by Paul Collins
She dared not stop and figured if she could put a little distance between her and her stalker, she would try her wrist unit again. She wanted to be out of sight of the chemhead to do it because he was watching for a sign that she might be summoning back-up. He was panicky and desperate and would not hesitate to kill her. He had killed before with his bare hands, she saw, because he was thinking about the kill. She wondered what he would do if she took the unit off and left it on the cracked sidewalk. It was a gradua tion present from her parents, but she thought they would prefer a live daughter without a wrist unit to a dead daughter with the proper urban accessories.
She came round a corner and her heart leapt at the sight of a corporate road beyond two tumble down buildings. The ground level stream was close enough to take in her plight but most vehicles would be delivery and service glides, and even if they had human drivers, it was unlikely they would open and take her in in this area. On the other hand, she was clean and unarmed and young enough that they would surely ping the pollys and make a report. She didn’t run, but she walked faster - aware her stalker had developed an entourage and they were all speed mgup.
She was within a few steps of the road and on the verge of breaking into a run, when a man dropped down from the building to the left to block her way. He was wearing what she recognised as the latest in urban combat, complete with the little antigrav pac that had let him make his dramatic entrance with out straining an ankle. He had plast body armour moulded into an exaggerated pectoral frieze and she stared at him in confusion, not knowing if this was a rescue or a new threat. She tried to penetrate his mind to find out, but the helmet he was wearing had some sort of tronics that blocked her.
‘Hile woman,’ the man said, his voice distorted by the tronics.
‘Uh, can you help me?’ she gasped. ‘I got off the glide at the wrong stop and I’m lost.’
‘You sure are, Doll, but N’zo found you and now you gone be saved.’
‘Oh, that’s great. Thank you,’ Hannah said stiffiy.
She couldn’t see the man’s face or read his mind, but there was a gloating cadence in his voice and her erstwhile stalker was withdrawing, his mind reveal ing that he had recognised her rescuer as a nunazi ganger whose favourite recreational activity was to laser-graffiti his gang sigil between the eyes of trash ers. She was no trasher, but her every instinct told her to run. Hannah’s eyes darted past the man to the road as she calculated how much time it would take between breaching the seal on the road and the arrival of a police pod.
‘Actually, I just need you to point me to the nearest glide stop, or wait while I call a cab,’ she said, adding absurdly, ‘I’m late for a meeting.’
‘Don’ worry, Doll, N’zo gone take you to a meet ing that will change your life,’ the man said and this time he gave a creepy skittering giggle.
Hannah saw the man’s intention to lunge in the shift in his stance and she leapt left, as he lunged right. The result was that he was wrong-footed, but he spun on his heel with swift grace and lunged again. Fortunately Hannah was quick and she had got past and set her gel boot triumphantly down on the smooth blue-sheened tarmac. Her attacker froze and glanced up and around, as she did, looking for a polly pod, but there was only one sleek private glide in the highest stream and no siren to announce that help was on the way. Hannah’s heart sank.
‘Pollys doin’ their thing elsewhere, Baby Doll,’ crooned the man. ‘Lucky fo you, N’Zo here to take care of ever’ little thing.’
But even as he stepped towards her, Hannah heard the sound of a glide in descent and she looked up in time to see the silver highfiier doing a swift vertical drop.
‘Don’ fight me, Baby Doll,’ the man snarled as he closed his arms around her in a bear hug. Before he could tighten his grip, she dropped to her hands and knees and rolled sideways, snapping out a kick at the unarmoured side of his knee. He gave a grunt, but he had thrown out a hand and, catching her by the hair, he hauled her up. The pain was excruciating as he lifted her off the ground. She clawed desperately at his hand. Too late she remembered his free hand and he punched her in the side of the head, turning out the lights.
She woke to someone touching her cheek and mur muring her name. ‘Hannah? Hannah?’ At first she thought it was Eva’s brother, but then a face swam into focus and she realised it was a stranger with a kind face, in whose lap she seemed to be lying.
‘Who ... who are you?’ she asked. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘I’m Jake and your name is coded into your wrist link.’
‘It’s encrypted,’ Hannah said, noting that her voice slurred. She was having trouble remembering what had happened, but it seemed to her she could see out of one eye a good deal better than the other.
‘Yes,’ he said with a mild smile. ‘I apologise for hacking you, but I needed to know if you had any medical conditions before I let Wu administer a revival shot.’
‘Someone was chasing me, then a moron in com bat gear leapt down from the building and knocked me out,’ she answered indignantly, as things began to float back. She felt her temple and winced at the size of the swelling.
‘So we saw,’ the man said. ‘You have an impressive black eye, but your assailant was limping badly when the pollys led him off.’
‘Good,’ she muttered wrathfully. ‘Who was he?’
‘A ganger,’ he answered. ‘The nunazi are anti technology, with a chaser of archaic notions about purity of race taken from an ancient cult. Somewhat difficult to put eugenics into practice in this day and age so the nunazi base their credo on appearance. You have pale skin, therefore you qualify as a poten tial recruit. As would I. Whereas my driver, Isah, or my assistant, Wu, would be considered sacrifices, as they term their victims.’
‘They practise sacrifice?’ she asked, aghast.
‘I daresay they dream of it, for their rhetoric and literature is very violent, but as far as I know, the sac rifices are merely shaven and tattooed with a symbol used by the antique Nazi cult from which the nunazi take some of their less charming practices. The so called sacrifices are ritually humiliated before being turned loose, naked. As a recruit, you would have been required to do the shaving and engage in the ritual humiliation before being tattooed yourself, on the arm.’
‘He said he was going to save me and take me to a meeting,’ Hannah murmured. Then she looked at her rescuer. ‘You seem to know a lot about them.’
‘Whereas you appear to know remarkably little and yet I understand the cult is gaining popularity in Antipoda,’ he said gently.
‘I didn’t live in a city in Tipoda,’ she said, stress ing the preferred freetown term. She was beginning to take in her immediate surroundings. She was lying along the back seat of a large glide with the sort of luxurious appointments ordinary human beings did not warrant. She noted the man wore a beautifully-fitted grey suit and his hair and hands were perfectly groomed. In the background his assistant, Wu, a ravishing Asiatic-looking woman with dark skin, was tapping into her wrist unit.
‘Where are you taking me? Hannah asked, strug gling to sit up.
‘To your hotel, which is where I assume you were headed when you decided to take a stroll through one of the worst districts in Londo-Arko. The name of your hotel was in the link, too,’ he said apologetically.
‘How come there were so few people in the area where you found me?’ she asked. ‘I thought rim districts were packed.’
‘They are,’ he said. ‘Except when they have been evacuated for redevelopment. That one is situated right between two rim slums whose residents fear their areas will be next, and who are determined to frighten off investors. The clearances are scandalous and brutal and verging on illegal even in a corporate city, but there is no profit in defending rim dwell ers so no one does anything. Your ganger belongs to a group inhabiting one of these, with ties to a new Luddite fundamentalist group c
alled the Shepherd Faction.’
‘Them I’ve heard of,’ she said grimly. ‘Strange bedfellows.’
‘Indeed,’ Jake said, giving her a thoughtful look.
‘In any case, there are rather more pleasant places to walk than rim sectors, even in a corporate city.’
‘I fell asleep on the public glide and when I got off to backtrack, I couldn’t find a stop. Thought I’d walk until I came to one. Dumb, I guess,’ she said, depressed because now she was remembering what had preceded the glide journey. ‘You don’t need to take me all the way to my hotel. Just drop me at a glide stop.’
‘It will be no trouble,’ he said smoothly.
‘You have an accent,’ Hannah said. ‘I noticed it when I first woke, before I was properly awake.’
‘Everyone talks like that in New Scotia and we are resistant to the nuspeek of the corporate cities, as you will have noticed,’ he said wryly. ‘I have lived away some time now, but the accent gets stronger when I am agitated. As I was at seeing a young woman attacked by a much larger man. You were brave to fight back.’
‘Brave on top of stupid might just equal stupid.’
‘Courage is worthy of honour wherever you find it, no matter the circumstances,’ the man said, sounding for a moment like her father, who had also eschewed nuspeek, saying he preferred his language straight up. But then again he had been a teacher. She remembered all at once that she had not thanked her rescuer. She remedied this and he smiled. It was the kind of smile some people have that starts out in their eyes and flows out to light up their whole face. It turned her rescuer’s nice ordinary face into something special. Then he had his assistant prepare a pain blocker. Her head was throbbing badly enough that she gave in, after being told the coffee and stimutabs she had consumed would not affect it. As his assistant administered the shot, Hannah watched her rescuer covertly, resisting the temptation to violate her own code and probe him. He was a good seven years older than she, but still young, and yet he had the gravitas and polish of an older man. Power and money, she diagnosed, and that took her thoughts the full circle back to William Reichler.
‘What is it?’ Jake asked.
Hannah shrugged. ‘I came to Londo-Arko for a research internship and the interview was this morm0ng. ‘
‘It didn’t go well?’ He actually sounded as if he cared, but maybe that was just the lack of nuspeek, which always sounded too cool and slangy to be smcere.
‘They offered me the position only ... only the company was not what I had thought it was. They want different things than I want.’
‘It is often the case when an individual wishes to join a group,’ he said. ‘The individual has to choose whether they can work within the group agenda or if they would be better to go their own way. What you must ask yourself is if there is any advantage to doing your work with these people.’
His words forced Hannah to think about her own agenda. Before the meeting, it had been her desire to come to Uropa and work on research that might help her better understand her abilities, and which might bring her into contact with others like her. Of course she could go back to Tipoda and eventually continue her own research, but she could not deny the Reichlers had shown her the way in the first place, or that their facilities were beyond impressive. Despite knowing what they were really like now, she could pursue her agenda far better working for them than in returning to Tipoda, so long as she kept her secrets. And if she didn’t work with them, Axel would go ahead with his research anyway. He was certainly brilliant enough to succeed in finding a way to iden tify people with paranormal tendencies. If Hannah took part in the research, she would be able to guide and protect them, and perhaps teach them what she had learned.
‘Hannah, we are about to set down on the pad atop your hotel,’ Jake said. ‘And I apologise for silencing you with a lecture. I am afraid the tendency to pontificate is part of being an ethno-sociologist.’
‘I wasn’t silenced, just thinking,’ Hannah assured him. ‘In fact I think you have just helped me to make up my mind to take the position. I don’t like the company, but I can work with them. At least for the time being.’
His brows lifted, and there was approval in his eyes. ‘Then you will be staying in Londo-Arko rather than returning to Tipoda?’ Hannah nodded, pleased at his careful use of the freetown term. Jake glanced at Wu, who passed him a holocard. He gave this to Hannah two-handed, bowing a little over it. ‘Perhaps you will allow me to show you a more pleasant route to walk, one afternoon next month. I have to go off planet for some time, but I will be in Londo-Arko upon my return.’
‘You don’t live here?’ Hannah asked.
He shrugged. ‘I’m afraid the corporate cities are not for me. Nor even a corporate town where there is somewhat more autonomy. But I travel here regularly as part of a liaison committee between the corporate committee and the Uropan government.’
‘Is that why you are going to the moon?’ Hannah asked, fascinated, for while there was some explora tion and tentative settlement on Mars, it was primi tive and not open for general settlement. The Moon base, on the other hand, was a small government city, though there was talk the corporations were slavering to get a foothold.
‘I am travelling to the moon, but on another mat ter,’Jake said. ‘My construction company is involved in some work for the World Council.’
‘How does an ethno-sociologist come to have a construction company?’ Hannah asked then flushed at her rudeness. ‘I’m sorry. That is none of my business.’
He smiled that warm smile. ‘It is a family business that I inherited by default. As to where I live, I have an apartment in Newrome.’
‘Newrome is the free city under the ground,’ Hannah said in wonderment, remembering with a little start that one could not travel there without the endorsement of a resident patron.
Jake’s smile broadened. ‘Strictly speaking it is a city built within a series of vast linked subterranean caverns. It is a free city though the corporations have their feelers out and would move in at once if those of us who have the power and the money to stop them falter in our vigilance.’ The door to the glide slid open and he stepped out and handed Hannah down. He was very tall, she noted as she thanked him again. ‘My name and address in Newrome are on the card, as well as my contact details. Ping me if you would like to take that walk. Or if you plan on visiting Newrome.’
Hannah glanced down at the card and suddenly she had trouble breathing. She gaped at the vivid little holo of the mountain valley pictured on the card, the shape of the peaks as familiar to her as her own eyes.
‘Obernewtyn,’ she breathed.
‘Yes,’ the man said. And only then did she take in the name in raised type above the image of the val ley: Jacob Obernewtyn. She looked up into his face and saw his smile fade, a little ridge of puzzlement forming between his brows. ‘Is something the mat ter?’ he asked, and Hannah heard his clear thought that her green eyes were the saddest, deepest eyes he had ever seen. Eyes that would see things other eyes did not. The thought was so close to the surface that she was not sure he had not spoken it aloud.
‘You . .. I . .. I was just -’ she stammered. Then she stopped, took a breath and asked more calmly,
‘What is the place in the holo? Where is it?’
He smiled and there was pride in his expression.
‘It is a property I own in the mountains outside Newrome. At the moment I am simply calling it Obernewtyn, but I will give it a proper name once I have built there.’
‘You ... you’re going to build there?’
‘I had always thought to build a refuge there. A place to escape to when I need it,’ he said.
She swallowed hard, and looking back down at the place of her dreams, said softly, ‘I am sure you will build something special in this place. And Obernewtyn would make a perfect name for a refuge.’
‘I know so,’ Hannah said.
Raph ran down the cobbled laneways, the grey haze occasionally making a brief appearance in his peripheral vision. He shook his head in an endeavour to get rid of it.
Sandstone buildings rose high on either side of him, their doors and windows firmly closed. As he looked up, he glimpsed a curtain shift, a pair of wary eyes watching him intently.
In the distance, Raph heard the sound of bells ringing out from the highest spire in the city, warn ing the residents that the Inquisition’s militia were searching for someone. Him! The orphan boy from the slums. The boy who had been turned in by the Physician General.
Raph remembered how the middle-aged man with the neat goatee and expensive clothes had suddenly taken an interest in him. The Physician General had been inspecting the public infirmary, distaste obvious in every aspect of his countenance. Raph had been trying to explain to a student physician that he kept seeing things, like an encroaching greyness, when the Physician General was at his side, talking to him about ‘perceptions of reality’. And then the physi cian was gone, racing from the building as if his life depended on it. Raph was leaving, finally fed up with trying to explain his visions, when the bells began and the militia arrived.
His mind returning to the present, Raph ducked down a small alley and allowed himself a moment to rest. He doubled over, leaning his arms on his knees, panting heavily. Staring down at the stones beneath him, he noticed that one of them was shimmering, as if it might not be real. ‘Not now!’ He quickly closed his eyes, blocking out the vision.
‘That way!’ he heard a distant voice calling. ‘I saw him go down there.’
Raph cursed silently and took off. Right, left and another left and then he was out into a deserted square.
‘Boy!’ screeched a shrill voice.
An old man stood by a narrow opening between two buildings. Dressed in rags, with a scraggly white beard and wrinkled face, he was hunched over and leaning heavily on a walking stick. He lifted a skeletal arm and beckoned to Raph.
