The Private Life of Elder Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Allow me to give you this, with my compliments.”

  He held out the Model 24 Stielhandgranate that Mister American had scavenged from the warship. He’d hated using them – the pull cord had a nasty habit of catching on things, setting off the grenades accidentally – but they had their uses.

  “I have already primed it.”

  Moving Targets by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  It kicked off when Derwent and Nzeogu gate-crashed the warehouse party in Edmonton aided and abetted by a handful of the Metropolitan’s finest. The neighbours – meaning anyone in a mile of the place – had been complaining about the music, but Nzeogu’d had a reliable tipoff and was hoping a few dealers of their acquaintance might be caught red handed, not to mention all the new friends they might make in possession of substances contrary to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.

  The tip-off had been some kind of crazy talk, though. Some small-time pot-grower they’d nicked had been all about the ultimate new high, and apparently a warehouse in Edmonton was the place to score it.

  “Goddamn bath salts,” Nzeogu decided, as they were waiting outside the warehouse doors. The boom and thunder of the music was loud enough that Derwent had to read his lips.

  “Going to be nothing,” she said in his ear. “Just the usual.” It felt good to say it, even if she was far from convinced. The vice world was spinning faster than ever these days. People were finding new ways to blow their minds faster than the legislation could keep up.

  “Goddamn Slumside,” Nzeogu added bitterly.

  Derwent nodded. They were within an easy step from the Surreyside Temporary Housing Project clusterfuck, the first of the trumpeted “transient estates” that Westminster had rolled out to great fanfare last year. Surreyside – aside from being nowhere near the affluent pastures of Surrey – had been opened as a stepping-off point for the homeless: transients, economic migrants, refugees, care-in-the-community patients and the just-plain poor. Spiralling property prices and a bullish rental market had driven unprecedented numbers onto the streets, and in the end even the current administration had accepted that some sort of action was needed. Their economic wisdom had decreed what was now mostly known as “slumside”. The intent was that everyone in need would find temporary housing in the super-estate before being sent on to something more congenial. Derwent wondered whether work had even started on phase two of that plan. All that had really happened was that a widespread homelessness problem had been shunted out of sight into a hellhole now so overpopulated it was reaching some kind of critical mass. Derwent had been sufficiently vocal, when the white paper had gone out, that she’d put the brass’s back up and missed on a promotion. Now, with the news crammed with the excesses and the horrible conditions of Slumside, she had the bitter satisfaction of knowing she’d been right.

  And of course, those consigned to Slumside didn’t stay there, but went out into neighbouring boroughs and got on with business. She’d lost count of how many of Vice’s leads had led back to that maze of concrete towers and broken windows. The party they were about to bust would be full of the young and rootless off the estate, because they wanted to have fun just like everyone else.

  Then the all clear came through and the team rammed down the doors onto a room packed with dancing, jumping, screaming teens. There was a mad light show going on, and the air practically shuddered with the beat. Nzeogu went for the DJ and started pulling plugs with brutal efficiency.

  Before the music cut – while all the revellers were still trying to understand that the party was over, Derwent had a sudden turn. The UV lights had been cut, but the whites of the ravers’ clothing were still glowing blue. For a moment she thought she saw some spectral not-quite-purple radiance that suffused the place. In that same instant it seemed to her that the walls of the warehouse were infinitely far away and receding still further, and the air around her was… Later, the only word she could think of was busy, as though it had been populated with some invisible throng.

  But then Nzeogu had pulled enough jacks to shut it all down, and the work of the night began – picking out familiar faces and taking them away; taking details, confiscating evidence, doing their jobs. It was a long night. There were a lot of stoned teens stumbling about clutching at the air around them, wide-eyed and reeling, gabbling and pawing at each other. Nzeogu’s tip-off had been good; someone had been dealing something new at the warehouse. Which meant someone over in Slumside had been doing some creative cooking.

  There were two major upshots from that night, neither of them the kind to build a career on. Firstly, aside from a couple of small-time dealers, the vice bust really was a bust. Almost everyone Derwent and Nzeogu had taken in turned up clean when the lab tests came through. Most of them would even have been legal to drive.

  The pair of them commiserated about it later. “You saw how they were, coming out of the place,” Nzeogu said,. “The way they were moving, there’s no way they weren’t on something.”

  Derwent could only agree but, whatever it was, it had left no chemical traces in the users, nor noticeable after-effects. And by that time the few who had lawyers were talking about charges and time limits and compensation.

  Which left Steni Osalawi.

  Derwent got in one morning to nine voicemails, eleven emails and a text concerning the new-fledged internet campaign to release Steni Osalawi. The Chief Inspector wanted to see her ASAP to demand why there was no paperwork about the boy and why they hadn’t let him go with the others. There was a Human Rights lawyer taking the whole business to the press for the publicity and there were friends of the incarcerated who were going to protest outside the station as though the kid was a latter-day Nelson Mandela.

  Neither Derwent nor Nzeogu had ever heard the name before.

  In that horrible panic unique to public servants who may have screwed up the admin, they went through all the records from the night, all the admissions, the names, the numbers. Nowhere did the name Steni Osalawi feature.

  “False ID,” Nzeogu decided, so they got a picture of the boy from www.freesteni.org and compared it to the mugshots of everyone they’d taken in.

  By lunchtime that day they were able to stand before the Chief Inspector and say with certainty that they couldn’t free Steni because they’d never had him.

  Steni had been at the party, according to his apparent large number of friends. Steni hadn’t been seen after the party. The Human Rights lawyer did her level best to draw the conclusion that he’d been nicked by the Met and spirited away to some secret interrogation site but the utter lack of evidence eventually defeated even her crusading desire for publicity. Steni, it was concluded, must have slipped out the back, and his current whereabouts were nothing to do with the Vice Squad. Presumably he was sunk somewhere in the morass that was Slumside.

  PR disaster averted, therefore. Except…

  Over the next week, Derwent and Nzeogu went over the footage they’d confiscated from various party-goers’ cameras, hoping to see some indication of drugs being passed from hand to hand. They were both convinced that someone had been dealing something that night, even if the lab had drawn a blank.

  And they would have gone with that phone footage as supporting evidence, if it hadn’t been for the lack of anything else. They found plenty of people under the influence of something – blissed out, staring, reaching out to touch empty space, goggling in astonishment at their hands or at nothing at all.

  And they found Steni. By then, they were familiar enough with his face that it leapt out at them. Steni had doubled down on whatever it was the crowd was taking and it looked like he was having a bad trip. Derwent and Nzeogu watched him flail and flinch and push madly through the crowd, only to come up short as though whatever he was fleeing was all around him. He was on three different videos.

  In the third, he disappeared.

  “Holy Mother of God, what just happened?” Nzeogu demanded, dragging back the video slider so that Steni re-emerged from thin air.

&nb
sp; They watched it a dozen times, feeling more and more unnerved. There was Steni, pushing, running; there he was, stopping, staring upwards, arms flung to protect him from something that wasn’t there. Then … just gone. When they played it back frame by frame there was no intermediate stage: present to absent without transition.

  But it was through a moving crowd and the image quality was poor, there were lights flashing and the hand holding the phone camera was shaky, probably the video was corrupted and, most persuasive of all arguments, people didn’t just vanish. Vice washed its hands of Steni Osalawi just as soon as it could establish that his disappearance – either figurative or literal, hadn’t happened on their watch.

  *

  There was another bust over near Camden. Derwent and Nzeogu weren’t on that detail, but the organisers and the MC had all been out of Slumside. The report had an angry bafflement they recognised from their own. Plenty of party-goers stoned out of their minds, no sign of actual drug use. There was a word associated with the phenomenon, now: “Ghasting”. Nobody seemed to know who had coined it.

  Nzeogu had gone over to have a word with the officer in charge of the Camden operation and, when he came back, he had a plastic-wrapped package under his arm.

  “What’s that?” Derwent asked him.

  “Evidence, on loan.”

  They went to an interrogation room with it, and Nzeogu unwrapped the thing with the air of a stage magician demonstrating a trick.

  “I don’t get it.” Derwent frowned. “Or … wait, wasn’t there…?”

  “They had a thing like this connected to the decks at Edmonton,” Nzeogu confirmed. “I figured it was just a DIY amp or something.”

  “Looks like a licence to get yourself electrocuted.” Derwent looked at the jury-rigged tangle, seeing a snarl of homebrew wiring mixed up with what might have been electromagnets and some projecting rods that were … antennae maybe? The whole had an oddly purposeful arrangement to it, as though the physical shape was as significant as the wires.

  “Goddamn flux capacitor,” was Nzeogu’s expert assessment. “Only, what the Camden lot called it was a ‘Ghast resonator’.”

  Derwent nodded. “So, we’re going to turn it on, or what?”

  After that, there was nothing for it. Derwent found a pair of insulated gloves and then cautiously plugged the whatever-it-was into the mains.

  The Ghast resonator made a shuddering, screeching noise, like some sort of feedback gone feral, but just as Derwent was fumbling to yank the plug again it settled down to a barely audible hum. Nothing lit up or exploded or dispensed illegal pharmaceuticals.

  “We’ve found a nasty noise machine,” she concluded, and looked at Nzeogu. He was staring at her. She stared at him. They stared at each other. The world around them slowly began to glow with colours Derwent had no name for. She watched them creep out of the walls and ooze out of the air like condensation. Nzeogu’s dark face was as infinitely detailed as God’s thumb-print, his features a maze-like whorl that never ended. She could hear something, too, some great irregular rhythm coming to her from a distance she couldn’t parse, the tide on an unnamed shore.

  “Mother of God,” Nzeogu got out. He slapped at the resonator but seemed to be separated from it by a colossal distance.

  “Gak,” Derwent said. Some part of her was aware of Nzeogu in a completely new way. She felt him as a physical construct in space and as a weight that was exerting a minute but perceptible gravity on all things around him. Mortifyingly, some part of her brain found this expression of physics and geometry intensely sexual, an inexplicable linking of the highest and most basal parts of the brain by a cracking electric bridge.

  Right about then, a stranger burst into the room, ripped the resonator’s plug out of the wall and took the pair of them into custody.

  *

  He gave his name as Falconer, which Derwent reckoned immediately as way too edgy to be true. He was very obviously someone who wanted to look like a dangerous government agent. He was a big man, taller than Nzeogu, who was topping six feet, and with the broad shoulders of someone who took their gym sessions seriously. He carried a gun.

  Derwent – separated from Nzeogu at this point – refused to say a damn thing until someone told her why an officer of the Metropolitan Police Service was suddenly in a cell without charge or warning. That got her a phone call from the Chief Inspector who told her for God’s sake to just cooperate. Apparently Falconer, in a blinding piece of reverse psychology, actually was a dangerous government agent working with Counter-Terrorism.

  He played hardball at first, all but accusing her of trying to bring down the monarchy. Derwent stuck to the facts, and in the end her annoyed bewilderment obviously got through because she was reunited with Nzeogu, sat down and given a stern talking to.

  Falconer did his level best to tell them they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into, and should just leave it alone. Derwent and Nzeogu, by unspoken agreement, told him that he was absolutely right they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into, and that meant they were going to keep on unwittingly getting into it until someone – hint: Falconer – actually told them.

  “Also,” Derwent put in, “this is some sort of new drug culture thing. How does this get Counter-Terrorism on our case?”

  “Funding,” Nzeogu guessed. “Whoever’s selling this shit’s sending the cash to Saudi Arabia or something.”

  “Selling?” Falconer repeated incredulously. Derwent reckoned that was the moment he finally accepted they didn’t know anything. She saw the pieces click together behind his eyes as he reclassified them from “threat” to “asset”.

  “Some kids are getting high off a transistor radio,” Derwent told him. “How does that become a clear and present danger?”

  So he showed them the video.

  The footage came from a security camera – they were both more than familiar with the terrible picture resolution, which wasn’t improved any by the flashing lights and constant bustle of motion. Someone had sent them a video of a party.

  “Are they just taking the piss now, or what?” Nzeogu asked disgustedly.

  “Maybe they want us to know what a good time they’re having,” agreed Derwent. The two of them stared at the grainy, jerky footage without much enthusiasm. If someone down there was dealing something, it was impossible to tell.

  About two minutes in, the crowd began to get more than passionate about the gig, and Derwent’s eyebrows went up past her fringe. “My, they are having a good time.”

  “Still don’t see why it’s our business,” Nzeogu said prudishly. He didn’t stop watching, though.

  At four minutes in, Nzeogu asked, “Where are they going?”

  “What?” Derwent glanced at him, then back at the screen. In that moment there were fewer people at the party. Those that remained were on their feet, couples breaking apart. They saw lots of waving arms, lots of wide-eyed faces, but for a moment it could still have been just a really wild party.

  Then Nzeogu said, “Mother of God,” and paused the video, flicking back a few seconds. “Guy there, in the stripy top.”

  It was Steni all over again. Derwent watched stripy-top guy vanish abruptly. Five seconds later and she’d forgotten him, because the condition was catching. The movement of the crowd was unmistakably panic by then, a fluid mob of people flurrying this way and that like sheep driven by an invisible dog. And fewer, always fewer, just vanishing away one by one until only a handful remained. They fled, but they never fled far. Whatever was on their heels was right before their faces as well, driving them around the room until they, too, were gone.

  By five minutes the entire terrified crowd had been spirited away, and the floor of the club was covered with discarded clothing. Derwent thought it was from the impromptu orgy at first, but then she saw that distinctive stripy top and realised that the detritus had been left behind by its occupants. The thought turned her stomach.

  The video continued to play, the came
ra’s lifeless eye watching that impossible room. And, just as Derwent was about to rewind, something moved. Out of a corner came a young … girl, Derwent thought, probably. She had hair cut short, and she was navigating carefully over the garment-strewn floor in a wheelchair. Halfway across the room she looked directly up into the camera. Then she slowly inched her way out of shot.

  Derwent and Nzeogu exchanged glances.

  “Faked,” he decided, in a voice that shook a little. They both looked at Falconer.

  “This was last week,” he told them flatly. “This was when this became, like you say, a clear and present danger. And whatever the fuck these machines are, they’re making them in Slumside.”

  He had a name from a previous bust, a supplier: Raymond Paoli. Perhaps they’d heard of someone by that name resident in Slumside?

  Derwent and Nzeogu stared at him. “Do you have any idea just how many people they’ve crammed into that place?” she asked.

  “Atacom,” Nzeogu put in. “They’re supposed to have records on everyone who got re-housed there.”

  Yeah right, was Derwent’s thought on that, but Falconer had seized on the slippery idea like his namesake, and that evening they went off to rattle the cages of the mighty.

  *

  The cheery red logo of Atacom was a familiar sight about Slumside. Atacom was the government’s chosen public-private partner on the project, whose previous triumphs included running down the unemployment benefit system and overcharging the NHS. Now they were responsible for administering Slumside and moving its residents on to permanent housing elsewhere. So far, according to the more incisive news websites, they had been paid a whole swimming pool of public money but not actually hit any targets. People went into Slumside but it just got fuller.

  Atacom’s regional office was actually on the very edge of Slumside, a big concrete wart so heavily secured against the locals that Nzeogu reckoned he could see where all the money had gone right there. They were calling on Atacom’s director of the Surreyside project, Hugh Hawkins. His alliterative name was already being muttered in the corridors at Westminster as the man who would take the fall when Atacom finally had to admit it couldn’t process the vast numbers of people it had “temporarily” housed in Slumside.