Border Princes

by Dan Abnett

  ‘The Killer Sudoku from the Planet Mind-Screw is not happy,’ noted Toshiko.

  ‘That much is obvious,’ said Jack, staring.

  ‘Firewalls?’ Toshiko called out to Ianto.

  ‘It’s eaten through three, but we’re holding it now.’

  Toshiko pointed at the projection display. ‘Elevated energetic behaviour. Some heat dissipation. There’s some edge-spectrum stuff there I don’t begin to understand. Nasty. Very agitated. Very angry.’

  Jack nodded. ‘I don’t think it likes the fact we spoiled its games. I don’t think it likes the fact we locked it up in a box that deprived it of all external sensory input.’ He looked at Toshiko. ‘I think it wants someone to play with it.’

  Toshiko shuddered. ‘I know we’ve got bleeding-edge inhibitors screening us from its effect, but I’m feeling ill just looking at it.’

  Ianto raised a hand. ‘Headache,’ he reported.

  ‘Psychosomatic,’ said Jack. ‘It’s just freaking us out. It can’t stand the fact it can’t get to us.’ He leaned closer and grinned at the rotating metal solid. ‘Can you?’

  He glanced back at Toshiko. ‘Even so, box it up, lock it tight, and put it in an isoclave in the vault until we’ve got time to deactivate it or even disassemble it.’

  ‘We don’t have that time now?’ asked Toshiko.

  ‘No,’ Jack replied. ‘Pressing matters.’ He handed her the sheet of paper Ianto had give him.

  Toshiko read it. ‘I don’t understand this...’

  ‘Seeing as no one else has turned up for work, looks like this one’s down to you and me. Ianto, maybe you could give everyone a call and remind them they work for me?’

  ‘On it,’ said Ianto, reaching for his cell.

  ‘I still don’t get it.’ said Toshiko. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘We’re going to the chapel, baby,’ said Jack.

  Despite careful oiling, the barrow’s wheel still squeaked.

  Davey trundled it up the path to the allotments. The sky was bare and white, like plain paper. A nothing day, caught in a trough between bits of weather. At least there was no rain yet.

  The ground smelled strongly of the overnight downpour: rich earth smells and raw vegetation. Drains gurgled as they drank down the overspill. Birds sang in the hedges with sharp, whetted voices.

  He’d intended to evict his guest in the small hours, after the dream. The storm had blown out around four thirty, and the sky had cleared so suddenly there had been stars. Davey, dressed in readiness by then, had put on his digging jacket and gone out into the wet blackness.

  But it had been a cold, sinister hour. A dome of sky like polished jet, the prickle of stars, the amber glow of Cardiff. Roofs and chimneys were key-tooth silhouettes against the air. Somewhere, a dog-fox was barking her pitiful saw-edged yap. It was coming from streets away across the plots, the baleful cry of winter’s onset.

  It had made Davey feel solitary and vulnerable. He went back indoors and decided to wait for morning.

  He flicked on the light in the bathroom and sat down again.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I’ll have to move you back tomorrow. I can’t—’

  He had paused. The hum intoned softly.

  ‘I can’t have you in the house, I don’t think. Sorry. I need my sleep, and I can’t be having dreams like that. Your dreams, weren’t they?’

  No answer.

  ‘I think they were. I think I just brushed against them. Anyway, sorry.’

  In the cold daylight, he wheeled the barrow up to the shed and unlocked the door. A few things had blown over in the night, but nothing had suffered human disturbance.

  He took it inside, and propped it up carefully, the way it had been before.

  ‘You’ll be safe in here, I promise. You won’t get disturbed. I’ll be back to check on you.’

  Davey turned to go. ‘You can dream all you like in here,’ he said.

  Back in his kitchen, the kettle and the radio on, Davey rummaged around in a drawer for his bus pass. He had already decided on a trip to the lending library.

  He put a bowl of food down, and banged the tin with a fork, but the cat did not appear.

  The flat was a mess, frankly, and smelled a bit stale. Dirty dishes were lined up on the counter, as if Rhys was in training for some washing-up record attempt, and the bins needed emptying. A carrier bag full of overflow hung from a drawer handle.

  Gwen started in the bedroom, and filled a hold-all with a few clothes, some clean undies, two pairs of shoes, and a few personal items from the dresser.

  She’d decided not to take much, just a handful of essentials to begin with. Clearing her stuff out wholesale while his back was turned would have been plain nasty. Besides, she didn’t have very long. She was late as it was. They’d overslept.

  Some favourite earrings from her jewellery box, a necklace her mother had given her, a locket that had belong to her nan. From the bathroom, her favourite soap and shampoo, her expensive perfume. Not the one Rhys had bought her duty free that time, which she wore to please him. The other one, the one she treated herself to because she really loved the scent.

  Gwen carried the hold-all back into the lounge. Books, DVDs, CDs... sorting through them seemed particularly petty. She knelt down and slid her trinket box off a lower shelf. Her box of lovelies.

  It was an old shoebox, covered in pretty gift wrap, and adorned with coloured twine and faded petals glued on with Pritt Stick.

  She took off the lid.

  Birthday cards, Christmas cards, congratulations-on-your-new-job cards; a dried flower from a wedding they’d been to; some photos; a week-to-view diary from 1994 with a kitten on the cover; old invites, still in their envelopes, clamped in a bulldog clip; a champagne cork with a coin cut into it; postcards from here and there; an interlock puzzle out of a cracker; a dead watch she’d worn in her teens; a charm bracelet that she’d been given when she was eight; some foreign coins; three old letters from a boy she’d loved a long time before Rhys, tied up with now-colourless ribbon; glitter-edged gift tags, ‘To Gwen, with love’; a shell she’d kept for reasons that now escaped her; a broken fountain pen; some keys that no longer fitted anything; a tacky little ddraig goch in a snow globe.

  There was a black and white photo of her aged three, on a tricycle. One corner had a fold across it, crazing the emulsion. Gwen turned the photo over, expecting the explanatory caption ‘The Heartless Bitch, at an early age’. There was nothing written on the back.

  The front door lock jiggled open. Gwen stood up very quickly.

  Rhys came in. He stopped dead and looked at her. His face looked puffy, as if he’d been sleeping too little or drinking too much.

  ‘Gwen,’ he said, genuinely surprised.

  ‘Hello,’ she managed.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I needed some stuff,’ she said. Nice footwork, Gwen. Not at all pathetic.

  He looked at the hold-all beside her feet and sniffed. ‘Moving out, are we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Coming back, then?’

  ‘No,’ she frowned. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. I just—’

  He waved his hand. ‘Please, spare me the “I need some space” bit, all right? Would you, please? Otherwise it’s all going to get a bit too bloody EastEnders for my taste.’ He hesitated. ‘You looking after yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. You got someplace to stay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With a friend?’

  ‘With... yes.’

  ‘Got a number? A forwarding address?’ He slouched off his coat.

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘What is it like, then, Gwen?’ he asked. He walked into the kitchen and filled the kettle.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d be here—’

  ‘Morning off, me. Dentist. Sorry to bugger up your plan to sneak about behind my back.’ He was losing his surprise and gathering a little confidence and momentum.


  ‘It’s not like that,’ she said. ‘I came round this morning because I needed some things. I came when you were out because I don’t know what to say to you. Not yet. And really, that’s all.’

  ‘Sounds very much like sneaking about behind my back to me.’

  ‘It isn’t. Not the way you mean. I’m not ready for a confrontation or a—’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A long, meaningful talk.’

  Rhys nodded. ‘When will that be, then? When will that be, you suppose? Next week? After Christmas? Can you pencil me in around work?’

  ‘Rhys—’

  He saw the trinket box on the floor. ‘Your box of lovelies. And you tell me you’re not moving out?’

  ‘I was just looking at it.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered, shaking his head. ‘How cowardly... how bloody spineless can you be? Coming in here to pick the place clean while I’m at work. Very classy, that. I’ve known burglars show more—’

  ‘I don’t want this!’ she protested. ‘Not now. Can’t you grasp that? This is exactly why I dropped in when I thought you’d be out. I don’t want this.’

  ‘OK. Just so long as you can sort out what you want, we’ll be fine. Just so long as you get what you bloody want—’

  ‘Rhys!’

  He glowered at her.

  ‘I’m not ready to do this,’ she told him. ‘I’m really sorry this happened today, but I’m not ready to do this yet.’

  The kettle began to steam.

  ‘I gotta go,’ said Gwen.

  ‘You got a number, then? Somewhere I can reach you if I need to?’

  ‘You can call me on my mobile.’

  ‘Apparently, I can’t,’ he said. ‘God knows, I’ve tried.’

  ‘I’ll answer you, promise I will.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  She put on her coat and picked up her hold-all. She paused to slide the trinket box back onto its place on the shelf.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you.’

  ‘Right,’ he nodded. He was staring at the window, not looking at her. The muscles in his jaw were tense.

  ‘I will. Soon. Soon as I can.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Take care of yourself, all right?’

  ‘Yeah. No one else will.’

  She walked out and pulled the front door closed behind her.

  Rhys sighed, and bowed his head. He turned the kettle off and looked at the front door.

  ‘Oh, also, I love you,’ he whispered.

  She’d parked her car around the corner. Morning traffic hissed by on the damp road: a turquoise Cardiff Bus, a minicab, an Alpha Course transit conveying chattering OAPs to a church lunch, a courier van, a big-boned Chelsea tractor with a tiny mum at the helm. Somewhere a car alarm was whooping, and a crossing signal was pinging. Engines idled. Tail pipes quivered, fuming.

  Gwen felt sick and she felt bad and, most of all, she felt wrong.

  She got into the black Saab. The windows had steamed up. James was dozing off in the passenger seat.

  ‘All done?’ he asked, opening his eyes as the door shut.

  She pushed her hold-all back over onto the rear seats. It wedged against the head rest. She gave it an angry shove to send it on its way.

  ‘Gwen? What is it?’

  Gwen fumbled with the keys, then sat back. ‘Rhys was there.’

  ‘Shit. Did he give you a hard time?’

  ‘No,’ she said, sternly. ‘He’s not like that—’

  ‘OK, OK. I was just—’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  She looked around at him. ‘He was so sad. So messed up.’

  ‘Gwen...’

  ‘I did that to him. Me. My fault. I tried to explain why I was there, but it looked bad, you know?’

  ‘Everything will sort itself out,’ James said.

  ‘Is that a promise?’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘Wish I had your confidence. It’s going to get ugly.’

  ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘I hate the lying.’

  ‘So you said.’ James waited a moment. ‘So, did you tell him anything?’

  ‘Like what?’

  James shrugged.

  ‘No. Nothing about that. It’s too soon.’

  ‘OK. You’re right. Too soon.’ He looked a little downcast, but right then she didn’t especially care.

  He wiped the window with his cuff and looked out. ‘Ianto called.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘Wondered where I was. Wondered if I knew where you were. Something’s gone off.’

  She started the engine. ‘Hub?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said James. ‘I’ve got an address. He told us to meet Jack there.’

  She pulled out into the traffic.

  ELEVEN

  Butetown, the old heart of industrial Cardiff, used to run right down to the Docks. It still did, in the opinion of dyed-in-the-wool locals.

  But Cardiff was post-industrial now. Chimney soot and coal ash from the steel works no longer occluded the midday sun. Smutty trains no longer clanked in and out along the Taff Vale line. After three billion pounds-worth of facelift, the Docks were no longer called the Docks. They were the Bay, gleaming new and millennial, where suits lunched, and bistros thrived, and a few hundred thousand bought you a penthouse in the Quay developments with views of the Barrage. Those stalwart locals still called it Butetown, though, fighting the onset of a change already done and dusted.

  All that remained of Butetown, all that actually perpetuated the name, had coiled up in the heart of the central area and laid down in surrender, a sprawl of brick link tenements and fatigued 1950s high-rises, criss-crossed by the ghost veins of railway embankments, rendered in decaying Victorian stonework.

  Shiny black, brooking no objections, the SUV chased up Angelina Street like a slipped greyhound. Terraces swept by, a mosque. Traffic on the road, a street market, shop fronts with battered shutters still closed at mid morning on a Tuesday, like knights in the lists with their visors shut for the tilt.

  ‘Chapel?’ asked Toshiko for the seventh time.

  ‘Patience. We’re getting there,’ said Jack.

  He turned off into Skean Street, then braked as a refuse lorry blocked the way. He turned his head, resting his left arm across the seat backs, and reversed as far as Livermore, then switched left and then right again. Cobbles bumbled under their tyres.

  He drove them down a narrow gulf between old machine shops, and swung out wide in the gravel bed of a dead lot. Fossil cars, up on bricks, gazed at them with rusted eyes.

  ‘Here?’ asked Toshiko.

  Jack pulled the handbrake. ‘Here. What have you got for me?’

  She shrugged, and leaned forward, punching up the dashboard displays, working between one body of data and the next with the trackball set into the dash.

  ‘Nothing?’ she suggested.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘An absence of fact. A lack of data. What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Exactly that,’ Jack said. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  ‘So why...?’

  ‘Nothing at all. You see?’

  ‘Uh, no?’

  ‘Not even bricks and ground,’ Jack said softly.

  ‘Ah,’ said Toshiko. ‘I see now. Hang on. No, I don’t.’

  ‘Let’s take a walk,’ said Jack.

  He got out. She followed him. The slam of her door sent pigeons mobbing up into the rafters of a nearby ruin. The air was wet, suffused with a mineral scent. Bird lime spattered the ground. The overarching iron rafters were black against the plain white sky. They looked like the ribs of a leviathan fish.

  Jack popped the SUV’s back hatch. He took a compact scanner out of the equipment boxes and tossed it to her. Toshiko caught it neatly.

  ‘And this is for?’

  ‘Keeping tabs on the nothing that still isn’t there.’

  Toshiko switched the scanner on. No
reading, no bounce, no tone lock.

  ‘You know why I love working with you, Jack?’ she asked.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Me neither. I was hoping you could help me out with that.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  They crossed the weed-infested gravel, and crunched onto a slurry of tiles that had cascaded down from the roof at some point. Cobwebs strung between bent girders encrusted with twinkling dew diamonds from the night’s onslaught. They walked into shadow under what remained of a warehouse roof.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Toshiko complained.

  ‘All in good time. Try appreciating the vernacular architecture,’ Jack said, his voice coming back hollow and echoing. ‘This was the Millner and Peabody Number Three Coal Depot. In 1851 alone, this place factored and then sent out eighteen million tons of coke to fuel the engines of Empire. Doesn’t that just make you crazy?’

  ‘The quantity?’

  ‘No, Tosh, coal. Like that was ever going to work in any lasting way.’

  ‘Right. I’m still getting nothing,’ Toshiko called, trying to reset her scanner.

  ‘Nothing? That’s good. That’s what we want.’

  She ran to catch up with him. Loose stones scattered under her boots.

  ‘Through here,’ he said, leading her out of a crumbling doorway into another bare tract.

  A little church sat in front of them, derelict, windows and doors boarded up, graffiti wound around its flanks. It was sitting inside the plot of the warehouse.

  ‘St Mary-in-the-Dust,’ said Jack, pleased with himself.

  ‘St Mary in the what?’

  ‘It was built in 1803 and demolished in 1840 to make way for the depots.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I hadn’t finished—’

  ‘I hadn’t started. Demolished in 1840? But there it is.’

  ‘Exactly. It keeps coming back, once every thirty-five or thirty-nine years.’

  ‘It... what?’

  ‘We can count ourselves lucky. It wasn’t due back until 2011.’

  ‘Again, what?’

  ‘Come on,’ Jack said. He drew his revolver out from under his coat.

  ‘Oh, now I’m reassured,’ said Toshiko.

  Davey got off the bus as it came to a stop.

  ‘Cheerio,’ he said to the driver.

  The driver ignored him.