by Gary Gibson
Donohue and another man, both armed with Cobras, jumped out of the van and began shooting. Farad’s viewpoint spun wildly, then ceased moving, showing nothing but the evening stars and the dark limb of Al-Khiba far overhead. Saul then caught sight of Eren backing into the same doorway, stepping over Maaloufrn,&os body before he crouched down to return fire.
Narendra made a gesture and the footage came to an immediate halt. ‘Eren was lucky to survive that encounter,’ he explained, ‘so he would very much like to know the identity of those men who killed Farad.’
Saul figured there had to be at least four in the assassination squad. The shots already fired before the van arrived meant that at least one person other than Donohue and the second gunman had taken part in the hit, while a fourth would have been in control of the van.
‘I can’t tell you who any of them are,’ Saul lied.
Narendra stared at him as if he didn’t believe a word.
‘The team you say were following me,’ Saul asked, ‘was it the same lot?’
‘Yes, it was.’
At that precise moment, Saul heard a low booming sound, not unlike a thunderclap. At first he thought it had come from the projector, then realized it came from somewhere outside the apartment. Narendra stood and listened, as if frozen, then suddenly broke into action, rushing to the door while directing a flow of dialogue at Eren.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Saul, following, but Narendra reached out a hand to stop him.
‘I don’t know,’ he muttered, then left the room.
Saul watched as the two men conversed in low, urgent tones. Eren was standing up now, his shotgun gripped ready in both hands. He moved away from the door until he was no longer directly visible to either man, and took the opportunity to push aside one corner of a lowered blind and peer out through the window behind.
He found himself looking directly along the entire length of the valley containing the city, towards the Newton Array at its far end. A dense cloud of grey and black smoke now rose above the Array, and was already beginning to pool under the giant canopy.
For one heart-freezing moment, Saul wondered if the Array had been sabotaged in the same way as the one on Galileo, thus stranding him light-years from home. But then the smoke thinned out a little, and he saw it rose not from the Array but from a tall building immediately next to it. Flames licked out of the building’s upper windows.
As he stared in awe, one side of another building, directly opposite the first, exploded into flames and black smoke, sending debris and glass tumbling downwards. A second low booming noise reached him a few seconds later, followed by the distinctive crackle of small-arms fire.
Saul tried to open the window, but found it wouldn’t budge. He pressed his forehead against the glass to peer down, and saw he was still a long way above the ground. Jumping out of there would only get him killed.
He stepped away from the window and headed back ver to the door. He saw Eren looming over Narendra, his voice turned angry. Narendra backed away, and Eren swung his shotgun at him like a club, battering him across the side of the head. The broker collapsed as if either unconscious or dead.
Saul darted back out of sight, squeezing behind the door into Farad’s office. He waited there, gripping the door handle, until he heard Eren’s heavy footsteps approaching.
The moment he stepped inside the office, Saul slammed the door into Eren’s face. But Eren batted it away with ease before barrelling into the room and levelling the shotgun. Saul lunged forward to try and wrench the shotgun out of his grasp, and for a moment they struggled for control of it.
The young guard who’d been set to watch the entrance came running into the living-room, and instantly brought his weapon to bear on Saul. Without thinking, Saul pulled himself close to Eren, twisting both of them around until Eren’s back was facing the guard. The larger man’s body jerked violently as the Agnessa’s bullets punched through his spine. He slumped forward, lifeless.
Saul grabbed hold of the shotgun and let himself fall back under the weight of Eren’s corpse, then heaved it to one side. Aiming the shotgun at the guard, he squeezed the trigger, and a fist-sized hole appeared in the man’s chest. The guard fell backwards in an awkward heap, the Agnessa clattering on to the wooden floor beside him.
Saul shuffled backwards until his shoulders were up against the wall beneath the window, his breath emerging in short, rapid gasps. He kept the shotgun trained on the living-room as he listened for the sound of running feet. He waited there for at least another minute, before slowly pushing himself upright and making his way back into the other room.
He kneeled beside Narendra, who lay face-down on the floor, and heaved him over. One side of the man’s head was crusted with blood, but he was clearly still breathing.
Narendra moaned, his eyes blinking open.
Saul rifled through Narendra’s pockets until he found a slim aluminium case containing a single set of contacts, then glanced back at Narendra in time to see his eyes start rolling up in their sockets.
He shook him fiercely. ‘Narendra!’ He held the case up where the other man could see it. ‘Look at me. Are these my contacts?’
Narendra managed to focus on the case and muttered something Saul couldn’t make out, before his eyes slid shut once more. Saul shook him again, slapping the man’s face and cursing, but it was clear a response wasn’t going to be forthcoming any time soon.
He pinched the contacts out of the aluminium case and dropped them on to his eyes. Relief surged over him like a wave once it became clear that they were his own. He tried first to access the local emergency data sources but found, to his consternation, that they were currently all down. Calling for help clearly wasn’t going to be an option any time soon.
There was no one to be heard, so if any of the neighbours had noticed any sounds of shooting or violence, they were doing the sensible thing and staying well out of sight.
Saul hurried back into the apartment, stepping over Eren’s motionless body as he once more entered the office. It took only a moment to locate all of the unencrypted video files on Maalouf’s network, before copying everything over to his own contacts.
A quick browse on the spot showed him that there were many, many other files than just the video logs Narendra had already shown him. He noticed documents in their hundreds, all marked for much higher levels of clearance than his own. Technically, his duty was to leave them untouched and hand them over to his immediate superiors.
To hell with that, he decided.
Saul abandoned his blood-spattered jacket, finding another that was a near fit in the bedroom wardrobe. It felt loose around his shoulders – Farad had been a couple of sizes larger – but it was long and roomy enough to conceal the Agnessa within its folds. Lastly he rifled the dead guard’s pockets until he found a box of spare ammunition, then headed down the stairwell as fast as he could, pointedly avoiding the elevator.
Once he was back outside, he looked out across the whole of the canopied city stretching out below. He walked rapidly away from the building he had been held in, sticking to the shadows and keeping an eye out for anyone who might be showing an undue interest in him.
There was another detonation as he moved, and he looked out across the cityscape to see smoke and flames rising from yet another building adjacent to the Array. He glanced up at the overhead canopy and wondered if there was any way of discerning whether or not it had been damaged. If by any chance it had, a very great number of people were going to die.
Picking up his pace, he crossed a street, heading for an elevated transit station a couple kilometres further down the slope. As a shadow fitted past his feet, Saul looked up in time to glimpse an observation drone flying overhead. He watched as it banked right, following the road and ignoring him.
Before long he came to a row of stalls beneath an awning running down the middle of a city block. By the look of things, the owners had left in a considerable hurry, leaving food and fruit scattered all acr
oss the street. He passed on down the road and caught sight of an abandoned trike with a kebab cart hooked up to the rear.
He looked around, but whoever owned the trike had clearly gone to ground along with everyone else. He bent down and pulled out the pin to uncouple the cart. As soon as he climbed on, the dashboard sprang to life. He twisted the throttle and guided the trike out on to the street, noting simultaneously that the battery had just about enough juice to get him as far as the Array.
He rode gingerly at first, feeling somewhat less than comfortable on anything with less than four wheels. He saw very few people, though the evidence of ongoing combat echoed loudly through the air. He came to an intersection and guided the trike on to a main thoroughfare, passing several cars and vans shooting at high speed in the opposite direction, away from the city centre.
Saul opened up the throttle, gathering speed and making his way down a second thoroughfare, as he followed the course of an elevated rail line back towards the Array.
The closer he got to the Array, the more ASI drones he saw. One passed him in the opposite direction, broadcasting a message warning people to stay off the streets, but whoever was operating it had failed to spot him hidden beneath the elevated train track. A few minutes later, however, he nearly came flying off the trike when another drone fired on him. He jumped off and dashed for the relative cover of a nearby doorway, then waited and watched till the drone buzzed away over the rooftops.
He glanced across the street and noticed three other men hiding in the open doorway of a shuttered shop. One waved to Saul and beckoned him to come closer. He approached them warily, keeping his borrowed coat pulled tight around him, the Agnessa pressing against his thigh where he’d tucked it into his waistband.
The oldest-looking of the three had a carefully trimmed, greying beard, and he addressed Saul in Arabic. Saul’s contacts instantly gave him a rough-and-ready live translation.
‘What the hell are you up to?’ the old man demanded. ‘You’ll get yourself killed riding around in the open like that. You don’t see anyone else out on the streets, do you?’
‘I don’t know what’s going on here,’ Saul replied in English.
From the way the old man squinted at him in confusion, it was clear he wasn’t wearing contacts.
‘He’s not from around here,’ one of the younger men informed the old man, before turning to Saul. ‘Amid doesn’t like technology, but you can speak to me. You’re from Earth, right?’
Saul nodded, glad that at least one of them had active translation enabled in his contacts. ‘I was at the other end of town, doing some business, and now I’m just trying to find my way to the Array, so I can get back home.’
Amid’s younger companion nodded thoughtfully. ‘Must have been quite some business to get yourself knocked about like that.’ He gestured towards Saul’s bruised face. ‘You’ll have a hard time getting anywhere near the Array, I can tell you. Haven’t you heard? We’re being invaded.’
‘By the Coalition?’
Amid started at mention of the word, then spat out a string of invectives that Saul’s contacts struggled to comprehend.
‘Their tanks came through just over a day ago,’ said one of them. ‘Soldiers, too, appearing like ants out of an anthill. They took over the Legislature, and now there’s fighting on the streets all around the colonial government building, with Al Hurr taking on Black Dogs and drones.’ Maz shook his head. ‘A lot of dead people already.’
Sudden shouting from nearby was followed by gunshots, and then an explosion that shook the ground beneath their feet. Several men with scarves or T-shirts covering their faces came running along the street. One of them carried an assault rifle, while another brandished a rusty-looking axe. They soon disappeared around a corner, followed a minute later by a heavily armed drone.
‘I’m not hanging around out here any longer,’ said one of the men, disappearing back inside the shuttered premises, as smoke started drifting above the rooftops of a neighbouring street. ‘You’ll all get your heads blown off if you stay out here.’
His companions followed him inside, the old man giving Saul an angry glance, as if he were somehow responsible.
Saul continued in the direction the fighters had emerged from, abandoning the trike now it seemed likely to draw too much attention. He soon came to an intersection, where a truck lay on its side, with broken bodies scattered all around. The rear of the vehicle still smouldered, while every window in the surrounding buildings appeared to have been shattered.
A targeted hit, Saul guessed, almost certainly from the drone that had passed by just a few minutes before. He started moving again, then froze when he heard that familiar buzz-saw rattle from behind. He turned to hear a mechanized voice shouting at him in Arabic.
A drone hovered just a few metres away, its central rotor scattering a blizzard of dust and debris outwards from beneath it. Twin gun turrets were mounted on either side of its primary sensors.
‘I’m ASI!’ Saul yelled over the din it made, raising his hands slowly. His Agnessa, momentarily forgotten, clattered to the ground at his feet.
‘ASI!’ Saul screamed again, dropping to his knees.
Dear God, please let it have a human operator, thought Saul, wondering how many seconds he had left before the bullets started ripping into him.
The drone wobbled slightly, light glinting from one of its lenses as a genuinely human voice emerged from it a moment later.
‘Hey, you’re ASI! I’m picking up on your UP.’
Saul let his breath out in a juddering rush. ‘Fine, can I take my hands down now?’ he yelled up at the machine.
‘Wait a second,’ the operator replied, almost certainly speaking from some temporary command post deep inside the Newton Array. ‘I need to run further verification on your ID, sir. You could have stolen those contacts, for al I know. Please wait just there.’
There was a click and a hiss of static as the operator went offline, presumably so he could consult with some superior officer. Saul bent down to pick up the Agnessa, keeping his eye on the drone the whole time. He kept the barrel pointing downwards as he waited.
The operator came back. ‘Sorry, sir, you check out fine. If you want to rendezvous with a clean-up squad, you can—’
Saul heard the sound of running feet once again, voices calling to each other in Arabic. Ignoring the drone, Saul crawled underneath a bus parked nearby, before turning to look back on to the street.
Two armed men appeared around a corner, and the drone wobbled around to face them. One of the two dropped face-forward as the machine fired several rounds into his body, while the second leaped back around the same corner. Saul heard a subtle change in the sound of the drone’s rotors as it moved to follow the fugitive.
A moment later, he heard a sound like a pop followed by a hiss. Something slammed into the drone, as it passed into the next street, engulfing it in flames. It spun wildly, its gyros obviously damaged.
A second rocket struck the drone, shattering it this time, and sent shards of metal spinning across the rubble-strewn roadway. There were shouts of jubilation and, a few moments later, more armed men came running towards Saul along the street.
He crouched low, hoping to stay invisible, but one of the resistance fighters, brandishing a meat cleaver, spotted him and yelled something that Saul’s contacts translated as a promise to kill him if he didn’t hurry the fuck up out of his hiding place.
Then things got really bad.
First, there was a bright eruption of light, and a deafening bass boom that Saul felt more than heard. The façade of the building opposite came tumbling down, burying most of the men now gathered triumphantly around the remains of the drone.
Saul closed his eyes, his ears still singing from the explosion, and when he opened them once more, the man threatening him had disappeared.
He crawled out from under the bus just as a Black Dog came pounding around the corner, bigger than any other he’d ever seen before, and w
ith heavy cannons mounted between its metallic shoulders. Half a dozen armed Consortium troopers followed on foot, their outlines rendered indistinct by their active chameleon armour.
‘Hey, is your name Saul Dumont?’ one of them yelled, lowering his weapon to his side, as the rest of the squad moved past Saul towards the other end of the street. ‘We got word from one of our operators, so who you with?’
Saul shook his head. ‘I’m not with anyone.’ He stared down at his torn and filthy jacket, his skin now caked with dust, and realized he had no idea where the Agnessa had disappeared.
‘Right.’ The trooper looked around, his armour reflecting the smoking rubble, making it hard to focus on him. ‘You need transport?’
‘I’m trying to get back to Florida,’ said Saul, wondering if he was in shock.
The trooper turned around, in an indistinct motion, lines of colour streaking as he looked back in the direction from which he’d appeared. ‘Well, we’re about to head back that way, because we need to recharge the Dog. Just try not to attract any more attention, will you? I think you just lost us a drone.’
‘Right.’ Saul nodded, feeling actually sorry.
The trooper turned back to his men, who were recovering the weapons dropped by the insurgents. Saul followed after them, dazed, his head filled with visions of monolithic structures under starless skies.
TWENTY-TWO
Arizona, 5 February 2235
Olivia woke with a start.
At first she thought someone must be in the bathroom next door, and had just swept the soap dish and toothbrushes off their shelf and sent them clattering to the floor. But then she saw the window rattle in its casement, the mattress beneath her also trembling slightly.
There was the sound of glass breaking, somewhere outside, followed by the frenzied barking of a dog some way off in the distance. Fingers clenched around the quilt, she waited for the tremor to abate, while adrenalin sent spikes of fear racing up and down her spine.
