The Complete LaNague Read online

  The prison grapevine was obviously better informed than even the established news media. The public was as yet completely unaware of his capture, but as soon as he set foot on the central walkway between the three tiers of cells, a loud, prolonged, raucous cheer arose from the inmates. They thrust their arms through the bars on their cages, stretching to the limit to touch him, to grab his hand, to slap him on the back. Most could not reach him, but the meaning was clear: even in the maximum security section of the Imperium Complex, the area on Throne most isolated from the daily events of the world outside, Robin Hood was known… and loved.

  Not exactly the segment of Throne society I’ve been aiming at, LaNague thought as he took his place in a bottom tier solo cell, watching the bars rise from the floor and ooze down from the ceiling, mechanical stalagmites and stalactites in a manmade cave. They met and locked together in front of him at chest level.

  After his escort departed, LaNague was bombarded with questions from all directions. He answered a few, evaded most, remaining completely unambiguous only about identifying himself as Robin Hood, which he freely admitted to anyone who asked. Feigning fatigue, he retired to the rear of his cell and lay in the wall recess with his eyes closed.

  Silence soon returned to the max-sec block as the celebrity’s arrival was quickly accepted and digested. Conversation was not an easy thing here. Max-sec was reserved for psychopaths, killers, rapists, and habitually violent criminals… and now for enemies of the state. These breeds of criminal had to be isolated, separated from the rest of the prisoners as well as the rest of society. Each was given a solitary cell, a synthestone box with five unbroken surfaces, open only at the front where bars closed from above and below like a gap-tooth grin, separating them from the central walkway and from each other.

  There was no chance of escape, no hope of rescue. LaNague had known that when he called in the tip that led to his arrest. The walls were too thick to be blown without killing those inside. There was only one exit from the section and a close mesh of extremely tight ultrasonic beams protected it. No human going through one bank of those beams could maintain consciousness long enough to take two steps. And there were five banks. Should there be any general disturbance in the max-sec block, another system would bathe the entire area with inaudible, consciousness-robbing sound, forcing a half-hour nap on everyone.

  LaNague didn’t want to get out just yet anyway. He had to sit and hope that Metep and the Council of Five would play into his hands… and hope that Sayers would be able to play one of those recordings on the air… and hope that the populace would respond. So many variables. Too many, perhaps. He had shredded the out-worlders’ confidence in the Imperium, now he had to mend it, but in a different weave, a different cut, a radical style. Could he do it?

  Somewhere inside of him was a cold knot of fear and doubt that said no one could do it.

  LaNague had almost dozed off – he had a talent for that, no matter what the circumstances – when he heard footsteps on the walkway. They stopped outside his cell and he peered cautiously out of his recess toward the bars. One of the prison guards stood there, a flat, square container balanced on his upturned palm. LaNague gently eased his left hand into his right axilla, probing until he found the tiny lump under the skin. He desperately hoped he would not have to squeeze it now.

  “You hungry?” the guard said as he caught sight of LaNague’s face in the darkness of the recess.

  Sliding to the floor and warily approaching the front of the cell, LaNague said, “A little.”

  “Good.” The guard tapped a code into the box attached to his waist, a code LaNague knew was changed three times a day. The central bar at the front of his cell suddenly snapped in two at its middle, the top half rising, the bottom sinking until about twenty centimeters separated the ends. After passing the container through the opening, the guard tapped his box again and the two bars approximated and merged again.

  It was a food tray. LaNague activated the heating element and set it aside. “I would have thought the kitchen was closed.”

  “It is.” The guard smiled. He was tall, lean, his uniform ill-fitting. “But not for you.”

  “Why’s that?” LaNague was immediately suspicious. “Orders from on high?”

  The guard grunted. “Not likely! No, we were all sitting around thinking what a dirty thing it was to put someone like you in with these guys – I mean, most of them have killed at least one person; and if not, it wasn’t for not trying. They’d kill again, too, given the chance. We can’t even let them near each other, let alone decent people. A guy like you just doesn’t belong here. I mean, you didn’t kill anybody – or even hurt anybody – all these years. All you did was make the big boys look stupid and spread the money around afterwards so everybody could have a good time. We don’t think you belong here, Mr. Robin Hood, and although we can’t do much about getting you out of max-sec, we’ll make sure nobody gives you any trouble while you’re in here.”

  “Thank you,” LaNague said, touched. “Do you always second-guess your superiors this way?”

  After a moment of thought: “No, come to think of it. You’re the first prisoner I ever gave a second thought to. I always figured you – you know, Robin Hood – were crazy. I mean, dropping that money and all. I never got any. My sister did once, but I work the night shift so l never had a chance. Did read that flyer of yours though… that really seemed crazy at the time, but from what I’ve seen lately, I know you’re not crazy. Never were. It’s everybody else that’s crazy.”

  He seemed surprised and somewhat abashed at what he had just said. He gestured to the tray, which had started to steam. “Better eat that while it’s hot.” As LaNague turned away, the guard moved closer to the bars and spoke again. “One more thing… I’m not supposed to do this, but–” He thrust his open right hand between the bars.

  LaNague grasped it and shook it firmly. “What’s your name?”

  “Steen. Chars Steen.”

  “Glad to know you, Steen.”

  “Not as glad as I am to know you!” He turned and quickly strode toward the exit at the end of the walkway.

  LaNague stood and looked at the tray for a while, moved by the small but significant gesture of solidarity from the guards. Perhaps he had touched people more deeply than he realized. Sitting down before the tray, he lifted the lid. He really wasn’t hungry, but made himself eat. After all, it was a gift.

  He managed to swallow a few bites, but had to stop when Mora drifted through his mind. Since his arrest he had been doing his best to fend off the thought of her, but lost the battle now. She would be learning of his capture soon, hopefully not from the vid. Telling her beforehand would have been impossible. Mora would have done everything in her power to stop him; failing that, she would have tried to be arrested along with him, despite the way he had been treating her.

  A short spool had been left explaining everything… a rotten way to do it, but the only way. With his appetite gone, he scraped the remaining contents of the tray into the commode and watched them swirl away, then crawled back into the recess and forced himself to sleep. It was better than thinking about what Mora was going through.

  “HOW COULD YOU LET HIM DO IT?” Mora’s voice was shrill, her gestures frantic as she twisted in her seat trying to find a comfortable position. There was none. Her mind had been reeling from the news about Josef – now this!

  “How could I stop him?” Radmon Sayers said defensively as he stood before her in the LaNague apartment. He had waited until the pilot and his wife had fallen asleep in the other room, then had put on the spool and let LaNague explain it himself.

  “Someone else could have gone! One of his loyal” – she hated herself for the way she snarled the word – “followers could have taken his place! No one in the Imperium knows what Robin Hood looks like!”

  “He didn’t feel he could allow anyone else to be placed in custody as the most wanted man in the out-worlds. And frankly, I respect that decision.”r />
  Mora sank back in her chair and nodded reluctantly. It was unfair of her to castigate Sayers, or to call into question the courage of any of the Merry Men. She knew Peter – although with the way he had been behaving since her arrival on Throne, perhaps not as well as she had thought. But he had never been good at asking favors of anyone, even a simple favor that was due him. He preferred to take care of it himself and get it out of the way rather than impose on anyone. So the idea of asking someone else to risk his life posing as Robin Hood would have been completely beyond him.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled through a sigh. “It’s just that I had the distinct impression he had someone else in mind as the public’s Robin Hood.”

  “That may have been a calculated effect for your benefit.”

  “Maybe. What are we supposed to do now?”

  Sayers fished in his pocket and came up with three vid spools. “We wait for an opportunity to play one of these over the air.”

  “What’s on them?” Mora asked, rising from her seat.

  “Your husband…making an appeal to the people of Throne to choose between Metep and Robin Hood.”

  “Are they any good? Will they convince anyone?” She didn’t like the expression on Sayers’ face.

  “I can’t say.” He kept his eyes on the spools in his hand. “A lot of the public’s acceptance will depend on the fact that he’s been identified as Robin Hood. The news bulletins should be breaking just about now, although hardly anybody’s watching. But all of Throne will know by breakfast.”

  “Play one for me.”

  “There’s three, one for each of the contingencies he thought possible.”

  “Play them all.”

  Sayers plugged them into the apartment holovid set, one after another. Mora watched with growing dismay, an invisible hand making a fist with her heart in the middle, gripping it tighter and tighter until she was sure it must stop beating. Peter’s messages to the people of Throne were beautifully precise and well reasoned. They pointed out the velvet-gloved tyranny of the Imperium, and the inevitable consequences. No one living in the economic holocaust engulfing Throne could deny the truth of what he said. He appealed on the grounds of principle and pragmatism. But some vital element was missing.

  “He’s doomed,” Mora said in a voice that sounded as hollow as she felt. The third spool had just finished throwing out its holographic image of Peter LaNague, alias Robin Hood, sitting at a desk and calmly telling whoever might be listening to rise up and put an end to the Out-world Imperium once and for all.

  Sayers puffed out his cheeks and exhaled slowly. “That’s what I told him when we recorded these. But he wouldn’t listen.”

  “No…of course he wouldn’t. He expects everyone in the galaxy to respond to pure reason, now that he’s finally got their attention.” She gestured toward the vid set. “A Tolivian or a Flinter would understand and respond fiercely to any one of those spools. But the people of Throne?”

  She went to the window. Pierrot sat on the sill, drooping heavily over the edge of his pot in the morose kengai configuration. She had watered the tree, spoken to it, but nothing she did brought it upright again. She looked beyond to the dark empty streets awaiting dawn, and thought about Peter. He had become a different man since leaving Tolive – cold, distant, preoccupied, even ruthless. But those spools… they were the work of a fool!

  “Why didn’t he listen to you, or check with me, or take somebody’s advice? Those spools are dry, pedantic, didactic, and emotionally flat. They may get a good number of people nodding their heads and agreeing in the safety of their homes, but they won’t get them out in the street, running and shaking their fists in the air and screaming at the tops of their lungs for an end to Metep and his rotten Imperium.” She whirled and faced Sayers. “They won’t work!”

  “They’re all we’ve got.”

  Mora saw the three spools sitting in a row beside the vid set. With one swift motion she snatched them up, hurled them into the dissociator in the corner, and activated it.

  Sayers leaped forward, but too late. “No!” He stared at her in disbelief. “Do you realize what you’ve done? Those were the only copies!”

  “Good. Now we’ll have to think of something else.”

  She paused. It had been necessary to destroy the spools. As long as they remained intact, Sayers would have felt duty-bound to find a way to broadcast them. But with them now gone beyond any hope of retrieval, he was free to act on his own – and to listen to her. Mora had already concocted a variation on Peter’s basic plan. But she would need help – Flinter help. With Josef dead and Kanya gone she knew not where, Mora would have to turn to other Flinters. They were available, filtering down in a steady stream over the past few weeks, setting up isolated enclaves, waiting for the time when their services would be needed.

  Mora knew where to find them.

  ALMOST THERE. Gasping for breath, Broohnin stopped on a rise and looked back at the dim glow that was Primus City. Last year it would have lit up half the sky at this distance, but with glo-globes fast becoming an endangered species on its streets, the city was a faint ghost of its former self. He sat down for a moment and scanned the terrain behind him, watching for any sign of movement as his lungs caught up to his body.

  After a long moment of intense scrutiny, he was satisfied. His eyes were adjusted to the darkness and he saw no one on his trail, not even an animal. He had come a long way; his muscles were protesting as much now as they had on the Earth jaunt. He had allowed himself to get soft again… but he had to push on. A little farther out from the city and he’d feel safe.

  The trigger was still in his hand, although the activating button was locked. No problem there… not many small locks could stand for long against his years of experience in bypassing them. He bet it wasn’t even a true lock… the trigger was most likely protected by a simple safety mechanism. When he reached a spot he considered safe, he was sure he could release it with a minimum of ado.

  Heaving himself again to his feet, he forced his protesting muscles onward. Not far now. Not too much longer. Then it was good-by Imperium. He had originally planned to hold the trigger back, use it as a trump card in his continuing battle with LaNague. But that was out of the question now. Somewhere along the path of his flight from Primus he had stopped to rest in an all-night tavern near the city limits. He could have used an ale but there was none to be had. As it was, nearly all of his cash went for a small wedge of cheese anyway. It was in the tavern that he learned of Robin Hood’s arrest.

  At first he thought it was a hoax or a mistake, but the face that filled the projection field of the tavern’s holovid was LaNague’s. Caught him red-handed, they said, and were holding him under heavy guard in the Imperium Complex. Broohnin had rushed out of the tavern then, continuing his flight from Primus at full speed.

  The revolution was over. Without LaNague to direct things, it would sputter and stall and die. Broohnin hated to admit it, but the ugly truth wouldn’t go away: only LaNague had the power to marshal the various forces necessary to bring the tottering Imperium all the way down. Only he had the authority to command the Flinters and who-knew-what-other resources. Only he knew what the final phase of the revolution was to be.

  Broohnin had nothing except the trigger for the giant Barsky box he had seen buried in Imperium Park. That would be enough to literally decapitate the Imperium by sending Imperium Park and the entire Imperium Complex surrounding it to some unspecified point in time and space. Wherever it ended up, Broohnin was sure it would be far from Throne. Everyone within the Complex – Metep, the entire Council of Five, all the myriad petty bureaucrats – along with a few early risers in the park, would vanish without a trace, without warning.

  He had an urge to stop where he was, find the way to release the trigger, and activate the box now. But that might mean a less than completely satisfactory result. He had to wait until mid-morning when the Complex was acrawl with all the lice that kept the huge bureaucracy f
unctioning. To destroy the Imperium Complex before then was to risk missing a key person, perhaps Metep himself.

  He’d have to wait, and wait out here, far from the city. Much as he would have loved to see the Complex and all it represented flash from view and existence, he preferred to keep a safe distance between himself and the event, and stroll into Primus later to see the open pit where the Imperium had been.

  He smiled as he thought of something else: he would also be looking at the spot where Peter LaNague had been.

  HAWORTH AWAKENED WITH A START. The vidphone had activated the auto shut-off in his alpha cap, thrusting him immediately up to consciousness. He pulled it off and leaned over to activate the receiver. He would accept the call once he saw who was on the other end.

  “Daro!” It was Jek. Metep VII had finally come out of his stupor. “Daro, you there?”

  Haworth keyed in his transmitter so Metep could see and hear his chief adviser. “Yes, Jek, I’m here. What is it?”

  “Why wasn’t I told of the Robin Hood capture immediately?” His manner was haughty, his voice cold. He was in one of his Why-wasn’t-I-consulted-first moods, a recurrent state of whenever he felt that Haworth and the council were making too many independent decisions. Fortunately, they were short lived.

  “You were sitting not two meters away from me when the word came.” He kept his tone light but drove his point home quickly and cleanly: “Trouble was, you weren’t conscious.”

  “I should have been awakened! It had been a long day and I was dozing, waiting for the news. I should have been told immediately!”

  Haworth looked closely at Metep’s image. This was not the anticipated reaction. A quick comment about Jek’s overindulgence in one gas or another was usually sufficient to deflate him, eliciting a nervous laugh and a change of subject. But this was something new. He seemed to have puffed up his self-importance beyond the usual level, to a point where he was impervious to casual barbs. That worried Haworth.