Quest for the Well of Souls - Jack L. Chalker [104]
A bit more than halfway he was a small figure that they watched anxiously. Wooley and Renard drew weapons and aimed them at Yulin without a word.
Yulin walked nervously, head bobbing, trying to look at both sides of the bridge. Long ago he'd shot a mark into it for the proper place. For a moment he was afraid that the mark had somehow been erased, or that his less efficient vision would miss it, but then—there it was! It was farther along than he remembered, but he hadn't been zapped yet, so that must be it.
Keeping arms upraised, palms out, he stopped and nervously cleared his throat.
"Obie!" he yelled at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing across the chamber and up and down the great shaft. "There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet! Hear me, Obie? There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet!"
He hesitated a moment more, took a deep breath, and walked on.
Nothing happened.
He reached the other end of the bridge, a tiny figure very far away and almost invisible to all but Wooley, whose pistol remained firm and dead on.
Yulin looked down at the body. It was badly charred and decomposed. Very ugly. That bastard Belden deserved every volt of it, he thought without pity.
The door slid back and he was surprised to feel a warm blast of air greet him. He stepped inside, then to one side and immediately to the control panel.
He flipped it on.
"Defense mode returned to my voice signal cancel only!" he said quickly, entering a series of numbers through the key pad on a control panel. The door slid rapidly shut.
"Defense mode on," Obie's voice said, as if from thin air. "You haven't changed a bit, have you, Ben?"
He chuckled. "Hello, Obie. Well, a little. I—" He stopped suddenly, noting that the dish—the platform used by Obie, the one from which the guests had received their tails and from which he'd received the disguises he used to escape from New Pompeii—was on active, ready to energize.
"Cancel that energize!" he ordered into the operator's mike. He walked over to the rail and looked down.
He saw a large oval, more than a hundred meters across at its widest by about seventy. A railed three-meter-wide balcony on which were located three control consoles was elevated above it. From the balcony, stairs led to the lower level, in the center of which was a metal disk raised perhaps a half-meter. Above it Obie's dish hung from its boom.
Ben Yulin gasped. Someone was on the disk—two people in fact. Humans!
"Hey! You on the disk! I'm Ben Yulin! Who are you!"
They looked slightly fearful, glancing at the little dish above them.
"Obie can't help you," he called, his voice echoing. "I control him now. Who are you?"
One of the figures sighed. "Hello, Ben." It was a pleasant, soft female voice. "I guess we're back to the beginning again. I'm Nikki Zinder, and this is my daughter, Mavra."
"Well I'll be damned!"
The Other Side of the Bridge
Renard had tried the system after the door slammed shut, and Wooley had fired a shot, but it was too late, meaningless.
It took the Agitar only a few steps to discover that the bridge was indeed still energized.
"Renard! Come on back!" Wooley called. "Maybe he was lying about those guns, maybe not. But you'll never get that door open on your own! Why take the risk? The bastard's double-crossed us and we have to retrench!"
Reluctantly the Agitar agreed with her, turned, and walked back. The voltage pulses struck him repeatedly until he reached the center of the bridge, but to no effect—except that he was fully charged for the first time in many years. It was a heady feeling to carry over eight thousand volts; it made an Agitar male light-headed and gave him the feeling he could do anything. Still, he made his way back to the far end of the bridge.
"Don't touch me!" he warned them. "I'll have to discharge some of this, or I'll kill somebody!"
He finally found a section of metal rail that didn't seem to be connected by a conductive material to anything nearby, tried a short jolt, then discharged about two thousand volts.
"So, now what?"