“Yes, you! Get over here! Move!” One of the Company policemen must have reached for his communicator, for another burst of fire sent marble chips screaming and whining. Mikal Margolis stood up sheepishly. The gunman motioned for him to come around by the side, leaving clear his field of fire.
“What’s happening?” asked Mikal Margolis.
“You’re being rescued,” said the gunman in the business suit. “Now, whatever happens, follow me and don’t bother me with any questions.” From an inside pocket he flipped a smoke grenade into the lobby. “Run.”
Mikal Margolis did not know how far he ran, along how many marble, oak or plastic corridors: he just ran, with the high stepping gait of one expecting a bullet in the spine at any moment. When the sounds of search and pursuit were sufficiently remote, the rescuer stopped and opened a section of plastic wall panelling with a rather clever tool.
“In here.”
“Here?”
The sounds of search and pursuit suddenly increased.
“In here.” The two men dived into the wall cavity and sealed the wall behind them. The rescuer thumbed the laser setting on his MRCW to random emission and by its blue light led Mikal Margolis through a jungle of cables, ducts, pipes and conduits.
“Mind that,” he said as Mikal Margolis reached for a cable to steady himself after teetering at the lip of a two kilometre airshaft. “There’s twenty thousand volts going through that.” Mikal Margolis snatched back his hand as if from a snake, or a cable carrying twenty thousand volts.
“Just who are you?” he asked.
“Arpe Magnusson, Systems Service Engineer.”
“With an MRCW?”
“Freelance,” said the systems service engineer, as if that word explained everything. “See those glowing dust motes there, mind them. There’s a communications laser in there. Take your head clean off, it would.”
“Freelance?”
“An independent in the closed Company economy. Term of abuse. See, like you, I wanted to see someone in the Company, I had this great idea for revolutionizing the Kershaw airconditioning system, but no one wanted to see me, not without a number or a visa. So I came here, behind the walls, because you don’t need numbers back here, and joined the Freelancers. That was about four years back.”
“There’s more than one of you?”
“About two thousand. There’s places in this cube don’t appear on any Company schematics. Time to time, I do some independent work for the Shareholders; domestic stuff mainly, something breaks, things are always breaking, Company policy, built-in failure rate, and they’re not keen on repairing things, better for the Company if you buy new, so they pass the word and I come and fix it. Also, I keep a look out at Enquiries there for potential Freelancers: every so often someone like you turns up and I get them away behind walls.”
“With an MRCW?”
“First time I’ve ever had to use it. Bit slow getting to you, the computer almost missed tracking that call to the police. Watch the draft from that ventilator… it’s not easy living here, but if you make it past the first twelve months, you’re all right.” Magnusson turned and extended a hand to Mikal Margolis. “Welcome to the Freelancers, friend.”
Between pitfalls, acid, chemical waste, power blackouts and electrocution, the months that followed were the happiest of Mikal Margolis’s life. He was in constant danger, from both the perils between the walls and the sporadic raids of Company Kleenteems and had never felt more comfortable or relaxed. This was what he had dreamed of in his long sojourns on the desert rim. Life was brutish, dangerous and wonderful. The Freelancers’ computer, Jitney, which lived in their headquarters, a web of support cables stretched across Airshaft 19, provided him with the identity number of dead Shareholders and thus equipped, Mikal Margolis could eat with impunity in any Company refectory in the city, bathe in Company bath houses, dress in Company paper suits dispensed from street-corner slot machines, and even sleep in a Company bed until the Company withdrew the deceased’s number from circulation. At such times he would return to the world of the crawlways and access shafts and doze in his hammock suspended over a kilometre-deep airwell, rocked with the breathings of a hundred thousand Shareholders.
When the alarm came he almost vaulted out of his hammock. But for his Freelancer-trained wits, he would have jumped straight down the airwell. He paused to gain composure. Composure was survival. Think before you act. Forethought, no spontaneity. He checked that the roll of documents was on his shoulder, then seized the swing rope and tarzaned to the lip of the shaft. Proximity alarms. Kleenteems. The backlog of complaints about vermin in the circuitry had built up until the department of water and sewage treatment was pressured into action. He felt for his gas mask. It was exactly where he had left it. He slipped it on and swung up into a major power conduit running parallel to the service duct. Thousands of amperes pulsed next to his cheek. He squinted through a chink in the cladding and watched the clouds of riot gas roll down the tunnel.
Flashlight beams lanced through the clouds of toxic gas. The Kleenteem waded into view: two men and a woman, paper-suited executive types from the department of water and sewage treatment, fat balloon men in their transparent plastic isolation suits. From their backpacks they poured a fog of neurotoxic gas down the tunnel and warped the air with their wrist-mounted sonic disturbers. One of the Kleenteem picked up Mikal Margolis’s alarm and showed it to the others. They nodded. and their helmet beams bobbed and curtsied.
Arpe Magnusson’s gasmasked head poked out of a hatchway, followed by an arm and a written note.
The two men scurried through the labyrinth of access ways, gantries and airshafts until they arrived at the junction with the level ten airduct which the Kleenteem had recently passed. Bodies of dead mice lay stiffening on the metal grilles, proof of the efficacy of the Kleenteem’s weaponry. Arpe Magnusson pointed to three snaking plastic hoses. Mikal Margolis nodded. He knew what they were, the Kleenteem’s umbilicals. Arpe Magnusson traced the umbilicals back to the air outlet. Motioning for Mikal Margolis to watch carefully, he uncoupled the airhoses and connected them to the level ten sewage pipe. Brown filth poured down the hoses and raced into the gas-milky distance. At once the headlamp beams froze in position, then began to wave frantically to and fro. Finally they fell to the ground and remained motionless. A few seconds later the two men distinctly heard three soft, brown, wet explosions.
Mikal Margolis had been two years in the tunnels when the opportunity came. The computer reported a death in the North West Quartersphere Planning and Developments Department, iron and steel division. Some junior sub-sub-production assistant secretary had thrown himself into a geyser in Yellow Bay because of a bad decision over the Arcadia project. Even before he was fished part-cooked out of the geyser by the Chrysanthemum Brigade, employed specifically for such duties, Mikal Margolis had taken his number, his name, his job, his desk, his office, his apartment, his life and his soul. The risk in approaching the North West Quartersphere Projects and Developments Manager/Director in such a direct fashion was great: the likelihood of recognition was nearly one hundred percent, but Mikal Margolis was not prepared to spend several years and a virtual economy of black money weaving his way up through personal assistants, junior sub-managers, temporary liaison officers, production assistant managers, sector organizers, junior sys tems analysts, sales directors, financial directors (junior and senior), area directors, chief directors, project directors, sub-managers and project directors’ personal managers. The information on his roll of papers was important.