Lawrence Watt-Evans - Nightside City

"I'm also getting some answers," I said.

"Not anymore. You fire that, and I'll drop you. You point it at me, and I'll drop you. I'll be acting in defense of myself and the Institute's property if I shoot you; if you fire, you're committing murder. Now, you get out of here peacefully and leave the Institute alone, and we'll forget all about this."

"I'm not forgetting about anything," I said. I put on my sincere approach. "Look, I need some answers from you people, and the gun's just the fastest way I could think of to pry them loose. Could we put away the hardware and just talk?"

"We've got nothing to talk about," he said, and he said it contemptuously. I didn't like that.

"I think we do," I said harshly. "Unless you want everything I know about the plans you and Nakada have for stopping the planet's rotation to be slapped onto every net in the city."

His gun wavered slightly, and I didn't think it was a software check.

"Want to put away the armament?" I asked again.

"No," he said, tightening up again. "If you put this on the nets, we'll ruin you."

"So what?" I said. "What the hell have I got to lose? If you know who I am, check out where and how I live, and how I got there, and what the hell, break into my financial records and take a look at those. You can't do anything to me that I can't do one hell of a lot worse to you. Now, are we going to talk?"

He hesitated, and the gun lowered slightly. "Not now. I need to think about this, talk it over with the others."

"All right," I said. "I can wait."

"I don't know how long it will take," he said.

"I'm in no hurry." I smiled at him.

"Listen," he said. "I can't leave you loose in the Institute, with that gun and your present attitude. Get out of here, go back to where you came from, and we'll call you, within… within twenty-four hours. If we don't, you go ahead and put whatever you want on the nets."

I considered that, and I didn't much like it. Anything could happen in twenty-four hours. They could fire off the big one and make all my questions moot. They could all be off-planet in an hour.

But it didn't look as if I was going to get him to tell me anything right there, and somebody might have called the cops already, or put something in the air that would take me right out, not to mention that he was quite right about what would happen if any triggers got pulled. I figured I could still dicker a little, but I couldn't fight.

"Two hours," I said. "And nobody leaves the city."

He glanced at the woman. "All right, two hours."

I nodded and backed out toward the street, with the HG-2 easy in my hand. "Nobody leaves the city," I repeated.

He nodded. "Nobody leaves."

I nodded back, and then I was out in the corridor; I turned and struggled not to run as I hurried to the door, feeling very, very exposed.

It wasn't a run, but it wasn't all that dignified, either. All the same, I got out before any cops or security machines got me, and that was the important part. I remembered to stop at the door and turn off the Sony-Remington and shove it back in its holster; then I stepped out of the shadows into the red glow of the night sky, and I called a cab.

BY THE TIME THE CAB LIFTED I WAS HAVING SECON Dthoughts. I couldn't flag exactly where I'd screwed up, but I knew I had somewhere along the line. I didn't have enough control. I'd given Doc Lee and whoever else was involved two hours to come up with something, and that was at least an hour and fifty-five minutes too long.

But I didn't see what else I could have done. I hadn't had any time to waste, because the charges might already have been set, despite what Nakada said. I'd had to get into the Ipsy fast, and I hadn't seen any other way than with the gun. If I'd tried going in on wire I'd have hit high security-wouldn't I?

Maybe not, but I'd thought I would. I hadn't stopped to see if I was right, and maybe I should have.

Of course, maybe all the work was being done in human skulls and other closed systems, in which case I wouldn't have found anything even if I had gone in on wire.

Going in in person had seemed the only way. Using the gun to get answers had seemed the best way. Nobody had ever called my bluff quite so completely before.

That made me wonder about this Doc Lee. I wasn't sure if I'd ever heard of him or not; he might have been on a couple of public affairs feeds, but I couldn't swear to it. Just who the hell was he? Was this idea of stopping the planet's rotation his? What was his position at the Ipsy?

I didn't know, and I knew that I should. I would have used the cab's terminal to see what I could get on him if I had had anything left on my card besides last-line bank credit.

Instead I forced myself to stop worrying about that particular detail for a moment while I looked around.

The Trap was big and bright and a million vivid colors out the cab's window on the right, the burbs mostly low and in dim shades of gray on the left. A line of advertisers squealed past overhead, but didn't target me; a spy-eye looked in, then turned away, obviously after someone else. The city was going about its business, just as it always had, and except for a handful, everybody in Nightside City was still expecting the city to die a slow, steady death with encroaching dawn.

I wasn't sure whether it was going to die slowly, or live, or die a fast and horrible death that would take me with it.

Worse, I wasn't sure whether I'd live to see whatever happened. If Lee was a hotshot at the Ipsy he might very well have some way of stopping my files from hitting the nets, even from the ITEOD banks. If he did, he'd have no reason to keep me alive, and although I'd never heard of Paulie Orchid doing anything as big-time as a permanent murder, I didn't think the little bastard would balk if Lee sent him to take me out. After all, Orchid was doing a lot of things now that I'd never have expected.

And even if Orchid did balk, there was the other muscle, the big guy-Rigmus, or whoever he was.

Suddenly I was scared as hell. I had screwed this one up bad, worse than when I let that welsher go.

Of course, it might all work out, I told myself. They might come through and tell me their whole plan, and it might be good and clean, and I might just settle down peacefully. Or it might be a disaster about to happen, and I might accept a little money to keep my mouth shut, enough to get off-planet, and then I might blow the horn on them anyway once I was clear-I didn't mind committing either blackmail or betrayal when the victims were planning mass murder.

But I was scared all the same that I had screwed up badly, and that I was going to pay for it.

I was right, too, but I didn't find that out right away.

The cab dropped me at my door, and I stepped out into the wind and looked around, just in case.

It looked clear. I didn't have anything with me that would scan much outside the visible, but it looked clear. The wind stung my eyes, and I blinked and opened the door.

Upstairs in my office I noticed that the window was still black, and I cleared it. If something came at me that way I wanted to see it-not that I expected any approach that obvious.

I also didn't mind looking out at the city again, seeing the flickering of the Trap and a swarm of meteors that drew golden clawmarks across the deep blue of the sky, hearing the hum of the traffic and the howl of the wind.

I got myself paté and crackers and a Coke III and I sat down at my desk and tried to think of what I could do with my two hours that could possibly be of use.

The obvious item was to run up a file on Doc Lee, so I touched keys.

His name was Mahendra Dhuc Lee, he was just over a hundred in Terran years, he'd been born on Prometheus, and he was assistant director of research in physical planetology, with a degree from Prometheus and a doctorate from Earth-I'd never heard of either university, so I won't name names. There was more, but it was dull as dirt; like most scientists, he'd never done anything but science and office politics, and either one is boring as hell to outsiders. He appeared to be good at both. Whether it was because he was good enough at both to offend people, or whether there was truth in it, I couldn't be sure, but there was a rumor that he'd been less than completely honest in some of his work-adjusting results to please backers, borrowing other people's work, the usual array of scientific misbehavior.