Lethal Velocity Read online

  Downstage, poor Olmstead was getting mauled by an enraged griffin, right on schedule. Swinging Perilous above his head, Hagen raced forward to attack. One of the griffins turned toward him, its mechanical eyes glowing bright red. Careful to keep the creature between him and the audience, Hagen gave a mighty thrust with Perilous, missing the griffin by a good six inches. Offstage, the handler worked his remote control, and the mechanical beast jerked and fell over, writhing on the ground, smoke darting from its mouth. It was a very realistic effect, and the crowd cheered wildly.

  Now, Hagen leaped over the body of his fallen shield bearer and raced toward the queen, dispatching a second griffin in the process. Already it was getting hot inside the armor. Sweat was beading on his forehead. There was a bank of small monitors, concealed behind the footlights at the front of the stage, providing the actors with views from the audience perspective. Hagen had learned to keep a careful eye on them. Even though his part lasted only two minutes, it was easy to get disoriented amid the smoke and laser light.

  He came forward, placing himself before the queen and raising his shield toward the archmage.

  “Varlet!” he cried. “By Goddes herte, cease thy alchemy!”

  The wizard gave another menacing laugh, gathered himself for another spell. The lights flickered, and the stage trembled as the subwoofers cut in again. Hagen glanced down through his visor toward the monitors, checking his placement, making sure he was half-turned toward the audience. When Mymanteus launched his spell, a laser would bounce off Hagen’s helmet, then carom wildly around the set, synced to more explosions. He’d fall, arms outstretched, victim of the evil archmage’s mindblast. It was a great effect, a real crowd pleaser. Hagen wanted to get it right his last day on the job.

  There was an unearthly shrieking noise; the wizard lifted his arms; a bluish beam shot from his outstretched fingers. Hagen kept his eyes on the monitor. He never tired of seeing this.

  Only this time, it looked different. The wizard’s beam did not reflect off his helmet, shimmering and coruscating into the smoke and haze. Instead, the laser pierced the helmet and lanced straight through Hagen’s head, emerging out the other side and heading stage left in an unwavering line. In the monitor, it looked as if a glowing knitting needle had been thrust through his jaws. The crowd roared its approval.

  But Hagen did not hear them. There was no pain, really: just a steady heat that refused to go away, and a pressure inside his skull that grew, and still grew, until one by one the rest of his senses dropped away and he crumpled to the stage.

  —

  MOMENTS LATER, THE curtain rang down to a thunderous cannonade of fireworks that burst below the tower rooflines and threw delicate traceries of color down toward the audience. The violent echoes quickly gave way to clapping and wild cheering as the crowd, with one mind, rose to its feet.

  The other side of the curtain was a scene of frenetic activity. Actors trotted toward dressing rooms, high-fiving each other; wardrobe assistants feverishly checked costumes for wear and tear; engineers began resetting props for the next performance. All ignored the booming wall of noise from beyond the curtain. The fireworks specialist examined his decibel meter, jotted some notes. In a distant corner, one of the nannies was scolding the sennet-player—a waif no older than ten—for holding his trumpet improperly. Only Roger Hagen remained motionless, sprawled facedown across the boards of the stage.

  Now Olmstead, his shield bearer, ambled up. “Hey, no laying down on the job,” he grinned, nudging Hagen with a booted foot.

  When Hagen remained still, Olmstead’s crooked grin widened. “What is this, Method acting?” he said. “I’m fresh out of Oscars, pal.”

  Still no response, and now the grin began to fade. “Hey, Roger, what’s the gag?” Olmstead asked, kneeling beside the motionless knight and shaking him gently.

  As he shook Hagen a second time, Olmstead noticed something. His gaze shifted to Hagen’s helmet. He bent closer, sniffing, detecting an odor of cooked meat.

  And then he leaped to his feet, his frantic shouts barely audible over the unceasing roar of the crowd.

  BOB ALLOCCO, HEAD of Park Security, had seen or heard just about everything in the six months since Utopia had opened. But he’d never seen anything like this.

  He stood in the monitoring station at the exit to Griffin Tower, watching through privacy glass as the audience streamed out of the theater. There was laughter, whistling, a little horseplay: the usual antics of a crowd keyed to fever pitch by the excitement of a show. If anything, they seemed more enthusiastic than usual. He snapped the mike channel open to listen to the exit chatter.

  “Awesome!” one kid was saying to another. “You check out those cool-looking dragons?”

  “They weren’t dragons, lamer,” said the other. “They were griffins. Don’t you know anything?”

  An old lady passed by the hidden doorway, fanning herself with a guidemap. “Merciful heavens,” she said to an even older woman at her side. “Those fireworks, practically in my face…you know, I thought I’d have to leave, with my heart and all.”

  “See how that knight died?” a man pushing a baby stroller said to his wife. “Zap, right through the head. Wonder how they managed that?”

  “That wasn’t so great,” the woman replied. “They can do anything with special effects these days. But that big old chunk of tower practically falling on top of us—now, that was something else.”

  Allocco waited, silently running a balm stick over his lips, as the last of the crowd filed out. Then he opened the door, nodded to the costumed hosts and hostesses, and stepped into the theater. The fallen tower section was being lifted back into position with a whine of hydraulics. Huge air scrubbers were venting the pall of smoke and gunpowder out through overhead ducts.

  He stood between the rows, glancing up at the high walls of artificial stonework. He had a bad feeling, of course: but then, he always seemed to have a bad feeling whenever the Park was open. Allocco liked Utopia best at 6:00 A.M.—the way it was meant to be seen, when staff was at a minimum and no guests were around to sully the illusion. Then he could walk through the cobbled streets of Gaslight or the skyways of Callisto without worrying about lost children, or poor health risks, or lawsuit seekers. Or drunken frat boys.

  Just last week, three motorcycle thugs had decided to go skinny-dipping in the Boardwalk boat pond. It had taken eight security officers to convince them to put on their clothes and leave. The week before, a Portuguese tourist objected to the two-hour wait to get into Event Horizon and pulled a knife on the cast member working the queuing line. Allocco shook his head. Security specialists were forbidden to carry weapons, even in self-defense. No Mace, no billy clubs—and sure as hell no firearms. They had to rely on their smiles, their powers of persuasion. Not exactly a match for a nine-millimeter. A Portuguese-speaking security officer had managed to talk the guy down—but it had been touch and go for a couple of minutes.

  Allocco walked down the carpeted aisle to the front of the house, then climbed onto the stage and ducked behind the curtain. Cast members were standing around in small groups, still in costume, speaking in low tones. Allocco shooed them away. Then he walked toward a white-clad figure kneeling over the man in armor, lying motionless on the boards.

  The knight’s helmet had been placed to one side. Allocco picked it up, turning it over in his hands. Puncture holes, small and very precise, had been drilled through each cheekplate. Allocco hefted the helmet, sighting through the holes. There was remarkably little blood. The helmet smelled of scorched metal and overdone hamburger. He put it aside and turned toward the kneeling doctor.

  “How is he?” he asked.

  “The laser cut clean through both cheeks,” the doctor replied. “Skin abrasions, tissue damage, muscle trauma. What you’d expect. The tongue is scorched, and he’ll probably lose two, maybe three teeth. And he’ll have one hell of a headache when he wakes up. But he’s lucky to be alive.” He glanced up. “If that beam had
been a couple of inches higher, we’d need a body bag instead of a stretcher.”

  Allocco grunted.

  “We can suture him up in Central Medical, but he’ll probably need some cosmetic surgery down the road. Shall I call Lake Mead, get an ambulance up here?”

  Allocco thought about John Doe. “No. Not yet. Just stabilize him downstairs. Let me know if his condition changes.”

  The doctor signaled to an orderly hovering nearby, and Allocco turned away. Downstage, near the wings, the stage manager was watching a couple of techs bring something down on a ladder. As Allocco drew closer, he could see it was a robot. It looked like a cart on wheels, topped by a long white tube—a laser head—with a lens at one end and a bundle of control wires snaking out from the other. The lens was shattered and hanging loose in its coupling. The top of the laser head had been peeled back like a zipper, jagged ends of bare metal charred and smoking.

  The techs placed the robot gingerly on the ground.

  “Which one of you is the laser safety officer?” Allocco asked.

  The taller of the two turned toward him. “I’m the LSO for Camelot, sir.”

  “Want to tell me what happened?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” The LSO swallowed painfully. He looked very frightened. “It’s only a thirty-watt head, I can’t understand, it doesn’t make sense…”

  “Slow down, son.” Allocco pointed at the robot. “Just tell me what went wrong.”

  “It’s an argon laser with a multiline air-cooled head. We needed argon because the beam had to match the blue color of the archmage’s blasts.”

  “Go on.” If he let the guy blab long enough, he might say something important.

  “And we couldn’t use a standard light-show controller because there’s no script to follow. You know?”

  Allocco nodded sympathetically. He knew the procedure. “It had to hit the knight, every time. But you couldn’t know precisely where the knight would be standing when the effect went off.”

  The man nodded. “There was an extra bot hanging around. They used to use it for some maintenance duty and didn’t want it anymore. Somebody got a bright idea.”

  The man’s look of fear grew even more pronounced. I can guess who that someone was, Allocco thought. He remained silent.

  “Anyway, so they mounted an argon head on it, fixed the bot to that overhead track, stage right.” He pointed. “That woman in Robotics—Teresa? She modified it to track an infrared beam on the knight’s helmet. At the trigger event, it fired the laser right down the IR signal.”

  “And how long has this been in operation?”

  “Since a couple weeks after the show opened. Almost three months now, four times a day. No problems.”

  “No problems.” Allocco pointed at the ruined housing. “What could make it overload like that?”

  “Never seen anything like it, sir. It must have exceeded its normal output by a factor of one hundred.”

  Allocco gave the man a sidelong glance. “You know, OSHA’s going to want to evaluate this incident.”

  The laser safety officer paled. For a moment, Allocco wondered if he might faint.

  “Your compliance chart is up to date?” Allocco asked in a more soothing tone.

  The man nodded again. “We follow Z-136 like a book.” ANSI Z-136 was the set of laser safety standards set by industry, research, and government. “Weekly evaluations, as specified. Hazard zone re-evaluation, maintenance, interlocks—”

  “Good boy. Now, I want you to take this thing downstairs, do a postmortem. Let me know what you find.”

  He glanced toward the stage manager, who had been listening in silence to this exchange. “No more lasers for the archmage, at least for the foreseeable future,” he said. “Can you cobble something together for the 4:20?”

  “I’ll have to, won’t I?” The stage manager turned and followed the techs backstage, disappearing into the dim tunnel that led toward the dressing rooms.

  Allocco watched her leave. Then he plucked his radio from his pocket and spoke into it. “Command Nine Seven, this is Thirty-three.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pull up the Griffin Tower history. Any intrusion alerts over the last twenty-four hours?”

  “Just a moment.” Allocco waited through the faint whisper of static. “No, sir. One beam is open, otherwise it’s clean.”

  “One beam’s open? Where’s the interrupt?”

  There was a tapping of keys. “Griffin Tower 206. West aspect, catwalk 4.”

  “And what time did the beam transmit an open signal?”

  “About five minutes ago, sir. You want me to send someone up to clear it?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll check it myself. Ignore any more tower alerts until I radio back.”

  Allocco returned the radio to his pocket and walked farther backstage, looking thoughtfully up at the webbing of spars and metal beams that formed the skeleton of Griffin Tower.

  The public areas of Utopia were surrounded by networks of intrusion mats and more modern infrared beams. They ensured that guests stayed safely inside their cars during rides; that they didn’t wander, intentionally or otherwise, into potentially dangerous backstage areas. Somebody passing by and interrupting an infrared beam would cause only a temporary break. When a beam stayed open, it almost always meant hardware failure.

  Besides, what guest would climb up into those metal rafters—avoiding all other intrusion sensors—and then sit, motionless, in the path of one?

  Allocco looked up at the metal track the laser-wielding robot had run along. Then he glanced back at the spot on the stage where the wounded knight had lain a moment before.

  It was crazy. Yet Allocco knew he had to check it out nevertheless.

  The gray-painted rungs of the metal ladder were cool to the touch. He pulled himself up carefully, hand over hand. It had been a long time since he’d climbed a backstage ladder—or jogged, or swum, or done much physical activity other than walk—and in less than a minute he began to puff. He rose past various strata of backstage gear: guy wires, curtain pulleys, black conduits of communications and power lines.

  It grew darker. The sounds of life from below—the murmur of voices, the brief tinkle of a troubadour’s song—grew very faint. Overhead now, he could make out a catwalk, the number 2 stenciled on its underside in white paint. He pulled himself up onto it, puffing more heavily. To one side was a spotter’s station, equipped with binoculars and a telephone. During performances, this span would be alive with activity. Now, it was deserted. A narrow band of fluorescent lights was set into the wall above the catwalk, ensuring that the stagehands would not run into each other as they scurried to and fro.

  Allocco walked twenty feet along the catwalk to the next ladder. With a sigh, he grasped the rungs and began to ascend once again.

  It was a longer climb to catwalk 3. When he reached it, Allocco swung himself up, took a seat on the hard grillwork, and rested his back against the walkway railings. He could feel the sweat on his back, damp where his shirt touched the metal railing. This was crazy. He should have let them send up a standard security team. Or, better still, just have Maintenance look into it. But he’d come this far, might as well follow through. God knew he needed the exercise.

  He looked around, breathing heavily. He was now at the level of the backstage ceiling. The light was fainter here, but at the far end of the catwalk he could make out a large bulkhead: housing for the hydraulics that dropped the breakaway section of masonry toward the audience at the climax of the show. Above his head, the interior and exterior walls came together: a narrow vertical channel forming the facade of Griffin Tower. Down catwalk 3 he could see the base of another ladder, rising into darkness overhead. He waited a minute, then another, catching his breath. And then he pulled himself to his feet. Too much to do to sit around here all day.

  Climbing up inside the skin of the tower proved much more difficult. If he leaned out too far from the ladder, his back would brush against the sur
face of the inner wall, the fake stonework coarse and nubbly. He was forced to stay close to the rungs, using his arms to pull himself up. By the time the shadowy outlines of catwalk 4 came into view overhead, the muscles of his arms were shaking. Gasping for breath, he heaved himself upward.

  This catwalk was only used for maintenance and infrequent safety checks, and it was very dark. Hard to believe that just on the other side of the outer wall were bright sunlight, strolling minstrels, the laughter of tourists. Allocco leaned against the ladder, feeling the hammering cadence of his heart. Great: he’d have a heart attack up here, and nobody would find him for at least a week.

  After a minute, as his breathing slowed, he reached into his shirt pocket and drew out a penlight. It threw a puny, threadlike beam onto the catwalk overhead. Why hadn’t he thought to bring a real flashlight?

  He climbed the final rungs, stepping onto catwalk 4. It was narrow, with a high railing. Even though he could see only darkness under his feet, Allocco was all too aware of the great drop to the stage below. He felt unpleasantly like a small insect, crawling along the inside rim of a Mason jar.

  The catwalk ran in both directions, vanishing into blackness. West aspect, they’d said. Allocco took a moment to orient himself, then moved forward cautiously, penlight sweeping a path ahead of him.

  After a moment, his light picked up the telltale housing of an IR sensor, fixed to the railing about a foot above the ground. Artfully concealed, but still easy to find if you knew what to look for. Allocco knelt beside it, directing his light over the faceplate. GT-205. That meant the defective intrusion sensor must be the next one down the line. Thank God. He rose to his feet and began to move forward again.