The Chrome Borne Read online

  "Exactly," Sam said, feeling a wash of contentment come over him, despite the threats of the morning. Donal and Rob had told him, over and over again, that Donal could make these invisible mods to the computer-driven casting equipment, but until he'd seen it, he hadn't dared believe it.

  "I hate to admit it, but you did good, Conal," Rob told the Sidhe.

  "Thank ye kindly, Skippy," Donal replied, slapping the little mechanic on the back so hard he staggered. "Gents, I have t' be off; I've got mods to put in on m' brother's car."

  "I don't think we'll need your particular expertise any more today, Donal," Sam said absently, as he ran another "casting" through the system, and this time got perfect "results." "Everything else Rob and I can fake without mucking with the computers."

  Everyone was behaving perfectly normally; Sam was taking his cue from the rest, in spite of the fact that tonight would be anything but normal.

  Assuming Vidal Dhu carried out his threats. He might not, according to Donal. He might simply have issued a challenge without intending to follow through on it seriously.

  "He's done that before," Donal had said, sourly. " 'Tis worth it to him just t' muck us up for a night, make us waste energy and magical strength to counter a threat that was never real. Make us jumpy, make us chase our tails from midnight t'dawn, and all for naught."

  The tall Sidhe (who reminded Sam strongly of G.E. Smith from the Saturday Night Live band) turned at the door and sketched a mocking salute before heading for the main shop building. As Sam and Rob finished setting up the rest of the equipment, with Rob running the fork-lift and Sam supervising the placement, Sam finally had the chance to ask a question that had been plaguing the life out of him all day.

  "What's with this `Skippy' business?" he asked, as they brought the second smelter up online and plugged its controls into the computer console.

  Rob laughed, and rubbed his short black beard with a finger. "That's from when I first came into Fairgrove," he said. "They already thought I was nuts, 'cause I do imitations of televangelists and bad game-show hosts at the drop of a hat. But then I kept seeing this one Sidhe all over, like, within seconds of the time I'd seen him somewhere else. And half the time, when I'd call him `Donal,' he'd glare at me like I was simpleminded and say his name was Conal. I thought I was going crazy. Then somebody finally told me that there were two of the bastards, they were twins, and they'd been having a good laugh at my expense." Rob chuckled. "I didn't mind, I mean, if they'd been human that's the first thing I would have thought, but who ever heard of twin Sidhe? The birthrate's so low I'd never have believed it."

  "So?" Sam replied. "That doesn't explain `Skippy.' "

  "Well, I turned the tables on them. Half the time when one of them saw me and called me `Rob,' I'd glare and say my name was Skippy. And when I was Skippy is when I'd do the really outrageous stuff, like try to sell Donal his own tool-kit or something." Rob's grin was so infectious that Sam found himself grinning in return. "They actually started to think I had a really crazy twin myself, named Skippy. It was weeks before anyone ever told them the human bad-movie joke about `the evil twin, Skippy.' I thought when Dottie finally broke down and confessed that they were both gonna hang me right then and there."

  Sam joined in Rob's laughter. "I'm surprised they didn't," he commented.

  "I'd rather have been well-hung!" Rob grinned, and made sure the smelter was staying cold even though the computer console said it was red-hot. "Those two have a lot better sense of humor than anyone except Keighvin. I think it comes from hanging around Tannim so much."

  Sam's response surprised even himself. "A lot of good things seem to come from hanging around Tannim," he said softly, half to himself. Then, a little embarrassed, he glanced over at Rob to see if the young man had overheard him.

  Rob was nodding, uncharacteristically sober. "They do," he said, then—

  "Sam, I have to tell you, I've got this great deal on a set of Ginsu steak knives, and if you order now, you get a free bamboo steamer—"

  Sam chased him out of the building, brandishing a broom.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Although she had every sense at her command locked onto her quarry, Aurilia "lost" the pair to everything but sight the moment they entered Tannim's car—and she lost the vehicle itself to President Street traffic soon after. The protections on the vehicle might have been set by Keighvin Silverhair, but Aurilia doubted it. Whatever other powers the boy had, he certainly drove like a demon. Once again she found herself forced to admit to a kind of grudging admiration for one of the enemy. . . .

  But not for long. The aggravation of losing quickly overwhelmed the admiration. Damn him, anyway. Crafty little monster. Where did he learn all that? Surely not from Silverhair. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect they'd managed to find some devil actually interested in buying his skinny little soul. . . .

  Still, Aurilia hadn't practiced her own particular brand of subterfuge for so many centuries without learning patience. She found herself an out-of-the-way spot in one of the little "pocket parks" and sat in her Mercedes. Tannim could cloak himself, and even his car—but once the girl left his presence, she would register to Aurilia's mage-senses. And the girl was really what Aurilia was after at the moment.

  It took longer than Aurilia had thought it would, but towards sunset, the girl finally "appeared" to Aurilia's inner eye. She quickly triangulated with a mental map of the town, and determined that the girl was at the corner of Bee and Wheaton streets.

  She reached out in thought, and seized mentally on the nearest pigeon, taking over what little mind it had with her own. Pigeons were possibly the stupidest creatures on the planet, but that stupidity made them remarkably easy to enslave. When she was done with it, it would drop dead of shock, of course, but that didn't matter. One more dead pigeon on the sidewalk would excite no one except a feral cat or dog.

  She sent the bird winging in a direct line to the area where the girl loitered. With sunset coming, a pigeon was perhaps not the best choice of slave-eyes, but it would do. A grackle would have been better, but like all the corbies, it would have fought back too much, wasting time and energy before she could take it. An owl was the best, but Silverhair used those, the bastard. And frequently owls were not what they appeared to be.

  She caught only glimpses of what the pigeon saw; just enough to guide it to her target. Fortunately, the girl was fairly conspicuous with her bleached-blond hair, even from above. Though darkness had fallen, the shock of pale straw made a kind of beacon for the bird's dimmed eyesight. So although the pigeon was not much good at flying by street-lamps, once the bird had the girl in sight, Aurilia had it land on a rooftop, and follow her in short flights, from tree to phone-line, to rooftop again.

  Even by daylight the pigeon's eyesight wasn't particularly good, as birds went, but Aurilia made out enough detail that she was forced to wonder what on earth Tannim saw in this appalling little creature. It certainly wasn't her looks. She was scrawny, underfed, a modern version of one of Aurilia's own Victorian Street-Sparrow constructs. Clean—well, Aurilia would give her that much. She was clean. And young, if your taste ran to children. But cheap, tacky—tasteless. Perhaps that was why her glamorie at the pub hadn't worked—maybe Tannim was only attracted to cheap tarts. Maybe he only enjoyed sex with hookers, children, or both. . . . But that didn't fit his profile, didn't fit anything she'd been able to learn about him.

  Peculiar. Once she'd seen him, he hadn't struck her that way; in fact, his attitude towards the girl, so far as she had been able to make out, was positively chaste. In any case, the girl's parents had to know what she was doing, unless they were even stupider than the pigeon.

  The girl wound her way farther and deeper into one of the bad areas off Wheaton. Well, now it wasn't much of a surprise that she'd had Tannim drop her back there on the corner. Aurilia didn't wonder now why the girl hadn't wanted Tannim to see where she lived; she was probably ashamed of her home. If she lived here, her parents couldn't b
e much better than what was locally termed "poor white trash." That might be why they didn't put any restrictions on her dress, her movement, or her behavior—they probably didn't care.

  The girl suddenly dashed across a street and up an enclosed staircase, catching Aurilia by surprise. She sent the pigeon to perch in a tree outside the first lighted window she saw.

  She peered short-sightedly at the window, trying to determine if the bird could get any closer, and discovered that luck was with her. The girl passed in front of it, showing it was the right one; and not only that, it was open, with no screen to keep her from perching on the ledge.

  She moved the pigeon in a fluttering hop from branch to ledge, and poked the bird's head cautiously inside. The place was appalling: filthy, bug-ridden, falling to pieces, with the only furniture being pallets on the floor. There were two rooms to the place; the girl and two other youngsters were in this one, and voices from the door beyond proved that there were at least two more in the other room. There were no parents, no adults of any kind, anywhere in sight. Within moments of listening to the conversation between the children, it was clear to her that there were no adults in residence in the tiny apartment at all. There were perhaps a half dozen children living there, and now Aurilia knew exactly why the girl had looked and acted the way she did—for she recognized one of the other children. There was a girlishly-pretty young boy on a pallet at the side of the room, sleeping the profound sleep of the drugged with his face turned towards the window. Aurilia knew him very well indeed; she had just spent the past week editing film that had his face—and other parts—all over it.

  It had been the "bondage-party" film (now called "Birthday Boy" and with three thousand copies already on order) that had featured five of their customers and one "pickup." The boy, called "Jamie," if she recalled correctly, was a free-lance hooker and a runaway.

  Suddenly, given Tannim's notorious do-gooder impulses, many things fell into place. That was the attraction, then. Tannim wants to save the girl if he can—and that fits right in with his profile. Meddling fool. Typical hero-wishing. Save her for what? A life of food-service? Well, if he wanted to waste his time and resources on dead-end losers, Aurilia wasn't going to stop him. Particularly not when his little hobby fit right in with Aurilia's own plans. Not only her plans, but the current projects for Studio Two.

  She withdrew her power in a burst of triumph, abruptly, allowing the pigeon to tumble unnoticed to the ground.

  * * *

  Tannim had expected Keighvin to jump all over him when he got back to the Fairgrove complex. After all, he had been scheduled to run test laps at Roebling, not spend the afternoon watching container ships and lolling around on the grass, however noble his motives.

  Maybe if I just tell him the truth . . . edited. Emphasizing the need the child's in, and leaving out the lolling on the grass and the picnic dinner.

  But as he wound his way through the offices, a change in the schedule posted beside the machine-shop door caught his eye. It would have been hard not to notice it; under the track schedule was a red-circled "canceled" notice.

  When he read it, he had to grin. The old luck comes through again. Excellent. Some time between when he'd left for lunch and when he was supposed to return, Keighvin had changed the scheduling. The track had been closed this afternoon for repairs after some damage from a tire-test this morning.

  A tire-test? What the hey?

  He grabbed the first person he saw when he got into the shops. "What happened at the track this morning?" he asked.

  The mechanic, Donal—one of Keighvin's Sidhe, and Tannim's oldest friend Underhill except for Keighvin—grinned wryly. "Hard to believe, eh? Wouldn't have believed it meself if I hadna seen it. We had a series of new tires for the GTP test mule—same mule you were supposed to check brake mods and suspension geometry on. Well, seems our mods or the tires or both were a little too good." Tannim watched the elven man rock back on his heels, eyes glittering.

  "So what happened?" he asked, since Donal was obviously waiting for him to make some kind of response.

  "Well, the lateral gees put a three-inch ripple in the asphalt on one of the turns." Donal's grin got even wider, and Tannim didn't blame him; Donal was part of the crew responsible for the handling. This was something of a coup—for a mule to hug the track that hard on the turns said a lot.

  But—a three-inch ripple? That was a lot of lateral. His expression must have said something of his surprise, as Donal held up a hand as if he was swearing to the fact.

  "I promise; I measured it meself. We all saw it—a three-inch lump, plain as Danaa's light, ten feet long. We had to hire a steamroller to flatten the track. Took us the rest of the day. Keighvin figured you'd see the posting and take off."

  Now Donal raised an eyebrow, because Tannim should have known what had happened, since it had undoubtedly been all over the shop; Tannim just shrugged. He wasn't good enough to lie to a Sidhe, so he simply told part of the truth. "You know there's never anyone to answer questions around here in the afternoon. I had a picnic out at the Fort. So, where's Keighvin?"

  "With Sam Kelly, at the forge-shop." Donal grinned again, showing gleaming white teeth, teeth that were a little feral-looking. "Now 'tis a `forge' in more ways than one. Sam seems to have concocted a process that will pass muster, and he's moved that molten-metal equipment we kenned out to the other shop. Says we'll be ready for a cast of thousands."

  "Ech, that's awful. `Forged' engine blocks, hmm?" Tannim indulged the Sidhe; Donal was fond of puns. "And a `forged' process. Well, I'd better get out there and see what Keighvin wants me to do now."

  He wound his way through metal and machinery to the roofed passage that joined this shop to the formerly-empty forge building. He noticed along the way that a lot of the computer-driven equipment was missing; presumably it had been moved to its new home.

  Keighvin should have been glowing with cheer; the mods that had warped the track had certainly proved successful, and now he had a "process" that would explain where his engine blocks and other cast-aluminum pieces were coming from. But when Tannim found him, supervising the set-up and activation of some arcane-looking machine by that insanely cheerful human tech-genius Skippy-Rob, he didn't look particularly happy.

  Tannim wondered if something more had gone wrong than he'd been told, but it wasn't that kind of expression. He'd seen the Sidhe display all kinds of moods, and it was the "unreadable" ones that he feared the most. Keighvin was a gentleman by any creatures' standards, but he had his breaking points, and when he was near one . . . Keighvin looked up and saw him lurking out of the way, then beckoned the young mage over.

  "What's cooking?" Tannim asked casually. "Anything wrong with Sam's phony process?"

  "With the process—nothing," Keighvin replied, rubbing one temple distractedly. "But—Vidal Dhu showed up at Sam's this morning. Not inside the house, but he blocked Sam's driveway long enough to deliver a message."

  "I think I can guess the message," Tannim said slowly.

  Keighvin nodded, grimly. "A threat, of course. At least he didn't say, `And your little dog, too.' The worrisome thing is that he's managed to recruit a corps of lesser nasties, and they're putting pressure on our boundaries. Nothing like overt warfare, but—don't go into the woods after dark."

  "Any things we haven't taken out before?"

  "Nothing any worse, so far as we can tell. I don't like it. And I don't like Sam being outside our hardened boundaries. I'm setting up our spare rooms here as sleeping-quarters for anyone who can't protect themselves, including Sam."

  The man in question had come around the corner during Silverhair's little speech, and waited until he had finished before leaving the work crew and joining them.

  "You're worrying too much, Keighvin," the old man said comfortably. "I've been going over my old gran's stories. I think I can hold off the boggles; enough to permit the cavalry to come over the hill to rescue me, anyway."

  Tannim noticed that the old man w
as wearing what looked like an Uzi holstered at his hip; Sam patted it as he finished his statement.

  Tannim frowned, rubbing his eyes. "Sam, I don't mean to rain on your parade, but plain old bullets aren't going to stop Vidal, and they certainly aren't going to do anything to a creature like a troll that can heal itself—"

  Sam pulled the gun from the holster and handed it to him, wordlessly. Tannim took it—and it sloshed. It was one of the old Uzi-replica water-pistols, and not a real gun at all.

  "One of your local geniuses prepared this for me," the old man said. "That's salt and holy water. That should take care of a fair number of yon blackguard's friends. I've got rosemary, rue, and salt in my pocket, and a horseshoe nail with them. There's an iron plate across every door and windowsill of the house, horse-shoes nailed up over every door and the fireplace, and sprigs of oak, ash, and thorn up there with them. A lass here is preparing iron-filled .357 hollowtips for me Colt, and meanwhile, there's this—"

  He touched the sheath on his other side, and Tannim saw the hilt of a crudely-forged knife. He had no doubt that it was of good Cold Iron. Sam wasn't taking chances on a steel blade.

  "That's all very well," Keighvin warned, "but it won't hold them for long. They'll find ways around your protections and mine, eventually."

  Sam holstered his water-pistol. "Doesn't have to keep them busy for long," he countered. "It'll hold them baffled for long enough. All I have to do now is supervise your setup, put my John Hancock to everything and write up my part in this deal. That's a matter of a couple of weeks at most. The rude bastard can bluster all he wants. Once I'm finished, you don't need me anymore. You just need my name."

  "But what if something goes wrong?" Keighvin asked. "There's nobody here that knows the language—"

  "But this Vidal character doesn't know that," Sam replied. "He's like some of the really old execs at Gulfstream, the ones who didn't understand tech. He may even be a technophobe, for all we know. That kind thinks that once something technological is set in place, it sits and glowers and runs itself with no further help."