The Bellenden Community Centre was a civic hall built eighty years ago on the site of an old school. Its composite panels had been printed to resemble traditional London brick, though that had faded over the decades so they now looked like walls made of a kid’s fraying building blocks. There was a constant stream of people walking through the entrance arch, most of them carrying bags full of cold dishes they’d printed out at home to accompany their hot meal. Nearly half of them were refugees who’d poured into the city when the Olyix started their invasion. Everybody who lived in the countryside or the ribbon towns had come, seeking safety under the shield, boosting the population towards eleven million. They were crammed into old deserted buildings, with few amenities. Communal was how most people lived these days. Ollie didn’t mind; it allowed for plenty of anonymity.
The scent of cooking filled the air as they went up the community centre steps. Inside, the main hall had been laid out like a makeshift cafe that no one had quite got around to regularizing, with a jumble of various tables and chairs taking up most of the floor, and long stainless steel canteen counters along one side. Rations were served from a hatchway that had two light-armoured police standing on either side. You could either choose to have the rations cooked in the centre or take them home. Most people ate in the hall, as electricity was scarce in this part of town. Who had enough kilowatts to heat food every day? Ollie queued up and held out his R-token for the woman inside the hatch. Registering for it had been surprisingly easy. Just after the siege started, he’d stolen Davis Mohan’s identity – one of his old neighbours from Copeland Road. When he and Lolo had begun exploring the nearby houses, they’d found Davis lying on his kitchen floor in an advanced stage of cocooning, his body a barrel of modified organs, limbs almost gone, fading in and out of consciousness. For Ollie, a fake identity was a simple enough task – one he’d done dozens of times before while he was in the Southwark Legion. If anything, this was even easier. When rationing was introduced in those chaotic early days, solnet was reduced to a Dark Age version of itself, and the checks were childish.
The woman behind the hatchway scanned his R-token and handed him a ribbon of pellet bags and a packet of assorted texture powders.
Lolo stepped up. ‘Any salmon powder?’
‘Sorry, sweetie, not today. Got some blueberry powder if you want. It’s quite good if you mix it with water and let it set in a mould. An ice-cube tray is best.’
‘That’s so lovely of you, thank you.’ Lolo pulled a small jar out from under the basket’s gingham cloth. ‘Almond-flavoured marshmallows. I’ve been experimenting. Let me know what you think.’
They exchanged a smile. Ollie thought the ribbon of pellet bags she gave Lolo was a lot longer than the one he’d got. He shook his head in bemusement. ‘Is there anyone in here you don’t flirt with?’
‘I’m not flirting,’ sie exclaimed in an indignant tone. ‘I’m just nice and talk to people. It wouldn’t hurt you to try it some time. We’re all in this together, you know.’
‘I talk to people. The ones I need to.’
‘Ooh, storm a-brewing. You’re so hot when you do that moody Mr Serious voice.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Mind your mouth, boyfriend. There are children in here.’
They went and queued at the counter. At the first station, they handed over a couple of the pellet bags each. Ollie looked at the labels on the powders he’d been given and dropped the one for butter chicken on the counter.
‘You’ll smell of that all night,’ Lolo complained.
‘Stop whingeing. It won’t smell or taste anything like butter chicken.’
A couple of minutes later they’d made it down to the serving station. Lolo took a pair of plates out of the basket. Ollie watched with an impassive face as the bloke behind the counter ladled a pile of gingerish slop onto his plate. It doesn’t matter; this is just what you have to do so you can rescue Bik and Gran, he told himself.
They sat down at one of the tables. Lolo made a show of taking the additional dishes sie’d prepared out of the basket, all peppy and cheerful as each one was announced. ‘I made some salad, look, and some naan bread – though to be honest, it’s more like a pizza base. And some chocolate mousse for pudding.’ Sie produced a bottle with what Ollie really hoped was apple juice, because it looked too yellow for his liking. Alcoholic drinks were banned from the community centre.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘It’s not easy, you know. I could do with some more electricity.’
‘Can’t spare any. Sorry.’
Lolo gave a martyred sigh. ‘Right.’
‘Look, I’m close, okay? Tonight should give me Larson.’
‘I don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘I cause the hurt, remember?’
‘Ollie, please . . .’
‘Don’t worry, I’m careful. You know it.’ Ollie picked up one of the leaves from the salad dish. That was a mistake. It was basically a thin green biscuit that tasted like what he imagined raw seaweed would be when it grew next to a sewer outlet.
The tables around them started to fill up, and with it the volume of conversation rose. Kids started to run around, and older people were helped to tables by younger relatives. Several Civic Health Agency nurses worked their way along the hall, checking up on their patients, asking families if the youngsters were okay.
One couple was carrying a newborn, which Ollie frowned at. ‘How could they do that? How could they have a kid in this place?’
‘Gedd and Lillie-D? They’re sweet people, and their baby’s a real cutie. I’ve cuddled him a few times.’
‘Why? I mean, don’t they understand what’s happening? Our two chances of getting out of Blitz2 are none and fuck all. How could they bring a kid into this world?’
‘Because we can’t afford to give up hope. Just look at him; he’s so adorable. We need babies to remind us why we’re alive.’
‘That’s not hope, that’s being stupid and selfish.’ Shaking his head, he bit into another salad leaf and tried not to pull a face.
‘Evening, guys, how’s it going?’
Ollie looked up to find Horatio Seymore standing at the end of the table. The senior manager helped run half a dozen district food operations in this part of London. He’d been some kind of hotshot with the Benjamin charity in the time before. Ollie had even encountered him a few times when social agency outreach workers had tried to get Bik and his parkour équipe to come along to a youth gym. Then one other time: an unnerving not-quite-encounter along the Thames just after the last of Ollie’s Legion friends had been killed.
Which made Horatio someone who actually knew Ollie’s real face. Every time he turned up at the Bellenden Community Centre, with his neutral smile and non-judgemental attitude, Ollie’s nerves kicked in. He knew that was stupid. The fleshmask was flawless. But still . . .
‘We’re good, thanks,’ Lolo said. ‘Would you like some lemon squash?’
‘It’s lemon?’ Ollie blurted.
‘Ignore my friend, he’s such a philistine.’
Horatio’s smile became more genuine. ‘No thanks. So you’re all right? Got something to do in the day?’
‘We trade,’ Lolo said. ‘We do all right.’
‘Nothing too illegal, I hope?’
‘Absolutely not. I’m into food textures. If you’ve got some watts left in a quantum battery, that’s my payment; I can work up most flavours. Vegetables are a speciality – no offence to the people in here, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Horatio said. ‘Glad to hear it. But if you do ever need help, you can always call on me. I’m not official, not part of the council or police, okay?’
‘That’s very kind,’ Lolo said. ‘We need more people like you.’
Horatio nodded affably and moved on to the next table.
Ollie spooned up some more of the not-butter-chicken goop. ‘I don’t like him.’
‘He’s a good man,’ Lolo protested. ‘You’
re just horribly biased against authority. Not everyone in government is automatically a corrupt fascist, you know. And anyway, you heard him – he’s not actually officialdom.’
‘Then what’s he doing here?’
‘Helping people.’ Lolo gestured around exuberantly. ‘Without people like him, people who care about others, where would we be?’
‘Breaking through the barriers the bastard Zangaris have built across the interstellar portals and getting offworld to where we’d be safe.’
‘Nowhere in the galaxy is safe from the Olyix.’
‘The exodus habitats will be. Not that we’ll ever make it there.’
‘We will,’ Lolo insisted. ‘Once you find Larson, we’ll have ourselves some real trading power.’
‘Oh, so now you want me to go after him?’
‘Don’t be such a trash king. I love you, Ollie. I’ve literally given you my life because I believe in you.’
Which wasn’t a responsibility Ollie had wanted at all. But he had to admit, for all hir stupid opinions and neurotic nerves and fragile mien, Lolo made this purgatory just about bearable. ‘I’ll find him. Don’t worry. I’m real close now.’
*
A couple of hours after the evening meal, Ollie pedalled up the north end of Rye Lane. The east side was taken up with a big old shopping centre that had been derelict for thirty years. Behind its boarded-up facade, it had been decaying sluggishly, attracting layers of gloffiti and moss while developers negotiated with the local council and the planning department over turning the big site into luxury apartments. Since the siege started and solnet commerce failed, traders had found their own use for it. Stalls had set up in the old shops – some no more than an over-optimistic kid sitting on a chair hawking a box of scavenged junk, while the more realistic merchants had metal-meshed kiosks and some tough fellas on either side to protect the commodities. By now Ollie had good relationships with several of them. He wheeled the bike up to Rebecca The-L, who was in her usual gothic black lace dress, with druid purple dreadlocks hanging down to her waist.
‘Davis,’ she drawled, ‘looking gooood.’
‘Not so trash yourself.’
‘You bring me some wholesome Ks?’
‘Very wholesome.’ Ollie took three quantum batteries out of the bike’s panniers.
Rebecca The-L’s nark-drifter smile lifted as she took them from him and slipped the first into a charge port on the kiosk. She let out a soft whistle of appreciation as she quickly read how many kilowatts he’d brought. ‘Impressive. Have you got a cable direct to Delta Pavonis?’
‘Something like that. So, are we in business?’
‘Davis, I appreciate quality, and you never fail me.’
‘You have them?’
She gestured to one of her tough fellas. He produced a small aluminium case from inside the kiosk and gave Ollie a disapproving look.
‘Go ahead,’ Rebecca The-L said as her dreamy composure returned.
Ollie slipped the catches and opened the lid a crack. Inside, two synth slugs the size of his little finger rested in protective foam, their dark skin glistening as if dusted with a sprinkling of tiny stars. Designed in some black lab using eight-letter DNA to craft unnatural components into their basic body, they had a bioprocessor cluster instead of a natural slug’s nerve cells. He told Tye, his altme, to ping them. Data splashed into his tarsus lens, confirming their functionality. ‘Be seeing you,’ he told her.
‘You don’t look dangerous, Davis. You have a pleasant face, guile-free. But it’s your eyes that give you away. When I look into them, I see only a depth that comes from darkness.’
‘Er, right. Catch you later.’ Ollie could feel Rebecca watching him as he wheeled his bike away. It took plenty of self-control not to look back.
The next kiosk belonged to Angus Ti, who claimed he traded whatever you wanted, but he didn’t have the kind of connections Rebecca The-L had. Ollie offered him a couple of quantum batteries he’d charged up from the kilns. ‘I don’t know where you keep getting electricity from,’ Angus said, ‘but this makes you my most valuable supplier.’
‘Happy to help. Now what are you offering?’
After a relatively good-natured haggle, he wound up with nine tubs of food pellets and a jumble of texture powders, plus a bag full of empty quantum batteries. ‘I get first refusal when they’re full,’ Angus said as he passed them over. ‘You know I give the best deals around.’
‘Sure thing.’ Ollie held his hand out. ‘So . . .’
Angus handed over the main event – a packet of zero-nark pads.
‘More like it.’ Ollie hadn’t used nark since the siege began, but Lolo hadn’t stopped. Sie had made an effort to cut down, but hir dependency was starting to worry Ollie. ‘Hey, can you throw in some duct tape, too?’
Angus gave him a calculating look, then produced a half-roll from under the counter. ‘You want anything else? My shoes? My girlfriend to bang?’
Laughing, Ollie grabbed the roll. ‘Tape’s fine. Be seeing you.’
‘Sure. What you want that for, anyway?’
‘Thought maybe I’d see if I’m into bondage.’
‘You take that shit easy, kid. People can get hurt.’
‘Thanks.’ Ollie turned away from the kiosk. ‘Voice of experience.’ He could guess the hand gesture Angus was making behind his back.
*
It took Ollie nearly an hour to cycle from Rye Lane up to Dulwich; these days the clear path was anything but. Two years on and still nobody had moved the broken taxez and cabez and bagez that cluttered the concrete, and now it was getting worse as people started tipping their rubbish wherever they felt like. And of course most of his route seemed to be uphill, leaving him sweating heavily, which was going to play hell with his face again. He’d never even thought about Connexion’s London metrohub network in any of the time before; it just was. Now, distance had become achingly real again – a handicap of effort, sweat and time. As he pedalled away with straining legs, all he could think about was stepping onto his old boardez and rolling along effortlessly one last time. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have the electricity to power it up again, but that kind of profligacy would draw way too much attention.
He reached the end of Lordship Lane and turned west onto the A205. The road cut through sports pitches that were now just desert-dry soil as hard as stone, enclosed by prickly dead hedges. But the goalposts were still standing, their scabbed white paint gleaming oddly under the radiant devil-sky.
Past the playing fields, the hedges changed to high brick walls, guarding big houses. Ollie stopped pedalling and freewheeled along slowly until he came to a nouveau-riche three-storey cylindrical house, complete with mock-Tudor facade, that belonged to one Brandon Schumder. The gates at the end of a short gravel drive were tall, topped with spikes that weren’t entirely ornamental. He didn’t expect them to be a problem. In fact, he felt a rush of satisfaction that he’d finally arrived here.
Without solnet, it had taken two years of dealing in markets, building contacts, paying in kilowatt hours or nark, and trading his own information, all with one goal: finding Nikolaj. Ollie still didn’t have her, but he knew for certain now that Nikolaj and Jade worked for the Paynor family, one of the major crime families operating out of North London. That just left him with trying to find a way to reach the Paynors. They were a tight bunch – and even tighter nowadays. But that was what he was good at: planning. It was like his superpower, one of the main reasons the Southwark Legion had never been caught. He just needed an angle no one would expect.
More quiet questions, and he had heard the name Karno Larson, who among other things had acted as the Paynor family’s money man in the time before, laundering illegal wattdollars clean and loading them into the legitimate banking system. There was plenty of cheap talk about Karno, but solid details – such as his location – were hard to find. A couple of small-timers suggested Brandon Schumder might know.
Ollie stared at the gates from th
e other side of the clear path and raised his arm, running a scan. He’d salvaged several systems from the old stealth suit he used to wear on raids with the Legion. There was no point putting it on now; not even its hazy grey fabric could conceal him under the insistent light of the devil-sky. So, in a marathon whinge session, Lolo had hand-stitched some of its systems into his leather biker’s jacket, along with a layer of armour fabric.
Tye splashed the results, showing zero power in the gates – and specifically the lock. So not even Brandon Schumder had the wealth for that kind of wattage these days. Ollie’s tarsus lens zoomed in, revealing a slim chain holding the two gates together, with a padlock dangling down, its shiny brass casing almost a shout for attention.
‘Too easy,’ he muttered suspiciously. But no, a scan of the house’s curving wall revealed no active electrical circuits. A sign of the times. Before Blitz2, only the seriously wealthy could’ve afforded this house, but material things weren’t a measure of wealth any more. Therefore personal security wasn’t currently high on anyone’s priority list.
Ollie fingered his insurance collar – a black band with a lace trim that fitted so perfectly around his neck that it could have been a tattoo. A silly nervous gesture; its icon was a solid unchanging splash in his tarsus lens. But given who he was going up against, checking wasn’t paranoia. If Nikolaj was as good as everyone said, she might have heard he was asking questions.
He went over to the gates and pressed a small ball of thermon onto the padlock’s hoop. There was an amber flare, and the metal melted away. The sensor splash showed him there was no one on the road or lurking behind the desiccated bushes. Technically, it was night-time. Hard to judge, but with the sun below the horizon, the purple gleam from above was maybe slightly dimmer. He could see a couple of lights on in the house, shining out of second-floor windows.
He shut the gate behind him and wheeled the bike up to the front door. Not a long walk, but the sensation it gave him let loose a whole slew of bittersweet memories. He’d always had the Legion to back him up when they went on raids or burglaries. Now it was their phantom faces that accompanied him down the drive. Tye splashed data about the house’s network. Signal strength was low, but it provided connectivity with the remnants of solnet. Ollie launched a darkware package into the node.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 3
