by Phil Hurst
“You should have let me skewer him,” Dave said. Lana looked at the disappointment in his face and tried to remember what he had declared when he joined the Unjudged. It was something to do with drugs, but she couldn’t recall exactly what. There was history between Dave and the tourist—that was clear. Maybe Dave had shaken him down last night. The tourist looked like the sort. Perhaps he was looking for another fix. Still, it was time to shut him down.
“Dave, fetch my pike.”
“You actually want me to?”
Lana just looked at him. Chastised, Dave slunk away. As he did, he swung his sword in front of him, practicing chopping someone up. He ended up creating a small slice in the wallpaper to his left. He saw Lana was still watching him and left the hotel.
Lana spun on the spot.
“Marie,” she said. “With me.”
Marie jumped to attention. She swung her longbow over her shoulder and followed Lana up the staircase. They climbed the first set without saying a word. Then Marie broke the silence.
“Dave stole his drugs.”
“Hmmm.”
“Last night. After the pier blew. He got every guest at the hotel down to the lobby.”
“He was supposed to.”
“He told them we had a zero-tolerance approach to drugs and that if people didn’t hand over anything they had that we would blow them up like we did the pier.”
“We had nothing to do with the pier.”
“They don’t know that.”
“How much did he get?”
When they reached the fourth floor Lana glanced back at Marie, who had gone a little red in the face. By now the hotel was almost empty. Most of the guests had decided to leave Cromer once the Unjudged had allowed them to. The tourist from the lobby was one of the last. If you had a Tumi implant, the last place you wanted to be was in the reckoner’s firing line. One misplaced shot and you’d be tagged for life.
Lana found a room that had a view over the pier. She moved a chair over to the window and sat down, analysing it.
“Be careful,” said Marie. “They might have snipers.”
“If they had snipers, they would have blown that idiot Dave away by now. There’s no chance he’s managed to stay out of the pier’s line of sight for the past 15 hours. Sit.”
Marie pulled another chair over. As she sat down, a Dove drone flew towards the end of the pier. It hovered for a moment then disappeared into a hole in the roof of the auditorium. A little later, it flew back out.
“Recharging?” asked Marie.
“Probably. Have you scouted their defences?”
Marie told Lana about the barbed wire and the Buzzard drones.
“How do you know?”
“The seagulls keep setting them off,” Marie said. She pointed to the left of the pier, and Lana realised she could make out a number of small red patches floating in the tide. In her mind, she ran through the options for taking the pier. In every one of them, it became a slog— would the Unjudged run out of bodies before the reckoners ran out of ammo?
The water made it especially difficult. Anyone who approached, even if the tide was low, was going to be slowed down to the extent even a child with a potato gun could take them out. Let alone the well-armed drones the reckoners would be using.
“If you were underneath the pier, how close would you need to get to fire the pulser?” Lana asked. The pulser was a weapon developed somewhere in East Asia. The reckoning was making slow progress through China because of the country’s vast size. That had led to a number of scientists wanting to escape the reckoning heading to rural areas to work on various anti-Tumi devices. The EMP pulser was one such device.
“To affect the theatre?” Marie thought for a second. “We’d need to be almost directly underneath it. Far too close to their drones.”
“We need better pulsers.”
“I said that before we took the town.”
“I know.”
“And about what I said in your room…”
Lana was not going to discuss Marie’s unrequested and unwarranted declaration of love the night before they took Cromer. The archer had come to Lana’s room, stood across from her, arms folded, and described her difficult childhood, her difficult teenage years and her difficult early twenties. About how reckoning had made her realise how little her life counted in the grand scheme of things. With little visible emotion, she had explained how running away from home and joining the Unjudged had been the only thing that have given her life meaning and that Lana was the person to thank for that.
Lana was a fantastic fighter and tactician. She had organised and planned raiding parties as far south as Norwich and along the coast to Hunstanton. She negotiated with the visiting Chinese arms dealers and had forced preferential rates. But to Marie, she had had no response. She asked her to leave the room, telling her she needed time to think about it.
Lana ignored Marie and continued with the original conversation. “Even if we could take out the theatre, to affect all their drones, they would all have to be in there at the same time.”
Marie stared at her.
Lana continued to talk: “Although it might take out their operation systems, leaving them vulnerable to attacks from our drones.”
“It would only be temporary as well,” Marie said, snapping out of the trance brought on by Lana’s indifference. “The pulsers wear off after a while.”
Lana continued to stare out of the window.
“What’s the range on your longbow?”
“Lana, I couldn’t hit anything with any accuracy from this distance.”
“But you could get an arrow from here to there.”
“From the top of the cliff down? Not from these windows.”
“Get your team armed. Get the fire rigged up.”
“You want us to burn it down?”
Lana nodded. “Tonight. Wait until the low tide. Then we burn it to the ground.”
Without understanding why, she kissed Marie on the cheek. Before she could react, Lana left the room. As she walked down the corridor towards the stairwell, she told herself off. What a stupid thing to do, giving the girl hope like that.
As she passed the open door to another room that overlooked the pier, Lana saw a Dove drone take off. It swept up to the hotel and passed so close that the old windows rattled. Lana caught a glimpse of the weaponry on board and decided that maybe a little false hope might be needed.
Gladwell
T he truck’s lights cut through the night, illuminating the empty road between Cromer and Norwich. The URC news had been advising people to stay away from Cromer, and no one in reckoner-controlled England was likely to go against that advice. From the driver’s cab, Gladwell watched the road signs flash past him. Some hadn’t been updated in years; he’d only ever seen them before in turn-of-the-century films. But then he’d never been to Norfolk before, so the signs could be standard up here.
In his career with the reckoners, Gladwell had seen some interesting sights. Most of them had come about from people trying to remove their Tumi implants without the proper knowledge of how to carry out the operation. As the truck carrying him to the Cromer command post pulled off the road and started a slower, uncomfortable trek up a dirt track, he recalled a similar journey on the outskirts of Bristol that had taken him to a campsite populated by a group who called themselves El Liberation.
A group of 23 men and women had greeted him when he had pushed the door to the marquee open, each of them staring at the entrance with dead, unblinking eyes. They all had large kitchen knives sticking out of their necks. Some had gone for it and hacked lumps of skin away as they tried to remove the implants. Others must have panicked when they felt the blade of the knife. The walls of the marquee were streaked with their blood.
Still, it had been his job to inspect the bodies. As he crouched by the closest, a slight groan attracted his attention. He moved one of the bodies and found someone who was, technically at least, still alive. She was youn
g, probably not even 20. The first thrust of her knife had missed and cut into the back of her neck, paralysing her.
Gladwell kneeled down next to her and put the back of his hand across her mouth. Her breath was slow but warm. He took his staff from his assistant, and the girl followed his actions with her pale blue eyes. The staff recognised her implant immediately and told him her name, age and her medical history. She was Scottish. Gladwell had never met a Scottish woman before.
After he tagged her, he grasped her collar and dragged her across the floor of the tent. Her feet traced the edges of her dead friends. She couldn’t do anything but blink and move her eyes. The knife was wedged into the side of her neck, stopping blood from bursting from her body.
Of course, Gladwell thought, leaning back against the jostling headrest. This was when his leg was good and he had the strength and enthusiasm of youth. He pulled her outside the tent and dropped her in full view of the crowd that had formed at the entrance to the campsite. Then he left her there for an hour while he checked the implants of the other group members. He didn’t find anyone else alive. After he had checked 12 of the bodies, his staff made a small clicking noise. The girl had died, and her soul was safely on its way to The Store to join her comrades in purgatory.
The PR team had given him a dressing down for that. They had all had to pull double shifts to neutralise web coverage of the incident. A full PR team, working for 20 hours, just to remove mentions and videos of the incident from the internet. Gladwell had ignored the complaints—he had his job and they had theirs.
His father had told him a man is defined by his actions. The truck skidded to a halt in front of the Cromer command tent, and Gladwell knew how his actions defined him. His father would have been horrified by the cruelty he showed that morning in Bristol. But the difference was his actions, though cruel, were necessary. The implant in that dying girl had allowed him to gather important data that could only be recorded at the exact moment a soul leaves a paralysed person.
That helped the reckoners when deciding what to do in intensive care units up and down the country. Reckoners in other countries benefited from that knowledge, and the world was consequently a better place. Gladwell wished his father were still alive so he could show him that defining a man by his actions and not his intellect only gave you half the story.
Gladwell was something of a celebrity throughout the reckoner community. Not that it ever got him any perks beyond the occasional trip out of the lab to some shitty little backwards town that hadn’t been reckoned yet.
He climbed out of the car and slowly walked towards the command tent. He leaned heavily on his staff thanks to a trapped nerve in his leg. He despised leaving London, but he knew he had little choice. Maximus didn’t allow people to say no to him.
Inside the tent, the reckoner commander, a powerful looking man called Titus, greeted him with a salute.
“Dr Thomas. A pleasure.”
“Please,” Gladwell sighed. “Commander Titus, such formalities are not required.”
The reckoner broke off the salute. In the centre of the tent was a large 3D display with a map of Cromer. Red dots were scattered around the map, moving slowly. Green dots hovered above the display, occasionally diving down into the town. Titus walked around the display and showed Gladwell into a small room.
Gladwell sat on an offered chair gratefully. Titus turned on a kettle.
“Tea or coffee?” he offered.
“Black coffee.”
Gladwell had both hands on his bad leg, manipulating it into a comfortable position. When he had finished, he watched Titus trying just as hard to manipulate a coffee pod into a small machine. It looked almost as painful.
“Tell me, commander,” Gladwell said. “Why have I been dragged up to Cromer?”
With a clunk, the commander forced the pod into action. A quiet hiss came from it as hot water began to run through.
“You’ve read my report, I take it?” Titus crouched to watch the coffee.
“I want you to tell me what the report doesn’t,” Gladwell responded. “You sent a report of an anomalous implant that ‘sucks up other souls.’ Then you went dark.”
“I was checking the equipment.”
“And?”
“My equipment’s fine.”
When pulled into Maximus’ office, Gladwell had tried to argue that the commander was overreacting. No one had heard of an implant capturing other souls. But Maximus had demanded further investigation and that the investigator be Gladwell.
“Please,” Gladwell said. “Enlighten me.”
The commander reached into his pocket and pulled out his personal display. He turned it to face Gladwell.
“I can’t see that,” Gladwell muttered. He gestured for Titus to move it closer.
The man placed the display on a small coffee table in the centre of the room. With a tap, a projected display hovered and a film started playing. It showed what Gladwell assumed was the pier at Cromer as it burned. The camera operator was standing behind two others, looking towards the burning pier with Cromer cliffs behind it. Titus stopped the playback immediately.
“This is the sTCam footage from last night, taken by one of our forward team on the pier. They came online soon after, and once the link was working, they sent this through. It’s probably nothing.”
“Commander, it was enough for you to report it.”
“On the pier here, in front of the sTCam. That’s our undercover agents, led by Jules Red.”
Titus placed the coffee on the table next to the projecting display.
“They don’t look very undercover.”
“Their cover was blown.”
Titus returned to the coffee machine and was struggling with another coffee pod. When the hissing had started again, the commander returned to the projection and zoomed in. “And in the water here, that’s a Cromer resident.”
“Why is he in the water?”
“He tried to rescue another civilian.”
“Seems a stupid thing to do.”
Titus zoomed back out: “You have to see it from back here first. I’m going to play it in real time.”
He pressed play. Gladwell didn’t react when he saw the man Titus had called Jules Red turn to the camera, say something and shoot the swimming man. Titus paused the playback after the swimmer had sunk beneath the waves.
“A little unfair, perhaps,” but Gladwell was intrigued. “The swimmer’s soul. This is the one you’re concerned about?”
Titus nodded: “Watch now.”
He pressed play again. Nothing happened. The camera stayed pointed at the small pool of blood, but nothing was detected. Eventually, the reckoners retreated from the edge of the pier. Gladwell leaned forward. Where was the soul?
“Play it again.”
Titus did. And it played back exactly the same.
“Your man’s sTCam is malfunctioning.”
“We thought that. But we ran a diagnostic this morning. No faults. We thought the swimmer might have survived. On my orders, Red sent a drone to perform a search and reported back that his body was discovered about one mile out to sea. Dead. For hours. That man died there.”
“Play it again.”
“This time, I’ll play it in slow motion.”
When Titus played it, there was a slight shimmer on the surface once the swimmer had sunk beneath the waves.
“There it is,” Gladwell said. “He must have just been in a hurry.”
“Wait.”
The shimmer didn’t move towards the sky, as the souls of those without Tumi implants usually did. Instead, it moved towards the shore. Despite his bad leg, Gladwell leaped to his feet.
“What just happened?”
“Weird, right?”
“Play it again.”
Titus did.
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know. We tried to find any other cameras that might have shown his destination, but there’s nothing covering that area of the seaf
ront. Our best guess is he was attracted towards something on the beach.”
“Were the Unjudged there?”
“The Unjudged and some civilians.”
Gladwell ignored the pain in his leg as he walked around the display, watching the short film play over and over again. He had not seen anything like that since Maximus had showed him the first experiments with the Tumi implant prototypes. But the speed the soul left the dead man’s body was disturbing. It was like it was being pulled toward something. If the Unjudged had created their own soul staffs…
But surely that went against everything the Unjudged stood for?
“The scan your man took of the body—do you have it?” Gladwell asked.
“Yes.”
With a few flicks, Titus changed the display to show a scan of the dead body. It wasn’t perfect, taken as it was from a hovering drone, but it was good enough for Gladwell to start inspecting it.
Titus continued: “It doesn’t show any kind of implant installed. This man hadn’t been reckoned yet.”
Gladwell sat back, frustrated. The Unjudged had a device that was capable of capturing untagged souls. That was dangerous.
“I need more information,” Gladwell said to Titus, who was sipping his coffee carefully. Gladwell hadn’t touched his.
Titus looked worried: “Do you think the Unjudged have some kind of Tumi device?”
“That’s obvious,” Gladwell said. “What’s the situation in Cromer?”
“Oh, OK,” he gestured towards the main section of the tent. “Come back in here.”
“Commander, I’m an old man. My leg doesn’t work, and I just received some pretty shocking news. Could you please tell me whether Cromer is under control?”
“We have all land routes in and out of the town under control. The only exception is the far west of the town, where the Unjudged have set up a supply line between the town and an estate—Sheringham Hall—where they seem to be based.”
