“So far, we’ve found four of them, or more precisely, they kind of found us,” Dave said. “A couple of this guy’s colleagues are upstairs in the control room right now mashing up a Friday Night Con Newsletter with the happy news and a lot of dire warnings — the reason security isn’t letting anyone out for a walk outside is that currently there is no outside, technically, because this building that we’re in and a narrow strip of land that was just around it is all that there is out there right now.”
“Show me,” Vince said abruptly. And then, turning back to his wife, “Angel, the swim really is deferred. There’s a problem with the pool. Hang on here for a second, would you? Dave wants to show me something, I’ll be right back.”
“Zach, would you wait here?” Dave said, and stepped away from the front desk, gesturing for Vince to precede him.
The broad — shouldered young man at the hotel’s front door, dressed like a Viking, was one of the con’s own security team; he knew Dave, but still he raised an arm to stop him as he approached the entrance area.
“Hey, wait — they said…”
“It’s all right,” Dave said. “We’re fine. We’ll just be taking a step outside. I promise you nothing bad will happen.” He gave a small toss of his head in Vince’s direction. “It’s our Guest of Honor. Gotta keep him happy. ”
“Simon said, don’t let anyone out there, but I guess you know what he knows,” the security Viking said hesitantly. “I guess it’s okay.”
“Just don’t let anyone follow us,” Dave said.
“Got it. Uh, be careful.”
“Come on, Mr. Silverman.”
They slipped as unobtrusively as they could through the front door and out into the overhang of the portico, and then Dave took a few careful paces to one side with Vince Silverman warily following until they both stood only a few steps away from an edge which gave into a black void. Somewhere to their right the waning moon looked rather larger than it had any right to be — but Dave wasn’t at all certain that this wasn’t just a psychological aberration.
“Far out,” Vince breathed. “Wow. This is… this is just… beyond… Are we still in the atmosphere? How is there air?”
“They spoke of some sort of… force field or something… it’s holding all of us in, else we’d go flying off into the black beyond if we hit a point where gravity becomes an issue.”
“How are they doing all this?”
“They, um, they tried to explain and they said they’re willing to explain it all again, but it sounds like they’re trying to explain differential calculus to a cat,” Dave said.
“Perhaps I could sit in,” Vince said. “I wasn’t at all sure that coming here — especially with everything as last minute as it was — would be such a great idea but now, now, Jesus H. Christ, people, you’re practically writing my next novel for me as we speak. I want to talk to these critters you’ve got stashed away.”
“They’ll all be at the Opening Ceremonies,” Dave said. “And they’re about to go on, very shortly.”
“Well, that gives me the perfect excuse to get Angel’s mind off the pool, for now,” Vince said. “I’ll whisk her away so she can start getting ready for the gala. Come on then — I could stand out here for hours, but it sounds like both of us have a deadline to meet.”
Back in the Con Ops room, things were heating up.
“Why on earth did I think that Opening Ceremonies at 10 PM were going to be such a good idea?” Andie Mae said, gnawing at her lower lip.
“Because only the doughty few come to those anyway, and you thought that if you made it the Event of the Night more might turn up?” Xander suggested. “It was a good idea. I don’t know if that will work in our favor, now, but it was still a good idea. But we do need a way to get those leaflets to everybody, not just the Opening Ceremonies gang. Maybe we could rig up a sort of a table or something with a large neon sign saying TAKE ONE OF THESE RIGHT NOW IT’S LIFE OR DEATH…”
Jess Sellers snorted. “Oh, that’s going to improve morale.”
“Just a simple DON’T PANIC will do,” Libby said, with a grin she couldn’t quite help.
“We can do that,” Boss said unexpectedly. “If you put a stack of these out in a place where they can be accessed, we can make a hologram — ”
“Of course you can,” Andie Mae said. “Okay, I have to go get changed, we’re almost due down for the ceremonies — is somebody looking after our movie star? He needs to be down there, now. Send a sheepdog. And you, Boss, you’re coming right along, and I’m going to point at you and laugh or cry — I just haven’t decided which yet — and tell everyone it’s all your fault. Get those things done, Libby, we’re running out of time…”
“They are done,” Libby said. “Printing now. Take a look.”
Andie Mae stepped over to the printer and picked up a single sheet of the newly headlined Friday night con newsletter, printed on eye — wateringly bright pink paper.
“And whose bright idea,” Andie Mae said, “was that?”
“I would have used red, red for danger, you know, but we don’t have red paper handy, and it isn’t as if we can pop out and get a couple of reams of it just now,” Libby said. “We happened to have a whole pile of the pink. Don’t ask. It seemed like a good idea to somebody at the time, I guess, or we just got it cheap. And besides, the print would show up worse on the red.”
“No… this.” Andie Mae’s finger hovered over the top of the page.
Libby picked up the newsletter sheet, her cheeks going almost as bright a pink as her newsletter’s paper. “Er, mine, actually,” she said.
She looked up, met Andie Mae’s eyes, and then they both lost it completely, Andie Mae laughing so hard that she literally staggered back a couple of steps to collapse onto a convenient empty chair, giggling helplessly into her hands. Part of it was mirth, another part was pure hysteria at the turn of events, but all of a sudden it was a matter of finding the situation fit for either laughter or for tears.
“I love it,” Andie Mae managed to get out at last, gasping for breath. “How utterly perfect. These are going to be fucking collectibles, if we ever live to tell the tale.”
She’d wanted a unique convention, she’d wanted to leave her mark, to be remembered for this — and although the situation that they found themselves in was hardly of her own devising it was definitely going to work as far as achieving that particular goal was concerned. Nobody who had been at this con, Andie Mae’s maiden voyage as con Chair, would forget the experience — and now the headline of the newsletter had summed it all up in one neat little phrase.
WELCOME TO ABDUCTICON.
This was nothing at all like Andie Mae had planned, nothing like the thing she had looked forward to and dreamed about — when she would step out onto that stage and take control and announce her own con and get the applause of the fen in the audience. It should have been smooth, and rehearsed, and practiced, and predictable. Instead, she waited behind the curtains at the back of the stage for her cue to go on while the belly dancers did their thing out front, her heart beating erratically, her face pale, her eyes burning. She was wearing a figure — hugging dress that seemed to be made entirely of purple sequins — she had found the monstrosity in a thrift shop a couple of years back and had known immediately that this had to be the gown she would wear for her first outing as con Chair at Opening Ceremonies. But events had robbed the gown of its glamour and its spell and she barely remembered what she was wearing.
The belly dancers finished, and streamed off the stage in a cascade of bare feet slapping against the wooden floor. Andie Mae took a deep breath.