A Cosmic Christmas Read online

  Channing nodded silently.

  Arden said: “Don’t kid anybody. Both of you want to know why a fuse should blow on a dead line.”

  Farrell grinned and Channing nodded again. “I—” Don started, but turned as the door opened.

  “Thought we’d find you here,” said Barney Carroll. Jim Baler added: “We got to arguing as to how and why a fuse should blow on an empty line and decided to ask you.”

  Arden squinted at Jim. “Did it ever occur to you that we might have been in bed?”

  Barney grinned. “I figured if we were awake from wondering about it, so would you all. So—”

  Jim interrupted. “So what have you found?”

  Channing shook his head. “Ask Wes,” he said. “He got here first and was measuring the deflecting electrode voltages when I arrived. I note that he has a hunk of copper busbar across the main fuse terminals.”

  Wes smiled sheepishly. “Had to,” he said. “Short was really shorted!”

  “So what have you found?”

  Farrell pointed to a place on a chart of the station. “About here.”

  “Spinach!” said Channing. “There isn’t anything there!”

  Farrell handed the figures to Don. “That’s where the short-circuit load is coming from,” he said.

  “Up there,” said Channing, “I’ll bet it’s hitting close to seventy or eighty degrees below zero. A supercold condition—” He paused and shook his head. “The tube room reached absolute zero some time ago,” he said, “and there’s no heavy drain to that position.”

  “Well?” demanded Arden, yawning. “Do we wait until tomorrow morning or go up there now?”

  Channing thought for a moment. “We’re due to leave in the morning,” he said. “Yet I think that the question of why anything up in an empty section of Venus Equilateral should be blowing fuses would belabor us all of our lives if we didn’t make this last screwball search. Let’s go. Wes, get your portable sun finder, huh?”

  “His what?” Arden asked.

  “Figger of speech, sweet. We mean a small portable relay tube that we can stick in series with his gawd-awful drain and use for a direction finder. I have no intention of trying to scour every storeroom in that area for that which I don’t really believe is there.”

  The main deterrent to swift action was the bitter, bitter cold that stabbed at their faces and hands, which were not enclosed in the electrically heated suits—of which each one of them wore three against the ultra-violent chill.

  “There should be a door here,” objected Don, reading a blueprint from the large roll he carried under his arm. “Fact is, this series of rooms seems to have been sealed off entirely though the blueprint calls for a door, about here!”

  “How would anybody reseal a doorway?” asked Barney.

  “Duplicator,” Don said thoughtfully. “And I smell rats!”

  “So. And how do we get in?” demanded Arden.

  “We break in,” said Channing harshly. “Come along, gang. We’re going back downstairs to get us a cutter!”

  The cutter consisted of a single-focus scanner beam that Don wielded like an acetylene torch. Clean and silently it cut through the metal wall and the section fell inward with a slight crash.

  They stepped in through the opening.

  “Someone has been homesteading,” said Channing in a gritty voice. “Nice prefab home, hey? Let’s add housebreaking to our other crimes. I’d like to singe the heels off the character that did this. And I think I’ll let the main one simmer.”

  “Who?” asked Arden.

  Channing pointed to the huge energy tube at one end of the room. It bore the imprint of Terran Electric.

  “Kingman,” he said drily.

  Applying his cutter to the wall of the cottage, he burned his way through. “No one living here,” he said. “Colder than Pluto in here, too. Look, Wes, here’s your short circuit. Tubes from—”

  “And here,” said Farrell quickly, “are your missing chums!”

  Channing came over to stand beside Farrell, looking down at the too-still forms. Baler looked at Channing with a puzzled glance, and Channing shook his head quietly.

  Then he said: “I may be wrong, but it strikes me that Walt and Christine interrupted skullduggery at work and were trapped as a consequence. No man, no matter how insane, would ever enter a trap like this willingly. This is neither a love nest nor a honeymoon cottage, Jim. This is a death trap!”

  Channing turned from the place and left on a dead run. He paused at the door to the huge room and yelled: “Don’t touch ’em till I get Doc!”

  By the clock, Christmas Day dawned bright and clear. The strip fluorescents came on in the corridors of Venus Equilateral and there began the inexorable flow of people toward the south end landing stage.

  Each man or woman carried a small bag. In this were the several uniques he or she possessed and a complete set of recordings on the rest of his personal possessions. Moving was as easy as that—and once they reached Terra, everything they owned could be reproduced at will. It was both glad and sad, the thrill of a new experience to come balancing the loss of the comfortable routine of the old. Friends, however, managed to get aboard the same spacecraft as a general rule and so the pain of parting was spared them.

  One by one, the huge ships dropped south and then headed for Terra. One by one, until the three-thousand-odd people who lived on, loved, and operated Venus Equilateral through its working years had embarked.

  Channing shook hands with Captain Johannson as he got aboard the last remaining ship. Behind Channing came Keg Johnson, who supervised the carrying aboard of Walt Franks and Christine Baler. They were seated side by side in deck chairs on the operating bridge of the spacecraft and Arden came up to stand beside her husband as she asked: “Captain Johannson, you are empowered to perform matrimony?”

  Johannson nodded.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m the matron of honor and this husband of mine intends to be best man. We agree that the couple there have spent too much time living with one another—”

  “If she says ‘sin’ I’ll strangle her,” groaned Walt.

  Christine reached over and took her hand. “She doesn’t dare,” she said. “She knows it was ah—er—colder than sin!”

  Big Jim Baler clenched and unclenched his hands. “I still think we should have called on Mark Kingman,” he said in a growl.

  Channing shook his head. “And spoil the fine end of a fine holiday? Nope. And also spoil a fine bit of retribution?”

  Linna Johnson smiled. “A man of action like Jim finds the finer points of retribution a bit too smooth,” she said. “But it’ll be plenty rough on Kingman.”

  “To the devil with Kingman,” said Barney Carroll. “I say we ought to commit this ceremony at once and then repair to the bar—or have the bar repair here—and have a last drink to Venus Equilateral.”

  Walt Franks stood up. “I’m still stiff,” he said. “But I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit down at my own wedding.”

  Christine stood beside him. “You’re thinking about that ‘repair to the bar’ and don’t want to get left,” she told him. “Well, frozen solid or not, I’m sticking tight.”

  Johannson turned to the pilot and gave the order. The big ship dropped from the platform and they all looked down through the glass dome at the diminishing view of Venus Equilateral.

  The captain turned to Channing and asked: “Just what did happen to Mark Kingman?”

  “Mark has mortgaged his everlasting black soul to the hilt to maintain communications under the standard franchise. For a period of five years, Mark Kingman must live on that damned station alone in the cold and the loneliness, maintaining once each day a relay contact, or lose his shirt. And because he dropped the Relay Girl into the sun when he planned that ‘elopement,’ we’ve just confiscated his ship. That leaves Kingman aboard a practically frozen relay station with neither the means to get away nor the ability to handle the situation at all. He must sta
y, because when he puts a foot on any planet we clap him in jail for kidnapping. He’s lost his financial shirt because Venus Equilateral is an obsolete commodity and he’ll never regain enough of his personal financial standing to fight such a case. If I were Mark Kingman, about now I’d—”

  Channing shook his head, leaving the sentence unfinished. He turned to Walt. “Got a ring handy?”

  Wes Farrell held up a greenish metal ring that glinted iridescent colors. “Y’might try this new synthetic,” he offered.

  Walt shook his head. He fumbled in an inner pocket and came up with a small band that was very plain. “This is a certified unique,” he said proudly. “It was my mother’s, and grandmother’s, too.”

  Then, with Venus Equilateral still visible in the port below and a whole sky above, Captain Johannson opened his book and started to read. Behind them was work and fun and pain, and before them—

  Was the exciting, unchartered future.

  * * *

  INTRODUCTION

  THE GRIMNOIR CHRONICLES:

  DETROIT CHRISTMAS

  A private eye whose income is shaky can’t turn down a case, even if it’s Christmas time. Even if it involves very dangerous gangsters. Of course, Jake Sullivan is a very tough customer and would be very dangerous himself, even if this weren’t the 1930s in an alternate world where magic (or some sort of mental power that might as well be magic) is real, and Jake has a potentially lethal talent at his disposal. It’s full speed ahead and damn the Tommy guns.

  Larry Correia is hopelessly addicted to two things: guns and B-horror movies. He has been a gun dealer, firearms instructor, accountant, and is now a very successful writer. “The Grimnoir Chronicles: Detroit Christmas” is part of his Grimnoir alternate history urban fantasy series, which also include two novels for Baen Books, Hard Magic and Spellbound. He is also the author of the New York Times best-selling Monster Hunter International series, which presently includes Monster Hunter International, Monster Hunter Vendetta, Monster Hunter Alpha, and Monster Hunter Legion. He shoots competitively and is a certified concealed weapons instructor. Larry resides in Utah with his very patient wife and family.

  * * *

  THE GRIMNOIR CHRONICLES:

  DETROIT CHRISTMAS

  By Larry Correia

  December 25th, 1931

  Detroit. One of the greatest cities in the world. The crossroads of industry and commerce. The American Paris, the City of Champions, Blimp-Town, Motor City, call it what you want, it’s one crowded place. Nearly two million people live in Detroit, but as far as Jake Sullivan was aware, only a few of them were trying to kill him at that particular moment in time.

  Sure, there might have been others in Detroit that were gunning for him, as he wasn’t the type of man that made a lot of friends, but judging from the volume of gunfire pouring through the windows and puckering the walls . . . Six. There were only six shooters.

  He could handle that.

  “Enough! I said enough!” The gunfire tapered off. One last angry bullet bounced off his cover with a clang. “You still alive in there?”

  The seven-hundred-pound chunk of steel plate he’d picked up to use as a shield had worked better than expected. Sullivan checked his body for holes, and finding no more than usual, shouted back, “Yeah, but your boys ain’t. You ready to surrender yet, Johnny? The cops will be here any minute.”

  “You’ll be an icicle before then.”

  The temperature was dropping fast, which meant that Snowball was out there too. Both Maplethorpe brothers were Actives, which was just his rotten luck. Sullivan’s teeth began to chatter. He had to finish this before the Icebox could freeze him out. At this range, a clean shot could freeze him solid, but behind cover . . . even a really powerful Icebox wouldn’t be able to steal more than ten degrees a minute from a room this big, but it had already been cold to begin with. That didn’t leave Sullivan much time.

  “Kidnapping, murder.” He needed to goad them into coming after him. It was his only chance. “You boys been busy.”

  “Throw ‘em on the list. They can only send me to the gas chamber once,” Johnny Bones shouted back through the broken windows. “Are you the Heavy? Is this the legendary Heavy Jake Sullivan, J. Edgar Hoover’s pet Active?”

  Sullivan didn’t dignify that with a response.

  “Heard you been looking for my crew. How’d you find us? I thought you Heavies was supposed to be stupid?”

  “Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while, Johnny.” Sullivan picked up the giant Lewis machine gun from the floor with one shaking hand. It was a good thing he’d already been wearing gloves or he would’ve left skin on the freezing metal. “You ready to go to prison?”

  “You know all about that from what I hear. So how’s Rockville this time of year?”

  The infamous prison for actively magical criminals was in Montana. Sullivan had been an inmate there for six long years. “Cold. Very cold.” Some of Johnny Bones’ men were going to try to flank him while they were talking. He knew because that’s what he would’ve ordered if their situations had been reversed. Sullivan picked the most likely window, pointed the Lewis at it, and waited. “You’ll get used to it. Your brother will be nice and comfy, though.”

  “We can make a deal,” Johnny shouted, trying to keep Sullivan distracted. “It don’t have to be like this, with you all blue and frozen stuck to the floor. How about I let you walk out of here, pay you enough to make it worth your time? We’ll call it my present to you. Tis the season and all that jazz. I’m in a giving mood. What do you say?”

  Someone moved on the other side of the window. Sullivan held down the trigger and let the Lewis roar. Bricks exploded into dust and glass shattered. The man on the other side went down hard.

  That left five.

  “I’d say you gotta do better than that.”

  Johnny Bones Maplethorpe ordered his remaining men to open fire and bullets ricocheted off the steel plate. Jake Sullivan was pinned down in a room that was rapidly turning into a walk-in freezer by a gang of hardened criminals led by a vicious Shard. It was one hell of a way to spend Christmas.

  Two Days Earlier

  “So, Mr. Sullivan, you got any plans this Christmas?”

  Sullivan finished counting out the January rent money and passed it over. It was the last ten dollars he had to his name. Paying work had been sporadic lately. “Nothing in particular, ma’am.”

  “I see,” Mrs. Brooks said. His landlord owned the entire building and the diner downstairs. It was obvious the old woman didn’t like her tenant much, but Jake Sullivan always paid his rent on time. “I don’t want any loudness or carrying on. I know how you Irish get during the holidays with the devil drink.”

  “Why, Mrs. Brooks, alcoholic beverages are illegal.”

  “I know all about your disdain for the law, Mr. Sullivan.” Mrs. Brooks eyed him suspiciously, then glanced around the office, as if expecting to see a distillery hidden in a corner. Instead there was only a battered second-hand desk, a couple of sturdy wooden chairs, a bedraggled couch, and a few book shelves. “It’s only my strong upbringing that’s allowed me to forgive your horrific criminal history and your unseemly magic.”

  The landlord talked a big game, but both of them knew that she’d rent to anybody who could pay in these tough times, and that included convicted felons, less popular types of Actives, or anybody else for that matter. The old lady would rent a room to the Chairman himself if he had ten dollars ready on the twenty-third of each month. “And I won’t forget it,” Sullivan said.

  Mrs. Brooks stepped back and examined the words painted on his door. “Why would someone like you go into this kind of business anyway?”

  “I like puzzles . . .” Sullivan said honestly. “Anything else I can do for you, ma’am?” and before she could even answer he was already closing the door on her. “No? Wonderful. Merry Christmas. Goodbye.”

  The sign on the door read Sullivan Security and Investigations. His last security
job had been intimidating the union strikers at the UBF plant. Good work that, standing around earning money because you had a reputation for being able to crush a man’s skull with a thought. It had paid well too, but that had been months ago. The last investigation job had meant confirming to an angry wife that her husband liked prostitutes. The final bit of money from that one had just paid the rent.

  There was other work out there. There always was for a man with his skills, whether physical or magical, but Sullivan was an honest man, and he preferred honest work. There was a difference between being a felon and being a crook, and Jake Sullivan was no crook.

  Then there were the government jobs . . . The monetary payment on those was meager, but completing them meant he got to stay out of Rockville. Sullivan sat behind his desk and reread the recent Bureau of Investigation telegram. It was a bulletin on the notorious Maplethorpe brothers. Their gang had recently gotten shot up in a robbery in Albion, and it was believed they were hiding in Detroit. A Shard and an Icebox, with Power to spare, armed, and extremely dangerous, wanted for bank robbery and murder. The telegram said a BI representative would be in touch if it was felt his services would be needed.

  The terms of his early release specified that he needed to assist in the apprehension of five Active fugitives. He wondered idly if the Maplethorpes would count as two . . .. As long as the government’s terms hung over his head, he would never truly be free. Sullivan crumpled the telegram and tossed it in the waste basket. Nothing usually came of the telegrams.

  The first client for the month of December arrived just before noon on the 23rd. Sullivan had been reading a Popular Mechanics article about a British Cog named Turing and his controversial attempt to build a mechanical man capable of reasoning, when there had been a delicate knock on the door.