you extracted from Dey; the two discs of P3 the vault's lock extracted from Frank and Joe; and the three discs of his P3 that he'd been keeping in the vault. So there's Julian Dey's soul, divided into six pieces.
You also pack the Libra Personae: the real book, not the fake one made to be destroyed in a fire.
You're just straightening up from sealing Frank and Joe's comatose bodies into the two pods when you feel a touch at your shoulder. You yelp and spin. Julian Dey grins weakly at you.
"Jesus!" you gasp. "For a moment, when I saw you, I thought--"
"Same here," he says. He nods at the pods. "So who are you going to take them to?"
"I haven't decided. Swann is crazy, but he's pretty decent. Rick-- Oh God, I don't know what he might do to me."
"What about Verity? She's in about four different pieces."
"We'll pack her up too." You regard the pods. "Okay, help me haul Frank and Joe upstairs. While I get Verity packed, you get some goons to help you carry them and Dey out to a truck. We'll put Verity on it too, ship 'em all back to the States for the Stellae to deal with."
"What about Frank and Joe's P3? It's at the country house."
"I hadn't forgot. I'll pick it up separately and meet the truck at the airfield. Have the Gulfstream fueled up and ready to leave as soon as I arrive."
"Settling into our assumed persona, it sounds like," he grins. "Got it, boss. And me?"
You suck in a hard breath. "Keep things running here, but for God's sake don't do anything until you hear back from me. No operations, no plotting, no nothing."
"What about all those lonely girls in the nightclubs?"
"Oh, them you can screw till your dick falls off."
* * * * *
It's the darkest and clammiest part of the morning when you finally drive away from the Vulcan headquarters in Dey's BMW sports coupe. Were you only there for a few hours? It feels like several lifetimes. In a sense, it was.
The streets are mostly empty and it doesn't take you long to get into the suburbs and then into those parts that are still green and leafy and unspoiled. Here is where Dey has his country house. It was Hyde-White's originally, and it was the house where he conducted his interview with you and Steve. He still murmurs his disappointment in your skull: Look at how you've despoiled my work, wrecked it utterly in the space of half a night. Think what we could have accomplished if you had worked with me!
The house is dark and you let yourself in at a side entrance. You open the secret door in the sitting room and descend to the basement. It seemed the safest place to keep Frank and Joe's P3 discs: in your personal possession, should they ever prove useful--
But that was Dey's reasoning, not yours. You shake your head clear.
--in Dey's personal possession, against the day he ever found a use for them, but far away from any machines that might insert them into dangerous bodies. The platters carrying their P3 are very big and heavy, but easy enough to carry. You take a last look around the work space--so many memories that fill you with pride and horror in almost equal measure--and go back upstairs. You fumble at the panel, closing it.
Behind you, a light comes on. "It's only me, Tomlinson" you start to say as you look around.
But it's not Tomlinson. Your marrow freezes when you see who it is.
Caught. Caught with no chance to explain or convince. Caught in the guise of a mortal enemy, carrying the mortal remains of two of his colleagues. Caught with no help, if help against him were even a possibility.
Rick Bredon sits in an easy chair: expressionless, motionless, intensely watchful. He grips the handle of that very scary knife.
"I'm not Tomlinson," he says in a neutral tone. "Wanna tell me who you're not?"  You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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