RIGHT AND LAW

Job 7: The Ends and Means

The water-filled tunnel Sly's swimming through narrows and curves steeply upwards. He emerges in a water filled opening in the floor of a small room, and pulls himself out. As he wrings out his clothes, he notices that the opening has a label: INSERT FISH FOOD HERE.

Fish food. He shakes his head. With all the sharks he had to avoid down there, they could've come up with a better description. Still, there has to be something here besides a glorified closet. Something interesting must be on the other side of that closed door.

"I've gotten out of the water," Sly says over the binoc-u-com.

"Swell," says Penelope, her voice crackling with static. "We may have a problem, Sly."

"What sort of problem?"

"Well..." Penelope's voice crackles more. "The binoc-u-coms don't work if there's too much metal and stone between them; it was an improvement I never got around to making, back when—"

"Bentley and Carmelita's coms cut out," Murray interrupts her. "Penelope's been going nuts, muttering to herself, trying to figure out what to do. So far, she just has me sneaking around up here, seeing if I can get a signal anywhere." A crackle of static ends his sentence.

"You're scratchy too, Sly," says Penelope. "Go much further, and I may not be able to contact you."

Sly's fur is standing on end, and he tightens his grip on his cane. "Were they together?"

"Last I knew," she says.

"Then they'll be fine," Sly says, though his tone's too tight to be truly relaxed. "I'll be fine, too. But I need to keep going; I might find them."

"Be careful, Sly," says Murray.

"Just... don't do anything stupid," says Penelope. "What am I saying? Don't use the ghosts in your binoc-u-com as a distraction, or use your Italian accent in a disguise, or challenge anyone to a contest of any sort and that includes opera singing, or—"

"That last one was Bentley. He took the ghosts out of my binoc-u-com, too. Look, I'll be fine; quit your worrying."

"And whatever you do, don't get caught."

Sly rolls his eyes and puts his binoc-u-com away. He knows when to be serious, and deliberately going into a place where he'll be cut off from his allies is one of them.

Particularly when he eases the door open and slips through, and sees what's in the room beyond.

When Clockwerk fell into the Krakarov Volcano eight years ago, he didn't melt. He sank, yes, but he didn't melt. Bentley still has no idea what metal he was made of. The conveyor belts, the molds, and the robot parts around him seem dedicated to building its prototype.

Conveyor belts line the edges of the room, the closest one in arm's reach. There are pipes in the ceiling, dumping streams of melted metal and jewels—heated in the volcano above—into molds. There are ditches around the edges of the room, where some conveyor belts drop the containers; the robots that emerge are encrusted in a thick layer of salt and spice. From there, the conveyor belts lead them through a curtained area, into another room; flashing lights can be seen through the opening. When they emerge, they're deposited in the room's center, empty save for a slew of guards who brush off the salt, insert a computer chip and more spices, and carry the robots from the room. Guards come in and out in a never-ending stream.

Each robot is small. They're building the birds and foxes that attacked them in England, in Scotland, in Holland. About a foot big. Prototypes. But there are other molds along the wall, each with a dozen obviously-failed variations. Other animals.

It all makes Sly's fur stand on end.

There isn't much going for laser security in this room. The guards are more than enough. In addition to the number of them going in and out of the room, inserting the computer chips, there are a few sleepy ones watching various parts of the conveyor belts and patrolling the edges of the room.

Slipping out of the room without being caught is only possible because Sly is a master thief. It takes timing, skill, precision. It takes riding conveyor belts and climbing opipes, jumping between them like an acrobat.

It takes hearing a quiet conversation, echoing from some other room: "So nice of you to drop in, my dear. I was starting to wonder if you'd make it. But of course, you're the finest officer in all of interpol. Of course you would."

Yeah, Sly is not going to get caught and start a noisy fight with that somewhere around here.

"Dr. Foxworthy? They got you too?"

"I'm afraid you are mistaken about that, my dear. You see, this is my own personal project."

The room leads out into a hallway, a three-path split. The guards, carrying robots, head to the right. A staircase up is straight ahead. But the voices come from the left, a path filled with vertical-moving lasers and moving spotlights. Sly starts down it without hesitation.

"Your personal project? This is—"

"An undertaking as legal as I can make it, my dear. This volcano is right on the border between Russia, Mongolia, and China. Officially, no country owns this peak, so anything I do here is strictly legal."

A dead end, a locked door... and a vent near the ceiling, grate open. Carmelita's enraged sputtering comes from there. Sly spire-jumps on a laser emitter to reach it and creeps through. Fans block his path in some directions, laser barriers he's too big to get through block others. He emerges at last in a room dark save for laser security, moving yellow lights illuminating orange-and-white pennants and a matching rug, a similarly patterned couch against one wall, a TV opposite. The door is open.

"Legality has nothing to do with this! This is wrong, unc—Foxworthy. There is nothing you could be doing here that justifies using Spice. Or brainwashing. Or—"

"That, my dear Carmelita, is your one problem as an officer. You don't believe the ends justify the means. But that is precisely why I've brought you here. Imagine, if you would, a world where there is no crime, no need for prisons; a world where every wrongdoer is stopped the moment they break the law, no matter what that law is. Wouldn't that be the best of all worlds?"

Sly ghosts through the laser security, into another hallway. Hang on, I'm not sure if 'hallway' is the right word. If the two-bladed fans were holding still, then they'd certainly line up to form a narrow path for people to walk down, single-file, ignoring the drops into oblivion on either side, the inch-tall railing on the edges doing nothing but posing a tripping hazard. But, you know, they're moving. Though they are moving slow enough that Sly can railwalk on those tiny railings.

"No. No it would not, Foxworthy. And what do you mean, you brought me here?"

"Well, of course it would be you they sent to investigate here. It did take them long enough, I admit, and I never got a satisfactory answer from my old patients as to how they got caught. Of course, I couldn't exactly question them myself, not after my earlier rehabilitation seemed to have failed. Nevertheless, with your instincts as part of their programming, my wonderful creations will focus all their energies on enforcing law. The computer chips will ensure they don't bother with trivialities like morality."

Sly gets on solid ground again and finds the next corridor mostly blocked off, a solid line of lasers just a bit above the floor, a gap thin enough that Sly has no hope of squeezing under them. There is a tiny ledge though, decorative molding at the base of the wall, just big enough for him to inch along. He has to be careful, pause to avoid all the spotlights moving in lazy lines, but this is something he can manage.

"The uploading helmet should be ready by this evening. I found the design in Neyla's old files; she was a fine officer, uploaded herself several times. I used her as a placeholder. Such a pity she was lost when she tried to join her entire body to machinery."

"Clock-La," Carmelita snarls, and Sly almost says it with her. He has to jump across the room to get at more decorative edging; luckily, there's a spotlight positioned just close enough for him to swing off it with his cane.

He's close enough, now, to even hear Foxworthy's drawn-out sigh. "It's a shame I only have seven that work properly, but that's one for each continent. More than enough to get the system under control, in a few years."

Carmelita outright growls at him. "To think I'd have to arrest you. When I get out of this cage—"

"But you won't," says Foxworthy. "That cage is inescapable. The specialists you brought with you are in similar condition, and your partner will be fished out of our security logs in moments." He chuckles. "Don't worry, this won't take more than a day or two. And I'll care for you, Carmelita. Protect you. You've always striven to be a model cop, following in the footsteps left by my father and I. It would be a shame to let this tiny misunderstanding ruin our relationship."

Sly emerges from the laser corridor to find a room with a door, open just a crack, some more statues of foxes nearby (ugh). When the door slams open, he ducks behind the nearest statue on instinct.

An elderly fox walks out, his cane hooked over one arm, strolling forward, his head held high and ears pricked. He walks past Sly, pauses, and taps a code into a keypad on the wall; the lasers turn off. Sly commits the code to memory as Foxworthy strolls through the now-safe corridor and out of sight.

As soon as he's gone, Sly darts out and into the room. "Carmelita!"

"Sly!" Carmelita steps forward, but can't go closer than that; the lasers are in the way. "Foxworthy's—"

"I know." Sly looks around, the room bare but for the chair Foxworthy was using. Behind Carmelita, the end of the slide can be seen. "Can you climb that?"

"It's far too steep," she says, shaking her head. "If I had climber's spikes, maybe some rope, then it'd be another story."

"What about Bentley?" Sly asks. "Wasn't he with you?"

"Trapdoor. I don't know what happened." She growls under her breath. "I bet he was the 'specialist' Foxworthy mentioned."

"What I wouldn't give for one of his good ideas right now," Sly says, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall.

From behind him comes the tiny beep! of an RC car.

JOB COMPLETE

Sly whirls on the spot to see a tiny RC car driving up to them, and circles his feet twice before beeping again and settling to a stop.