‘What’s happening?’ Gabriel asked.
‘I’m improvising a little present for Toby.’ There was no longer any vindictiveness at the prospect, nor even malice. This was an intrinsic fight for survival now, nothing more. His mind had relegated Toby to an obstacle which had to be tackled. Hatred was all the other man’s problem.
Greg clamped the pole between his knees and tied on a strip of the ripped nylon mesh. It was a laborious job, he had to use his teeth to grip the end of the strip while his fingers formed the knot. Spears didn’t come any more primitive, but the rudimentary tail ought to keep its trajectory stable for a few metres.
They slogged towards a narrow alleyway between the two houses ahead, the disturbingly concave walls had so many bricks missing they looked like two vertical checkerboards. There was an unstable aggregation of brick chunks and sandy earth in the gap, rising half a metre above the algae. Greg had lost his shoes somewhere in the slough channels; his feet were unrecognizable, lumps of gummy tar which ached abominably. If he stood on anything sharp they’d go completely numb as the pain breached the cortical node’s threshold. When they reached the small front garden they were knee-deep in the greasy mire again.
The street they found themselves in was virtually intact. Greg could almost believe he’d walked out into a pre-dawn autumn morning of fifteen years ago. Rusted, windowless hulks of petrol-driven cars were parked along the road. Barren trees stood tall, low brick walls were topped by fanciful wrought-iron railings, the lampposts were still vertical. It was a well-ordered slice of middle-class suburbia. Only the algae-matted water shattered the illusion of normality.
A curtain of light streaked out at the far end of the houses a hundred and fifty metres away. Toby’s hovercraft had turned down into the gardens. Greg sensed the excitement rising in the man’s mind. Toby’s native instinct was telling him his prey was near by.
Greg found it uncanny to observe, almost as though his own ability was being turned against him. He and Toby must share the same mental genotype.
‘I want you to walk down to the other end of the street,’ he told Gabriel.
She didn’t reply, standing with shoulders drooping, arms dangling at her side. Her left hand looked appalling, tumescent and inflamed. Mud had dried and cracked on it, as though she was shedding a hardened outer skin, allowing new, blue-tender flesh to break through. He refused the impulse to check his own.
‘Listen, Gabriel. You must walk down the street. And when the hovercraft comes, you fall down. OK? That’s all. Can you manage that for me?’
A confused frown puckered her forehead. ‘Walk?’
‘Yes.’ Greg pressed his hand on her back, starting her off. ‘And when the light shines, you go for cover.’
Gabriel’s feet had found a shuffling rhythm. ‘Fall down?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Orders,’ she mumbled vaguely. ‘I won’t let you down, Greg. I won’t.’
Greg left her doing her apathetic sleep walk, feeling a prize turd for using her as bait; and headed back up the street towards the wide beam of light which kept shooting out, documenting the hovercraft’s progress. Algae foamed around his knees. Slithery mud tried to pull his feet from under him. Sometimes he thought he could feel the hardness of the tarmac.
The light shone out of the gap in front of him. Greg stood still, listening to the drone of the propeller growing louder, echoing back and forth across the street. The light was extinguished. A faint trace of it rippled along the roof of the house.
Toby’s hovercraft drew level with him. Light slammed out of the gap, transfixing him like a rabbit in a headlamp.
A scream of ecstatic triumph burst from Toby’s mind. Greg’s vision was wiped out in a sparkling pink mist as his retinas were overwhelmed by a targeting laser. He lurched forwards. The warbling of electromagnetic rifle fire punctured the night. Bullets stitched a line of small craters in the algae behind him. The propeller drone rose to a crescendo as the pilot fought to turn the hovercraft.
Greg was dumped into the darkness again. The laser impact abated, and he saw a smattering of stars through the shredded gauze of cirrus clouds. He could hear the ripping sounds of the hovercraft riding roughshod over fences.
Greg felt his nerves cooling, heartbeat slowing, tension abating. Going with the flow.
He sensed the hovercraft racing down the gardens, heading back the way it’d come.
A final visual check on Gabriel showed him a forlorn figure bumbling through the mire. His espersense showed her mind was operating with cyborg simplicity, completely absorbed by the mechanics of walking.
He lowered himself into the algae.
The hovercraft had reached the end of the gardens now, rounding the last house in the row. Greg caught a glimpse of its insect eye array of lights sliding into view as he dropped below the surface.
Espersense revealed all he needed, real and hypersense universes entwining smoothly. Toby leaning against the prow, fists clenched, eyes bugging, slipstream plucking at him. The merciless lights finding Gabriel. Her legs buckling, sending her toppling forwards. Toby’s howl of revenge consummation.
Greg could hear a throbbing sound transmitted through the filthy water, getting louder.
Toby’s mind was a lurid spew-point of animus thoughts zooming towards him.
Greg pressed his feet down hard as the hovercraft rumbled directly overhead. He broke surface, bringing a cloying cone of algae with him. A blast of desert-air wind escaping from beneath the hovercraft skirt ablated the mucus from his face. He kept rising like a shabby tenth-rate Neptune, galvanized spear in his hand, already drawn back for the throw. Aiming. The pole steady. And fling.
It shot through the wide mesh of the protective carbon fibre grille at the rear of the hovercraft, hitting the spinning propeller full on. The trajectory bent then as the tip was chopped by the blade’s leading edge, tugging it down and round. That, by itself, wasn’t disastrous, the blade edge was designed to handle bird impacts. But the length of the pole meant it was deflected right into the mounting. The propeller’s axle-bearing sheared off instantly under the terrible impact stress. And a two-metre-diameter five-hundred-r.p.m. buzz-saw exploded out of the grille to digest the rear of the pneumatic hovercraft.
There was a thunderclap blow-out, and the prow of the hovercraft bucked up into the air, losing rigidity, light beams strafing the sky. Three bodies and pieces of loose equipment were catapulted in a short arc. A tremendous spume of water jetted up as the propeller hit the algae, chewing through. One of the bodies fell into its base. The shredded hovercraft hull flopped back down. The lights went out, and the spume died.
It began to rain gobs of mud and algae, pattering down over a wide area.
One mind had survived, the body which housed it writhing feebly. Another body was face down in the water, Toby. Of the third there was no sign.
Greg waded forward. It was easy going. A vast patch of the street had been stripped of its covering of algae.
Gabriel was floating on her back, half submerged. Greg got his hand under her head and lifted her. She coughed weakly. ‘I did it, didn’t I, Greg? Just like you wanted.’
‘Sure did, and no messing.’
‘Did you get ’em?’
‘Yeah, they aren’t going to hazard anyone again.’
Four lightbeams pinioned him. Kendric’s hovercraft was turning down into the street. He froze into place. Too exhausted to run. Besides, he could never have left Gabriel.
The hovercraft approached at a cautious unhurried pace. Greg shielded his eyes against the glare. Kendric was standing in the prow, in front of the Perspex windscreen. The epitome of the great white hunter, electromagnetic rifle cradled in a light grip, one foot on the gunwale.
Greg saw it coming, reading it straight from Gabriel’s mind. Genuine telepathy. His mouth gaped, and he pointed high into the western sky.
Kendric’s mind registered sublime contempt that Greg would try such a pathetic stunt. Then vacilla
tion set in, precisely because it was so unlikely. He looked round to follow the direction of Greg’s accusing finger, just in time to see a frigid saffron dawn expand across the sky above Wisbech.
The light source was directly above them, a cold dazzling star which crawled through the genuine constellations at an infinitesimal pace. Its radiance was throwing shadows as sharp-edged as daylight. Greg could see wisps of flurry cloud gusting high overhead, they must’ve been kilometres away.
Gabriel began to laugh.
The false star was as intense as noonday sunlight, then brighter. It began to elongate. Brick walls glared scarlet. Dew-mottled algae sparkled like a diamanté ice floe.
Intuition whispered into Greg’s brain. He knew. The Merlin. Then his far-flung espersense delivered the final shock, a single band of incendiary thought originating from the space-probe’s bioware nodes: Philip Evans’s unholy vengeance glee as he hurtled inexorably towards Leopold Armstrong.
The Merlin descended at orbital velocity, boring a vacuum-tunnel through the lower atmosphere. A purple-white plasma comet with a rigid incandescent tail of superionized air, stabbing down like some monstrously overpowered strategic defence laser.
Greg flung his arms desperately over his face, trying to save his eyes. There was carmine blood-light, then sable blackness.
The blast wave was a white-noise tsunami. It plucked Greg out of the mire and sent him spinning through space. He could see the street’s houses disintegrating, slates taking flight, bricks avalanching. The air had become a blizzard of giant splinters and powdery fragments.
He saw the tower. Rather, where the tower had been: a thick column of fusion-hot air fountaining up into the darkening sky. Its flickering vermilion fluorescence was sheathed by ragged braids of ebony soot-clouds. Garish blue-green static webs discharged around its mushrooming crown.
For a liquid, the water was incredibly hard.
44
Greg woke to peace, body and mind. Blissful. He could feel his entire body except for his left hand, and nothing hurt, nothing felt abused. There was just warmth and softness.
Makes a bloody change.
He opened his eyes. Even the light was gentle, pale pearl. Rapid blinking resolved the blurred shapes around him.
He was lying on his back looking up at an ivory-coloured ceiling with inset biolum strips. A young man in a white medical-style coat was removing an electrode hoop from his forehead.
‘Welcome back, Mr Mandel,’ he said.
That humourless tone, his intent professionalism. He had to belong to Event Horizon.
‘There is no need to worry,’ the doctor assured Greg. ‘You are a patient in Event Horizon’s Liezen clinic – that’s in Austria.’
‘Who’s worrying?’
The doctor nodded earnestly. ‘Ah, good. Sometimes there is disorientation following a prolonged somnolence induction.’
‘What do you call prolonged?’
‘Eight days. In addition to your physical injuries you were suffering from advanced cerebral stress due to an overdose of neurohormones. I’ve loaded a prohibition order into your cortical node preventing any gland secretions. Come back in three months, and I’ll wipe the order; or you might consider having the gland itself extracted.’ His nose twitched. ‘I don’t approve of them, personally.’
‘Thank you, Doctor.’ Julia’s cut-crystal voice chopped off any further admonishments. ‘That will be all.’
The doctor sighed resignedly, and backed away.
Greg turned his head. He was in a small tidy room with plenty of medical gear modules stacked beside the bed. A picture window looked out over sunny parkland dotted with grazing llamas.
The bed was elevating him smoothly into a sitting position. His arms lay outside the ochre blankets. A chalky-coloured bioware bladder had been inflated around his left hand, trailing scores of fine fibre-optic cables to the gear modules, its nutrient fluid veins pulsing rhythmically. Just as well, he didn’t particularly fancy looking at the hand.
Julia was wearing a crinkled navy-blue sundress. The skirt was shorter than her usual, its hem hovering well above her knees. She was watching him with silent diligence.
‘The hair’s nice,’ Greg told her. Tiny corkscrew curls had fluffed it out into a candyfloss cloud. A chain of minute blue flowers formed a delicate tiara above her brow. Given a posy of primroses she would’ve made a good bridesmaid, he thought.
‘Oh, you think so?’ A dainty long-fingered hand lifted to pat a few of the more wayward strands. ‘Adrian likes it this way.’
‘Lucky old Adrian.’
The door closed behind the doctor.
Julia’s face fell, giving him a woeful stare. ‘I’m so sorry, Greg. Really I am. None of this need have happened. It’s all my fault.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘But it is.’
Greg listened as she launched into an explanation about the Cray files, her mistrust, the St Christopher. There was no energy in him to power any strong feelings about it, one way or the other, anger or despair. The issue seemed an abstract. It was over, all it could ever be now was an exercise in ‘what if’. The whole bloody great cock-up was down to his over-reliance on mystic intuition, treating it as infallible, giving logical thought the big elbow. His own stupid fault.
He let out a long dispirited sigh, and said, ‘Forgiven. Besides, you were right, I should’ve seen Ellis’s connection with the PSP. And I missed Steven as well. That’s got to make us quits.’
‘Really? Did you really mean you forgive me?’ She was studying his face, trepidation lurking in her expressive tawny eyes.
Julia wanted absolution, so he smiled and said, ‘Yeah, I really do. No messing.’ He’d sought it for himself often enough. He could hardly deny her.
She flashed him a hundred-watt grin and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘I’ve been terrified of you waking up all week. You were the last loose end. I’ve made my peace with everyone else.’
‘Everyone?’ His thoughts moved slowly. ‘Hey, what about Gabriel?’
‘She’s all right. Everyone is all right now. Treating you all at the clinic was the least I could do.’ Her lips came together pensively. ‘They took Gabriel’s gland out two days ago. She insisted, said it was part of her deal.’
That would take a while to sink in, Greg knew. Gabriel without her gland would be interesting. Maybe she’d even get back into shape, take part in life. Nice idea.
‘How did you get us out?’ Greg asked.
‘Oh, Teddy and Morgan Walshaw jumped a Prowler over to Wisbech about twenty minutes after the blast. I wanted to go.’ Her face hardened slightly at the memory. ‘They both said no. Only thing those two ever did agree on.’
‘Teddy? How do you know Teddy?’
Julia’s smile was taunting. ‘You’ve got a bit of catching up to do. I’ll let Eleanor explain. I pulled rank to be here when they woke you, but I’d better not stay much longer or she’ll be bashing the door down to get at you. She’s good at that.’ The smile turned devilish. ‘I might’ve known you’d prefer the buxom type. And you’re lucky to have her, Greg. We’ve spent a lot of time talking this last week. I’ve got to know her quite well. She’s a smashing girl.’
‘You think I don’t know?’
Julia nodded in satisfaction. ‘Good. You’ll be quite all right to have children, by the way The Merlin’s isotopes were left in orbit, there was no radioactive fallout.’
‘You did it. You shut it down.’
‘Yah. It was all I had, Greg. I told you, I knew it was Kendric who was behind the blitz; somehow, somewhere along the line, he’d be there. I didn’t know who to trust. The Merlin was the one global-range weapon which was totally under my direct control, I didn’t have to go through anyone, ask anyone’s permission. My executive code gave me unlimited access to the Astronautics Institute’s memory cores. I pulled the Merlin’s command codes, and used them to put it into stasis. I was going to kill Kendric with it. When he was out at sea on the Mirria
m, where no one else could get hurt. The Merlin can fly twelve million kilometres and find a rock two hundred metres across; dropping it three and half thousand kilometres on to a sixty-metre target is no problem. All I’d need to do was place a satellite call to Kendric, and I’d have Mirriam’s position down to a metre, constantly updated. Not that I needed a direct hit; even with its isotopes and ninety per cent of its fuel dumped, the Merlin still masses over a tonne. And, well, you saw how big a kinetic punch it packed travelling at that velocity.’
‘Yeah, I saw. What did happen to Kendric? I survived.’
Julia glanced out at the grassland beyond the window, expression neutral. ‘They only brought you and Gabriel back. I didn’t ask. You can if you want.’
‘No. Not necessary.’ Not with Teddy in the rescue party. Walshaw too, come to that; maybe especially Walshaw.
Julia bent over and touched her lips to his, a soft dry kiss. ‘First time,’ she murmured huskily. ‘Thank you, Greg.’ There was a draught of some expensive Parisian scent, then she was standing up briskly. ‘Memento for you.’ She hung the St Christopher on the bedpost. ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t work any more.’
‘Pity, I’d feel safer.’
‘Must dash, got a lesson with Royan. He’s teaching me to write proper hotrod software.’
Greg almost asked. But settled for hearing it from Eleanor instead.
Julia opened the door. Eleanor stood outside, looking grand even in the shapeless white clinic robe she was wearing. There was something not quite right about the way she walked, and the skin on her face seemed to be peeling, except for two patches around her eyes.
The two girls exchanged a glance as they passed. Smiled knowingly.
‘All yours,’ said Julia.