Phoebe Harkness Omnibus

by James Fahy

  “Actually, Mr Scott,” I said, “I do believe we have a mutual friend in common. Phillip Harkness? He was my father. Didn’t you used to work with him, before the wars?”

  Scott stared at me hard, as though I had just slapped him. It was the first time he has seemed anything other than a grumbly old man. From the look that crossed his face, I might as well have thrown my glass of champagne over him.

  “That was a long time ago,” he said, composing his features again. “Different world back then. I’m not the fool I was. None of us are anymore.”

  He turned to Oscar, glaring at him witheringly.

  “Fetch me a drink, boy,” he barked.

  Cloves had gripped my arm.

  “Actually, Marlin,” she said sweetly, “I’m so sorry but if I could just borrow the good Doctor a moment. I need to powder my nose. Couldn’t possibly go on my own. You know how it is with us girls. Doctor Harkness, would you mind?”

  Her smile was a happy ray of sunshine beaming down on us all, but her fingers were digging into my elbow so hard they were going to leave bruises. I may as well have had my arm trapped in a vice.

  Before I could speak, she practically dragged me away, leading me through the crowds. The Scotts, older and younger alike, watched us go. Marlin was frowning after me suspiciously, Oscar looking a little abandoned, obviously unhappy at being left with the patriarch.

  When she had me in a corner, behind an enormous and elaborate ice sculpture shaped like a swan, and was sure that no one was watching us, the benign smile dropped from her face and the Veronica Cloves I was more used to resurfaced.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?!” she gnashed at me, dropping my arm. “I nearly had a heart attack! Are you trying to get me fired?”

  “I need to talk to you,” I replied, ignoring her fury. “And to him.”

  I pointed back at the distant figure of Marlin Scott.

  “Scott is a very important contributor to the safety and prosperity of our city!” Cloves hissed at me. “What business you think you could have with him is beyond me!”

  She raised a warning finger to my face.

  “You have already caused an incident between humans and the GOs last night. Harrison was on my ass for the chaos at the club today. I have had a very stressful afternoon making nice with the Channel Seven reporters and dispelling the rumours about the missing activist girl, to the point that my face is aching from smiling and telling the people of New Oxford that they have nothing to be concerned with.”

  She took a breath, and leaned in even closer.

  “I have picked up Trevelyan’s files, which have finally been decrypted. I haven’t even had a moment to look over them yet. I want to see for myself what’s on them before I turn them over to Harrison. Call me curious. I will not have you showing up here and upsetting the running of a Mankind Movement fundraiser just because you don’t agree with the cause. You’re supposed to be pumping your vampire.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “For information,” she hissed. “What use are you to me here?”

  “You think I came here to make trouble for you?!” I spluttered. “Good God, the world does not revolve around Veronica Cloves, you know.”

  High level Cabal Servant or not, I had had enough today. Cloves thought her day had been tough being a talking head on the DataStream? Try my day: facing genetic mutants and government cover-ups of mass peacetime genocide.

  I wondered briefly if she knew anything about the MA division. I doubted it. She was PR. Organisations like the Cabal succeeded by keeping their arms very much uncrossed.

  “The Cabal walk the political tightrope, Harkness, and it takes a hell of a lot of balance,” Cloves said, walking me over to the large and generously laden buffet table.

  I glanced at the food as she made a show of selecting a few hors d’oeuvres. There was lobster, more cold meats than I could count, and a debauched abundance of rare and imported foodstuffs, all hard to come by in our new world. Trade routes were not what they once were. I felt guilty even looking at it knowing that within our city, people were crammed together in the lower district slums, practically starving.

  “I may well be here making sure the rich and powerful of the Mankind Movement know that they have our trust and support,” Cloves said to me, “but you can be pretty sure that at the next GO Rights march, there will be another representative of the Cabal making sure they know we are right behind them all the way. We work all the angles, Harkness. We keep the peace. It’s what keeps civilisation moving along. You, on the other hand, seem to make things anything but peaceful!”

  “Listen, I’m here because I found something,” I said, “and I think it’s important.”

  I’d had the framed photograph under my arm the whole time; now I thrust it, quite violently, at the Cabal Servant.

  “What’s this supposed to be?” she demanded, still angry.

  “This,” I pointed to the glass, “is Vyvienne Trevelyan’s father. This is my father, and this guy is the rich old fart you have been licking the boots of all night. There’s a connection, I just don’t know what.”

  Cloves stared at the photo for a moment.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked.

  “That’s … irrelevant,” I replied, sounding childish.

  My list of crimes, now including trespass in a private home, breaking lab protocol, DataStream espionage, and petty theft, didn’t need airing right now.

  “I don’t know who the other two men are, but I was hoping Scott would remember them. That’s why I’m here.”

  Cloves was still staring at the photo.

  “I don’t know who the chubby fellow with the beard is, but this one…”

  Her gloved finger brushed over the young, gawky looking man I had been unable to identify.

  “I’ve seen his file at Cabal HQ this morning. I recognise the face.”

  “This morning? Are you sure?”

  Cloves stared up at me, looking baffled.

  “Yes, when the news came in about the GO rights activist, Jennifer Coleman, the hippy whose teeth we had delivered today. Obviously, we checked her file. Known associates, any links we could exploit, that kind of thing. We have a lot of data to draw on at the Liver. This is Riley Coleman.”

  She frowned down at the photograph again before looking back up at me.

  “Harkness, this little ninety pound lab rat is Jennifer Coleman’s father.”

  I stared back at her in disbelief.

  So Coleman was linked to me and Trevelyan after all.

  I opened my mouth to reply but at that moment, the lights in the grand Divinity School went out.

  The spacious echoing hall was pitched into sudden darkness.

  23

  I was utterly disoriented.

  Before I could react to the lights going out, a deafening boom tore through the hall and there was a flash, as bright as a nuclear flare.

  People screamed all around me. There were musical tinkles as champagne flutes dropped or were knocked from startled hands. Plates clattered on the floor.

  I blinked and nearly fell, sure that a bomb had just gone off. Someone slammed into the ice sculpture next to us in the darkness and it fell, shattering into countless pieces on the floor like a spray of glass. The swan’s transparent, icy head must have slid across the floor. I jumped a little when it butted the toe of my shoe.

  There was another flash, bright as the sun. It burned my eyes.

  I tottered against Cloves, trying to blink away the lurid red after images.

  Above the screams, I heard the high staccato of gunfire. Dim red emergency lighting flickered on and I saw the room was filling with smoke. We were being shoved as people stumbled in panic in the sudden darkness. Diners crashed blindly into the buffet table, knocking its contents to the floor in a slurry avalanche.

  “What the fuck is happening?” I heard Cloves shout, a faceless shadow next to me, but her voice was distant.

  My ears were filled wi
th a high-pitched whine. I had been almost completely deafened by the blast.

  Looking up, I saw one of the high windows shatter as something like a hand grenade sailed into the blood-hued hall and landed among the guests. It didn’t explode, but began to pour out more white smoke, spinning like a top.

  “We’re under attack,” I yelled, but nobody heard me.

  There hadn’t been a bomb. It had been a noise blast, designed to disorientate. The flashes were light grenades, meant to blind and incapacitate. And the smoke bombs, well, they smoked.

  There were crashes from the bandstand as people fell into the music pit in their efforts to escape. More gunfire. The flash of the muzzles spread throughout the dark old hall like fireworks in a night sky.

  Men entered the hall, a dozen of them, moving through the crowds. They were demonic black silhouettes in the low crimson light. Holding semi-automatics, they fired them into the air. People everywhere dived to the ground, frantic with the sudden gunfire. Shouting and chaos surrounded the silent invaders. They stalked through the mist like soldiers, their faces hidden behind gas masks. The torches strapped to the muzzles of their guns swept the room in wide arcs, searching.

  Who were they? Terrorists? GO rights protesters gone militant in reaction to the disappearance of Jennifer Coleman?

  I looked around but Cloves had disappeared into the crowd. I made to follow, tripping over fallen people in the darkness. An old woman in an elaborate chiffon ball gown had fallen to the floor. Men and women stepped and tripped over her as she held her thin arms up in self-defence, her many rings glittering in the burst of gunfire.

  From what I’d seen, these mercenaries were not shooting people, at least not yet. They were firing into the air, into the unique and ancient famous ceiling of the Divinity School. The stone dust and the white smoke from the grenades were indistinguishable from one another.

  Fucking Philistines, I thought, then immediately felt guilty for being more concerned about the historic building than the people inside it. I eased my conscience by crouching and helping the old countess or whatever the hell she was to her feet. She was panicking and broke away from me, swept off into the crowds. People were trying to get out of the main doors, but the mercenaries had blocked them, keeping everyone penned in while they swept their torch beams around in the confusion.

  Something in the smoke bombs was making me hack and cough. It burned my eyes and lungs. Was it pepper spray? Tear gas? I lost my balance and stumbled to my knees.

  In a small rational corner of my mind, I made a solemn vow to never, ever attend another social gathering. Clubs, fundraisers, even children’s birthday parties. They were all well and truly off my list.

  Someone grabbed my wrist and pulled me to my feet.

  For a second I fought, blinded by tears and still deaf, thinking it was one of the gas-mask wearing invaders, but then my watery eyes cleared and I saw it was Oscar, his mouth covered with a silk handkerchief from his tux, his wide eyes streaming with tears from the gas.

  He dragged me clear of the panicking crowd and behind one of the elaborately carved pillars where there was a smaller exit from the hall.

  I half ran, half fell after him, my hand wrapped in his, stumbling through the door. It was almost pitch black out in the corridor. I was guessing the entire power supply to the building had been cut. The only illumination came from ghostly emergency lights set at intervals along the walls, red and flashing. Despite the gloom, it was relatively free of the smoke out here.

  A few other resourceful party-goers had made it out this way. A balding old man was on his hands and knees on the carpet, retching spittle. A young woman in a long green gown was being enthusiastically sick into a tall potted plant.

  “Saw you in the flash,” Oscar managed between heaving gut-wrenching coughs. “What’s happening? Bloody hell!”

  “No idea,” I gasped. “Where are your bloody bodyguards?”

  My throat was raw as I heaved air into my lungs in ragged gasps. I was still rubbing the stinging tears out of my eyes as Oscar dragged us away, down the corridor and away from the Divinity School. We could still hear the chaos in the room behind us, more gunfire and shouting.

  “With Dad, I guess,” Oscar gulped.

  He glanced over his shoulder briefly, past me and at the closed door behind us.

  “Fuck him,” he said with feeling. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I didn’t argue with Oscar’s daddy issues. I had no idea where Cloves had gone and I had lost the photograph somewhere inside. I just wanted fresh air – preferably without bullets.

  We stumbled along the corridor, feeling our way in the flickering red light. Turning a corner, we saw a green emergency exit sign was ahead of us. We stared longingly at it for a moment like a twin pair of Gatsbys and then we ran.

  We threw ourselves against the heavy push-bar fire door. It gave, spilling us out onto the snow outside and into icy, fresh and blessedly breathable air.

  I looked around, dragging my sleeve against my eyes to try and clear my vision. There were steps here, leading down to the pavement. We stumbled down them in the snow. We were still on campus here, I realised, off the city streets. There were dark university buildings all around us. No pedestrians, no visible help.

  I noticed a large black van waiting at the foot of the steps.

  Shouting came from behind us. I risked a look and saw two of the men in gas masks running down the corridor toward us as the fire door swung shut. We had been spotted.

  Shit.

  “Doctor Harkness?” Oscar brought my attention forward again, sounding panicked.

  We ran down the stairs onto the pavement. The large unmarked van across the street had its engine idling, the low growl of a panther. I saw the side door slide open with a whooshing clatter. There were more gas mask men within. Two of the mercenaries stepped out of the vehicle, like black-clad executioners.

  “Oh bollocks,” I said quietly.

  Oscar let go of my hand. The cold night air bit at my face as I watched one of the men raise his gun. I had just enough time to register the fact that I was about to be shot before they pulled the trigger.

  Twin coils, like fishing wire whooshed across the narrow campus path with a whistling trill. The metal spikes at the ends buried themselves in Oscar’s tuxedo jacket and flickered with electricity, a rattling crackle emitting from them like popcorn kernels exploding. Oscar jittered and danced next to me, then bonelessly dropped to a crumpled heap on the pavement.

  The doors behind us burst open and two of the men ran down the stairs towards his fallen body to scoop him up. They ignored me completely. I looked wildly down the dark street.

  Here on campus there was still no traffic, no witnesses, no one to help. I decided I really had to invest in a gun or at least a baseball bat. As I lacked either, I settled for staggering un-heroically away, tottering sideways from Oscar’s fallen body.

  But then I saw the figure by the van reloading his gun. Another of the gas masks pointed to me.

  I was next.

  I would have joined Oscar in an electrocuted dogpile right there on the stairs, but as the man turned to face me, a motorbike suddenly roared around the corner. It tore up the street, mounting the snowy steps, and slid to a juddering halt between me and my attackers. The rider turned to me, his arm outstretched urgently.

  It was Allesandro.

  He wasn’t wearing a helmet, but then I suppose health and safety were less of a concern when you are practically immortal. His white face was bright in the darkness.

  “Get on!” he yelled.

  I didn’t question him. I stumbled forward, still light-headed from the gas, and threw myself at the bike, practically jumping on it like a circus performer leaping onto a horse.

  Without so much as a backwards look at my assailants, Allesandro gunned the throttle and skidded in the snow, almost throwing me off the bike before I had found my grip. Making an effort, he wrenched it upright and we leapt away, juddering
down the steps so hard that I almost bit my tongue off.

  I clung onto the vampire for dear life as we screamed away down the quiet campus street. Too shocked to speak, I risked a look back over my shoulder, the wind whipping my loose hair around and making it hard to see.

  My legs dangled either side of my ride. I’d never actually been on a motorbike before and wasn’t sure what to do with them. I was overwhelmingly glad I hadn’t dressed for the occasion. It would have been impossible to stay on this thing in a billowing gown.

  I shook the hair out of my eyes and immediately saw Oscar. I had left the poor boy behind. I could see him being roughly folded into the van.

  I was clinging to Allesandro so hard it would probably leave bruises.

  “Who are they?” I bellowed, still looking back.

  The gas masks had all climbed into the van now, and I watched in horror as it moved off, gaining speed.

  “Fuck! They’re chasing us!”

  “Are you hurt?” Allesandro shouted to me.

  “They got Oscar. Did they kill him?” I yelled. “And what are you doing here?”

  I saw him check his mirrors. The van was gaining on us, roaring up behind like a juggernaut of death. He leaned the bike into a turn and left the tarmac of the street, mounting the pavement and cutting across a deserted quad lawn. The wheels sent up a spray of mushy snow and mud behind us.

  “They are the Black Sacrament,” Allesandro yelled back to me. “And you’re welcome by the way.”

  They were still following us but not across the grass. They had skirted the corner of the quad and were making for the road parallel, obviously aiming to cut us off at the corner.

  “Hold on tight,” he said. “I can get us to the main road.”

  I knew what he meant.

  If he could get us off the campus and out into the city streets, we could probably lose them. His bike could cut through the busy, city centre traffic, but the van would be stuck. These lanes were empty roads. They were gaining on us.

  I knew I should be worried about Oscar, even if he was the vampire bride of the evil son of a bitch who wanted me dead, and I should even probably spare a thought for Cloves too. I had no idea what had happened to her in the confusion.