The Naked God - Faith nd-6

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Prove it, babe.”

  “How?”

  The gang girls both took small sensors from their pockets.

  “Show us you contain only one soul, that you’re pure.”

  Ivanov turned to Louise. “Humour them,” he said in a clear voice. “I can’t be bothered to shoot them; I’d have to pay the judge far too much to bounce us out of jail before breakfast.”

  “Fuck you,” the second gang girl shouted.

  “Just get on with it,” Louise said wearily. She held out her left arm, the right was curled protectively round Gen. The gang girl slapped the sensor on the top of her hand.

  “No static,” she barked. “This is a pure babe.” Her followup grin was weird, showing teeth that were too long to be natural.

  “Check the sprog.”

  “Come on, Gen,” Louise coaxed. “Hold out your hand.” A scowling Genevieve did as she was told.

  “Clean,” the gang girl reported.

  “Then you must be what I can smell,” Genevieve scoffed.

  The gang girl drew her hand back for a slap.

  “Don’t even dream it,” Ivanov purred.

  Genevieve’s face slowly broke into a wide smirk. She looked straight at the girl with the silver eyes. “Are they lesbians, Louise?”

  The gang girl had trouble controlling her temper. “Come with us, little girl. Find out what we do to freshmeat like you.”

  “That’s enough.” Ivanov stepped forward and proffered his hand. “Genevieve, behave, or I’ll smack you.” The gang girl put her sensor to his skin, taking care to do it softly.

  “I’ve met a possessed,” Genevieve said. “The nastiest one there’s ever been.”

  Both gang girls gave her an uncertain look.

  “If a possessed does ever comes out of a train, you know what you should do? Just run. Nothing you can do will stop them.”

  “Wrong, titchy bitch.” The gang girl patted a pocket; there was something heavy bulging the fabric. “We just pump them with ten thousand volts and watch the firework display. I’ve heard it’s real pretty. Be good to me, I’ll let you watch, too.”

  “Seen it already.”

  “Huh!” The girl turned her silver eyes on Banneth. “You too. I want to know you’re pure.”

  Banneth laughed gently. “Let’s hope your sensor can’t probe my heart.”

  “What the hell are you all doing here?” Ivanov asked. “The only time I’ve seen the Blairs and the Benns in the same place before was a morgue. And I can see a couple of MoHawks over there as well.”

  “Looking after our turf, brother. These possessed, they’re part of the sect. You don’t see none of those bastards down here, do you? We’re not going to let them crunch us like they done New York and Edmonton.”

  “I think the police will do that, don’t you?”

  “No fucking way. They’re Govcentral. And those shits let the possessed down here in the first place. This planet’s got the greatest defences in the galaxy, and the possessed just breezed through them like they weren’t even there. You want to tell me how come that happened?”

  “Good point,” Banneth drawled. “I’m still waiting to hear on that one myself.”

  “And why haven’t they shut down the vac-trains properly?” the girl continued. “They’re still running to Edmonton where we know the possessed are. I accessed that sensevise of the fight, it was only a couple of hours ago for Christ’s sake.”

  “Criminal,” Banneth agreed. “They were probably bribed by big business.”

  “You taking the piss, bitch?”

  “Who, me?”

  The gang girl gave her a disgusted stare, not knowing what to make of her attitude. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “Go on, get the fuck out of here, all of you. I hate you rich kinks.” She watched them walk through the exit archway with a vague sense of unease scratching away at her mind. There was something badly wrong about the group, the four of them were a complete mismatch. But screw that, as long as they weren’t possessed who cared what kind of orgy they were heading off to. She shivered suddenly as a cold breeze swept along the platform. It must have been caused by the carriage airlocks swinging shut.

  “That was awful,” Genevieve exclaimed when they reached the big sub-level hall above the station’s platforms. “Why didn’t the police stop them doing that to people?”

  “Because it’s way too much trouble at three o’clock in the morning,” Ivanov said. “Besides, I expect most of the officers down there are quite happy to let the vigilantes take the heat if a possessed did step out of a train. They act as a buffer.”

  “Is Govcentral being stupid allowing the vac-trains to continue?” Louise asked.

  “Not stupid, just slow. It is the universe’s largest bureaucracy, after all.” He waved a hand at the informationals flittering overhead. “See? They’ve shut a few routes down already. And public pressure will close a lot more before long. It’ll snowball once everyone’s had time to access the Edmonton fight. This time tomorrow you’ll have trouble getting a taxi to take you further than a couple of streets.”

  “Do you think we’ll be able to leave London again?”

  “Probably not.”

  The way he said it sounded so final: a pronouncement rather than an opinion. As always, an authority in knowledge he had no business knowing.

  “All right,” Louise said. “I suppose we’d better go back to the hotel, then.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Ivanov said. “There might be a few more of these nutters around. It wouldn’t do for the natives to learn you’re from Norfolk right now. These are paranoid times.”

  For some reason, Andy Behoo popped into Louise’s mind; his offer to sponsor her for Govcentral citizenship. “Thank you.”

  “What about you?” Ivanov asked Banneth. “Do you need to share a cab?”

  “No thank you. I know where I’m going.” She walked off towards the lifts around the rim of the hemispherical cavern.

  “Don’t mention it,” Louise muttered grumpily at her back.

  “I expect she’s grateful, really,” Ivanov said. “Probably just doesn’t know how to express it.”

  “She could try harder.”

  “Come along, let’s get you two home to bed. It’s been a long day.”

  Quinn watched the lift doors close on Banneth. He didn’t bother to rush after her. Finding her again would be relatively simple. Bait was never hidden. Oh, it wouldn’t be obvious. He would need time, and resources, and have to make an effort. But her location would be filtered through the arcology’s downtowners, the sect covens and gangs would be informed. That was why he’d been lured here, after all. London was the largest, most elaborate trap ever assembled for one man. In a strange way, he felt rather flattered. That the supercops were prepared to sacrifice the whole arcology just to nail him was a mark of extreme respect. They feared God’s Brother exactly as He should be feared.

  He trailed after Louise as she walked over to the lifts with her brat sister and the huge private eye. She was very drowsy, which relaxed her face. It left her delicate features unguarded and natural; a state which served only to amplify her beauty. He wanted to put out a hand and stroke her exquisite cheeks, to see her smile gently at his touch. Welcome him.

  She frowned, and rubbed her arms. “It’s cold down here.” The moment broke.

  Quinn rode up to the surface with the trio, then left them as they went off to the taxi garage. He took a subwalk under the busy road and hurried along one of the main streets radiating out from the station. There would only be a limited amount of time until the supercops closed down the vac-trains.

  The second alley leading off from the main street contained what he wanted. The Black Bull, a small, cheap pub, filled with hard-drinking men. He moved among them, unseen as his expanded senses examined their clothing and skulls. None of them were fitted with neural nanonics, but several were carrying processor blocks.

  He followed one into the toilets, where the only
electrical circuit was for the light panel.

  Jack McGovern was peeing blissfully into the cracked urinal when an icy hand clamped round the back of his neck and slammed his face into the wall. His nose broke from the impact, sending a torrent of blood to splash into the porcelain.

  “You will take your processor block from your coat pocket,” a voice said. “Use your activation code, and make a call for me. Do it now, or die, dickhead.”

  Rat-arsed he might have been, but overdosing on self-preservation allowed Jack’s mind to focus with remarkable clarity on his options. “Okay,” he mumbled, a lip movement which sent more blood dribbling down the wall. He fumbled for his processor block. There was an emergency police-hail program which was activated by feeding in the wrong code.

  The terrible pressure on his neck eased off, allowing him to turn. When he saw who his assailant was, the thought of deviously calling for help withered faster than hell’s solitary snowflake.

  Quinn returned to Kings Cross, sharing a lift down to the underground chamber with a cluster of vigilantes. He wandered through the vaulting hall, ambling round the closed kiosks and steering clear of industrious cleaning mechanoids. The lifts kept on disgorging gang members, who immediately took the wave escalators down to the platforms. He kept watching the informationals, paying particular attention to the arrivals screens. In the two hours which followed, five vac-trains arrived from Edmonton. All departures slowed down to zero.

  The Frankfurt train pulled in at five minutes past five. Quinn went and stood at the top of its platform’s wave escalator. They were the last to come up, Courtney and Billy-Joe gently guiding the drugged woman between them. The two acolytes had smartened up, looking closer to a pair of grungy university students than downtown barbarians now. Their snatch victim—a middle-aged woman wearing a crumpled dress with an unbuttoned cardigan—had the vacant eyes typical of a triathozine dose; her body fully functional, brain in an advanced hypnoreception state. There and them, if she’d been told to jump off the top of an arcology dome, she’d do it.

  They moved at a brisk pace across the floor and hopped into a lift. Quinn wanted to materialize, just so he could cheer at the top of his voice. The tide was turning now. God’s Brother had given His chosen messiah another sign that he remained on the path.

  At five-thirty, the sixth train from Edmonton arrived. A notice slithered over the holograms announcing that the routes to North America had now been shut by order of Govcentral. Five minutes later, all departures were cancelled. Vac-trains already en route to the arcology were being diverted to Birmingham and Glasgow. London was now physically isolated from the rest of the planet.

  It was just a little scary how his prediction had come so true. But then he was bound to be right, with God’s Brother gifting him understanding.

  People were coming up from the platforms: the last straggle of passengers, the vigilante gangs (already eyeing each other now the reason for their truce was over), the police duty teams, station crews. Informationals floating overhead vanished like pricked bubbles. Display boards blanked out. The twenty-four hour stalls closed up, their staff gossiping hotly together at they rode the lifts up to the surface. The wave escalators halted. All the solaris lights overhead dimmed down, sinking the cavern into a gloomy dusk. Even the conditioning fans slowed, their whine dropping several octaves.

  It was the paranoiac moment every solipsist fears. The world was a stage constructed around him, and this chunk of it was shutting down as it was no longer part of the act. For a second, Quinn worried that if he went to the dome wall and looked out there would be nothing there to see.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Soon though.”

  He took a last look round, then went over to one of the emergency fire stairs and started the long trek to the surface and the rendezvous point.

  Louise was surprised at how much she associated the hotel room with home. But it was reassuring to be back after the ordeal of Edmonton. Partly it was because she now considered her obligation over: she’d done what she promised dear Fletcher and warned Banneth. A small blow struck against that monster Dexter (even though he’d never know). The fact that the Ritz was so comfortable helped a lot, too.

  After Ivanov Robson dropped them off, both girls slept well into the morning. When they finally went downstairs for breakfast, reception informed Louise there was a small package for her. It was a single dark-red rose in a white box, with a silver bow tied round. The card that came with it was signed from Andy Behoo.

  “Let me see,” Gen said, bouncing on her bed in excitement.

  Louise smelt the rose, which to be honest was rather a weak scent. “No,” she said, and held the card aloft. “It’s private. You can put this in water, though.”

  Gen regarded the rose suspiciously, sniffing it cautiously. “Okay. But at least tell me what he says.”

  “Just: thank you for last night. That’s all.” She didn’t mention the second half of the message, where he said how lovely she was, and how he’d do anything to see her again. The card was put into her new snakeskin bag, and the little pocket codelocked against small prying fingers.

  Gen took one of the vases from the ancient oak dresser, and went off to the bathroom for some water. Louise datavised her net connection server and inquired if there were any messages for her. The six-hourly ritual. Pointless, as the server would automatically deliver any communiqué as soon as it received one.

  There were no messages. Specifically, no messages from Tranquillity. Louise flopped back on the bed, staring at the ceiling as she tried to puzzle it out. She knew she’d got the message protocol right; that was part of the NAS2600 communication program. Something had to be wrong at the other end. But when she put the news hound into primary mode, there was no report of anything untoward happening to Tranquillity. Perhaps Joshua simply wasn’t there, and her messages were piling up in his net server memory.

  She thought about it for a while, then composed a brief message to Ione Saldana herself. Joshua said he knew her, they’d grown up together. If anybody knew where he was, she would.

  After that, she launched a quick directory search and datavised detective Brent Roi.

  “Kavanagh?” he replied. “God, you mean you bought yourself a set of neural nanonics?”

  “Yes, you didn’t say I couldn’t.”

  “No, but I thought your planet didn’t allow you that kind of technology.”

  “I’m not on Norfolk now.”

  “Yeah, right. So what the hell do you want?” he asked.

  “I’d like to go to Tranquillity, please. I don’t know who I have to get permission from.”

  “From me, I’m your case officer. And you can’t.”

  “Why not? I thought you wanted us to leave Earth. If we got to Tranquillity, you wouldn’t have to worry about us any more.”

  “Frankly, I don’t worry about you now, Miss Kavanagh. You seem to be behaving yourself—at least, you haven’t tripped any of our monitor programs.”

  Louise wondered if he knew about the bugs Andy had removed at Jude’s Eworld. She wasn’t going to volunteer the information. “So why can’t I go?”

  “I gather you haven’t got the hang of your news hound program yet.”

  “I have.”

  “Really. Then you ought know that as of oh-five-seventeen hours GMT, the global vac-train network was shut down by an emergency Presidential executive decree. Every arcology is on its own. The President’s office says they want to prevent the possessed in Paris and Edmonton from sneaking into more arcologies. Myself, I think it’s a load of crap, but the President is scared of public opinion more than he is of the possessed. So like I told you before, you’re on Earth for the duration.”

  “Already?” she whispered aloud. So much for Govcentral moving slowly. But Robson had been right again. “There must be a way out of London to the tower,” she datavised.

  “Only the vac-trains.”

  “But how long will this go on for?”

  “Ask
the President. He forgot to tell me.”

  “I see. Well, thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. You want some advice? You have finite funds, right? You might consider shunting along to a different hotel. And if this goes on for much longer, which I suspect it will, you’ll need a job.”

  “A job?”

  “Yeah, that’s one of those nasty little things ordinary people do, and in return they get given money by their employer.”

  “There’s no need to be rude.”

  “Eat it. When you apply to the local Burrow Burger as a waitress, or whatever, they’ll want your citizenship number. Refer them to me, I’ll grant you temporary immigrant status.”

  “Thank you.” That much sarcasm couldn’t be carried along a datavise, but he’d know.

  “Hey, if you don’t fancy that, at least you’ve got an alternative. A girl like you won’t have any trouble finding a man to look after her.”

  “Detective Roi, can I ask what happened to Fletcher?”

  “No, you can’t.” The link ended.

  Louise looked out of the window across Green Park. Dark clouds swirled over the dome, hiding the sun. She wondered who’d sent them.

  It was a forty-storey octagonal tower in the Dalston district, one of eight similar structures that made up the Parsonage Heights development. They were supposed to raise the general tone of the neighbourhood, encumbered as it was by low-cost housing, bargain centre market halls, and a benefits-reliant population. The towers were supposed to rest on a huge underground warren of factory and light manufacturing units. Above that buzzing industrial core, the first seven floors would be given over to retail outlets, followed by five floors of leisure industry premises, three more floors of professional and commercial offices, and the remaining floors taken up by residential apartments. The whole entity would be an economic heart transplant for Dalston, creating opportunity and invigorating the maze of shabby ancient streets outside with rivers of commerce and new money.

  But Dalston’s underlying clay had a water-table problem which would have tripled the cost of the underground factory warren in order to prevent it from flooding, so it was downgraded to a couple of levels of storage warehousing. The local market halls cut their rock bottom prices still further, leaving half of the retail units unrented; franchise chains took over a meagre eight per cent of the designated leisure floorspace. In order to recoup their investment, Voynow Finance hurriedly converted the thirty upper floors into comfortable apartments with a reasonable view across the Westminster Dome, which market research indicated they could sell to junior and middle management executive types.