Four
Edgecomb came up with something. He unearthed five ID tags from a heap of dust and junk in the corner of a dormitory room. One of them was Sabri Jek Nisr's. I took a look and told them in my best P.I. manner: sidecutters, probably neutrite-edged. He said it was impossible; I replied that maybe the toughness of his tag material or the cutters was different in this brave new universe.
Helena didn't have time for that. She nodded to herself and told us we had to make for where the shooting was. We'd find our man there.
So we went. Wasn't any use arguing with her - we tried.
On the way I managed to ask Edgecomb what was in his backpack. He looked a little surprised, as if I was dumb, and replied it was the branehook. "Oh of course," I said, trying to look as dumb as he thought I was. I fingered the parts in my jacket pocket. What the Penal Authority could procure was a blunt chainsaw to my scalpel. That's one up for Werth's black market system, anyway. So Edgecomb was prepared to abort our trip and tunnel us back to our home universe if things got too sharp for him.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps, as Werth's puppet, he was intending something else entirely. I noticed the man had drawn his service automatic, I think a Steyr Compact, and was checking the action. I broke out into a sweat all over again. Why exactly did he want to find Nisr? Before the sun goes down today, I thought, at least one of us is going to die: him, me, Helena or Nisr.
I caught up with Miss Szychter in a hurry to try and pick her brains a bit more. I asked her if she was sure about Hamdani being any use in convicting Werth. Until then it hadn't occurred to me that any judge would dare slap a guilty verdict on Werth. Plus, he'll never really be locked away, even in the securest brane, right? She insisted that Hamdani had been hiding behind a forklift when Werth's thug had killed Junot Jaar, that he'd linked to Junot's father all the details before he'd fled, hoping that would be enough to convict Werth.
So why had Werth ordered Junot's murder, along with all the witnesses who were clan members? That's what I wanted to know. She told me, contemptuously, that Werth had run out of patience waiting for the ransom, which he hadn't needed anyway. He was just playing. He enjoyed the game, and took no chances. He knew his clan was big enough to absorb the loss of a few hirelings.
That made sense to me, but it turned my stomach like a sewage treatment plant.
We'd crept so close to the firefight that the shooters' excited chatter was audible between volleys, and we had to keep well behind the cover of crumbling walls and piles of fallen masonry. I wanted to hang back and get working on my pocket branehook, but there was no opportunity. With the fingers of one hand inside the pocket I managed to click the emanator into the coder stub, but the modulating ring wouldn't go on.
After peering around a lot of corners and into a number of unfamiliar sweaty faces, we had come to the back wall of a roofless house from which five men were firing. The return fire alternated between indifferent and murderous.
Something caught at my shoe. It was one of those leaflets. From my brief scan of its text, I surmised that the inmates here were appealling to the security staff to join with them in a jointly-governed, egalitarian new world. No chance of that now, I reflected.
Just when I thought it was quietening down, a great whoosh roared from another building and something went bang up on the hill. Like a big RPG round. Maybe if the Brane 0021 Portal is still cut off, that's why. It certainly gave my gut a punch.
Through a loophole I spied our man. He was feeding gunpowder charges and ball shot to an ogre of a man who yelled as he fired. He yelled curses, mixed in with cries of "Freedom!"
Sabri Jek Nisr seemed dwarfish next to him, and nervous like a hunted bird. His prison crewcut frizzed silvery-black and his dappled cheeks plumped out like apples. His new grey convict overalls already showed stains and rips.
From his face, he was obviously a man out of his depth, close to drowning, caught up in a storm not of his choosing. I knew that feeling.
Suddenly I knew none of this was his fault. It was obvious. The sun came up in my head. It's like reaching a certain spot in a hike from where you can see over the next ridge, and that changes everything. Sabri was One Of Us.
I noticed that Edgecomb was busy linking to his people again, so I grabbed Helena's arm and pulled her through a doorway towards Nisr. "We've got to get him away from Edgecomb," I shouted above the noise.
She asked, breathlessly, which one was Hamdani. I pointed, while grabbing up my branehook with the other hand. She shook her head. "That's not him!" she hissed. I ignored her, knowing what I knew. At last I had the ring screwed down, and I popped the power button. Of course I wasn't going to hook us all into my getaway brane. I had an alternate setting for situations just like this. I just wish I'd been able to use it from London, directly, but of course they can track you with ease.
The ogre had noticed us and turned his homemade musket on us, demanding to know who we were. Helena produced a tiny fingergun, a composite make, that obviously hadn't shown on the Portal sensors. It slid on over her fingertip, extending back to her first knuckle, looking like a grey toothpick mounted on a ring. So it was a standoff, since the ogre recognised the toothpick for a weapon. I pulled an alarmed Nisr over to us just as Edgecomb came into the room and a volley of automatic fire from the hill made us all duck, even the ogre. Shards of stone flew off the walls.
Then I twisted the ring left, and we three found ourselves somewhere else entirely.
The pen-sized branehook wasn't as smooth as the Penal Authority's portal. I was left with a slight headache, as if my thoughts had suffered a shear fracture.
It was the rush of freefall skydiving, without the slipstream. The noise of war ended abruptly and my ears were ringing in the comparative silence. Miss Szychter and Sabri Jek Nisr hung with me in empty air, motionless at first, surrounded by flocks of what looked like silvery clouds that extended in every direction as far as we could see. The sky was a hazed, pale blue everywhere we looked.
Sabri gaped down at his feet. Beyond the dissipating cloud of dirt and rocks scooped up by the Hook's spherical field from the floor of the house where we'd just stood, we saw no reassuring dark disc spread to the horizon. That was all sky, too, up and down. It was the kind of view to leave you breathless with wonder, if you could enjoy it at leisure. In that instant, it came to me that everything was going to be alright somehow, and it wasn't an incongruous idea as I looked around.
Already we were floating together, along with that cloud of dirt. The backstreet guy who had programmed the Hook told me about that: Gravity's stronger there, but there's no large mass, just silicate clouds at a certain amorphous phase so you bounce off them. Just like a million miles of kiddy play fun, he had said. Just a staging area for you.
Nisr started yelling and bugging out his eyes. Where? Why? Who? All the obvious questions. His voice dissipated into the huge volume of air, with no reverberation. Our bodies attracted each other, but he grabbed at my jacket and flung me away in his rage. Both of us floated apart. I tried to placate him, saying that Edgecomb would catch up with us eventually. He was outraged that he'd been singled out and cut off from the battle for New Australia.
I was just fumbling with the ring of my Hook, waiting for the device to recharge, when Szychter asked him if he was Ali Hamdani. Her voice had changed to a gruff monotone, masculine somehow. I looked up. He just stared at her in shock, tumbling slowly head over heels, as if he'd only just noticed her, but she put up her fingergun, twisting her torso to allow for her gradual rotation, and shot at him, aiming to kill.
Too late: I realised with a tsunamic fear that I'd been wrong. This was not alright. The Elysian view had fooled me. I was unarmed. Szychter was not, and she was the puppet, not Edgecomb.