Episode Eight: Not In Our Stars, But In Ourselves
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Not
In Our Stars, But In Ourselves
(continued)
1:30 a.m., April 14
Every time Walker tried to sleep, thoughts of the newspapers, of what they’d be saying about him, kept him awake. In the lightless cell, there was nothing to do but cringe inwardly, try to think of an answer, and hear the occasional telephone ring coming through the half-open door to the sheriff’s office.
“Deputy?” The voice was so low, he could barely make it out. “Frank Ford, military intelligence. Here about Walker.” The deputy said something in response. “ID? Of course.”
Beyond the doorway, Walker heard an angry, serpentine hiss and froze. The hissing stopped, followed by a mocking laugh from Ford as he stepped into the unlit cellblock. Walker drew in a deep breath and stayed very still as Ford’s shadowy figure stopped by the bars of the cell. As he’d expected, there was another hiss; he hoped he could outlast whatever the gas was.
After maybe 30 seconds, Ford laughed again and jangled keys at the cell door. As he stepped into the cell, Walker let out his breath, inhaled again, and waited. Ford, humming softly, drew within arm’s reach; Walker jumped up, driving his fist into the man’s gut with all the fury of the past twenty-four hours behind it.
“What the hell?” Ford snarled as Walker slammed him into the bars. “Goddamn Mason!” Walker kept hitting, them something hard smashed into his skull and he staggered back. Ford hit Walker again, making his head spin, but Walker somehow blocked the next blow and swung a punch of his own. Ford cursed, but then he had Walker pinned against the wall, his arm crushing down on Walker’s throat. Walker clawed at the man’s face without effect, then remembered a trick from his past, thrust a finger into Ford’s nose and pulled. Ford screamed and jerked back as the side of his nose tore, then Walker was on him, pounding him into unconsciousness.
Walker ran out of the cell, into the office and saw the balding deputy sitting at the old, coffee-stained desk with a polite, glassy-eyed smile on his face. “Deputy? You okay?” No response.
Like me at Sykes’ house. And then Ford wakes him up and he finds me—dead? Gone?But why?
He went back to his cell, turning on the lights as he did. Ford sprawled out on the floor, a military-issue automatic lying by the wall. Must have been what he slugged me with. Ford was a tall, unfamiliar brunette with crew-cut hair. Kneeling down, Walker searched his pockets, turning up a wallet confirming his ID, some kind of gas gun strapped to the man’s wrist. Nothing else.
Walker went back to the office to wake the deputy, then paused. Would the man listen to an accused murderer and nigger-lover long enough to understand the evidence?
What if Ford makes up another lie about me? Who’s this cop going to believe?I’d better call Eisenstein first.
Except ...if Ford’s really military intelligence, how far does this go? Maybe that’s why she believed me against all the evidence: She’s in on it.
He stared at the deputy, wondering how long he had to figure it out before the man woke. And then, on the spike where they stuck phone messages, he saw a scribbled note with his name.
Walker yanked it off the spike, saw the call had come in during the afternoon, from Eisenstein. Guess nobody thought it worthwhile to tell me. The illegible scrawl was only a half-dozen words.
What do you know about Chernobog?
Forty minutes later, he plodded up a wide lane of mud-covered asphalt, praying to God that neither gators nor cottonmouths emerged from the nearby mangroves.
He’d tried calling Eisenstein, but she’d been out, and he couldn’t risk leaving his name, not when he didn’t know who else to trust. So he’d handcuffed and gagged Ford and left him on a bed in the cell before taking a police car off to Chernobog.
It had been Canaveral’s first launchpad, built in a rush along the edge of a marsh. It turned out it was too close to the edge, and the soil could barely support the concrete base of the site, never mind a rocket. The Russians had bought the land, so they’d named it Chernobog for some sort of bogeyman from the mother country.
Walker had parked the car far enough back nobody would hear him coming, and now he approached the half-submerged concrete platform. A part of him wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake. Maybe the deputy would have listened. But Jesus, if he didn’t, if I wound up back in that cell ... He climbed up onto the concrete, listening, looking—there! A sliver of light which proved to be the edge of a metal trap door.
Walker clutched the police automatic he held and moved closer, heard the sound of flesh striking flesh and a gasp of pain, but he hesitated.
Never saw combat when I was in the Army. And before tonight, I hadn’t been in a fight since Sheriff Colby told me no Walker in history ever amounted to shit.But it’s too late to go back. If the deputy’s woken, it’ll look like I busted jail somehow…
Cursing mentally, Walker grabbed the edge of the trap door, lifted it and jumped down onto the stairs below.“What?” A man he’d never seen, clad in mud-smeared overalls and leather gloves, looked up at him in surprise. Next to him, Eisenstein was shackled to a metal pole, stripped to the waist, and badly bruised; her nose looked broken. The rest of the room was occupied by a paper-piled table, a blackboard covered with chalk equations, a couple of machines and what looked like a miniature generator. “Walker? How the hell did you get here?”
“I have the gun, I get to ask the questions.” He wanted to just shoot and plug the bastard, but that would be stupid. “Are you Mason?” The man nodded. “What the hell is this about? Why did you frame me for a—”
“Because Todd ate the potato salad.” The man didn’t seem terribly concerned by Walker’s gun. “We’d planned to use him, but Peabody sent you instead. Fortunately, the letter just called Todd ‘honey-darling’ or whatever it was, so—”
“Jesus.” Walker’s finger tightened on the trigger as he descended the stairs. “Just because I had time that evening to—why would military intelligence do that?”
“Not your military,” Eisenstein’s voice sounded odd, probably because of her nose. “He is a traitor, a member of the October Guard—”
Mason spat something in Russian and gave Eisenstein a backhanded slap, then turned back to Walker. “Ford and the deputy were supposed to find you hanging in your cell by now,” he said. “I’m beginning to think that would have been a waste.”
“Meaning?” Walker glanced around, but there was no phone he could use. “And uncuff Eisenstein while you explain.”
“Hear my explanation first.” There was no way Walker could miss from six feet away, but the man still didn’t look worried. “Tomorrow morning, Brezhnev is going to die—”
“Bull!” Walker almost laughed. “Security is so tight, nobody could—”
“We can. And clues will lead me here to Chernobog, where paperwork will show you were responsible.” Walker’s mouth moved, but surprised muted his speech. “Not alone, of course, you were working for a CIA faction behind the assassination. With you being a murderer and a suicide, we can easily divert suspicion from any of other agents.”
“Only I didn’t kill myself. “
“And you somehow found our base.” Mason nodded, almost approving. “Some of us were very displeased that we had to use you as a red herring—so to speak. We’ve had you in our sights for some time: You’re smart, ambitious—and we respect ambition.
The KGB—the real one, not the capitalist lapdogs Colonel Eisenstein works for—will need agents here more than ever after the World Defense Alliance collapses. L.G. Walker’s name may be mud, but we can give you a new name, a new face—and then the sky’s the limit. You want authority? Money? Respect? Sign on with us and you’ll have it all.”
“You’re insane,” Eisenstein said softly. “Russia cannot survive another invasion, you know this.”
“We survived Hitler,” Mason said. “We survived Napoleon. The West will collapse long before we do, and then this planet is ours.” He reached out his right hand toward Walker. “Well, ‘Elegy?’ Want to join the winning team?”
Without saying a word, Walker fired into Mason’s stomach.
Mason stood there, smiling, and raised his right hand. The bullet was stuck to his palm.
Something snapped in Walker and he hurled the gun away, leaping on Mason, and fitting two hands around his throat as the man’s back struck the stone floor.
A swing of Mason’s right arm sent him flying back into the table, toppling papers to the floor. Mason got to his feet, smiling. “You really should have taken the deal, Walker. Now I’ll just crush your skull and toss you in the swamp.”
He raced at Walker, who rolled away as the impossible hand came down, gouging concrete out of the floor. Walker scrambled to his feet, saw the glint of steel where the skin and leather had been scraped away and ducked behind the stairs as the next karate chop—Or is it a judo chop? I can’t remember. —dented the metal steps. “Won’t it be hard to explain all this damage, Mason?”
“After the tragedy this morning, people will be too shaken to worry about such details.” Walker backed away, up against the blackboard, searching for a weapon; all he could think of was to snatch up an eraser and hurl it at Mason’s face. “Pathetic. You’re like a Ukranian peasant, with muck permanently on your feet!”
“Been hearing that my whole life, Ivan!” He leapt away as the next punch caved in the blackboard. Could I get him to hit the generator, no, he’s not that dumb, but there’s got to be— “And you know what? Scarf! Your mother’s scarf!”
“Is that slang back in the Kentucky pigtown you come from?” Mason closed in, clenching his fist, as Walker backed against the pole holding Eisenstein. “Goodbye, Mr.—”
Walker swung up his leg, driving the toe of his mud-smeared leather shoe into Mason’s crotch with every ounce of strength, then lunging forward, grabbing the gasping man by his coat collar and swinging him around, up against the post.
Next second, Eisenstein looped the chain on her wrists around his throat and yanked back.
With a horrified croak, Mason’s robot arm thrust up, but Walker was on it, dragging it down. Mason swung him into the wall, but Walker hung on, hung on as he hit the wall again, and despite the impact, began to laugh. “Too bad, Ivan, you have gotten metal balls to go with the hand?”
Another, desperate slam made stars flicker in Walker’s vision—and then Mason went limp, his hand relaxed and Walker fell to the floor. Eisenstein didn’t let up. “You can—let go—”
“Are you crazy? Check his pulse, you goddamn idiot!”
“Oh ... right.” He reached for the right hand, realized that a metal arm wouldn’t have a pulse, and reached for the other. Catching sight of Mason’s face, he didn’t think there was much chance he was breathing, but… “No pulse. He’s good. Keys?”
“Coat pocket.”
“And his arm?” He began searching as Eisenstein let Mason slump to the floor. He suddenly realized he’d strapped the gas gun onto his wrist but he’d been too angry to think of it.
“Ripped off by the Vodyanoi. Replaced with a robot limb.” Eisenstein managed a smile. “You saved my life, Elegy Walker. Like a knight of the Round Table—” He froze with his fingers on the keys, knowing his face was turning scarlet. “Is Lancelot Galahad Walker so horrible a name?”
“Don’t know where my mother got the idea from, but where I grew up, she might as well have stamped ‘sissy’ on the birth certificate.” He fished the keys out and unlocked her. “How the hell did you know?”
“I turned up lots of information hunting the traitors.” Massaging her wrists, she went over to what he realized was her uniform jacket in the corner. “That is the real reason I am here in the goddamn heat.”
“And you’re a colonel? I didn’t think Russia had women colonels.”
“It was not easy, even for a war hero.” She buttoned up her shirt, pulled out her pipe, lighter and tobacco pouch and started for the stairs. “It’s why I like you, we both know what it takes to climb above our ‘station.’ You have a car?”
“It’s a ways to walk, but yes. And it’s a police car, we can call someone on the radio.”
“Good.” She walked over to the machines, turned them off and removed a couple of parts. “These will cause one of the experimental gravity generators to reverse itself at liftoff: Everything within a mile radius, including the deputy premier and the other watchers, will be hurled a thousand feet in the air, for a second or two then—”
“I get it.” Yeah, no problem getting through security that way. “What about Ford and—”
“One call and I can have most of them arrested.” She shook her head. “I delayed too long, hoping to take all their agents in one swoop, not knowing they were watching me, too. So, why didn’t you accept his offer?”
“Honest to God, I’m not sure.” He lifted up the trapdoor and let her out. “I guess…I never really thought about it before, but…he was wrong, I don’t want respect. I want to deserve respect. And it’s not the same.” And I ever see Sheriff Colby again, it ain’t gonna be with some goddamn fake face he won’t recognize. He’s gonna know he was wrong about me. They all are!
“Never do anything you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of the New York Times. ” She stroked her pipe but didn’t fill it. “You realize your work here may never be acknowledged? My government would prefer that the October Guard be dealt with quietly.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He looked up at the moon, brushing the tops of the mangroves. When Shepard I lands on the moon, it’s going to be because of me and Eisenstein. That’s a pretty fine thing to be able to say. Even if no-one ever knows.
As they walked away from Chernobog, L.G. Walker smiled.
Applied Science 8: Not In Our
Stars, But In Ourselves
by Fraser Sherman 1 2