She changed the topic yet again, to one she knew she’d have to broach,
‘You... frustrated me the other day. In Marsham. I didn’t want to have to shoot. It was wrong of me.’
Oddly, with all his other concerns, Beck had hardly linked together the fact of this being the woman who had tried to kill him two days before.
Meanwhile, now settled in the car, he remembered some advice that Chris had given him. Firstly, to keep his lie as close to fact as possible. In this case only omitting that he knew where the others were going next, and that his turning himself in was in the effort of obscuring that destination. Secondly, that as long as he could keep her on small talk the better: delaying, obscuring, trying to buy time as he figured out what she wanted from him.
She broke his thoughts, with,
‘I’ve been thinking of you, since we parted.’
‘Oh?’ he offered worriedly.
‘About those secret evenings at the University...’
‘Oh,’ he said, with relief.
‘...doing your dark work after hours, when even the most dedicated students had gone home. Alone in your locked upstairs room, surrounded by disembodied limbs hanging from racks. Or something similar, I’d imagine?’ (He nodded.) ‘Artificial eyeballs looking out at you? It must have felt like a nightshift in the charnel house.’
‘A bloodless charnel house. But yes, I was often alone there, cutting up strips of false muscle, angle-grinding recalcitrant alloyed joints. But as I say, bloodless. I don’t think I’d have stood it if it hadn’t been.’
‘And have you ever been to counselling for it?’
He was agog, reactive, defensive all at once, spluttering,
‘And how could I, when the whole thing was a secret?’ And for the first time in his life Beck realised all he’d been holding on to.
He saw a road sign though the car window, and guessed their destination as London. It would take them hours to return there. He hoped it would be long enough.
Chapter 109 – The Recovery of Danny Pt. 1
Chris had taken over driving from Anna as they neared the town. A consequence of their hurried leaving was the need to pack her adult frame in the boot – and Christopher couldn’t escape the feeling of transporting a body. He wondered idly whether, under the Philosopher General’s hoped-for legislation, mistreatment of a vacant frame might bear the same criminal penalty as failing to report a human death?
They had been driving for hours, ignoring only motorways with their plethora of traffic cameras. Now the A-road ahead was dark and full of fear.
‘What will happen, Chris?’ asked Anna.
He turned to her, ‘I don’t know. But nothing will happen to you, Anna. I promise that.’
He popped the car into third as they exited the A-road. Game faces on.
‘Why are we all going into the town?’ she asked. This was despite them having discussed it back at the house. But she needed reassurance, and Chris offered it,
‘Because it’s the nearest focal point to the co-ordinates, and we hadn’t time to come up with a better plan.’
‘So, we’ll go directly past the signal site?’
‘Yes, and if there’s anything happening, then we go on to our rendezvous point.’
‘And why aren’t we talking on the phone?’
‘Because we can’t risk them monitoring our conversations.’
‘But we’ll ring Ellie and Vincent if there’s trouble?’
‘Yes, and offer no longer than a five second message, then throw the phone out of the window and... go full-speed to our rendezvous point.’
‘And you’ll remember where it is, Chris?’
‘Yes, as will you.’
‘But what if I can’t trust my memory?’
‘Then I’ll remember it for both of us.’
But they didn’t even reach the co-ordinates, let alone the rendezvous. Before they got there Ellie’s car was up ahead, parked on a lay-by facing them and flashing its headlights.
Chris pulled up alongside and wound down his windows. Ellie leaned out, telling them both,
‘We got here much quicker than expected – we knew you’d take this route, so we waited for you. We’ve been along the road that passes nearest the co-ordinates, and it’s full of sirens and police cars. We got lucky, they clearly haven’t a clue why they’ve closed off the road. They weren’t looking out for anybody in particular and weren’t asking any questions. They just turned us around, saying there’d been an accident; but when I pretended to own a house along the road, and asked a few questions, they couldn’t tell me the first thing about it.’
‘Best guesses, everyone?’ asked Victor from passenger seat.
Chris surmised,
‘Then Eris has understood the Morse of the signal and learnt the co-ordinates, and has rung ahead to local police to close off the scene – although she appears to have given them no indication why, probably asking them to await the arrival of her own people.’
Ellie’s look hardened, as much as her visage had capacity for hardness, as she said,
‘Then the bad news is that Eris’s people might already be there – while we’ve been waiting here, two black vans have passed us at speed.’
‘That makes sense,’ said Chris. ‘We couldn’t leave until our tapping-phase had ended, though they could have deduced the signal midway through.’
‘They also had the motorways,’ said Anna, perfectly deductively.
‘So what do we do?’ asked Victor. ‘We’re blocking this road for a start.’
‘Well, at least the local traffic police are tied up,’ joked Ellie. ‘But really, if only we’d had another hour...’
‘Au contraire,’ offered Chris to lighten the mood. ‘This situation only offers us the chance to find the best of ourselves.’
‘Always thinking positively, Christopher?’ asked Ellie.
‘Always, where my family is involved.’ And he offered each a beaming smile. Then, ‘Ellie, you got to see the site of the co-ordinates?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Then, in ten words?’
‘Unlit scrub, scattered farm buildings, boggy ground, ponds...’
‘That’s only eight,’ he smiled. ‘And any sign of a car?’
‘Not that I could see.’
Chris was thinking aloud, ‘Danny must have had a vehicle. He couldn't have gotten this far while damaged without one. He could have parked off the road. But if there had been a suspicious vehicle at the scene, it would have been the first thing those officers focussed on when arriving, especially after being told to use a motor accident cover story. So, he must have parked it neatly, perhaps beside a building...’
Chris paused, then considered, ‘Which means he knew his time was short...’
‘Oh, Chris,’ said Anna.
Chris placed a hand on her arm, and continued,
‘...and so he needed to hide himself. And what are the two things we were told about artifs and water?’
‘That we sink!’ answered Anna.
‘Yes, and that it will not harm us.’
Ellie had a revelation, ‘Chris, would muddy water have blocked his signal?’
‘You mean, is he still transmitting down there? I’ve really no idea. But please don’t get your hopes up.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘Anna, go to Ellie’s car. I need to do what I was built for.’
Anna didn’t need instructing, and was already jumping out of one car and into another.
‘No, Chris,’ called Ellie. ‘You’re injured yourself.’
‘Not as bad as Danny was, and he managed to hide himself. I won’t leave him down there.’
‘And what should we do?’ asked Victor, as he unlocked the backdoor in their car for Anna.
‘You come back here in an hour, and then on every hour till dawn. After that, find the Professor.’
Chris looked along the road he’d have to travel, toward the police roadblock. He fired up the car, smiled, and
was gone.
Chapter 110 – The Recovery of Danny Pt. 2: The Schmidt-Beck Prototype
As he drove, Chris spoke incessantly, almost chanting,
‘The precise co-ordinate point was to the north of this road...
‘I have to hope there is a turn-off before the roadblock...
‘That puts me into farmland. I can cross behind the roadblocks on foot, so long as there are no searchlights up yet...
‘After that, I’ll have to go off my hunch.’
He looked to his watch then, at the glowing illuminated face – an expensive piece, sadly having to be pinched as it was too costly to purchase – but which was linked to Global Positioning Satellites and locatable to the seventh metre.
At the same time as he saw the police lights on the hillside, Chris also saw a building, thankfully in darkness, and the turn-off for its driveway. He killed the engine and his lights; but not before perfectly memorising the shadow of every fencepost and piece of farm machinery. With this memory in mind, he let the vehicle coast in near darkness, missing every obstacle as it rolled past.
The car came out in the large yard of a working farmhouse, far enough away from the chaotic roadblock not to be seen. Chris pulled up behind a parked tractor; and in the silence, listened intently.
There were voices, but not those of officers and radios. He looked, and noticed he had coasted to within yards of some locals talking by the gate – and they hadn’t heard a thing. He slipped quietly out of the car on the opposite side to the residents, who were probably remarking on what was happening half-a-mile along the road.
Back in the other car, Victor was asking,
‘Won’t they be able to track him?’
‘Who, Chris?’ asked Ellie. ‘Not so long as they haven’t got the motion sensors set up as they had in Marsham; or that he doesn’t use a phone; or become damaged himself and start sending his own alarm – please, Chris, don’t start doing that. Victor, you’d have to drive us if we started tapping.’
‘I don’t want Chris to be injured,’ said Anna.
‘Don’t worry love,’ encouraged Ellie. ‘He won’t let that happen. I was only thinking aloud.’
Victor, though, still had questions, continuing,
‘And they have no way of tracing Danny now?’
‘Ellie answered, ‘No, not now his signal’s stopped. There’s no other beacon in him.’
‘So,’ reasoned Victor, further clarifying for himself, ‘the authorities get to the co-ordinates... and then they only have what they find on the ground?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Chris has the same?’
‘Yes, but he has the advantage, knowing how his brother thought.’
The past tense in that final word summed up the mood of the car.
Underwater – that had been Chris’s first instinct upon seeing Danny’s final transmitted co-ordinates on the map. It was also counterintuitive: wouldn’t anyone without a working knowledge of the Schmidt-Beck Prototype assume it to be as frail around H2O as the average electric heater? They wouldn’t know that the artif body was ninety percent non-conductive rubber and carbon fibre.
Night was on Chris’s side, as was the lumpy, unlit terrain. There were houses, but his brother wouldn’t have gone to one of those to be discovered. There were parked cars – one of them probably Danny’s – but none of them were parked out of kilter... which meant that Danny had had time to park cleanly.
Time enough also, deduced Chris, to make it to the other nearest landmark – the still, black pond lined with reeds and bushes, that stood between him and the distant flashing lights.
‘I love you, brother,’ he muttered, and began to make his way around the pool to the side nearest the parked cars. This brought him nearer also to the authorities; but being in the dark emboldened him, and he felt perfectly safe.
The cars were parked beside a low unlit building. Chris deduced that it might have been a tool shed, or a hostel for itinerant workers. Either way, it was thankfully empty that evening.
He then turned to the moonlit pool itself to look for any disturbance, as he knew what to look for. And there it was: broken reeds, and what might have been boot-falls in the thick mud. Chris hoped he was the only one who’d notice these, at least before daylight.
He turned one last time to judge the distance – the police were just the other side of the low building, maybe twenty yards away. But he had no choice. He would just have to go in as quietly as possible, and trust that the crackle of their radios would obscure the officers’ hearing, and that their bright lights would kill their night vision.
He had to go into the water in everything he wore – he couldn’t leave a pile of clothes at the poolside (though he did remember to toss his phone out onto the bank). And it was once submerged that Chris’s difference to humanity was exposed. He sank like a stone. This was due to the weight of some of his internals, which easily outweighed the little air and water within him. Like a spaceman bouncing down the edge of a moon crater, Chris made his way down the submerged bank of the pool, each time throwing thick gales of sludge up around him.
As the pool bed levelled out, he paused a minute to let the silt settle. He kept his mouth firmly closed, which he didn’t need to do, but which would leave less of him needing to be rinsed out afterwards. His robotic form also saved him from having to rise for air, or from releasing conspicuous bubbles to the surface.
Meanwhile, his every system was still exposed to water-damage. His core had once been sealed of course, but who knew what drips and drops his bus-damaged innards might now accept with glee? Even being in the water in his state was ridiculous. But as the murk cleared, and in the poorest light, there he saw it – a previous disturbance in the mud similar to that which he was now making. Yet without the added disturbance caused my moving limbs. No, in that previous instance the foreign body had slid smoothly down between the weeds and out of view.
Chris slithered onward, through renewed flurries of silt; and as this again cleared, he saw the feet of his brother. Reaching forward, Chris put his arms around Danny, and as he pulled him up to him, so a face with lifeless eyes rose up and brushed his own.
Chapter 111 – The Recovery of Danny Pt. 3
There was nothing to be done underwater, so Chris began to move his brother onto land. And there was no disrespect there: Danny hadn’t chosen a final resting place as a human might have done. The pond had been a pragmatic location to stay undiscovered. Now the circumstances had changed.
Chris attempted to navigate their course underwater, which was hard in the dark and when silt blew up around them with every motion. Still, he broke the surface a good twenty yards further along the bank from where they had entered it, and so a little further from the police positions.
He held just his eyes and ears above the jet-black surface for a moment: the police voices were still in the distance, though new mechanical noises pointed to equipment being set up close by. He really had got there in the nick of time.
And so, on the ground beside the reeds, Chris laid Danny out. Chris discovered that when unpowered their joints were not rigid like a more mechanical construction’s might be, but rather floppy where the rubber muscles had gone limp. Danny’s one arm was almost entirely missing.
They were too close to the increased presence of law enforcement for Chris to load Danny in the car and leave unseen. He had made an error – he should have kept another of the gang with him. He could have probably used Victor, leaving Ellie to look after Anna. It had been a mistake to send them all away.
The phone was not far from where Chris remembered leaving it, and it took a moment to power up. Then he phoned Victor, whispering, right away without a common courtesy,
‘I have him, fifty feet west of the gate before the roadblock, beside the water. I need you to come for us.’
‘But that’s right by where they’re all parked,’ reasoned Victor. ‘They’ll see us.’
‘Well, they’ll see me carrying a body re
gardless, but I’m not as quick as a car.’
‘But they’ll chase us.’
‘You haven’t seen us drive.’ This was intended to end any argument. And Chris didn’t allow any to continue, as he terminated the call and then skimmed the phone into the pond, where it skipped twice on the surface like a pebble, before on the third contact, it sparked and fizzled a moment among the opposite reeds, before beginning its own journey to the depths.
Ellie kept the car at low revs and in high gear, lights off and almost coasting. There was a slight dip in the road as they neared the farm at the edge of the search-zone.
‘There’s the gate,’ said Victor; and Ellie turned, nearly knocking over a woman in a Barbour jacket.
‘Jesus! Who’s that?’ asked Victor, he not having driving duties to distract him from his nerves.
The woman stood a moment, stunned. Before turning, and following the car along the drive it had just entered, calling, ‘Hey, you! This is my friend’s property!’
‘What do we do with her?’ asked the nervous passenger. He saw only urgency, and not the abundant time they had to complete their operation.
Before they knew it though, there was the drenched, spectral figure of Christopher, beside the driver’s door and carrying a body.
The woman in the Barbour jacket was silenced, as a back door of the car was flung open, and the soaked man, with his clearly deceased friend with awful injuries, clambered in. The body was flung in ahead, with a lack of care that to the woman displayed everything un-Christian in this world.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Chris to Anna, who was already in the backseat, and now had the lifeless body of her brother pressed up against her. Chris them climbed in also, to make it three.
‘You drive,’ said Chris to Ellie, pulling his door closed. ‘We haven’t time to change seats.’ But Ellie was one step ahead of him, and already had the car in low gear and spitting gravel. It spun across the uneven surface of the yard, and past the woman, back onto the tarmac road.
‘What about your own car?’ she asked, while working the gearstick like a rally driver.
‘The police were closer than I realised, I couldn’t have got Danny into it and driven away in time. Only Anna and I had been in it, there’ll be no DNA.’