Chapter Nine

Vectors



Lloyd and Lil walked throught the Noordermarkt, happy to be, at least for a little-while, full-sized.


Oh, shrinking was fun—like a vacation from reality. But even after the best vacations, it's nice to get back home.


Since they couldn't actually go home, they got as close as they could.


"So what time should we head back to Meintje's?" asked Lloyd idly, as they arrived at a small open-air café.


"She and her boyfriend will just be having sex for hours on end. It's nice and all, but it makes it difficult to think. I'm wondering whether we shouldn't move on."


"What do you mean?" asked Lloyd.


"Well, I'm thinking it might be good to establish a base at a few different places anyhow. Just in case one becomes uninhabitable. For whatever reason."


"Ah," said Lloyd, smiling at the waitress as she came over. They ordered, and he then said, "Well, it might make some sense. Thinking we should track down your male model friend?"


Lilavati stuck her tongue out, then smiled. "No, love, not unless we bump into him. I was just thinking that having two or three bases in Amsterdam might come in handy. I know we think we've lost them, but…."


"…but one never knows. All right, you've convinced me. So where to next? May as well get our base established while the two lovebirds are having sex; fun as that was, it makes foraging a bit tedious."


"Let's look for someone in the market," said Lil. "It'll give us something to do. No?"


"All right," said Lloyd. "Let's find another host to leech off of. Should be fun."



Zoraida walked through the deserted streets of the fortress, vexed.


It was early. Too early for the sun to be coming up. And it would be far too late before the sun went down. It had kept her thus far from getting acclimated to the time zone in whatever godforsaken place she'd landed.


She shivered involuntarily. Four degrees Celsius. That wasn't right, not for the end of May. Maybe for January, during a cold snap. The night before it had gotten below freezing.


Zoraida had always hated winter. She liked a good forty-degree day as much as the next Spaniard. She had always presumed if her forbearers had liked the cold, they would have stayed on in Switzerland.


What was she doing here? She knew the answer by rote; the past week-and-a-half had taught her much, and she knew that she was the lynchpin of an operation that would establish female supremacy throughout the globe. And she'd listened to Wafia's story of her stoning, and Alyssa's story of her rape, and she'd remembered a few stories of her own, and she knew that there was much to be said for tipping the table over and starting clean.


Perhaps she was worrying too much. Just unsettled from her exile. That was it; she needed to sit down and write tonight. Maybe that would calm her nerves.


Maybe.


But she couldn't help feeling that nothing was going as it should be. And as she shivered in the cool Alaska morning, she couldn't help feeling that things would get worse before they got better.



Meanwhile, just south of Washington, Mitch Michaelson shuffled uncomfortably.


He didn't like civilian dress. Didn't like it one bit. Even though the difference between a General's dress uniform and a three-button suit was more psychological than material, that psychological change mattered.


But he'd accepted it; this post was part of the plan. The Pentagon had taken its orders from SecDef, and those weren't changing. But this department, though officially under the rubric of the National Security Advisor, was actually being overseen by the OVP. Actually, to be precise, the department was being headed by the Vice President himself.


And the Vice President was a man who knew that sometimes, you had to shoot first and ask questions later.


He'd met a great many people in the past few days. He'd been very surprised when he'd taken the card Leah Jackson gave him, went to the address it offered, and asked to speak to the man in charge. He was told that the Vice President was not in, but his lieutenant would help him.


Michaelson was more than a bit surprised to find out who that man was.


"You've no idea," the man had said pouring a bourbon for Michaelson, "how much I hate the damned Society. They've completely lost their way. You know, back when they were still the Cadre, still fighting the good fight, I funneled ten million dollars from my organization to them? Ten million! I thought Koschei was serious about keeping women in their proper place. But of course, he sold us out. He sold us all out."


"I see, Reverend," said Michaelson, fidgeting idly. He was still trying to sort this out. "But what I don't understand—"


"Why you were approached by Jackson? The Lord works in mysterious ways, General." Michaelson could feel the charm that had made this man rich. "We were getting our organization back together at the same time as Jackson was getting hers back together, and we crossed paths, so to speak.


"You served during the Cold War, didn't you, General?"


"Of course," said Michaelson.


"That's our lodestar. America and the Soviet Union formed an alliance during World War II, knowing full well that a greater struggle lay beyond it. But we had to eliminate the threat to us both before we could get down to fighting each other."


"You want to take out the Society," said Michaelson.


"Yes, we do. We have to. General, are you a Christian?"


"Presbyterian," Michaelson murmured. "More or less."


"Have you been born again?"


"I believe in Jesus, if that's what you mean," Michaelson said, shifting uncomfortably.


"A lot of fair-weather Christians in the land these days. 'I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first. Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds. Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan's so-called deep secrets (I will not impose any other burden on you): Only hold on to what you have until I come.' The Word of the Lord," the preacher said, reciting from memory.


Michaelson was quiet for a moment. "What does that mean?"


The minister smiled his most winning smile, the one that had earned him three hours a week on cable and a few hundred million dollars. "God is on our side, against the harlot in charge of the Society. And you must have faith that He will sustain us in our righteous cause."


Michaelson looked at the minister a long minute.


"I have faith," Michaelson said. "What can I do?"



"So, Lucky, find anything useful?"


"Well, this is interesting, ma'am," said Andrew Scott, looking absently at his grildrometer. "We're near where they came through, I think."


Ana Garcia spun around slowly, surveying the street, trying to get a feel for where the escapees had exited. They'd been smart – they had kept their heads down since getting here. Not a jump, not even a transform spell to scare up a little bit of cash. She felt fairly sure that if the Coed had been casting, there'd be evidence of it.


But there was just the residual effects of the tunnel from Chicago to here – lapping up to this random corner in the middle of a block of apartments in the Bronx.


She looked around, and sighed. "Well, at least we know where they exited. Maybe someone saw something. Or…."


She trailed off. "Commander?" asked Andy.


But Ana didn't hear him. Instead, she noticed a gate in front of an apartment about halfway down the street. She saw the orange thread laying just beside it.


She jogged the hundred yards to the gate, and picked it up. It wasn't much, just a few inches of orange. Doubtless the woman who'd shed it didn't even notice it. But it was a match for the standard jumpsuits that prisoners wore.


"Over here!" she called, walking up the walkway quickly. "This is where they went."



Leah Jackson smiled a thin smile as she lifted Chegren out of the water. He sputtered and gasped, and after getting his breath, said, "You know I'm not going to break, Leah."


"I know," she said, her smile widening, "but I'm enjoying this too much to stop," as she dunked him back under.


Waterboarding was much easier when the subject was doll-sized.


She pulled him back up. He coughed and sputtered again, and she said, "What do you know about Operation Orion?"


"No such project," lied Scott.


Leah rolled her eyes. "We know that your organization is looking for ways to disrupt our network. Operation Orion is your long-term plan. Tell me about it."


"I haven't been involved with any Operation Orion," said Scott, taking a breath as she plunged him back under.


Leah was almost bored with this. As he bobbed under the surface, she idly considered how to torment him tonight. She thought perhaps she would play some old New Kids on the Block albums at 140 decibels, and open the windows to the stockade. That should give him another sleepless night. Eventually, he'd break.


She looked down at the pathetic figure under the water, struggling to hold his breath, eyes closed. She thought she might just leave him under until he lost consciousness. It would be kind compared to what he'd put her through.


"So small, so pathetic," she said, looking at him. Indeed, he almost seemed to be shrinking before her eyes, withering into nothing….


No. He didn't seem to be. He was.


"What the—" she said, flipping him back up out of the water. But he had already pulled himself through the restraints, and he leapt off the board, shrinking further.


"Impossible!" she said, as he disappeared into nothingness. "Aalto! What's going on with the dampener?"


"No problem, ma'am," came the voice over the speaker. "Everything is running at full power."


Leah looked around the surface of the table. He had shrunk himself. Hadn't attacked her. His powers – he still had them. But they were weak.


She thought for a second that she'd order the dampeners off, but she knew he was counting on it. He couldn't be more than a few nanometers tall at the moment. The table itself was the size of a continent to him. He was contained.


"You're clever," she said to the emptiness, "and stronger than I give you credit for. But if you want to hide down in the microscopic world, you're welcome to it. You're still my prisoner."


With an angry growl, she rose, and spun, and headed for the door.



Lil was growing tired of looking for a potential host or hostess. Indeed, she only persevered because it had been her idea, and she didn't want to give up easily. Still, as she sat down heavily on a bench in Amsterdam Centraal Station, she had to admit that this wasn't as easy as it had seemed. She looked at the paper idly, and then gasped a little at her own stupidity.


"Ready to go back to Meintje's?" asked Lloyd, bringing her a paper cup of coffee. "You've rejected all my candidates."


"I shouldn't have," said Lil, taking a sip and grimacing; she didn’t really like coffee, but she liked caffeine, so she put up with it. "The family made sense, they would have had food aplenty."


"No, I think you were right about the two-year-old. We'd be taking our lives in our hands around him. Singles, young couples, maybe a family with older teens – they're who we should look for."


Lil smiled. "Now you're just repeating things I've told you."


"Well, you are particularly bright," Lloyd laughed.


"True," Lil chuckled. She paused for a moment. "You know, I think we should head for Germany."


"Germany? Why?"


Lil looked at her copy of the International Herald Tribune, and gestured to a lower article datelined Berlin. "Headquarters of the Society in Europe. Look, we can't keep running forever. Maybe they could help us there."


Lloyd looked at the article, and nodded. "Makes sense. But don't you think they'll be expecting that?"


Lil smiled. "You mean the folks coming after us will be waiting in Berlin? Of course they will. But that doesn't mean they'll catch us before we get there. Besides, we'll take the circuitous route."


Lloyd sighed, and looked up at the display. "Well, there's a train leaving from platform eight heading to Stuttgart. Looks like it's departing in about an hour. Shall we?"


Lil looked at him. "You know, love, if you think I'm daft, you can say so."


Lloyd grinned back at her. "I'm grateful for your company, and no, I don't think you're daft. I think I'd be dead long ago if not for you."


Lil frowned at that. "Actually, if you'd just let them take me…."


Lloyd shook his head emphatically, and grabbed her shoulder. "Never, never think that, Lil. Never. I'd rather die than let them hurt you. I'd much rather be on the run than have them hurt you. And if it comes down to it, I'd rather they had me than you any day."


"They want you," said Lil. "And I'd rather they didn't get you."


"They won't," said Lloyd, smiling. "Not as long as I have someone smart as you helping me. So, to track eight?"


Lil smiled in spite of herself. "Let's go."



"It's been abandoned for a few days, I think," said Lucky, flipping through scattered papers. "But there's no question this was a League outpost."


Ana looked around the living room, searching the few photographs, trying to figure out what the story was. It was cramped, and the three bunkbeds and one lofted bed all but filled the room. "It had to be a safehouse," she said. "Somewhere to stow people, get them out of the way. Why did they leave?"


"Probably moving to another safehouse – figured we'd be after them," said Andrew. "Hey, here we go. 'Angela McMartin' — that name ring a bell?"


Ana walked over and looked at a notice from the New York Department of Motor Vehicles. "McMartin…she was connected to the Coed somehow. Society lost track of her after the Second Battle of Madison. I think she was one of Liz's recruits. Interesting."


She noted the license number. "They're probably moving out in this car. Get this information to Chicago. I think this could be what we were looking for."



Scott moved.


He'd felt Leah leave as much as anything, but he knew she'd be back, probably with some hydrogen peroxide to sterilize the table. He didn't have much time, and he had to get clear before she got the chance.


He felt very much like he was fumbling through darkness. The powers he had were weak, and he knew that some of the trickier spells, like transport and morpheus were out of the question. Shrinking and growing were going to be about all he could manage. But they were enough.


He pushed himself to a half inch and took off in a dead sprint for the edge of the table. It took him a minute or so, but he leapt into the void, not worrying about the landing. He instinctively reduced his size by a power of a hundred, and floated in the whirling eddies of the wind, simply enjoying the feeling of being a bit of dust, constantly stirred by the air currents.


He tried to claris his way into Sarah's mind, to send her a signal he was okay. He didn't get anything, but he'd keep trying. He had nothing else at the moment to occupy him, and he wanted her to know he was not beaten yet.


He lay back, and tried to reach her. He would drift until he felt power return to him, or he hit ground. At worst, he'd be away from Leah's torture chamber. At best, he'd soon be home.



"Her," said Lil, finally, pointing at an American flipping idly through a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land. "She'll do nicely."


Lloyd looked at the pretty young thing, who was dressed in a short skirt with leggings, black boots, camouflage shirt and pink hair. "You really think so?"


Lil nodded. "She's alone, she's got a nice rucksack there, odds are high she's spending the summer abroad. We can go with her to her dorm or the next hostel and hitch a ride from there."


Lloyd nodded, and pointed to her purse lying on the ground, festooned with pins advertising a few obscure bands and some fairly liberal causes, at least by American standards. "That's our ticket. Plenty of handholds. Let's move quickly, train will be here in twenty minutes."


They approached the bag at two inches tall, and helped each other climb up, jumping gleefully into the tattered denim bag just as the train arrived, and their unwitting hostess hoisted her bags, heading for Heidelberg.


An hour later, when the train had rolled out, a thin man came through the station, holding a grildrometer. He nodded, and punched a number into his mobile. "Germany," he said. "Redouble the guard in Berlin. And have a detachment waiting at Stuttgart. We've got them now."