by John Meaney
‘I was drifting in the sky. Did someone spot me?’
It was a redundant question, but his mind was still coming online.
‘Someone from Deltaville,’ said Tannier. ‘They found a big flotation bubble – good thinking on your part – and pulled you in. You were lucky that you hit the right current and that we’re visiting, what with the birth being due and all.’
‘I was chasing Helsen. She was on board a flyer, and I went after her. But she attacked my quickbug, and I—’
‘Nearly died, but never mind.’ Tannier’s tough, ugly-handsome face creased up in a smile. ‘Officially I should reprimand you. Off the record, well done for trying.’
‘She got away. I should’ve called you.’
‘Next time, please do.’ Tannier gestured, causing Roger’s tu-ring to beep. ‘Now you’ve got my ident, you might want to set it as the emergency services port ID.’
Roger tipped his head, closed his eyes to inhale – it felt only a little unnatural, smartgel coating his lungs like mild phlegm – then breathed out and looked at Tannier.
‘Why aren’t you more annoyed? And what was all that about currents and births? Or did I hear it wrong?’
‘All the cities are on converging trajectories,’ said Tannier. ‘Because of Conjunction coming up – which is what it sounds like – but that’s still several tendays away. We’re still far removed from each other, on the whole.’
‘Er, right.’
‘But Deltaville’s close to giving birth, so Barbour’s planning to be nearby when it happens. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Conjunction, there would have been several more cities clustering alongside for the occasion.’
Roger tried to parse the implications from Tannier’s words, then put it aside for later. He preferred to read online rather than ask questions that would sound childlike.
‘So is that where you think Helsen went?’ he said. ‘Deltaville?’
Tannier said, ‘That’s the most likely destination, though not definite. She might have configured her flyer for a long haul to Popper or Dalton, maybe further.’
About to ask about the various authorities tracking incoming flyers, Roger stopped, not needing another lecture on privacy. A Pilot was supposed to be sensitive to cultural variations, not keep tripping over them.
‘What can I do to help you?’ he asked.
Tannier stared at him.
Then: ‘For now, rest up with your lady friend, and keep out of sight and trouble. We’ll need you to identify Helsen.’
Her theft of the autodoc and flight from Barbour were making Tannier, and by extension the Barbour authorities, take the matter seriously.
‘Helsen’s made her first tactical mistake,’ said Roger. ‘Hasn’t she?’
‘What do you mean? For an offworlder to make such good use of our systems and get clean away … I call that pretty slick.’
Roger finally smiled.
‘Yeah, but if she’d just kept her head down here in Barbour, the most you’d have had is a strange report from a youngish Pilot who sees things that others don’t, not even other Pilots. Right?’
‘Good point.’ Tannier grinned back. ‘Except we take all reports from the public with equal seriousness.’
‘Sure you do.’
How would Dad have analysed this situation? Imagining yourself in the opponent’s position was the usual first stratagem.
‘If Helsen just wanted to hide,’ he added, ‘she would have kept more low-key, don’t you reckon?’
‘Go on,’ said Tannier.
‘So if she’s trying for another Anomaly, what resources does she need to gather?’ He remembered something Dad had said about categorising problems. ‘What people does she need? What technology? And what processes does she have to organize to make it happen?’
‘Hmm.’ Tannier was nodding. ‘Good questions. I’ll ask the people with the big brains what they think. So far, Helsen has only one specific objective that a simple copper can deduce.’
Roger said, ‘What’s that?’
Tannier’s voice went mild.
‘She seems to want you dead, don’t you think?’
Time slowed, in a non-relativistic sense. Three tendays passed while Roger lived with Leeja, enjoying more uninhibited sex than he had thought possible; going for ever-increasing long slow distance runs along Barbour’s upper galleries (where yellow-tinted view-windows looked out onto orange clouds and more recently the growing bulk of Deltaville); and regaining his strength and coordination with the combat-dance-acrobatics routines he had used for years, but had stopped more recently since the reality of violence became clear. Now he used the routines to elongate his muscles and keep his movements whippy, without the illusion that they made him a fighter. That, if he was serious about it – and he still had doubts – was something that would surely have to wait until he returned to Labyrinth.
Sometimes he daydreamed of wolves and axes in ways that afterwards were unclear.
In keeping with Pilot practice, he said little to Leeja about life in mu-space, never mentioning Labyrinth’s name. Perhaps because of Conjunction, when Molsin’s sky-cities came together once every four standard years, Leeja seemed to assume that Pilots lived with their ships clustered together. Roger hinted she was right, without ever telling a literal lie. For the first time, despite having had to hide his own nature as he grew up, he appreciated what Dad (and to some extent Mum) had gone through as they lived a life of subterfuge, interacting with their friends and colleagues on Fulgor through interfaces of deceit, layers of indirection hiding the complexity beneath, much as his tu-ring accessed local city services not knowing how they were implemented.
Once, out walking with Leeja, he spotted Alisha looking into a shop window, a peculiarity of Barbour: back home on Fulgor, shops had existed, but with no need to display their wares to anyone outside – that was what Skein was for. Alisha did not turn; but if she had, she would have seen just another stranger in the crowd.
After they had walked past, Leeja said, ‘So that was her, was it?’
Roger stopped, then kissed her. As always, even the lightest contact with her softness felt like absorption, turning into a composite organism in the only manner humans should.
‘And that’s you,’ he said. ‘The only woman in my life.’
‘I know. But she’s young, isn’t she? Like you, although you appear older.’
‘Maybe because you’ve worn me out.’ Smiling: ‘In the nicest possible way.’
‘Bad Roger.’ She kissed him back. ‘Come along.’
But he could feel her sadness as they walked on.
TWENTY
LABYRINTH, 2603 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
In Labyrinth, time could flow in any way one liked. Max Gould had been awash in pain for so long he perceived it as a single, ongoing instance of agony, the one surprise being the strength that remained in his screams. He was an instrument; suffering was the music; Fleming was the master musician. And now, amid the normal purple lightning, silver light was brightening, which meant that Fleming was coming back.
I still hurt.
How many layers was it now?
Three. No … seven.
Not good.
Try to remember.
Or perhaps he had already given everything away. The layers upon layers of lies – entire world-views of falsehood laid on top of each other, a sequence of cover stories – were beginning to shift in his mind. But he could not have broken yet, not completely.
Because Fleming continued to bring the pain.
‘Commodore.’
Changing his voice now, the bastard.
‘Commodore Gould, look at us.’
Us?
Dried blood cracked and wet blood trickled as he moved his head and squinted. A man and a woman, right enough. Fleming’s reinforcements.
Bastard.
Everything already hurt. What more was there?
‘My name is Clayton. My friend here, we’ll keep her name out of it fo
r now.’
Secrets. Everyone had them.
Everyone wanted them.
‘Come on.’ Hands upon him. ‘We’re moving you now.’
Flares of agony.
‘What have they done to you?’ That was the woman. ‘Evil fuckers.’
He liked her, despite the tidal wash of pain, and that was dangerous.
Silver light, growing.
What are they doing?
Grey and black rotating.
Where—?
The torture cell was gone.
TWENTY-ONE
EARTH, 1941 AD
From the pavement of Baker Street, the building was a massive bone-grey cube lined with blacked-out windows. Inside, it was a hive of orthogonality: square-cross-sectioned corridors and cubic interior rooms: windowless, functional and bleak. This was the headquarters of the Special Overseas Executive, home of code-makers rather than breakers, where even the air felt pressurized; and the stay-at-home executives looked even more strained than the agents getting ready to parachute in to some darkened field to be met by resistance fighters or Wehrmacht bullets; because you never knew, sitting at a radio set in London and listening to enciphered dots and dashes, whether the operator over there in Holland or France had been turned – was sending the signal with a Luger against their temple – or was even German, while the person they had replaced now whimpered in a Gestapo cell or rotted with a hundred other corpses in a pit.
But SOE had cells of their own, and that was where the two enemy agents went: down to the basement, under military guard. Gavriela remained somewhere in the core of the building – every floor and corridor looked the same – standing next to two soldiers, while Rupert Forrester went off to chat to a short civilian, or rather someone not in uniform; for everyone here was some kind of soldier, even her.
They’re not going to do anything.
Not to her.
She had no logical grounds for optimism, beyond standing here instead of in a cell like the prisoners; but Rupert had looked at her as a subordinate in need of discipline, not an enemy. Still, she was better at reading codes and ciphers than human beings.
A one-armed man came around the corner and winked at her.
‘Brian!’ She could not understand why he was here rather than Bletchley. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Well, darling Gabby, I’m feeling relieved’ – with a grin – ‘that you’re on our side after all.’
He had never called her darling before. Tonight he looked like a man who had just tilted a massive rucksack off his back, thought that was it, then been given a heavy box to carry, and was trying to make the best of it.
‘The message-within-the-message had a prefix en clair,’ she said, ‘which I happened to recognize. And the rest was a simple monoalphabetic substitution.’
They must have found the decrypt, because of the twenty policemen descending on Trafalgar Square. If they had simply been suspicious of her, there would have been a team of plainclothes watchers, no more. And clearly, from Brian’s words, he had been working with Rupert on this.
‘Really.’
‘You’re going to think I’m insane, Brian. Once I’ve told you how I recognized the prefix, I mean.’
‘That’s a possibility, I guess. But I think you’re sane enough.’
He looked back along the corridor. At the far end, Rupert turned, and for a moment it was like a resonance cavity: some imperative signal bounced back and forth between them, growing stronger. Then Rupert nodded, touched the shoulder of the man beside him, and walked out of sight.
Gavriela wanted to ask about that, and why an SIS officer like Rupert chose to use SOE headquarters, and how long Brian had been watching her; but tonight she had better respond to questions rather than pose them. Curiosity about secret war work, beyond her own remit, could drop her into the kind of trouble she was trying to evade.
He was a friendly interrogator, it turned out.
They used one of the anonymous offices, and she told him quickly what the message said and how she worked through it. He nodded when she mentioned Trafalgar Square and the unknown time, then backtracked.
‘So what are these cryptonyms?’ he said. ‘Eagle and darkness?’
‘I’m guessing that one of the two men in the basement, or wherever you’ve got them, is the eagle. Maybe that’s a tattoo on his forearm, or a design on his tie-clip, or something. For identification. Or maybe that’s too easy, I don’t know. But the darkness … that’s different.’
She was vibrating inside, sick and scared and elated, on the brink of spilling her personal madness.
‘It started when I moved to Zürich,’ she said. ‘Fourteen years ago, on my first day as a student, although it perhaps reinforced the occasional odd perception from childhood. Or maybe you’ll call it hallucination.’
‘Hallucination?’
‘Yes—’
An endless hour later, a knock sounded and the door swung in. Rupert’s face was corpse-white.
‘What is it?’ said Brian.
‘A moment.’ Rupert turned, nodded to someone in the corridor outside, and came in. ‘I’d like to catch up, if that’s OK with you.’
He used his heel to close the door.
‘Gabby can, er, see things other people can’t,’ said Brian. ‘Certain individuals are surrounded by a sort of dark aura—’
‘Not an optical phenomenon.’ Gavriela wanted Rupert to understand. ‘It’s a psychological artefact, like one of those Benham Tops.’
‘Like a what?’
‘Sorry. A spinning-top.’ So much of her knowledge of people came from textbooks. ‘If you spin a certain black-and-white design at the right speed, people see it in vivid colours: red, green, violet. There’s no diffraction or refraction involved. It’s a neurological effect.’
Brian closed his eyes, smiled as he pushed out a breath, then looked at Rupert.
‘See?’ he said. ‘She comes out with nutty stuff and you have to believe her.’
Rupert frowned at nutty, one of those Americanisms he despised.
‘And they’re good at hypnosis,’ Brian went on. ‘Or something like that.’
‘Who is?’ said Rupert.
‘The people with the auras. Possessed of demons, or whatever. The darkness.’
‘And the two men at the rendezvous?’
Gavriela said, ‘They’re both tainted with it. I don’t know whether “possessed” is the right word, but it might be. The intercept I decrypted used the word, so that much is not delusion.’
‘What word?’ asked Rupert.
Brian said, ‘Dunkelheit.’
Then he got up from his chair.
‘Are you all right, Rupe?’
‘Not entirely. Can I–?’ Rupert sat down on what had been Brian’s chair. ‘Look, Gavriela—’
Brian raised his eyebrows. He knew her as Gabby Woods.
‘—are you sure about this hypnosis? In fact, didn’t you have a book on the subject’ – his eyes focused on a remembered image – ‘the night we first met in Oxford?’
‘Someone had left the book in the pub,’ said Gavriela. ‘I took it with the barmaid’s approval. It made partial sense of the things I’d seen … but only partial.’
Rupert rubbed his face, which remained bloodless: white, with the ghost of blue veins.
‘That might explain how thirty minutes ago our German guest got away.’
Time seemed to jump: scratched record, gramophone needle; something like that.
‘Got away?’ said Brian. ‘From this place?’
Perhaps it was the dungeons that had brought Rupert here rather than Broadway Buildings. But Broadway these days was only nominally SIS HQ, so close to Whitehall, that prime Luftwaffe target. The real headquarters was Bletchley Park, SIS squeezed in with GCHQ, plus the Whaddon Hall outstation down the road.
Such knowledge in her head. They would have to be sure about her, to allow her to leave.
‘All right, Gavriela.’ Rupert glanced at Brian
, then focused on her again. ‘Gabby. These hypnotists with the auras – or whatever – are Nazis, have I got that right?’
‘I …’ Gavriela stopped. ‘It sounds like one of those serials on the wireless, doesn’t it? But I really don’t know.’
‘So are they Nazis?’
‘I don’t think … I think the darkness is something real, and the thousand-year Reich would suit its purpose, but it’s not the goal. It … I just don’t know.’
Rupert said, ‘You do make it sound like demonic possession.’
‘The only real demons are people in uniform with sick dreams.’
‘Fair enough. Bri?’
‘She believes it,’ said Brian. ‘I’m not sure I do, but Gabby isn’t lying.’
For the first time it occurred to her that the encrypted message might have been left for her to find, that Clive had decrypted it already – hardly difficult, once you realized it was not a misread transmission – and someone had known about the darkness, and the sound associated with it.
‘You said the German guest got away.’ The analysis could wait, because she was concerned about the remaining prisoner. ‘Therefore the other man isn’t German – I’m guessing English – and you’ve still got him.’
‘And we have him in a chair, blindfolded and gagged.’ Rupert made a half-fist, then flicked his fingernails against the desktop. ‘Let’s see him use hypnosis like that.’
It felt like hands around her throat, the panic.
‘You’ve got to knock him out,’ she said. ‘It’s the only way.’
‘There’s no way he—’
Now to find out what they really thought of her.
‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘I’ll come down with you.’
‘To see the prisoner?’ said Rupert.
Brian shook his head.
‘In the circumstances—’
‘Then go down there yourself, make sure you’ve got dull, level-headed, suspicious men surrounding him. A lot of them, preferably deaf.’ She needed Rupert to be clear. ‘You like bright people, I know that, but the more intelligent and imaginative someone is, the easier it is for them to go into trance. Only cretins and morons, in the absolute technical sense of the terms, can’t be hypnotized.’
