Against Gravity

"What the fuck is that?" asked Buddy, bemused.

"Ssh."

"Who dares summon the sleeper in the dark, that they may seek knowledge?" The voice was a deep baritone, the face itself dark red with wide, staring eyes and a half-crazed grin filled with sharpened teeth.

"I seek knowledge," Kendrick replied laconically.

The demonic eyes grew wide and round, before sliding from one side to the other, as if checking whether anyone was eavesdropping. "Are you prepared to pay the price, mortal?"

"Yes," said Kendrick, in a resigned tone. They'd redesigned the front end, and although it looked slicker it was taking almost twice as long for him to get where he wanted to be than he remembered from previous visits.

Still, it could have been worse. The kind of information he was after wasn't something you could get out of any public newsfeeds. For this kind of thing, you needed hackers. "I'm looking specifically for information on the Maze. I need a schematic of the whole thing, downloadable to this eepsheet."

The face wiggled its eyebrows. Somewhere out there, maybe in Kazakhstan – which was functionally an anarchist state – was a real live computer geek with a micro-lens mapping the movements of his face to this devil animation. Probably not even speaking English, since some top-end translation software was virtually undetectable. "Such schematics are available publicly," the devil pointed out.

"Not the ones I'm looking for. Check the records for the World Court proceedings, charges of genocide, accused President Wilber and General Anton Sieracki, 2090.1 don't have the exact date of the investigation to hand, but there was a question of missing schematics concerning to the Maze, how it was built, who contracted it."

Of course, Kendrick had found his way to such schematics before during his lengthy researches into Draeger's background. They weren't legally admissible as evidence since they came only from highly illegal sources.

Which, of course, didn't mean they couldn't be found, so long as you knew who to ask and were willing to pay the price. The fact that the schematics had disappeared from every official database, server and Washington office where investigators might have reasonably expected to find them, along with untold terabytes of information and incriminating data, had done nothing except convince Kendrick that someone had set out to deliberately destroy evidence of a direct, explicit co

"Mm-hmm" said the face after a short pause. " Veerry interesting. You accessed this information once before, yes? 12 March 2093."

"Yes, but I don't have access to it any more. I deleted it."

"Very wise. Also, I note your current position near the border of the former United States, moving approximately south-east. Flying in the direction of Venezuela, perhaps?"

Shit. "Please don't spread that around," Kendrick said earnestly. He hadn't expected this.

"Of course not. Well, not unless someone pays us to know where you are right now." The face gri

The face was replaced by a new animation of a taloned hand shaking a dented tin can. Kendrick pointed Buddy's wand at the eepsheet and watched as a substantial amount of money transferred itself to the hacker's account.

A look of alarm spread across Buddy's face. "Christ, Kendrick, that's a lot of money. I'm not rich-"

"If you're right about the Archimedes, you won't need the money much longer, will you?"

Buddy blushed red. "Yeah, true."

"Look, once we're in LA I can arrange a fund transfer from my account if you like-"

"That won't be necessary."

Kendrick looked back down at the eepsheet. The taloned hand had gone and had been replaced by a list of files. Most of them were useless, the same publicly available schematics he'd seen before. But he persisted, delving deeper, finally finding what he wanted: rooms and corridors that didn't exist in other schematics, laid out in a three-dimensional array that he could study from any angle. He zoomed the POV outwards until he saw tu

"Look at this," he said, holding up the eepsheet.

Buddy squinted at it. "You blew all my money on this?"

"Yeah, and for a good reason. There are tu

Buddy let out a long, descending sigh. "You're going to get me killed, I absolutely know it, and for some reason I'm still going to follow you in there."

Kendrick gri

Kendrick half-slept as Buddy simultaneously piloted the craft and fired out messages via the helicopter's ancient gridnode. Kendrick woke when the constant drone of the rotor blades above his head changed subtly. He looked down with sleepy eyes and saw a crossroads: two intersecting highways cut through an infinity of scrubby desert. As he looked more closely, he saw a truck kicking up sand and dust as it approached the intersection. Buddy piloted the 'copter down, landing it close to where the two roads met.

Caroline was awake now. They helped her out and she swayed a little as she tried to stand, choking on the thick dust kicked up by the rotor blades still turning slowly above their heads. The truck had pulled up a few metres away from them. A tall man with shaggy blond hair and a neatly trimmed beard climbed out. Kendrick ransacked his memories, trying to remember where he'd seen him before.

Samuel Veliz, he remembered, the memory rushing back Veliz had arrived in Ward Seventeen only just before the liberation and so had never made it down to the killing levels. Although Kendrick had never spoken directly with the man before, he remembered that Veliz had given evidence against Maze guards during the subsequent trials.

"Is that the lady?" Veliz strode forward. Caroline peered at him awkwardly, as though she wasn't sure what was going on. Kendrick kept an arm around her shoulders, more to support her than anything else.

"Kendrick, I'm sorry," she murmured. Kendrick shook his head, as if to say It doesn't matter. Together, he and Veliz helped her into the rear of the truck where a cot had been arranged for her.

"Where are you taking her?" Kendrick asked Veliz.

"Frisco. Then offshore to…" Veliz glanced over at Buddy, who nodded that it was okay. "Offshore to the launch ship. They've got facilities there that don't necessarily involve UN nanoware restrictions. Long as you don't tell nobody," he added, gri

"I won't," Kendrick promised sincerely.

Veliz looked at him curiously. "So how come you two guys ain't heading there right now?"

Buddy stepped forward. "We've got some things to take care of first. When you see Sabak, tell him I'll be there a little later than expected."

"Okay, but there isn't much time left," Veliz warned. "When we go, we go."

"I know that," Buddy replied, casting a significant glance in Kendrick's direction. "We'll head for LA first, if there's time. But not just yet."

Over the next several hours they stopped twice again, dropping into small, private airstrips for refuelling as they continued south. The landscape changed beneath them, becoming rougher, wilder, before all visible signs of civilization disappeared beneath a verdant jungle canopy. At one point they saw a ruined highway passing through the jungle from horizon to horizon, cutting the green world into two halves.

With its camouflage on, the helicopter appeared from below as just a pale blue outline that would darken as the day moved on to dusk. From only a few dozen metres away, you could barely hear the sound of the rotors. Although it looked ready for a scrapyard, hidden under its scarred and dented interior lurked some pretty state-of-the-art technology. In fact, it had been optimized for smuggling. Of course, good-quality thermal-imaging equipment could penetrate its disguise in a second, but some kind of concealment was better than nothing.