Noble Conflict

by Malorie Blackman

  ‘I know.’

  Kaspar looked at Mac’s face. Scared, but determined. She really was quite beautiful – and a better friend than he deserved if she was prepared to go through all this with him. He couldn’t help wondering why she was doing it, but he wasn’t about to question her motives. She was genuine, he’d bet his life on it.

  ‘OK, let’s do it,’ he said finally. ‘But we’ll have to come up with a better cover than pizza. And the other thing I need to do is find a way to get back into the Clinic.’

  36

  After a full-on week of yet more skirmishes with groups of Insurgents, Kaspar sat against a wall, getting his breath back, next to the bodies of two stunned, unconscious terrorists. This latest attack had involved a prolonged ground car chase through some pretty suburban backstreets and had ended with Mariska immobilizing the terrorist’s vehicle by sending an override command to its engine management computer. The four terrorists had bailed out and scattered into the Botanical Gardens, and it had taken twenty minutes of chasing them round the shrubbery before they were tagged.

  Kaspar was excited, and it wasn’t just the adrenalin from the chase. He had known for some time now that he needed to get back inside the Clinic, and today at last a golden opportunity had presented itself.

  It was time to find out what was really going on.

  Mariska had zapped the other two, and he knew that she was on her way to him, so he only had a few moments. After a quick check to ensure he wasn’t being watched or monitored, Kaspar took out his utility knife and slit a hole in the leg of his trousers. Here goes, he thought, steeling himself. Taking a deep breath, he stuck the knife through the tear and into the fleshy part of his thigh.

  For a moment he felt nothing, then red-hot, screaming pain ripped through his body. Kaspar bit down hard on his bottom lip. He looked down at the damage he’d inflicted to his leg. It was bleeding a little too copiously. God, he hadn’t hit an artery, had he?

  Stop panicking, Kaspar. He’d been careful to aim for a non-lethal part of his thigh. But it still hurt like hell and was bleeding like a water feature.

  By the time the transports arrived, Mariska had already stuck a field dressing on the wound. After treating the terrorists, a medic found time for the good guys.

  Kaspar gave him a rueful smile. ‘One of them got me with a knife,’ he explained. ‘It looked a bit rusty but it’ll be fine, yeah?’

  The medic peered at Kaspar’s leg. ‘It’s superficial, but it’s safer to come with us and get it checked,’ came the reply. ‘It might need a couple of stitches. You can’t be too careful with open wounds. The last thing you need is for it to become infected. Here, stick this over it for now.’ The medic handed Kas a fresh field dressing.

  Fifteen minutes later, Kaspar was at the Clinic. He was directed to wait outside Treatment Room B, where he would be seen as soon as the more urgent cases had been dealt with.

  ‘Could you at least do something to stop the bleeding?’ Kaspar read the nametag that was part of the uniform of the nurse before him. Nurse Drayton had a sour face and lips that were permanently turned down. It probably took a High Council directive to get her to smile. ‘I’ve got blood dripping down my leg and it hurts like a bastard.’

  ‘I could cauterize the wound and staple it closed, but a doctor has to administer the local anaesthetic,’ Nurse Drayton told Kaspar in no uncertain terms.

  ‘And how long before a doctor is available?’

  ‘At least an hour,’ said the nurse.

  Kas took a deep breath. ‘I really can’t wait that long. Could you just staple me back together so I can get back to the Academy?’

  Nurse Drayton’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Are you sure? It’ll be quite painful if you don’t have the local anaesthetic.’

  ‘I’ll grin and bear it,’ said Kaspar.

  The nurse shrugged. ‘It’s your leg. Just sign the waiver form and I can get right to it.’

  A couple of minutes later, Kaspar was seated on a gurney, his leg stretched out in front of him. Nurse Drayton had escorted him into the treatment room and was laying out the necessary medical-ware to fix his leg.

  ‘Last chance to back out,’ said the nurse.

  Kaspar shook his head, and gritted his teeth. He had to be insane to go through with this but he really couldn’t go exploring with blood pouring down his leg and leaving a trail behind him.

  But this was going to hurt. A lot.

  Kaspar hadn’t been wrong. His leg was throbbing, his heart was pounding, and all he wanted to do was put Nurse Drayton in a choke hold. But at last his wound was clean and stapled. The nurse covered it with a fresh dressing, securing it with a bandage.

  ‘You’re very brave,’ said the nurse, a touch of admiration sneaking into her voice.

  Kaspar wiped the beads of sweat off his forehead. ‘Not brave. Just stupid,’ he corrected.

  ‘Would you like me to call the Academy for a transport to take you back?’ asked the nurse.

  Kaspar shook his head. ‘No, I’ve got that covered. But thanks anyway.’

  ‘Take some painkillers and keep your weight off it for at least twenty-four hours. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Kaspar, knowing full well that it wasn’t going to happen.

  He hopped off the gurney and tentatively tried putting weight on his bad leg. It was manageable. Acutely painful, but manageable. Kaspar thanked the nurse one last time before he headed out of the Minor Trauma department, made his way down to the kitchen, slipped out through the exit into the garden and limped across to the melon patch where he knew he could get to the North Wing.

  By the time he’d taken up his position beneath the melon plants, his leg was throbbing worse than ever. Kaspar would’ve given his left arm for some strong painkillers at that moment; if he didn’t take the weight off his leg soon, the wound would open up and the dressing would be saturated with blood. He had to hurry.

  He kept his eyes on the entrance to the North Wing. This time, there was no one there and the side door was shut, but Kaspar reckoned he wouldn’t have long to wait. With a large number of captives to process, he figured that medical reinforcements would soon be on their way. Kaspar settled down, hidden among the roots of the plants, and pointed his rifle at the door. Through the telescopic sight, he could clearly see the keypad. Now he just needed someone to arrive. About ten minutes later, two doctors turned up. They obviously didn’t think they could be seen, so they weren’t at all careful about shielding the keypad. Kaspar watched the movements of the shorter doctor’s hand over the keys.

  Left side, right side, middle, right side.

  Perfect.

  Once they had gone in, Kaspar sprinted across to the door and examined the keypad. There was a fine layer of dirt on it – except on the two, four, five and nine.

  ‘No wonder people get burgled.’ Kaspar shook his head. Anyone could see that the clean keys had to be the active ones. And since the code pattern was left – right – middle – right, the code had to be 5 – 9 – 2 – 4. Kaspar keyed in the numbers, satisfied with his logic.

  The door remained disappointingly sealed.

  How about 5 – 4 – 2 – 9?

  Kaspar held his breath as he keyed in the alternative code. There was a satisfying click and the door swung open.

  ‘Yes!’

  He followed the now-familiar route down the corridor, peering carefully into each room, but they were all empty. At the end of the corridor, he took the stairs up one flight and walked back along the length of the building, still checking. Nothing. The second floor up was also unoccupied, but when he reached the third floor, he immediately heard noises.

  Kaspar tracked the sound to ‘Operating Room One’ and peeked through the door. He couldn’t see everything that was going on, but he could see that there were glass panels just beneath the ceiling, through which medical students above could watch operations. He followed a sign that said VIEWING GALLERY up a flight of stairs. Carefully opening and closing the door so as not to a
ttract the attention of those below, Kaspar began to observe.

  The room contained medical staff and a couple of Guardians from the Special Support Group, none of whom were wearing surgical masks. However, they were in the minority. The room was filled to capacity with gurneys, each occupied with strapped-down terrorists. Most were unconscious, no doubt zapped by Guardians’ stun rifles, but a few were awake but restrained, alert and looking around, or struggling to get free. Regardless of whether or not they were awake, all of them were immediately stunned by one of the medics. Not anaesthetized, but given a high-power, direct contact blast.

  Kaspar winced at each shot. A while ago, back at the Academy during a close-quarter battle drill, a real oaf of a trainee called Micheson had accidentally fired his weapon point-blank into Mikey’s thigh during a wall climb. Even after Mikey had woken up with a boatload of painkillers swirling through his system, he was still in agony.

  ‘It felt like the nerves in my leg were being shredded,’ he told them afterwards. ‘All the way from my lower spine to my toes. My leg felt like it was on fire and the pain just wouldn’t let up. If they hadn’t sedated me through the worst of it, I’d have thought seriously about killing Micheson and then myself.’ And he hadn’t been joking.

  Micheson had been kicked out and Mikey had come damn close to quitting too.

  So to hit someone with a contact shot was not a humane or pleasant thing to do. And after the patients were all unconscious, there was something else. The way they were treated was more reminiscent of a slaughterhouse than a hospital. Their bodies were stripped and tossed about like carcasses. They were being slammed, dropped and slung across the room. Occasionally they landed face down on the floor and sustained facial injuries.

  This wasn’t nursing; it was torture.

  Kaspar spotted a intercom by the viewing window and pressed the button to hear what was going on.

  ‘How much longer is this going to take?’ asked one of the SSGs, a short woman with fringed, dark brown hair.

  ‘You can see for yourself,’ said one of the doctors, indicating the gurneys pushed against both sides of the room.

  The medical procedures weren’t gentle nor professional. Kaspar crossed his legs involuntarily as catheters were rammed in like drinking straws being stuck into a milkshake. Then each patient was flipped onto their stomach, and their head was allowed to dangle over the edge of the trolley. One of the medics then inserted a large-bore needle into the back of the neck at the base of the skull, and pumped in about ten millilitres of some brown liquid. Kaspar didn’t know what that was for, but he shuddered again. Finally the patients were flipped over again and a thermal cauterizing scalpel was used to slice off their eyelids.

  ‘I don’t see why we have to be here in the first place,’ complained the female SSG. ‘Once you jack ’em up with that brown shit, it’s not like they’re ever going to wake up again, is it?’

  ‘You know the rules,’ her SSG colleague told her. ‘Two SSGs to be in this room at all times to protect the medical staff.’

  ‘My sanity is what needs protecting. This assignment sucks.’

  ‘You’ll get no argument from me on that one,’ said her colleague.

  ‘Did anyone see the handball game last night on the TV?’ called out one of the doctors.

  The previous night’s handball final immediately became the topic of conversation. Kaspar had heard enough. He turned off the intercom.

  It was like an assembly line. Insurgent after Insurgent being incapacitated and tortured. And throughout it all, the medics laughed and joked with each other as if they were having a picnic.

  Kaspar watched until his eyes and his stomach begged him to leave. Heartsick, he crept back down the stairs. He’d seen enough. All he wanted now was to escape this place.

  If this was Alliance humanitarianism, then he wanted no part of it.

  Truth is an absolute. While there may be many versions or variations of lies, how can this apply to the truth? Our enemy, the Crusaders, believe that truth is on their side. They mistake truth for their own warped perspective. We in the Alliance have tried in vain to bring them around to our way of thinking but they stubbornly persist in their belief that their world view is the only one which is valid.

  We in the High Council had hoped that allowing some of the Crusaders to labour and live amongst us would work to the benefit of all of us. But progress has been slow.

  Some have criticized the introduction of special ID cards and documents for the Crusaders living amongst us, but even Alliance citizens must carry at least one form of identification at all times. We have asked no more of them than we have of ourselves.

  The High Council have a duty of care to all our peoples. We don’t doubt that there may be Crusaders who deplore violence and who wish to live amongst us in peace, but they fail to denounce in the strongest possible terms the Insurgents who live amongst them.

  We cannot and will not rest until the very last Insurgent is in our custody and subject to Alliance justice. The price of peace is eternal caution. We will never cease in our efforts to form one cohesive society, open and accessible to all, but the Crusaders need to understand that they too must play their part. It is their duty to turn their backs on those amongst them who would seek to maintain the divisions between us.

  If they are not for us, then they are against us. On this issue, there is no middle way.

  Extract taken from ‘The High Council Manifesto’ by Brother Simon

  37

  The problem Kaspar had was lack of info about the Insurgents. Hard facts on their religious beliefs? None. Good intel on their personal lives? Zero. He recalled some data that Mac had helped him retrieve. In all the interrogations that had ever been conducted over goodness only knew how many years, nobody had ever logged anything interesting about captured Insurgents.

  There was nothing.

  Kas checked out what Mac had previously said – ‘Nothing but meaningless rants, abuse, vile threats and some hair-raising displays of self-harm.’

  But in less than a month he had met a few of them, and while most had tried to rip his head off, he just knew they weren’t mindless thugs. Rhea had walked into an earthquake and risked capture to save his life. He had looked into her eyes. Anything further from an unreasoning animal he couldn’t imagine. She and the rest like her were stone-cold killers but they weren’t without method. So why had none of the interrogators ever seen anything like that? Rhea couldn’t be an anomaly.

  Kaspar constructed a quick query, encapsulated it as a parasite and then launched it on the back of a trivial bot-search. The request he made was very specific in terms of personnel, timespan and content, so the response came very quickly. Kaspar stared at the results.

  ‘Damn!’

  He read them again.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn!’

  He checked his search parameters, the data identifiers, the authenticators. All the data was complete and unabridged, all logs were certified authentic by Central Records and carried the electronic signature of the informant. Everything was in perfect order, except for one thing. He read his screen one more time, hoping that what he saw would make sense.

  INTRUDER AT COMPUTER CORE OF GUARDIAN ACADEMY . . . DISABLED BY GUARDIANS 0229 VOSS AND 4518 WILDING . . . WHILE ATTEMPTING TO DETONATE A THERMOBARIC DEVICE . . .

  SIGNED

  0229 VOSS / 4518 WILDING

  INTRUDER AT LEVEL THREE COMMUNICATIONS NODE LOCATED AT 864 WISSANT AVENUE . . . KILLED ACCIDENTALLY DURING HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT WITH GUARDIAN 4518 WILDING (INCORRECTLY APPLIED CHOKE HOLD) . . . RECOMMENDATION FOR REMEDIAL UNARMED COMBAT TRAINING FOR 4518 WILDING.

  SIGNED

  4518 WILDING

  Kaspar couldn’t believe it. These reports were fiction. There hadn’t been any thermobaric device in the computer core and he most certainly had not choked anyone to death, accidentally or otherwise. Central Records had rewritten his After Action reports and then falsely authenticated them. Why? And if they had done it
with Kaspar and Voss, what about other Guardians?

  Why were they so desperate to hide the suicides? Everything else was pretty accurate. The unauthorized accesses, the stunning, the death, the personnel involved. What the intruders were actually doing, however, had been falsified.

  If he couldn’t trust his own reports on the system, what could he trust? The official records showed no discernible rationale for what the Insurgency was doing, but the official records weren’t just useless, they were lies. The sacred, encyclopaedic, tamper-proof computerized archive was being deliberately skewed to reflect someone’s agenda. But whose?

  As soon as I learn how to use the computers, I find out all the computers are lying to me. What else isn’t true? he wondered. Anything coming out of Central Records is now suspect. Kaspar punched the table in frustration. He needed help and a fresh perspective.

  He headed across to Library Services.

  ‘Oh my,’ said Mac, when he had explained what he’d found.

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Oh my . . .’

  ‘OK. It would be more helpful if you said something else, though,’ sighed Kaspar.

  ‘Sorry. It’s just that—’

  ‘You’ve spent your life trusting computers?’

  ‘Well . . . yes.’

  ‘What can we do? I’m out of ideas. I don’t know how to proceed if all the data in the computer has been fiddled with.’

  ‘Not all of it,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘It hasn’t all been tampered with.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Because there’s far too much of it.’ She looked a bit happier now, a glimmer of faith in her computers returning. ‘Look, at the last count, there were about seven hundred yottabytes of data in the Central Archives.’

  ‘Seven hundred whatabytes?’

  ‘Yottabytes. It’s one thousand to the eighth power.’

  ‘Is that a lot?’

  ‘Oh, for the love of—’ she spluttered, before reining in her geek umbrage. ‘Yes, it’s an awful lot. You know what a gigabyte is? A billion bytes of data? Enough to store about ten minutes of HiDef recording?’