by Paul McAuley
Someone came towards him, stepping easily despite the tilt in the deck and the jolting ride. Sade Oyecan: a tough wiry woman whose family had been in service of Tony’s for ever. She had trained him in use of weapons and personal security fifteen years ago. He remembered her sharp voice echoing under the high roof of the gymnasium during krav maga sessions, the whiplash of her scorn, the relentless exercises, the happiness he had felt whenever she doled out rare praise.
She dumped an exosuit in his lap, told him to put it on. ‘You won’t be armed. It might make you reckless, and I remember your attempts at marksmanship. You’re liable to hit one of us if there’s any excitement.’
‘I want to help in any way I can.’
‘You can do that by staying out of trouble. Keep to the rear, move only when I tell you to move. Understood?’
‘Absolutely.’
Sade helped him buckle into the exosuit. Its musculature woke with a shiver, tightened at his ankles and knees and hips, his shoulders and elbows. Sade handed him gloves and a visored helmet. ‘Remember how this works?’
Tony scanned the symbols and readouts of the visor’s head-up display, nodded. His mouth was dry. He felt as if he had swallowed a knot of thorns.
Sade rapped the top of his helmet. ‘Stay back. If there’s any trouble throw yourself flat and wait for me to tell you when to move. The place is dark. I’m hoping that’s the police’s idea of defence. My people will set up a perimeter and sweep the area, and then we’ll walk in. You tell the wizards to evacuate; we’ll escort them out. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
The flitter made a sudden sharp turn, then dropped faster than the Black Tower’s express elevator. Tony grabbed a strap and hung on, bit his tongue when the little craft banged down. He swallowed a spit of blood, followed Sade and the half-dozen guards down the ramp into a cutting wind that blew flat out of the freezing dark. Snow up to his knees. He remembered how to toggle the visor’s starlight view and slogged after the others to a fence half-buried in a smooth white wind-sculpted wave.
The long, low laboratory building stood beyond snow-covered fields. No lights showing anywhere. On the command band, one of the guards was telling Sade that drones were not picking up any movement.
‘Try another sweep,’ Sade said. ‘And give me a line to the police in there.’
She talked to someone, a brief exchange of mostly yeses and noes, told Tony that the lab had been locked down and everyone was safe.
‘Tell whoever you are talking to that I want a word with Junot Johnson,’ Tony said.
‘All’s quiet here, Mr Tony. The hostiles are way to the northwest, up in the foothills.’
‘Don’t be so sure. Tell them to put my man on the line.’
Sade leaned close, said quietly, ‘If you have cold feet, you can go back to the flitter. Wait until we’ve secured the place.’
‘If you were so certain nothing was wrong, why didn’t you land outside the entrance? Ask them to put Junot on.’
Sade asked. She told Tony, ‘They say he isn’t around right now.’
‘Something isn’t right.’
‘Maybe your man is looking after the wizards.’
‘I told him to lock them in one of the cold stores. And the greenhouses should be lit up. Aunty Jael is running experiments in them. Tell the police I want to talk to her.’
After a moment, Sade said, ‘Apparently she’s busy. I think you’re right, Mr Tony. Something’s wrong.’
‘Ask one of the police to come out. Tell them to bring Junot with them. Tell them it is on my order.’
Sade passed on the message. Silence. Stars twinkled brightly everywhere overhead. Seeing them from a planet’s surface was very different from being aloft. They seemed so very cold and remote.
‘They’ve cut the channel,’ Sade said, and a moment later a constellation of little sparks crackled and died in the dark air above the laboratory.
‘The drones are down!’ a man shouted, and the flitter’s rotors spun up with a roar, blowing a huge gust of snow over them. As the machine lurched into the air, something screamed across the fields. Tony saw the flitter’s shadow against the starry sky, saw it tilt hard right, and then it burst in a flower of bright flame and someone banged into him and knocked him face down in the snow.
‘Okay,’ Sade said after a few moments, and helped Tony to his knees. A cauldron of flames was tilted in a stand of pine trees, throwing huge flickering shadows across a stretch of snow pockmarked with fallen debris and little fires. And in the other direction thin dark figures were running across the snowy fields, moving with curious high gaits . . . Tony’s visor popped brackets around them and zoomed in. They were four of Aunty Jael’s hands, packs strapped to their chests.
‘Suicide bombers,’ Sade sang out. ‘Put them down.’
There was a brief soprano squall of gunfire. Three of the figures collapsed. The survivor came on, zigzagging through spurts of snow, and Sade jacked her carbine to her shoulder and squeezed off three shots. The hand collapsed, headless, a hundred metres off. A moment later, a plume of dirt and snow erupted where it had fallen and the clap of the explosion echoed out across the dark flat countryside.
In the freezing silence Sade stood up and told the guards they were going in. She was calm and matter-of-fact, saying they would cross the open ground as quickly as they could, selecting one group to take the main entrance, another to take the loading bay. The guards rose up and ran; Tony chased after Sade. His exosuit took over, pounding through knee-deep swales of snow. His head-up display was cluttered with signs and portents as the suit analysed and dismissed likely targets; he ached for a gun. His breath was a harsh engine. Muscle memory from the combat games he had played as a kid, an echo of childish glee, and a sick apprehension growing because this was not a game where you died in half a dozen ways before going home to supper.
Three guards cut away towards the main entrance; the others, led by Sade, ploughed straight on. Tony stumbled and fell flat on his face in a deep snowdrift, pushed to his feet and sprinted to the corner of one of the greenhouses where Sade and the guards crouched. Silence. Nothing moving in the dark shadow of the laboratory.
Sade put a hand on his shoulder, pointed to the lab’s loading bay. Tony nodded to show he understood.
‘Now!’ she said, and they were up and running again. Over a fence, across a yard, halting in the shelter of a big tractor. The loading bay was a dozen metres away when a sudden thunderclap of red flame rolled up beyond the laboratory’s flat roof. ‘Booby-trapped,’ someone reported breathlessly on the command band. Then: ‘Hands coming at us,’ and there was the sound of small-arms fire.
Sade said to Tony, ‘How many of those things does Aunty Jael have?’
‘Ten or twelve, I think. She can control some of the equipment, too. Low-loaders and so on.’
‘Is there a kill switch?’
‘I don’t know.’ Tony was not sure that the hands were being run by Aunty Jael, either. He had a bad feeling about her and Junot and the wizards.
‘Then we’ll take them down one by one,’ Sade said.
One of the guards scrambled onto the loading bay’s platform, plugged something into the keypad by the door, flattened against the wall as the door rolled up, took a quick peek inside, gave the all-clear thumbs-up. Sade and the other guard dashed forward; all three vanished inside. Tony took a few seconds to nerve himself up and follow them. He had almost reached the loading platform when bright flame blasted out of the door and a hard jolt of noise and air slammed into him.
He was on his back. Dazed. A high ringing in his ears. The front of his exosuit was smouldering; pockets of blue flame guttered in the snow around him. He could not move. His exosuit was locked.
Someone leaned in above him. A young man with a pale face and a stiff brush of blond hair, a black band painted across eyes that gleamed silver. Tiny crosses for pupils. Tony tried and failed to scrabble backwards. He was trapped in a rigid lobster shell, helpless as the man reac
hed down and unlatched his helmet, saying, ‘I just need your head.’
Tony saw the glint of a knife blade, his bowels liquefied, and then the man grunted and flew sideways. Tony lay there, sweating inside the shell of his suit. He had pissed himself, could feel it soaking into the liner, warm then cold.
Sade knelt beside him, asking if he was okay, her voice distanced and flattened by the ringing in his ears. She had lost her helmet and the right side of her suit was scorched and her arm was strapped to her torso with a grappling cord.
‘I can’t move,’ Tony said. The words were barbs in his throat.
‘I can fix that,’ she said, and stuck something into the port under his chestplate.
The hard shell of the exosuit relaxed. Tony rolled over, got to his knees, stood up. The pale man lay in the snow, a raw red crater in his chest, one arm flung above his head and a saw-bladed knife lying nearby.
‘We were hit by a booby trap,’ Sade said. ‘A hand ran up and exploded. Killed Tokun. Are you okay?’
‘Sade, I owe you my life.’
‘We’re not done yet. Can you walk?’
He could walk. They headed towards the main entrance. The floor of the lobby was shattered and scorched; overhead, shredded tiles dangled from twisted struts. One of the guards met them, said that aside from the booby trap there had been minimal resistance. ‘We knocked out about a dozen hands. Two hostiles took off in a spinner. It looked like they were loading equipment when we came in.’
Tony said, ‘What about the people who were working here?’
‘They didn’t make it, sir,’ the guard said. ‘I’m sorry.’
The dead were in the work space, lying in stinking black water that had spilled from the smashed ruin of the stromatolite aquarium. A man and a woman in Commons police green, Junot Johnson, three wizards in their white coats. The wizards had been decapitated. Tony recognised the heraldic formulae scrawled on Cho Wing-James’s lab coat and looked away.
‘I think they took the heads of the wizards because they are infected with a Ghajar eidolon,’ he told Sade. That was why the man she had killed had wanted to cut off his head, he realised. He was infected, too.
According to one of the guards, all of the dead had been electrocuted.
‘Like with a taser but a lot more voltage,’ she said. ‘The filaments are still stuck in their skin.’
Sade, surveying the dismal scene, pointed to several small hands lying in the flood. One, the plastic shell of its torso badly cracked, was still twitching. ‘It looks like they were attacked by the hands, and made a last stand here,’ she said. ‘But who was controlling the hands?’
Tony was certain that Junot Johnson, loyal to the last, had smashed the aquarium to prevent the stromatolites falling into the hands of the raiders. He asked the guards if they had swept the building.
‘This floor is clear,’ one said.
‘Two of the wizards are missing. We need to check the basements,’ Tony said.
There was no one in the cold store, and the door to Aunty Jael’s room was open. Her laminated brain and the apparatus that supported it were gone.
‘I think Junot and the others were attacked and killed before the raiders arrived,’ Tony said. ‘Someone mobilised the hands against them, and sabotaged the comms so they couldn’t call for help. And I think I know who did it.’
‘You mean the two missing wizards?’ Sade said.
‘Not the wizards,’ Tony said. ‘It was someone who knew everything—’
Sade raised a hand and half-turned away and began a brief conversation with someone on the command band.
Tony realised that the intruders could not have known that he would come to find them at the laboratory. And because they wanted the eidolon in his head they would have gone to look for him . . . A panicky convulsion passed through him. ‘I need to get back to the city,’ he told Sade. ‘I need to get there right now.’
She turned to him. Her expression behind the overlay of symbols and little windows in her visor was serious and sad. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Tony,’ she said.
‘If you can’t take me there I will find some other way.’
‘It isn’t that,’ Sade said. ‘You’re under arrest.’
23. Chloe Millar
Lisa scattered Pete’s ashes on a flat ridge that overlooked the dry wash where they’d often walked in the evening. Pete always running ahead, investigating rocks and undergrowth, chasing after critters he’d raised up. He had never lost that artless enthusiasm, the dumb old dog. Sometimes he would disappear for a couple of hours, tracking the spoor of something intensely interesting, returning with a sidling guilt he’d shake off as soon as Lisa forgave him. As she always did. She’d lived with Pete for six years, and in all that time the world had been ever fresh for him, born anew every day. She’d loved him for that, and he’d given her his unconditional love in return. Flopping beside her while she worked, putting up with her moods, sleeping at the foot of her bed at night. He’d loved Willie too, greeting him in a frenzy of delight whenever he turned up.
Lisa remembered the times when she and Willie had perched up here of an evening. A little fire flickering in a circle of stones. Stars coming out above the darkening shrub-steppe tableland as they talked about their lives and people they knew, talked about anything and everything except the Bad Trip and how it had split them in two. Willie had done most of the talking, now Lisa thought about it. His wild tales. They’d come out here on his fortieth birthday with his road dogs, the little gang of bikers he’d fallen in with after he’d bought a second-hand Harley Davidson Roadster. A year later he’d had to sell that bike to settle a gambling debt, but they’d had a fine old time that night. Building a big fire, firing roman candles at the stars, dancing to old songs and howling at the little lopsided moon as it jumped up from the western horizon. Lisa remembered how Willie had ridden his bike through the fire, scattering galaxies of sparks into the night.
Oh Willie. Oh Pete.
She climbed into her pickup truck and in the last light picked her way across country until she struck a county road, and then drove to the Trading Post, a store with a pit barbecue out back. She needed to eat before she set out, and it was a popular joint. If Nevers was somehow keeping watch on her, it would be good cover for what she needed to do.
She sat at one of the picnic tables under coloured bulbs strung criss-cross on poles, a couple of dozen people eating and chattering around her, and placed a call to a service that patched ordinary phones to a q-phone exchange. She gave the number Sheriff Bird had passed to her and while she waited for the call-back worked through a pulled-pork sandwich and a side order of slaw, demolished a portion of pecan pie. She was on her second coffee refill when her new smartphone rang and the exchange operator told her that the call was connected. A few moments later, a cool English voice was asking what she wanted.
‘My name is Lisa Dawes. You don’t know me, but we have an acquaintance in common. Adam Nevers.’
It was the usual miracle – talking in real time to someone on another planet halfway across the galaxy. No delay, the signal so clear she might have been gossiping with her next-door neighbour.
A pause. Then Chloe Millar said, ‘How did you get my number?’
‘My place was raided by Adam Nevers. He works for the geek police here on First Foot. The TCU. They killed my dog, and someone passed on your number because he felt bad about that.’
‘Adam Nevers killed your dog?’
‘Euthanised him because, allegedly, he might have been infected with an eidolon. I just now scattered his ashes. What it is, I’m in kind of a tight spot thanks to Mr Nevers. I’d be really grateful if you could spare a couple of minutes and tell me anything that might help me deal with him.’
‘Before this goes any further,’ Chloe Millar said, ‘I have to tell you that you aren’t the first person to call me about Adam Nevers. And I have to ask you, as I asked the others, not to go into any details about the kind of trouble you’re in.’
‘Okay.’
‘I looked you up when the exchange got in touch about this call. I know you deal in artefacts. I know you were involved in some kind of incident with one some years ago. And that’s all I want to know. I’m trying to have what passes for a normal life, even though I’m living on an alien planet full of alien ruins. I have a husband, two kids. I don’t want to become involved in anything that could attract attention. I don’t want my family involved.’
‘I understand,’ Lisa said. ‘But since you kindly agreed to talk, maybe you could tell me about your encounter with Adam Nevers. Your history with him.’
‘I haven’t seen him for a long time. Eight years. He came back to Mangala once, made a point of seeing me. He felt that it was important to let me know he was still working. It was a matter of pride as far as he was concerned.’
‘I think I know what you mean.’
‘Is he still suited and booted?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘What does he wear, these days?’
‘Suits, silk ties, cufflinks . . . Sort of like one of those old movie stars. Pretty fancy for a cop.’
‘I noticed his clothes the first time I met him. Which isn’t something you can always say about a man. Especially a policeman. That was back in London, when he and I were on different sides of the search for these two kids who’d fallen under the influence of a Ghajar eidolon.’
‘And you found them, and they led you to the Ghajar ships.’
‘We found the place the ships returned to after spending who knows how many thousands of years in mothballs. And Nevers persuaded his bosses to allow him to chase us all the way to Mangala, and tried and failed to arrest us. The one thing you should know about him,’ Chloe Millar said, ‘is that he really does believe that he’s doing the right thing. And he doesn’t give up, and he has friends in high places.’
‘If you mean the Jackaroo, he brought an avatar along the first time he visited my place,’ Lisa said. She was about to explain about the raid and the follow-up, then remembered that Chloe had asked her not to give any details.
