Deathworld

Charlie started to fold the file up preparatory to tossing it into the ring. This particular file was going to be useful for him. Most of the other coroners' blood and tox results had had rather minimal information about the dead person's blood chemistry. This one listed blood fractions that Charlie had only heard of in his most recent study. Whoever was working tox here was seriously interested in genetic microfractions, as well as-

Charlie stopped and looked curiously at one molecule that was hanging in the air off to one side. It looked familiar. He put the main file aside and went over to it, plucked it out of the air, turned it several different ways, looking at it. 'Mark, hang on a minute.'

'Okay, but no more than that. Whatcha got?'

'This looks familiar.'

'It looks like Tinkertoys,' Mark said. 'Thought you were a little old for this kind of thing.'

Charlie upended the molecule, tried looking at it from another angle. It didn't help. 'Squirt, don't push your luck. Home system-'

'Online.'

'Let me see this as golf balls.'

'Processing.'

The construct in his hands changed, got bulkier, and the 'sticks' between the colored balls vanished, the chemical bonds now expressing themselves as spots where the balls squashed together. This was the method that his physics teacher had trained him to prefer, almost against Charlie's will, but it did work better than sticks and Ping-Pong balls for him. He turned the molecule over in his hands again, trying to find the best way to hold it. The benzene ring at one end suddenly triggered a memory, and so did the bromate structure sticking out of the middle of it.

'Charlie,' Mark said, 'you should save this for later… we really oughta get out of here.'

Mark, getting nervous? It was worth seeing, though Charlie wasn't willing to linger under the circumstances. Nonetheless, he grinned to himself briefly. 'Right. But one thing first. Home system-'

'Ready.'

'Orthodox name for the compound.'

'Scorbutal cohydrobromate.'

Charlie's eyes narrowed. Oh, no. Oh, no. 'I hate this,' he growled.

Mark looked up at him. Charlie refused to repeat himself. 'Come on,' he said, folding up the file and chucking it through Mark's copying ring. It vanished, and the ring as well. 'Let's get the heck out of here.'

They hurriedly backtracked the way they had come, through a shortcut Mark had 'wire-cut' to the outer security perimeter. He had to stop to reweave the wire, patching his cuts, but it didn't take him too long… which was as well, for far away, inside the 'blockhouse' away inside the wire, Charlie thought he could hear sirens wailing. 'Company?' he said.

'No kidding. Their security program woke up. Took it long enough-' The implementation was getting louder, as if closing in on them, and Charlie had no desire to see what form it was going to take when it finally appeared in their neighborhood. The last hole chopped into the outermost fence rewove itself. it!' Mark said to his penetration program, and then he and Charlie were once more standing in the darkness of his own workspace, surrounded by the light-forest of the Digamma penetration program.

Mark let out a long breath, and suddenly looked very thirteen. 'These guys had it a little more on the ball than the others,' he said.

Charlie grinned. 'Not necessarily a bad thing. But Mark, you're not afraid of getting caught, are you?'

'Not much. I mean, no, of course not. It's just that, you know…'

'That that one was closer than you like to get.' Charlie looked at him. 'You want to call it quits?'

'No. Let's finish.'

'Good,' Charlie said, because they were shy only one set of information now, and it would be a shame to have to stop without it. There would alWays be that nagging doubt that some single important thing had been missed, the one piece of data which would have clinched the case…

But Charlie rather thought it was clinched already. It would only be a matter of taking all this information home, sitting down with it and comparing everything very carefully. All he needed was the data from their last stop, the coroner's clerk's office in Forestville, Maryland. There the security was almost as nonexistent as it had been in Atlanta, and there Charlie picked up and copied the set of records belonging to the second kid involved in the recent 'double' suicide. They were nowhere near as complete as the New York records had been, but they would have to do. The final raid took them fifteen minutes. At fifteen minutes and ten seconds they were standing in Mark's workspace again, with the forest of light sinking into the virtual floor under their feet. Mark let out a long breath of relief.

'Mark,' Charlie said, 'you're a hero.'

'I'm modest, too,' Mark said, wiping his forehead. 'Ask me about it sometime.' He plopped down in one of the chairs. 'Lights!' he said to his workspace, and the VAB reasserted itself, the angle of the sun having changed slightly, but everything else as it had been before. From high up in the air, the creaky voices of buzzards could be heard, and beside Charlie, piled up on the floor, was a stack of manila files nearly as tall as he was. 'It's all there,' Mark said. 'I'll keep copies secure for you, if you like.'

'I'd appreciate it,' Charlie said.

'No problem. But just what was that you found back in New York?'

Charlie shook his head. 'Bad stuff,' he said softly. 'Ask me later.'

'Mark?' a man's voice said from out of the air around them.

'Ohmigosh, get out of here, it's my dad,' Mark said hurriedly. 'Probably with a brain full of bait.' He leaped for the pile of files, scooped them up and started stuffing them into one of his desk drawers. 'These are encrypting. But I need to wipe my logs of these, and you, before he comes in. Go on, blast out of here!'

Charlie hurriedly headed for his doorway into Mark's space, which appeared a few feet away. 'Mark- thanks!'

'Yeah, yeah, thank me later. When I get back, gimme a shout and tell me what you find!'

'I will!'

Mark vanished. Charlie was left standing in his workspace with a pile of files.

'Son,' he heard his father say from outside in the real world. 'You've been in there for an elephant's age. Want a sandwich?'

'Absolutely,' Charlie muttered. He checked to make sure that the files were saved, and then closed down his workspace and returned to the real world, where his stomach was growling fiercely… but not so much so that it drowned out the nervous muttering in his head.

Scorbutal hydrobromate.

Were these really suicides…?

Late the next afternoon Nick stood out in the softly falling ash, and held very still, listening for something beside the screams of the Damned. He didn't immediately hear the sound he was waiting for, but he was willing to wait for a good while. If there was anything he had been learning in the last couple of days, it was patience.

He was in no hurry to get back to the spot he had finally reached during the session before last, the first 'subbasement' of the Dark Artificer's Keep… even though his money was getting close to running out, even though his folks were getting increasingly interested in 'sitting down and having a talk' with him. Nick had the secrets of the Eighth Circle seriously on his mind, for he was beginning to suspect that there was more to play for, a lot more, than just lifts of new songs and the possibility that you might meet one of the clone-Banes down here.

Nick had decided to follow a hunch. He had gone back to do what Shade told him she'd been doing: to talk to others he found wandering around the ashy wilderness on the far side of the Lake of Tears, and guide them through. At first he wondered whether this had been such a great idea, for the environment responded badly to it. It was as if the crevasses started to target Nick, going out of their way to stitch themselves straight at him as he made his way through the knee-deep ash. He had had a couple of extremely close calls over the first few hours, as the ground stubbornly, even maliciously, opened again and again under his feet. Once, if this had been reality, he would have left the skin of the palms of both hands on the jagged outcropping of rock that was all that kept him from plunging into the lava-filled abyss below. But Nick kept doing what he had decided to do. It was sheer stubbornness, at first. If the environment was going to target him, he was going to outlast it.

After five or six hours of this, things got a little better. The environment started getting less dangerous… or