by Manda Benson
“It worked well enough last time we needed to hide your signal. Wear it.”
Dana fumbled with her armour, which seemed to have come together as intended, despite its ill fit. “Will you come with me?”
“I can take you as far as the Forge perimeter. I can’t go in with you. If it becomes known I, as a Spokesman, have interfered with the proceedings of the armed forces when they are acting under a veto from the Spokesmen, that will look very bad.” Jananin put her foot into the stirrup and mounted the horse.
Dana put on the helmet reluctantly, trying not to show that the sudden disappearance of GPS and all the other minor signals to which she was accustomed bothered her as much as it did. The world felt very empty and sinister without them.
“What’s that on the horse?” Dana stared at the reflective black-and-white webbing and the trumpet-like apertures pointing forward on either side of the animal’s chest.
“It’s a sort of cannon developed for use against rioters, that causes disorienting shockwaves from blasts of sound. It’s unlikely to kill anything, but it should be some use if we come up against any constructs from the Emerald Forge.” Jananin reached down to pull Dana up by her arm. The saddle had an additional seat fitted behind the rider’s. “Now keep your feet away from the horse’s flanks, and hold on.”
Dana held on to Jananin around her middle. The armour covering her torso made her feel more like a machine than a living thing. Jananin checked the screen on her arm, and the horse started to move forward. Outside the stable block, the morning sun cast a long, looming shadow from the Stormcaller, and dew glistened in the grass and the crops in the fields had grown bright and fresh from the previous day’s rainfall.
“I’m going to keep to the cover of the trees for as long as possible,” Jananin explained. “We move quickly now!”
She touched her feet to the horse’s sides and they sped alongside the hedge, up the incline of the land towards the wooded line Dana had ridden through alone, fleeing the birds. The birds wouldn’t be able to sense her now, not with this helmet blocking her signal. Or at least she hoped they wouldn’t. The motion in the saddle hurt muscles that ached already from the ride yesterday.
Soon they were moving through wood, slowly down banks and through streams, and faster through breaks in the wood and open areas between widely-spaced trunks. It was a long while before they reached the edge of the woods and stopped to look out upon an open field, and beyond it, more fields, and beyond that, a blocky shape on the horizon that might be the Emerald Forge.
Jananin raised a communicator to her ear. “Rajesh?
“We are in position. We need the distraction now. Over.”
“Do we go now?” Dana asked, impatient to get this over with.
“No, we wait. If they perceive Rajesh’s attack to be a threat, they will start summoning their forces to the front. Watch.”
Birds started to rise from the trees, all flying off in the same direction. Dana stared up as they darkened the sky, and hoped Rajesh would be okay.
“Now do we go?”
“No.” Jananin was studying the screen strapped to her arm. “There’s something coming.”
A faint murmur of a rumble was becoming audible. Out in the distance in the dry field, four or five pale shapes became visible, horses. As they drew closer, running at full gallop, Dana could scarcely believe what she was seeing. Each of them had welded in the centre of its forehead a single long spine of metal that flashed in the sun, and ran with its neck arched and head lowered, so the horn pointed forward level with the ground, like a lance. Jananin waited for the horses to pass by, the thunder of their hoofbeats diminishing as they moved to the front to defend the Forge.
Jananin kicked the horse urgently and it took off at full speed. Dana did not try to move with it or hold herself down in the saddle properly, and all she could really manage was to cling to Jananin and try to look forward and make sense of a rattling view of the dry, wheat-stubbled ground tearing past beneath the horse. They passed down the side of a field of maize, perhaps the same one she’d hidden in when she’d first approached the Forge, and jumped a dyke. The shape of the Emerald Forge grew upon the horizon, and at last they reached the meadow surrounding it. The dry blades of grass whipped around the horse’s legs as they galloped for the perimeter fence, Jananin turning the horse to line up for a gap where one of the high wire panels had come down. The horse leaped the full length of it, and then Jananin was pulling the reins and leaning back, and the horse was digging its hoofs into stony earth and cracked concrete coming apart along seams of rampant weeds, slowing as the wall of the Forge loomed before them.
“Now hold my arm and get down.”
Dana dismounted and waited for Jananin to get off. High above, a large bird of prey turned on a thermal.
“We don’t have much time,” said Jananin, noticing the bird. “I can go no further with you.”
Dana pressed her back in to the solid wall and gazed up at the stained concrete under the cavernous sky with mounting trepidation. “Can’t you give me anything? Something that will help me?”
“You mean a weapon? Do you remember what the Samurai said, about using weapons you don’t understand?”
Dana recalled a room in a B&B, a mystical length of steel and woven leather sunk into the folds of a crumpled duvet. She had once asked to look at Jananin’s sword...
“A wise man gives life with a sword. A fool kills himself on another’s sword.”
Jananin said, “That was it. And yet... The Samurai had another belief, that a sword is more than just the steel it is made from. A sword is believed to be imbued with natures from its maker and its owner, to have a soul in its own right. While that is plainly fantasy, there is in such beliefs some deep psychological inertia... and what are war and weapons apart from psychology?
“What do you think?”
Dana looked once more at the blank, forbidding face of the wall. She was afraid to go in there again, into that dark, dirty labyrinth abandoned for whatever its original purpose had been, alone, deaf and blind to the familiar reassurance of GPS and computer signals.
Jananin considered for a moment. Then she bent down and pulled something out of the cuff of her boot.
“This is called a tantō. It’s another Japanese weapon, more of a dagger than a sword. I fear by giving it to you, I will only be providing it to be used against you, but on the other hand, having it might be able to do something for your state of mind.”
Dana took the knife, a short leather-braided handle and a blade hidden inside a lacquered sheath, with leather straps for securing it to a belt or something wrapped haphazardly around it.
“Do not think of trying to do this in a pacifist way. There is unlikely to be time, even if you do manage to free the prisoners, for you to get out of range. As soon as you get in there, your job is to stop Gamma as quickly as possible, by whatever means necessary.”
Dana squeezed the handle of the tantō and nodded, her mouth dry.
Jananin put her foot into the stirrup, pushed off, and swung her leg over the horse. “If you see the Stormcaller in the sky, run away from it.” With a quick adjustment of the controls on her arm and a flick of her heels against the sides of the horse, they were away, Jananin glancing over her shoulder just once as the horse tore back through the perimeter and made for the cover of the woods.
Dana looked back at the sky, but the bird had gone. She pushed the scabbard of the tantō through her belt, but she felt sick at the thought she might have to stab Gamma with it. By whatever means possible. She thought again of her brother Cale. Dana had got herself into this, and she couldn’t just abandon it and leave Cale to die. It was time to get on and act. She could do this. She had Jananin’s blood running in her veins, literally and not just by genetic descent. She had Jananin’s knife that had gone everywhere with her, imbued with her courage so now it could imbue it in turn on Dana.
Jananin could do this. So she could do this too.
Ke
eping close to the wall, she began to make her way around the perimeter, searching for an opening. It wasn’t long before she found a boarded-up window with a loose panel.
She pushed it aside just enough to squeeze through the gap, splinters scraping dully against the protective carapace of polymer alloy encasing her chest. The contrast from the bright sunlight outside and the near darkness within was impossible for her eyes to adjust to, and she stumbled blindly over something on the floor, possessed by a helpless horror at the loss of her eyesight on top of the signals she could usually sense.
Another body collided with her. Dana screamed in the dark. Hands grappled with her arms, pulling them behind her back, out of reach of the tantō.
“I thought you would be back eventually,” said Sanderson.
-17-
SANDERSON hauled Dana through the corridor and into another room, lit by a dim electric bulb. He shoved her into a seated position on a wooden chair and dragged up a chair for himself. “Tell me what you know about Ivor Pilgrennon.”
The instant he’d pushed her down into the chair, he’d let go of her arms. The unexpected question stayed her handfrom reaching for the tantō. A seed of doubt had taken root in her mind: this man might not be the enemy she knew him to be, and he had information she wanted.
“He was my father. Sort of.”
“Yes, and you were his fifth and final issue, Epsilon. He made you from ovarian tissue he deceived Jananin Blake into donating to him by claiming it was for stem cell research, yes, Jananin Blake the Spokesman and Nobel laureate, and sperm cells cultured from some crackpot modified clone of himself that was born dead. Now, you know something. Where is he?”
Dana stared at him, scarcely able to believe he’d just summarised in a loud voice information she’d only ever heard in low voices and secretive whispers. There were only supposed to be a very small number of people who knew about how she’d been conceived, and all of them were people Jananin trusted implicitly: Rajesh, Osric. There could easily be more of them she hadn’t met, but surely Sanderson couldn’t be trusted by Jananin — she would have known when Dana had described him, and more importantly, if he was loyal to her, he would have found a way to help her get Cale and Peter out of the Emerald Forge. “How do you know this?”
Sanderson raised his palms to her and spread long, delicately boned fingers. “Pilgrennon isn’t a surgeon. He started a medicine degree and he either dropped out or got kicked out after the first year, I forget which, and changed to a BA in Experimental Psychology. He wasn’t trained nor skilled enough to carry out the procedures he wanted to do. He did initially try on a severely brain-damaged child and only succeeded in making her even more brain-damaged. Bull in a china shop. After that, he asked a surgeon for help — me — and he vowed only to experiment on foetuses rather than living children. Then Blake realised what he was doing and grassed him up to the police, and he disappeared. Now, it’s imperative I find him, so tell me what you know.”
Dana had never thought there had been people Pilgrennon had trusted, although she’d been aware of Jananin’s confidants, and thinking of it now it did make sense. Yet whereas she’d felt greatly relieved to discover Rajesh’s allegiance to Jananin when before she’d been distrustful of him, with Sanderson her reaction was very different. Something about this man being there when Pilgrennon had created her and Cale made her deeply uneasy. Whereas Rajesh’s connection to Jananin had made him safe and trustworthy, Sanderson’s connection to Pilgrennon made him an unknown impossible to predict. Dana couldn’t understand why she felt this way. Sanderson had known Pilgrennon, and he might have some idea where Ivor had gone. If she helped him, he might be able to help her. “We were trying to destroy a computer. We threw it into the sea near Cape Wrath in Scotland, but a helicopter blew up and Ivor was flying it. We looked and looked afterwards, but we couldn’t find him.”
“Where did you look?”
“I don’t know.” Dana could only remember the cold air, the surreal storms that ravaged the edge of the world, and the utter desolation she had felt after that point. “I think everyone just went home after we looked in the sea.”
“Do you know where he had been hiding after he disappeared on the first instance? Perhaps he could have returned there?”
A sudden, desperate hope ignited. She had never thought of that. “He was in a disused military base, in a cave in an island called Roareim, off the northern end of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.” Surely Jananin must have looked, or sent someone to look. After all, she’d wanted Pilgrennon dead from the start. But then again, her mind might have changed after what had happened off Cape Wrath. She’d said she wanted to go back to her life as a scientist, and might have chosen in the end to draw a line under the whole business and forget it.
“Interesting.” Sanderson rubbed his cheek. “Now, you came here to stop Gamma, did you not?”
Dana didn’t say anything, so Sanderson continued. “Gamma, of course, remotely controls one side of the war going on outside. She’s the only one who can.”
Disliking his arrogance, Dana locked eyes with him. “The RAF is coming. The Spokesmen for the Meritocracy have voted to destroy everything in the Emerald Forge with a Compton bomb.”
“I say she is the only one who can. There are only five children known to be implanted with Pilgrennon’s devices. The brain-damaged girl is dead. We exhumed the grave and retrieved the transceiver, so we know for sure it was her. The boy here does not have the mental proficiency to mentally control an army, and my assessment of the other boy recently found suggests that whether or not he has the proficiency, he is utterly disinterested and unmotivated to work for us. You, however...”
His voice had tailed off, as though he expected her to make a logical inference. Dana felt sick, remembering the thought of people digging in Alpha’s grave, stealing from what should not be disturbed. “You want me to take Gamma’s place? You want the RAF to win the fight outside against the animal machine constructs you made?”
“Perhaps you will understand my situation better if you see for yourself.”
He reached into his pocket and took out a flat, black, rectangular object. It took several seconds before Dana realised it was a phone — she was still wearing the helmet and couldn’t sense the signal that normally accompanied one. Like most modern phones, the full face of it was a screen with a few basic buttons to control it on the edges and back. Sanderson set it on the table in front of her, and a video began to play.
A man and woman looking to be in their late forties sat on chairs in a room. They looked stiff and formal, their expressions serious. Facing them and leaning in a much more casual manner on a desk, was a man, and recognition sent a bolt of adrenaline through Dana’s heart. He was a young man, smooth-faced, his curly and neatly parted hair a bright sandy brown, his broad-shouldered physique looking not quite at ease in a white shirt with the sleeves crumpled up around the elbows and a badly done tie with cartoons on it fastening the collar, but undeniably he was Ivor Pilgrennon.
The woman spoke, her face sceptical and Ivor’s intense. “I have talked to six different consultants. All of them told me the same thing: that I could not have children of my own. The eggs in my ovaries are all used up. But you are saying you can make an embryo in a test tube that will really be ours?”
“Yes. The technology we’re developing allows us to make germ cells — eggs and sperm — from normal cells taken from the body.” His voice, although rendered flat and thin through the phones meagre speakers, sent an electric prickle up Dana’s back. “There will be no hormone injections, no painful procedure to collect ova, just a simple cheek swab. The child will be genetically yours and your husband’s.”
The conversation continued, the woman leaning forward in fascination, as Sanderson spoke over it. “Mr and Mrs Percival. Career people. People who didn’t stop to think about when to have a family until it was too late. Pilgrennon is lying, of course. The embryo he implanted in Mrs Percival was not from an ovum generate
d from her cells, and it certainly was not fertilised with the sperm of her husband. The ovum came from a female patient at his institute; the sperm came from that Frankenstein cloning experiment of his. The Percivals were nothing more than a free surrogate for an experiment to him. Of course, I had to provide the surgical expertise to implant the transceiver in it when it was large enough. Pilgrennon wrote the Greek letter Gamma on the container the zygote was cultured in. Mrs Percival seemed rather taken with it, because when a daughter was born, she named her Gemma.
“When Pilgrennon disappeared, I never found out what happened to the other four children. Pilgrennon set off a Compton bomb and destroyed the computers with all his records on, so I couldn’t find the Percivals’ address. When I did eventually track them down, they were childless once more. I managed to get hold of Gemma’s NHS health records. As it turned out, she was not growing up normally. She had autism, certainly, but there seemed to be some kind of psychotic condition in addition that none of the experts could agree on a diagnosis for. Some said it was schizophrenia. By this time, Gemma had grown to look nothing like her parents, and the Percivals must have realised Pilgrennon was a fraud, and had a genetic test done to find out if they really were her parents. When they discovered they weren’t, it seems they disowned her and abandoned her in an institute.”
Abandoned. Dana considered this. She’d considered herself and Cale to have been abandoned by their real parents, before she’d hit her head and Jananin Blake had abducted her from the hospital, and another truth had been revealed to her. But that Gamma should be abandoned by these people who’d said they really wanted a child, put into that awful hospital where they used to tie her to a bed, that seemed far worse.
“Gamma is functional, but she is damaged. I don’t know if she would have turned out that way whatever the circumstances, or if it’s more a result of the way she was brought up, and her obsessive parents dragging her in and out of hospitals constantly. It is very difficult to work with her when she insists what we make be made to look and function like imaginary animals she reads about in mythology books. If Prendick and I refuse, she refuses to control the finished products. You seem rather more reasonable.”
