Inferno 2033 Book Two: Perdition Page 2

  One student ventured that his student loans weren’t charity. He would have to repay them, with interest.

  “As you would a loan for a house, or a car.” Brzinski stroked his chin with pretend thoughtfulness. “So an education is a product, and you pay for it like a product, is that it?”

  The student supposed it was.

  “In that case, like any product, it doesn’t really matter who pays for it, as long as the bill gets paid. The same goes for government services, I suppose. You pay your taxes, you receive your services.”

  Many students seemed to agree that was right.

  “But some pay more taxes than others. Some pay no taxes at all. And yet we all enjoy the benefits of what government has to offer, more or less equally. We drive the same roads, we drink the same water, we enjoy the same protections from terrorists and foreign aggressors. What an arrangement! Imagine a restaurant—let’s say a McDonald’s—where everyone gets the same Big Mac, fries, and a Coke, but each pays a different amount, according to some arcane formula based on birth, race, gender, income, genetic deformity, and the federal tax code!”

  He pointed. “Your Big Mac costs four dollars and fifty-nine cents. Yours costs three hundred dollars. Yours costs ten. And yours—because you don’t have a job and can’t get one because your mommy didn’t love you and somebody in some other country was mean to your great-great-great-granddaddy three hundred years ago—your two all-beef patties and special sauce on a sesame seed bun is free.”

  There were a few chuckles here and there, but mostly an uncomfortable silence. One student held up his hand. “But isn’t that the free enterprise system?”

  “No! That’s the ‘freeloader-prize’ system. The working men and women pay the bills. The freeloaders get the prizes.”

  At that moment, as she often did, Victoria turned round in her seat toward Sands and Carrie and mocked her father, screwing her face into a scowl and mouthing his words. Sands and Carrie were well practiced at keeping a stone face when Victoria went into one of her little performances, but when Sands saw the corner of Carrie’s mouth twitch, a single laugh burst out of him like a stifled hiccup.

  “You!” Brzinski thrust a finger straight at Sands. “Stand up.”

  Certain of an imminent dressing down, Sands got to his feet.

  “How are you paying your tuition?”

  “ROTC scholarship, sir.”

  “And how much is covered?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything. That should be adequate. Do you have to be special to earn that scholarship?”

  “Sir?”

  “Does it matter whether you are rich or poor, black or white, man or woman, Democrat or Republican? A descendent of the Saxe-Croburg-and-Gothas, perhaps? Is it open to anyone?”

  “Anyone willing to work, sir.”

  “That’s a novel idea. And who pays your tuition?”

  “The government, sir.”

  “I think you mean the taxpayer, but we’ll let that pass. And what do you have to do to repay this magnificent gift from your fellow citizens? Does it involve compound interest?”

  “No, sir. Four years active duty, after I graduate.”

  “Service! You repay it with service!” Brzinski swept his gaze over the other students. “That is how a debt is paid, ladies and gentlemen. Not by getting a job. Not by making Mommy and Daddy proud. Not even by repaying loans. You repay a debt—a true debt—with service. And the surest and proudest service you can undertake is military service—the commitment to lay down your life for your fellow citizens, if need be. One student—one, in this entire class—has truly committed to serve. No doubt many of you think he is a fool to sign away four years of his life, but after those four years he will be a free, sovereign individual, beholden to no one. I wonder how many of the rest of you—with your student loans, credit cards, and thirty-year mortgages—will be able to say the same?”

  Sands needed to hear no more. His decision was made. Basketball was out.

  After class, Brzinski asked him to come to his office. Again, Sands thought he was in trouble, but before he could get the apology out of his mouth, the Doctor handed him a slip of paper. “That’s my home address,” he said. “I’d like you to come tonight. Cocktails at six-thirty, dinner at seven. No need to wear the uniform, but a tie would be appreciated.”

  Sands had no other plans, but Brzinski hadn’t asked. He thanked him for the invitation and said he would be there.

  It was an awkward affair from the beginning. When asked what he would like to drink, Sands unthinkingly said “Corona,” just as if he had been in a bar. Brzinski didn’t blink, but he had to call to the kitchen to get it, and Sands only realized his mistake when he saw everyone else sipping on ice-clear concoctions in martini glasses.

  Although it was only a family dinner, it was quite formal, down to the uniformed maid who served it up, each course on a different plate. Dr. Brzinski sat at the head of a carved dining table, with Sands, as the guest of honor, at the opposite end. Victoria sat to Brzinski’s right, her strange, brooding brother Todd—who had graduated the year before—to his left. Brzinski’s wife—who the Doctor had introduced simply as “My wife”—sat at Sand’s elbow, seldom speaking and watching him with bird-like eyes.

  Brzinski conducted the dinner as if it were a symposium—introducing topics, soliciting opinions, offering counterarguments and pronouncements covering every-thing from the latest Supreme Court decision to the qual-ity of the veal. Todd engaged his father most vigorously, with a nervous edge to his voice and a look in his dark eyes that was at once angry and fearful. Victoria was unusually subdued, parrying her father’s forays only when she was directly addressed. Instead of the usual sardonic quips delivered with a spark in her eye, she affected boredom. Sands had never seen, or even imagined, Victoria embarrassed by anything, but he wondered if her exaggerated disinterest weren’t just a cover.

  After dinner, Sands was invited into Brzinski’s study, where the Doctor poured brandy and offered cigars. Sands took the brandy, but demurred on the smoke.

  Brzinski’s study was like his school office, only more so. Among the items that crammed the shelves and hung from the paneled walls were a Knights Templar shield and sword, a boar’s head, an Indian lance, a flintlock rifle, and a tricorn hat. On his cluttered desk was a crystal pyramid topped with an all-seeing eye, what appeared to be a loaded revolver, and a strange object like a ball of endless, interwoven triangles, which Sands vaguely recognized from high school geometry as a “600-cell.”

  “Have a seat.” Brzinski indicated the two leather captain’s chairs that sat before his desk.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Instead of taking the chair next to Sands, or the high-backed swivel chair opposite, Brzinski sat on the edge of the desk. It gave him a friendly, almost fatherly, aspect, but it also allowed him to look down at Sands rather than up. He picked up a folder, leafed through a handful of papers, and pulled one out.

  Sands guessed it was his final paper, an in-depth research project he had written with Victoria. He had wanted to work with Carrie, but the partnerships were “randomly” assigned by alphabetical opposite, so that Zacarro was paired with Adams, Wilson with Armstrong, and so on. As luck would have it, Simon matched up with Brzinski, although Sands wondered if luck had anything to do with it.

  “You’re mine, sucker!” Victoria had bragged when the assignments were posted. Carrie was paired with a pimply faced munchkin named Marvin Morton (or was it Morton Marvin?) whose idea of eye contact was to stare at her breasts. Sands tried to soften the blow by suggesting that they could all work together in the library, but the munchkin rejected that, insisting that it would just be a distraction, since each team would be working on a different topic.

  “Marvin’s wise to us, Sands,” Victoria said. “He knows we just want to steal his ideas.”

  It was all a great joke to Victoria. Sands dreaded the long study sessions the project would require—hours with the tw
o of them together, hours apart from Carrie. But Victoria had a brilliant mind, and although she had a tendency to drift off task, she was a font of ideas and had an intuitive grasp of how to shape them. During their study sessions she could be teasing—sometimes obnoxiously so—but Sands was relieved that she was never flirty. Carrie wasn’t the jealous type, but sometimes Sands could feel her eyes on them when they happened to be in the library at the same time. He wanted to tell her that Victoria had given her no reason for jealousy, but he realized that would only make the situation worse. In time, he became so engrossed in the project that the hours flew by without him even giving Carrie a thought.

  “Truly excellent work, Sands.” Brzinski held the paper, staring down his nose at the title through black-rimmed reading glasses.

  “Thank you, sir. It’s really just based on your ideas. And I have to give most of the credit to Victoria.”

  “Most? I doubt that.”

  Before Sands could protest, Brzinski said, “You and my daughter make a good team.”

  “Yes, sir. She’s a very . . . interesting person. Really brilliant.”

  “She’s creative but directionless,” Brzinski pronounced, dropping the paper onto the desktop. “You’re unimaginative but disciplined. Together, you could go far. With, ah, my support, of course.”

  “I, uh…”

  “You don’t find her attractive?”

  Sands set his brandy snifter on the desk. “Sir, I’m engaged to Carrie McKee. We’re going to marry when I enlist.”

  Brzinski nodded. “A sweet girl for a good soldier. I would have thought you’d aim higher.”

  Sands felt the color rising to his cheeks. “Higher than love?”

  Brzinski affected his best fatherly smile, took a stroll around his desk and sat in his chair. It seemed to be on a raised platform—he sat almost eye to eye with Sands.

  “Love is a practice, my boy, not a goal. It’s a discipline. Sometimes a tool.”

  Sands frowned, trying to follow.

  “I’ve upset you.”

  “No, sir. It’s just—”

  “No matter. I have a vision for the future, Sands. Some will have a place in it. Some won’t. A young man with your drive and intelligence can always make a place for himself.”

  He slid the paper across the desk, a gesture of dismissal. Sands stared at the title, the pride he had felt in crafting it suddenly deflated:

  Prisoners at Sea Secured:

  A Modest Proposal for a Maritime Penal System.

  -3-

  What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.

  —Voltaire

  Sands sat in his prison cell: the place he had made for himself.

  The video feed was on, and a news anchor sat before a map of the Koreas, a shaded area just north of the border marked “Oil Fields.”

  “Although South Korea denies the charge,” the anchor was saying, “North Korean President Kim Jong-Seung is accusing the South of using their superior drilling technology to steal the oil from under his feet. President Stockdale has reached out to China to help mediate the dispute…”

  The anchor spoke in a heightened voice, matching his verbal tension to the political tension in the region, but Sands paid little attention. Instead, he kept his eyes on Victoria, still sitting with her back to the grate of her cell, still no more than half-conscious, the straps around her torso holding her upright. Seeing her in this way, in this place, had been a shock, and it made him see his surroundings with a clarity he hadn’t since he had first laid eyes on the ship.

  “In a bizarre development, Radwan Karga of Bashkiristan is attempting to stir the pot in his on-going vendetta against the United States...”

  The mention of Karga got Sands’ attention, and he looked up at the monitor to see the familiar face, with its black unibrow like a second mustache, mouthing threats from the balcony of his presidential palace. At least it looked like a balcony, but there was something suspicious about the way the video of Karga didn’t quite match the video of the crowd he supposedly addressed. Rumor was that Karga’s fear of drone strikes kept him strictly out of the open air, and that his balcony speeches were actually delivered from a digitized set in some underground bunker. Nevertheless, he always put on a good show.

  “Let the American criminals be warned: I will stand with my brother Kim. Your money and oil cannot shield you from a nuclear dagger!”

  It was the same old threat Karga had been making since Sands and his team had taken out the installation on the Caspian. If this new “alliance” between Islamist Bashkiristan and Communist North Korea was absurd, it was also familiar in a tactical sense. It was just Karga once again attempting to play one against the other, attaching himself like a lamprey to the shark of the moment, sucking up what scraps of advantage he could, ready to jump free the moment the shark got the fisherman’s gaff.

  “The power is the six hundred.”

  Sands heard the words clearly, low and distinct. But they hadn’t come from the video feed, and the voice didn’t sound like any of his male block-mates.

  “Victoria?”

  She was stirring, her head rotating in a tight, languid circle, as if her half-open eyes were following the flight of a swirling mite of dust.

  “The power,” she repeated, but the words that followed were unintelligible. She muttered on, her volume rising and falling, her words slurred, then clear, then slurred again. “The power…the six hundred…not the party...the six hundred…the power….”

  “Victoria, can you hear me?”

  Sands rattled the grate of his cage, shouted her name. Victoria’s speech only became more erratic, her breathing more labored.

  Then she stopped.

  “Victoria! Victoria, talk to me!”

  She gasped, sputtered out a few more words. Like a struggling swimmer, she gulped at the air, her arms straining at her bonds.

  “What is it, Sands?” Rashid called from the neighboring cell.

  “I don’t know. She needs help.”

  Sands stepped back from the grate to the center of his cell and stared hard at the monitor. He waved his arms, made a choking motion with his hands around his throat, and pointed emphatically toward Victoria’s cell.

  Ahmer, ever watchful, got the message. From his post in the Vestibule, he grabbed his pack and headed for the hatch, moving like someone following an irresistible urge.

  Oleg stood up, ready to block his way. “Where are you going?”

  “Gotta get to the head.”

  “With that?” He pointed at Ahmer’s pack.

  Ahmer opened it to reveal a clutch of comic books. “Reading materials.” He screwed up his face. “I gotta go!”

  “All right, all right.”

  Knowing Oleg would be watching, Ahmer went straight to the head and pretended to lock himself in a stall, the only place where, in theory, anyone on Inferno could expect privacy. He had chosen the stall nearest the air vent, which he had previously rigged for easy removal. Taking advantage of a blind spot he had spotted after weeks of meticulous searching, he slid under the partition, lifted the register free, and slipped into the vent, pulling the register back into place after him. It only required a few feet of crab-walking to get to the main ventilator shaft, from which he could access any deck. All the air shafts were monitored, too, though, and because they were restricted areas, Ahmer knew if he were spotted there he would have no plausible cover for his actions. He switched over to the service shaft stairwell, which guards and even Drones used whenever they were more convenient than the elevators. The diversion with the head had only been to throw off Oleg. Once Ahmer felt sure he wasn’t being actively watched, he could blend in with the usual crew traffic, knowing that even if he were spotted, most of his fellow Drones wouldn’t rat him out.

  As Ahmer approached Sands’ cell, he could hear the big man rattling his grate, and for a moment he feared Sands had gone psycho.

  “Ahmer!”

  “I’m here.”


  “She’s having trouble breathing. Can you get those restraints off her?”

  “They took the chip. Without it I can’t get in.”

  “You got a knife?”

  “A knife?”

  “A knife! A knife! To cut the straps!”

  “Knives are contraband.”

  Victoria’s head snapped back against the grate. Her chest heaved with a great gasp rattling deep in her throat, and she went still.

  “She’s fading,” Sands said. “Every time she does that, it’s longer between breaths.”

  Ahmer produced a hypodermic from his pack. “This might help.”

  “What is it?”

  “Our own concoction. The Techs, I mean. Fluorenol, phytochemicals, B-vitamins, biphetamine, I think, and uh…One more ingredient…It’s um—”

  “Just tell me what it does.”

  “It wakes you up.”

  Sands looked at Victoria. She was still as death. Thirty-five seconds since her last breath. Forty.

  “Give it to her.”

  Ahmer held the hypo up to the dim light, squeezed the plunger until a thread of liquid spurted from the needle. He bent to the grate, searching for a spot between the steel that lined up with a vulnerable area in Victoria’s restraints.

  “Hurry up!”

  “It’s not easy. I need to find a vein.”

  “Her neck, Ahmer, try her neck.”

  “Okay, I found a spot.” He threaded the needle through carefully, having found a space in the grate that lined up with his target. “I have to be careful not to break it,” he explained, as he slowly pushed the needle in. Sands grimaced as he watched the long sliver of steel slide into Victoria’s neck. “Okay, here goes.” Ahmer thumbed the plunger forward until the hypo was empty. He withdrew the needle quickly, as if he expected some violent reaction.

  For a moment, there was nothing. Then Victoria gasped, flailed her legs out, pounded her heels against the deck, and bucked against her restraints as if she would pull the steel grate from its welds. In a moment it was over. Her breathing returned, raspy but steady.